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Seattle, the True Voice of America!
(Jonathan Raban, The Guardian, March 22, 2003)
US public hardens behind war but radical fringe finds its voice - headline in the Guardian last week. Not true - or at least not true in my corner of the US, where the leafiest and richest suburbs are thickly placarded with "No Iraq War" signs, and where, on weekend protest marches against the Bush White House, prosperous bourgeois families, more usually seen tramping around the downtown art galleries on the first Thursday evening of each month, hugely outnumber the bearded peaceniks of the radical fringe. . . . A few days ago, Speight Jenkins, the general director of the Seattle Opera, said that in the course of a season of heavy fund-raising he hadn't so far encountered one person who was in favour of the war: fringe radicals are not usually people who can fork out seven-figure cheques to keep the Ring cycle going. At the private elementary school attended by my daughter, "No Iraq War" bumper stickers adorn the Range Rovers and Toyota Land Cruisers of the soccer moms . . . Seattle is by no means anti-war in general. It houses the main plant of Boeing, the company that made the city rich in the second world war. It's ringed with large military bases - the naval air base on Whidbey Island, naval bases at Everett and Bremerton, the army base of Fort Lewis and the McChord air-force base near Tacoma - and military spending of one sort and another puts $8bn a year into the Washington state economy. . . . The signs saying "Support Our Troops" and "No Iraq War" are complementary rather than oppositional. It is this war for which Seattle has no stomach. . . . President Bush, who talks of his relationship with Jesus as if they'd been Deke fraternity brothers in college and casts himself as God's personal instrument in the war against Evil . . . To the Seattle ear, George Bush sounds an awful lot like Jimmy Swaggart. . . . If that applies to Bush, it applies even more strongly to the secular absolutists and visionaries by whom he is surrounded - and especially to Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, who pop up everywhere, propounding the case for invasion. . . . In Wolfowitz's version of the domino theory, democracy is a contagion, spreading through the Middle East after the (effortless) conquering of Iraq. Iran ... Syria ... Saudi Arabia ... state after state goes down with democracy, each falling on the next with a gentle click. . . . With the glint of fanatic certitude in his [Wolfowitz's] eye, he was explaining how both the invasion of Iraq and its reconstruction would be comfortably paid for by its own oil supplies. . . . Having just breathlessly stepped off the rollercoaster of the New Economy, Seattle is wary about being taken for another ride aboard the New World Order. The Wolfowitz scheme for the market-democratisation of the Middle East rather closely resembles the kind of untested business plan for which venture capitalists here used to hand over millions of dollars without a second thought . . . Seattle has two daily newspapers. Ownership of the Seattle Times is split between the Knight Ridder publishing empire and a local family, the Blethens. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is owned by the giant Hearst Corporation, which is hardly famous for its liberal bias. . . . Though the P-I generally sits somewhat to the left of the Times, both papers usually endorse a fairly equal number of Republicans and Democrats. Both are now severely critical of the Bush administration, and one has squarely opposed the invasion. . . . So the prospect of America's hitherto untravelled president going abroad, at taxpayers' expense, on an adventure of untold, untellable cost, comes at a singularly bad moment for the individual states - and especially for Washington, whose New Economy tax-base has been steadily shrivelling over the last two years. In basic housekeeping terms, Seattle and the White House are living in different worlds. . . . One measure of the P-I's emerging position on the war is that, since Tuesday, it has started to run Robert Fisk's reports for the Independent. Fisk! His scepticism about US intentions in the Middle East sets him apart from all other British, let alone American, correspondents; it is as if the P-I, after listening to Bush's address to the nation on Monday night, had turned to Jacques Chirac for a more enlightened view of things. . . . From where I live, there appears to be no very significant gulf between American and European opinion: as far as I can fairly judge it, Seattle's position on the invasion of Iraq differs little from that of, say, Bristol or Manchester, or even Hamburg or Lyon, though it is seriously out of sync with that of Washington, DC. Yet Seattle does not believe itself to be on the radical fringe - and I have a hunch that I'd be writing in a very similar vein if I were living in Des Moines, Iowa, or any one of a dozen provincial capitals in the US. . . . Suspicion of the national polls has hardened into outright disbelief. "You can get a poll to say any damn thing you want," . . . There is also much anger at the Democrats for failing to provide any articulate leadership in the war on (not with) Iraq. � But something interesting happened on February 21, when the present crop of presidential hopefuls paraded in front of the Democratic National Committee in what several reporters likened to a beauty pageant. Joe Lieberman made a speech so flat his candidacy may well have died in that moment. Richard Gephardt boasted of making common cause with the Bush administration on Iraq, and was met with cries of "Shame!", but went on to outline his domestic policy and won a series of standing ovations. Then came Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont. . . . "I'm Howard Dean, and I'm here to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic party ... What I want to know is why in the world the Democratic party leadership is supporting the president's unilateral attack on Iraq." . . . Dean's opening remarks were enough to leave both Lieberman and Gephardt in the dust. The hall was in an uproar of approval and relief. At last a reasonably qualified and plausible presidential candidate was saying something that rank-and-file Democrats have been waiting to hear for many months. . . . "We are all Americans now," Le Monde's headline on September 13, 2001, has been much quoted as a reminder of how disastrously the Atlantic alliance has broken apart in the course of the last 18 months, and of how wantonly the Bush administration has squandered the world's goodwill toward the US. Yet living here, far from the Beltway, I'm struck by how many Americans have become no less alienated than the great mass of British, French, Belgian, or German voters by the American government's stand on Iraq. � a surprising number of Americans feel they are Europeans now. . . . As cruise missiles and laser-guided bombs dive on Baghdad, public opinion will inevitably harden in favour of the administration, and will further solidify when the first remains of American servicemen are brought back to the US - in body bags, if they've been killed by conventional weapons, in urns if they've fallen to biological ones. Yet there will still fester the sense that this is a grossly unaffordable war, an immoral war fought on a policy wonk's fantastic premise that "democracy" can be imposed by brute force across the Middle East. In six months' time, I doubt that convictions now so widely held in this West Coast city will be seen as the property of a radical fringe. Watch Howard Dean.

posted by LoZo 9:39 AM