Torn and frayed in Manila

Blair's love of war

Ever since seeing Michael Sheen’s depiction of Blair in The Queen, I can’t help wondering whether Tony Blair died back in 1997 to be replaced by an actor, so obviously scripted is his every move. Even "Blair's" thoughtful pauses in the clubby atmosphere of the Iraq War investigation last week seemed part of the screenplay, just so he doesn’t look too glib.

Anyway, Tony and war — he loves it doesn’t he? Give Tony a couple of choices and he will always pick the one that gives him a chance to look like a “great leader” and forger of destinies, especially if it involves dropping bombs.

Remember the illegal bombing of Serbia back in the 1999s, where “Blair” stiffened Clinton’s resolve to press ahead with attack? The British playwright Harold Pinter has it about right:

"He was well to the forefront. He loves to drop a few bombs. It gives him, I think, great excitement," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

What came out most forcefully from Blair’s testimony to the Iraq War inquiry was not his complete absence of any regret for having caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people for non-existent weapons of mass destruction (I don’t think great leaders express remorse) but his bellicose statements on Iran.

For if Tony were still in Downing Street he would be planning war with Iran right now. He mentioned Iran 58 times in his testimony and urged the international community to take a "very hard, tough line" (such a Blair line) over its banned nuclear programme.

Blair’s love of war seems to me some sort of sickness. His religious fanaticism and vanity over his “world leader” status have intermingled in a terrible way to create a modern crusader prepared to destroy the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Iranians in support of a few poorly defined and often false principles. The actor playing Tony Blair is a very dangerous man and I for one am very glad he has been written out of the script.

Call that humiliation?

Terry Jones’s sarcastic put down of the “outrage” in the British gutter press over the arrest of British naval personnel in the Gulf was the Guardian’s top comment piece of 2007.

No hoods. No electric shocks. No beatings. These Iranians clearly are a very uncivilised bunch

I share the outrage expressed in the British press over the treatment of our naval personnel accused by Iran of illegally entering their waters. It is a disgrace. We would never dream of treating captives like this - allowing them to smoke cigarettes, for example, even though it has been proven that smoking kills. And as for compelling poor servicewoman Faye Turney to wear a black headscarf, and then allowing the picture to be posted around the world - have the Iranians no concept of civilised behaviour? For God's sake, what's wrong with putting a bag over her head? That's what we do with the Muslims we capture: we put bags over their heads, so it's hard to breathe. Then it's perfectly acceptable to take photographs of them and circulate them to the press because the captives can't be recognised and humiliated in the way these unfortunate British service people are.

It is also unacceptable that these British captives should be made to talk on television and say things that they may regret later. If the Iranians put duct tape over their mouths, like we do to our captives, they wouldn't be able to talk at all. Of course they'd probably find it even harder to breathe - especially with a bag over their head - but at least they wouldn't be humiliated.

And what's all this about allowing the captives to write letters home saying they are all right? It's time the Iranians fell into line with the rest of the civilised world: they should allow their captives the privacy of solitary confinement. That's one of the many privileges the US grants to its captives in Guantánamo Bay.

The true mark of a civilised country is that it doesn't rush into charging people whom it has arbitrarily arrested in places it's just invaded. The inmates of Guantánamo, for example, have been enjoying all the privacy they want for almost five years, and the first inmate has only just been charged. What a contrast to the disgraceful Iranian rush to parade their captives before the cameras!

What's more, it is clear that the Iranians are not giving their British prisoners any decent physical exercise. The US military make sure that their Iraqi captives enjoy PT. This takes the form of exciting "stress positions", which the captives are expected to hold for hours on end so as to improve their stomach and calf muscles. A common exercise is where they are made to stand on the balls of their feet and then squat so that their thighs are parallel to the ground. This creates intense pain and, finally, muscle failure. It's all good healthy fun and has the bonus that the captives will confess to anything to get out of it.

