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Betrayed
The British Playwright David Hare used to have an instinctive sympathy for
politicians, particularly Labour politicians. The war on Iraq changed that. Now
it is impossible to imagine any US policy that Britain would not support - and
so the government has become irrelevant to the people
Monday June 23, 2003
"When I try to understand what's going on every morning, I tell myself there's
been a military coup." - American diplomat
One of my favourite literary jokes of the past 20 years was made when a
well-known novelist, hitherto apolitical, announced that the recent birth of his
first baby had convinced him that he could not tolerate living in a world that
contained nuclear weapons. The critic Adam Mars-Jones responded by noting that
he had heard many powerful and convincing arguments both for and against the
bomb, but that his final judgment on the question was unlikely to be swayed by
the fact that Martin Amis had recently become a father.
The same potential for epic self-importance attends all those of us who have
found the last period of international conflict among the most seriously
disillusioning of our lives. We risk making fools of ourselves. Frankly, you may
ask, who cares? It would, after all, be a rare idiot who had followed the
direction of our last two governments and imagined that their leaders gave a
hoot, private or public, for the thoughts and feelings of those who had argued
or even campaigned for their election.
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown claim, in their rhetoric, not to be victims of the
traditional deformities of the left. But, curiously, for all their talk of
breaking the bonds of the past, they have both inherited one of the left's most
disabling characteristics. They continue to show much more vigour when finding
fault with their friends than they do when giving stick to their enemies. Any
plain citizen - anyone, in fact, ruled rather than ruling - would have to be
blind with conceit not to notice that the Blair-Brown project has motored
forwards on a powerful fuel made up of two-parts admiration for the opposition
mixed with three-parts contempt for their own supporters.
What does it matter, then, if those of us who have always believed in social
democracy now find ourselves seized by a unique, impotent sense of shame at the
collusion of a British government in a manifestly cooked-up invasion of a
foreign country? When, 10 weeks ago, I wrote in these pages about an illegal
occupation which was predicated on at least five principal untruths - 1) That
Iraq represented a threat to the United States; 2) That it presented a current
or increased threat to its neighbours; 3) That it had developed nuclear weapons;
4) That it was linked in any way to al-Qaida and to the devastation of September
11; and 5) That Hans Blix was being fooled, through his own ingenuousness, in
what turned out, in reality, to be his scrupulous and thorough searches for
chemical weapons - then I was properly rebuked by correspondents asking why I
was so ready to press the case against the US, and yet had, apparently, not a
word of blame for my own government. It was a fair question. It was also hard to
reply.
My fault, but alongside an apparently small minority of my fellow countrymen, I
have always been instinctively sympathetic to domestic politicians. It had long
seemed to me that many of them, and most obviously those in leftwing parties,
were people willing to take on problems which most of us find easier to leave
alone. My experience in 1993 of being given access to watch Neil Kinnock at
close quarters throughout his doomed attempt to become prime minister left me
markedly intolerant of people who love to declare that anyone standing for
election must necessarily be a fool or a crook. It seemed even sillier, as Fleet
Street does, to seek first to elevate individual politicians and then, through
an inevitable cycle of attrition and fatigue - a kind of boring media war -
always to consign them to a place where they are deemed no longer worthy of the
journalistic community's high standards.
My own belief in the difficulty and desirability of democratic politics was
hardly based on a utopian view of what might be achieved. Just as important, I
could reluctantly see that most western societies were made up of people and
interest groups who wanted very different things. They could not all be
satisfied at the same time. Whereas most of us could airily wave a
leader-writer's hand and proclaim, "This should be done - and then this,"
without actually having to follow through the practical implications of what we
urged, politicians were the poor mugs who were allocated the job of reconciling
the irreconcilable. In our own lives, most of us habitually equivocated, elided,
jumped logic, changed our minds and generally faffed about on the margins of
conviction. But it was only politicians whose profession obliged them to be held
to account for these particular offences.
