The importance of being realistic

Among the many informative and enlightening documentaries from around the world with which the CBC has favoured us in recent months -- a fantastic assortment in which George Bush is made out to be responsible for everything from September 11 to rickets -- was a three-part series from Britain that argued, rather successfully I thought, that there was no such thing as international terrorism: it was all a scare story got up by a cabal of Straussians alleged to be in control of American foreign policy, to sustain themselves in power.

Entitled The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear, the series drew striking parallels between the Straussians and their al Qaeda foes -- both are, after all, hostile to liberalism -- even as it was arguing that the latter did not exist, at least as a serious threat to global security. The notion that al Qaeda, and Islamic extremism in general, represent such a threat, it asserted, “is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services, and the international media.”

Now, you might think the deaths of more than 50 Britons in a string of bombings for which an al Qaeda unit has already claimed responsibility might persuade the documentary’s makers and their sponsors at the BBC that the threat of international terrorism was indeed real, but I doubt it. Indeed, much as British security officials had long anticipated just such an attack, the film’s director, Adam Curtis, had fretted to an interviewer last year that, “if a bomb goes off, the fear I have is that everyone will say, 'You're completely wrong,' even if the incident doesn't touch my argument. This shows the way we have all become trapped ... by a fear that is completely irrational.” Yes, it’s that insidious, this myth: people are so terrified they’ll accept mere shredded bodies as evidence.

This sort of courageous defiance of reality was always a minority point of view, of course, even before the attacks. But denial takes many forms. In their wake, the air has been filled with the sound of barn doors being slammed shut after their departed inmates. Across the world, security was tightened on mass transit systems, on the theory that the terrorists, having an almost infinite number of different targets at their disposal, would choose to strike again in exactly the same way -- or that the security agencies, having failed to prevent the last, were any more likely to prevent the next. As if to acknowledge this failure, officials instead congratulated themselves on their response to the attacks -- that is, to what services they were able to perform after they had taken place -- while the newspapers featured political leaders issuing appropriately Churchillian phrases: London can take it, you cannot shake our resolve, etc.

This last at least has some substance to it. In times of great national danger, the British, and the English-speaking peoples who are their cultural inheritors, draw from a historical template, a shared narrative of events, still within living memory, that defines and shapes their response in a way that has no parallel in the other democracies. It is, of course, of Churchill, and the lessons of Munich, of fight them on the beaches and all that, of the Few and England fighting on alone and, eventually, of victory, and if it sounds corny, it is no less real a phenomenon for that.

But jaunty as one wishes to be, it is important also to be realistic. Whether or not the terrorists succeed in their overall ambitions -- among them, to reverse “the tragedy of Andalusia,” or the fall of Spain (1492) -- it is a certainty that they can succeed in their near-term objectives, to kill a great many infidel: not as many as they would like to, perhaps, but a great many all the same. That they were able to carry out their plot as planned on Thursday speaks not to any great failure of intelligence, but simply to the impossibility of preserving every conceivable target from attack.

After September 11, governments focused on tightening airport security, with what success we can only guess. But even if they had achieved perfection, airlines are just one of many different forms of mass transit, a fact of which we can assume the terrorists are aware. Hence the attacks on the London subway, or the Madrid train stations. And if it were not transit, it would be fixed infrastructure: bridges, or water mains. Or shopping malls. Those who argued, and argue, that the war on terror should not be fought abroad, but at home -- that resources should be diverted away from military action to inspecting shipping containers -- are deluding themselves. It is simply not possible to play defence in this conflict.

Could it happen here? Of course it could -- could, and probably will. All of this government’s discreditable attempts to distance us from the Americans and our other historic allies, the British and the Australians, will not spare us. So even if one were inclined to take the soft option, it is not available to us. We have no alternative but to pitch in, and take our lumps.