Airport terrorist attack fears - 8 February 1991

I am flying west again, to California, but with an overnight stop at Dallas to talk to some students, the airlines have warned us of longer, more bothersome security checks and advised us to be at the airport as much as an hour earlier than usual. So, I am there, 90 minutes before the flight is due to leave and it takes me about three minutes at the check-in counter and 15 seconds to go through the metal detector. A record. Why? Because, to anyone who flies at that time of the day, nine in the morning, the airport looked as I imagine it looks, at three in the morning, a great empty chasm – so few people flying and no lingering friends and families, they are forbidden now, to greet people at the gates. So, they have got the message and apparently are not showing up, in large numbers.

The only conspicuous innovation having to do with security, is obvious the moment you get out of your cab. There is no more, sidewalk baggage checking in. That's to say, I forget now I am not sure it's a normal procedure in Europe, it's not in Britain I think, but if you are flying anywhere within the United States, you normally get your bags deposited right there, on the sidewalk – English pavement – and a porter, so dressed, anyway, looks at your ticket and puts the necessary tags, the destination tags, on your luggage and he sees that they are trundled inside, and sent off to the loading platform.

For, some no doubt good and thoughtful reason I can't quite figure out, this security procedure is enforceable at airports, for the duration. A very small price to pay for whatever safety they have in mind. At Dallas the university officials, two young ladies were, who were going to meet me, were down at the baggage claim area and looked like two forlorn creatures stranded in the dessert. Dallas airport, is I believe, I am sure, physically the largest airport in the world, and even in the thick of the tourist season with people flying in all directions, it has the air of a vast modern construction, a giant, gymnasium or cathedral say, a cathedral with wall-to-wall practically knee-to-knee carpeting so, that hundreds of people stalking around, looked like the strolling midgets in a Canaletto painting, and make no more noise than a convention of kittens. But, this time, the airport looked to me to be at most, a quarter full and it was in the Dallas news that I read about the heavy slump in airplane travel, most of all in tourist travel just about everywhere.

In Europe, in the Middle East of course, and even here one reads in every paper and magazine about the secret hysteria that seems to have overtaken hoards of travelling Americans. Including I notice, a movie star famous or notorious for his portrayal of a muscular machine-gunning hero, the new stereotype of the gung-ho martial American at his worst. Before I left New York, I took this up with one fairly celebrated show biz star, normally a droll and sensible woman, who I should have guessed would not be put off her stride, or her travels, by ten Saddam Hussein's but she was cancelling a trip here, a trip there, because – I was made to feel like a cretin – because of terrorism, stupid.

Well, I suggested that if she took the plane every day for the next year, to almost anywhere on earth expect maybe Bagdad or Tel Aviv, the chances of her being terrorised would work out at one in several hundred thousand, maybe a million, whereas anyone who, at any time of the day, walks across Madison Avenue takes his life in his hands. Yes, yes, she knew that – no avail. Saddam Hussein 'thou hast conquered'. After Dallas, I flew on to southern California to Orange County which is south of Los Angeles. And if I tell you that the airport is named the John Wayne Airport and when you drive out of it you are soon in MacArthur Boulevard. You will gather that you are not in Democratic country. You can win for sure, anytime you cared to bet, that nowhere in prosperous Orange County is there an Adlai Stevenson equestrian statue. Or even, I should guess a building named, after Franklin Roosevelt.

However the, erm, the university, erm, secular university – I mean it's not a Baptist or a Catholic university – is certainly not recruited from the Republican legions who infest Orange County. It's part of the state university system. We all know about the University of California at Berkley and UCLA – University of California at Los Angeles. Well, they are pretty crowded both in numbers and for building space and the university I was visiting is UCI – University of California at Irvine, a community came up like a giant mushroom in the past 30 years. This campus is only 25 years old, they have 16,000 students and because they own about 400 acres across open land, the great marsh on which I was told, eager bird watching students huddle before the dawn, they are required to double their registration to 32,000 by 2000 AD.

This and much more about a splendidly equipped university, I learned before I was privileged to talk to an audience of about 1,200. I do not mean, to sound coy in saying privileged. For there were 10 other events going on that evening – concerts, performances in other auditoriums. stadiums. concert halls with which the campus appeared to abound, including a university basketball game, a science lecture, a performance by the university, symphony orchestra. By the way, how many universities can you name, that have their own student-recruited symphony orchestra. During a busy 36 hours I did not bring up the war. I was waiting for the students and or the faculty to do that. I discovered later they stayed mum out of nothing but courtesy, they did not want to throw out the sidelong suggestion that the subject of my talk ought to have been on the war, or at worst, the strain of it on the domestic front. But finally, after the lecture, so called, was over, and there was an informal get-together, I did bring up the war.

I had seen, of course, polls which show even on the college campuses a very big majority in support of the war. I say carefully in support not in favour. I wish the poll takers would be pedantically careful in the way they frame the questions about the war. I suspect there has never been a war in which popular support is so shadowed by misgivings and opposition so embarrassed by qualifications. It seems so, anyway among the students I noticed on the way to the reception. On the notice board a sheet of paper announcing in crayon a meeting a protest meeting against the war. At the other end of the board, was another notice, a pro war meeting. I was told that these antagonists have not so far visibly or physically antagonised each other. Once recently, indeed, they met together and argued, rising I was told to strong differences of opinion but stopping well short of mayhem. Or the sort of howls of malice and hatred that disfigured many such campus confrontations during the bedlam that accompanied the Vietnam war.

Well, for one thing, remember it's a volunteer army – nobody has been drafted, yet. For another, the opponents, the protestors, do not have the main rationale they used during Vietnam: the belief or the illusion, that the north Vietnamese were Third World democrats fighting to oust a Western power, as they had asked of the French. And a powerful impetus to the Vietnam protestors, had been given, by both general MacArthur and former president Eisenhower, both of whom had urged first President Kennedy and then Johnson, not to get involved in a land war in Asia. But, even to the most downright peacenik, Saddam Hussein is not as he is, by the way, to more and more Arabs, a hero, saving the Arab world from the detested, the invading, Western superpower; he is condemned right left and centre for his annexation of Kuwait. He is watched and feared for his remembered use of chemical weapons against his own Kurds. He made a glaring psychological error, when he paraded those obviously maimed or beaten-up prisoners of war, and at the moment the protestors do not seem to have made clear to themselves an effective alternative to enforcing the United Nations resolution. Approved by 28 nations, which for the first time in 45 years, and finally, sanctioned the use of force, in an international dispute. Something the United Nations was created to do.

Three weeks ago, at the beginning of the war, most protestors condemned the, erm, allied coalition for not having stayed with the imposition of United Nations sanctions. But since that time much disheartening proof has come out, about leaks in the embargo system amounting to a regular flow of goods and material from Jordan, Iran and Syria to go no further. However, unlike any previous war this one is seen in every home, being waged producing vast devastation, and the deaths of harmless people, television penetrates what was always the remote disasters of war. And it alone will ensure, I believe that the anti-war protestors will come into their their passionate heyday if the land war goes on for long and the casualties mount into the thousands, the tens of thousands, a fear that haunts the White House, the Pentagon, the high demand, and makes the support for the war, large, but fragile.

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