When I heard some stray minister being roasted in parliament for a chance remark
he had unwittingly made five years previously, I would wince in sympathy and
think how few of my own utterances would survive this kind of examination. If
politicians dodged, weaved and buckled language to a point where it screamed for
mercy ("I did not have sexual relations with that woman"), then it was, in part,
because their trade committed them to higher levels of scrupulousness than the
rest of us. They were under scrutiny. A lot of us aren't. Watching all the
hallmark sweating and wriggling of the professional pol, I was usually persuaded
of Fawn Brodie's famous pronouncement: "There's a little bit of Richard Nixon in
all of us." Only on occasions did I tend instead towards John Kenneth
Galbraith's equally memorable riposte: "I say, the hell there is."
It is difficult, therefore, for someone of my temperament to accept that my own
feelings about politicians have become worse than irrelevant. They have become
worthless. Why? Because local politicians are, definitively, no longer speaking
to me. The important dialogue in Britain is no longer carried on between the
governors and the governed, but is maintained in another direction entirely:
neither up nor down, but east-west, between the colony and the imperial capital.
The charge has been made - as though it were the most damning possible - that
Britain and America decided to annexe Iraq and then afterwards search for any
random justification, however implausible, which they could find to decorate
their intentions. (Paul Wolfowitz's own words plainly bear that meaning, and
Clare Short is telling us the same). But far more troubling, at least to those
of us who imagine that some sort of national conversation still goes on, is the
knowledge that it is now impossible to imagine any American foreign policy,
however irrational, however dangerous, however illegal, with which our present
prime minister would not declare himself publicly delighted and thrilled.
These are, it is clear, frightening times. A revolutionary doctrine of the
pre-emptive strike has been introduced into international relations, but its use
is to be the privilege of one country alone, on no other grounds than that this
particular country is so powerful as to be beyond sanction. The UN, which was
established, in Samantha Power's words, "specifically to end the days of
military intervention dressed up as humanitarianism", has been pushed brutally
to the side. From now on, America will do what it damn well pleases, but the
messy business of explaining and justifying will be left largely to the junior
partner. Harold Wilson is held in history to be the most untrustworthy and wily
practitioner of the black arts of politics, yet even he managed the principled
feat of remaining allied to Lyndon Johnson without uselessly killing British
soldiers in a similarly doubtful venture. If, as Stanley Kubrick claimed, large
states often behave like gangsters while small states often behave like
prostitutes, then we may at least console ourselves that we have descended to a
point where we are more whore than racketeer. But the sum effect is to leave us
in a world where no one will listen to us. They know we have voluntarily
surrendered our wish for an independent voice in foreign affairs. Worse, we have
surrendered it to a country which is actively seeking to undermine international
organisations and international law. Lacking the gun, we are to be only the
mouth. The deal is this: America provides the firepower; we provide the
bullshit.
The easy thing, of course, in response to this fait accompli, is to hand all
discourse back to the cynics and to say that the deeply impressive massed ranks
of two million voters in February indeed represented, as the Labour government
hoped, nothing but a walk in the park. As the Americans lie back on their Roman
pillows and toy insincerely with a laughable road map for the Middle East which
is touted, among other things, as Blair's reward for his loyalty, and which, in
a world now pathologically distrustful of American intentions, has no
conceivable chance of success, the temptation is to throw our hands up and
declare that there is no alternative but for the rest of us to join our
short-sleeved cousins lolling in the bleachers. We are to watch as innocent
people spin to their deaths, whether in Gaza, on the West Bank or in Tel Aviv.
The status quo of occupation and chaos in Afghanistan and Iraq, and of savage
butchery in the Palestinian territories and Israel is already acquiring a
disturbingly permanent look. Summer is coming, the weather is changing on the
Potomac and in the home counties, and you can feel, as our rulers reach for the
barbecue forks and the Chardonnay, as they gather forgivingly again for their
frotteurs' trade union meetings in Evian - "How lovely to see you, Mr Bush";
"No, how lovely to see you" - a growing confidence that although something
utterly dishonourable happened in public life earlier this year, there is no
reason that, like all dishonourable things, it should not soon be forgotten.
Well, there it is. Those of us who opposed the war from the start have won the
argument and lost all influence. Even if we are unwise, as I think we are, to
focus our vindication on the fruitless 96-day search for weapons of mass
destruction - the war was wrong, it was wrong regardless, because it was outside
the authority of the United Nations - nevertheless we are left at the end of it
all in the curious position of finding no satisfaction or purpose in our own
rightness. The policies are not going to change. We are going to be ignored. In
the aftermath of an invasion which is now recognised all over the world to have
been conceived, born and carried out in mendacity, we have, it seems, only one
obligation, and it is one which may one day even provide our shivering democracy
with a useful antibiotic. It is to set out and nail the remaining lies which the
belligerent are still trying to advance for their cover.
Of these, the most important and insidious is the idea, given much romantic
play, particularly in Europe, that Americans are, by nature, isolated from the
rest of the world and therefore charmingly incompetent at the exercise of
diplomacy. This seems to me the exact opposite of the truth. It may well have
been useful to the pursuit of recent US policy to pretend that there is still
some element of prairie innocence at large on Capitol Hill. Implicitly, the
question is put: "How can we homespun regular folk be expected to find our way
through these damned complicated international organisations?"
But the disastrous mistake, on our side of the argument, has been to indulge
this American exceptionalism for even one moment. Whatever the patronising
propaganda emanating from Downing Street - "Yes, the Americans are a bit crude,
but don't worry, we'll smooth things over" - there is nothing peculiar to the
American character which exempts it from the obligations of diplomacy. On the
contrary. For an administration which is widely held to be provincially ignorant
of the world, you may notice that it is doing remarkably well at getting its way
in it.
It may be perfect fun to crack our sides at the witty anti-war campaigner who
claims that "God invented war to teach the Americans geography." But we should
be aware that when we do so, we play straight into the war-makers' hands. It
suits them better than they can tell. They love it when we choose to assume that
they are rough and artless, even naive. The truth is, it isn't likely. The more
plausible interpretation is that they know exactly where they're going. When
Colin Powell walks out of the General Assembly in a snit because he believes a
Frenchman has been rude to him, it is not, as he would claim, because he has
tried very hard to be reasonable, but, dammit, there is a limit. It is because
he is deliberately using diplomatic incompetence as an excuse for the US to
thenceforward be licensed to do exactly as it chooses. If it wished, America
could perfectly well do as its critics advise and "grow up". It could easily
engage with the world's arguments against it. Why not? It wouldn't be hard. It
is, oddly, a mark of our own stupidity that we seem incapable of grasping the
point that the US does not engage for the simple reason that it does not want
to - any more than Bush wants to take notice of unthinking liberals who keep
advising him to "travel more".
The overriding offence of all of us in Europe, on whatever side of the argument,
has been to have peddled the notion that because Bush is inarticulate, he must
therefore be stupid. It is a peculiarly English snobbery and it is damaging.
Anyone who has read the high-wire Darwinism of Stephen Pinker would know that an
inability to competently handle language does not argue a lack of coherent
purpose or intention. We can laugh as much as we wish at slogans such as "The
moron's got a war on." We can even buy Private Eye and indulge its falsely
comforting view of a man who is too dumb to know how many beans make five. We
may, like Blair himself, elevate our own importance, and parlay our world role
by managing to imply that we are acting as a restraining influence on these
hopeless barbarians. (To a friend, who said he was grateful that Blair had been
in the room when some of the recent discussions had gone on in the White House,
the prime minister replied that only those who had been in the room could have
any idea just how wild some of those discussions had been.) But when we do so,
we miss the larger facts and we mistake our analysis. Consider. At the end of
the war, Bush has rising popularity, a cowed and craven media which has
abandoned all serious pretensions to investigation or even to basic reporting,
and a Democratic opposition which has been triumphantly blackmailed into
nervous, pseudo-patriotic silence. Meanwhile, he is raising money, hand over
fist, for his own coronation. Blair has falling popularity, the media on his
neck, and may never be trusted again. The Labour party, by report, is not
expanding. Which one clever? Which one stupid?
©-free 2003 Adelaide Institute