The choice this Autumn

In the latest polls the two appear to be in a neck-to-neck race for the White House. Reasons could be manifold. Americans still feel that George Bush can wage a more effective war on terror than Senator Kerry can do. Bush they know. Kerry they have just started to know. Despite his definitive win in the three presidential debates, Senator Kerry does not appear to have been able to convince the American voters that he has the better plan to get the US out of the Iraq quagmire, reduce budget deficit, provide affordable health care, improve American competitiveness, arrest outsourcing of jobs, give tax relief to middle class Americans, etc.

To non-Americans such a baffling situation is reflective of American insularity verging on isolationism at home and indifference to global concern over four more years of George W as president of the US. US voters have failed to acknowledge former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix's warning that the US led invasion of Iraq not only failed in its aim to make the world a safer place, but has succeeded in stimulating terrorism. The acknowledged gain of the war, in Blix's opinion, was the removal of "a treacherous and murderous dictator, but the rest has been tragedy and failure." Quite an indictment of Bush and Blair from a man who was closely associated with the unfolding drama in pre-invasion Iraq.

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Blix's views coincide with those of Leo Abse (Labour MP from 1958-1987), expressed in his book, Tony Blair: The Man who Lost his Smile. Abse writes that like Bush, Blair is a great believer that God is on his side, and regardless of the condemnation of the Iraq invasion by the Pope and Archbishop of Canterbury, Blair's "personal communing with the Lord during his incessant Bible reading has left Blair confident that when the day comes for him to appear before God, the Lord's judgement and his own will happily coincide." In his inimitable and entertaining yet unsparing analysis, Abse characterises America as a nation of church-goers, with invocation to God being part of national conversation, where the Republicans have struck a Faustian bargain with the Pentecostal movement: the Republicans will concede that abortion or stem cell research are against Biblical text in return for the church mobilising its members to vote for the Republican party.

It is amazing to note how important a role religion plays in the lives of western leaders. Millions have noticed the deep attachment to religion expressed by Bush and Kerry during the presidential debates. Such attachment if confined to their personal life would perhaps be admirable in a world which some would like to describe as becoming increasingly agnostic in belief and atheist in practice. But then again there is a powerful Christian Right in the US, particularly the evangelists who firmly believe in the gathering of Jews in Palestine as a precursor to the second coming of Jesus Christ when all Jews will become Christians.

This group, writes Stephen Zunes (of Foreign Policy in Focus) sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a continuation of the battle between the Israelites and Philistines with God already having decided that the entire Palestinian territory should belong to the Israelis. Albeit neither President Bush nor Senator Kerry are evangelical Christians. Yet as politicians courting votes, they cannot be oblivious to the disproportionate influence this group may wield in the coming presidential elections.

It is ironic that while the Christians persecuted the Jews for centuries bearing responsibility for the betrayal of Jesus Christ to his enemies by Judas Iscariot, the Muslims lived in peace with the Jews in what is now Israel and the occupied lands. Lord Noel Becker, the first Secretary General of the League of Nations noted that in one of his conversations with King Abdul Aziz, he found the Saudi king favouring the idea of Jews living alongside Arabs who would benefit from the expertise the Jews would bring with them being "so talented people and so advanced in different branches of knowledge."

Lord Becker's view finds resonance in the words of historian Bernard Lewis when he writes: "Until the rise and spread of western tolerance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they (Jews) were better off under the Muslims than under Christian rule in most significant respects." But the cruelty dispensed by the Israelis to the Arabs in which the West, particularly the Americans, have been complicit has produced a different history and a disharmonious world. Some have seen the appalling terrorist acts of 9/11 on the phallic twin towers as akin to castration of American manhood which had to be avenged immediately through the total decimation of the Talibans and grinding of Afghanistan, already a pre-industrial society, literally to dust. But the American anger was not to be satiated so easily and therefore the pretext of WMD and untenable links between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein had to be drummed up.

