Prospero

Scottish Elections: New Politics, Old Pastimes

2011-04-15T18:37:00.000+01:00

An even-tempered, “even-handed” sort of piece, by my standards at least, to break me in to the task of writing about a campaign that already looks a bit predictable. I hope I’m wrong.

At any rate, the broader topic involves a little bee in my bonnet, and a bad habit common to all of Scotland’s parties. The insight isn’t original, but the problem persists after almost 12 years of Holyrood. The SNP get picked on (slightly) only because their manifesto was the most recently published at the time of writing.

The Sunday Herald, April 17.

When the unlovely nature of the Westminster coalition began to emerge, a few exasperated people made a suggestion. As the Tories and the Liberal Democrats discarded long-held policies, embraced policies they had previously denounced, or introduced – like rabbits from the partnership hat – policies they had never once mentioned during the campaign, the suggestion was this: why not make manifestoes legally binding?

In other words, why not oblige politicians to mean what they say, or say what they mean, or at least stop scattering ludicrous promises like so much cheap confetti? Above all, why not put a stop to “pledges”?

You’ll recognise those. If things are going well, they count as party-political vows, achieved against all comers. When luck flees, they wind up as mere “aspirations”. Often enough, they are proposals politicians know fine well they cannot or will not bring into law. In the most egregious cases – Nick Clegg could offer testimony – there was never the slightest intention to legislate.

So politicians fib: what’s new? If you harboured any sympathy towards those Lib Dems and Tories, you could moderate the statement, and say that coalition was a whole new ballgame. Give and take was “inevitable” for the sake of stable – no kidding? – government. Besides, isn’t it the case the voters like – or say they like – the sight of rivals attempting to settle their differences?

Does that mean political parties should be entitled to offer a shoddy bill of goods? Doesn’t it mean that if public cynicism is ever to be cured a politician should be obliged only to promise what he knows he can, if elected, deliver?

Any attempt to make a manifesto legally-binding would be tricky, for fairly obvious reasons. Parties would never cease to claim that every pledge was offered in good faith, that unforeseen circumstances arose, that political argument should not be subject to the whims of nit-picking lawyers. In any case, no Westminster party would ever legislate to restrict the use of outrageous fairy tales.

Besides, coalitions are exceptions to the Westminster rule. For most of the time, there’s one winner. When Tories and Lib Dems blame extraordinary circumstances for shamelessly expedient or deceitful behaviour, they have – and you can believe them if you like – an excuse. So what’s the excuse in Scotland?

The 21^st century is well-advanced and the Scottish Parliament is well-established. We’ve had our “new politics” since May 12, 1999. Central to that idea, and to the institution, is that the chances of one party achieving an outright majority are as remote as the chance of the Water of Leith flowing with milk and honey. Everyone is forced to live with the fact, like it – and they don’t, much – or not.

Labour and the Lib Dems have enjoyed and endured partnerships. They have cut deals, granted concessions, traded horses, and attempted – publicly at least – the “consensus” supposedly adored by punters. Short of pretend friends, the SNP have since tried the alternative route, minority government. But they too, lacking any other choice, have made their deals. Each of these parties claims success for its spell in office.

More than a few promises have been broken, however, for the sake of the new politics. Perhaps, if such is your taste, that’s as it should be, and perhaps it amounts to better representation than is ever achieved by first past the post. But has that ever prevented an opposition party from accusing the government of the day of the foul crime of breaking promises? And has it stopped any of them campaigning with a fistful of pledges and the solemn statement, “If elected we will...”?

Another statement, a simple one: it doesn’t work like that, not any more. And they know it. In each Scottish election since 1999, the intelligent question has not been “Who won?” but “What follows?” A minor Holyrood sport, in a pre-election year, is attempting to spot who might be amenable to an approach from whom, who is stating the price for a deal, and what might be the kind of deal at stake if no one means to “go it alone”.

How to read a manifesto, then, should the prospect ever appeal? Do you dismiss every page as so much recycled paper? Do you cast aside pledges X, Y and Z as merely impossible? Do you wonder which policies are simple (or cynical) post-election bargaining chips? Or do you wonder why each and every party persists in defying Holyrood reality with the ancient ritual of the campaign promise?

Alex Salmond is proud of the fact that his SNP government got through its term in office with 80-odd of its 90-odd – the numbers are disputed, predictably – election commitments preserved. On balance, he’s right to boast. There was a time when many believed the Nationalists would be obstructed at every turn. Salmond was one jump ahead, with a crushing question: did his opponents really want to force an early election?

As he campaigns now, however, the First Minister overlooks a detail: some promises are bigger than others. His biggest pledge of all was to move Scotland towards an independence referendum. As of last Thursday, and the publication of the SNP’s latest manifesto, that remains the case: the promise is renewed. Is it a promise the First Minister truly believes he can keep simply because his opponents would lack the “moral authority” to get in his way?

This trait isn’t distinctive to the SNP. Iain Gray of Labour says he would drop the need for corroboration in rape cases. Just how would he enact that nonsense, exactly? The Tories and Lib Dems, equally, have their lists of pledges. In their case, given a coming hiding at the polls, what they really mean – and all they can truly “promise” – is an intention to vote against anything that fails to match their own proposals, or to trade their support, come the day.

There’s no choice in the matter. The Holyrood system is so constructed, in fact, that one or two individuals, Greens or independent, could easily have a more decisive influence after May 5 than a larger grouping. You could ask yourself what’s so very democratic about that. What’s not in doubt is that the old rites of the manifesto and the campaign are at odds with our new politics. They have ceased to resemble reality.

Salmond says he intends to freeze the council tax for fully five years. It’s a terrific headline. In reality, he calculates that rival parties would hesitate to prevent such a move, that squeezed councils could be persuaded to accept it, and that the budgets allowed to Holyrood by a London Treasury obsessed with cuts would be sufficient, year after year, to allow it. He may be right, in each particular. But how does that amount to a promise?

Each of the top ten commitments in the SNP manifesto is prefaced with those two little words, “We will”. As with the other parties attempting election under the Scottish system, that should probably read “We would dearly like...” These days the fine documents can never be more than statements of principle, and those hard-fought tribal campaigns can never be more than political theatre.

It’s better to know what you might actually be voting for, I’d have said, than not. The alternative is on daily display in a museum named Westminster.

Lockerbie and Libya: Hide & Seek

2011-04-15T17:58:00.000+01:00

Alex Salmond says that Moussa Koussa, formerly Gaddafi’s head of intelligence, is merely a “potential witness” in the (still live) Lockerbie investigation, but not a suspect. Dear me, no.

As the First Minister explains it, had Moussa Koussa been a suspect, he would have been arrested. Since he has not been arrested...

This is almost as good, if you are in the mood, as William Hague’s assurance that at no time was the non-suspect offered immunity from prosecution after his defection. After all, if there was never any real intention to prosecute, why bother to talk about immunity?

Better still is the decision, at Britain’s prodding, to remove the non-immune non-suspect from the so-called EU watch list. This means he will henceforth be free to travel as his pleases, and that his assets will no longer be frozen.

Since Moussa Koussa is not suspected of anything, we can therefore conclude that assets lodged in Europe or the US were in no sense stolen from the Libyan people. Since he is free as a bird, it must also follow (forgetting Lockerbie) that he had no hand in arming the IRA, or in endorsing threats against the lives of exiled Libyans, or in the commission of a single crime during decades in Gaddafi’s service.

Brilliant. The Colonel is promised the International Criminal Court for numberless heinous acts, but his most notable henchman, a man with various bloodcurdling nicknames, did nothing at all.

For his reward, he gets to lay hands on enough money to enjoy his retirement in the pleasant climes of his choice, no questions – none whatsoever – asked.

Those climes will not include Britain, if reports (the Telegraph and others) are to be believed. As a British “official” has explained, since Moussa Koussa was never detained – no suspicion, no immunity, ergo no crimes – “It’s up to him”. There goes Salmond’s “potential witness”, delighted to have been of service.

Think of it this way. Let’s say a Mr X turns up in London. “Oh, yes,” he admits. “Member of al Qaeda I was, man and boy. Quite important I was, too, though I do say so myself. Some said I was bin Laden’s right-hand man. Not that I killed anyone, you understand, not personally. Now, are you sure there’s nothing you’d like to ask me?”

Meanwhile, our old friend Mustafa Abdul Jalil is back in business with a “sworn statement” – worth all the paper it was written on – to (oddly) the English Bar’s Human Rights Committee. Once again he offers to prove that, as to Lockerbie, Gaddafi did it, with Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi as his one and only instrument.

No proof as yet – yet again – however. Instead, the assertion, hardly a secret in any case, that the Colonel recompensed al-Megrahi with quantities of money. In Jalil’s previous version, as I recall, this was “a slush fund”, offered up not for lawyers and such, but under the threat that the lone agent would spill the beans.

If I follow Magnus Linklater in the Times, the unwitting folk from the Bar of England and Wales did not ask Libya’s former justice minister to reconcile his claims with problems – six of them – encountered by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review (SCCRC) Commission. Strange how that slips everyone’s mind.

But then, if the First Minister of Scotland hasn’t wondered why Moussa Koussa is not being detained for a view on the discrepancy, and if Hague is happy for the non-suspect to keep his memories of events and files to himself, the rest of us can only guess what the SCCRC was on about.

That seems to be the general idea.

Murdoch: Coming Up for Air

2011-04-12T16:02:00.000+01:00

April 13. The Herald.

Here’s a trick question: why would a journalist ever break the law? Were you, should chance befall, engaged upon the pursuit of truth and justice, young and eager, for some venerable old newsheet dedicated to righting wrongs, why would you ever commit a miserable, squalid wrong?

I’ve broken the law of the land. Anyone I ever respected did the same. Sometimes it involved wilful prejudice towards a trial. Sometimes it involved the invasion of what someone said was someone’s privacy. Sometimes there was deliberate provocation. As in: Go on, sue. Please. Because we really want this tale in open court.

Once or twice the Official Secrets Act was at stake. Once or twice some utterly minor piece of administrative legislation was being tested. It was, then, just trivia. But what you, me, and the world would call a minor row can matter greatly to an important person who thinks a big job is on the line.

Once it involved a bit of paint on a roadway. We all played that game. The paint job was intended to catch out those nefarious striking miners. So we played daft. “I just crossed your paint. Why aren’t you arresting me? And what’s the definition, officer, of a picket?”

I did cause some actual damage once, and could probably have been held for affray, in English terms, had anyone been looking. But at Wapping they were careful not to arrest journalists, outside the wire, and the News of the World (NoW) snappers had probably gone home for the night.

Why would a journalist ever break the law? We hold these questions to be counter-intuitive. We all know, don’t we, that “those hacks” will do anything for a story? But we are also slightly pleased, now and then, when the hacks turn out to be Woodward and Bernstein, and the story turns out to be Watergate. How many laws did that pair break?*

It is presented as a straight question, deserving a straight answer. Would I hack someone’s phone? This newspaper is unequivocal: no, not ever. But were you led to understand that your next-door neighbour had a big bomb in mind, and that the only way to establish intent was through some hacking and bugging, how would you respond?

Hacking? Then what? Intercept the mail? Rake the bins? Get some sneak photography – in breach of every press code and law – of a happy couple seeing the kids to school? If you’re right, it’s heroic. If you’re wrong, it’s disgusting.

The point would be, nevertheless, that journalism asks itself these questions. And it lacks any established political, moral, or religious justification for its behaviour. There is no government sanction, no church authority, no body of institutional law, for this ethical chaos. We do our best.

Each one of Rupert Murdoch’s finest is heading for the hills, currently. “Voicemail interception” – until I get the transcripts on Rupe, I’m not laughing – has silenced an industry. Everyone was at it. Best Toy Ever. Had even one of the redtops turned up a Watergate, or even a droll column on “My Dinner With David Cameron”, applause would have been general.

Instead, what do we have? First, the apparent suborning – with a decent wine – of the Metropolitan Police. The Met’s refusal properly to investigate the alleged hacking of hundreds of individuals would lead a bystander to wonder who actually runs Britain’s biggest cop shop. It does not appear to be, since a couple of those have come and gone, the government of the day.

Secondly, there is the business of journalism itself. There is a world of difference between having cause to wonder about celeb X and politician Y, then staging routine fishing operations – off the books, denying all knowledge – just to see what can be dredged from W and Z. Then there is the issue of manner, means and machine.

I’ll spare you the expletives. Let’s only say that no one messes around, much, with Mr Murdoch. Why so? We have, for starters, members of Commons select sub-committees reporting intimidation, in the case of the NoW and its hacking adventures. Members of Parliament have said, cautiously, that they were led to believe “consequences” might follow if they failed to be more reasonable.

Yet on that account alone, no one is under arrest.

Switch off your phones, then. The point here is not “interception” by journalists under pressure to find a story or two, far less journalists liable to believe that Max Clifford might hear some printable gossip. Tony Blair went half way around the world to do inspirational chat for Murdoch executives. The American-Australian was the first person into Downing Street after Cameron’s election.

So if there’s a small mess involving the NoW bugging its way across London, what follows? Big cheques all round? The Met “re-examining” its evidence? Apologies, more cheques, a promise never to do it again, and a solemn News International pledge that a couple of bad apples have been plucked and chucked?

There is no ambiguity: the NoW’s phone hacking was about as illegal as it gets. Nor was there, in any of the cases made public, a defence, not even a redtop defence. Neither “ the public interest” nor “what interests the public” pertained. Some of the stuff – the stuff the Met has allowed to surface – would have been an interest only to a blackmailer. They sometimes call that politics.

Currently, Murdoch hopes to take possession of the parts of Sky that he does not already own. Once achieved – don’t bet against it, please – he will be the biggest, least disputed, employer of journalists this planet has ever seen. That’s what “media ownership” means. Self-declared law-breakers such as your columnist are not – as a matter of style – to his taste. Nothing new in that.

But how did it come about that each and every one of the United Kingdom’s central political parties came to believe that Murdoch’s interests were, always, their interests? And when will the Met be inviting that tycoon along for an interview?

*Just a couple of tiny ones, in point of fact. In Britain, they would have got 20 years each. At least.

Lockerbie: Lawyers, Guns & Money

2011-04-08T15:04:00.001+01:00

The Herald, April 9.

One of my favourite pictures is Raeburn’s portrait of Henry Cockburn, Lord Cockburn, once judge within the Court of Session. It’s there in a glance, cool as you like, direct from an age of reason. It says: here are my principles; convince me.

I once entertained a theory that most of Scotland’s high-end prose, Walter Scott’s most obviously, descended from Scots law. Years ago, I even tried to convince an audience that Robert Louis Stevenson could not have written nit-picking tales of moral difficulty without Hume and the Faculty of Advocates. They wondered what I was on about.

Scotland is soaked in the language of lawyers. After the churches and education, the law was the one inviolable (supposedly) thing we rescued from Union. We are a country of laws, of legal tradition, and of reasoned prose. Most of our politicians have been lawyers, and most of our hired legal hands have been political. They can’t help themselves.

Cockburn concludes his Memorials with the news that he’s getting on in the world. Thanks to the usual patronage, the boy from Edinburgh’s Hope Park is to be Solicitor-General. He writes: “I trust that we [Jeffrey had bagged Lord Advocate] shall do our duty. If we do, we cannot fail to do some good to Scotland. In the abuses of our representative and municipal systems alone, our predecessors have left us fields in which patriotism may exhaust itself”.

So, Cocky: what would you have made of Moussa Koussa?

Here we have an unresolved mass murder. Here we have a witness. Here we have (it is suggested) “abuses of our representative and municipal systems”. Here we have certain subservient protocols attendant to a treaty of Union. Still, one would wish to at least detain the witness, surely?

We get a legal letter instead. The indefatigable Brian Fitzpatrick writes, in timely fashion, to the oldest daily newspaper in the English-speaking world with a note of support, it seems, for a public inquiry into the Lockerbie atrocity.

Or rather, one from the Faculty suggests, there might be “scope” – Cockburn would have flinched – “for laying to rest some of the more egregious claims of the tribe of Lockerbie conspiracy theorists – those who have made a life’s work of the now unravelling assertion that somehow Libya and its senior operatives, including Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, were not to blame”.

Send lawyers, as the song used to go, guns and money.

The brief then goes on to lavish praise on pillars of our legal temples. He suggests that the Camp Zeist trial was terribly hard – unpaid? – work for those who allowed security spooks to infest the well of the court. He overlooks the Socratic wisdom that entertained the bribing ($3 million to a pair of those crucial Maltese witnesses) of participants by American “authorities”. He does not trouble himself with forensic difficulties.

But, first and foremost, this lawyer nowhere mentions the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC). It counts as a significant omission. It makes no odds to me whether “Gaddafi did it” or not. I just want to know what went wrong with Scots law, why the SCCRC found six reasons – after years of work, and 800 pages – for doubting the conviction of al Megrahi, and why the rest of us, we sometime citizens, are barred from knowledge granted as pub gossip to every lawyer in the land. And then told to forget about it.

“Conspiracy theorists” is neat. It suggests that anyone who might wonder about the habits of our legal-political establishment has problems – a ticklish inversion – with reality. It is meant to shut down argument. The conviction is as safe, it seems, as all those blasted, bloodied Lockerbie houses that no longer stand.

The real mistake was to believe that Gaddafi’s fall would give oxygen to the truth. Instead, in the blood and the mire, there’s a big carpet being unfurled, and a lot of sweeping going on. On this point, I am liable to sound repetitive: why isn’t Moussa Koussa under arrest?

More particularly: why has he not been taken into custody by officers from Dumfries & Galloway? Students of the Treaty of Union may take another view, but I had thought – certainly in the case of al Megrahi – that Scots law held sway. So why has our Crown Office been “negotiating” with the Foreign Office over this witness, of all witnesses?

Saif Gaddafi, heir to idiocy, says there are no secrets. Washington and London, he tells the BBC, know all there is to know about Lockerbie. Scotland’s lawyers, some of them, know exactly what he means. But Scotland’s people have been given no such advantages.

What was asked of Moussa Koussa? That’s not a complicated, nor legally compromised, question. Having won London’s sanction – ignoring questions of jurisdiction – what followed? Just state the question, or the area of inquiry: we have a right to know. Disclosure could in no sense be prejudicial to a possible trial, far less to a public inquiry.

The obvious fact is this: “Gaddafi did it” is not the point. The safety of a conviction, and the suborning of a legal system by security services is another, bigger, deal. Cockburn wouldn’t have sat still for it. Brian Fitzpatrick prefers a lesser prose.

You have to ask yourself: why does it still matter, and matter so much, to those who promenade around Parliament Hall? Why does it still, after all these years, infect every party? You might have thought, if naive, that an SNP government would be rushing to settle the Lockerbie business, if only to discomfit Labour placemen and Tory hacks. No chance.

Three hundred and odd strollers in the Faculty count for more, in Scottish public life, than any other constituency. Which is odd. Lockerbie wasn’t their doing. They did not infect the evidence. They didn’t nobble the politicians, or write the editorials, nor do a squalid deal in the desert. They were just legal cabs for hire.

Henry Cockburn saw them coming. I don’t even know if Memorials of His Time is in print. Still, the good judge had witty things to say about small countries and the profession of principle. The reason we don’t know about Lockerbie is this: the lawyers don’t like it. And they respond to argument by any means necessary.

How come? What worries them so much? Why has there been no public inquiry? Who – pace Fitzpatrick – would be harmed? Why isn’t Moussa Koussa under close arrest? Why does the government of Scotland, another party to the safety of an absurd conviction, fail to assert the rights of an independent legal code?

So: is Brian Fitzpatrick supporting a properly independent public inquiry into all that befell the Lockerbie prosecutions? He doesn’t quite say as much. Why not? Instead, he seems to believe that anyone in doubt over the independence of our judiciary has fallen in with “a tribe”.

I’d be interested in a test case. What would one propose, tomorrow, as a paid defence strategy – with an SCCRC judgement to hand – for Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi? And how would the betting go, up at the courts, around the dockets, or by the Shirra’s seat, for that one?

Cockburn said: “In the abuses of our representative and municipal systems alone, our predecessors have left us fields in which patriotism may exhaust itself”. Two hundred and seventy were murdered, and still we fail them.

Dylan: One From The Heart

2011-04-08T15:00:00.000+01:00

A heavy heart. Not a piece I ever meant to write. But, hell, how rich must you be before you open your mouth? Sunday Herald, April 10.

Someone has been nominating Bob Dylan for the Nobel literature prize since 1997. It’s no stretch, as an idea. It’s also about time. If there was no Dylan, none of the other, ineffably pompous criteria concerning art and influence would ever, even once, apply.

He has his Oscar, his Pulitzer, his many honorary degrees from St Andrews and lesser schools. He has a great many scholarly things attached, barnacle-like, to his name. All that’s left is to persuade the Swedish Academy that a peculiar circumstance of writing and performance is also, always, poetry.

We could even adopt him as our own, if it helped. Dylan probably knows more about the Scottish folk tradition than most Scottish folk. He has a weakness for our songs. If the SNP is casting the net wide, they could make an honorary Scot (another one) of the laird of Aultmore House, by Nethy Bridge, in one of his many “homes”.

For Nationalism, it would mark an advance (God knows) on Brian Souter, Donald Trump, David Murray, and the House of Windsor. It would certainly count as a triumph for the literature of Scotland. We’re short on poets, currently.

But Dylan doesn’t need that, and never has. He has fought shy of political manoeuvres since a little song, “Blowin’ In the Wind”, began to elicit odd, discrepant reactions from those who confused agit-pop with troubled juvenile art. As a matter of fact, the funniest thing about “Bob Dylan, Protest Singer” is the scarcity of any protest in his music over a long career.

He has objected to grand politics about as often as most of us have objected to local planning decisions. He has kept his mouth tight-shut for near 40 years. Those imagined songs, that “Voice of a Generation” stuff, were in large part the products of someone’s wishful thinking. Where was Dylan throughout the Vietnam war? The roughly factual answer: down in a basement, drunk.

That’s a little brusque. Pressed, Dylan has argued that our party-political democratic habits are neither here nor there. He has said (as much as he could ever be bothered) that “politics” misses the point of human existence. “Politics” goes around and comes around. Nothing changes. To wit: “You can hang back or fight your best on the front-line... Sing a little bit of these workingman blues”.

Bob Dylan doesn’t do politics. He has been repeating himself on this point for a very long time. When on occasion he has involved himself in “an issue”, he has been accused of naivety, or worse, for indulging radical chic – the case of Reuben “Hurricane” Carter – or arraigned for simple stupidity. You have to pick among the facts, though, to see how those things happened.

Late in 1971, he picked up a phone, booked a studio, and did versions of a song entitled ‘George Jackson’. Some said the subject was a terrorist thug who had played liberal opinion; others thought George was the last best hope of black Marxist liberation, a man who knew full well he would be murdered in prison, and who chose to give it back, bullet for bullet. Tricky, then.

Trickier, though, for a pop star in the pre-Bono, pre-9/11 world. Trickier when you have cast aside all bien pensant advice about how a proper Voice of a Generation must sing and must, always, behave. People mistake Bob Dylan for naive. All those black bloc kids scurrying around London the other weekend could have done with a declarative statement as bold as “George Jackson”.

Like this: “Sometimes I think this whole world/ Is one big prison yard/ Some of us are prisoners/ The rest of us are guards”. That would do it for TopShop, I think.

Dylan isn’t an idiot. The present President of the United States was tickled, recently, when the National Treasure played a song at the White House. Afterwards, Obama said: “He wouldn’t come to the rehearsal. Usually, all these guys are practising before the set in the evening. He didn’t want to take a picture with me; usually all the talent is dying to take a picture with me and Michelle before the show. But he didn’t show up to that.”

Dylan was down to do “The Times They Are a-Changin” that day in DC in a commemorative show for the civil rights movement. As a young man he was there, in Washington, when Martin King spoke. He wrote the songs that were sung. But “come to the rehearsal”, as “the talent”? He’s Bob Dylan. The other guy is just the President of the United States.

My soft spot for Bob Dylan could be mistaken, most years, for a bruise. He’s one of two talents in the last 100 years that I cannot – the other was a painter – explain. I can tell you why ‘New Danville Girl’ and ‘Brownsville Girl’ are so very different. I can talk about the blues and the rebellions of fettered folk. I can tell you why he isn’t as bad in poetry as those real, dull, invented poets. I can talk about Bob Dylan, politics – and the rest – until a strayed milking cow comes home.

The only Bob Dylan I don’t understand is the one who agrees to be censored. These days, he doesn’t – Aultmore was £2.2 million, five years back – need the money. With his catalogue, a certain boldness is allowed. The point in dismissing politics is to grant freedom from every politician. Had you happened to be called Dylan, and written “Chimes of Freedom”, and then find yourself in the middle of TotalitarianCentral, it might resonate.

But no. Instead, a silence. Instead, he allows those ancient Chinese inherited party goons to tell him what he may and may not sing. In fact, having abandoned a tour last year, Dylan just appeared at the Worker’s Gymnasium – fully one half of the Marxist problem – in Beijing, with 5000 “fans”, and with “approved content”.

We left a younger Bob, you’ll recall, drunk in a basement. He emerged from that soon enough with a song entitled “I Shall Be Released”. He then went on to do some stuff about the Spanish Steps, in Rome. Inter alia, the Bob sang of folk, hack reporters too, beaten by pol-eess for speaking up. In Beijing, at the show, there was not a word of these things, least of all from the voice of a generation. Why not?

I could do special pleading. I could point out – for the Dylan boards will – that he got away with “All Along the Watchtower”: a doom foretold, a secret prophecy. It’s no comfort. Being let down by Bob Dylan is not a big deal. It’s par – and he’s so old now, he plays golf – for the course. Only the songs remain to be explained. It turns out that they are a larger case, morally, than any person, or singer.

That was always a problem for “Bob Dylan”. A Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, has just disappeared into the totalitarian murk. Perhaps he’s “calling out that he’s been framed”. Perhaps we could get him out, and talk a regime to death. It wouldn’t cost “Bob Dylan” more than the effort of a raised eyebrow to care.

But if he does not, songs die. They’re not my songs, mercifully. So I venture. “Bob? Almost 70? That means ‘nothing to lose’.”

Obama: Money Doesn't Talk, It Swears (Allegiance)

2011-04-05T17:51:00.006+01:00

I wouldn’t describe myself as fascinated with the politics of the United States. Most of it is familiar, predictable, and a bit dull.The endless boasting over freedom and democracy, like the Oath of Allegiance and the veneration of the flag, speak of a deep insecurity, not to mention certain authoritarian tendencies. But those habits are sometimes amusing, if you’re in the mood, at least until the moment the US decides to export a few values on to the heads of the willing and unwilling alike.

What does fascinate me is America’s effortless success in convincing other countries, the English speakers in particular, that we are just like them. Music, movies and software have a lot to do with that, of course, not to mention some history. But if the US has colonialist traits – denying an imperialist intent all the while – there are armies of the willingly colonised out here in the big world. Profound differences are simply overlooked.

Back when Clinton was up to his neck in trouble over “that woman” I had an editor who was convinced, beyond all argument, that impeachment must follow. “He’ll never get away with it!” went the cry. So there was nothing for it: I had to get myself to Washington to cover the inevitable historic event.

Fine by me: there’s always lots to see in DC. The fact that I had no White House access was regarded as a mere detail. But so too – such is the hypnotic effect of propaganda – was a larger consideration. I stated the case all the way to the airport: it doesn’t work like that. Specifically: “There is no way that a Democrat-dominated Senate will ever impeach a Democrat in the White House. This is a waste of time”.

I almost added: “They order matters differently over there. Very, very differently”. DC was nice, though, and my son got the usual lousy T-shirt.

Gore Vidal once pointed out that his country doesn’t have a two-party system. It has one party, he said, with two wings. Europeans who decide to ignore this small but important fact misunderstand presidential elections, and a lot else besides, utterly. This is, good, bad or indifferent, a foreign country. Americans themselves, ironically enough, harbour no illusions. There’s them and a place they call “the world”.

