They are dark, unseen enemies, come from far away — and they are scaring us witless. Daesh (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) is not a disease, and Ebola is not a terror organisation. But fear is their common currency: intentional for one, inevitable for the other. Today they can seem to be working in tandem, a pincer movement paralysing the world’s governments as it terrifies the world’s people. Each time one advances, the space for the other expands.
From the vantage point of the west, the similarities are obvious. It starts with a menace that was once obscure and understood by few, with a name that keeps shifting (is it Isis, Isil or IS?) or a pronunciation that is uncertain (is it ee-boh-la or ebb-ola?), and which suddenly becomes all-pervasive, threatening catastrophe.
In both cases, the turning point came when the victims were no longer distant others, but people deemed to be like us. So Daesh became impossible to ignore not when it conducted mass executions, on camera, of hundreds of Iraqi and Syrian fighters, but when it beheaded western hostages: James Foley, Steven Sotloff, David Haines, Alan Henning.
Ebola was an African problem until cases surfaced in places we could point to on a map: Madrid or Dallas. The Daesh and Ebola stories are both captured by a simple Andre Carrilho cartoon showing a ward full of dying black people — with a cluster of TV cameras huddling around the lone white victim.
But the greater similarity is the feeling of impotence that both crises prompt. The US, the most armed nation in the history of humankind, which spends more on weapons than the 10 next highest-spending nations combined — along with five European allies and partners from the Gulf states — is pounding Daesh from the air and yet making only marginal progress. No one is talking of victory over Daesh; most speak of merely containing it. Meanwhile, the same US, with all its state-of-the-art technology and germproof suits, couldn’t prevent one of its nurses catching Ebola.
Against that impotence rages the cry that something must be done. It loses little ardour when it is confronted with evidence that that something is likely to do no good.
From the start, military strategists pointed out the obvious defects in a policy of air strikes against Daesh. Surely its fighters would hide themselves and their (serious) military kit rather than remain exposed in plain sight. And if Daesh did hide among civilians, then western attacks would end up killing innocents not militants, thereby creating sympathy, and recruits, for the extremists. As for the British (and European) willingness to hit Daesh in Iraq but not Syria, that surely was to insist on a border that had been erased by war. Daesh operates in both countries, combining them into a single battlefield. Surely it was quaintly legalistic of America’s allies to preserve a distinction that events had made defunct.
The errors in the anti-Ebola strategy were just as obvious. “Enhanced screening” at British airports and Eurostar terminals carries the smack of firm, decisive action. But health experts coughed politely and noted that such screening would not pick up those whose symptoms were not yet visible, and would be no protection at all against those who lied about their movements.
The experts further warned that a likely product of such measures would be increased anxiety, which might hinder — not help — the one action that really would make a difference: getting doctors and nurses to go to west Africa and combat Ebola on the ground.
It’s not as if policymakers don’t hear these warnings. They do. As chief of staff to former British prime minister Tony Blair during a decade in government, Jonathan Powell managed a fair few crises. He says of President Obama and Daesh: “He knows bombing has no chance. He wants to be the man who ends wars, not starts them. He’s taking action he knows can’t succeed. There’s a logical dissonance there and it shows.”
Current UK prime minister David Cameron is, no doubt, similarly conflicted, though for different reasons. He surely believes air strikes over Iraq but not Syria make little sense, but political reality — given parliament’s veto of action against Syria last year — means he can act in one area but not the other. On both Daesh and Ebola politicians are aware of the limits on their capabilities, yet have to make a show of mastery and control. Yesterday (17OCT), Obama appointed an Ebola tsar, a title that suggests a contagious disease can be instructed to recede by imperial fiat.
But the biggest problem might also be the most prosaic. It is simply that these two big crises have struck at once. In 1999, during the Kosovo war, I asked a White House official about progress on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. He confessed to me that even the White House — regularly imagined by Hollywood as the throbbing heart of power, bursting with might — could only cope with one major international issue at a time.
Powell puts the capacity a little higher than that, recalling his own “rule of six”, by which he could cope with six problems — small, medium or large — at once, but no more. He pictured himself running between spinning plates. If there was too much going on, “lack of time, lack of space, meant you couldn’t get back to that first plate”.
That is especially true in presidential or quasi-presidential systems, where any big decision has to be taken by the person at the top. There are only so many hours in the day, only so much room in the leader’s head. When people speak of “limited bandwidth”, this is what they mean.
Of course, that’s always been true: leaders have to deal with both the crises the public know about and those boiling away below the surface, as well as trying to advance their own agenda, rather than merely reacting to events. But in an age that Michael Ignatieff describes as “the new world disorder”, where Daesh and Ebola take their place alongside an ongoing war in Ukraine, and where the authoritarian behemoths Russia and China are becoming more assertive, that is becoming harder than ever.
There is simply not enough capacity to deal with all these problems at once. We make mistakes in our handling of each of them, and so they all get worse. Daesh feeds Ebola, and Ebola feeds Daesh — and our fear feeds them both.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
