American flags, Afghan stories, and all our futures

1 October 2001

America is awash in populist nationalism. Nobody told people to put out flags. They appeared everywhere before September 11 was over. Tiny ones on hats. Little ones on cars. Big ones on the front porch. Mammoth drapes on public buildings. Heroic ones erected over the rubble. Animated versions as background to the TV news. Scraps worked into the stage costumes of rock stars. Downloadable versions from your Internet service provider. The back page of a newspaper with instructions for placing in the window ('this side up').

The reaction has been populist in the literal sense of 'by the people and for the people'. Rescue teams had to turn away volunteers. Hospitals are awash with donated blood. Television coverage first framed the story as an attack on symbols of American power, but rapidly switched to an attack on American people. The collapsed buildings have become backdrop; the stories are all human. Both victims and rescue workers are heroes. Tales of escape rotate with tales of tragedy. The battered fireman's helmet has taken the place of the infantryman's tin-hat. Billy Joel played 'New York State of Mind' with one on the grand piano.

President Bush called it an attack on freedom. But in the popular interpretation, it was an attack on the nation. Titles chosen to headline the television news have one word in common. America Under Attack. America Responds. America Rises. America Recovers. America Fights Back. When President Bush delivered his national address, he skipped quickly past the idea of freedom, and told people he understood this upsurge of populist nationalism. His approval rating soared.

Like most nationalisms, America's version has a strong religious undertone. People have visited church for the first time in years. Prayer vigils have boomed. Every McDonalds has 'God Bless America' on the panel to announce promotions. Bush slipped unthinkingly into calling the American response a crusade. The notice about trash collection at Chang Noi's Washington condo has a classical quote of the week: 'If a man destroys an eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye'—the tribal ethics of revenge from Iraq (!) four thousand years ago.

Like most nationalisms again, America's version has a military streak. The flag is a battle standard. The anthem is a battle hymn. Bush dispatched the fleet because the populist-nationalist upsurge expected a military order. A columnist in the Washington Post urged the military leaders to ignore the complex arguments about invisible enemies, discouraging precedents, innocent victims, and difficult terrain. 'The military is a killing instrument,' he noted, 'if we want finesse we should hire a ballet company.' Another columnist declared himself a 'lapsed pacifist', and expected he was one of many.

American liberals are caught up in this populist nationalism as much as anyone else. But they are quietly asking two questions. Can the US military fight this war without making things worse? What will be the long-term effect on the US position in the world?

In US media, the world has shrunk to New York, Washington, and Afghanistan. The liberal concerns have surfaced most strikingly and most subtly in the media's outstanding coverage of Afghanistan. Daily press reports. TV specials. Radio analyses. Academics contributing deep background. A survey of the country concluded: it's no use trying to bomb Afghanistan back into the Stone Age because it's already there. Live reports from the borders show thousands fleeing Afghanistan's cities and being blocked by the border closures. Countless are stranded in the desert, becoming the world's next great human disaster. These stories encode the liberal concern that Goliath America presiding over human disaster will forsake the moral high ground as surely as in Vietnam and much more quickly.

More chillingly, the reporters on the Afghan border cover not only those trying to get out, but those trying to get in. Students and migrant workers want to return 'to defend our homeland'. A young man clutching a school satchel says fiercely, 'We will fight the Americans just like we fought the Russians.' Their nationalism echoes America's own, with an added steeliness from suffering murderous attacks not once but many times.

In Pakistan, a TV crew films comfortable middle-class school boys cheering bin Laden because he stands for principle rather than simple greed. A Quetta Pakistani says 'the Afghans are our brothers'. The real problem of the Middle East, notes a commentator, is that all but a tiny elite are horribly poor. 'The economic collapse is irreversible. Too many feel their governments have failed them. They want to get rid of these governments which America supports.'

These reports are background for some quiet confessions in the corridors of power. Policy-makers from past administrations have wondered aloud why America won Afghanistan from the Russians then lost it to the Taleban. It won the battle about guns. It lost the one about hearts and stomachs. After the Russian withdrawal, the plans for economic aid went missing. In the aftermath of communism's collapse, the US forgot that the benefits of its triumphant capitalism are not shared by everyone.

These confessions are not simply sad post-mortems. They hint at what this war may mean for America's role in the world. The US has just declared the first post-modern war. It has targeted an enemy which operates outside the system of nation-states. It has expanded its role as the world's policeman. To win the immediate battle, it may have to support and strengthen some of the failed, hated nation-states of the Middle East. But, the liberal conscience hints, to win the war, it has to respond to the aspirations of the many who want to see these states overthrown, and their own lives improved. The US has to share more of the world's wealth. It has to be the world's benefactor as well as its policeman.

Down the road, America's populist nationalism has to rediscover the rest of the world.