The 27th of July provided the starkest contrast imaginable between the French tradition of rationality and the Anglo Saxon one of putting together a few random bits of information and hoping a pattern emerges.
Le Monde carried a masterful editorial on Living With Terror. Ten closely-reasoned sub-points argued that “Islamic terrorism” (as I suppose we must get used to calling it) was:
- here to stay
- had no single cause
- could not be reduced to being the direct consequence of any single, long-standing regional conflict (although many fed volunteers to terrorist groups)
The editorial went on to say that:
- the US / British invasion of Iraq has, as many Europeans said it would, exacerbated tension and found limitless volunteers for radical groups
- Westerners do not hold all the keys to the solution: we desperately need progressive and reformist forces in the Islamic world to lead
- the struggle against Islamic terror is not a “war”: in wars, one side wins and there is a surrender or a negotiated cessation. That will not happen here: “Al Qaida” is more a brand than an organisation
- the hatred that drives the terrorism may be more of a European issue than an American one; it has been nurtured in communities in Europe where we have failed to make the ideas of Western democracy alive or appealing enough
Le Monde concluded with two suggestions:
- Pakistan is the epicentre of this terrorist movement. Overall American policy to Pakistan is inexplicable but its failure to target extremism there may be the most serious American foreign policy error.
- what the terrorists group want is for us to abandon our values and to resort to torture, internment and sanctioned state-killing. A first step to this “barbarisation” of our society would be abandoning habeus corpus and other traditional liberties.
I haven’t done justice to this exceptionally lucid and compelling piece of writing. Look at the original in the Le Monde archives for the 27th of July (http://www.lemonde.fr/web/recherche/0,13-0,1-0,0.html)
On the same day, the lead editorial in The International Herald Tribune, also published in Paris, was on Zimbabwe. Its leader writers had noticed that the UN report critical of slum clearance in Zimbabwe had been written by a woman. It showed, said the IHT, that she was “not one of the boys”. “Maybe that’s why she did not mince her words about the horrors ... that Africa’s male establishment seems so afraid to talk about.” This was it, the whole of the point. She was a woman; she had been critical; some men had not; ergo the problem in Africa is a male establishment sticking up for a male president. Presumably simple ignorance meant that the leader writers did not know that Mugabe’s designated successor (and an enthusiastic advocate of slum clearance) is a woman. Or maybe it was just a fact that didn’t support the conclusion. (See if I'm being unfair to them at www.iht.com)
You can see the common pattern in Anglo thinking. The people who blew up the World Trade Centre were Arabs who didn’t like America; Saddam Hussein is an Arab who doesn’t like America; ergo Saddam must be responsible for 9/11.
Maybe we should leave any serious thinking up to the French.
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