But the Americans standing at the threshold of November elections do not seem to care as evidenced by the recent (October13-16) CNN/USA Today, Washington Post, Business International, Time, and Newsweek magazines polls. Americans under 50 years of age, urban Americans and poor Americans living in big cities, many of whom would have ordinarily voted for Kerry, are more fearful of terrorist attacks at home than outsourcing of jobs, burgeoning deficit, or unaffordable health insurance. President Bush clearly outpaces Senator Kerry as the man most capable of thwarting terrorists at home and abroad. This seemingly inexplicable phenomenon of support for President Bush almost inevitably leads to an obsessive suspicion of Muslims and Islam as being instrumental and inspiration of Al-Qaedist terrorism.

That such an interpretation of global conflict is a gross over-simplification has been accepted by Bernard Lewis (Atlantic Monthly, Jan 2004) is by itself noteworthy. It is generally acknowledged that if any single individual has provided intellectual muscle to the Bush-Blair misadventure in Iraq it is the unassailable intellect of Bernard Lewis. Even Lewis who sees millennial rivalry between Islam and Christianity and the defeat of the Muslims at the hands of the Christians and the Jews as forming the root of Muslim rage is wary of blaming Islam for the current global mess.

For most of the Middle Ages, Lewis argues, it was neither the older cultures of the Orient nor the new culture of the West that were that major centres of civilisation and progress, but the world of Islam. There old sciences were recovered and new sciences were discovered, industries were born, manufactures and commerce were expanded, and growth of freedom of thought and expression led the persecuted Jews and dissident Christians to flee Christendom and seek refuge in Islam. But the erstwhile asylum seekers proved to be more brilliant, innovative, competent, and also devious, enabling them to outpace the Islamic world in economic, military, and political domains.

The Islamic world needs constant reminder of the fact that in the two great movements of the twentieth century -- socialism and nationalism -- the Muslims played the role of an adjunct, a subaltern in the great power and ideological struggle that has irrevocably changed the politico-security architecture of the world. As for nationalism, basically a Eurocentric idea, (perhaps invented by French Orientalist Ernest Rena who saw classical antiquity consisting of republics, kingdoms, empires, or confederation of local republics, but hardly of nations) it played havoc with the non-western societies. Islam, for example, is a universal creed transcending the boundaries of race, tribe, and language. Therefore the notion of an Islamic state is an internalised modernist western construction of a "nation-state" which also has constructed Islam as a cultural whole where the vast range of Islamic cultures, political systems, and beliefs are obscured.

A Bush victory would possibly increase further the obscurantist view of Islam and indelibly imprint in the western mind the impression of all Muslims as followers of Osama bin Laden. If Dr. Susan Rice's (a Kerry advisor) recent comments on Israel and Saudi Arabia are any indication, a Kerry victory would present an equally blind view of Israeli genocide in Palestine, but a proactive US role relating to the genocide in Darfur.

There is no gainsaying the report of Brussels based International Crisis Group on needed reforms in Saudi Arabia, for example, treading carefully upon the strain put by an westernised elite and by the Wahabis wedded to their belief in the simplicity, decisiveness, and incorruptibility of their religious thought, seeking return to Quranic literalism and puritanical theology of Islam. It would not be anti-Semitism to criticise Israeli murderous excesses and ask the next US president to be even-handed in solving the Palestinian problem, the absence of which is being used by Al-Qaedists as an important tool for recruitment of nascent terrorists from among the deprived, delinquent and marginalised people.

Henry Kissinger does not believe that elimination of Osama bin Laden will end the problem of terrorism nor does he believe that success in Afghanistan, by itself, will end the issue. Perhaps Dr. Susan Rice is not off the mark in her observation: "It is we who lose when failed states like Afghanistan, Somalia, and Pakistan cannot keep terrorists out of their territories, even if they want to." Therefore the next US president may consider taking the path of internationalism forsaking unilateralism, promote traditional understanding of international law forsaking preemption as a first resort, embrace diplomatic and developmental engagements with perceived enemies forsaking confrontation, and encourage inter-faith dialogue to bridge civilisational chasm. It is the use of the "soft power" forsaking "hard power" which can return to the US its moral claim of global leadership.

Kazi Anwarul Masud is a former Secretary and Ambassador.