Millions in Europe regarded Obama’s election victory as their victory. This was fatuous. That knowledge will not prevent the BBC, the Guardian and the rest from parachuting hundreds – and I mean hundreds – of hacks into a distant land late next year to observe while two cliques fight to decide which has the bigger wallet.

“And,” as Bruce Cockburn (a Canadian) used to sing, “they call it democracy”.

The following is the pre-edited version – I do both, generally – of a column for The Herald, April 6.

Everyone knows why Barack Obama became president of the United States. There was hope, “change we can believe in”, the mobilisation of the youth vote, “yes we can”, a yearning to end the moral squalor of the Bush years, and an understanding that at long last the time had come for a black American to occupy the White House.

All that and the small – or not so small – matter of $748 million. Obama may have claimed to represent something new in the public life of the United States, but he achieved his goal by observing the oldest American dictum of all: who pays, wins. With donations large and small, “from Main Street to Wall Street”, each one a vote in and of itself, he outspent the Republicans. Now he means to do it again.

He will seek re-election next year: of course he will. Only by emulating Lyndon Johnson in refusing to claim or accept his party’s nomination could Obama have surprised anyone. Like all those who before him who aspired to two terms, he cites unfinished business. There is plenty of that, of course. But this time, just to make doubly sure, the Democrat means to break the bank. Reportedly, the candidate intends to raise a billion dollars.

A figure so staggering, with all that it implies for American notions of representative democracy, can only sound like overkill. It also raises a couple of questions. How much political advertising can you buy before the figures, and hence the campaign itself, become actually indecent? How can anyone still talk of free and fair elections in such a context?

Equally, how worried is Obama? He may have left many of his earliest supporters, the young not least, disillusioned. His party may have suffered a “shellacking” in last year’s mid-term elections. He may have surrendered cherished policies too often without a fight. He may have emerged as the target of near-irrational hatred from American conservatives. But, says the outsider, come on: the Republicans can’t even find a candidate.

That last statement is the simple truth. The American right have obstructed Obama at every turn. They have gloried in policy stalemate, not least over health care, and turned the business of government into a matter of naked self-interest, particularly when demanding renewed tax cuts for the very wealthy. They would dearly love to turf this “socialist” president from the White House. So who seeks that honour?

Silence falls. Bolder souls on the right recall that in this, as in so much else, George Bush was inept. By saddling himself with the ageing, often unwell and deeply unappetising Dick Cheney as vice-president, Bush ensured that he left no obvious Republican successor. Planning was never his strong suit.

His party meanwhile failed to anticipate or harness the emergence of the so-called Tea Party movement, a populist insurgency that forgot to be popular among sane and non-aligned voters. Those who take the likes of Michele Bachman and Sarah Palin seriously are not taken seriously, mercifully, by the majority of Americans. The Mad Hatters are influential, yet hopeless.

Palin, cashing her cheques from Fox News, has the wit to understand as much. Funnily enough, given ubiquitous “terror” and a mad – did someone mention black? – Marxist secret Muslim staging a coup d’état before America’s very eyes, she judges that there are slim pickings for her own brand of fundamentalism. Short of a political earthquake in the next three months, Palin will wait for 2016 and, no doubt, “the call”.

All of which leaves a list of individuals who are not, in their turn, taken seriously. There are nobodies: Tim Pawlenty, Mitch Daniels, Rick Santorum. There are proven losers: Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich. There are scary zealots: Ron Paul, the aforementioned Bachman. There is even (but don’t tell Alex Salmond) an outright joke: Donald Trump. But only Pawlenty, former governor of Minnesota, has “declared” and Republicans, says received wisdom, “are depressed”.

Yet Obama still believes he needs $1 billion, nothing less, as though measuring the loss of his political capital in hard cash. He says the staggering sum is required to protect his achievements. But how much advertising will it take to convince previously supportive voters that those achievements are real?

The military trials of alleged 9/11 conspirators are about to go ahead at Guantanamo, the base Obama promised, as the first order of business, to shut down. The Libyan intervention has not been popular; Afghanistan drags on; a limited degree of health-care reform looks vulnerable still; the housing market is in ruins; and 8.8% of Americans – those who are actually counted; the real figure is very much higher – remain out of work.

This Democrat also suffers the Curse of Bush: it remains, as Bill Clinton’s obsessive team never forgot, the economy, stupid. Who still remembers that Obama inherited a hellish mess? He may have averted a banking collapse, but that is small comfort in a country where real incomes for ordinary citizens continue to fall. In short, there has been little enough change for anyone to believe in.

All the young people Obama galvanised in 2008 have, beyond question, lapsed into apathy. The Democratic left, as it is termed, is disillusioned with a president who has seemed less cautious than timid. Besides, what looked like a landslide last time was actually forged from some fairly narrow wins in states such as Ohio and Florida: nation-wide polls, inasmuch as they explain anything, tell only part of the story.

Americans tend to re-elect incumbents: so much is in Obama’s favour. But key independent voters – those who are not registered as Democrat or Republican – must be asking some hard questions. Conservatives may not be able to beat this incumbent in a straight fight, but they can obstruct his every move thereafter. As they have already demonstrated, they (and their corporate paymasters) can still get what they want, and may yet demolish those healthcare reforms. So what is that soaring Obama rhetoric actually worth?

The received wisdom still insists that he will probably win again. What he will not do – for who could? – is revive a dysfunctional political system in which destructive tactics have supplanted strategic thinking, in which stalemate has become the status quo, and in which the going rate for government of, by and for the people just went up to $1 billion. The politics of the United States – not that Britain can talk – is a private and exclusive club.

Obama says he wants the chance to finish the job he started. That’s what all the incumbents say. They never explain why the job of government has been left undone. They are too busy campaigning for re-election, most of the time, for that.

Still, amid these impending festivities we are liable to be spared the hysteria of Europeans who have seen too many sentimental movies. Few will indulge their absurd expectations twice over for a man who is, it turns out, just another president of the United States. That’s a foreign country, lest we forget.

Omagh: Killing Hope

2011-04-04T12:45:00.000+01:00

Standing in Omagh in the rain on a Monday morning in 1998, I thought I knew one thing for sure: it’s over. Whatever republicanism’s armed struggle – a phrase for all seasons – had come to mean, it had ended in Market Street, where the hulks of buildings groaned, glass whispered underfoot, and the forensics teams, ghostly white, prowled through the murk.

The murders of three Catholic children weeks before had been borne, just about. But the Omagh bomb was never meant as “a response”, mere tit for tat, to the acts of Loyalist freaks. It was in the planning long before the excuse appeared. It was meant to destroy language, argument, hope, process and – not incidentally – the democratic will.

“Politically”, the bombing was intended as an attack on the Belfast Agreement. And what did it say, “politically”? That only the self-declared “Real” IRA, that handful of career terrorists, possessed any legitimacy. No one else, least of all the people of the north of Ireland, had any rights in their own future.

Time after time in Omagh locals struggled to say the same thing: this was never that kind of town. It was as though, in the hyper-reality of shock, they were clinging to an indisputable fact: this is not us. It was true.

As best I could, I interviewed a man who was prominent in the local chamber of commerce. Only later did I discover – for he never mentioned it – that he had been one of the first into Market Street after the blast, lifting bodies and bits of bodies. One or two called him a hero, but he wasn’t interested in that.

Instead, he wanted to tell me, for one thing, that he had been born and brought up in the Republic, but had never encountered even the slightest difficulty, in his business life or his private life, on that account. Then he gave me a challenge. Find me a single piece of sectarian graffiti, he said, on any wall in Omagh.

I took him at his word. In the following days I kept my eyes open and found not one scrawled word, no suggestive use of red, white, blue or green paint, no flags or emblems. The contrast with places such as Lurgan or Portadown was stark. Omagh was not that kind of town. And some said that’s why it was hit.

There is a lot of talk now, justifiably, over the reasoning – we’ll call it that – behind the murder of Constable Ronan Kerr. Crucial to power-sharing, you may remember, was Sinn Fein’s demand for a truly non-sectarian police service in Northern Ireland. But if you happened to be an unreconciled, self-appointed republican purist, you were liable to hanker after the Prod polis of the old RUC. They were the ideal enemy. It takes two to fight, after all.

The RUC’s bigotry helped to keep the battle lines neat and tidy, and helped to convince the next republican generation that the fight against the occupier went on. And on. Intimidating Catholics who might fancy a police career – who might even wish to serve and protect all communities – therefore became yet another “legitimate” tactic. So a 25-year-old gets assassinated.

That’s nothing new. What stretches the imagination of anyone who has tried to think his way into a terrorist skin was the choice of Omagh. The symbolism was understood perfectly well. The act was the product of sheer deliberation. Omagh was chosen precisely because Omagh had suffered.

The killing of Ronan Kerr was not just a renunciation of peace or power-sharing, but of everything the town represented. Saturday, August 15, 1998, was the moment when everyone knew – beyond doubt, for certain? – that it was over, that the Troubles couldn’t go on. The death of the constable is supposed to say otherwise.

People on this side of the sea get a little glib about the “peace process” in the north of Ireland. You can thank Blair, Clinton and the rest for that. We tend to think there was a sudden outbreak of common sense and harmony, an epidemic of mutual understanding, a problem suddenly, belatedly and mysteriously solved. It wasn’t like that; it isn’t like that. Trust remains in short supply; old attitudes are still alive and unwell.

The truth is simple: peace came because people, on all sides, were exhausted, sick and tired. The Provies couldn’t properly lose, but knew they could never win. The Loyalists knew they could kill until kingdom come and not restore the old “Unionist” state. And the politicians wanted proper careers, with proper salaraies and proper dodgy debates over schooling or corporation tax.

Peace? One woman said to me, in a bar in Portadown, of all enclaves: “We might as well give it a go. God knows we’ve tried everything else”.

It wasn’t exactly a noble sentiment. It didn’t mean she was making lots of new Catholic friends. But it was good enough, inasmuch as it mattered, for me. But not good enough for some. I should have known better.

Libya & Lockerbie: Secrets for Sale

2011-04-02T11:54:00.000+01:00

A piece for The Sunday Herald, April 3, plus 400 words or so that space would not allow.

Moussa Koussa, Libya’s foreign minister until last Wednesday night, must be giving Her Majesty’s government a lot to think about. His insights into the state of the Gaddafi regime – if reliable – will be receiving undivided attention. His opinions on what might happen next will be scrutinised in minute detail. Above all, the question of what this defector really hopes to gain will surely keep MI6 busy for many an hour.

And then there’s Lockerbie. As the indefatigable Dr Jim Swire, who lost his daughter, has already said, “This is a guy who knows everything”. Koussa’s flight is therefore “a fantastic day for those who seek the truth”. Specifically, Dr Swire wants to hear the former head of the Libyan Bureau for External Security explain the how and why, if Libya was responsible, of the atrocity. After almost 23 years of evasion, obstruction and power politics, at home and abroad, that’s little enough to ask.

Some caution is required, however. Koussa is not just the latest in a succession of rodents quitting the foundering SS Gaddafi. The charge sheet is a long one. The Libyan rebel administration in Benghazi wants him returned for trial for bloody crimes that have nothing to do with Lockerbie. His alleged involvement in terrorism and internal repression goes back a very long way. If the Colonel is due a visit to the International Criminal Court, so is Koussa.

Yet here he is, in effect, handing himself over to British custody without – so we are told – preconditions. We are further assured that immunity from prosecution has not been granted. So let’s get this straight: he has preferred to flee Tripoli while Gaddafi yet survives and chosen to risk the possibility – it should be a certainty – of a trial for mass murder in a Scottish court, and much else besides? Either he has proof that would stand every Lockerbie allegation on its head, or he is not much of a terrorist mastermind. Or things are not as they seem.

I’ve been wondering about that. Consider, for one example, a report from the Washington Post dated February 24. This described Koussa as “a key CIA contact in the war on terror and the removal of [Gaddafi’s] weapons of mass destruction”. The foreign minister was central, in other words, to the brief rehabilitation of the regime. Such were his crimes, according to the Post, “he cannot defect to the opposition like other top Libyan officials”. The consensus a month ago was that Koussa “may have no option now but to go down with the ship”.

Clearly, the so-called “envoy of death” had other ideas. Having been Gaddafi’s “point man in clandestine meetings with top CIA and British officials” he may have lost the dictator’s trust. He may therefore have gained some trust elsewhere, or secured a stock of that commodity some time ago. Flying into London with (supposedly) no guarantee of immunity from prosecution over Lockerbie and a host of other terrorist acts suggests a certain confidence, if nothing else.

Koussa could tell us, as Dr Swire says, a very great deal. For one thing, he was said to be at the heart of Libyan efforts to secure the release of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, personally issuing threats – the only relevant word – to Scottish ministers. He would know better than most what went on. He would certainly know why al-Megrahi came to be the only person convicted of the murders of 270 people in December of 1988, the shambolic legal process that sealed and resealed the conviction, and the persistent efforts of various governments, Britain’s above all, to deflect serious questions.

Instead, we have a “key CIA contact” who is either prepared to deal with his responsibility, if any, for Lockerbie, or a man well known to “British officials” who foresees no difficulties in that regard. William Hague, foreign secretary, reiterates his refusal to offer an immunity from British or international justice. Hague fails to clarify a more important point: is Koussa therefore under arrest? If not, why not?

Dumfries and Galloway Police certainly want a word, as does the Crown Office. Both would be obliged to seek an interview with any member of the Libyan regime. That doesn’t exactly put an inquiring mind at rest, however. Our prosecution service has not been exactly quick on its toes when previous opportunities for interview/investigation have presented themselves.

When was a request lodged, for one example, to interview Mustafa Abdul Jalil, former Libyan justice minister and the first defector to claim to know “for certain” about the planning and execution of the 1988 atrocity? Lockerbie remains a scandal and an open wound because, to put it no higher, domestic agencies have failed repeatedly to resolve the issues at stake.

But Koussa is different, in any case, from all the other defectors who have told the western media what the media want to hear where Lockerbie is concerned. Simply to say “Gaddafi did it” when Nato aircraft are supporting a rebellion and your neck is at risk is not the same, not remotely the same, as providing chapter, verse, eye-witness testimony, and an explanation of your personal involvement, if any, in mass murder.

So another question falls to Hague. Can the British public, the Scottish public in particular, be assured that Koussa will not be leaving these shores, that there is no deal in place concerning the Lockerbie atrocity or any other crimes? The government has already conceded that Gaddafi might be allowed to slip away into exile if he yields to the Libyan rebellion. Is Koussa to be granted the same consideration?

Or is he, as some suspect, only in Britain to negotiate such an arrangement on behalf of the whole Tripoli gang? Does that also merit an “amnesty”? Not where Lockerbie is concerned, even if playing nice with Koussa is being presented, in all media outlets, as a necessary stratagem to persuade others to desert the Colonel.

An amnesty and a plane ticket might be the pragmatic way to prevent further bloodshed in Libya, even if it did little for the standing of the international court. As an answer to those bereaved by Lockerbie, however, it would count as (yet another) insult. If Koussa has resigned as foreign minister, as the government claims, he has no diplomatic immunity. If his crimes are as extensive as his victims and his enemies allege, he should be facing arrest irrespective of Pan Am 103. An “unscheduled visit”, as former foreign secretary Jack Straw creepily describes it, hardly fits the case.

Never mind the Dumfries and Galloway force: the Scottish government should be saying as much. A prior claim exists, in the names of 270 individuals, that in no sense impinges on the progress of the Libyan rebellion. The Edinburgh political and legal coterie can parrot the line – another fine little mystery – that al-Megrahi’s conviction was and remains safe. The fact is that the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), after four years of study, found fully six grounds (still buried beneath legal manure) for doubt.

For Scotland, and for Scots law, that remains the heart of the thing. The $3 million paid by US authorities to a pair of Maltese “witnesses” who could not remember the weather, far less a face, might be explained. The conduct of the Camp Zeist trial – sufficiently contentious to have the UN’s observer, Professor Hans Kochler, decrying a “spectacular miscarriage” – could even be overlooked. The presence of intelligence officers in the well of the court itself could be chalked up to bitter – if infinitely suggestive – experience. But the SCCRC referral hangs over all talk of justice.

Koussa, if anyone, is central to everything where Lockerbie is concerned. Dr Swire is dead right about that. I only hesitate over celebrations because I find it hard to believe no deal has been done. The former foreign minister may have been in the frying pan. Would he really jump into the fire, unprompted, when there is serious talk of Gaddafi being allowed to escape into exile? Or are we supposed to believe that Koussa has grown himself a conscience?

With luck, some parliamentarian will be asking Hague these questions before long. Where Lockerbie is concerned it is not enough, and never was enough, just to say “Gaddafi did it”. If the order was his, the order was followed. How – for the purposes of argument – and by whom? It is a long time since blind obedience to orders was last accepted as any sort of excuse.

The British government’s approach to this little problem is liable to be fascinating. David Cameron has spent a great deal of parliamentary time condemning al-Megrahi’s release. He has said, repeatedly, that he would never have agreed to such a thing. He has dismissed the Scottish government’s arguments in favour of compassionate release. Our Dave is unflinching, by his own account, in matters of justice, terrorist crime and condign punishment. So let’s see, where Moussa Koussa is concerned, whether he is also consistent.

But consider: if the truth is ever allowed to escape, Koussa might not be the only double-dealer, home and abroad, who finds himself in an uncomfortable position. Yet again, I suspect, opinion is being nudged towards the belief that “Gaddafi did it” settles all questions. Simultaneously, a spurious Lockerbie “resolution” will be a handy distraction, no doubt, amid the Libyan aftermath.

And if Koussa winds up in the United States for the sake of “intelligence sharing” and old alliances, we will all be just a little wiser. Dr Swire and many others deserve better. But they always did.

Voting Reform: Majority Rapport

2011-04-01T21:12:00.001+01:00

A slight change of pace. A cut-to-length version appears in The Herald on April 2. Electoral reform! Contain your excitement!

There is a tenacious idea abroad that a referendum on voting reform is crucial to Nick Clegg, and therefore to coalition government. If the leader fails to “deliver”, it is said, a furious Liberal Democrat rank and file – apparently there is such a thing – will conclude that the partnership game isn’t worth the candle. There will be hell to pay.

If true, this surely tells the rest of us something about the priorities of the ordinary Lib Dem activist. It suggests that a change to the electoral system – a change the party knows full well to be a second (non-transferable) best – matters more than all the broken promises over public spending, banks, or tuition fees. It suggests a certain remoteness, shall we say, from common concerns. Alternative voting: the phrase on everyone’s lips.

Is it true, in any case? Those ordinary Lib Dems have swallowed a great deal from Clegg and the Westminster leadership. They have seen support evaporate among all those voters once persuaded to “agree with Nick”. They have learned what it is to think the unthinkable, and watched their hierarchy tolerate the intolerable. Yet a lost plebiscite on the additional vote system is a straw liable to snap the camel’s back?

And what would that involve? A leadership challenge? Clegg has taken care to implicate all plausible suspects, Chris Huhne foremost, in the deeds of the coalition. A figure outside the charmed circle, such as Charles Kennedy, would risk breaking apart the party if he mounted a bid - if he even desired the job.

But why not a split, if only to resolve underlying tensions once and for all, and separate two political strands, centre-left and centre-right, that have never meshed comfortably? Experience says that voters would not be impressed. Pragmatism says that a couple of new-born (or reborn) parties would only stand a chance if voting reform could be achieved. And voting reform is the problem.

That leaves simple anger, or “fury” as it is sometimes termed. Would that cause Clegg to question the point of coalition, finally? It would depend on your estimation of what matters most to this most flexible of politicians: the job of deputy prime minister, or leadership of a party heading for a hiding on May 5 even as the fate of AV is decided. Precedent alone says there is no chance of Clegg walking out on David Cameron unless his career is at stake.

This amounts to quite a fuss, one way or another, over a proposed proportional system that is no one’s first love. Clegg cannot even say he has been betrayed by the Tories. He could have demanded reform as the minimum price of coalition, after all. Instead, he settled for a referendum. Now even that is likely to be forfeit because so many voters, even those who despise first past the vote, will oppose anything that Clegg happens to advocate, just for the hell of it.

It is a pitiful system, in any case, the so-called additional vote. It appeals only to those who think the chief aim of politics is to turn out politicians, come what may. It reflects the popular will only by redefining the popular will as a majority composed of those not-entirely-against a candidate. In large part it amounts to passive voting, if such a thing is possible.

Personally, I’d put it like this. Let’s say I enter into the spirit of the thing – though that’s no obligatory – and list the candidates in order of preference. I then wait while the piles are shuffled and contenders fall away until one reaches the magic 50% - though even that’s not guaranteed – and declared the winner.

So on the joyous morning after I discover that my miserable third choice, my least-despised option, is my new MP. As one who struggles to find a decent first choice, when asked, I don’t call that satisfactory. I call it bizarre.

Not – and see how democratic choices are offered – that this excuses first past the post (FPTP). The rag-tag No campaign, embracing some very strange political bedfellows, would be laughable had the AV advocates not beaten them to the punch. They seek to protect a status quo that does only one job – maintaining the two-party Westminster system – with any efficiency. And in the process they employ arguments that have been discredited time and again.

First past the post is simple, they say. True: it simply guarantees that handfuls of voters in swing seats choose governments. First past the post is straightforward, they say: one candidate wins. Also true: if, that is, you define winner as best loser, the candidate, as often as not, with the biggest minority share of constituency support.

Above all, say the advocates of No, FPTP provides stability, that bedrock of the British constitutional tradition. What they really mean is that the system keeps smaller parties locked in a box.

Such a party – let’s take the Greens as an example – may have hundreds of thousands of supporters across the UK. But grant them a single Westminster representative? Only if things go awry, amid a strange, indecisive election, and only in a town such as Brighton. In all other circumstances a Green vote is the Pyrrhic victory of hope over experience.

When large numbers are thus disenfranchised, democracy ceases to be a relevant concept. Even the bigger parties are familiar with FPTP’s quaint “anomalies”, chiefly its inability to correlate votes cast with seats gained. They treat such outcomes as swings and roundabouts, content that the old duopoly is preserved. To invoke stability is stretching a point, though, under a coalition government whose partners did not actually “win” anything, and dumped their manifestos the instant the carve up began.

None of this means that the AV lobby are paragons. Even while they talk of fairness they calculate the gains in seats liable to accrue from reform. None of them are much interested in broadening the base of the political class. Few even bother to pretend, meanwhile, that AV is superior to the single transferable vote, the only system – though still wildly imperfect in its distribution of “choices” – that comes close of meeting the demands of equity and representation.

It would be ironic, of course, were the referendum to be won or lost on a low turn-out on May 5. What would be proportionate about that, exactly? The single truly necessary reform required in British political life is the one no party wants to discuss: compulsory voting.

Prod the apathetic – the rationally apathetic – into participation and you would see some reasonably fair but wildly unpredictable outcomes. Rouse the housing schemes, the inner cities, and all the young people inclined to regard voting as organised fraud. They won’t thank you for it. Some will argue for the civil right to dissent from the whole mess. (Perhaps the chance to vote for “none of the above” would help). But the established parties, with their precious “key seats”, are not keen on that sort of unpredictability.

One final aspect of all this has been too little discussed. Let’s say the AV advocates emerge triumphant. Britain will have then acquired yet another voting system to add to a patchwork that was already beginning to seem a little bizarre. Scotland, for example, copes with no fewer than four different ways to cast a ballot.

Are they equally good systems, equally bad, or simply applied – take a guess – thanks to horse-trading and political convenience? If we must have another long and frankly tedious argument over electoral reform just to give the Lib Dems a sweetie to suck, surely it should involve the choice of a single system, for non-European elections at least.

It is almost a century since the Commons tried to sort out British democracy by welding STV to AV. The experiment was abandoned after the Lords, guardians of democracy, chucked out the proposals on no fewer than five occasions. No one had voted for the peers themselves, of course, but no doubt the noble Lord Clegg of Driftingmiddleground will reopen that issue one of these fine days.

Libya: Spinning the Compass Needle

2011-03-31T12:16:00.003+01:00

I’ve been reading Tariq Ali on the Guardian site. This is bracing, as ever, not to mention illuminating. Any argument Tariq happens to be making is strengthened, always, by a single revealing fact: you won’t find this distinguished historian’s opinions anywhere else. That’s half his argument, on most occasions, before he even begins to write.

The other half, a singular advantage, is too often overlooked: Tariq is never wrong. In 30-odd years of reading his books and articles, I can’t remember hearing of those odd, humiliating little human errors that afflict the rest of us. Borne on the wings of a rigorous analysis, Tariq has risen, time and again, above the battlefield of ideas and explained, patiently, what is really going on. Yet the foolish, mendacious and the forever-deceived won’t listen.

A pity. Tariq has been right so often you would have to be daft or dishonest – and at odds with the historical record – not to give him a hearing. He was right about Vietnam and right about Iraq. He’s right, even now, about Afghanistan and Pakistan. He’s right about superpower relationships, information flows, economic self-interest, base media allegiances, and the survival of colonialism. The governments of the west have been obliging, in that regard.

Rationally, then, you’d want to trust Tariq. Anyone who has been right so often should inspire confidence. You might even take a bet and say he couldn’t, with that record, be wrong. For a bonus, you would gain several moral advantages. After all, isn’t “not being wrong” in human affairs always the same as being absolutely right? Isn’t morality a syllogism, and isn’t the syllogism the perfect instrument of logic?

Not, as certain ancient jokes at Aristotle’s expense demonstrate, exactly. Tariq’s Guardian piece is just like old times. For some, the language alone will do, even if the language appears – the compromises of the cash-strapped liberal media – alongside a flash advert for the new Jaguar XF.

Here’s “selective vigilantism by the US and its attack dogs in the west”. Here’s a deluded civil society “easily moved by some images”. Here’s a “squalid protectorate” being created by “Obama and his European satraps”. Here’s the west, asserting its control over the Arab rebellions, “confiscating their impetus and spontaneity and trying to restore the status quo ante”.

Some observations, then. It’s noticeable, first, that the necessary provisions of international law are no longer, in Tariq’s reading, sufficient. All of us who complained, over and over, that the Iraq occupation was utterly illegal now learn that UN Security Council resolution 1973 endorsing “all necessary means” in Libya is mere “cover”. Even for the purposes of a syllogism, I’d call that inconsistent.

The real argument, I’d have thought, would be over legitimate interpretations of the resolution. The US and Britain are now muttering that arming the rebels might just be lawful. I’d happily see the rebellion armed, but I wouldn’t – because it’s impossible – indulge that legal fiction. An arms embargo is an arms embargo. Get another resolution, if you can.

Tariq then asserts: “It is absurd to think that the reasons for bombing Tripoli or for the turkey shoot outside Benghazi are designed to protect civilians”. Absurd it may be; that doesn’t prevent it – this applies to most of the world’s absurdities – from being true.

Besides, polemicist that he is, the writer conflates two actions. You can say, credibly, that the Tripoli bombings protected no one. Is it also a fact that no one in Benghazi now remains alive who would otherwise have been dead? Or would that just have involved a few of those images that move the naive so easily?

Then Tariq embarks on the syllogism favoured by all those who oppose intervention. It asks about the west’s logic. If Gaddafi is a dictator, and if a dictatorship (we now say) must be destroyed, ergo all dictators must be destroyed. Tariq – for who doesn’t? – has a list. Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi: tyrannies in plain sight, corrupt as hell, long-standing and valued clients of western economic and military interests every one.

There is no mention of Syria, however, and that’s interesting. It suggests that Tariq senses a problem when he excoriates the hypocrisies of the west. What if Washington, London and Paris actually paid attention, and cast aside those double-standards? We could march (metaphorically) on Damascus: God knows we’ve done it before.

Israel would be unhappy – the Assad mob at least provide “stability” – and Iran would probably provide a war the US media could get behind. That would be consistent, right? It would also involve one hell of a “squalid protectorate” across the Middle East.

