The Guardian, Tuesday November 27, 2001President Bush's prime purpose now is gearing up America for a wider war. "It's not over. It's not over," he told Newsweek, concerned that the people might think otherwise. "Afghanistan is just the beginning," he roared to an audience of soldiers at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. "America has a message for the nations of the world. If you feed a terrorist or fund a terrorist, you're a terrorist."
In Newsweek, he amplified this with reference to one man. "Saddam is evil," he declared for the first time. It could take years to catch Osama bin Laden, he allowed. But many other targets are now on notice of merciless aggression.
You do not hear a single word of similar intensity from any European leader. Even Tony Blair, while regularly reinvoking the global campaign against terror, seldom talks about the enemy with Bush's slavering passion for specific eliminations. The president is mobilising an American national will such as we have not recently seen.
During the cold war it was unquestioning, but static. During Vietnam, it disintegrated. Now the enemy, though invisible, is unmistakable, and the national stirring is deep against him. For the first time, the US was attacked: for the first time, the US doesn't mind if casualties are taken in the name of vengeance or self-protection. For the first time, therefore, public opinion is unambiguously ready to come in behind whatever intervention a president decides he must propose.
One proof of this is what encroachments on their liberties Americans are willing to put up with. Protests against the repressive gospel according to the attorney general, John Ashcroft, are few and far between. A country that guards its constitutional freedoms with meticulous passion is prepared to surrender them with pious indifference. So easy is such submission to raison d'état that the quiet torture of recalcitrant suspects surely cannot be far behind.
Europeans should reflect on this as a measure of the hard-eyed national commitment that differentiates the American mood from that of any other country. This, rather than the diplomatic niceties of coalition building, will mainly determine what happens next.
Though a division over policy is not yet visible among the allies, the gulf of perception seems likely to become significant. The temper of the times will remain sternly hot in the US while, barring more terrorism, it eventually cools in Europe. Far from this campaign yielding a new concert of civilised nations, it will emphasise the deafening control of the trumpeter and conductor. The British piccolo, in particular, will find it harder to be heard. The band continues to play in rough harmony, but only on condition that it follows the unilateral beat of the big bass drum.
In three theatres, you can see this starting to happen. Afghanistan itself has become an American operation. Sure, they needed allies in all adjoining countries, and worked to get them. There's been a huge amount of transatlantic traffic. When aspiring partners, from Italy to Japan, thirsted to get in on the action and prove their manly commitment, they were nominally accepted, their troops probably never to be used. When even the German Greens, at the weekend, voted to take part, a Rubicon of lasting importance to Germany and Europe was crossed.
But Washington remains in unimpeded charge. Behind coalitionist talk, that's how they want it. They speak, moreover, for a different aftermath. Again the verbiage tries to soften this. But when Mr Blair talks about rebuilding Afghanistan and not forgetting it in the peace, it's plain he is sincere whereas Bush's people mouth the words and do not really mean them.
There's nothing wrong with nation-building, but not when it's done by the American military," said Condoleezza Rice not long ago, speaking as the president's closest foreign policy aide. Though Washington is pledged to a large chunk of the $10bn aid Kabul has been promised, it's unlikely to stay and oversee the maintenance of a stable, semi-decent regime to spend it. That's not what the new Bush doctrine, a results-oriented, short-vision construct, is all about.
Second, the world itself will not, I now guess, benefit from a new internationalism. After September 11, many of us wrote optimistically otherwise. A unilateral foreign policy was surely dead and buried. When it comes to collaborating against terror, that may remain so. Washington's withdrawal from the Middle East peace process is also no longer an option. But the other litmus tests seem likely to be failed.
Swift smashing of the Taliban can't plausibly be seen as a platform for reneging on Republican hostility to either the comprehensive test ban treaty or the international criminal court. On the contrary. Seen from Washington, what's being achieved is, among other things, the triumph of an American view of the world that can now be amplified elsewhere.
Third, and most delicately, comes Bush's promise that Afghanistan is not the end but the beginning. Again, many countries are signed up to that. Organised commitment to strangle the finances of terrorism should make a difference. But a choice presents itself, in which it's clear where every EU country, not to mention Russia and most of the Middle East, stands: on the slow road of economic and diplomatic action, rather than the fast track of bulldog threats followed by instant bombing.
Though Iraq may not be the first place that comes under fire, it's by far the most sensitive, and now the president, talking to Newsweek, gives Saddam his warning: let the UN arms-inspectors back in, or face the consequences.
The American mood will tolerate this, perhaps demand it. Not long ago, speculation about the Iraqi option was linked to an anxious need for incontrovertible proof of al-Qaida connections. Now, the test is becoming looser. What looks like a speedy victory in Afghanistan is galvanising US ambitions to be the world's super-enforcer, whatever the problems, for a global cause Americans believe in more clearly than they've believed in anything since the second world war. It's hard to identify a single voice that might be loud enough to stop it.
Least of all Tony Blair's. Though Mr Blair has done a good job as a major builder of the coalition, is it credible that he will count for more than the deep-throated thunder from of the Republican right, smarting with rage to complete the job Bush's father failed to do on Saddam? Most Europeans know which side they're on after the criminal obscenity of September 11. But as time passes, they're drawn ineluctably into a campaign over which they will have ever less influence.
Their support is an essential token, and their networks are vital to the political and economic effort. But when it comes to calling the shots, Washington cannot be denied, at least by Britain. It's impossible to write the speech one could believe Blair might give to defend his withdrawal of support. Maybe he wouldn't want to. But, helplessly drawn along, we will not walk taller in the world.
