Colin James: Defending freedom in a world of moral absolutes

COMMENT

Here are two bits of advice: Do not go to Indonesia unless it is essential because you might get caught up in a bombing. Do not go to Indonesia because bombers are targeting your country.

The first applies to New Zealanders, the second to Australians. The Australian embassy in Jakarta has been attacked. The New Zealand embassy is unlikely to be attacked unless as collateral.

Australians fear an attack at home. New Zealanders don't. If there is danger in this country, it is of an attack on American, Australian or British diplomats. Those countries invaded Iraq, New Zealand didn't.

That distinction between front line and collateral, however, is a fine one. New Zealanders are Western, subscribe to Western values and are intricately bound up with the American way of life.

It is those values and that way of life that the warped Islamic clerics and bombers demonise. No American is innocent in their eyes. Neither is any New Zealander.

People in hotspots learn to live with the remote possibility of being bombed, as I did when the Irish Republican Army (in part funded by Americans) was planting bombs in London. A lot of it goes on - humans have huge reservoirs of hate.

What is different now is that some Arabs drove planes into the Twin Towers in New York, and the United States went to war. The world may not have changed three years ago, as some claimed. But the US has changed, and it rules the world economy.

The essence of that change is in President George W. Bush's dictum in early 2002 that: "Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time and in every place." He has set about defending and proselytising that moral truth.

Certainty of this sort in the minds of the wrong people has caused untold suffering. Hateful certitudes in the minds of the Islamic fanatics Bush is fighting are causing suffering now.

Bush talks of good battling evil in the manner of a Greek tragedy or Wagnerian epic. American commentator Samuel Huntington divined a "clash of civilisations". Norman Podhoretz, an American Jewish intellectual, has labelled it World War IV (World War III having been the cold war between the liberal democracies and the communist states).

If this is World War IV, the adversary is not a mighty military machine or totalitarian bloc of nuclear-armed states but a shadowy, even if lethal, sect that envies and hates the US and hides in dark corners.

Nevertheless, take Podhoretz seriously. He is a leading "neo-con" (neo-conservative) and "neo-cons" are the moral force in the Bush Administration.

Podhoretz is editor-at-large of Commentary, an influential right-wing journal. This month, in a long essay on Bush's foreign policy and defence doctrine, he excoriates some critics of Bush as peddling veiled anti-semitism.

Many of those who moved from the left in the 1960s to the right now and are identified as "neo-cons" are Jews, he writes. Critics have focused on those "neo-cons" who have Jewish names, implying a conspiracy by Jews "to manipulate the world for their own nefarious purposes".

Go down this track and you soon get to Israel. Go one small step further and you run into Islamic deviants only too keen to conjure a world Jewish conspiracy.

It beggars imagination that there is any such conspiracy and it is also hard to imagine that any but a few on the far right and far left in the US think there is either.

But with Bush we are not in a world of shadings of meaning but in one of moral absolutes. There is room only for friends and enemies. And so we are all constrained.

Exporters pay more to have their containers inspected before transport to the US. Our passports will have to carry biometric information. We must quell Americans' (realistic) horror of another bomb on home soil. There are tougher international rules on terror organisations and on refugees. And the rule of law is no longer sacrosanct in World War IV.

A Kafkaesque account in the August 5 London Review of Books of the detention without trial in Britain of a mentally ill Arab, given indefinite leave to live there in 1998, indicates where that can lead. The man has innocent and documented explanations for the allegations against him but may not see or contest any of the evidence on which his continued detention is based, nor even know whether his explanations have been noted.

Britain invented the rule of law. The US enshrined it. A rabble of religious fanatics have chipped it with their bombs. Our freedom, you understand, is not a moral absolute.

* Email Colin James