But that’s fantasy. It is not even remotely what Tariq means. So what does he mean? It seems to amount, in practice, to saying that if the US won’t destroy Assad or the House of Saud (and they won’t) they should leave Gaddafi alone. And that would be progress? Alternatively: leave Libya to the Libyans. After all, “We will now never know how long Gaddafi’s crumbling and weakened army would have held together in the face of strong opposition”.

Factually, this is correct. We will “now never know”. What do we know, however, while a “weakened army” rolls easily towards Benghazi in the face of opposition that would be comical were it not so pitiful, is that Tariq’s wishes find few echoes in reality. He’s betting lives on his contempt for western motives and the idea – though he knows better – that revolutions get their happy endings thanks to the popular will alone.

There are a couple of problems with that. One is dealt with briefly: “Even those Libyans who, out of desperation, are backing Nato’s bomber jets, might – like their Iraqi equivalents – regret their choice”. Indeed they might. But once you concede that there is desperation, and that the popular will involves “backing” – or is it demanding? – those Nato jets, parts of the argument fall away. What remains is a rebellion begging for help.

A simple choice, then. Turn away – we’ve done it often enough; have your lists ready – or risk supporting a western involvement that could well – lists, please – turn squalid. The alternative is to push the argument beyond the old binary certainties, the either/or, that have kept Tariq in business for so long. Even a malign intent can have a decent outcome: how about that?

Has the west already picked its clients? No doubt. Tariq calls them “English-speaking Libyan collaborators”, though why the possession of a second language proves anything is a mystery. The aerial assault would itself prove tricky, I’d have thought, without collaboration.

The established fact is that some members of self-styled interim Libyan administration have been Gaddafi’s named enemies for decades; others, recent converts to opposition, deserve more suspicion. The Guardian also tells me, however, that our old friend Mustafa Abdul Jalil has been “sidelined”, which sounds like a wise precaution. Abdel Fattah Younis, former interior minister and a bloody criminal of note, is the real cause for concern.

Or should we worry over Islamists? Are we fostering a rebellion that is a mere host body for devious jihadis? It has become the latest reason – not adduced by Tariq Ali to be fair – to oppose intervention. It’s the Afghanistan precedent. We could, too clever by half, be about to arm al Qaeda, couldn’t we?

Yes, we could: everything is a risk. If al Qaeda are about, however, their battlefield performance leaves something to be desired. More seriously, this “fear”, of US manufacture, is better example of colonialist attitudes than anything Tariq names.

Arabs? They’re all the same. Libya, Yemen, Saudi: same difference, and each stuffed with people (Muslims, you see) eager for the caliphate. But Gaddafi (irony, if you like) treated his people to the best education system in the region, encouraged (in the name of his own revolution) a secular middle-class. The Arab world is vastly more diverse than the anti-Nato argument allows.

Tariq knows that better than any: that should go without saying. But his arguments are forced to hinge, at some point, on motives. Here he gets stuck on, as it were, an internal contradiction.

On the one hand, the west has happily done business for decades with the tyrants of the east, Gaddafi lately included. This is patently, disgustingly true. On the other hand, however, the Colonel is right when he “speaks of imperialism’s desire to topple him and take the oil and even many who despise him can see that it’s true”.

But we were getting our Libyan oil with no difficulty. We were doing business, guns and all, without problems. Thanks to Tony Blair’s ability to keep his conscience bound and gagged, we had Gaddafi pliant and co-operative. Latterly, the Colonel was even supplying some of that precious “anti-terrorist intelligence”. Yet now we seek to burn him just to “take the oil”? By Tariq’s own account of the west’s dealings with tame dictators, that’s bad – self-contradictory – business.

But no: what the Nato-west is really about, in Tariq’s account, is the confiscation of the Arab revolutionary spirit. It’s out of control; it doesn’t suit. We seek a major influence, in short, over the lives of others.

Now there’s a novelty. Yet the same Nato gang is also culpable for failing to influence or control events – to interfere – in Yemen? Tariq leaves a question standing, lonely and neglected: which course should the northern countries therefore adopt? Which course would make them right? If it is wrong to intervene in Libya, why complain when there is no intervention in Bahrain?

Libya has seen the first instance in these upheavals of an Arab revolution being met with serious armed force. If Gaddafi wins, who really takes comfort? At the head of the queue, needing no urging from the west, would be the Saudis. What would Tariq then advise?

Meanwhile, Libya edges towards stalemate, cease-fire and partition. The apparent defection – Tripoli says otherwise – of Mousa Kousa, Gaddafi’s foreign minister, speaks of a regime in deeper trouble than events on the battlefield would suggest. It is also being reported that both sides are now seriously short on ammunition, an outcome that may yet do the work of another UN resolution.

Granting that Tariq is always right, I offer a simple addendum to his infallible analysis of western perfidy, in the form of a question. When has a single one of those devious, duplicitous, grand western schemes ever come off? About as often as a confident prediction of the outcome of a revolution.

Libya: Bending the Rules

2011-03-29T14:32:00.003+01:00

I’ve been reading Glen David Gold’s stylish and vivid novel Sunnyside. It’s about – as much as that word is worth – Chaplin, early Hollywood, America’s entry into the First World War, and a few other things. One droll sequence recalls the Allied Expeditionary Force to Archangel in 1918, and the west’s comical intervention in the Bolshevik revolution. At one point, Gold writes:

[Woodrow] Wilson had given the subject far less public consideration than, say, sending troops to Europe in the first place. Once war had been declared, a little more war was hardly something to fret about.

As “the protection of civilians” became a euphemism for interdiction and a rolling aerial bombardment on the road to Tripoli, that last sentence struck me as near-perfect. Where Libya is concerned, the terms of UN resolution 1973 are fast becoming a memory.

In practical terms, that needn’t matter much. If Gaddafi’s gone, he’s gone: I’ll weep another day. Legality is another matter. It’s the point, in terms of grisly precedents, that trumps all others, the one that makes it possible to talk about charges such as crimes against humanity, the one that might – just might – prevent the future from resembling the past.

Legal authority also gives, or gave, an answer to the sort of hypocrisy we’ve been hearing from countries as different as Russia and South Africa. One abstained over 1973, the other actually voted in favour. The former has Chechnya to explain; the other the survival of Robert Mugabe. Yet now they act as though they missed the “all necessary measures” clause where Libya was concerned. Legality, the mandate, was supposed to be the answer to their belated and predictable complaints.

Its erosion, as the following piece attempts to explain, is liable to make the aftermath messy. What the column fails to address – 1000 words gets you only so far – is the other side of the coin. Where would we be, where would the Libyan rebellion be, if Nato had in fact stuck rigidly to the merely protective mandate?

Anyhow: The Herald, March 30 edition...

United Nations resolution 1973 manages to be both explicit and vague. Since the start of the Libyan rising, this has suited different people, at different times, for different reasons. The legal clarity lacked by the Iraq war has found its hazy mirror in the sly, interpretive arts of diplomacy.

Does it matter? Muamar Gaddafi’s fan club has become an exclusive affair, its former members outnumbering the still-loyal by a handy margin. Even amid the sub-plots of the crisis – anyone heard from Tony Blair, lately? – there is no chorus speaking, or whispering, on the Colonel’s behalf. If he wants to measure his chances, he should listen to the silence.

Most want him gone, even – especially – those who accepted his subsidies and his embrace with a smile. Most also appear to accept that there is little appetite for western “boots on the ground”: this time, influence will be achieved by other means. As to the use of force, even those who wince at the sight of Nato bombers at work find it hard to portray Gaddafi’s armoured brigades as pathetic victims.

The fate intended for Benghazi was spelled out in gloating (if reckless) detail. There was to be “no mercy” for “rats”. They were to be hunted from house to house, and not because the Colonel was keen to hear their views on institutional reform. Those who doubt the motives of the interventionists – the proposition that can never be falsified – are left with a question. What would they have said if Benghazi had fallen?

That has not deterred certain governments. Russia, with Chechnya to its name, says the UN mandate has been exceeded. India, with Kashmir on its CV, says disproportionate force has been used. China, with Tibet on its battle honours, makes cease-fire noises. Those with double standards allege double standards, and remind the world that they abstained in the Security Council. Meaning what, exactly?

In the UN’s well-rehearsed terms of diplomatic engagement, it means that they did not exercise a veto. They did not enable, but they did not prevent. So what did they mean to achieve?

Specifically, they allowed a resolution – 10 for, none against, five abstentions – for a no-fly zone, an arms embargo, and intervention by members “acting nationally or through regional organisations or arrangements” to protect civilians through “all necessary measures”. The final three words are key. How could any resolution containing such words ever be breached?

Yet Russia complains that Nato has become the de facto air force for rebel fighters. Those are combatants, by definition, not civilians. The west (some of it) replies that the tanks being destroyed are the same tanks that would destroy Benghazi and half a dozen other towns, given the chance. So angels wrestle on the head of a pin.

Moscow and the bystanders have a point, nevertheless. Defeating an attack is a different matter from prosecuting an attack. Selecting only one part of Gaddafi’s forces for destruction – a few of his ships have just joined the target list – hardly counts as non-participation. The legal cover of proposition 1973 is being stretched to the very limit. In the unlovely generals’ jargon, “mission creep” is accelerating.

Again: does it matter? The 35 governments represented at Lancaster House in London yesterday did not come together to hear the case for the survival of the Gaddafi regime. Once the ritual expressions of unity were put aside, personal, regional, national, commercial and strategic interests were no doubt stewing below the surface. But the fundamental question was simple: once this is over, what next?

The Colonel is done and no one (publicly) is mourning. International Criminal Court, rebel justice, or a deluxe retirement villa? Convenience will dictate. But the endgame is in view; the aftermath is under discussion; and no one is too apologetic, as yet, over any possible “errors” in the Iraq style. The real aim – to circumvent Russia, Turkey, or anyone else with a suspicious cast of mind – is Gaddafi’s surrender, otherwise known as “a speedy ceasefire”.

Yet here’s the odd part. America, Britain and France are still talking as though they are not waging an offensive war, as though the only military aim has been the protection of civilians. Each is still pretending that regime change is not – perish the thought – an ambition. They are paying lip service, of course, to proposition 1973, but they are also contradicting reality, blatantly.

On the one hand, Barack Obama takes to the airwaves to tell the American people that Gaddafi is not a target. On the other, the US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, says that the idea of arming the rebels – an explicit breach of the embargo – has not been ruled out. Someone, and it sounds like the president, is being worse than disingenuous.

As are Britain and France. While also asserting that Gaddafi is no target but “must go”, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy have been bending the language somewhat. The protection of civilians has become a military campaign to neutralise “the threat of attack”. The Colonel’s entire regime is therefore defined, presumably, as just such a threat.

As no doubt it is: in these matters, Gaddafi is a known quantity. But you need not be in thrall to the brother-leader to see that Nato has been expanding, exceeding and abusing its mandate. The Libyan intervention risks becoming illegal, even if – another argument – its motives are unimpeachable. If the Colonel is not dislodged soon, the problem will deepen.

Here lies the Iraq precedent, the one Obama claims to fear. If Arab opinion begins to turn against intervention, not least amid a messy aftermath, international law will matter. If arguments continue over what is to be done, or not, about the next autocrat – and here comes Syria – legal authority, conferring moral authority, will count.

The chances of all concerned returning to the UN for another resolution, and another round of haggling, are zero. That doesn’t mean the people causing the bombers to fly should not give the idea some very serious thought. Getting rid of Gaddafi might yet be the easy part.

Libya: A Little Vigilance

2011-03-21T12:08:00.000Z

I’ve no appetite for war porn. I get tired very quickly of those who find explosions exciting, who drool over “kit” and forget what the hardware is doing. I’ve already seen enough shots – is there such a thing as information underload? – of big aircraft taking off and landing.

I get a bit impatient, too, with young (younger) journalists who’ve never done a war. I mean editorially speaking. My “combat experience” is nil, I’m happy to say. The closest I ever got to a war zone was Omagh. But if that’s what a crude 500lb device can do to a small town, I can just about work out what the clever stuff is doing in Libya. Some editors, tabloid and TV, need to get a grip: it really is no game.

That achieved, those journalists might then have a crack at scepticism. Even if, finally, by some miracle, despite every precedent, the right thing is (more or less) being done, that doesn’t render it a thing of glee and childish joy. Equally, the generals, politicians and spooks don’t change the habits of a lifetime simply because there exists a rough consensus for dealing with Gaddafi.

Truth remains the first casualty. Applying a pinch of salt when William Hague opens his mouth – to choose a random idiot – doesn’t devalue the arguments. It might even deepen them. Complexity is a nuisance, no doubt, when all that stirs your loins is new footage of things going bang. But complex truths will remain after the dust has settled.

Back at the time of the Falklands, a colleague was despatched to London to cover the daily MoD briefings. The last advice from his editor and mine – and where are such men now? – was this: “Just remember, at times like these, the Ministry of Defence becomes the Ministry of Propaganda”.

Currently, too much is being taken at face value. The fact alone does not alter my troubled support for intervention. I still don’t see the alternative. But this is the stage in such affairs when it helps to be wary of those forever inclined to seize an advantage, and then lie about it.

The responsibility falls most heavily on those of us who say this is worth doing. Irony, eh? Who needs it?

Libya: Pick Your Bastard

2011-03-20T14:19:00.001Z

Sometimes I feel like one of those venerable sorts who used to write to the Times – and may do still, for all I know – claiming to have spotted the first cuckoo of the year. Instead, I claim whatever prize is going for sighting (on a comment thread for a London paper) the first of a guaranteed flock: “IMPEACH OBAMA”.

Genius. I fell out with “liberal opinion” somewhat when this African-American first emerged as a plausible US presidential candidate. You may remember. Suddenly, the world was being saved before our very eyes. People who now think less well, shall we say, of the man entertained hopes that were as often comical as they were unfeasible, as daft as they were high. To wit: they believed every word.

I think I understood the historical significance. I think I saw the difference between a Democrat and the Bush gang. But I was one the party-poopers who also said, “Hold on. This bright hope is opposed to Iraq, yet reckons that Afghanistan must be fought? And by the way, he’s not, in point of fact, my president-elect”. Judging by some responses, I might as well have been caught sniggering at the Second Coming.

My point then, as now, was simple: he may be one of the good guys but he is, first, foremost and inescapably, a President of the United States. In that job, imperatives apply, none of which were designed for the betterment of my conscience, or to guarantee me a good night’s sleep.

So what would the rest us like to see from such a character? Noble speeches are great: after Bush, Obama was a victory for syntax, and that’s not chickenfeed. You tend to hope that a person who speaks clearly is thinking clearly. On the other hand, cast your mind back to John Kennedy...

Least harm would cover most of it. Then, if we get lucky, doing some good now and then. Obama is not saintly; the west has a dire historical record; between David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy the only impediment to choice and denunciation is the old fact that too few in these islands know much or care about French politics. “Dave” is a risible Tory; his counterpart in the Elysee is a time-served, careerist thug.

Not my first picks, then. I can take apart their motives, their hypocrisies, and their corporate allegiances with the best of them. But an argument has formed the sub-text to most things written on these pages for a couple of weeks: name the alternative.

We can all unburden ourselves on the topics – add at will – of warmongering colonialists, death, horror, and a wicked world. Some things posted, for and against, have been very moving. Still: if not Gaddafi, what?

I remember having long discussions, once, with a colleague. The subject then was the Falklands. My view, entirely and admittedly cynical, was simple: “Either the junta falls, or Thatcher falls. And the world will be better off”.

Right now, I’d rather they – we? – bomb than not. My real worry is what follows if that doesn’t work.

Tales For Children

2011-03-20T01:14:00.002Z

I am taking heart – courage, indeed – that tonight this is not a wholly-owned American affair. I even find it cheering that “Paris” just pissed off “Washington” and “London”.

It’s important. Where Tomahawk Cruise come from is, of course, another question. But we do this, in our backyard, because the “unique capabilities” of the United States are also liabilities. For us.

I never managed to be a citizen of the 151^st state. Most current American definitions of democracy strike me as insane, and demonstrably a-historical. Gaddafi is also – and demonstrably – barking at the moon. So pick. So choose the less-worse option.

We should have armed the revolution a fortnight ago, I still maintain. But: better it were done than not...

Who are we, we Europeans? If a vote is being taken, I’m with the cheese-munchers, always. The history will say that the Continental Republic needed proxies, this time, because imperialism gets tricky. Why would that be? Germany refused; Cameron and Sarkozy needed a poll rating; politicians cheat. No matter.

I’m a human being. This is not a species equivalent to “American”, in every circumstance. A lot of people are about to die to prevent – if we get lucky – still more deaths. It’s not chat.

Allez.

First Drafts, Final Drafts

2011-03-19T22:15:00.001Z

When I was plausibly juvenile, the term “Marxist historian” was commonplace. It worked as shorthand for people – people like me, ironically – who never managed real shorthand. It was intended to signify political intent rather than something dull, like a working method.

E.P. Thompson was your standard Marxist in the history business, in those days. You were supposed to know, presumably by a process of intellectual osmosis, that old Ed’s tales of proletarian achievement were tainted, somehow, by the fact that he didn’t care for Tories, or Cruise missiles. The sub-text: mind how you go with those Karlists, young voyager.

And that was fine. Only idiots and children understood history as a dispassionate process, or read the Daily Mail for a factual record of What Just Happened. We understood an argument, instead. But there was, once, an argument.

Now I see Niall Ferguson shouting on my TV in favour of the “killer apps” – no editor blanched, it seems – that rendered the old Protestant ethic triumphant and imperishably true in every version of the best of all possible worlds.

I see Norman Stone touted, hilariously, as the senior teller of the Ottoman story who just happens to earn his corn from the Turkish Republic.

And I hear successive young Americans re-inventing the Hitler war as a parable of exceptionalism and God’s will.

I say, in the privacy of my own Freedonia, “No shit?” But these narratives are then re-read, if there happens to be someone literate in the West Wing, and managed as policy. So history happens.

Which also, in its turn, is fine. If it matters to someone to maintain that Vietnam was not catastrophic, that Nixon was just a patriot with a shaving problem, that each of the idiot Bush chaps meant well, we should talk about it.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve written, for my American friends: The imperial stuff? We did that. It gets messy, and dangerous. Beware. They don’t get it. Instead, they get history as a fairy tale. Instead, they get presidents who believe in fairy tales. Instead, they get perpetual war.

And those who need the sustenance, or the tenure, suck on the bones of the dead.

And Another Note

2011-03-19T12:37:00.001Z

As veterans of the experience will vouch, I’m the last person in the world to whom “executive responsibility” should be granted. It sits badly with my inner hooligan. This blog was intended, consciously, as a hand-made, home-made affair.

In short: Picture of the dug, some thinking aloud, a bit of bickering, we see how it goes, and all welcome.

Sadly, and for one obvious reason, some editorial decisions have become inescapable. I find this depressing, but also – for art is where you find it – a handy metaphor.

I’ll be making some choices, henceforth. Those of you still stuck with the enduring human race will have no problems with that, I hope. But for the ghost of Primo Levi, for a photograph of my wife’s Armenian grandmother, for the James Connolly Battalion, and for many more, rules will be made.

This week’ special (no postal order) prize goes to the first person who can remember what George Jackson’s little brother said when he broke into that court room.

Another Note

2011-03-18T18:39:00.000Z

This should be quick too. I'm making it a general post because dealing with individual threads is becoming inadequate/impossible.

Sinclair, your last contribution got stuck in the spam box. Apologies. But if you will mention the wielding of "conspiracy theory" as a method for shutting down discussion of conspiracies... It's not even funny.

For the rest, for us all, I apologise for missing so many of the arguments today. They call it work. But as someone once said, "A career is just a job that's gone on too long".

When the skies darken, the ability to disagree with a sense of common humanity becomes more important than any feeble, corrupted, manufactured "consensus".

In my opinion.

Libya: The Larger of Lesser Evils

2011-03-18T18:16:00.000Z

This from The Herald, March 19. I’ve left out the overmatter, this time, because the contracted 1200 words feel like enough. And because – smart as a whip, me – I have the faint suspicion there will be more to say.

Hypocrisies abound. Of course they do. We lay an interdiction upon Gaddafi, but not upon the House of Saud. We cut a deal that will see Britain and France act as America’s proxies in Libya merely to secure a UN Security Council abstention – because the White House prefers it so – from Russia and China. We manage democracy, as we see fit, with the Tornado jet and the Mirage bomber.

Not everywhere, though. Not consistently, nor honestly. The Prime Minister who spoke so eloquently in the House yesterday was flogging guns around the Gulf just the other week. His government has turned aid into an instrument of trade. He sees no contradiction between an oppressed democrat in one sphere, when we care to notice, and a thuggish ally in another.

“To war!” as that great Marx Brothers comedy had it, “To war! Freedonia’s going to war”. And so, clumsily, belatedly, hypocritically, we are. Thanks to the abomination of Iraq, we make it legal, this time. We keep our boots, for now, off Arab ground. We give David Cameron’s government its Falklands moment. And we invoke a moral right. That’s the interesting part.

It’s called, in evolving doctrine, the “responsibility to protect”. In terms of Libya, it can be plainly stated: if Gaddafi should lay hands upon Benghazi, many will die. The dictator we indulged for so long, with whom we did so much business, is old-fashioned. He has a taste for slaughter. There is a correlation between his comical ego and the quantity of corpses. He should, sane people say, be stopped.

My colleague David Pratt described this yesterday, better than I could. Those voices in the northern countries who say it’s “just a civil war”, who claim that Libya is “none of our business” had better be explicit, for once, about what they mean.

I’ll grant them the entire, despicable Iraq affair. I’ll concede the entire history of western foreign policy. I’ll even throw in a discussion on Orientalism, and the profound ignorance of history and culture that the late, great Edward Said laboured to explain.

But the point has to be addressed. In what practical sense is “non-intervention” different from allowing Gaddafi just to get on with his stock in trade? Why does one species of western guilt simply create the conditions for a more profound guilt? How many dead will do?

It’s not that this is a big deal, in military terms. Yesterday, Cameron had barely done boasting of the puissance of “the world’s fourth-largest military power” before the Gaddafi clan were declaring “an immediate cease-fire”. The United Kingdom, at a best guess, was offering to put up four fighter-bombers and a refuelling craft. Then Tripoli thought twice. “Game,” as Arab democrats like to say, “over”.

But it isn’t. First, obviously, Saif Gaddafi – plainly the man in charge – should not be trusted. He wants breathing space, more chatter, the chance – and I know the history of the phrase – to cheat and retreat. But the UN resolution, a remarkable reminder of British and French diplomatic tradecraft, talks of “all necessary measures”. The prose is clever, the meaning is simple: regime change.

Secondly, more importantly, is the question of morality. Yesterday, Cameron denounced the very idea of accepting “a failed pariah state (that) festers on Europe’s southern border”. Was he serious? If so, where is the “no-fly zone” over Bahrain? Where, for that matter, is the UN resolution on Palestine that the UN intends to make stick?

If Gaddafi & Sons have forced the big powers to think in moral terms, consequences follow. One is that the responsibility to protect becomes universal. A second is, bluntly, that you cannot today sell killing hardware to those you might “abhor” tomorrow. A third would be moral equivalence: an arms embargo on Gaddafi must mean on embargo on the Saudis, the Israelis, the Egyptians, and the rest.

All of which leads to the problem of colonialism. Who are we to be dispensing justice at gun point? Gaddafi’s Libya is a sovereign state, on one reading, putting down an armed insurrection: by what legal right do we intervene? By which moral authority do we sell – or refuse to sell – hardware to one or another? Rich white countries sort the world according to taste: how is that just, if the alternative is yet another bombing raid?

Yesterday, David Pratt invoked Srebrenica. For our generation, that fable will be a long time fading. The massacre – the massacres – were blood paid for a collective failure by each of the west’s estates. How do we excuse our hypocrisies? We don’t. How do we explain the right of a pair of cheap European right-wing politicians to order up a bombing raid? We don’t. How do we justify ourselves? By consent.

Amid Iraq, the slogan went “Not in My Name”. It was a good slogan. It spoke explicitly to a moral sense. It felt like the statement of a long-buried human right. But it overlooked a consequential emotion. What could and should and must be done instead, then, “in my name”?

David said Srebrenica. I say Barcelona, in Benghazi’s stead, back when a dishonest decade was guttering out, and when “non-intervention” was presented as moral. When the Spanish Republic was being beaten to death in the late 1930s, no one in power felt any “responsibility to protect”. Thugs thereafter took heart.

I know what I just said. I just endorsed a Tory prime minister busy upon a politically-useful war. I just gave licence to western oil interests. I just tried to give the old imperialism a new coat of humanitarian paint. I just said that hypocrisy is justifiable – hypocritically – some of the time.

To do nothing is impossible. By which I mean: passivity in these affairs is a fiction. Inaction has an active effect. Gaddafi has been emboldened, this past fortnight, by our fear of boldness. He has been decisive amidst indecision. And he has been bluffing – his favourite tactic – while others counted their cards.

Should there be no western “boots on the ground”? Of course. The Libyan revolution will be destroyed on the instant that it ceases to be Libyan. Should we trust all the new-minted patriots of Bnghazi who have wormed into “government”? Of course not. Some of those would give Quisling a bad name, on a good day.

Should we be happy, then, to see the west embarked on another war in Muslim lands? Only if we have lost our wits. Should we be cheered by a Tory premier making easy capital from easy (he thinks) warfare? Only if our memories have fled.

I happen to believe, nevertheless, that the responsibility to protect is a bigger idea than anyone has yet realised. The notion is compromised, continually, by political expediency, amnesia, and a hard-earned cynicism. Lots of smart people can explain why it is always best to do nothing. That’s been the reaction to every revolution history remembers.

Simplistic isn’t shameful, sometimes. This is simple: there are ordinary people who need our help. We’ve done the arguments, and examined the excuses. What’s the excuse for failing to help? In my book, it counts as the worst kind of patronising colonialism.

If you remember Duck Soup, Freedonia wasn’t the worst country going. And worth fighting for.

A Note

2011-03-17T14:23:00.002Z

This needs to be brief, and may depend on my (considerable) ignorance. But because I get to look behind the scenes with this little blog – country of origin, referral sites, and such – I see this. Would anyone care to Google it, and tell me where it goes? Or enlighten me further? To wit:

http://10.31.11.146:15871/cgi-bin/blockOptions.cgi?ws-session=3707871833

Dunblane & Other Excuses for God

2011-03-15T15:39:00.001Z

I didn’t intend to post this. In part, I was not convinced – and have never been convinced – that anyone or anything is served by this form of journalism. I’ve had previous disputes, elsewhere, over the decency of notions such as “Omagh: One Year On” and the astounding insults implied in the question, “So, how does it feel?”

This was the result of a compromise with people who were alive to the argument. I’m still not sure that, in the parlance, it “came off”, but there has been a bit of response from readers who seem not have hated it. And not everyone, though it’s their loss, reads the Sunday Herald. This is from March 13.

Reservist sub-editors can stand down, though: 2000 words were asked for. Be fair. “Problem of Evil? Two thousand years of western philosophy? Should knock that off before lunch, then.”

A river rises in indistinct hills and passes, companionably, through a town that calls itself a city. Here’s a cathedral, an old one, that calls itself a parish church. Here’s bits of the past – a town-house, an arch bridge, a famous old library, museum fragments – amid what the modern world calls “developments”. Here’s a place where people live and leave, day by day, for what they call commuting.

There’s not many of them: 7911 said the 2001 census, unfeasibly precise; more since, thanks to those developments; fewer back in 1996. These residents enjoy, most of them, a contentment called “quality of life”. People want to live here, beyond the valley of the Forth, where the Allan Water runs.

The schools are good, very good; the town is fair; the landscape embraces. Work may be elsewhere, as often as not – in Perth or Stirling, Glasgow or Edinburgh – but here, as the estate agents sometimes say, is the best of both worlds. Perhaps they really mean “of all possible worlds”. Dunblane can feel that way.

It’s not a poor town, not by any stretch. These days it wants to be green, and “sustainable”. It likes to be “in bloom”, too, for civic pride and pleasure. In its older streets a compendium of Scottish domestic architecture, some of it picturesque, is well-preserved.

