Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 2002, pages 26-27

European Press Review

 

Bali Bombing Leads to Questioning of Whether Bush War on Terror Is Working

 

By Lucy Jones

The European press was reeling in October from the Sari nightclub bomb attack on the Indonesian island of Bali which led to the death or injury of over 500 people, including many Australian and British tourists. The assault, which followed the shooting of U.S. Marines in Kuwait and the ramming of a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen, was a “crime against all humanity,” wrote the UK’s Guardian on Oct. 14. “The linear connection of Bali to the fundamentalist killers behind Sept. 11 does indeed appear all but certain,” the editorial continued. “The main difference now may be that the organization has decentralized its operations since its expulsion from Afghanistan and that small cells or even lone individuals are now tasked with carrying out ‘freelance’ assaults wherever and whenever they can.”

Like many publications, France’s Liberation of Oct. 14 questioned whether the West should be considering war on Iraq while terrorists are still at large. “By making Saddam Hussain public enemy number one of the moment, George W. Bush is deliberately following the wrong path,” the paper editorialized.

Russia’s liberal daily Kommersant argued the same day that the campaign launched after Sept. 11 could well have led to more bloodshed. “Having set off a spiral of violence under the label of fighting terrorism,” the paper said, “the so-called civilized world has in effect adopted the same rules as terrorists, for whom might is right.”

So what can be done? asked The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland in an Oct. 15 article titled, “Bali proves that America’s war on terror isn’t working.” Political action is needed “to win over the constituency that offers them [the terrorists] tacit backing: to drain the sea in which they swim,” Freedland said. “No longer would the U.S. and others need to manipulate the Middle East just to safeguard their petrol supply,” he continued. “They could let the peoples of the Arab world choose their own governments for once. The U.S. would move its troops out of Saudi Arabia, healing one of the sores Bin Laden most likes to inflame: the presence of ‘infidels’ on holy Muslim soil. And Washington would pick up where Clinton left off, devoting serious political muscle to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Genuine movement in that area would instantly rob the Islamists of one of their greatest recruiting pitches,” he concluded.

 

“We Must Take Saddam at his Word,” says France’s Le Monde

Saddam Hussain’s sudden offer in mid-September to readmit U.N. weapons inspectors to Iraq added another dimension to the war debate. The UK’s Independent of Sept. 19 recommended that the Americans “should, against their better instincts, take the offer at face value, and reverse their position, so that America keeps the moral high ground and widest possible support for any eventual military intervention.”

Le Monde of Paris on the same day agreed with French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin that “we must take Saddam Hussain at his word.…It’s the least that public opinion—in the Arab world, in Europe, in the United States—has the right to require before the new war is unleashed, with the thousands of ‘collateral’ deaths it will bring the Iraqi people.”

According to Britain’s Daily Telegraph of Sept. 19, however, “The ‘unconditional’ offer to readmit weapons inspectors is, almost certainly, a ruse. ... Saddam will not voluntarily give up his weapons of mass destruction because, without the threat they embody, his regime would be fatally weakened.”

Russia’s leading daily Izvestiya on Sept. 18 highlighted Moscow’s role in bringing about Iraq’s U-turn. “The cunning fox from Baghdad didn’t really give in to U.S. pressure,” it said, “but reacted positively to the requests addressed to him last weekend by Arab leaders and the Russian Foreign Ministry.”

 

Dossier on Iraq Fails to Dispel Unease, Says Swiss Le Temps

British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s release on Sept. 24 of his anti-Saddam dossier—in order to justify a preemptive U.S. and UK strike on Iraq—was met with broad skepticism in Europe. The British Daily Mirror tabloid praised the prime minister’s presentation the following day, saying, “Tony Blair really knows how to make the best of a bad case. He must have been a brilliant barrister.” The newspaper found the content severely lacking, however. “It was 50 pages of old facts and new guesses,” it editorialized.

According to The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee on Sept. 25, “With eloquence, reason and deftness of foot, the prime minister silenced the war wobblers,” who have been gaining in number in recent months. The same day, however, the Financial Times said the 50-page dossier “offers no compelling evidence that immediate military action is needed. …Nor does it present a strong argument against a policy of enhanced containment.” The editorial concluded, “It is unlikely, on its own, to prove decisive in changing perceptions of the Iraq threat.”

