The logical outcome of this argument is that the very justness of the war is proved by the fact of regretting its means. As Runciman points out, this is not the most robust moral armour to deploy against Muslims. They hold to the same concept of just war and take it to similarly brutal extremes as do the 82nd Airborne and the USAF in the Sunni triangle.
In plotting his way through this morass, Runciman is always putting political philosophy to practical purpose. He accepts that democracy can impede a government needing to take decisive action in time of emergency, but points out that freedom has always accepted a measure of risk in its honour. Trouble occurs when democracy is cited in aid of minimizing risk, when an electorate can be so alarmed that any curbing of freedom seems justified. So seductive is today’s pre-emptive paranoia that democratic institutions can seem wimpish obstacles to precaution.
Runciman disagrees. Especially when hysteria is the rule of the day, democracy must be on guard. It must retain judicial oversight, time-limits on emergency laws, disclosure and vigorous parliamentary debate. These must be supplemented by “a free press protected from monopoly influence and offering as wide as possible a range of political views”. This in turn depends on there being “an inquisitive public driving the market for news”.
There are moments when Runciman cannot resist a tangent. A lengthy comparison of the present Iraqi regime with Weimar Germany is implausible, if not wholly without basis. Certainly it is worth reminding the world that not every dictator is another Hitler and not every foreign intervention is another D-Day. There seems no limit to the historical illiteracy underlying the war on terror.
Runciman is not above Isaiah Berlin’s device of praying in aid a little-known European philosopher, in his case Emmanuel Sieyès, to pit against Hobbes, Madison and others. He takes up the cause of more recent theorists of the new world order, Robert Kagan, Philip Bobbitt and Robert Cooper, and subjects the neoconservative world view to incisive analysis. He simply disagrees when Blair demands that we “believe that September 11 changed the world; that Bali, Beslan, Madrid and scores of other atrocities . . . are part of the same threat and the only path to take is to confront this terrorism, remove it root and branch”.
The fact is that neither Bush nor Blair can offer “any good reasons why this view of the future should be true”. All they can do is echo Cheney’s incantation in 2004, “There never was a time when terrorism was just a nuisance; there never can be a time when terrorism is just a nuisance”. It is hard to imagine history ever being so traduced in the cause of paranoia. But this is the final paradox, that the war on terror is without limit and without restraint, and yet it is something that can somehow be “won”.
The essay resolves itself into a study in common sense. There is no war on terror. There is no enemy army and there can be no negotiation, no treaty and no peace. Terrorism is indeed a nuisance, a weapon of war, a technique of conflict as old as war itself. To demand
its “rooting out” is as ridiculous as rooting out bombs, or machetes, or revenge, or poverty, or fanaticism. This obsessive chapter in post-Cold War belligerence has reduced itself to no more than waiting for Osama bin Laden to do something next. It is the most nihilistic
of narratives.
As Runciman says, “just being spooked” is no solid foundation for tearing up the post-Cold War order. Neoconservatism, the driving ideology of the war on terror, is another utopia, blatantly capitalist, pro-American, pro-Israeli. It is as fantastic as is the alternative United Nations warm bath of consensus. In reality the New World Order is the old steady grind of diplomacy in which powerful nations try to keep small ones in some sort of order without the latter resenting it too much.
I am sure Runciman is right to prefer to “disaggregate global terrorism, and to sever its links, than to build them up at every opportunity”. But a dozen studies have failed to put much flesh on the bones of the “al-Qaeda
menace”, beyond a few bank accounts, websites and address books. The supposition that this constitutes a grandiose and global threat to Western values is a pathetic comment both on the robustness of those values and on the neo-conservatives’ faith in them.
The present occupation of Iraq is based on a belief that it is somehow holding the line against Armageddon in the war on terror. “At the time of writing”, says Runciman, “it is hard to see this as anything more than mere superstition.” For this superstition, relations between Christians and Muslims are being jeopardized, and Western freedoms undermined. Thousands are dying each year and billions of dollars being wasted. All this is to minimize the risk of a terrorist bomb attack on a Western city. Though such attacks are awful they are extremely rare and best countered by good policing. They do not put Western values or freedoms at risk, unless we choose to let them.
At such times the philosopher rightly demands that we refine our arguments and guard our language. If we abuse reason, how can we expect others not to do so too? There may be a touch of utopia to Runciman’s rational democracy, but guarding democracy is, after all, what this great conflict is supposedly about.
