Frank Haden
Sunday Star-Times, Auckland, September 30, 2001
It's not comfortable, sitting around biting your nails and wondering whether George W Bush has enough far-sighted advisers to tell him to quit while he's ahead.
As the grossly injured party that has so far held back from striking out in righteous anger, the United States occupies the moral high ground, a position it hasn't approached for half a century. But it will lose this advantage with the first civilian casualty in Afghanistan.
It will be back where it was before September 11, envied as a giant consumer society, but feared for its manipulation of other economies through the IMF and the World Bank, and with the blood of Korean, Vietnamese, Nicaraguan, Libyan, African, Chilean, Palestinian, Iraqi and Serbian women and children on its hands. That's a whole heap of bad public relation.
Already anxious, I'm not encouraged by Bush's comic-book rallying-cry: "If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists." If I were a praying person, I'd be asking the great Strategic Communications Consultant in the sky to put eloquence into the mouths of Bush's advisers. I'd want them to use the huckster's argument: "Hey, hold on a minute, boss. We've got the high moral ground here. We can't buy this sort of publicity!"
If Bush presses the button, he will be playing into Osama bin Laden's hands, giving the Muslim extremists everything they want. A war with Islam will cost thousands if not millions of lives, depending on who gets involved and to what extent.
For one thing, the Chinese won't be too keen on Americans interfering in yet another civil war, installing a Western-dependent puppet regime over its back fence.
Apart from the human cost, a war will shrink the world economy, which floats on a fragile confection of confidence in a stable future. It will damage New Zealanders more than most because of our precarious dependence on tourism and high-cost produce.
Old Dubya may not be able to spell prescience, but I hope he can recognise good advice when his advisers offer it. If they do.
