Gloom after Glasgow, but Miliband sitting it out?

No time for a detailed post-mortem on the terrible Glasgow East result (we're about to leave for a week in Cornwall, so things will be quiet at this blog for a while), so instead I'll link to analysis by others.

Read Oliver Kamm's take on the political earthquake here and here. 

And here's Shuggy's apocalyptic reading of the result.

Finally, here's Chris Dillow on why, despite the fervent wishes of some of us, David Miliband will probably sit this crisis out, and may be hoping to be Labour's next-leader-but-one.

Obama 'compelled' to back Israel, says Guardian

In an earlier post I noted the contradiction in Jonathan Steele's view that, while Barack Obama's approach to Iraq and Iran was evidence of his independent judgement, the Democratic candidate's attitude to the Israel-Palestine issue apparently revealed him to be nothing more than a passive tool of the pro-Israel lobby.

Maybe Steele was responsible for today's Guardian leader which suggests that, during his visit to Israel this week, Obama was 'compelled to call the country a miracle, to visit the Israeli Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem and to link the memory of the 6 million Jews who died in Europe to Israeli victims of Palestinian violence today'. Note the sinister, conspiracy-theory overtones of that word 'compelled'.

Or perhaps we should see the hand of Seamus Milne behind the piece, given its attempt to diminish the responsibility of Hamas for recent attacks on Israeli civilians. Referring to Obama's visit to Sderot, which has borne the brunt of such attacks, the leader writer mentions the recent ceasefire 'which is why Mr. Obama was able to hold a press conference in Sderot without rushing for the bomb shelter.' How nice of them to stop shelling kindergartens in time for the visit. The word 'ceasefire', with its suggestion of shared responsibility, obscures the reality that the Hamas attacks were unprovoked and came after Israel's withdrawal from Gaza.

Norm skewers the 'oozing cynicism' of the leader column here.

Update: Saturday

Confirmation that the leader probably was written by Jonathan Steele comes in the latter's column in today's Guardian which uses very similar language to criticise Obama's Israel visit.

Obama and anti-Americanism

Anti-totalitarian progressives who support Barack Obama have often had to swallow their reservations about aspects of his foreign policy, particularly his unconditional promise to withdraw swiftly from Iraq, so will broadly agree with John Rentoul's hope (and expectation) that he will tack towards a more pragmatic approach as the election nears. Here's the nub of Rentoul's argument for lending critical support to Obama:

I think McCain is right about Iraq - that the surge has been a success, and that eventual troop withdrawal should depend on that success continuing. But I think it is more important, for America and the world, that Obama should be the one who learns the truth of this the hard way.

In office, he would be forced to use his eloquence and his global popularity to make the case for what is left of the coalition to see its responsibilities to the Iraqis through. Many of his supporters, especially outside the US, would see it as a betrayal. I think it would be a necessary one, by which he could at last heal the suspicion of American power that provides so many around the world with easy excuses.

Oliver Kamm endorses Rentoul's conclusions here, as does Shabba Goy here. The latter also links to a fantastic piece by David Aaronovitch on Obama and anti-Americanism. It's not often I say this, but I agree with every single word in Aaronovitch's article and recommend you read the whole thing. I particularly liked this analysis of the roots of British and European anti-Americanism:

In part I think that anti-Americanism is linked to a view of change as decline. The imagination is that dynamic capitalism, associated with the US, is destroying our authentic lives, with our own partly willing connivance. It is a continuing and - at the moment - constant narrative, uniting left and right conservatives, which will usually take in the 19th-century radical journalist William Cobbett (conveniently shorn of his anti-Semitism) and end with an expression of disgust over the Dome, the Olympics or Tesco. Just as bird flu is a disease from out of the east, runaway modernity is a scourge originating to the West.

This is spot on. You can find this pessimism and disgust with western modernity reproduced in the Guardian comment pages every other day (from the assembled Buntings, Milnes, Steeles et al), and in the tired and facile anti-American 'humour' of every other BBC TV or radio comedy programme. And that sense of a loss of 'authenticity' neatly links the anti-Americanism of many on the left with their indulgence of religious fundamentalism - as long as it originates in the more 'authentic' East.

Don't make concessions to fundamentalists of other faiths

Of all the arguments against ordaining gay priests, the contention that it will adversely affect relations with Muslims must be one of the weakest. It's not enough that Anglicans have to worry about the reaction of sexual conservatives in the Vatican - now they have to take account of the feelings of fundamentalists of other faiths? According to the Archbishop of Sudan, Daniel Deng:

We are called infidel by the Islamic world...When they are hearing our brothers and sisters from other parts of the Christian global, when they are talking of the same sex to be blessed. Immediately it gives them the way out to tell the other people, these people are evil and they can even harm our people more.

You have to sympathise with Archbishop Deng: it's not easy being a Christian in a majority-Muslim country. But surely he's aware that Islamists don't need new excuses for persecuting Christians: they already regard them as infidels and no concessions will ever appease their intolerance. The Anglican church should not sacrifice its more humane instincts on the altar of a spurious multi-faithism.

Thank God for the end of sectarian voting

Following James Macmillan's prediction that Labour will lose Glasgow East because of a revolt by working-class Catholics against the party's 'lifestyle liberalism', which I posted about here, Geoffrey Wheatcroft tries to portray the by-election as a good old-fashioned Catholic vs. Protestant battle. The reaction of the (mostly Scottish) commenters on the Independent site has been pretty uniformly hostile. 

