Telegraph

'I believe the terrorists wanted a nuclear attack on Baghdad' (Filed: 07/10/2001)

PJ O'Rourke is a man who normally believes in giving war a chance. But when he talked to Clive James at a fundraising benefit for the Red Cross, he showed an uncharacteristic degree of tolerance and understanding for the Muslims of the Middle East. Gerry Adams, though, did not escape so lightly . . . This is an edited extract of their conversation.

Clive James: It is already apparent here in Britain that 7,000 innocent deaths delayed by a maximum of 48 hours the opinion forming that this is really somehow the US's fault, for its position in the world, for its role and its behaviour. What do you say to that?

PJ O'Rourke: It's no surprise to me. The largest target, the largest entity will be given all responsibility and all blame. In the 19th century, everything was Britain's fault. If you go into distant parts of Pakistan, of India, of Africa, you will still hear how it's still all Britain's fault. That it's some sort of plot involving the Queen and the Jews. And there's probably still some distant area of Ruritania where someone is still blaming everything on the Roman Empire. It just happens.

CJ: There are plenty of places in Australia where there are people blaming Britain for everything.

PJ: I'm sure. And in Ireland, too. I keep coming back to an experience that I had in 1984. I was in Beirut at a Shi-ite militia check-point. I was held at gunpoint by this kid, maybe 17, maybe 16 years old. I wasn't really scared he'd shoot me but the question in those things is always more about gun-safety. The Lebanese boy scouts don't probably teach the gun safety courses like they ought to.

Anyway, he's waving this gun at me and he's yelling at me - in pretty good English - how we had fathered Zionism and how we are the Great Satan and how we were responsible for all the trouble in the world generally. At the end of which he said: "As soon as my green card comes through I'm off to Detroit to go to dental school." He didn't think this needed any sort of apology.

I think that terrorism is essentially a reactionary thing - it really has more to do with fighting back a world that is changing. The reason for much of terrorism in the world is that we are moving towards an open, liberal, cosmopolitan, tolerant, modern indeed middle-class world, and it terrifies certain people who have a hold on, and a power over, other people by virtue of things that are not tolerant, not liberal, not modern, not middle class. It isn't because they are intent on winning that terrorists resort to these things, it is because they are losing.

CJ: It did occur to me they couldn't have chosen a less advisable target than a World Trade Centre full of about 30 different nationalities. If they'd wanted to hit something American they could have hit Disneyland. The terrorists actually formed the coalition which will fight them.

PJ: They did, they did in a sense, yes. I was thinking after Timothy McVeigh, after the Oklahoma City bomb, I was thinking: "No, no Tim, the IRS [Internal Revenue Service] building, in the middle of the night, nobody there - that would have been the right move." But, you see, that's not what they are about.

I think in some ways the WTC was the correct target in so far as the theory of terrorism. We, of course, don't know what is going on in someone's head when they do this, but in so much as we know about the theory of terrorism, the most important effect it is supposed to have is to cause a draconian response: this is what is wanted most by terrorists, and who better to deliver a draconian response than the entire damned world.

I firmly believe that these terrorists wanted, indeed foresaw, a nuclear attack on Kabul or Baghdad or perhaps both. The reason they want that sort of thing is that it would help galvanise the people who they consider to be their potential allies but who are presently not their allies - millions and millions of people across the globe who are Muslim, but Muslim as I am Methodist. I consider myself a pretty religious person but I am not looking to create an absolutist Methodist state.

CJ: I'm a Presbyterian. You don't feel the urge to wipe me out?

PJ: No. In fact, I can't quite remember why it is. Which is which?

CJ: Neither can I, which is the whole point.

PJ: They are predestinarians, I think. Which is a very bad thing. But that said, Methodists do believe in free will. What would a Methodist Absolutist state be like? We are so far away from that we can't even imagine what Methodist Sharia Law would be.

CJ: It's only about 500 years actually.

