Now my generation is in a war we must win

By Robert Harris

FOR some years now, a fascination with war has been prevalent among certain male writers entering middle age. I know the feeling. I was born in 1957, far enough away from the war not to have known what it was like, close enough for it to have infiltrated every aspect of childhood: the conversation of my parents, the war films in the cinemas, the documentaries on television, the weekly comics with their brave-hearted Tommies and dastardly Jerries; even the occasional bombsite still existed.

Obviously, this wasn't nostalgia in its proper sense, for these were memories absorbed at second hand. But among many of my contemporaries, especially the men, born between 1945 and 1960, there has been an odd sense of having missed out on something - that there is a hole where the central experience of our lives should have been. Military age has been and gone, and the defining event which shaped the existence of our fathers and grandfathers thankfully never touched us. The great question has therefore remained unanswered: could we have done what they did?

Well, now we are going to get an answer, at least of sorts. We're not going to have to put on uniform, or face anything like the danger, discomfort and disruption that afflicted that earlier generation. But an atrocity has been committed of a kind even Adolf Hitler would have shrunk from ordering in 1939, and it has been made explicitly clear that this is only the beginning: that the means and the money exist to replicate it, that more attacks will be mounted, and that these are likely to be of escalating violence, conceivably involving chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons.

What could be clearer? This isn't some shady, post-imperial escapade, like Suez. This isn't another Falklands war - a battle to retrieve territory lost by political miscalculation, and which in any case we'd been trying to divest ourselves of for years. This isn't a Vietnam, or even a Gulf war. In moral terms, this is about as black-and-white a casus belli as you could get: mass murder, of people from some 40 different countries, by terrifying methods, and with the promise of more to come.

Yet the sophistry, especially on the Left, has already been wondrous: a time loop back to the Comintern of 65 years ago. "All must kowtow to the Pentagon and the almighty dollar, or be blown to smithereens," wrote Rana Kabbani, in last Thursday's Guardian, in a breathtaking reversal of the reality we had all just witnessed. "One hopes that the painful lesson that Americans have had to learn is not drowned out by cowboy ravings about 'getting the bastards'." The murder of 5,000 people: a "painful lesson"?

It wouldn't be worth getting exercised about this ridiculous woman ("a writer and broadcaster who lives in Paris") were it not for the fact that hers was typical of so many voices heard last week, from Seumas Milne, the Stalinist Rip van Winkle who now edits the Guardian's comment pages, to the New Statesman editorial writer who argued that the victims in the World Trade Centre had less of a right to live than an Arab, because they had had the chance and had failed to vote for Ralph Nader (statistically, of course, it's likely that several hundred of those killed were Nader voters: one wonders what they were in the NS world-view: collateral damage?).

The old contemptuous, communist description of these types as "useful idiots" is only half true. They are not at all useful. Indeed, their views are positively embarrassing, especially to those for whom they purport to speak. Yasser Arafat's response to last week's catastrophe was to give blood for the victims. Syria and Iran plainly condemned the attack. The last thing the Palestinians need is for their just cause to be polluted by the maniac followers of Osama bin Laden, and then to be paraded as justification for mass murder by trendy journalists in the West.

Now, as the first phase ends and we have to prepare ourselves for the long haul, one can only wonder: if this is the sort of stuff they were capable of producing when the dust had barely settled on the dead, what can we expect in the future? Certainly, if the action shifts to Afghanistan, there will have to be some peculiar intellectual gymnastics in defence of the Taliban.

This won't be easy, particularly for a Paris-based female "writer and broadcaster", as no woman is allowed to be educated in Afghanistan, or to work, except in hospitals, or to appear in public unless veiled from head to foot. Couples who have sex outside marriage are flogged. The punishment for men convicted of sodomy is to die by having a wall pushed on top of them: the Taliban use tanks and bulldozers for the job, in front of thousands of spectators. Amnesty so far has documented nine such victims.

If ever there was a regime for the Left to revile, this is it. But just wait. There are those who will find arguments to excuse even this. Exactly the same syndrome prevailed in the 1930s, when the far Left denied Stalin's crimes. As Robert Hughes points out in The Culture of Complaint, it is considered "the height of sexist impropriety" in the West to call a "woman" a "girl", but "more or less OK for a cabal of regressive theocratic bigots to put out the eyes of offenders on TV": "Oppression is what they do in the West. What they do in the Middle East is 'their culture'."

And so those of us who thought we might live out the rest of our lives without being put to the test have been disabused. War is no longer an exercise in mid-life nostalgia. And we discover, as our parents did in the 1930s, that the problem isn't so much whether we have the physical courage to face an enemy, as whether we have the moral and intellectual sense to recognise when a war is worth fighting, and the fortitude to keep our nerve amid a babble of idiots.

-- Anonymous, September 17, 2001