I celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall, the downward slither of the Soviet Union and the defeat of the counter-revolutionary coup that sought to restore a communist regime in the Kremlin for two non-sustainable reasons: principle and self-interest. The second was more comprehensible than the first. As a journalist I had a vested interest in free expression, and the Soviet regime was its boring antithesis. But that was so last century. In the first decade of this century, there is a vacuum where once lay the brooding, looming Soviet shadow, a force that kept its own citizens under a form of house arrest and yet inspired enough fear in Anglo-American hawks to restrain their imperial tendencies. Would the Bush-Blair partnership have invaded Iraq in 2003 with such brazen impunity if Uncle Stalin, or even Cousin Brezhnev, had been around?
My faith in principle was foolish. Principle is an impotent yardstick if it is used to measure Saddam Hussein but not Tony Blair. Few emperors have been as airily indifferent to their own lies as Blair has been on Iraq.
Coincidentally, President Obama chose his Oslo moment, around the same time as Blair was offering a who-cares justification to the BBC, to define the relationship between justice and war. If the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq was based on a lie, were those who resisted American troops fighting a just or an unjust war? How many more nations would Bush-Blair have sought to conquer if there had been no resistance in Iraq?
Obama waded into uncharted territory when he stated a proposition with the confidence of conviction, that a holy war could not be a just war. He was, of course, taking a sideswipe at jihad, understandable in the context of his need to be closer to American opinion than Muslim dogma. In the process, he might have slashed at Hinduism. Its two great texts, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, are war epics, and a Hindu would be aghast to hear that Lord Rama and Lord Krishna were fighting an unjust war. The moral code of most eastern faiths is deeply ingrained into popular belief. Obama might be surprised to learn that the iconic holy warrior in the Qur'an is David, king of the Jews.
In the best of all possible worlds, we would have had, in the first decade of the 21st century, a half-Brezhnev as head of the Union of Semi-Socialist Soviet Republics, a muscular superpower in which Pravda was as free as the Guardian and Izvestia as irreverent as the Sun. A balance of powers has given way to an imbalance of power, and space for a legitimate counterweight has thereby been handed over to shadow armies impelled by private agendas but mobilised in the name of nationalism. Patriotism gives theocratic movements strength that they might never have achieved by a more transparent declaration of intent. This was the story in Iraq; this is the story in Afghanistan. In Iraq, they have been co-opted into the system, where they bide their time, waiting for local politicians to self-destruct and American forces to leave. In Afghanistan they have history and geography on their side.