It feels like a solid place, and safe: on almost every count, crime is lower, far lower, than the average. The worst of the traffic goes elsewhere, too, feeding the cities that offer jobs. The town has a singular virtue in a worried age: it causes you to believe that here some things can’t happen. This is old, insulated, secure; at one remove, somehow, from the worst of the world. If the commute pays, you can make a home. It’s good.

Things that can’t happen: two 9mm Browning HP (“Hi-Power”) pistols; two Smith & Wesson .375 Magnum revolvers; 743 rounds of ammunition; 109 shots fired, some of the shots alternating – by choice, with obsessive, pathetic premeditation – between “hollow-point” and “full-metal-jacket” bullets. With children for targets.

These are armaments enough for a gang war, for a gun battle. Even by those brute standards, they count as insanely out of scale with simple – if that’s the word – murderous intent. A first thought: the person who arrayed himself in that quantity of weapons and explosive bric-a-brac did not want simply to kill. He did not want to stop killing.

Something else that can’t happen: Thomas Watt Hamilton. In an obvious sense, the statement is plainly false. The failed shopkeeper and dismissed Scout master was born, he lived, and he put a bullet through his head and its contents on March 13, 1996, aged 43. But Hamilton and Dunblane seemed then, and seem now, like an unthinkable conjunction.

As follows: a man like that, with a mind like that, in a town so plain and ordinary, so sane? When the news broke, and in the days and weeks that followed, a phrase began to sound like an unsought motto for the old former burgh. Thus: “Dunblane – of all places?” It was as though every known calculation of probabilities and risk had fallen apart.

First, mass murder was an American affliction, not – or not often – a British blight. Secondly, murder on the scale seen in Dunblane Primary School on that ordinary Wednesday was unknown, alien, to Scotland. (As it remains: Scottish gun homicides in 2002 were 0.06 per 100,000 population; in the US, 3.98).

Thirdly, even if such things could be conceived of in this small country – Magnum revolvers, mass child-killing, a man apparently untethered from the species – one country town was the least plausible place. In the weird, revealing logic of distressed humanity, it should have been, must have been, anywhere but Dunblane.

A second thought: Hamilton did what he did to this town because it was this town. Why else select the children? The pathetic nonentity – look at the photographs, that puddle of a face, that sketch of half-remembered identity – was attempting something mythic and absolute. It was a ritual slaughter of the good. Or it was something beyond even his comprehended universe.

That day, many things failed, but imagination was first. Empathy, human feeling, needs imagination in order to function. If either surrenders, unmediated pain roars in. So on March 13, a question was left in Hamilton’s wake: if those killings could happen in Dunblane, “of all places”, was anywhere safe in the world? Fifteen years on, the fact lurches back from the past: this is truly how we thought. Hurt descended like hail.

It’s probably illegitimate, in someone’s book, to talk of an entire country traumatised. Call these anecdotes, then. News stopped rolling. People wept in the streets. People inundated schools with phone calls, many miles from the scene, just to ensure that their own children, children who faced no possible risk, were OK.

And in those schools teachers contemplating Gwen Mayor, the colleague killed by Hamilton as she tried to protect her pupils, struggled to talk in simple words to infants who had glimpsed a TV, or heard an adult weep. To this day, I’m not sure how that was done.

A third thought. Was this infamy what Hamilton wanted most? In the first days of the aftermath much was lost amid inept policing and an official attempt to hide the traces of incompetence. First and above all: this likely paedophile and proven gun nut with a grudge was well known. He wrote any number of letters to important people. He was a conspiracy theory awaiting his cue. Some in authority didn’t want to talk about that. Perhaps Hamilton wanted most to be heard.

It seems that barely a month after the death of all those children, I wrote: “Scotland’s most senior law officer threatened editors with proceedings for contempt if they continued to investigate the circumstances of the Dunblane massacre. As though to sharpen the point, the Crown Office said the remarks of Lord Mackay of Drumadoon, the Lord Advocate, were themselves ‘not for publication or broadcast’. The curb on reporting is not to be reported”.

That was true. Dozens of conspiracy theories were born then from freemasons, cop-connections, and tales of paedophile rings. Some even said – still say – that Hamilton did not even commit suicide, but died a “Manchurian Candidate”, if you can believe such language, after the fact. When a 100-year seal was placed on the witness records, those who detest the obvious had all “the truth” they needed. Bigger mysteries, real mysteries, remained.

One was this: what do we say, even 15 years on, of a man who slaughters 16 children and their teacher in a primary school just because he can? Is the question complicated? But some good journalists ran out of words in the days after the event. There was, not for the first time or the last, a void in the language.

This isn’t a big country, but in my memory it had never felt so much like a village as March 13 worn on. I seem to think that the sky fell like a curtain, that distance shrank, that strangers became intimate. I do know, equally, that a few barely paused to draw breath before muttering about “hysteria”, and judging – on whose behalf? – that no one should “leap to judgement” about guns, and the control of guns.

A fourth thought. In killing those 16 children, their teacher, and himself, Thomas Hamilton may have demonstrated the existence of evil, and sought to do exactly that, even to those with no belief in the supernatural. What other profit could he have sought? The world would not have blinked at mere suicide for this nothing of a man. If his mind ached and screamed, few would have grudged him that release. But he planned – very carefully – and acted to put himself beyond forgiveness, and beyond understanding. Some call that evil. What do they mean?

In 1710, Gottfried Leibniz, a Saxon philosopher-alchemist, published a book with a long French title that gets shortened, among English speakers, to Theodicy Essays. It ought to be better known, but those who need God and his justifications seized it for their own long ago. Biblically, it’s tricky.

Leibniz set out to answer a child’s question. If the Creator is all-knowing, all-powerful, and perfectly good, what sense can an evil world possibly make? As a proposition, it amounted to another of those things that can’t happen: if God, why evil? Learned theologians called this “a problem”. Leibniz answered it by saying that the deity permitted evil within his limited creation to allow it, and us, to perfect faults in this, the best of all logically possible worlds. Some have called this optimism; Voltaire called it hilarious.

Other philosophers have offered variations: God allows us free will; we sin because we are free; because goodness makes no sense without evil; because our knowledge of His purpose is limited; because what we call evil is an illusion; or because the deity is, in bitter reality, less than omnipotent. You can play with these notions endlessly, and in the process you might – just might – satisfy some people. But they do not answer a fundamental question: why Hamilton? Why not you, or me? Why monsters?

There have been plenty of psychological versions that attempt to connect the dull, disappointed life of the killer with his last deeds. They are about as useful as the many “explanations” for the Hitlers, the Stalins, the Pol Pots. They have the unintended effect of making the word evil seem trivial, like a label applied to excuse the inexplicable. We call them evil, it seems, merely because they make no sense. And we forgive or not according to injunction or taste.

A fifth thought: something tells me that Thomas Hamilton understood this. I think it was important to him to baffle, to astonish, to force shock beyond its limits. Had he simply killed a policeman – two were in the vicinity, off-duty, seeing to their children – a simple narrative involving a grudge and Hamilton’s frustrated interest in young boys would have been adduced. But he wanted more.

Evil, if you use the word, has that function. It marks the point where any presumed limit is exceeded. It corresponds to nihilism. It means to destroy what you think you know about the human race, the good and – this is important, I think – the bad. This was one reason why the reportage from the aftermath in Dunblane was useless. Hordes of journalists wandered that little town asking for clues from people who, like the reporters, could not begin even to guess. It was an utterly pointless intrusion upon grief.

The companionable river rolled on, taking its turn as a metaphor. The town continued, despite everything, to be ordinary. The weather was mixed. It happens that I was due to write a column “on the day” as the facts, utterly useless, were still coming in. The cliche “lost for words” never felt so true. I remember only the first sentence. It ran: “So tell me about this species”.

That piece of inadvertence still resonates. There is something in the human animal, I think, that is found in no other creature I could name. It even creates a paradox: we form the concept of forgiveness, sometimes, precisely because we know what we are. And we reject that concept for the self-same reason, and make a ritual of retribution.

I could cast aside the word evil and tell you – because it makes a kind of self-evident sense – that Thomas Hamilton was simply a very sick man. But I would cast aside the diagnosis, too. Childhood trauma or a malformed brain – the latest wheeze – sound very like excuses. If humanity modified itself genetically to remove this or that trait, the beast would find another excuse.

Leibniz and his God don’t emerge well either way, in my book, save at the margins. What we call evil is very probably a mirror to what we call good: does that help? A little, perhaps. Hamilton’s murders exposed a vast reservoir of love in this flinty little country, 15 years back, for Dunblane and its children. But it was also a reminder of why the death penalty doesn’t answer, least of all for the inexplicable monsters. To become just like them: isn’t that evil too?

A last thought, wholly banal: Thomas Hamilton was also a child, once upon a time.

God's Party: Notes & Queries

2011-03-15T15:21:00.000Z

This from The Herald, for March 16. Anyone unfamiliar with the title, or for that matter with Scotland, should probably understand that certain rules of engagement are involved where journalism and the country’s two dominant faith groups are concerned. Some itch eternally for the chance to be insulted. Old story.

The Roman Catholic hierarchy tends to write me down and off as “well-known left-wing secularist/typical Humanist” and the like. I prefer to offer up the fewest number of hostages in that game. Hence the slightly formal – Jesuitical? – tone.

When next Tony Blair submits to interview, someone should ask him what liberation and seeming democracy have done for the Christians of Iraq. As a man of faith, the former prime minister might be able to explain why his co-religionists are worse off now, demonstrably, than they were under Saddam.

The Coptic Christians of Egypt, too, are probably wondering if the apparent end of autocracy will coincide with more bombings, assaults, and what are termed, glibly, “tensions”. Is this why they spent so many days and nights in Tahrir Square?

In Pakistan, few Christians remain who harbour many illusions. The recent murder of Shahbaz Bhatti, minority affairs minister and the single Christian member of the country’s cabinet, was only the culmination of a quickening campaign of religious persecution.

These things are not trivial. You can count them as tokens of opposition to “western” policy towards the Muslim world, even if the victims are Iraqi, Egyptian and Pakistani. You can use them, too, as measures of militant Islam’s growing reach, and for its deepening addiction to ruthless violence.

The fact remains that talk of democracy has no meaning if freedom of belief is overlooked. Even those – I’d say, especially those – who harbour no religious inclinations understand that diversity, pluralism and co-existence are essential. Christianity may be of marginal importance in a Muslim world being torn apart – the story the west still fails to grasp – by the conflict between Sunni and Shi’a. But if the rights of a minority cease to count, no rights count.

By one estimate, there were over one million Christians in Iraq before the invasion. Now, though numbers are hard to come by, there may be as few as 150,000. They flee or die, easy victims for mobs, easy targets for those who seek to control a country we first destroyed, then left in the lurch. To adapt a word from another time and place, they are suffering pogroms.

Cardinal Keith O’Brien has a point, then, and one that is hard to answer. Why, he asks, should Britain grant £445 million in aid to Pakistan – almost double the previous figure – when that country cannot protect Christians, feels no urgent need to do so, and comes under no obvious pressure from the British government to meet its obligations?

You could go further. Hamid Karazai’s corrupt regime in Afghanistan has survived thanks to a lot of British blood and money yet treats the rights of its Christian minority with, at best, disdain. Iraq’s stage-managed democracy, endorsed repeatedly in the capitals of the west, has allowed (and worse) those believers to become scapegoats. And Pakistan, “ally in the war on terror”, accepts faith-based terrorism with minimal apologies.

So the cardinal asks a good question. Government ministers raise human rights repeatedly, though by rote, when they pay business calls on stressed and oppressed regimes. Yet a concept of human rights shorn of freedom of belief would not be accepted – tolerated, indeed – in this country. We are making a grave mistake, and putting many lives at risk in the process.

But wait. Do these descriptions amount to the definition of an “anti-Christian foreign policy”, in the cardinal’s words? You could as easily say, of Iraq, Pakistan and others besides, that Britain has just as often operated an anti “Communist trade unionist” policy, for all the help it has ever given secular voices. And what would the cardinal advocate instead? A Christian foreign policy?

You could observe, of course, that the cardinal’s job description is in his title. The fates of atheist Egyptian labour organisers are not, formally, his patch. He defends those of his creed, as he should and must. But the UK’s foreign policy, such as it is, represents more than one outlook, one faith, or one pressure group. That may be why it fails so often. If the alternative to anti-Christian is Christian, as the expression of a diverse country, my support is withdrawn.

It’s relevant, too, that the cardinal speaks on behalf of a global denomination and, at one remove, of a state. The Vatican operates its own foreign policy. Were it to be the arbiter of British aid to HIV-stricken sub-Saharan Africa, to take an obvious example, a lot of taxpayers here would be less than content.

What is the logic, in any case, of objecting to the spending of £445 million on Pakistan? On the one hand, a state that fails to protect human rights could be blackmailed, perhaps, into better behaviour. On the other hand – in a sense the cardinal might understand – we would be politicising charity. So what would aid “policy” be if the next grim earthquake hit Pakistan?

Such is one question offered by the Foreign Office in response to Cardinal O’Brien. It’s not an honest question – the coalition has been merrily politicising aid – but it depends on a grain of truth. In theory, we give our money to improve societies in which poverty, bigotry and hatred walk hand in hand. Is anyone better served if we just walk away?

Something else is going on. In particular, the conspicuous faiths of the worlds seem to be engaged in an oppression auction. “Who suffers more than us?” each asks, one after the other. So the cardinal publicises a report by a group, Aid To The Church In Need, claiming that 75% of all religious persecution is aimed at Christians. A big figure – 100 million – is adduced.

The organisation has the Vatican’s approval, as is proper, and expends much effort on those at risk in Baghdad and Mosul. But why the need to claim that Christians are uniquely at risk when the faith-based competition, creed after creed, makes exactly the same claim?

Each of the faiths understands the real enemy. It is non-belief, secularism, the lack of faith. Those who identify oppression also wish to reclaim their old dominance. I’ll tell you I’m wrong when they speak up, to take one example, for the tens of millions of gay people, believers and otherwise, facing daily persecution by all creeds.

Arab Revolutions: Spring & Old Winter

2011-03-13T19:51:00.005Z

Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s former chief of staff, derived a few sound-bites once from the observation that all crises contain opportunities. Gaddafi needs no tutelage. While Japan suffers hell, the world’s attention wanders, yet again, to bigger casualty lists and better pictures. Suits the Colonel just fine.

It would be strange, though, if the weird one was alone in taking advantage of generalised distractions. When the Arab Spring commenced, anyone who had ever bothered to care about history found two thoughts (among many) uppermost.

First: how will the House of Saud react to all of this? If autocrats are out of fashion, real oil politics, the no-fine-words version, is about to be a properly big deal.

Secondly: how will Israel respond? Egypt’s revolution is a long way from done. The army supposedly beloved, inexplicably, by all those demonstrators has yet to grant anything much. But Hosni Mubarak, Israel’s thug of choice, has taken his leave (publicly at least). So, in the beginning, you had to assume a response.

You had to assume, notably, that with Obama still struggling to connect all those lovely speeches with the real business of America, Benjamin Netanyahu would have something in mind. You had to conclude that with the EU all over the kiosk, as ever, something would be in the offing.

The record suggested that Israel would find some way to take advantage, and then adduce all the old imperatives of eternal vigilance and self-defence. For Netanyahu, it would be par for the course.

You can’t live on guesses, though, even in this medium. Rather than comment now, I’ll quote from Haaretz, the only Israeli newspaper to which I give much credence. These from this morning:

Thousands of Israelis turned out at the Givat Shaul cemetery in Jerusalem on Sunday for the funerals of five members of the same family killed Friday night in a brutal attack in their home at the West Bank settlement of Itamar.

The Fogel family - father Udi, 37, mother Ruth, 36, 10-year-old Yoav, four-year-old Elad, and three-month-old Hadas - were all stabbed to death in their home. Two other children in the house at the time, were not hurt in the attack.

Next, columnist Amir Oren:

Netanyahu cannot sever the link between issues of local security (for instance, around Itamar), security of the state and its agreed-on borders, and peace. Settlements can’t defend themselves alone. They help perpetuate hostility. Nor will the dispute vanish if the settlements are removed, unless mutual efforts are made to bring the violence to an end.

The Itamar attack proved once again that intelligence information furnished by the Shin Bet’s efficient regional security chief R. and by the most experienced, skilled IDF officers (including Brig. Gen. Nitzal Alon of the Sayeret Matkal commando unit ) doesn’t provide a foolproof ability to thwart terror attacks. Intelligence officers come and go, but hundreds of settlements and outposts like Itamar remain on the ground, stuck down the Palestinians’ throats.

Next, a subsequent Haaretz news report:

The ministerial committee on settlement affairs decided Saturday night to approve the construction of hundreds of housing units in several West Bank settlements, a move that came in response to a deadly attack on a family of five in the settlement of Itamar on Friday.

The approval of further settlement building follows several long months wherein no construction was approved. The move involves measured construction of several hundred housing units within settlement blocs.

Further:

Interior Minister Eli Yishai said Sunday that the decision to build hundreds of new housing units in the West Bank settlements as a response to the Itamar terror attack is not enough and Israel must construct many more homes.

During a Sunday cabinet meeting, Yishai said that Israel must build “at least a thousand new homes for each person murdered.”

Housing and Construction Minister Ariel Atias of Shas also expressed support for West Bank settlement construction as a reaction to the murder of five family members in the settlement of Itamar.

“We must change the ratio and build in Jerusalem and Judea and Samarea. We must strengthen the settlement, and the time is now,” said Atias.

There will be more to say, inevitably. The slaughter of a family deserves better than instant chat, though it should be said, for context, that settlers in Itamar are disinclined to talk peace, and live for the perpetuation of confrontation.

But Netanyahu and his crew? Amid even the fragile hope of Arab democracies? The absence of those has been Israel’s chief propaganda defence for a very long time.

More follows, one way or another.

Libya: Points of Law

2011-03-12T14:06:00.001Z

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that there was broad, popular, international agreement over Libya. This is unlikely-to-impossible, of course, for numerous well-rehearsed reasons, some good, some pitiful. Let’s pretend, in any case, that the inchoate constituency, “the people of the world”, had arrived at a consensus in favour of action. What would follow?

Since Iraq, a lot of us have acquired the habit of invoking international law. Hence the charge of war crimes against Bush, Blair and the gang. Crudely put, Saddam had not attacked a neighbouring state, patently had no plans for such an attack, and no UN resolution authorising war existed. Even the responsibility to protect, implied but never stated by Blair ever afterwards, was held in contempt when Saddam was gassing Kurds. An open and shut case, then.

But there’s a problem, as anyone who quotes international law understands perfectly well: who makes it stick? Which institutions are able – or allowed – to enforce common standards?

Who didn’t suppress a grimace when the cry went up to haul Gaddafi before the International Criminal Court? That would be the court America – and Russia, and China – refuses to recognise?

G. Galloway can be found in this morning’s Guardian debating the issue of Libya with a Tory who-he? named Mark Pritchard. It is not, interestingly enough, a predictable exchange.

The Conservative isn’t blowing bugles, for one thing. In fact, he is explicitly opposed to western “boots on the ground”. Pritchard simply argues that the rebellion should be armed and equipped. Having made the same case, I find this strange to contemplate – agreeing with Tories is generally a symptom of something – but, nevertheless, fair enough.

Galloway meanwhile declares that he is “not a dove in these matters” (and should never – perish the thought – be confused “with a liberal”). The Man Who Has Returned To Save Holyrood goes so far as to suggest an international brigade of Arab volunteers – “I’m for bringing down the Gaddafi dictatorship” – on the grounds of legitimacy and legality. Again, in my book, fair enough.

But Galloway makes the obvious point. For any other version of “action”, international law requires the sanction of the United Nations. And it ain’t going to happen. As far as the security council goes, Russia and China will veto any sign of the US (and chums) flexing muscles.

So the EU? We saw their clarity of purpose, for good or ill, at the end of the week. David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy may be up and at ’em. The latter may even have tried to bounce his peers by recognising “the government” – stretching a term – in Benghazi. The rest? They wish this problem would just go away. Angela Merkel wants a joint EU-Arab League-African Union meeting, eventually. Does she really think that would help?

The Arab League, as Galloway suggests, is a dictators’ club. Can the Saudis, busy shooting at demonstrators, be imagined as guarantors of Libyan democracy? The African Union – too many skeletons, too many closets, with Mugabe’s survival on their CV – are little better.

As for Nato, George G can again take credit. Afghanistan may have encouraged the myth that the organisation is entitled to behave as a global cop and a US proxy. That’s not what the founding treaty says. On paper – hence in law – this remains a self-defence pact. And what would it be defending, as Galloway inquires, “out of area”, in North Africa?

As I suggested, personal views on what could and should be done for Libya are one thing. But they are rendered redundant by the woeful state of the institutions that are supposed to lend credence to the fine words. You might say there is nothing new about that. You might observe that the UN has failed so often its right to a continued existence is questionable. Would it really help to expand the Security Council – an overdue reform – to include Brazil, India and South Africa? I’d like to believe it, but I don’t.

So where does that leave those of us who know that the alternative to international law is warlordism in sharp suits? Uncomfortable, at best. Contemplating might defining itself as right, yet again, with no end in sight. And irredeemably naive, no doubt.

I’ve been re-reading some of the transcripts of the Nuremburg trials. Some people hold up those hearings as an early example of international law in action. The fact is, despite the guilt of the monstrous accused, that these were examples of victors’ justice, pure and simple. Their only real virtue in terms of process was the likely alternative: Stalin (and Churchill was also tempted) would have shot the scum out of hand.

We’re better than that, supposedly. But the US and the rest refuse to recognise the International Criminal Court. They draw no parallels between Gaddafi and the House of Saud. Above all, the perpetrators of Iraq still dismiss any notion of crime, guilt, or law.

When the Ottoman Empire was done slaughtering 1.5 million Armenians in 1915, the word genocide was coined. That was supposed to mark the birth of a common sense of responsibility, and of a common legal standard. After almost a century, progress is very hard to spot.

Libya: Alternatively

2011-03-11T21:20:00.000Z

I have a sense of tails chasing tails. This is sometimes known as politics. The planet shrugs, many people die in Japan, and news editors wet calloused thumbs, and turn a page. What was profound yesterday gives way to telegenic catastrophe today.

And that’s fine. First rule of the baleful media: they reflect audience. They are as sure, or as tawdry, as “the consumer”. The hatred is entirely mutual.

Japan tonight is a better-looking disaster movie. Some tale of the EU – already, no one cares – failing to agree about the least-worst thing not to do about Gaddafi? You just lost the audience, colleague.

In the course of the day, I glimpsed a TV. The picture was The Desert Rats, a half-true, true-Brit, Richard Burton vehicle based on the (mostly-true) defence of Tobruk, by Australians and others, in 1941.

What was striking, in this year, was the absence of a single Libyan, in Libya, in that parable of willing heroism.

Anyhow. Since I’m a little tired of chasing tails, and tales, I thought something different might serve. I’ll call it fair quotation, but if the estate of the late Hamish Henderson seeks a fee, I’m easy to find.

Elegies For the Dead in Cyrenaica, Hamish called it. If you check a map, you’ll grasp the relevance, I hope. The “Seventh Elegy” – “Seven Good Germans” – ends with this:

The seventh a young swaddy,

Riding cramped in a lorry

to death along the road which winds eastward to Halfaya

he had written three verses in appeal against his sentence

which soften for an hour the anger of Lenin.

Seven poor bastards

dead in African deadland

(tawny tousled hair under the issue blanket)

wie einst Lili

dead in African deadland

einst Lili Marlene

Libya & The Old World Order

2011-03-10T18:42:00.001Z

Later this year a lot will be written and said, predictably, about the fall of Manhattan’s Twin Towers, and what became of a low, dishonest decade. Many familiar lies will be repeated. A lot of history has become inconvenient.

September 11, 2001, is worth remembering, though, in terms of before and after, and in any argument over what changed and what, stubbornly, remained the same. We are living in the aftermath still. To resort to a journalistic cliché, the attacks on the United States defined a generation. And that’s a modest estimate.

An anecdote, then: most people have one. In those days, journalists could still observe the lunch ritual without facing interrogation from some witless suit. On September 11, we had just ordered when every mobile went off. At first, it felt like someone’s idea of a joke. But we crossed the street to find a pub and a TV set. Before I saw the screen I saw an Australian woman, a tourist, open-mouthed and weeping.

I remember saying to a colleague, the Scottish editor for one of the London Tory papers: “America just declared war”. His reply: “I bloody hope so”. I bloody didn’t.

The title for which I then worked excelled itself. With those images, it wasn’t hard, perhaps, but a wraparound front page – a technique pioneered by the Mirror in its great days, for trivia fans – gave a sense of scale. It was a tricky job, but words – I would say this – were trickier.

I was assigned to write the leader, the editorial. In the fiction of newspapers this unsigned copy is either “the editor’s view” or the collective opinion, acquired by a kind of osmosis, of the publication itself, argued over beforehand – on self-respecting papers, at least – by the senior staff.

I’ve written my share. I’ve also refused to write a few – some editors are more tolerant than others – when I couldn’t subscribe to that night’s groupthink, even anonymously. I’ve only once had to form an opinion on the outbreak of a war with no obvious end.

I have a bad memory for my own stuff. As we used to observe, “It’s not f*cking Proust”. I do remember guessing, though, that the perpetrators were probably Islamist. That’s more interesting in hindsight than it seemed at the time. The United States had many enemies, but only one “group” combined history, motive and ability.

In those hours a few people, brave or stupid, had already begun to say that America had been asking for it. I couldn’t then, and cannot now, think of office workers and rescue personnel like that. I did argue, though – leaderspeak, once more – that it was foolish to pretend no connection existed between US foreign policy and a terrorist reaction.

I concluded with the only demand that seemed sane. However America chose to respond, I wrote, “this must not escalate”. I was known for my matchless foresight in those days, too.

In the following weeks the arguments developed. It seemed to me obvious, first, that the US was ill-equipped psychologically for terrorism on its own soil. A lot of American foreign policy can be explained by the belief that wars only happen in places that are hard to spell, and by the fact that two global conflicts left not a single mark on the American homeland. The US, I believed, was liable to be as unpredictable as any exotic zealot. I claim my gold star.

But I also took the view – still do – that America had a perfect legal right to hunt down those who murdered thousands – early estimates topped 10,000, remember – of New Yorkers. If the Afghan Taliban were harbouring the plotters, planners and instigator, the Americans were entitled to send in the Marines. The term I used was “police action”. But that was all, the limit. This overlooked the fact that “mission creep” generally involves more than one creep.

Go back a bit, for a moment. Who remembers the elder idiot Bush and the “new world order”? Who recalls “the peace dividend”? It amounted to a promise. With the empire of evil gone, only one super-power was standing. We were in luck, they said: it was the not-evil non-empire, run by the good guys. They didn’t want to be the global cop, said the elder idiot, but they were around to do the right thing, and we could all sleep easy.

Off-stage, a few of the good guys were meantime preparing a production entitled The New American Century, featuring “The Ballad of the Liberal Interventionist”. Those few of us who half-noticed thought they were just think-tank cranks, selling a line that even – surely? – Americans wouldn’t buy.

After the junior idiot Bush began to steal elections, pennies began to drop all over the place. The merry pranksters of resurgent Republicanism were looking for trouble while simultaneously denying any interest in “nation-building”. This Bush’s America managed to be isolationist, interventionist and wedded to the myth of US exceptionalism, all at one and the same time. But logic was never an obstacle: they had a plan instead.

Still, one fact worth remembering about September 11 is the outpouring of solidarity granted even to the junior idiot. Briefly, the atrocity seemed like a major miscalculation on the part of the perpetrators. When even a leftish French newspaper – Liberation, I think – could declare that “We are all Americans now” every tide was flowing in his favour. If you’ve read this far, you’ll remember what followed.