Paulie thinks Wheatcroft's argument might be a tad simplistic, while Shuggy concedes that 'not all the article is bullshit', but takes issue with the notion that Scots vote along sectarian lines, arguing that 'it is class that is the overwhelming determinant of voting behaviour - as it is in the rest of the country'. Shuggy's post is a riposte not only to English commentators like Wheatcroft who betray their ignorance of the complexities of modern Scotland, but also to Catholic nostalgics like Macmillan who yearn for a religious communalism that (thankfully) no longer exists. As Shuggy says:

There is precious little evidence that Catholics even agree with the Vatican on issues like abortion, euthanasia, stem-cell research and the like - still less that their voting behaviour is influenced by them. Anyway, the convention is British politics - thank God, if you'll pardon the expression - is that Parliamentary votes on these questions are a non-partisan affair.

The criminal negligence of the Bush administration

I've just finished reading George Packer's The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, which I strongly recommend. This is not an exhaustive account of the political shenanigans that led up to the war, nor it is it a blow-by-blow narrative of the campaign: those wait to be written by political and military historians with the benefit of hindsight. Instead, Packer offers a journalist's first draft of history, a series of linked vignettes, given immediacy and authority by the fact that he was there: with his friend Kanan Makiya and other Iraqi exiles in New York and London before the war, and with soldiers, politicians, administrators and ordinary Iraqis in Baghdad, Basra and Kirkuk, in the months after the invasion, when it was still possible for a foreign journalist to move around the country with relative ease.

Some of the quotes on the dust-jacket would have you believe this is a straightforward anti-war book. My copy includes this from Peter Watts of Time Out: 'A necessary and honest antidote to the ideological buffoonery Iraq has encouraged. Hitchens, Cohen, Moore, Jenkins et al:  read and learn'. Don't believe a word of it: the book is nothing of the kind. Rather, Packer is among those (and there are many of us) who could see the moral and strategic case for removing Saddam, were allergic to the simplistic slogans of the anti-war movement, but at the same time critical of the way the case for war was made, and of the incompetence of its execution.

It's the fact that Packer should have been a natural supporter of the war that makes his detailed critique of it particularly damning. The reader is left with an overwhelming sense of anger and frustration at the Bush administration for the sheer waste of lives, resources and opportunities that were the direct result of their incompetence. Once you've read this book, you'll find it hard to to dismiss Bush's laziness, incuriosity and lack of imagination as cute foibles. Together with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith and Rice, the president is shown to be morally culpable for a tragedy that need not have happened. At the same time, the book is full of examples of the dedication and initiative of ordinary US service personnel, shamefully let down by their leaders, and the resilience and optimism of ordinary Iraqis, despite the repeated dashing of their hopes.

Packer sums it up well:

I came to believe that those in positions of highest responsibility for Iraq showed a carelessness about human life that amounted to criminal negligence. Swaddled in abstract ideas, convinced of their own righteousness, incapable of self-criticism, indifferent to accountability, they turned a difficult undertaking into a needlessly deadly one. When things went wrong, they found other people to blame. The Iraq war was always winnable; it still is. For this very reason, the recklessness of its authors is all the harder to forgive.

Queer as (ordinary) folk

There was a fascinating programme on Radio 4 the other day (you can listen to it again here), in which Olivia O'Leary interviewed a man and a woman, both of whose spouses had undergone a sex change. What made the interview particularly interesting was the fact that, despite the emotional turmoil that they had clearly gone through, both had decided to stay with their partners. When questioned about this by O'Leary, the interviewees talked movingly about still loving the person they married, regardless of their altered gender.

I found the story of the male interviewee, a very down-to-earth ex-policeman, especially affecting. Despite initially recoiling from the prospect of sleeping next to a man (made more traumatic by the fact that he himself had once been a victim of male rape), he had now come to terms with it and was even able to consider resuming some kind of sexual relationship with his partner, at the same time as realising that his own sexuality might be more complicated than he had once thought.

For me, these people's stories were a challenge to a view of sexuality (which at the risk of being accused of po-mo political correctness I'm tempted to label 'heterosexist') which sees it as based simply on the attraction of polar opposites, and fails to recognise that individuals are often attracted to each other by qualities that have little to do with their belonging to the 'other' gender (and indeed might find appealing in members of the same sex, if they were able to fight free of heterosexual conditioning). I remember reading an interview some time ago with a female writer - someone who had been in both heterosexual and same-sex relationships, but was now single. The interviewer asked her which gender her next partner would be, to which the writer replied that she had no idea - it would depend on the person. Incidentally, the ex-policeman's experience is also a riposte to those who would dismiss gender and sexual quality as an elite, metropolitan 'lifestyle' issue (see this post).

Other good news on the gender/sexual equality front: the USA is about to get its first lesbian poet laureate, while it looks likely that the excellent and openly gay Rachel Maddow will soon be hosting her own show on MSNBC. Anyone keen to dismiss Maddow as a stereotypical leftie on account of her stint at Air America and background in HIV advocacy should note that her dad was an air force captain in Vietnam and that she describes herself as a defence-policy wonk and 'national security liberal'. 

Speaking of transsexualism: have you seen Hercules and Love Affair? Disco electronica is not usually my thing, but I love the way this band not only challenge gender stereotypes but also deconstruct the whole idea of what a band should be. Their core membership consists of a gay man, a lesbian and a transsexual, but audiences and critics have often got confused about who is which. What can you say about a band whose presiding genius is a geeky bearded guy who looks as though he's still playing in his bedroom, whose backing singer has virtually no stage presence, and who feature a celebrity vocalist (Antony of 'and the Johnsons' fame) on their debut album, but then replace him for their first world tour with the virtually unknown club singer Nomi? Incidentally - could the latter be the most convincing male-female transsexual ever? Judge for yourselves: