I have just been watching a documentary about 9/11, following the USA President and the people around him on that day, cutting between contemporary photographs and video footage, and excerpts from recent interviews with the key people. Right at the end, the interviewer asked George W Bush if he thought the decisions he took back then had made the world a safer place. Bush paused for a moment, and replied: "Well, there haven't been any more attacks on America, have there?"
Bush hears a question about the world, and replies with an answer about America.
There are two obvious ways this can make sense.
Firstly, if you believe that America's interests and the whole world's interests are one and the same - that what is good for America is good for the world. America is safe - this is good for America, so it is obviously good for the whole world.
Or, secondly, if you believe that the rest of the world does not matter. America is safe - who cares about anything else?
Perhaps these two ways are just two sides of the same coin: only caring about our narrow national interest. Following 9/11, America invaded Afghanistan. It made promises to the people of that country, then immediately adopted strategies which were bound to fail - arming the warlords, for example. The inevitable retreat has just happened, and the country is in a far bigger mess than it was 20 years ago. America pulled out, supposedly to save American lives, although it had reached the point where very few American lives were being lost, and as a result Afghans are dying and their lives are being turned upside down. Are they going to feel grateful to America for this legacy?
Perhaps the USA and Britain will one day discover that pursuing our national interests in someone else's country may give us short term wins but will always give the world long term problems - and other people will, quite reasonably, blame us for the chaos we cause in their country. Every time we think we can make the world a better place by starting a war, we are proved wrong - and every time we refuse to learn the lesson that this will never work.
Terrorism is fuelled by a sense of injustice. A 'war' on poverty and injustice might make the world a better and safer place. A 'war on terror', trying to kill all the bad people - all the people we think are bad, because they don't support us - has never made the world a better place, and never will.
Postscript:
A quote in an ABC interview from former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the dean of Belmont University Law School in Nashville, who was White House counsel to then-President George W Bush on 9/11: "We obviously wanted Americans to live their lives as normally as possible, but to understand that we live and operate in a very dangerous world where there are people, there are organizations, there are groups that don't have very kind views about our way of life, about our values."
This is a very common misconception. Very few people across the world care anything about the way of life and values of Americans - apart from the terrible effect of that way of life upon our planet, of course. What they do care about is the way Americans force their way of life and values upon everyone else, and back that up with soldiers on the ground and attacks from the air when other people don't do what the American government thinks they should.
Of course, when you think that the rest of the world should adopt American values, the American strategy of imposing their values makes perfect sense ... but that does not make it right. And it is equally wrong for Britain to constantly support America in imposing their (our?) values.