Bob Woodward and others have demonstrated, in documented detail, that the junior idiot and his crew had nominated Iraq even before the first voting machines were nobbled. This was the plan from the start, long before Osama bin Laden put martyrs where his mouth used to be. And this was, in my case at least, the criterion by which “America” would be judged for a lousy decade.

Where the world saw an atrocity, and a national tragedy, a President of the United States saw an opportunity. I wouldn’t insult the dog-in-the-picture by calling the junior idiot a son of a bitch. Let’s say only this: he betrayed his own people before he got around to betraying anyone else. And when one lie unravelled, he thumbed the Big Book of Fun Lies and found another.

So: Iraq. Another paper; another time. Months before Shock n’Awe I found myself writing, week after week, that the junior idiot would have his war. Hans Blix and the weapons inspectors didn’t matter; the despised UN didn’t matter; a pimped British polity didn’t matter.

This was Duck Soup pour encourager les autres. And those who had poured fellow feeling on an America created thanks to French revolutionaries – the junior idiot didn’t “do” history – were cheese-chewing surrender-chimp. September 11 itself became an inconvenient detail, save as shorthand – week after week, my spellcheck protested – for turr. In the collective memory of Foggy Bottom, where the State Department lives, we were back in the days of the United Fruit Company, of what the US wants, it takes.

A debacle, of course, and a debacle that resonates now. That’s part of the trouble. It calls, perhaps, for what is known as counter-factual history. So imagine.

Imagine if a President of the United States had said 23 years ago – almost to the day, it so happens – that America would not stand by while Saddam dropped Sarin and Tabun on the Kurdish city of Halabjah. Imagine if that president – the elder idiot, in 1988 – had said that the US wasn’t hanging about while the UN debated genocide. And oh, by the way, that weirdo Rumsfeld, Saddam’s favourite photo-op, was under arrest.

I know: dream on. You have to arrange many other details, Iran above all, to make that fantasy work. You also have to forget the last decade, all the decades before, and Israel’s pivotal – in the proper sense – role in US foreign policy. But then, counter-factually, you have to sort through what is, what has been, what might have been, and what could be.

It’s coming to a point now. Does the fixation with the murderous effects of US/Nato history grant exemption to Gaddafi? All other considerations begin to fall away. That’s the choice. I’d call it a moral choice. As in, this or that?

Sir Simon Jenkins of the Guardian – one of nature’s revolutionary socialists – says that nothing foreigners get up to is any of our business. He says that any excuse for involvement is a sham, cooked up by the military-industrial complex. He even says:

The only requisite justification for attack is a tear-stained girl pleading over the corpse of her brother on TV, or a car-load of civilians hit by a strafing fighter, or just a mob anywhere howling for help. Nobody likes being bombed.

Sir Simon, as the knighthood might suggest, is a class act. A wild guess says that, like most of us, he’s never been bombed. A brother’s corpse is a satirical motif. And a prick with a byline is still – yes: I see it coming – a prick.

Anyone who allows their moral sense to be degraded simply because of the junior idiot Bush, or Blair, or because of the myth that history runs on a loop, or because they have learned to mistrust every official word, or because they know the price of oil, or because they need to run an ethical credit-check on the next but one regime, or because they understand the species, should pause.

There are no ideal choices, nor perfect conditions, perfectly met. It’s always a bloody mess, and the politicians always lie. In France, Sarkozy has just recognised a Benghazi government that no one else can yet identify. The little guy wants air-strikes, too, “probably”.

Because he is grand-standing, amid a dying presidency, for the sake of the many French Muslims he otherwise treats with racist aplomb? Because he’s getting in the first bid for future contracts? Because he saw Britain screw up its “diplomatic mission” and sees an opportunity? Because he drew the short straw as Nato’s stalking horse? Because he can’t stand, sincerely, to see Gaddafi resurgent?

I could do you 1000 words for each question, and make all the answers plausible. It seems to me that Iraq has attenuated our sense of the possible. We know what we will not tolerate. We know what we do not trust. But simply ask, “What can be done for Libya?” and all you get is another class in “Western Perfidy, 2001-2011”. It does not – to put it no higher – help.

Some bloke who just got his turn at Nato says that the treaty organisation is “united, vigilant, and ready to act”. No citizen of a member country will ever get a vote on that, of course. The community of nations to which we invite Arab democrats involves few actual communities. The disreputable “revolutionary” opportunists understand this perfectly well. The young, bumbling, passionate amateurs who are dying for ideas understand something else, I think.

In all the left-liberal-sceptical comment on Libya, one parallel is ignored, over and over. This is slightly odd, I think, given our tendency to venerate the safely-dead and all the failed revolutions. You want to know what history says? It says Spain, July 17, 1936. It tells of a chaotic, disunited, ad hoc government; a people who had had enough; autocratic thugs with no interest in the hilarious idea of democracy; an “international arms embargo”; and too much grieving poetry. Lorca was lost, in that one, while nations pondered.

Auden suppressed his own verse thereafter. The last stanza goes:

The stars are dead; the animals will not look;

We are left alone with our day, and the time is short and

History to the defeated

May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.

We have all been drawing our lines in someone else’s sand. I still maintain that a single American or European thumb print on a firing device will destroy the Libyan revolution, even as it destroys Gaddafi. I still think that arming the insurgency, the one choice that no one will discuss, can and should be done. I still think there is time for that.

I think there is time, too, to refuse the patented lessons, on all sides, of the decade just ending. History is an argument, not a sentence with no right of appeal.

I also happen to believe that Britain’s ragged democracy becomes more important by the day. Remember the small fuss when Gordon Brown hinted he would break ranks over Afghanistan? Because we have become the perennial useful idiot, our dissent is an appreciating currency, however it is spent. Just a thought.

But if you want history now, here’s some: for Barcelona, read Benghazi.

And if the facts change, my arguments change.

A footnote. Gaddafi’s boys are beating up journalists, I see, and causing some to disappear. I suffer a lot of crap on behalf of my trade, the “mainstream media”. Some of it is well-founded; much is ignorant. For example: we lose dozens each year, we stooges. Actual lives, everywhere.

There are naive idiots, desperate to make a name, and there are people just doing the job who run out of luck. The media alter, no doubt, but the facts of the trade remain. We only know what we know thanks to professionals putting themselves at risk. In that world – take it from me – Gaddafi is done.

Libya: Our Boys Fly Back To Front

2011-03-08T15:57:00.001Z

A shorter version of this appears in The Herald on March 9.

Andy McNab would have written it better, I think. For one thing, he would at least have explained where the helicopter sprang from, the one used for the “diplomatic mission” to Benghazi, or thereabouts, that has caused William Hague such chagrin. No one is saying.

If it flew from a naval vessel, from HMS York or HMS Cumberland, the SAS/MI6 jaunt seems even sillier, if that’s possible, than before. If it came from elsewhere, things are not – as supporters of spooks, trained killers and Tory governments have been hinting heavily – quite as they seem.

Some fans of derring-do go further. Nothing is as it seems. They would have us believe that the entire purpose of the mission was to deliver messages – plus a signed note from David Cameron – to our old friend Mustafa Abdel-Jallil, formerly Gaddafi’s justice minister, now the self-styled leader of the Libyan National Council. By this account, the “misunderstanding” (and the humiliating arrests) were neither here nor there.

There are a couple of problems with that. One involves the word debacle. When covert missions become public, the mystique of the secret world dissolves into mere Carry On comedy. Having your brightest and best collared by farmhands is hardly calculated to convince anyone that Britain is a one-stop shop for military assistance and strategic advice.

The other difficulty is Abdel-Jallil. Let’s say that if he has been selected as a man with whom Britain can do business, the Foreign Office hasn’t quite thought things through. Let’s add that if HMG has already picked this individual as a potential client, all the talk of democracy and self-determination is, for Whitehall at least, claptrap.

Abdel-Jallil, as mentioned previously, is a patriot of what the French resistance used to call la dernière minute, the last minute, one of those who leap into action when it’s safe or opportune to do so. At the heart of Gaddafi’s government and its “justice” system until the instant the wind changed, Abdel-Jallil has been busy styling himself a leader of the rebellion for the west’s benefit. Those Libyans who have been opposing the dictator for more than a few weeks are less enthused. They reject his claims. And this is Britain’s first point of contact?

But that’s the trouble with intervention. On whose behalf? By what means? For whose benefit? The governments of Europe and America are confused, to put it no higher, about what could be done for the people of Libya, and why or if it should be done. Or if – just to restore default positions – they could get away with it. Just to be strictly fair, those governments are scarcely alone.

On one level, it should be simple. Gaddafi’s record of intimidation, murder, arbitrary arrest and torture has been no secret to anyone – with the possible exception of Tony Blair – for a very long time. A founder member of the dictators’ club, Gaddafi has supported and encouraged every genocidal despot from Idi Amin to Bokassa, Mengistu, Charles Taylor and Robert Mugabe. It is as though, in fellow feeling, he has gone out of his way to succour the worst individuals Africa has had to offer. His is a career worth terminating.

Where Libya is concerned there is, besides, the UN’s vaunted “responsibility to protect” doctrine, that legacy of international failure in Rwanda. It endorses intervention, up to – as a last resort – military action if a state is waging war on its population. More often honoured in the breach than in the observance, generally out of naked self-interest, it nevertheless provides an ethical framework, of sorts, for action, and a standard to which to aspire.

Then there are the military issues. By most assessments, Libya’s rebels are outmatched. Gaddafi has tanks, airpower, and troops who are, supposedly, better trained and armed than their opponents. That his air force seems reluctant or unable to hit a target is a minor blessing. With an international arms embargo in place – no problem for an African dictator with oil money – the rebellion is condemned to an unequal contest against a man with a taste for bloody revenge. You don’t have to be a Guns n’ Ammo groupie or an Andy McNab fan to acknowledge the fact.

So why not act? Why not, for once, do the unimpeachably right thing by people who want nothing more than the liberties enjoyed by others? After all, if nothing is done, and if Gaddafi reasserts himself, all the hopes invested in the Arab Spring will disappear. Only the autocrats, each with a close eye on Libya, will take heart.

You could go further. You could define a refusal to become involved as taking sides, albeit inadvertently. On this argument, Libyans are being denied their rights, the ones we deem human, as much by those who refuse to help as by Gaddafi. The direct comparison is with the aftermath of the first Gulf war, when the elder idiot Bush encouraged the Marsh Arabs to rise against Saddam – freedom, democracy, all of that – and proceeded to leave them in the lurch. Thousands were slaughtered.

It follows, then, that if there should be no intervention there should be no encouragement offered to Libyans opposing the regime. The message can be implicit or explicit: shut up, enjoy your repression, or shift for yourselves, if you can. It amounts to saying, “Accept your lot, for we judge the risks of involvement too high or too disreputable. Wait and hope. You never know: the democracy we go on about might just materialise, one fine day”.

Such a position involves a certain degree of historical amnesia, but those who recommend democracy have a sketchy memory at the best of times. It’s been a while since America and France saw revolutionary wars. Spain has travelled far in the three and some decades since Franco. Greece, Ireland and Portugal have hazy memories now of risings or dictatorship. Most in Britain couldn’t tell you the first thing about Cromwell, and reduce even the Hitler war to cartoon and caricature. In short: we forget that liberty isn’t conjured from the air.

But then, we also overlook our own self-regard, we exemplars. It’s one reason why Americans (with Britons close behind) struggle with an uncomfortable fact: an awful lot of people, in an awful lot of places, don’t like us much, and trust us less. Can they all be brain-washed fanatics? Are they all less civilised? Are they jealous, misled, or simply “not ready” for our sophisticated ways? How troubling would it be to grasp that many are just close students of history, and of the west’s involvement in their own histories?

A list of reasons to hesitate over intervention would therefore go, in no particular order, something like this: Iraq, oil, history, Arab opinion, UN divisions, western incompetence, potential casualties, and – that old favourite – unforeseen consequences. Add an ever-present fact of geo-political life: what western politicians say and what they mean are rarely one and the same thing. Motives differ, somewhat. The peoples of North Africa and the Middle East know as much.

Say it for the umpteenth time: Iraq was “about democracy”, was it not? Even those conservative Americans currently itching to do for Gaddafi and somehow erase the memory of that catastrophe cannot bridge the gap between their rhetoric and reality. A dictator was overthrown but a bloody shambles ensued. Hundreds of thousands died and are dying still. It’s scarcely a blueprint, even for a neo-con.

Then there’s oil and history, two tales entwined now as they have been for 80-odd years. The west, Europe in particular, can hardly pretend that it has no interest in what comes out of the ground in Libya, and who controls the stuff. A willingness, even an eagerness, to cut deals with Gaddafi while his people suffered is hardly a token of good faith. To paraphrase: We only want to help... ourselves.

At the UN, meanwhile, there are the usual divisions. Russia has already stated its opposition to armed intervention. After Iraq and Afghanistan public opinion in Britain and the US will be divided, at best, over another foray into a distant country. And if there is “mission creep”, as so often before, and things drag on, bloodier and bloodier, what then? A third Muslim country subjected to western firepower? Even for liberal jingoists, that begins to look like a pattern.

As to the question of competence, we already have part of the evidence. Despite their speeches, western leaders cannot decide what should be done, even if “it” – whatever it might be – can be done. David Cameron has blown hot and cold about a no-fly zone according to the breeze from Washington. The fact remains that however you present the notion, it involves the possibility of US munitions landing on Libya and Libyans.

Some in the rebellion are vehemently opposed; they understand the symbolism and the reality only too well. Some – like our new friend Abdel-Jallil – want bombs to fall. That tells us something, I’d have thought, about this would-be leader.

It’s a deeply stupid idea. If this revolution ceases to be the property of the Libyan people it will disintegrate. A democracy will not be made at the behest of western command-and-control, with western commercial interests lurking in the background. Popular opinion in the Arab world would turn, quite rightly, in an instant.

But all of this, pro and con, still leaves a nagging question. I make no apologies for repetition, for what it’s worth (in this democracy, nothing at all). It’s a simple question: So we just let Gaddafi get on with it, then, come what may? There are rational reasons, if such is your taste, to answer in the affirmative, but there are likely consequences, too.

Personally, I still see no reason not to arm the rebellion, if only to allow it a fighting chance. But that means equipment, not “advisers”, nor “guidance”, nor western boots on Libyan ground. And it means – though chance would be a fine thing – resisting the temptation to shape the politics of a revolution.

Libya: Our Boys Go In

2011-03-06T14:38:00.002Z

It’s not funny: of course not. These are serious times, with much at stake. There’s nothing to smile about. But if there is such a thing as grimly hilarious, and if Her Majesty’s Government persists in honouring old tradition by turning high politics into low farce, you have to laugh. A bit.

There’s been a lot of talk, in these parts and beyond, of the west’s bad faith and nefarious intent towards the Arab revolutions. Rational people with attention spans and a knowledge of history have been reluctant to take anything at face value, least of all the fine talk about democracy. But one aspect has been overlooked: incompetence, the matchless, time-honoured comical incompetence of British governments in particular.

I touched on this, in passing, in a previous post (“An Apology For A Coalition”, February 26). That was written when David Cameron was apologising to anyone who would listen for the ham-fisted attempts to evacuate British passport-holders from Libya. The piece proposed a little thesis. Put aside ideology, it said, and note only that our shiny coalition, stuffed with public school self-assurance, isn’t actually much good at the being-in-charge thing.

But I jumped the gun. Or the guns. And the bag of explosives. I wrote before a government led by a PR man decided to rattle a sabre at Libya while simultaneously laying off veterans of the Afghanistan carnage, laying up warships, disbanding air squadrons, and explaining – perhaps not the best word – that Britain is still spending billions to prove that it hasn’t a clue about defence procurement.

“Send a carrier? Um, sorry PM. We don’t actually have one of those.”

In general terms, these are cuts that don’t trouble me much. Throw in Trident as a real austerity measure and I’ll be happy. But the contrast with Cameron’s rhetoric has been startling (and funny). The contrast to the wider debate over western action or inaction has meanwhile been – you can take your pick – illuminating, or salutary, or laughable. Ask not what Britain can do for Libya. Just ask what Britain can do, in the latest, greatest game, without screwing up.

Take the case of one of nature’s footnotes: Prince Andrew, Duke of York. On the one hand, we’re encouraging Libyans to follow our example, and set themselves on the road to liberty and democracy, western-style. But what might they encounter on a lay-by on that road, setting down his golf clubs and setting out his stall? A royal spiv maintained in the guise of a trade envoy, a spiv – thank you, WikiLeaks – who can’t see the problem with corruption. Why, some of HRH’s best friends are corrupt. Were it not for “fucking journalists” – our royals were ever dulcet – no one would make a fuss.

But such is the British way: Libyans be warned. Our royal barrow boy – “Small arms? You’re in luck, guv. Got a bogof special on” – is emblematic, proof that we’re only here to help. The non-funny part being that the Libyan revolution could really do with some help, and soon.

Instead, they get a cwack skwad of men in black from the SAS – motto: “Who Cares Who Wins?” – dropped by helicopter near Benghazi at dead of night, and hereinafter to be known as “a small diplomatic mission”. Allegedly, the boys in the black pullovers were a protection team for the benefit of a single Foreign Office chap. The fact that they were armed is unsurprising. The claim that they had explosives in their luggage is astounding.

At this point one of those unwritten rules of British life, the kind for which no law was ever passed, kicks in. The Ministry of Defence “does not discuss the activities of our special forces”. Why not? My taxes and in my name? All of that? If a piece of gung ho slapstick ever required an explanation, in any case, this would be it.

In layman’s terms, what the hell were they playing at? Purportedly, the idea was to contact a member, or members, of “the rebel leadership”. I therefore defer to the BBC’s Jon Leyne (on the web-site) who is in the city sans SAS protection and bags that go bang.

The instant arrest of “our boys” – another triumph for intelligence – caused some understandable fears locally, writes Leyne, and certain “misunderstandings”. But he adds:

The big question here is why on earth, if this was some kind of diplomatic or even military liaison, they chose to do it like this? The HMS York was docked in Benghazi harbour on Wednesday. So if Britain wanted to send anybody in to the court house where the proto-government is based here, they could have jumped in a taxi, or even walked there, from the harbour.

Indeed. But where was the fun in that? The best guess would be that HMG has already selected a likely candidate for cultivation and grooming among those in Benghazi jostling for a spot in an alternative government. Presumably, the idea was therefore to stage a private chat on – how would this rubbish go? – confidential issues of mutual interest. So much for transparency and an open democracy, then.

But even at that level, this is inept, and daft. I’m hardly an expert on covert action, but if MI6 had a local ripe for suborning in mind, couldn’t they have done something subtle, something clever, something like inviting him to lunch? Perhaps the Americans, the French, the Italians and the rest had booked all the good tables. You can’t trust anyone, you know.

Such would be the lesson until, or if, we learn more. Many people have said as much, here and elsewhere: the only motives the west can understand are those of the mixed variety. Clearly, they are piling in to Libya already, peddling influence and making promises. At this rate, down-town Benghazi will soon begin to resemble a deleted scene from Casablanca. But real Libyans will still be dying for their beliefs, and real questions over what can and should be done will remain.

Those Libyans should ponder a thought, if the opportunity arises: as with governance, the people who offer guidance on the road to democracy are not, themselves, much good at it. They practise the art grudgingly. The tragedy is that they are the only game in town.

Postcript: 5.45pm or so. Our lads are liberated, presumably on the grounds that the Libyans have stopped laughing. Or run out of ways to explain that assistance works better when it's sought rather than imposed. Amusingly - will it never end? - the Foreign Office appears to be describing the fiasco as "an outreach mission". Right. Small correction: two "diplomats" (MI6) not one, plus six - a pair of the standard three-man teams - from the SAS. Next time we should send Comic Relief. It might actually do some good.

Gaddafi: Playing To The Gallery

2011-03-05T15:10:00.006Z

There is a lot of guesswork going on in Libya, even among journalists who are as close as they can safely get to shifting front-lines. You can tell as much from the words and from the footage. Some people are passing on claims, and trying (or not) to note when claims conflict. Others are applying freely the tell-tale word, “unconfirmed”.

Meantime, this medium is more of a hubbub than ever. Some of it is invaluable, to anyone who cares. A lot of it makes you wish that, just for once, people would surrender their anonymity, if they can, and their invented names. The traditional fog of war is thick enough. Trying to guess at honest intent just adds another layer.

But this isn’t a spectator sport, despite all the keyboard generals materialising around every news-site. If the front-line correspondents are offering guesses, even informed guesses, the rest of us “know” next to nothing. If we’re mouthing off – guilty – we should keep speculation to a minimum.

The fighting is becoming serious: that much seems clear. The western reporters who have seemed to suggest, in so many words, that “this isn’t much of a war” may now be thinking again. Gaddafi – “reports” again, but consistent – has deployed tanks alongside his militia. A lot of people are dead, according to a couple of presumed witnesses, in a place called Zawiya and the town appears to be under siege.

Still, “seems” and “appears” – and out of date instantly. The rebellion has taken control of Ras Lanuf, an “oil centre”? That was ten minutes ago. I’m just watching screens, like a lot of other people, and trying to settle on an opinion that might last beyond the moment. What can we say?

That the Colonel has been as good as his word: given a choice, he’ll stay put and fight on. The best efforts of the “international community” – even the magic of a Tony Blair phone call – have not moved him an inch. So what’s his intention?

That seems easy enough. On a descending scale of ambitions, Gaddafi wants to crush the rebellion; failing that, to secure the oil (and never mind the sanctions); failing that, to survive to fight another fine day. Currently, each possibility is entirely plausible.

The west is no mood to intervene. Amazingly enough, one lesson of Iraq has been learned. Not – chance would be a fine thing – that interference is generally a bad idea (you can fill in the moral blanks yourself), but that overt interference is more stupid than usual.

Inexplicably, to my mind, this extends even to the relatively simple business of equipping the rebellion. Meanwhile, “rebel leaders” themselves seem ambivalent – some for, some against, reports differ – about a no-fly zone that the west appears to have ruled out. But that decision will depend no doubt, and as ever, on the fate of the oil fields.

We’re back to first principles. Gaddafi could win and kill a lot more people for the crime of demanding a few human rights and an end to dictatorship. Should that happen he will be a pariah again, but he can probably live with the discomfort. The rest of the world needs to decide whether it can live with his victory, and the likely manner of such a victory.

This touches on the arguments that have gone on here and everywhere over intervention. You can mix and match: the duty to protect versus western bad faith; universal rights versus the long history of imperialism; democracy versus what the ever-flexible northern powers would term realpolitik. And so on.

It strikes me, though, that there is another aspect to all of this. Everyone is watching Libya. Those who are watching most closely are the Arab countries, whether countries that have embarked on revolution, such as Tunisia and Egypt, or countries that yet expect some attempt at revolution. Each will be asking the same question: can Gaddafi pull it off?

He’s the first of the thugs to have faced an actual armed rebellion. If he prevails, certain regimes – the Saudis, certainly – will quietly take heart. Even in Egypt, where the democracy movement has been wise in refusing to yield an inch to Mubarak’s surviving cronies, the generals – who call the shots in every sense – will be studying the efforts of the mad Colonel.

For all these people, the question is brutally simple: can this nonsense, as they would see it, be stopped? Is it better to crush rebellions by force of arms or subvert them with hand-outs and promises of change? If the former – they’ve tried the latter – what might the consequences be?

Gaddafi will remain beyond the pale whatever happens. Saudi princes and Egyptian generals would be another matter, should violence become “unavoidable”. Once the dust had settled Washington and London would be satisfied – you can bet on it – with a few more pledges and some reformist noises. “Stability” and oil would be payment enough. And straightforward repression would be back in vogue for the old regimes.

A lot hinges on Gaddafi and his attacks and counter-attacks, and not just for Libyans. The Colonel is testing a proposition derived from firepower and ruthlessness. He is not alone among Arab rulers in possessing those things. And that’s not guesswork.

Murdoch: Oligarchy Made Easy

2011-03-04T18:54:00.002Z

Once upon a time I interviewed Harold Evans, former editor of the Sunday Times and, briefly, the Times. He was pushing a memoir, the self-explanatory Good Times, Bad Times, and he had a lot to say on the subject of Rupert Murdoch. Specifically, Evans had acquired a view on the value of a Murdoch promise.

You could fairly say that the former editor was a little disillusioned. After all, he had lasted only a year on the Times before deciding that guarantees of editorial independence, august “independent” oversight boards, and pledges of non-interference from the proprietor were utterly worthless. Murdoch had burdened himself with these laughable commitments merely to placate an establishment accustomed to treating the so-called Thunderer as a private bulletin board.

Equally, you could say that Evans got what he deserved. Either he was beyond naive, or he was stupid. Murdoch was hardly an unknown quantity when he got hold of the Times in 1981. His takeover methods, in Australia and in Britain, were a matter of record.

Besides, Evans knew, or ought to have known, that there are two kinds of proprietor: those interested in money, and those interested in money and political influence. Both sorts are conservative and Conservative, invariably, but the former are less likely – were less likely; an era is passing – to bother with editorial matters if the cash is coming in.* Murdoch is the other sort.

Murdoch is an ideologue twice over. He wants political power in order to protect and advance his commercial interests. But he wants it, too, for its own sake, because he is entirely, quite sensationally, right-wing. The erstwhile student Labour man has followed the usual arc, his plotted course forever to starboard.

Put it this way: he much prefers the insane world-view of Fox News to the tepid, rule-bound stuff put out by Sky News. He is fonder, too, of the neo-liberal (in the British sense) Wall Street Journal than he is of those wimps on the Times. Sky and the Thunderer: bleeding hearts. Struggle with that concept.

But this is old hat. Murdoch’s editors always say he doesn’t interfere much. There is an excellent reason: they don’t need to be told. If you can’t anticipate the boss and his views, you won’t get the job. When the proprietor does step in, it is generally because a cock-up or an editorial crime risks harming the business. If the News of the World has been caught hacking its way across celebrity London just as Murdoch is trying to close a big, politically-sensitive deal, he will manifest himself.

As I say, old hat. There was never the slightest chance that this oligarch’s bid (£8 billion, they say) to take control of the part of Sky he didn’t already own would be blocked. Many have already said it. What’s the least surprising headline this (or any) year? “Tories Give Murdoch What He Wants”. The first civilian into Downing Street after David Cameron’s election has played this game so often, with so many prime ministers, he could do it in his sleep.

As is traditional, the usual solemn promises have been made. In order to fend off the Competition Commission – strange how arch-capitalists hate competition – an implausible scheme to “demerge” Sky News for a decade has been devised. The station is a loss-maker in any case, so no real harm has been done. But Murdoch has agreed, graciously, to the appointment of an “independent” chairman – another one – to allow the Tories to pretend they drove a bargain. Has Evans managed a wry smile, I wonder?

Rivals are aggrieved, of course. “Plurality”, they say, will be put at risk by the emerging cross-media juggernaut. You may wonder what was ever intellectually or politically plural in the combined offerings of the Telegraph, Daily Mail and the Lib Dem-endorsing Guardian. You might even ask certain of those titles if it was so wise to spend so many years kicking the BBC around when that institution – its deficiencies a tale for another day – is suddenly revealed as the only real broadcasting alternative to a wholly-Murdoch Sky. No matter: you don’t need to endorse the old Forger’s Gazette to grasp that the scale of an Australian-American’s media dominance in Britain is unprecedented, and still growing.

This is, according to its own publicity, a democracy. So it allows a foreigner 36% of London newsprint, a broadcaster twice the size (in terms of income) of the BBC, a near-absolute control of sports rights, a big part of film, and – most important – control of the means of distribution. Some of those Arab regimes gripped by nascent rebellions allow greater media “diversity”. Some of the old Stalinist states made a better pretence of “plurality”.

The first time I used the word oligarch in connection with Murdoch, a few people thought I was being (typically) extreme. I can’t see it myself. Take away the habit of actually killing difficult journalists and the difference between Murdoch’s trans-national fiefdom and Putin’s Russia seems slight. You could even note that the ex-KGB man confines his attentions to one country, unlike the individual who picks and chooses the cast for Britain’s political regime.

You could say, of course, that it was ever thus. I was raised in what used to be called the socialist tradition. First rule: never believe anything you read in the papers. But Beaverbrook and his kind never dreamed, even in their pomp, of this. It was never so explicit, so concentrated, so casually blatant. The News of the World scandal is the merest glimpse of what goes on. If you can bend the Met to your will, and have every mere politician offering fealty on command, oligarchy is the only word.

It would be nice to dream of on-line alternatives: many do. But witness the fate of the Huffington Post (not that anyone who remembers Arianna Stassinopoulos in her British days should be surprised). Witness the continuing failure of almost everyone, large and small – the Daily Mail being the exception, God help us – to make internet journalism pay. Witness the fact that those who happily deride the pernicious mainstream media, and rejoice in a death foretold – not that I blame them – still get the vast bulk of their news from the free stuff distributed on-line by the old, ailing imprints.

You might see a sliver of hope in that. Murdoch’s titles suffer the same afflictions, after all. His paywall around the Times doesn’t look like the answer, and nor does he his new tablet newspaper, The Daily. But this is a game of last-man-standing. When the box in the corner is a conduit for all content, from your social network to your pay-per-view football, your search terms to your saucy movies, Murdoch aims to have a piece, the largest piece, of everything.

It happens to be the Tories who are handing over the keys to the kingdom. I can’t even pretend to be surprised, or shocked. It’s worth noting, though, just how feeble our “mature democracy” has become. Murdoch used to cast himself, improbably, as an outsider ranged against the British establishment. Now he’s sole proprietor. The difference these days? No one even bothers to pretend otherwise.

*Up to a point, your lordship. Even the pure money-grubbers would look askance at anything too radical. Something like: “Is this really what our sort of reader wants?”

Assange, Manning & The Intelligence Test

2011-03-03T02:08:00.002Z

If I follow the logic, an awful lot of people just became unwitting enemies of the United States, each one “aided” by Private Bradley Manning. According to the central charge among 22 laid against the soldier under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, he did “knowingly give intelligence to the enemy, through indirect means”. Newspaper readers everywhere are in big trouble, then.

Not half as much trouble as Manning, of course, but that was, in one way or another, inevitable. Unless his lawyers can demonstrate that he is unfit to stand trial, he has no defence. Heroic or not, misguided or not, his breach of military law was spectacular – and embarrassing for the Pentagon: a heinous offence – in half a dozen ways. The price of his idealism will be very high.

But what of the rest, this “enemy” and its adherents? They seem to occupy a very broad category. In fact, if Manning’s lawyer is to be believed, the US military defines them, in a manner that would do a Stalinist proud, as members of “any other hostile body that our forces may be opposing”. Which is to say: anyone we choose. Arrests among the editorial staff of the New York Times should follow shortly.

Why not? Clearly, we are witnessing an attempt to, as it were, reverse engineer a charge against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. First define Manning as treating with an enemy, then put a name – an Australian might fit the bill – to that enemy. You might then have the foundations of a conspiracy charge against Assange under America’s Espionage Act, and might then be able to smuggle such a charge past the First Amendment. But I doubt it.

To prove conspiracy, you need evidence of collusion. The publication of all those files by WikiLeaks would not normally be sufficient, such are the protections for journalism provided by the amendment. But even if prosecutors sweep that aside, they face another obstacle. If Assange colluded with Manning, why not the Times, why not Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian? They too received classified documents; they too published those documents. Surely that too was collusion?

Where Assange is concerned, the fundamentals of US constitutional doctrine still pertain. To get him – and they really do want to get him – the American authorities must somehow demonstrate that he induced Manning to enter into a conspiracy to commit espionage. Yet in January, NBC News was reporting that the US military could find no evidence of any contact between the two men. That – and it is insisted upon by Assange – is crucial.

The Australian would no doubt say that he doesn’t fancy betting his life on the argument. The charges against Manning are therefore liable to feature prominently in Assange’s fight to avoid extradition to Sweden. I’m more inclined to believe that the US Army has just handed him a gift, however, by its treatment of Manning. Irrespective of the sex assault allegations, would the Swedes – big fans of press freedom – conspire in an assault on journalism by a piqued military-industrial complex?

It’s not my freedom to wager, obviously enough. I still maintain that Assange should deal with the Swedish allegations rather than encourage the impression that he has something to hide. It wouldn’t hurt, either, if he stopped putting spurious ethnic labels on the conspiracy against him. The real contest has just begun.

Gaddafi: Cracking The Nut

2011-03-02T11:03:00.000Z

The UN’s “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine was developed, in large part, because of Rwanda. National governments don’t care for it much. They like the sound it makes, as a kind of grace note to their fancier speeches, and they like to pick and mix bits and pieces when it suits a purpose. But as a complete, coherent mechanism for dealing with the four crimes – genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and ethnic cleansing – it doesn’t suit. It gets in the way.

It gets in the way when it causes even children to ask those “if A why not B” questions. And those are honest questions. If Iraq, why not North Korea? If Iran, why not Pakistan? Most people could produce a list. But since the doctrine doesn’t invite anyone to select war crimes according to taste, governments tend to find themselves accused of hypocrisy. This is a nuisance when you’re trying to decide which blind eye to turn next.

“Responsibility to Protect” is an obstruction, equally, when it’s your habit to view a catastrophe as an opportunity, or when you’re trying to maintain two conflicting motives simultaneously. Libya would spring to mind, just at the moment, where the northern powers are concerned. Is it about democracy, or is it about oil?

Both, in point of fact, though history would suggest that oil always takes priority. Since the 1920s, no indigenous people has been allowed to stand in the way of a secure supply for the prosperous folk. A horrible fact, but a fact.

And what is this democracy business, in any case? You can have the textbook definition – universal suffrage, free and fair elections, the rule of law, free media – or the working version. The latter is crude but familiar: whatever suits us currently. Only weeks ago it suited us – as ever, you can dispute the pronoun – just fine to turn one of those blind eyes when Hosni Mubarak was deeming himself “elected” by, so it appeared, every adult Egyptian who could walk. Then his army took a vote of their own.

Why then even bother talking about a Responsibility to Protect when it is rendered ludicrous, year upon year, by low, dishonest politics? Isn’t it destined to go the way of the dodo or (much the same thing) the League of Nations? The doctrine resembles nothing so much as yet another piece of UN window-dressing, a fancy facade on the charnel house. When the international statespeople salve their shrunken consciences with this stuff, they merely insult those they betray. After all – for who hasn’t noticed? – the bigshots don’t mean a word of it.

But here’s a thought: what if we therefore adopted the logical conclusion? Forget the Responsibility to Protect: it’s a joke. Drop all that stuff about war crimes and genocide: those concepts, new-fangled in the scheme of things, are overwhelmed by the old hypocrisies. Prefer honesty instead: whatever it is, however it seems, it’s none of our affair. There’s moral safety in that: just do no harm, if you can. Rwanda was none of our business, after all.

So how does the world look now? Strip away that empty, high-flown doctrine, dispose of the moral argument, stay out of it, whatever it might be. Would anyone care to estimate the casualties?

The old cliché runs that generals are forever fighting the last war. One irony is that those who don’t much care for generals do the same. So the question of intervention in Libya is coloured, stained, with the memory of Iraq. It doesn’t matter that the parallels are less than exact. It also doesn’t matter that the differences are better than significant. Iraq stripped the ethical pretensions of America and Britain to nothing. Mendacity, illegality, imperialism, barbarism, murder and greed; and they said that was “for the sake of democracy”.

The legacy is an entirely healthy aversion to the smallest hint of a repetition. It has penetrated, in some cases, to the corridors of power: few want to be stuck with a Bush-Blair reputation. Besides, Libya’s oilfields are too obvious as a recurring motif in the old story. Add further: what we call, in our ignorance, “the Arab world” is watching closely. Large parts of its population persist in believing that democracy has something to do with self-determination. In this, the west’s record speaks for itself.

Still, Libya is not, in fact, Iraq, despite the fondest hopes of those American conservatives attempting to cast the struggle against Gaddafi as a parable of what the war on Saddam should (they imagine) have been. The Libyan people, despite the usual admixture of opportunists and turncoats, have decreed the difference. And those people are in a bit of trouble.

Gaddafi has the firepower. He has a habit, too, of killing wholesale those who oppose him. The Colonel has few inhibitions, but a bit of airpower and some well-trained – British trained, in some cases – fighters. If he launches his civil war – what else would he have in mind? – he will make it bloody, and account that a lesson taught. If he is unhindered, there is a very good chance he will win.

The problem with discarding the Responsibility to Protect is the alternative. There isn’t one. We do nothing. We observe the slaughter while Gaddafi crushes an outmatched rebellion and console ourselves that another Iraq has been avoided.

The task, it seems to me, is to limit intervention to its minimum. As I suggested yesterday, a no-fly zone of the sort that seemed to captivate David Cameron at the start of the week would be a catastrophe. The sight of American jets shooting down Arab pilots would inflame all shades of opinion in North Africa and the Middle East. Western “advice” – contacts are already being made in Benghazi, they say – would also lead to endless trouble. In that regard, we should indeed stay out of it.

But equipping the anti-Gaddafi forces? If the alternative is to allow the Colonel to stage even one last speciality massacre, I fail to see why not. You might invoke Iraq as an argument against, and you might be right. I could as well recall the Spanish Civil War, another inexact parallel, and remind you what was wrought by that example of “non-intervention”.

But if we intend to forget our Responsibility to Protect, we had better just say so. There might be poor sods out there who were stupid enough to have taken us at our word.

Gaddafi: Lost Plots & Loose Cannons

2011-03-01T17:37:00.000Z

An edited version of this piece appears in The Herald on March 2.

So we’re agreed: Muammar Gaddafi is mad, bad and dangerous. After 41 years, this hardly counts as a discovery, even if the baroque extravagance of his delusions – drugs in the Nescafe, al Qaeda under the bed, Tony Blair on the phone – could keep analysts busy for a long while. The Colonel is detached from reality, and reality is the worse for it.

Watching his performance in that BBC/ABC interview, it was hard not to imagine Gaddafi’s advisers off-camera, heads in hands, groaning “Oh no, he’s off again” as the boss rhapsodised on the people’s deep, undying love for their giggling gaoler. The stooges and handlers must be used to it by now.

All that remained was to wonder, idly, if someone in the retinue – the family, perhaps? – has decided to keep the facts from the dictator-with-no-title. One thing was nevertheless obvious: unless this was Academy Award-quality acting for some fantastically obscure purpose, Gaddafi has popped out of the real world like a cork from a bottle of fizz.

Dictators are like that. In fact, it’s slightly surprising that their own-brand megalomania is not yet a distinct field of study for psychologists. Many people go mad; many of those suffer delusions of omnipotence. But the man – invariably the man – who spends decades watching the world respond obediently to every weird wish that strays across his brain is in a category (almost literally) of his own. He has reason to be mad.

So it has been with Gaddafi for four decades. Why wouldn’t he believe that his patented revolution, colour-coded in that nice shade of green, is the hope and dream of his people? Don’t they always cheer whenever he opens his mouth? Don’t they sing songs in his honour? Don’t they sit smiling through those three, four and five hour speeches? Doesn’t the wider world treat him with utmost seriousness?

The point of the Potemkin village was to fool the ruler, remember, not the poor bloody peasants grovelling at the road-side. The Colonel has been a resident of Gaddafi Land for a very long time.

But surely, you think, he must once have known better? Even the best-armoured belief system would have to accommodate the facts of oppression, dissent, torture and massacre. He couldn’t have mistaken all those victims for fans. Surely to call him mad begins to sound, in a weird way, like a kind of excuse. Madness itself trumps that argument: he believed what he needed to believe. All was for the best in the best of all possible revolutions. Clearly, he clings to that nonsense now.

Which is a problem. All the talk of international “pressure” on a tottering regime presumes a rational process of cause and effect. In that world, governments issue their threats and demands on behalf of the Libyan people. Gaddafi thinks it over, decides his cause is hopeless, and calls off the dogs while he tries to cut a deal. If his mental universe has acquired rubber walls, however, there can be no discussion. What then?

There’s a choice: leave it to the Libyan people, or intervene to whatever degree is possible or sensible. Neither option is ideal; both might even be impossible. The former is hazardous simply because the revolution, according to scattered reports, has an abundance of moral purpose and a paucity of useful military hardware. There has been no triumphant march on Tripoli for a very good reason: no one walks into a bloodbath.

The problems with the second option are a reminder of how quickly people forget. The west, as it styles itself, ought to know by now to tread carefully when seized by high moral purpose, especially around Arab countries. Even when the cause is decent – and we’ll see about that – consequences are impossible to predict. Bluntly, if no lessons have been learned from Iraq, so much the worse.

There is a simple, underlying truth to this. Thanks to “liberal interventionism” in Iraq, thanks to Palestine, thanks to Lebanon, thanks to decades of tawdry deals with filthy dictators, the US and Britain are neither trusted nor (to say the least) popular in Arab countries. You can dispute the reasons, but it is a fact of life.

There is even a case for saying that the best way to help the Libyan resistance now is by not helping. After all, nothing would be better calculated to encourage a Gaddafi remnant to manufacture an insurgency against a new, vulnerable government than the belief that the west was again acquiring clients, and doing so from sheer self-interest.

It doesn’t mean that we should, in the parlance, stand idly by. Too many have died; too many more could yet die. A no-fly zone seems unlikely, for practical and political reasons, but equipping the rebellion is perfectly reasonable, and certainly feasible. As a task, it is more urgent than any number of UN resolutions designed to prise Gaddafi from his fantasies. I can see plenty of moral reasons, and few objections if the Colonel remains immune to argument

Too many people have been too quick to assume that somehow the battle has been won just because the Libyan people have raised their voices. It’s a nice thought, but Libya, self-evidently, is not Tunisia or Egypt. Tripoli’s deluded demagogue does not quail at the popular will: that’s why he’s deluded. But hope and experience are odds here.

Gaddafi’s regime is crumbling, but it survives. His ability to listen to reason, such as it was, has disappeared. He insists that he will not quit or run, but his opponents lack the means – an air force in particular – to force the issue. He has survived a wave of defections. His sons do not seem inclined towards patricide, symbolic or actual. And through his mouthpieces, over and over, he threatens civil war.

A few of his Russian Migs still fly. He has helicopter gunships. A no-fly zone would neutralise these, but Washington hesitates and London lacks the means. In any case, the symbolism of American jets shooting down Libyan fighters is in no one’s interest. Western politicians may grow indignant on democracy’s behalf, but many in the Arab world and beyond wonder what matters most: a downtrodden people or a massive investment at stake in oilfields crucial to Europe.

The fact remains that Gaddafi’s last stand could still be a nasty and protracted affair. David Cameron, sounding for all the world like Blair in his martial pomp, says that it would “intolerable” to allow the Colonel to wage war on the Libyan people. The Prime Minister adds, improbably, that “We do not in any way rule out of the use of military assets”. But he does not say – he cannot say – what that means.

Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, also states that “All options are on the table” while thumping that very article of furniture. US warships are making their stately way to the Libyan coast. To do what? Even if the Pentagon has “contingency plans”, UN agreement would (this time, surely) have to be sought. Russia and China, no fans of the popular will, might have certain reservations. Turkey, for one, has already ruled out Nato involvement.

You could call this paralysis, and another failure of the international community. Better that than another western military adventure in which all concerned choose to forget about possible aftermaths. Instead, it makes sense to equip the anti-Gaddafi forces if – and only if – Washington and London can resist the temptation to “influence” the slowly-emerging Libyan leadership. The people fighting the Colonel don’t need, and don’t want, those sort of favours. They’re wise.

But anything else? Last week, Cameron was struggling even to organise the rescue of a few hundred oil workers. The idea that he might now send in the Marines to ride to the rescue of the Libyan people is designed for our consumption. And to reassure certain fretful oil companies.

Since the subject is delusions, we should not be deluded about that: the game now afoot, noble talk and all, is to ensure that whoever succeeds Gaddafi will go on doing business. After all, to paraphrase: the business of democracy is business. But which comes first?

Lockerbie, Guilt & Gaddafi

2011-02-28T12:20:00.004Z

Mustafa Abdel-Jalil is quick on his feet, if nothing else. From senior functionary in a despised and brutish regime to freedom-loving “head of the provisional government” in under a fortnight is smart work indeed.

It is reassuring, too, that Gaddafi’s former justice minister has been “chosen”, in the Scotsman’s words, “to head new regime”. Alternatively – the Sky News version – Abdel-Jalil has been “elected... president of Libya’s newly-formed National Council”.

As it turns out, the born-again democrat appears to have done all the electing and choosing himself, backed by the overwhelming support of persons named Abdel-Jalil.

On Friday, Al-Jazeera TV reported that talks were taking place between “personalities from eastern and western Libya” with a view to forming an interim government. On Saturday, Abdel-Jalil was said to be “leading the process”. Late that same night, he was declaring – a turn-up for the books – that he would be heading said government.

As the Associated Press put it: “His announcement seemed to provide exactly the kind of emerging opposition leadership that many both inside and outside Libya are looking for”.

The agency went on to report, however, that the resistible rise of Abdel-Jalil had not been acclaimed universally. On Sunday, Abdel-Hafidh Ghoga, a noted human rights lawyer just released from jail, held a news conference in Benghazi to explain that no “provisional government” exists. The Libyan Youth Movement meanwhile tweeted: “... any talk of a ‘Libyan’ government on hold until Tripoli liberated”.

AP elaborated: “In the corridors of the Benghazi courthouse, where much of the business of governing the rebel territories is unfolding, the former justice minister’s announcement of a provisional government was greeted by many politicians with surprise and bafflement. Ghoga told reporters that even if there were a provisional government, it would certainly not be headed by Abdel-Jalil”.

Atif al-Hasiya, a spokesperson for the “National Libyan Council” (also newly-formed) in Benghazi, further observed that Abdel-Jalil contacted officials in some towns and cities before he made his announcement, but ignored others, causing “bitter feelings”. The former minister had also met with opposition (my italics) from many veteran human rights activists as someone who was, for a time, closely associated with the regime.

Al-Hasiya was another quick to state that if a provisional government was indeed formed it would not be led by Abdel-Jalil. The rebuffed former minister has since “clarified” his claims as mere “personal views”.

But such is revolution. For some, it’s a struggle and a sacrifice. For scurrying types disembarking from sinking ships, it’s an opportunity. Clearly, our friend Abdel-Jalil was engaged in a shameless grab for power, and hoping to exploit the eager media to manufacture his fait accompli.

“Closely associated with the regime” is not a description liable to bear much scrutiny in the weeks to come, after all. It might require some fast talking. Abdel-Jalil – doubtless about to the “overthrown” in a newspaper near you – has the knack.

Over the weekend, for example, he felt able to tell reporters that “Gaddafi alone bore responsibility for the crimes that have occurred” in Libya. What might that mean? That no one else – a former justice minister, for example – should be held accountable? That anyone and everyone who served the regime “only followed orders”? First he claims a government, now he demands amnesty.

The point is, of course, that a person prepared to say anything to save his neck or to win power is probably not the most reliable witness ever born. That Abdel-Jalil is granted credibility is bad enough. That he is taken at his word, no questions asked, even when his claims are flimsy or fatuous is very much worse. This, after all, is the man who has been touting “the truth about Lockerbie”. And finding a global audience.

He calculates, no doubt, that his access to the world’s media will bolster his status in a post-Gaddafi Libya. Name recognition, they call it. But to pull off that trick, Abdel-Jalil must first tell the western press what the western press wants to hear, and bet – a safe enough bet – that reporters will not think beyond the headlines. Over the weekend, he made excellent use of his brief spell as Mr President.

So here’s Murdoch’s Sunday Times, a paper to which the phrase “once great” attaches itself like a faded obituary. “Gaddafi ordered the Lockerbie bombing” was done and dusted by the weekend. A new line was required. Any ideas?

The Lockerbie bomber blackmailed Colonel Gaddafi into securing his release from a Scottish prison by threatening to expose the dictator’s role in Britain’s worst terrorist atrocity, a former senior Libyan official [guess who] has claimed.

Now, let’s keep this simple. Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was handed over to Scottish police on April 5, 1999, and released on compassionate grounds on August 20, 2009. Clearly, this was the most patient blackmailer the world has seen. If we believe a word, the man nursed his threat to exact “revenge” for over a decade, until terminal cancer intervened. As you do.

According to Abdel-Jalil and the Sunday Times, nevertheless, “Megrahi’s ploy led to a £50,000-a-month slush fund being set up to spend on legal fees and lobbying to bring him back to Tripoli”. Since the entire Libyan exchequer was Gaddafi’s personal slush fund, the sum seems niggardly. If vastly more was not spent on the case, I’d be astonished. And why wouldn’t it be spent? Wasn't Megrahi threatening to “spill the beans”?

But here Abdel-Jalil pulls out another of his plums. Again, he provides nothing resembling the whiff of proof. Al-Megrahi “was not the man who carried out the planning and execution of the bombing, but he was ‘nevertheless involved in facilitating things for those who did’”.

So where does that leave us? Megrahi – what with “planning and execution” omitted – didn’t do it. Another sensation. Or is that revelation perhaps designed to solve several tiny issues raised by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) and others over a miscarriage of justice and sundry associated issues?

Never fear: Gaddafi certainly did do it. That’s “on the record”, placed there by the erstwhile “head of the provisional government”, no less. So what then of “planning and execution”; what of “those who did”? Yet again, Abdel-Jalil doesn’t say. Why not?

Smoke and mirrors is a cliché, God knows. You only wish they would polish the mirrors occasionally, and puff up some properly thick smoke. But why bother? It works. First: make sure that “everyone knows” Gaddafi did it. Secondly, as though inferentially, throw in a few details based on a “fact” established by hearsay and mere assertion. This is how you build a lie.

What happened – what is established by the evidence as having happened – matters less than perception and belief. Gaddafi, with his multifarious actual crimes, is now the handiest scapegoat imaginable. Perhaps he should complain to Tony Blair.

Or perhaps he should get himself to the Hague, and to a proper court. It would do the dictator no good, but it might do wonders, even now, for the reputation of Scottish justice. I put the chances of that at zero.

Postscript. Having caught up with sundry other press reports, I see that Atef Abu Bakr, formerly a “general” with Abu Nidal’s murderous “Fatah Revolutionary Council”, has decided to join in the fun. He too “breaks his silence” to the Arabic paper Al Hayat. It is, as they say, a riveting read.

“I can assure you categorically that the two processes [making the bomb and destroying the plane] were the outcome of a partnership between the Abu Nidal group and the security of the Libyan Jamahiriya,” says Bakr.

This would be fascinating had the same individual not said precisely the same thing before, in August of 2002, in a previous interview published in Al Hayat. On that occasion he reported Nidal as confessing all just before his death.

As the Guardian had it at the time: “Nidal had said: ‘I will tell you something very important and serious. The reports which link the Lockerbie act to others are false reports. We are behind what happened.’ According to Bakr, Nidal then threatened anyone who leaked what he said with death.”

The revelation had no effect in 2002, but with open season having been declared on Gaddafi we are granted an encore. Bakr’s actual contribution now, as paraphrased by the Scotsman, is to observe that Megrahi “may have played only a minor part” in the bombing.

That, so I had presumed, was the point all along, at least as it affected the conduct of Scottish justice. As for the rest – and one hates to be tiresome – there remains the matter of proof. Bakr is not claiming that he planted the bomb himself, after all.

Assange: Leaking Credibility

2011-02-27T01:34:00.004Z

A condensed version of this article appears in The Sunday Herald this morning.

Are they out to get Julian Assange? You bet. Would they smear an innocent man to achieve their ends? I should think so. Should the WikiLeaks founder therefore resist by every means possible the attempt to extradite him to Sweden to answer allegations of rape and sexual assault? Not if he’s got any sense.

One thing at a time. The WikiLeaks revelations, from war logs to diplomatic cables, have upset a great many important people, most of them Americans. This is not because – in no particular order – the material was false, its disclosure got anyone killed, or because the public had no right to know. Assange and his organisation committed a two-fold crime: they showed what whistle-blowing can mean in the modern world, and they knocked a large hole in the culture of secrecy. In some quarters, these offences are accounted heinous.

Official US opinion holds, then, that Assange is a spy, or no better than a spy. Certain of the zanier American politicians have therefore concluded that the Australian should be locked up for a very long time or, for preference, executed. But they can’t lay hands on him, as yet. Nor, as yet, can they frame a charge that defines journalism as espionage within the terms of the US constitution. The motive to ensnare Assange within someone’s jurisdiction meantime is therefore strong.

The means need not matter. After Iraq, WMD, the latest Lockerbie dossier, or – to bring matters closer to home – the welter of tales in the so-called Cablegate files released by WikiLeaks, it’s obvious that fastidiousness is no virtue in certain government circles. In extremis, any tale will do. A nasty tale, one liable to discredit Assange in the public mind, will do better. Since when does a rapist achieve the moral high ground?

Last week, two narratives collided. In the first, a conspiracy against the WikiLeaks founder came a step closer to fruition. Despite furious resistance from a high-powered defence team, the chief magistrate at Belmarsh court in south-east London, one Howard Riddle, decided that Assange should be returned to Sweden to face the allegations of two women. Afterwards, the Australian said America’s ends were being served.

In the other tale, a man who insists he has nothing to hide was simply being obliged to prove as much. He was not being packed off to some Third World hell-hole, either, but to Sweden, a country in which he once wanted to reside, so greatly did he admire its freedoms and its institutions. Now he says he stands no chance of a fair trial in such a place.

In fact, as his detractors have begun to note, Assange has availed himself of a curious logic. It goes like this: if there is truly a conspiracy against him, he cannot hope for a fair trial in any western court. Therefore, it follows that he should not be tried for anything, anywhere. He has awarded himself immunity from all doubt. Or should he nominate his own judge and jury?

That’s the crux of the problem. Assange’s counsel, the eminent Geoffrey Robertson QC, defined it repeatedly, no doubt inadvertently, at Belmarsh: no chance of a fair trial in Sweden, but every chance of extradition from Sweden to the US, where there is no chance of a fair trial. So – says the lay person – no reason to deal with three allegations of sexual assault and one of rape beyond offering to answer a few questions in London? Who else gets such privileges?

But let’s say – for it is certainly true – that something fishy has been going on. The selective leaking of witness statements by the Swedish police to the Guardian (Assange’s now-estranged former ally) was beyond dodgy. The strong suggestion of collusion between the Australian’s accusers was at least alarming. Sweden’s use of a European arrest warrant against a man previously given permission to leave that country was arguably sinister. And what was Sweden’s Prime Minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, playing at exactly when he chose to “defend” his country’s court system by attacking the Assange legal team?

You could go on. There will be an appeal against Riddle’s ruling of course. If that fails, the fight against extradition will doubtless go all the way to the European Court of Human Rights. Then someone might get to ask a crucial question: how can Assange be extradited when he has not been charged with anything, least of all in Sweden? Is that a proper use of the European warrant, or any warrant?

A good question deserves a better one: why doesn’t Assange just get on with it? Throw away the Stig Larsson plots. If there was the slightest chance of an unfair trial in Sweden before, there is no chance now. The scrutiny of proceedings would be, will be, minute. The idea of a trial “behind closed doors” may appal Robertson – a half-truth: the evidence is private, the proceedings public – but it is normal in Sweden in such cases. As for other risks, what might those amount to?

Assange’s team have claimed that extradition to Sweden could lead to their client facing the death penalty in the US. They have heard the ravings of American right-wingers. They know a grand jury has been prepared. They know, above all, that there is an urge to make an example of their man. All this is stressed, but certain details are forgotten.

First, the Swedes cannot just “forward” the subject of a British hearing without British permission. Secondly, the European Court would not sanction the despatch of a prisoner to face the chance of execution, or any sort of punishment definable as cruel and unusual. Thirdly, above all, the chances of the US Department of Justice securing a warrant are remote. The reason is simple: under America’s own laws, they can’t find a charge.

