Nobody does it better

After yesterday’s reminder of why some of us miss Tony Blair, here's evidence that Barack Obama is his natural successor as a consummate political communicator. Like Blair, Obama is a natural centrist and instinctive big tent politician who, despite calls to be more partisan, just can’t resist looking for common ground with his opponents.

Well, that’s one way of interpreting his speech to the Republican caucus in Baltimore yesterday. Another view is that the event, in which the President ran rings around his Republican questioners, was a supreme political coup for the White House, one that his hosts are already regretting. Judge for yourself:

Live-blogging Chilcot (well, kind of)

Radio 5 has replaced its usual Friday afternoon film programme, featuring Mark Kermode, with wall-to-wall coverage of Tony Blair’s trial - sorry, appearance at the Chilcot inquiry (see here). I’ve been listening to it on and off (they're taking a tea break as I type) and so far I think the former PM has acquitted himself rather well, remaining determined to comply with the supposed aim of the inquiry to learn lessons from Iraq, rather than taking part in a pointless blame game.

A few random thoughts:

Reading the slanted coverage in Tory papers like the Telegraph (no, I don’t buy it, but I was flying to and from Edinburgh yesterday, and you get it free with a bottle of water, or vice versa, at the airport), and reading about the top civil servants sticking the knife into Tony, then listening to the cries of ‘murderer!’ from the lynch mob outside - it struck me that Chilcot might be viewed as the revenge of a perverse alliance of Establishment mandarins and the anti-imperialist left, on an upstart Labour leader whose popularity and success they have always, for very different reasons, resented.

Another thought. Why is it that the USA, where opinion on the merits of the Iraq war was just as fiercely divided, indeed where the current President was elected partly because he vigorously opposed that war, has not seen fit to organise anything along the lines of the Chilcot charade? Answers that don’t rely on fatuous anti-American or anti-British prejudice on a postcard please…

Then again (and this is sticking my neck out a bit), it occurs to me that the violent hatred of Blair that seems to have gripped much of the country, and of which Chilcot is the latest lurid manifestation, is actually rooted in a deep national fear of terrorism and violence. But, as with the whole 'Blair's bombs' episode, instead of that fear being directed against those who actually threaten us - whether jihadist suicide bombers, or Iranian or Ba'athist nukes - it's displaced on to our own government. The 'reasoning' seems to be: if you don't bother these people, they might just leave us in peace, and if you do dare to stand up to them, then we'll blame you and not them for the way they react. The reasons why some, particularly on the 'left', seem unable to direct blame - whether for 9/11, 7/7, or the Iraqi insurgency - at those who were actually responsible, are complex and have often been the focus of posts on this blog, but inverted racism, cultural relativism and a deep-seated revulsion from western modernity are all somewhere in the mix.

A scapegoat must be found for our deep unease about the post 9/11 world. And as of today, that scapegoat's name is Tony Blair.

For more on the madness that is Chilcot, see Mick here, and Oliver here and here.

Update

Well, it's all over. From the bits I heard, I thought Blair offered a powerful defence of liberal interventionism and a clear and unwavering assessment of the threats that still face us. Radio 5's summary of his testimony began with 'Well, he didn't apologise and he didn't admit he lied', or words to that effect, as if that was the only 'take away' from Blair's appearance that would have satisfied the journos. Truly, the mainstream media coverage of Chilcot has been a disgrace.

More from John Rentoul here.

And from Hopi Sen here.

And Max Dunbar here.

Three quick links

Dashing hither and thither this week, so I only have time to recommend posts from elsewhere:

The Plump writes about the dangers of creating a false equivalence between Nazism and Communism, and on the other hand his problems with the notion of a ‘post left’, as if antisemitism and totalitarianism among progressives were recent phenomena and ‘the left was pure and innocent before the Stop the War Coalition came along.’

Mick responds to the collective madness surrounding Chilcot and the 'outpouring of hatred' against Tony Blair, including George Monbiot's absurd call for the ex-PM's arrest for 'mass murder', and challenges 'the assumption that had we not got rid of Saddam everything would somehow have turned out just fine: the internal divisions within Iraqi society would have healed themselves by magic and Saddam himself would have turned to Sufi mysticism'.