PJ: No, it's not that long in time but it's that long in attitude. Anyway, you can say that all Muslims are against the kind of thing that these terrorists are trying to set up. They are hoping that if enough Muslims were attacked with enough viciousness that everyone will rally. Or so I believe.

CJ: It occurs to me that in the Muslim countries, even if they are not theocracies, if there is an emergent middle class they will have difficulty articulating themselves as they come under pressure from the Right wing.

PJ: Absolutely. I think that the worst fear after this terrorist attack was probably within Muslim states. I'm sure the government of Egypt is extremely upset, even the governing people in Sudan must be upset. Not because of the prospect of retribution but because of the prospect of this kind of thing striking them, where it really could bring them down.

This type of attack, terrible as it is, is not going to bring down the United States. Even a direct attack on the leadership is not going to bring down any free country. If you get rid of the leadership - half the time you are doing us a favour - you are certainly not going to destroy us that way.

There is a pyramid in every society but in a democratic society it's the heap that rules the head, not the head that rules the heap. We will reconstitute ourselves but there are more fragile societies and they must be very frightened.

CJ: What I want you to address is the subject of America's guilt. If America had behaved differently in Iraq, or was behaving differently to Israel and the Palestinians - and I'm bound to say that I don't really follow the argument that America controls Israel: if America controls Israel then they'd make Sharon do what they want - what should America do differently and how much would that change things?

PJ: The problem with a criticism of American foreign policy is that it presumes that there is an American foreign policy and there isn't, and especially over the past 10 years there hasn't been. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, we've been floundering around taking things on largely guided by the pressure of elections and poll results back in the United States. Very few of our actions have added up to anything that amounts to any kind of coherence.

I was in the Gulf covering the Gulf war. I didn't understand at the time why it stopped when it stopped.

CJ: You were there when the retreating Iraqi army was getting annihilated.

PJ: I was. I didn't disagree with it. I didn't understand why we stopped when we stopped but I didn't disagree with it. I was up on the Basra Road about a day after the American aerial attack. It was a slaughter, just a slaughter, and I was sickened and ready for it to be over.

I'd looked around up there and had encountered all these Iraqi soldiers who were begging for water - not food even - who were on the road trying to get back to Iraq, some of them in shock and indecisive as to the direction Iraq was. Some of them were actually headed back to Kuwait, which would not have been very good for them if the Kuwaitis had got hold of them.

I watched the Kuwaitis, there were a lot of Palestinians in Kuwait and the Palestinians had tended to be acquiescent to the Iraqis if not actually somewhat in favour of the Iraqis. The Kuwaitis were taking people from their apartments, taking them off and I don't imagine that they came back.

Yet I didn't understand the strategic logic of stopping it. If you have an enemy that was as bad as we said that Saddam Hussein was, why do you have a chance to destroy him and stop short?

I was in Bosnia a couple of times and in Kosovo after that war, and a very close friend of mine was an army major in Banja Luka in Bosnia as a peacekeeper. His job was civilian liaison and he would sit at a desk every day and people would come and say: "My car was stolen, my house was burned down, my property was taken, and my wife was assaulted." And my friend Michael would sit there with a large book and say: "OK, we've made a note of that. Yes, we've got that down. We'll call you."

He resigned his commission after this. He said: "I can't do this. I can't do this on a number of grounds. This is absolutely, perfectly fucking useless: that's one ground. The other is that I'm a soldier. I kill people and break things. I'm not a nation-builder, I didn't take nation-building at school."

I was in Somalia. I wasn't there when our Black Hawk was shot down but I was there not too long before that - that was an ill-considered mission in every respect. I neither understood why we began it nor why we ended it.

So there's a couple of examples of America's foreign policy . . . I could go on and on and on. The problem is that America is an inward looking nation. Why is it an inward-looking nation? It is a very big nation and it is a big nation full of foreigners.

You would think they would be interested in foreign countries but no, they left those foreign countries to get away from that stuff and they don't want to go back.