This is, ironically enough, the biggest hole in Assange’s case. The US enshrines the rights of journalists and the protection of sources. Simply receiving information – any sort of information, even a quarter of a million government files – is no crime. Nor is the publication of that information. In order to nail Assange, the justice department has to connect him to Private Bradley Manning, currently the subject of brutal treatment at a US Marine base, in a conspiracy to commit espionage.

Manning copied all those files, or so it is alleged: scandalously, he too awaits charges. But can the Americans link one man to the other? Can they show that Assange induced the soldier to copy (steal) the documents? They cannot, and they have spent months trying. On what grounds, then, would the Swedes pack the Australian off to the States? Because they felt like doing Washington a favour? In this case, of all cases, those games are no longer possible.

Writing for the Guardian on Friday, Assange’s solicitor, Mark Stephens, assembled his client’s defence. This: Sweden doesn’t do fair trials. That, in effect, was it. There was no mention of a larger conspiracy, simply the argument – a very old one – that the broad European tradition of the investigating magistrate is inimical to open justice in the English style. Stephens wrote as though this was a shocking new development.

He attacked the European arrest warrant, with very good reason, for allowing countries “to pluck their suspects from the UK so long as they tick the right box on the EAW form”. He damned a Swedish “human rights black spot in relation to solitary confinement, the lack of a money-bail system and ill-treatment of foreigners in the very prison for which Assange may be destined...” But the fundamental argument, old as the hills, was pathetically simple: the Europeans don’t do trials in a properly English way.

Perhaps not, but most Europeans seem not to mind. Besides, isn’t there also a notion that an individual should face the law in the jurisdiction where his offences are alleged to have taken place? What would Stephens say if roles were reversed, if Sweden refused to return one of its nationals to face trial for a rape supposedly committed in London, and all because open courts – not always so open – are in no one’s interest in such cases?

The tradition that justice must be seen to be done is a fine one, no doubt, but so is the idea that countries should co-operate to uphold the rule of law. To read Stephens, however, you are left with a single conclusion: few if any European countries could offer the standard of justice Assange thinks he deserves. Is that even plausible? They may be out to get him, but if this is the conspiracy it began centuries before Julian Assange was born. His legal team are doing him no service by failing to point out the fact.

But so what? If Assange believes there is a risk where there is none, that’s his affair. Nor, unlike some of his supporters, do I know “the truth” of the allegations against him. Michael Moore, to name one, can call rape accusations “hoo ha” if he likes: not me. The facts are known to three people. But I know this much: the sight of Assange fighting so furiously to avoid the chance to clear his name, and in Sweden of all places, is beginning to do the WikiLeaks idea terrible harm.

An impression is beginning to form: Assange is clutching at any straw available just to avoid facing his accusers. Perhaps that’s unfair. Perhaps he is paranoid, but with every right to be paranoid. Or perhaps his reasons are less noble than his image requires. To repeat: I don’t know.

It strikes me, though, that too many of Assange’s supporters (not to mention his detractors) seem incapable of holding two ideas simultaneously. Put it this way: it’s not unknown for flawed (and worse) individuals to do great things. And in the case of WikiLeaks, the great idea is vastly more important than the man. If Assange continues on his present course, if he continues to allow the impression to grow that he is evading serious accusations, fickle public opinion will soon dismiss man and idea alike.

It looks bad; it sounds bad. To read Stephens quibbling over Swedish definitions of rape is dispiriting, to put it no higher. To see him write as though the laws of a Scandinavian democracy are no better than a tinpot despot’s whims is unnerving. Is this really the best they’ve got? Does Assange really stoop to this? And is his great, cherished WikiLeaks idea worth so little?

The Americans have no grounds for extradition. So will the Swedes really try to fit Assange up, after all this? If he is valiant for truth, he should help us to find out. If not, all that remains is the spectacle of a man refusing to recognise anyone’s court.

Lockerbie: Scoundrel Time

2011-02-26T02:17:00.002Z

“There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world,

and the worst of it is that half of them are true.”

Churchill.

Expressen’s Kassem Hamade has been filing non-stop from Libya since he found his way into the country. You can hardly blame him. It’s not often a journalist winds up in the middle of a revolution, with a historic tale unfolding wherever he happens to look. Hamade files like a man in a hurry.

His Swedish newspaper is one of Europe’s more lurid tabloids, which is, of course, saying something. At a glance, it seems to publish just about anything its war correspondent elects to send. Whether it then asks many questions is another matter. You don’t dick around, as the Swedes may or may not say, with world exclusives. Print first, worry later.

Hamade is either a very good journalist, or a very bad one. Which is to say that either he has an instinct for a tale, or more luck than is strictly credible. This week, in any case, Expressen’s man found himself outside “a local parliament building” in an unnamed Libyan town, just as someone important was being greeted by several hundred locals.

Given that it appears the gent in the “dark winter suit” and burgundy hat had only decided to switch sides and “join the people” on February 19, Hamade was luckier than usual. Here he was with a “40-minute interview” (readable in less than ten) with a top-level defector no more than three days after the event. This was smart work, on someone’s part.

Even better, the new-born patriot had the sound-bite of the year, perhaps of the decade: Gaddafi ordered the Lockerbie bombing. How about that?

Given that Mustafa Abdel-Jalil’s words reach us from Arabic via Swedish via (Googleised) English, we should probably exercise a little caution. This would set us apart from just about every newspaper, Scottish titles included, and web-site in the world, who excelled themselves if they remembered the word “claim”, and who otherwise didn’t give a toss. Gaddafi’s “justice minister” had spoken: gossip was proof.

Did any journalist, Hamade included, know anything at all about the erstwhile “Secretary of the General People’s Committee for Justice”, lately of Tripoli’s al-Salad Street, former recipient of numerous file-and-forget Amnesty petitions, nominal steward of an arbitrary system of murder, torture, kidnapping, and “disappearance”? Thought not.

Did anyone know how close – or not – this individual had ever been to Gaddafi, particularly in December of 1988? A mere detail.

Did anyone pause to wonder why Abdel-Jalil’s revulsion at a massacre – the first he had ever heard of in Libya? – had coincided neatly with the regime’s collapse? Did they ask what he might have to gain, or to lose? But that sort of talk can seriously damage a world exclusive.

Hamade appears not to have allowed such words to enter his head. He did at least ask whether Abdel-Jalil possesses such a thing as proof, however, but was reassured by the functionary’s claim to have “information that is 100% sure” and “nothing I think... 100%.”

As the week wore on, this turned out to be the evidence heard around the world. It was enough, as any glance at the web will show, for almost every media outlet on the planet to go on. For most, the exciting follow-up was Abdel-Jalil’s loyal promise that “the devil” (Gaddafi) will “die like Hitler”, rather than a simple, sceptical question or two.

A pity. Had anyone read on, they would have found that Hamade did in fact get a little more change from his 40-minute investment. Why couldn’t his subject – who seemed to have returned to the business of governing in short order – just spill the beans?

Answer: “It is not time to reveal everything now”. Why not? Second answer: “I do not want to reveal the names involved, for the sake of the country”.

Aside from the fact that numerous individuals around the world involved with the Lockerbie case could – and have – allowed themselves the same excuse, this was interesting. Many of Gaddafi’s once stalwart ministers and diplomats have hit the rat runs; Abdel-Jalil is no different. But he seals his discretion in an odd fashion.

So he names Gaddafi as a mass murderer: that will suit Washington and London. It won’t upset Edinburgh much, either. Another slaughter to add to a lunatic’s charge sheet, and to bury therein. If the lunatic winds up dead “like Hitler”, so much the better. But Abdel-Jalil seems to be extending his insurance cover: having named a name, he retains “names”, and all “for the sake of the country”.

Things took another turn on Friday night. With his usual taste for self-dramatisation, the BBC’s John Simpson secured an interview in the vicinity of Benghazi with an escapee from the crumbling regime more significant than Abdel-Jalil. Until the end of last week, General Abdel Fattah Younes al-Abidi was Gaddafi’s trusted Interior Minister. He has also known the Colonel for 47 years.

Here was still another Libyan big shot who suddenly found himself unable to stomach the day job. In his own account, al-Abidi was sent to Benghazi to crush the demonstrations there. When he decided to break the habit of a lifetime – or simply failed in the task – he pleaded with Gaddafi, he claims, not to bomb the protesters, and suffered an assassination attempt for his trouble.

So the general also felt the urge to “join the people”. He was also able to confirm that his former friend and leader will commit suicide or be killed. And the general also felt able to say for certain that Gaddafi had ordered the Lockerbie bombing.

Except he did nothing of the sort. Simpson, like Hamade, was content, oddly in this case, just to hear a lapsed member of the regime pin the blame for mass murder on his old boss. Nothing in the way of proof was sought. All that al-Abidi told the BBC’s correspondent was, “There is no doubt about it. Nothing happens without Gaddafi’s agreement. I’m sure this was a national, governmental decision.” What a coincidence: two superannuated thugs with the same gambit.

Writing on the BBC’s web-site, Simpson prefaced the general’s quote with the following: “Although he was a military man rather than a politician at the time of the Lockerbie bombing in the 1980s, he [al-Abidi] maintains that Col Gaddafi was personally responsible for the decision to blow up the Pan Am flight”.

There is no argument here for argument’s sake: if Gaddafi did it, he did it. But thus far we are being asked to accept – as the world is being asked to accept – the testimony of two men (no doubt there will be more) with skins to save and plenty of questions of their own still to answer. Yet even as they “confirm” they evade.

Perhaps I’m old-fashioned, but persuasive testimony runs from remarks such as “It was common knowledge in the regime” to “I was there when he gave the order” to “This is how it was done”. The general was latterly Interior Minister, in Simpson’s words “one of the most powerful men in Libya”. Yet the best he can manage is “I’m sure this was a national, governmental decision”? What else would it be?

Stories and alibis are being assembled. Were you in the shoes of al-Abidi or Abdel-Jalil, bartering for your life and manoeuvring for a place in whatever power structure emerges when Gaddafi has gone, you would probably do the same. There’s no surprise in that.

My interest lies in how these off-handed confirmations, glib yet vague, connect with the Scottish justice system, the activities of successive British governments, and the statement of reasons – all 800-plus pages of it – produced by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission in June of 2007 identifying “six grounds where (the Commission) believes that a miscarriage of justice may have occurred” in the case of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, “the Lockerbie Bomber”.

The short answer is that they do not, on the face of it, connect. Yet if there is somehow a connection the demand for explanations from the Scottish, British and American political and legal establishment is liable to become more, rather than less, intense. I’m betting we never reach that point. Our two new “witnesses” thus far resemble nothing more than a pair of concentration camp guards who know the game is up, and who rack their brains for tales to tell.

These two emerge from the fog of war with hands full of mist. Here in Scotland, meanwhile, that statement of reasons is locked still in a hall of legal mirrors, along with a Scottish government’s courage to insist on its legal right to inquire into the bombing. Which is worse?

In less than a week, a few evasive remarks by two tainted, desperate men have become common currency around the world, disseminated happily by those who know nothing, and gratefully by those who know better. Meanwhile, the evidence of crucial choices touching at the heart of justice lie buried from sight. Every party of government available to Scotland – Tory, Labour, and Nationalist – has been content to settle for that. Is it the questions they fear, or the answers? That could be settled easily enough.

Instead, we are asked to swallow the pronouncements of two individuals who worked hand in bloody glove with Gaddafi.

(For better or worse, time passes. A generation for whom Lockerbie is history have grown up, in journalism as elsewhere. To anyone who needs to know more, I once again commend Robert Black’s lockerbiecase.blogspot.com for the most comprehensive history of the affair. I just shout the odds, as and when I can. Professor Black commands every detail).

An Apology For A Coalition

2011-02-26T00:46:00.000Z

A version of this appears, slightly reduced, in this morning’s Herald.

Those Britons still stranded in Libya can take comfort: their Prime Minister is “extremely sorry”. David Cameron is about as sorry, in fact, as it is possible for a prime minister to be before the word abject springs to mind. His compatriots, poor sods, are just sorry they’re not Dutch, German, Russian, French, or Chinese. And safely at home.

Cameron has had the air, though, of one who feels as though he’s the real victim of the Libyan crisis. You can just about see his point. Everything that could go wrong, short of HMS Cumberland springing a leak, has gone wrong. In the modern bureaucrat’s ineffable jargon, his government has failed in its “core function” – looking after its own people – at every turn.

Historians of the modern era never tire of trying to name the moment when Britain’s post-imperial decline became complete. For now, the Libyan debacle will do. First the shambles, then the excuses (“technical”), then the apologies. Cameron has apologised; William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, has apologised. Could it speak, the Foreign Office cat would be calling a press conference to offer a fishy story and an apology.

It’s not funny, but it is comical, like the remake of an old Boulting Brothers script. First, there’s Cameron Carlton-Browne, wanting only a plumed hat, trotting around the Gulf trying to sell arms while Gaddafi and his SAS-trained elite troops are killing Libyans. Then there’s some oik with a ticket marked “Press” in his hatband asking, “Who’s in charge at home, then?”

Up pops toothy Nick Clegg (played by Ian Carmichael, no doubt): “Yeah, I suppose I am. I forgot about that”. Once the deputy Prime Minister has been hauled back from Davos – from the family-owned chalet, naturally – the après-ski apologies resume. None of this is fiction; it just feels that way.

The word I’m hunting for here, much like the government, is competence. Since last May, Cameron and his coalition have basked in praise from those commentators and newspapers liable to share their philosophical inclinations. The Tory press, as it used to be called, has been kind. Scrutiny has been light.

Ministers have been admired for energy, radicalism, and a willingness to “confront the deficit”. They have been encouraged to promote the idea that Labour alone was the author of every economic problem. The solution – to load austerity’s price on the poor and the public realm – has been applauded. But no one has paused to ask a simple question: are they any good at it, then, this being-in-charge business?

Libya provides one big answer. The issues are complex, no doubt, and the challenges many. The fact remains that crisis management is the stuff of government. The best this government has managed has been a succession of apologies. Ironically enough, Cameron and his team are good at those. Rather than judge them by the success or failure of their policies, in fact, you could draw up a score sheet based entirely on the number of times ministers have said sorry.

They’re unstinting, as a rule, and imaginative. Trees, stranded oil workers, people of diminished stature, non-existent schools, the unemployed, soldiers sacked by e-mail: the list is long and colourful, the sorrow extravagant. As a rule of thumb, if you haven’t yet had an apology from the coalition, you should either be patient, or choose to live in Scotland, where blame has been devolved.

Caroline Spelman, the Environment Secretary, gave a choice example of the new ministerial art just last week. Most people could have told her that an attempt to flog off 258,000 hectares of public woodland would touch a raw nerve in Middle England. Yet only when half a million had signed a protest petition, and only when the likes of the Archbishop of Canterbury and Judi Dench had waded in, did Spelman glimpse the truth: she was alienating her kind of voter.

An apology best described as grovelling – “One of the things we teach our children to do is say sorry” – followed. Yet this merely echoed little Michael Gove, England’s Education Secretary, who apologised blushingly to the Commons for telling certain schools that their cherished building projects were safe when the opposite was true.

It echoed Liam Fox, Defence Secretary, who did penance for the sacking by e-mail of 38 soldiers, Afghanistan veterans among them. It echoed Lord Young, the superannuated Tory business guru, who made his apologies and left after suggesting that most people “have never had it so good since this recession – this so-called recession – started”.

You might almost say that Spelman echoed Simon Burns, a junior health minister, who last summer apologised to people of restricted growth after describing the Speaker, the diminutive John Bercow, as a dwarf.

All governments make mistakes. Coalition governments, it seems, make apologies. Cameron is of the political PR type who believe that an apology is as good as an answer, that the simple act of saying sorry is a solution. Perhaps he should communicate the idea to George Osborne, his Chancellor, if the UK economy continues to shrink by 0.6% a quarter, or to Andrew Lansley, his Health Secretary, if the TUC turns out to be right and 53,000 lost English NHS jobs are just the iceberg’s tip.

Those would count, however, as apologies to end them all, certainly to end hopes of re-election. Some acts of contrition are, especially for the likes of Osborne, unthinkable. But this tends to render all the other apologies cheap, as though they don’t matter much, as though they are an inconvenience before we all “move on”. If that’s Cameron’s thinking, he should be careful. There is such a thing as a cumulative effect.

One obvious effect is to leave the impression that ministers just aren’t much good at their jobs. Hague can’t be held directly responsible for the botched Libyan rescues, but he can be held accountable for the failures of his department. Fox can’t be blamed personally for the budget cuts that are reducing the humanitarian reach of the military, but he can be indicted for supporting Osborne’s economic policies and failing to see the consequences. Sometimes, in any case, sorry isn’t good enough.

That’s the secondary effect. Governments that are never done apologising resemble the wilful child who thinks “Sorry” is enough of a response to another smashed ornament. “It just broke” doesn’t amount to a full explanation, however, of the failings of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office when hundreds of passport holders are stuck in the middle of a bloody civil war.

Competence is not an ideological matter. As Spelman’s tree-hugging apology showed, something is amiss when a Tory-led government can’t even manage a privatisation exercise. Lansley’s NHS reforms for England have been attended by warnings of disaster from every shade of expert opinion, and yet – how ominous can a fact become? – he refuses to listen. An apology, as the minister might find, is no panacea.

If, when, it transpires that Osborne has driven the economy into the wall, when it becomes inescapably obvious that the slaughter of public spending was precisely the wrong policy at precisely the wrong time, it will be too late to wonder about apologies. It will certainly be too late to ask how Dave and the chaps (male and female), those evangelists of efficiency, could be quite so inefficient. We will be simply left to wonder how all that terrifically expensive education, the stuff by which they set such store, could produce so much cackhandedness.

Libya will stand as a symbol, for now, for a government that flounders when the going ceases to be easy. Even Cameron’s latest, all-bulletins apology for the mess in North Africa could have been better managed. No doubt he misses Andy Coulson, the former Downing Street communications director forced to quit when someone hit “redial”, at long last, on the News of the World phone hacking scandal.

But remind me: which Prime Minister failed to see that spectacular accident waiting to happen? Cameron may be sorry, but too often he hasn’t a clue.

Lockerbie: Kicking The Woodwork

2011-02-24T09:33:00.001Z

The fact-checkers at the Sun were quick off the mark, as ever, this morning. No sooner had Mustafa Abdel-Jalil decided that his career as Libya’s “Justice Minister” was over – what was the clue, I wonder? – than the tabloid had its headline: “Gaddafi ordered the Lockerbie bombing”.

Sensational indeed, if proven. Sensational enough for a redtop, in fact, if even halfway plausible. Only the small matter of evidence – the stuff that fits the established facts – would remain to detain the attentive reader. Thus far, Abdel-Jalil has offered not a shred of that, to the Swedish newspaper Expressen, touting an exclusive, or to anyone else.

That has not prevented the Guardian from securing the responses of two of the American bereaved, both quick to say that the former minister was corroborating a truth long known, or clear “all along”, at least to them.

But not to others, not by the longest chalk. Abdel-Jalil claims, nevertheless, to have proof of his claim. What might that involve?

Gaddafi’s role in the US decision to pay $3 million to two Maltese for the sake of the wildly inconsistent identification evidence that helped convict Abdelbaset al-Megrahi? Libya’s sinister hand at work in the tainting of forensic evidence? Gaddafi’s ability to have a suitcase follow the strangest of journeys? The influence of his goons on the work of a Scottish court? And so on.

A great many people have claimed that “Gaddafi ordered the Lockerbie bombing”. They have their contending reasons. But what matters, all that matters, is the ability to demonstrate the actual connections between such a claim, a mass murder, and its consequences. Abdel-Jalil’s account should therefore be fascinating, for one reason above all.

Suspend judgement, if you can. Keep an open mind. Then consider: if this former minister is somehow telling the truth, things make even less sense than hitherto. In fact, no event subsequent to the destruction of Pan AM 103 makes any kind of sense at all.

For some, that’s neither here nor there. Murdo Fraser, deputy leader of the Scottish Tories, has already launched himself into the arena by stating that Abdel-Jalil’s claim is “disturbing but believable”. Others, equally averse to any contact with facts, will be quick enough to follow. Gaddafi’s impending fall is an opportunity too good to miss.

For my part, I’ve been expecting to hear the word “Lockerbie” since sitting through the Colonel’s entire mad peroration to “his” nation the other day. You could almost hear familiar cogs turn in the background. Didn’t he already pay up for 103? Wasn’t he a known backer of terrorism? Is he not palpably insane? And isn’t he even now murdering people en masse? Some call that a narrative.

But let’s not prejudge anything that Abdel-Jalil might have told Expressen in what was, reportedly, a taped conversation. Let’s only observe that the former minister might be in a spot of trouble, just at the moment, given the nature of his recently terminated career and his lapsed loyalties. When western intelligence comes to call, he will need something to sell. He will need a story they want to hear.

That being so, I’d make a small plea to the Libyan resistance. Should you lay hands on Gaddafi, resist temptation: don’t kill him. Pack him off to the Hague, instead, and allow an independent prosecutor to question him about Lockerbie. Send Mustafa Abdel-Jalil along, too. Even the Sun would spare a couple of column inches for that.

Gaddafi: Clowntime Is (Almost) Over

2011-02-22T19:06:00.000Z

Rogues are preferable to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.

Alexandre Dumas.

So now we know: all those countries in revolt in North Africa and the Middle East are different. It’s the new expert orthodoxy: Tunisia is not Egypt. There are, it turns out, hitherto unnoticed local conditions – different yokes for different folks – liable to explain why Gaddafi murders freely in Libya while Bahrain’s regime flinches at violence.

Handily, this new-found appreciation of nuance also helps to excuse the fact that the self-styled west hasn’t a clue about what is likely to happen next to its east. Until Tunisia went up, in fact, those paid to know – governments, analysts, media, spooks – had not the slightest sense that anything was even in the wind. One oppressed Arab looks much like another; only the reliability of the regime – a currency tied to the petro-dollar – matters much.

(I don’t excuse myself from that censure. Then again, I’m no Middle East specialist, nor a career Foreign Office Arabist. I offer only one tip. Perhaps in future we should measure the risk of a popular revolt by the quantity of riot control gear we’ve sold lately to the local despot?).

Still, the generalisation is not without merit. The tendency to sketch “a region”, or talk about “the Arab street”, explains nothing more than our prejudices. Reality is as disparate as you would expect from 300 million souls. A tinpot monarchy here; an institutionalised dictatorship there. Cosmetic democracy in one country; mad “personal rule” in another.

A semi-functioning civil society in this capital; nothing of the kind – less than nothing – in Tripoli, where the Gaddafi clan deploys the fear of bloody chaos itself as a weapon. Then throw in differences in religion, differences in national wealth, and sharply distinct relationships, for distinct reasons, with the western powers.

All true. But each of these facts is subordinate to a fundamental reality, the basis of the kinship between the various revolutionaries. It’s nothing new, or complicated. Everywhere the people face the same thing: corrupt elites with firepower. Each rising thus confronts a single question: will the rulers shoot, or blink?

We know Gaddafi’s answer. At the time of writing, he can still command his fighter planes (some at least) to fly and fire on his people. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak and his brood – though have we really seen the last of them? – had no such self-belief. Their army couldn’t be trusted. Gaddafi, insane but not stupid, tried to obviate the risk long ago with military purges. Now he adds insurance: a bit of oil wealth expended on mercenaries, Serbs and others, ready to kill anyone for money.

Libya’s leader – no mere president, by his account – shared his paranoia with his people this afternoon. In a grisly sort of way, it was hilarious, a performance for connoisseurs. After almost an hour, as though to teach them a real lesson, Gaddafi decided to read poetry at his audience. But the message, like the speaker’s departure from reality, was clear enough in the fog of imprecation, defiance, boastfulness and self-pity.

There is no popular uprising, Gaddafi said, just mere gangs of teenagers drugged and duped by foreigners. He would neither quit, because he “cannot”, nor run, but die if needs be – even the clichés were offensive – “as a martyr”. His vaunted “major reforms” meanwhile turned out to be a few more local committees. But his threat to “liberate and purify” tainted towns and cities was a call to his supporters to launch a civil war. I don’t speak Arabic, but I have a smattering of lunacy’s lingua franca. Violence by the people must end, or Gaddafi will unleash more violence. In the people’s name.

The performance prompted a conclusion you might call brutal: the Egyptian people were lucky. Many died thanks to “pro-government” thugs, and I do not mean to diminish their sacrifice. But Mubarak was not able to bring his rotten edifice down around his ears; Gaddafi, as always, has been different. He may yet be looking for a haven while he empties his treasury; he may equally be preparing for a megalomaniac’s last stand.

It’s a bit naive, therefore, to believe that if an oppressed people can only occupy some notable city square, freedom will follow. Whatever the differences, Tiananmen should have taught us that much. It should certainly have taught the governments of the west to avoid the sort of sound-bites being uttered today in Kuwait by David Cameron.

“History is sweeping” through “the region”? “Violence is never an answer” to “people hungry for political and economic freedom”? All that was missing was a proper Marxist reference to historical inevitability.

Cameron, to be slightly fair, ventured only as fair as “cautious optimism”. He also accepted – for now at least – that the traditional western preference for “stability” (plus oil) over democracy is no longer excusable. Equally, the PM GB was doubtless dropping a few gentle hints to his Kuwaiti hosts that discretion might be in order for a while. But even that gesture only served to expose the west’s contradictions, contradictions that are no secret, I think, to the common people of North Africa and the Middle East.

Here was a British leader, with half a dozen arms dealers in his entourage, talking about democracy. Meanwhile, Gerald Howarth, one of our defence ministers, was attending the big arms fair in Abu Dhabi, where British firms were as busy as ever. Cameron failed to see the problem in that. There’s nothing wrong with selling equipment to allies such as Kuwait, he said, who seek only to defend their borders.

Yesterday, several web-sites with an interest in these matters produced maps depicting the British effort in that regard. They left only two serious questions. To whom do we not sell weapons? Iran aside, no one: we even sell ammunition to Syria. So who isn’t a trusted ally, in Cameron’s terms? It depends on the size of the order, it seems. All the buying countries are very different, as those experts remind us, but when their people are facing riot squads and live rounds, they seem very much the same.

Cameron was making an exception for Kuwait, where peace appears to reign. This may have something to do with the fact that a year ago the Kuwaiti government deported 17 Egyptians, members of Mohamed ElBaradei’s National Association for Change, for attempting to organise local people in Kuwait. Cameron probably met members of that same association when he was in Cairo, congratulating sturdy democrats for their part in Egypt’s (unfinished) struggle.

So why is Kuwait “different”, and fit for the attentions of our salesmen? Simply because the Prime Minister was in town to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the first Gulf war (the mostly legal one) and the liberation of the country? But British troops died in that conflict, as I remember, in part to expel Saddam, in part because the ruling al Sabah family promised one of those transitions to democracy of which we currently hear so much.

The latest Emir of Kuwait, nominated by his family alone, is named al Sabah; he also commands the army, and controls the courts and legal system. Another al Sabah heads the “executive branch”. The Emir must be appointed by the toy 50-strong National Assembly, but the al Sabahs have frequently found reasons to dissolve that body. Kuwait prides itself on its free press, meanwhile, but any criticism – and they mean any – of the Emir is punishable by law.

All this after 20 years on the rocky road to representative government? Before Tunisia, before Egypt, no western government could be heard demanding speedier progress. Britain had fought, after all, as Cameron recalled, to “liberate” Kuwait, or at least to free the minority of its people allowed the franchise. Never mind: these days, its regime is an excellent customer. And its history sweeps along slowly indeed.

The old habits of mind and policy that allow the west its convenient contradictions also explain why the response to the democracy movement has been so utterly confused. They certainly explain why Europe and America have not the slightest idea what might follow in Libya if the people win through. Governments are a bit nervous about that. The fondness for stability re-emerges, one finds, when the price of Brent crude tops $106 a barrel.