Simon Jenkins writing in the Sept. 25 London Times described Blair’s dossier as “an act of desperation”: “Mr. Blair told us yet again yesterday what a nasty person Saddam is. We know that,” he pointed out. “The task of leadership is…to judge how far a threat to the nation’s interest is real and, if so, how the nation should respond proportionately. Neither Mr. Blair nor George Bush has yet explained what has suddenly led them to abandon containment of Iraq and to demand Saddam’s head on a plate.”

Switzerland’s Le Temps of Sept. 25 thought that both the British dossier and President Bush’s U.N. speech on Iraq “have failed…to dispel feelings of unease about the real intentions of the British-American pair.” “European opinion,” it added, “is less concerned about the evidence against Saddam than about the motives for attacking Iraq.” And these motives, the newspaper wrote, “smell of oil.”

The same day, Spain’s El Pais described the British prime minister’s dossier as “essentially a public relations exercise to support George Bush’s position,” and Russia’s Izvestiya described Blair’s speech as “a symbol of Anglo-Saxon unity.” Continued Izvestiya, “Tony Blair proved that the U.S. has just one loyal ally. And that ally is Britain.”

German newspapers saw the British dossier as an opportunity for newly re-elected Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to repair relations with Washington, which cooled after his campaign pledge that Berlin would not support a U.S. attack on Iraq. The road to improving relations “passes through Downing Street,” wrote Hamburg’s Die Welt the day after the speech. But the Berliner Zeitung of Sept. 25 saw the British dossier as a means for the German chancellor to confirm that there is no case for a preemptive strike against Iraq. “Tony Blair’s Iraq dossier does not contain any pieces of evidence that are any more convincing or more dramatic than those contained in the many previous ones,” it said. “By implication this will let Mr. Schroeder off the hook.”

 

Has the World Changed Since Sept. 11?

On the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, which the London Times described on that day as “a moment of global grief,” many European papers reflected on the consequences of the event. Belgium’s De Standaard of Sept. 12 challenged the view that the world has changed in the past year. “With Africa still suffering, and the Middle East conflict still raging, as awful as almost 3,000 deaths in the USA was, it hasn’t fundamentally affected our lives,” said the newspaper. Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung of the same day noted that Western countries could have exploited the event to forge a “coalition of cultures,” and regretted that such an attempt “was never seriously made.”

France’s Le Monde said on Sept. 12 that the initial reaction of solidarity with the U.S. “has given way to a wave which could make you believe that the whole world has become anti-American.” It continued, “The United States has reached an impasse. And by making Iraq its next target, it is overlooking the consequences of Sept. 11 since the tension created in the Arab world... is such that we are approaching the breaking point.”

According to Denmark’s Sept. 12 Information, however, the Sept. 11 attacks have affected the whole world, not least those parts of it which are home to more than a billion Muslims. The war on terrorism has polarized the Arab and Muslim world, the paper argued, deepening the gap between governments which ally themselves with the West, and populations which see themselves sinking in ever-increasing oppression and poverty.

 

Pakistan’s Election Called a Cloak of “Democratic Mufti”

Pakistan’s Oct. 10 general election—its first in five years—aimed to restore democracy after three years of military rule. “In reality,” London’s Times wrote the following day, “the vote did no more than cloak continued military rule in democratic mufti.” The newspaper continued: “Anti-Musharraf politicians have been banned from participating in voting on grounds of corruption or religious extremism, while leaders loyal to President Musharraf, but tainted by similar accusations, have been allowed to run.”

Writing in the UK’s Daily Telegraph of Oct. 10, Ahmed Rashid bemoaned the U.S. and British administrations’ failure to protest Musharraf’s rigging of the election because they “consider security measures against terrorism more important than stability and democracy.” Predicting a post-election political crisis when opposition polls protest the new government’s illegitimacy, Rashid concluded: “In the short term, dictatorships can catch terrorists as well as anyone, but they cannot rebuild trust in the state. Nor can these countries play a long-term role as part of the international coalition against terrorism.”

The Financial Times wrote on the same day that, given Pakistanis’ disenchantment with the often corrupt political class, Musharraf easily could have defeated “discredited, feudal politicians.” By choosing instead to manipulate the system, the paper said, he “set himself on a path to confrontation with modern and secular forces that he should mobilize in the struggle to modernize Pakistan.” The FT editorial concluded: “President Musharraf should think again, perhaps in terms of a new constitution, produced by an elected constituent assembly. So should the Bush administration, which, in its national security strategy, argued that the advance of democracy was in the U.S. national interest. It is hard to think of anywhere where that is more true than Pakistan, where a flawed election could help turn a failing state into a failed one.”

Lucy Jones is a free-lance journalist based in London.

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