Finally, Minnie marks Holocaust Memorial Day with a poem by Primo Levi.

Rev. Stephen Sizer: enemy of free speech

Rev. Stephen Sizer is the Anglican vicar of Christ Church, the 'international community church' in Virginia Water, Surrey. He's also an outspoken 'anti-Zionist' who has shared a platform with Holocaust deniers and lectured on the evils of 'Christian Zionism' to Islamic fundamentalists in Iran.

He also appears to be extremely prickly when it comes to public criticism of his ideas and activities. He recently tried to intimidate my fellow-blogger Seismic Shock (who keeps a watchful eye on Christian anti-semitism) by sending the police round. And heartened by this experience, he proceeded to leave the following comment on a post by Australian Christian blogger Vee:

Dear Vee,

You must take a little more care who you brand as anti-semitic otherwise you too will be receiving a caution from the police as the young former student of Leeds did recently. One more reference to me and you will be reported.

Blessings
Stephen

Somehow, that disingenuous 'Blessings' makes the threat all the more sinister. Yuk.

I can't vouch for the validity of all the criticisms made of Sizer, but two things seem crystal clear:

1. The police have no business telling bloggers what they can and cannot write.

2. Those who resort to the law to silence their critics usually have something to hide.

The story continues to unfold, but you can catch up by following these links:

http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/anglican-vicar-uses-police-to-intimidate-blogger/

http://modernityblog.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/reverend-stephen-sizer-uses-british-police-against-a-blogger/

http://modernityblog.wordpress.com/2010/01/25/ex-national-front-leader-and-rev-stephen-sizer/

http://modernityblog.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/stephen-sizer-the-police-and-the-barbra-streisand-effect/

http://dolphinarium.blogspot.com/2010/01/thats-not-way-to-do-it.html

http://sedgemore.com/2010/01/not-fit-for-the-cure-of-souls/

Update

Good to see that Index on Censorship has taken the case up with the West Yorkshire Police. More updates over at Seismic Shock.

The mental deformations of appeasement

For the record, I was against the Iraq war at the time, but for pragmatic rather than moral reasons: like Barack Obama, I thought it was a huge distraction from the key priority to defeat al-Qaida and their Taleban allies in Afghanistan and risked undermining the wave of global goodwill that followed 9/11. Nevertheless, I've always found myself in greater sympathy with those who supported the war for good, anti-totalitarian reasons, than with those opponents who didn't seem able to envisage any grounds for removing a murderous tyrant.

That purblind and obstinate refusal to accept that there might possibly have been a moral case for ending Saddam's cruel reign seems to have infected British media coverage of the Chilcott enquiry. As Nick Cohen wrote in his brilliant and necessary column yesterday: 'The inability to accept that a policy they honestly opposed still had moral virtues is producing levels of dementia unusually high even by the standards of British public life.' The reporting of Alastair Campbell's appearance at the enquiry last week was shameful for its lack of balance and inattention to what the man was actually saying. Goodness knows what kind of lynch mob awaits Tony Blair when he appears later this week. (Incidentally, am I the only one to find somewhat distasteful the decision to give free tickets to relatives of service personnel who died in Iraq? The implication seems to be that Blair, rather than Ba'athist and Islamist insurgents, was somehow responsible for their loved ones' deaths, and they have the right to see him brought to account.)

Here's the core of Nick's argument:

Consider the response of liberal Europeans to the last 40 years of Iraqi history. From 1968, an authentically fascist state confronted them, complete with the supreme leader, the unremitting reign of terror, the gassing of ethnic minorities and the unprovoked wars of conquest. America and Britain had, to their shame, been complicit in the oppression, but in 2003 they overthrew the tyrant thinking that he still possessed the weapons he used against the Kurds and the Iranians. He didn't and the occupation turned into a disaster as the followers of Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and Ruhollah Khomeini began a campaign of mass sectarian killing.