All those different countries; a single desire for liberty, ready or not. All those different spots on the maps, flaring like sparks; and a single blank. From that quarter, real news has all but ceased. I wonder why. You would almost think that no western leader, preaching freedom and picking his next eastern clients, dares to mention Saudi Arabia.

Jobs: I Used To Care, But Things Have Changed...

2011-02-18T15:47:00.000Z

I just about got to the end of this, and thought “Just like old times”.

One part of my brain replied: “Dolt. Wasn’t that supposed to be your point?”

The less-attractive cranial stuff then said (more or less): “Yes and no, colleague. What feels like the re-run of a bad movie to you is life, new-minted, to these young people of whom we’re supposedly writing”.

Both parts of my mind thereafter agreed to differ.

What I don’t grasp, currently, is the absence of fury. The intermittent nostalgia in this piece is no doubt risible, but it tries to invoke a time when people were, actually and truly, angry.

One million young people (officially) whose future has been stolen? You wouldn’t want to lead the paper/the Six O’Clock on that, now, would you? That would be extreme...

I mention old times only because I haven’t written in this fashion for years. The fact alone may prove a point. If I finished a column in the 1980s with anything left in either barrel I accounted myself a lazy sod. They used to call it “ranting”. I called it rational. And somehow I lost the habit...

(Anyone who has ever watched Casablanca should probably change channels now...).

But read the piece, for what it’s worth. If anyone thereafter has an idea of why things that almost felled governments 30 years back produce barely a flicker of fake emotion today... I’m all ears.

The hereinafter should be in The Herald, by morning. I’ll then try to get back into this game with something – “original” would be stretching it – different tomorrow.

I got out of the 1970s by the skin of my teeth. Many could say the same. A few scrapes, a bit of cheek, a lot of luck: then you wake up to discover you’ve wound up in a so-called career, and are better off, much better off, than most. For the rest, everything goes to hell.

History says that hindsight is not entirely wrong. Some of us got on board just before the ladder was pulled up, and a generation was wiped out. They called that the 1980s. Before a low, dishonest decade had expired a little boy, unprompted, was asking his mum about that terrible woman on the TV. And one parent or other was trying to explain that it was a long story.

You didn’t quite expect the tale to be so repetitious, however. If it helps, I’ll take the rap on behalf of my generation. Most of the charges are true. We spent all the money; neglected the institutions; used all the credit; accepted the corruption of the common realm; allowed the wholesale theft they called privatisation; betrayed our unions; and failed to string up the person who called mass unemployment “a price worth paying”.

We allowed ourselves to believe that the daft cash for a mere house would foot every bill, forever. We were mad enough – and “mad” is not hyperbole – to talk ourselves into the idea that debt equals prosperity. The indictment would therefore call us stupid, or venal, or both, but the guilty verdict would stick. Whether in terms of the NHS, university tuition, the provision of pensions, lousy wars, or mere common decency, we sold out our children.

I don’t mean that you voted for any of it, necessarily. No more did I. You would struggle even now to find volunteers prepared to admit that they put a mark down for the present, crumbling coalition administration: what we call parliamentary democracy doesn’t work that way. But as David Cameron struggles to keep his band of guilt-stricken Libs and hungry Tories together, a little honesty doesn’t go amiss.

The generation that was so righteous, and right, over the asset-stripping of British industry, over the miners, and child poverty, and the moral crime of mass unemployment, just let it all happen again. Those of us who thought “Going Underground” was just the very tune for 1979, and for all the things we would never tolerate a second time, have let it all happen. Again.

But no, I stand corrected: this time, it’s worse. This time, it’s specific. Joblessness among the young, among those 18 to 24, has not been this bad – roll out another cliché – “since records began”. In the 1980s – I can even remember writing the review – it was UB40 and “One in Ten”. Now it’s one in five, and rising. Now there’s still another young Labour leader, knowing nothing of these things, talking about “a lost generation”.

Some of this, down in the depths of the think tanks, is technical. Young people are not being hired, in part, because older people – my generation – are hanging on to their jobs. I can’t find any numbers, so I hazard a guess: too many pensions have turned out to be uncongenial, or worth buttons, or a fraudster’s paradise.

This is the universe of the “black hole”, another cliché born in the 1980s. The “underfunded pension scheme” is a long-winded way of saying theft. But we children of the Thatcher years, of protest, demo, and those rusty “Right To Work” badges, accept it as just another fact of life. We accept it as true.

The fact, if fact it is, has entered the parlance of government. There is not a mainstream British politician who disputes the idea that in future we must all – politicians aside – work harder, and for longer. Fine by me, if that’s the choice. But if I and those like me are occupying the economic space until kingdom come, just to pay for our later years, what should be said to those million workless young people, and the millions behind them?

More technical stuff. How do you “prepare for growth”, in Cameron’s language, when you allow one million of your brightest, fittest, and best educated to stand idle? “Spare capacity” is a stupid piece of dogma at the best of times, but even within its own terms it decrees that Britain, thanks to coalition economics, is enduring a self-inflicted wound without precedent. If or when the economy recovers - I chose each of those words with hesitation – what shape will your “workforce” be in?

Germany has growth. German unemployment is falling (finally, and from a high level). In Germany, youth unemployment is not regarded as an act of God, but as a political failure, almost – for these are Germans – as a crime against the nation. In the German lands, conservative economics is not regarded as a force of nature, born from some weird natural selection, but as the product of rational argument. Kantian or Hegelian: discuss.

In Germany, such things are never just accepted. In Britain, it is as though we are watching some terrible old movie for the umpteenth time: Tories in, unemployment up. But even I know that right-on clichés of predation and fraud don’t explain everything. Are we now entering a truly post-industrial era, one in which all the old assurances have become forfeit?

No guaranteed job. No pension, no health care, no free education, no deposit on the little house: is this what we made for the children born when we were getting arrested because of Mandela and the miners? Is this the new reality, and the best we could manage?

That would be the neat column. I could write that: lots of demographic stuff, with a quote from an actuary and a wise remark from the minister-for-something. Personally, though, looking out at my patch of a small country, I don’t buy it. It makes no human sense. It fails to describe people.

I’ll flagellate my generation with the best of them, first for its inattention, secondly for its self-indulgence. I’ll give anyone a debate on how and why an economy must be “rebalanced” if – though I still favour firing squads – you allow some bankers to escape with the swag. I’ll even swap opinions on the meaning of the word “growth”, if you like.

But here’s an opinion we did retrieve, by the skin of our teeth, as the 1970s became the Eighties, when Thatcher came in, and it all kicked off: work has a moral dimension. Work is ethical. Work matters, and is no one’s gift. Work is part of what it means to live. Deprive a person of that and you deprive them of a right.

We don’t have a million students lying in their kip, currently, despite anything you may have read elsewhere. We have, instead, a million young people who want to live their lives. Just that. We are killing some of them, wounding the rest, betraying all. Most of them want to have children too.

It would a pity if any of those infants yet unborn have to be told who that plump Dave bloke Cameron on the telly used to be, and why any country can make the same damned stupid mistakes time after time. The song wasn’t written for coalitions. Still: “Stand down...”

Egypt: That Parade, This Rain

2011-02-12T04:20:00.003Z

Quote: “The generals say they will guarantee reform.”

You’ll forgive me if I just dropped my laudanum and my service revolver. The TV news is rolling. Eager telly producers the world around are laying anthemic pop tracks over shots of happy Egyptians while relaying the usual Obama-feed.

Democracy, it turns out, is a good thing. The president just said so. Obama is talking about history as though speaking of a personal friend. He’s also talking about what must be.

Take it from a man who just ordered a military coup, eh?

Speaking live from my front room, though, I wonder, being difficult, about the connection between supreme military councils and the people’s will. Since I’m not Egyptian, I don’t necessarily love the army that kept Hosni Mubarak in power for 30 years. Since, unlike the President of These United States, I’ve actually read some history, I don’t believe revolutions work that way. But I quibble.

What makes me curious is all the cheering coverage. Is there a script? In living reality, Obama’s White House will be terrified, right now, by what the cast changes in Egypt might portend. To paraphrase: “Democracy? Oh, crap.”

Our counterpoint will be informed by an equal and opposite assumption. For al-Jazeera’s Gulf audience (and owners) the idea that representative legitimacy might catch on across the region will also elicit a startling thought. Something like, “Democracy? Oh, crap”.

Egypt’s ancient generals have their work cut out. The trick – and the Pentagon will be gaming this one – will be to let the youngsters argue and vote without allowing a single important difference to occur in Egypt’s politics or policies.

Secondly, and vastly more important to America’s own numerous generals, is the issue of what old Dr Henry “Death” Kissinger used to call linkage. If this democracy idea – which is a good thing – gets out, “Oh, crap” will barely cover it for America and her friends.

Who might those be? Three, as a rule: Egypt, Saudi, and the little Jewish one the others pretend to hate. If Mubarak has been sold for scrap, the implications of his fall matter only, in American eyes, to the extent that they affect Israel and Saudi Arabia. But if the democracy idea gets around, who knows what might happen?

Israel and the House of Saud confronted with democracies everywhere they turn? Would that be another good thing?

Mubarak’s kiss-off – was he arguing over the pension plan? – caught me and numerous others in mid-ponder yesterday. The following is therefore the rewrite, rough in places, from this week’s turtle-and-hare race. It should appear, more or less, in The Herald this morning.

Clumsy or not, the piece means to address the idea that all of the west’s rhetoric about democracy is coming home for a long roost. The hypocrisy is easy to identify. Watching the Cairo demonstrators was sad, though, only because you could glimpse the outlines – medals, braid, guns and all – of the betrayal to come. But what happens if, when, those afflicted people decide that democracy isn’t all it was cracked up to be?

Lying through our teeth, we sold them liberation. When they catch on, those betrayed people, they might choose to rattle our cages, too. Anyhow...

L’etat, c’est moi. Such was the gist of Hosni Mubarak’s speech to his country on Thursday night. Egypt’s own Sun King was less defiant than supremely complacent. I am the state: if I fall, it falls. Therefore, I cannot fall and will not fall. I will depart when I choose, with my dignity (and wealth) intact.

It didn’t turn out that way. Three decades of one-man rule may have left the world wondering about the chaos that might descend after Mubarak’s passing. He designed that fear, if you like, by allowing no alternatives to his authority. He said it was him or anarchy. Yesterday, finally, the Egyptian military, no doubt nudged by their friends in the Pentagon, chose to differ.

A victory, then, for American policy? More like an act of desperation. The removal of a dictatorship by a military coup is no ringing endorsement of democracy. On Thursday, a cheerful Barack Obama seemed convinced that the crisis was reaching a decent, manageable end. A swift, “orderly transition” to democracy was at hand. Then Mubarak cocked a snook. The White House paused, shocked and confused.

In his televised speech Mubarak went out of his way to tell the US – “I have never succumbed to any international pressure” – where it could stick its advice. No doubt this was the last straw for Obama and Egypt’s generals. But the assumption of control by a supreme military council is hardly ideal for Obama, despite the jubilation of the Cairo protesters. The outcome may be welcome, but it reeks of bad old days and bad old ways. It says little for the reach and grasp of the last superpower.

But that’s becoming common. Israel also cocks its snook, when the mood takes it, at its “closest ally”. Pakistan, “bulwark against terror”, is a long way short of reliable. Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai, secure in Kabul thanks only to US firepower, frequently tells his patron what he will and will not tolerate. Then there’s Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, oil-hungry America’s most-favoured friend of all.

At the end of January, according to the Times, that autocrat reprimanded the President of the United States, instructing Obama to avoid humiliating his good friend Hosni. If America persisted, the king himself would put up the $1.5 billion in aid given annually by the US in exchange for influence. Thanks to American motorists, Abdullah can afford small change. Thanks to Mubarak, we now know that $1.5 billion doesn’t buy much.

The US may have won the contest, but only just, and only by the least attractive means. Mubarak came very close to proving that a determined dictator can defy an American president. There has been nothing neat, tidy, or – let’s be brutal – inspiring about the means used to force his “resignation”.

Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated that American power is a fragile concept. The capacity to blow up things and people – for a price that a hugely indebted US can ill afford – is no guarantee that strategic aims will be achieved. The ability to invade a country is one thing; the ability to hold it another. The idea that America can tame and shape an entire region, the Middle East above all, is an illusion, especially when, as now, an American president is baffled by contradictory demands.

Egypt is the obvious case at hand, but scarcely alone. Ever since the people of Tunisia decided that enough was enough, the US has been confronting a paradox. Democracy is the vaunted ideal: so much (supposedly) goes without saying. But what if the popular will produces unsought (for America) outcomes?

A simple example, currently agitating minds in Tel Aviv: what are the chances of a newly-democratic Egypt deciding that Israel has been indulged for too long, that the price of peace has been the betrayal of the Palestinian people? The chances, at a rough guess, are excellent.

You could say the same about Jordan, another of those friendly family businesses. The common people there have a long, shared history with the Israelis, and few happy memories. Democracy would give Jordanians the chance to emulate the people of Gaza, and vote for their equivalent of Hamas. If that happened the US and Israel would not be able to pretend that a coup – the fiction inflicted on Hamas and Gaza – had been mounted.

Finally, there is America’s biggest nightmare, and the real reason why Abdullah stood ready to write a cheque for his chum in Cairo. If the Middle East’s democracy movement can be pictured as a spreading wave, what is there now to prevent that wave from crashing over the big beach called Saudi, and over a royal house that needs no lessons in corruption and oppression from Mubarak?

Few would mourn, but the US – and Europe – would panic. Oil dependence constitutes two vast, interlocking problems. One is obvious: production has probably peaked. At best, the stuff is becoming much harder to find. Secondly, those who still have oil to sell are generally not the people with whom you would choose to do business, in an ideal world.

They range from vexatious (for America) left-wing states such as Venezuela, to “mafia regimes” (say US diplomats) such as Russia, or to those sweethearts in Saudi. The US has courted, coddled and indulged the last of these for over half a century. A blind eye has been turned to every excess. Talk of spreading “our values” is suspended on the instant one of those repressive, filthy-rich princelings hoves into view.

No one in American government, of either party, has ever talked of an “orderly transition” to democracy where Saudi Arabia is concerned. They wouldn’t dare. It is a cardinal rule of the last superpower’s foreign policy that the House of Saud must never, ever be offended. Even the fact that most of the 9/11 bombers sprang from Saudi Arabia, and from its malevolent fundamentalist Wahabi sect, is rarely discussed in front of American voters. Who really funds al Qaeda and the Taliban? Don’t ask.

You can see Obama’s problem, then. If the US president endorses democracy and the demonstrators in Tahrir Square, why not do the same for Saudi Arabia and its people? If a 30-year secret police state in one country can no longer be defended, what justifies support for venal, oil-fuelled medievalism on the other side of the Red Sea?

A simple answer: because devout folk in Saudi might take it into their heads to install a government of Islamists. What was deemed unsayable after 9/11 is fast becoming the only thing worth saying: free peoples are not likely to accept the embrace of the foreigners, the US and Britain above all, who courted and supported the autocrats for all those years, who allowed Israel to do as it pleased with the Palestinians, and who, for an encore, took to killing Muslims in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

If the point was to defeat fundamentalism, America and friends have picked some strategies. Reports from Cairo certainly suggest that the demonstrators, secular or not, conservative or liberal, are no lovers of the US or Britain. What did we expect, exactly?

And when might we realise that the phrase “the last superpower” has a hitherto unsuspected meaning? In the last of something, as often as not, lies its end.

Lockerbie: Some Shrapnel

2011-02-10T06:02:00.002Z

Something stuck in my mind. It came to me just after the wave of fatigue you get from the sort of approbation you neither need nor seek. Specifically, it was this: a brief comment in the Telegraph, that blunderbuss among reactionary snipers, on August 21, 2009.

On Wednesday night, I was still thinking about Lockerbie. We had just driven back and forth in a day and night to the Humber’s edge so that my wife could sit with her dying mother. But I’m a hack. In the car, coming back across the border, I thought: Fucking Brian Wilson. Must look it up.

I’m so old, I keep cuttings. Not just any old cuttings; only the important mounds. August 21, 2009.

Wilson is a hack, too, of long-standing, who surely won’t mind if I remind the world that he was locally-minded, once, and may even have made a youthful political gesture of nationalism (with a tiny n), and later gained some expertise as a minister with an energy brief, before he grew energetic, post-ministerially, for Energy. That stuff is none of Scotland’s concern, of course.

Anyhow, in the cutting Wilson’s sub stunted a cunning paraphrase: “The SNP’s Libya stunt has shamed my nation”. With a determination born of free West Highland localism, the writer began: “The Scottish Nationalists have never been too fussy about the international company they keep”.

He then excoriated Alex Salmond for opposing the bombing of Belgrade. This sally was in tribute to the late Robin “Ethical” – unless you happened to have met him – Cook. Apparently, Cookie was Wilson’s companion on the British parliamentary – sorry, I’m straining this joke – road to socialism.

Let the quote do some work instead. Wilson wrote – on August 21, 2009, mind you: “Rarely can so many decent Scottish stomachs have turned than at the sight of the Saltire being flourished in Tripoli as a centre-piece of the repulsive celebrations to welcome home the mass murderer Megrahi, courtesy of the SNP”.

Wilson judged the entire affair to have been a matter of self-aggrandisement. He wrote that, “The vast global audience for the rantings of Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish Justice Minister, could have been forgiven for assuming him to be the spokesman for a sovereign state, albeit a tinpot one with curious moral values”.

Bear that phrase in mind: “curious moral values”. History being slow but oddly quick on its feet sometimes, how are those turning stomachs now?

The net’s Nationalists will give you a quick answer. Labour’s multifarious duplicities stand exposed. MacAskill has been vindicated. I’d get the usual reflexive praise just for saying so, over and over.

The rantings of Brian Wilson were of a piece with each of Labour’s stitched-to-order lies levelled against the Justice Secretary. For some people, that’s better than enough. They’d like me to say nothing else from now until – My, is that the time? – May.

But here’s a problem: Kenny MacAskill is still Justice Secretary; al-Megrahi is still “a convicted mass-murderer”; and a government of Nationalists still refuses to attempt to make public the facts that each one of them, MacAskill in the van, understands.* To paraphrase that Telegraph sub-editor, someone is shaming my nation.

Labour have had their turn. Wilson’s siblings have been exposed. But they are not in government, currently, in Scotland, where the plane fell from the sky. That would be another party.

Nationalism’s bots course through the local web demanding that the MSM tell the truth. Good luck with that. But here’s weird: MacAskill has part of the truth about Lockerbie at his fingertips. He and Alex Salmond, his First Minister, could find out a great deal more with a full public – not parliamentary, please – inquiry into the massacre. The farrago of al-Megrahi's farcical conviction is a stain on Scotland’s honour: what greater cause for truth could there be?

What’s the worst that could happen? That Salmond and MacAskill could join the likes of Wilson in defending the conviction, yet again? Surely not. Surely it would take a mainstream media plot to make that smear true?

But it is true. Someone else is shaming my nation.

* I should have said that, in this, I exempt Christine Grahame MSP from criticism. Apologies.

Lockerbie: Collateral Damage

2011-02-08T13:32:00.004Z

Again, a slightly longer version of a piece scheduled for The Herald on February 9.

Sir Gus O’Donnell’s trawl through certain of the documents relating to the Lockerbie bombing has become very bad news for the Labour Party. It is bad in London, bad in Edinburgh; bad for reputations, bad for careers. On both sides of the border, the charge is the same: saying one thing, doing another. The only difference is that some things were shouted in one place and whispered elsewhere.

David Cameron handled the report with a certain vicious elegance in the Commons, in his best more-in-sorrow-than-anger voice. Too many things, he pointed out, were left unsaid by Labour ministers. Whether he would have behaved any differently was a point he was happy to leave moot. He had certain aims in mind, and he achieved them.

Thus: blame Labour, blame the SNP, placate America, exonerate BP, and remind us that he was always opposed to the freeing of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi on any grounds. Better still, for the eternal interests of Her Majesty’s Government, nothing in O’Donnell’s document obliged Cameron to deal with a real question: what of profound doubts over the safety of the original conviction? No one in the Commons, as usual, had a word to say about that.

Labour was all over the place. Gordon Brown was forced into a statement that answered no questions. Jack Straw, England’s Justice Secretary in the period at issue, fell to parsing any phrase that might provide an excuse. Meanwhile, the Scottish party found itself in a truly hideous position: stupid or cynical, but collateral damage either way. Save your tears.

Either its leading members knew about London’s efforts to “facilitate” a release deal with Libya, or they did not. If not, what does that tell us about relationships between Labour in Edinburgh and Labour in Westminster? You might imagine that the proper politicians down south felt no need to enlighten the little folk, or the Scottish people they are supposed to represent.

But if, equally, all was known, what excused the many, vehement accusations hurled at Kenny MacAskill, the SNP minister who freed al-Megrahi? Labour in Scotland were still at that game this week, even when it was beyond all doubt that their colleagues in London had connived in Libyan efforts. Straw, O’Donnell tells us, even thought of supplying a supportive letter.

It’s possible, of course, that some Scottish Labour figures were “in the loop” and some were not. The Scotland Office, first under Des Browne, and by October 2008 in the charge of Jim Murphy, was under no illusions. The latter was certainly given the minutes of calls between Straw and Alex Salmond. So what about Holyrood?

But this means, surely, that some passionate opponents of al-Megrahi’s release were permitted – encouraged? – to go on conducting a campaign against MacAskill while the truth was otherwise kept hidden. It means, too, that a host of Scottish Labour parliamentarians either failed to understand even the basic facts of the Lockerbie affair, or chose to forget them. Take your pick: scandal, shambles, or a bit of both?

None is easy to spin, but Labour has done its best. Supported by the – no doubt unprompted – cheap right-wing blogger Guido Fawkes, a tale filtered into the London media this week to the effect that MacAskill was prepared, late in 2007, to amend the Scottish government’s opposition to Labour’s prisoner transfer agreement with Libya. The alleged price: cash to pay off human rights claims over prison slopping out, and devolved control over airgun legislation. And how tawdry would that have been?

O’Donnell certainly relates – of exchanges in November, 2007 – that “it is clear that HMG’s understanding was that a PTA without any exclusions” – meaning al-Megrahi, the only Libyan in a British prison – “might be acceptable to the Scottish Government if progress could be made with regards to ongoing discussions...” (on slopping out and firearms law). The Cabinet Secretary’s footnotes then refer the reader to letters between Straw and Browne alluding to their “understanding”.

But O’Donnell’s very next sentence in the body of his text records that, “Kenny MacAskill restated the Scottish Government’s position that any PTA should exclude anyone convicted [my italics] of the Lockerbie bombing in a letter to Jack Straw on 6 December 2007”. So much was already in the public domain, thanks to the Scottish government’s web-site. Nor did the SNP deviate from that position. Labour’s attempt to establish otherwise this week, seized gratefully in some quarters, depends entirely therefore on a “leaked” e-mail from John McTernan, Browne’s adviser, who gleaned his “understanding” from unnamed “officials”.

You wouldn’t want to base a Scottish election campaign on that, I’d have thought. But what else does Iain Gray and his Holyrood party now possess in this affair? Continued demands for the release on al-Megrahi’s medical records? Such material is redacted even in O’Donnell’s report (on data protection grounds). An oncologist would tell you, meanwhile, that a prognosis is not a prediction, but add that prostate cancer treatments – and hence survival rates – are improving yearly. Even given the horrific scale of Lockerbie, an attack on compassion is tricky.

It’s also beside the point. As is O’Donnell’s report, and Cameron’s lofty satisfaction, and Brown’s floundering response. If this is repetition, forgive me: everything to do with Lockerbie is repetition.

The fact that Labour has been found guilty of monumental hypocrisy is important in its own right, no doubt, but it is only one part of a larger argument. In the matter of mass murder, the question of guilt is paramount. Unless it is settled, beyond doubt, every other “row” is chatter, and distracting chatter at that. In the case of al-Megrahi, despite anything politicians claim, there is no certainty whatever.

We do know, though, of $3 million paid by US authorities to two Maltese, the brothers Toni and Paul Gauci, for the sake of identification evidence. We know that Lord Peter Fraser, then Lord Advocate, would later describe the former brother, supposedly a star witness, as less than the full shilling and “an apple short of a picnic”. Fraser got away with it, too.

We know, furthermore, that the forensic “experts” on both sides of the Atlantic, providers of still more “key evidence” at Camp Zeist, were later discredited thoroughly. We know that Professor Hans Koechler, Kofi Annan’s UN observer, damned the trial as an outrage and an abuse.

There’s more, much more. We don’t know, though, why al-Megrahi still fails to provide proof of his innocence, or why no political party – the SNP included – in Britain or the United States is prepared to entertain an inquiry into the conviction. Those rows over the compassionate release of “the Lockerbie bomber” will do instead. They shift attention; they deflect serious questions, not least where the security services, the Crown Office, the Scottish judiciary and governments – then and now – are concerned.

Labour can survive its bad news and its bad week. The truth will have no such luck, at least until some successor to Sir Gus is commanded to examine a few more of the spooks’ papers salted away in the hidden record.

Lockerbie: Muzzled, Toothless, Tamed

2011-02-07T17:26:00.005Z

A stirring piece of Westminster theatre, then. A judicious performance from David Cameron, mournfully deprecating a lack of clarity from his Labour predecessors. A fine display of righteous indignation on behalf of the dead from Sir Malcolm Rifkind. Some face-saving non-remarks – before his time, you understand – from Ed Miliband. And an intervention from Jack Straw that was feline, lawyerly, self-serving and utterly empty.

But there was a big, black, ugly dog in the shadows of the Commons chamber early yesterday afternoon, Sherlock. Once again, as so often before, that dog didn’t bark.

Britain’s politicians, some of them, are not fools. The Scots and the lawyers (often one and the same), in particular, have read all the articles, noted all the books, heard and seen the TV reports and documentaries. The ministers and former ministers among them have had access, confidentially, to more information than that.

They could each say – and such as Cameron certainly would – that the last Labour government’s efforts to “facilitate” Libyan attempts to secure the release of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi were wholly hypocritical, and morally indefensible. There’s no longer room for conjecture.

Oil; a prisoner transfer agreement (PTA); “bringing Gaddafi back into the fold”; Libyan threats and menaces; and a troublesome prisoner whose second appeal, likely to succeed despite every attempt to obstruct and undermine it, was looming: if the PTA wouldn’t stick, “compassion” would do instead. In the national interest.

Labour at least confessed that it did not wish to see al-Megrahi die in a British prison. The problem was two-fold: the Americans wanted exactly that, and there was no guarantee that the Nationalists in charge in Edinburgh could be relied upon to co-operate with a distrusted political rival. And did any party fancy facing the consequences if the dying man’s appeal succeeded? The tale told in all those articles and TV docs – effectively an international conspiracy to pervert the course of justice – had horrifying implications for very important people.

Hence our ugly, silent dog. Not a well-informed soul mentioned the safety of al-Megrahi’s conviction in the Commons yesterday, even for the sake of invective. Taking a pop at the SNP was routine. Keeping BP clear of the mess was all-but a patriotic duty. Sticking to the tight brief that Cameron himself had handed to Sir Gus O’Donnell was simplicity itself. And venting anger against mass murder, covered up or not, was all in a political day’s work.

I don’t say that the O’Donnell exercise has added nothing to the stock of information surrounding Lockerbie. It could certainly be construed as grounds for the SNP government to demand a couple of apologies. Equally, you could define it as another reason to ask why that same administration still refuses to question the safety of the conviction. But no one at Westminster has any intention of approaching that territory, even to dismiss the very idea as unworthy and outrageous.

Yesterday’s report and the parliamentary exchanges stand, then, as another exercise in misdirection. We can wrap ourselves in a whole debate over ministerial propriety, lose ourselves in the paper chase, sift through the record of who said what, when, and to whom. None of it is edifying. But that trail is designed to lead the interested observer astray.

Questions of guilt have a contagious quality, a logical pattern. If the dying man was always innocent – “prima facie” will do, at bare minimum – who did the killing, and why? Then the old dog really begins to bark: who thereafter covered it up, and why?