CJ: One thing that really rankles with almost everyone in the West who describes themselves as an intellectual or liberal is Israel and the Palestinians, and what I think of as the illusion that American can wave its magic wand and fix this. It's quite obvious to me that if America could wave a magic wand it would have waved it long ago.

PJ: God couldn't fix that and he tried, he really did try; he sent his kid.

The night before all this happened I had just finished editing a piece for the Atlantic Monthly about Israel and what it's like to live in constant contact with terror and strife. It was more of a depressing piece than I'd intended it to be.

I wrote a piece to cover the first intifada, very sympathetic to the Palestinians. This time I wrote a piece very sympathetic to the Israelis and I read them back end to end. They were both right, which is to say they are both wrong. It isn't something that can be easily settled.

A friend had come over from Hong Kong and he and I were sitting in a bar, spending the evening in Jerusalem - we'd had a bunch of Hebrew beer, and then we'd gone over and had a bunch of Palestinian beer, and we were sitting in the American Colony Hotel and he's going: "God, this place is screwed up, but it's a really nice place for somewhere screwed up. The women are cute, the weather's great, do we have to choose sides?"

I thought about that and said: "It's like dating sisters." You probably have to choose sides or get out of the global village. That said, there's no point looking for an easy fix, whether it comes from America or from the Oslo peace process, or whether it comes from Arafat or from the Israeli doves - or indeed the Israeli hawks. But blaming the US too much is probably not a useful thing to do. On the other hand, expecting America to fix too much is probably not very useful either.

CJ: It just could be that extremism in itself a way of life. One of the big problems with Israel and Palestine is that each side is squeezed from one wing by its extremists.

PJ: King Abdullah of Jordan was considered too soft on the Zionists and was assassinated. The danger of compromise is not from the other side, the danger of compromise is from one's own side.

It's important when you're looking at and thinking about this never to fall into the trap of saying we don't understand it - especially in this country, because right next door [Northern Ireland] you have had this going on for a couple of hundred years.

CJ: Where your people come from.

PJ: Yes, my moron cousins have been doing this up in Belfast and before this all over Ireland. The mechanics of it, the logic of it and the romance of it. I'm sure the Taliban and bin Laden have lovely songs and heart-rending poems about the heroes that do this kind of stuff just like my moron cousins do. It's something we should all understand.

CJ: You don't sound like you've ever subscribed to Noraid then.

PJ: No. There is a person in America who is known as a three-drink Republican - I don't mean my Republican party: the Irish Republican Army - and the Noraid can comes along and in goes a fiver and "that's for the boys back in wherever". Yes, America has a lot to answer for.

We turned a blind eye to the funding coming out of the USA. We did it because the Boston Catholics were a very important part of the Democratic coalition and they were also a very important part of the Reagan Republicans and neither wished to offend them. They had a lot of clout in Congress and we let them go and it was shameful, absolutely shameful.

And frankly, I think it's shameful that you guys are at the table with these people right now.

When it comes to ending terrorism round the world I'd start with the Protestant stone throwers and go directly to Gerry Adams because at least we know where they are. We might not be able to fix it but we could fix them.

I've always wanted to ask Gerry Adams: "Gerry, do you ever kill anybody or do you just do the PR for it?" I've always wanted to know that about him.

CJ: Perhaps we should touch on the subject of women. It seems to me that the women are in a terrible condition if extremism closes in. This is particularly true in Afghanistan where the Taliban behave shamefully towards women and there is nothing women can do about it. The only advantage is that the huge BBC reporter John Simpson, who is 6ft 4, actually managed to penetrate Afghanistan while dressed in a full burka.

PJ: Think of these Taliban guys going: "I won't need four wives. Heaven."

CJ: But they didn't search him because he's only a woman.

PJ: But "only a woman" is going to be a big question. I am not known for my cultural sensitivity but I would like to stick something in to that and remind people that the most severe behaviour towards women in the Islamic world is not Islamic per se, it is almost all tribal customs.