Anyone who believed what Europeans said about their determination to make amends for Nazism and communism would have expected a principled response. However much they loathed Bush and Blair, surely they would have offered unreserved support for Arabs and Kurds struggling to escape totalitarianism. The British bore a heavy responsibility, as our army was effectively defeated in Basra. With too few troops to fight, it allowed clerical death squads to take over the city. British commanders had to suffer the humiliation of seeing the American and reconstituted Iraqi forces charge in to stop the violence they could not control.

And yet mainstream public opinion has never been interested in offering solidarity to the victims of Ba'athism and Islamism. Instead of talking about what happened to Iraq either before or after the invasion, it has remained stuck in the groove of spring 2003, endlessly scratching the record for a conspiratorial explanation for Britain's decision to invade.

As for the endless attempts to prove that the war was 'illegal':

However vigorously they seek to parse UN resolution 1,441, the use of "illegal" demonstrates that Tony Balir's lawyerly critics believe that the Ba'athist regime, which was guilty of genocide and under UN sanctions, remained Iraq's legitimate government, entitled by law to treat the country as its private prison.

Cohen refers to the prediction by Sir Oliver Miles, former British ambassador to Libya, that the enquiry would be a 'whitewash' because two of its members were Jewish, and he concludes:

He's not alone. I have had an allegedly left-wing journalist say the same to me. Once, he would never have allowed Jew obsessions to infect his thinking. Now, his battered mind was wide open to racial fantasies.

The mental deformations appeasement brings should not be underestimated. People don't just placate their enemies, but become them by adopting their ideological mannerisms and foibles. For years, we've had the notion that democracies are the "root cause" of every Islamist atrocity accepted in polite society. You must now prepare yourself for the return of the Jewish conspiracy theory to supposedly honourable discourse. Indeed, if you look around, you will find it is already there.

More from Norm, Mick and Oliver.

Something for the weekend

Here's Mimitah - a new discovery, thanks to Bob's latest post. A little bit of African music to cheer up a wet and windy Saturday morning.

Blame game again

Time for our weekly dose of CiF self-parody.

Simon Tisdall catalogues the 'recent wave of violent attacks on Christian worshippers and churches in countries across the Muslim world', which has included the murder of churchgoers and the burning of buildings and Bibles. Cue an analysis of the worrying persistence of religious intolerance and its roots in fundamentalist versions of Islam, perhaps? Not a bit of it. Tisdall is, after all, a Guardian columnist and his piece appears under the 'Comment is Free' banner, so his interpretation of these events should come as no surprise:

[A]nalysts and academics suggest common threads do exist, notably the impact of globalisation on conservative communities across the Muslim world and a resulting threatened loss of cultural identity

[...]

Yet hostility also arises, in a fundamental sense, from Muslim perceptions of western aggression against Islam, be it the war in Afghanistan, domineering western economic and cultural behaviour, attempts to ban veils, offensive cartoon caricatures of the prophet Muhammad, airline and immigration profiling, or systemic, unchecked and arguably worsening discrimination and harassment of Muslim minorities living in western nations.

Hang on a minute: is Tisdall saying that murdering innocent churchgoers is an understandable response to a bunch of drawings? Or that we should blame the torching of churches in Egypt on a change in the uniform rules in French schools?

As for that bit about the impact of globalisation: it looks like Tisdall is casting Muslims as simply passive victims of world events, rather than people who are responsible for their actions. How patronising. Would he have the same response to (say) reports of western racists trashing mosques or burning copies of the Koran? I know historical comparisons can be odious, but it's rather like blaming Nazi war crimes on the Great Depression. Aren't you just glad, though, that globalisation is having an impact on conservative communities in the so-called 'Muslim world'? Who knows, it might eventually weaken the hold of their oppressive conservatism, to the great benefit of women, religious minorities and many others in those countries.

Reading Tisdall's depressing list of attacks on North African and Middle Eastern Christians, you'd have to strain every intellectual sinew not to put the blame squarely on Islamic militants and their intolerant ideology. But this, of course, is the Guardian, and that would never do. In the new pro-faith pseudo-liberal consensus, for which this once-great organ is the leading mouthpiece, you can blame the victim, blame anonymous historical forces, above all blame the west. But whatever you do, you must never ever blame the religion.

Via Mick , and also Norm, whose description of Tisdall as 'witless' is, I think, too kind.