Radio
Power for good
Michael Vestey
There's more than a whiff of antiAmericanism in the air at the moment. You've only got to have a Republican president and out it all comes. The Left were becalmed when the old knee-trembler Clinton was groping his way across the Oval Office carpet but mention of the name George W. Bush and suddenly America is the evil empire.
The usual suspects were out in force in Straw Poll on Radio Four last week (Friday) which debated the motion: America's power is a power for good. It was held in the theatre of the American International University in London before an audience. I fully expected that the motion would be lost among the audience and it was, in the vote held at the end, by 70 per cent to 30. Never mind, I thought, listeners could vote by telephone and the result on Saturday's phone-in sequel would indicate that common sense had prevailed. Depressingly, for me, 61 per cent of Radio Four listeners who voted rejected the motion, 39 per cent supported it. Perhaps pro-Americans had better things to do on a Friday night and Saturday afternoon than to listen to Straw Poll; either that or anti-Americanism is more widespread than I had thought.
Defending the motion were Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at King's College London, and Tom Reid, the London bureau chief of the Washington Post. Against were Professor Mary Kaldor of something called the Centre for the Study of Global Governance at the LSE, and the anti-Israel and rather muddled George Joffe from the Centre for International Studies, Cambridge. Kaldor thought America had too much power which was incompatible with democracy and could not, for that reason, be a power for good. American power, she said, affects us all but we don't have any say in how it's used. She objected to the 'language of the war against terror'. It had not tackled 'the conditions that breed terror' and she didn't like the way America went about dealing with its enemies.
Listening to this breathtaking nonsense a delicious and subversive thought swam into view in my mind's eye. Supposing Kaldor had been sent to Afghanistan to, using her phrase, tackle the conditions that breed terror and talk Osama out of his declared intention of killing all Americans. Wearing her compulsory burqa it might have worked. She might just have beaten the Taleban into submission with her suffocating windbaggery and there might have been no 11 September. Why didn't we think of that before? It would have saved all that bombing.
Confusingly, Ka!dor first objected to the use of American power and then complained it hadn't been used enough, which puzzled Freedman and Reid and the rest of us. Reid defended his country so impressively that he became one of my new heroes. He said he's often asked in Britain about hostility between the US and Cuba and how much better Fidel's paradise is in education, health care and so on. 'If Cubans are so much better off how come 100,000 of them every year get in rubber rafts and ride over to Miami? Why isn't the flow the other way?' he answered, Kaldor thought America should be more co-operative, particularly in international affairs, to do, really, what she wanted them to do. 'We need to push for America to be brought into a multi-lateral framework.' Has she not heard of Nato? Or Nafta? The conflict against Serbia to save the Kosovo Albanians? Or the fact, as Reid reminded her, that 90 nations signed up to the war against terror and that 15 of them went into Afghanistan?
Reid had a good command of facts that would unsettle crazed anti-Americans. 'How big is the European peace corps? Anybody here know?' he asked. No one did, so he gave them the figures, 'The EU has 30.000 volunteers being paid to go around the world, The US has 625,000: The Taleban, he said, thought inoculations against diseases were Western voodoo and banned them. According to Unesco one of those useless organisations so favoured by the Kaldors of this world 19 million Afghans have been inoculated against measles since last October. `Thirty-five thousand children who would have died of measles will not die this year,' he added. The British Left would always find something wrong with the US. 'When we get involved and get engaged we're evil and when we don't get involved then we're passive and following our own interest.'
As Freedman said, 'In the hot war against Nazism and the Cold War against communism our freedoms depended on the Americans coming to the aid of the European democracies.' Without the US the world would be a poorer and much more dangerous place. The Left aside, I can only wonder at what drives the antiAmericanism that produced the Radio Four vote, Jealousy, perhaps, at US dynamism and success? It seems to me to be rather dangerous as we all know that one day when we're in serious peril the US will be there to help, as usual.
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