CJ: Like Somalia?

PJ: Exactly - clitorectomy etc. There is nothing in the Koran about that. The Koran was relatively enlightened for its time, granting property rights to women and certain rights which were not much but probably a lot better than they had in the tribal pre-Islamic society. The Koran says that women and men were to dress modestly and leaves it at that.

I don't claim great expertise here, but severe behaviour towards women in Afghanistan was probably going on when Alexander the Great was through there. Alexander, incidentally, had an Afghan wife, Roxanne.

CJ: A rock singer.

PJ: Not a happy marriage. So we have to be very careful to distinguish between Islam and cultural behaviour which is not Islamic even though it takes place among people who belong to the Islamic faith.

This was an awful catastrophe that we experienced on September 11 and the worst harm will come to people in the Islamic world, not because of military strikes from the West but the internal dynamics of terrorism.

CJ: One of the things I get increasingly worried about is that the age of information is not the age of knowledge: that our children will know nothing unless they can find it on the internet at random. For example, a whole generation educated by our newspapers will grow up believing that America, powerful America, is fundamentally interventionist and it simply isn't true. Until after the Second World War there was no such thing as American interventionism. What there was was American isolationism, and that's what we're all scared of. The world was scared that the Americans would never come.

PJ: To be fair, there was a certain amount of American interventionism - it was weak and intermittent. We did get into a pretty silly war with Spain and we did have colonial possession of the Philippines, although for the life of us we couldn't figure out what on earth to do with it.

CJ: But it wasn't an intervention against European or Asian power was it?

PJ: No, it wasn't intervention on a European scale and, yes, actually a very big problem has been the lack of American interventionism. We were real slow coming to your help in World War One. It was one of those things: "Well, is it over yet - is it safe to come over?"

CJ: Decisive when America did, though.

PJ: We had to be dragged kicking and biting into the Second World War even though that was a much more evident fight against evil than the First World War.

The Second World War was a much more clear cut thing and yet we didn't exactly rush in to help. Then immediately after the Second World War we completely disarmed. We just said: "Well, we don't need an army, an air force, a navy, stuff like that", and then had to completely re-arm ourselves for Korea, which we very nearly lost.

It took Churchill's speech in Missouri to alert us to what the...

CJ: The Iron Curtain speech, yes.

PJ: ...commies were up to. Overall, although American intervention has doubtless done its share of harm, probably more harm has been done to the world by lack of American intervention.

CJ: I can imagine you storming ashore on D-Day.

PJ: That's very nice of you to say, but I cannot.

CJ: I can imagine more easily you doing that than I can imagine Tom Hanks, frankly.

PJ: Well, I don't know. Actors are pretty dumb and I think dumbness would be a big asset.

CJ: Isolationism is a perfectly respectable position, it's just that it doesn't work. If you are sufficiently big you can't be isolationist because people want what you've got.

PJ: There is really no hope for it really. I mean little bitty countries might be able to pull it off, but even a place like Switzerland has its difficulties staying fully isolated. A really big country just can't help it.

I was talking to somebody earlier and he was saying about the Heisenberg principle - the principle in physics that even by observing something you change it. And when you are engaged in the world, the things you don't do are every bit as important as the things that you do do.

So what's the hope for you? You might as well try and do it as well as you can rather than just letting it happen by accident, as I think America has been doing, particularly in the last 10 years.

CJ: There's a non-American principle which is sometimes called the Clive James's Principle in historical circles, which is that we want the Americans to come and save us but only when we want them.

PJ: That's the parent principle, isn't it? You want your folks to get you out of a jam but first you don't want them to know about the jam you are in but you really want them to turn up and bail you out but you can't tell them. You sure don't want to owe them anything later and you don't want to hear a lecture.

This is an edited extract of a conversation that took place between PJ O'Rourke and Clive James on September 27 at a Red Cross fundraising benefit arranged by PEN and The Guardian Hay Festival.

-- Anonymous, October 07, 2001