24 January 2004	Saturday	01 Zilhaj 1424

LONDON: Try this exercise: imagine that Britain had joined France and Germany in refusing to support the war on Iraq. Where would the British be today?

They would still have had a war, since it was never a convincing argument that British support was a necessary condition for American action. But what else would have been the same, and what else different?

Certainly, Tony Blair would not have been in the kind of trouble he is in, although the British Conservative Opposition would no doubt have been galvanized by a government they could have attacked as both anti-American and pro-European.

And we can guess that President George Bush would have given a rather different state of the union address than the one he in fact delivered this week. Perhaps he would have railed against the United Nations and Europe or argued that the paths of the Old World and the New had decisively diverged. Or perhaps he would have been calling, in whatever coded terms, for a rapprochement, since a different war might have produced almost a mirror image of what most people deem the situation today, which is a strong America and a weak Europe.

For the European Union would undoubtedly have been strengthened if there had been a united front of Chirac, Schroder and Blair against the war. It is likely that the Polish, Spanish, Italian and other governments that supported the United States would have been much more muted, since they were emboldened in that course by the British position.

An anti-Iraq-war triad would have struck a great blow for the joint European foreign and security policy so often honoured in the breach. It might have been followed by other joint decisions - on the Middle East, for example - and by a closer relationship with Vladimir Putin's Russia.

Any move toward creating a separate defence structure would also have had a much greater impact, since Nato would have been rocked by a clear-cut transatlantic division on Iraq. What in the real course of events has been tolerated by the United States might in the alternate path have deepened a trans-atlantic crisis.

We can guess that the momentum might well have carried over into the EU's internal politics, that we would have a European constitution today instead of a messy disagreement and that a British referendum on the euro would not be far away - and would have gone Blair's way.

As for the campaign against terror, one can wonder about what Al Qaeda might have done or said. What if it had declared that Europe would be a jihad-free zone? That would have really embittered relations with America. In any case, the thinktanks and the conferences would have been talking about the transatlantic divide, as they are now, but in terms of European unity and American disunity, not of the reverse.

For, if America had gone into Iraq entirely alone, and was as embroiled as it is today, perhaps American politics would not have contained the issue in the way it seems to have done. Maybe the message from Iowa would not have been that Americans do not want their next presidential election to be dominated by the question of whether it was right or wrong to go to war.

The further you sail the boat of speculation into the alternative future, the more it veers toward the shoals of unbelievability. Much of this picture seems implausible, because while it is possible to imagine Britain or France or the United States making different decisions, it is hard to envisage them being entirely different societies and states.

That is why the alternative future only begins to ring true again if you argue that a Britain that had gone against America on Iraq would now be striving to lead the other Europeans into a reconciliation with the United States, and that the others would be far from reluctant to follow. That is the point where the alternative path intersects with the path we actually followed. But the distorting mirror of the counterfactual can show us some truths, and one of them is that the image of a weak America - and even that of a strong Europe - is not without basis.

In his real state of the union address, the president argued, for instance, that the demonstration effect of the Iraq war, and of Afghanistan before it, had led to welcome changes in Libya, Syria, Iran and Sudan. Some would add to the list of good consequences of recent American policy the resumption of dialogue between India and Pakistan, and even China's readiness to support America over North Korea.

But a closer examination reveals a more complicated story, which is of a world reacting both to the new security threat to all that September 11 dramatized and to American behaviour, including eccentric and inconsistent behaviour. The roots of all the changes that are put down to the Iraq effect go back to long before the war.

Muammar Qadhafi's desire to wipe the slate clean goes back to his first concessions after the Pan Am 103 outrage. Syria's tentative shift, of course, has much to do with Bashir Assad's succession, and Iran's acceptance of inspections relates as much to its economic need for better relations with Europe as it does to any perceived threat from the United States.

The Indo-Pakistani changes equally have their own logic, as does the Chinese takeover of the North Korean crisis. China is not assisting the United States in the attempt to end nuclear proliferation in East Asia. It is more the other way round.

This last is a clue to what may really be happening, which is not that the United States is compelling other societies to do things, but that these other societies are taking matters into their own hands. This is a truth that might be reflected in a different way when Condoleezza Rice claims that the axis of evil formulation "really challenged the international community to get serious about that class of states pursuing weapons of mass destruction".

America's military strength has been stretched to the limit by Iraq, and its economic prospects are conditioned by the choices of Japanese, Chinese, and European bondholders and investors. Its need for Europe and the United Nations, in Iraq and elsewhere, grows more evident all the time.

What the counterfactual helps us to understand is that the truth about the times may lie somewhere between the idea that the United States is managing and sometimes manhandling the world and the idea that the world is managing the United States. -Dawn/The Guardian News Service.