And this brings me to my final point. It is clear from her TV appearance that servicewoman Turney has been put under pressure. The newspapers have persuaded behavioural psychologists to examine the footage and they all conclude that she is "unhappy and stressed".

What is so appalling is the underhand way in which the Iranians have got her "unhappy and stressed". She shows no signs of electrocution or burn marks and there are no signs of beating on her face. This is unacceptable. If captives are to be put under duress, such as by forcing them into compromising sexual positions, or having electric shocks to their genitals, they should be photographed, as they were in Abu Ghraib. The photographs should then be circulated around the civilised world so that everyone can see exactly what has been going on.

As Stephen Glover pointed out in the Daily Mail, perhaps it would not be right to bomb Iran in retaliation for the humiliation of our servicemen, but clearly the Iranian people must be made to suffer - whether by beefing up sanctions, as the Mail suggests, or simply by getting President Bush to hurry up and invade, as he intends to anyway, and bring democracy and western values to the country, as he has in Iraq.
• Terry Jones is a film director, actor and Python
www.terry-jones.net

Londonistan calling

I’m not a fan of Christopher Hitchens, but his article on British Islamic extremism in the most recent Vanity Fair makes some good points.

Hitchens mentions a documentary called “Undercover mosque” (below) which is also worth a look, though if you make it past 23 minutes you will have done better than me.

I stopped at that point because the accent of a young Muslim cleric reminded me of some of my Muslim mates at university 30 years ago. The midlands accent is about the only thing they have in common though; the contrast between my happy-go-lucky friends and these guys couldn’t be more stark. Somehow I can’t imagine the people I used to hang out with saying:

And if she doesn’t wear hijab, we hit her.

Take that homosexual man and throw him off the mountain.

It’s a shame I’ve lost contact that with that group of friends, because I’d be fascinated to know what they make of the current swing of the pendulum in the UK. Perhaps they even have children who are caught up the mosques depicted in the movie.

It’s strange, of all the possible futures for Britain in the 21st century, I never would have predicted this.

Why Blair is wrong about the veil

To be British is to hold an opinion on the veil

Last week, Tony Blair condemned the veil as “a mark of separation”. This, it appears, requires no further explanation: to desire distance from the rest of society is wrong. He was supported by Azadeh Moave, who is trying to carve out a career as an inside commentator on Islam, in an article for Time (“Why Tony Blair is right about the veil”):

Covering the face, whether in Yorkshire or Beirut, seems to send a universal message of separateness. If the full-face veil is considered creepy by many Muslim women in the Middle East, why wouldn't it cause a twinge of unease among ordinary British people with no tradition of veiling at all?

I don’t buy this “mark of separation” theory. In my early 20s I was on the fringes of the original punk movement. I was really just a student rather than a hard-core punk, but I had quite a few punk friends and like them I would dress up when we went to see bands. The whole point of punk regalia—as of the uniform of any youth movement—was to assert a space between the wearer and mainstream society, and I used to cherish the disapproving looks I received. Outside of society? Hell yeah! In fact punks, hippies, and other counter-culture figures assert their rejection of society much more aggressively than wearers of the veil.

Freedom of expression must include the choice to be different or “separate”, whether you are an indigenous punk or an immigrant from a minority ethnic and religious group. If we don’t have the freedom to look “creepy” (in the words of Azadeh Moave) we are not free at all.

Blair thinks he can get away with his specious arguments because he knows that people in Britain don’t like the veil. Liberals believe it represents female subjugation, conservatives are unhappy with an immigrant group asserting its identity so forcefully. The veil has few supporters, apart from Muslims themselves, and probably a minority of them. I’m not crazy about it, but to disallow the veil because it is “a mark of separation” is illogical. What next? No saris for Indians? Straight hair for West Indians?

In the end if Blair and Co think their arguments against the veil are better than those of its proponents they need to argue the case. If the veil is such a lousy idea, it will fall.

Blair’s comments were prompted by two recent “veil events” in the UK : (i) the comment by the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, that he does not want women to wear the veil when they visit his constituency office, and (ii) the sacking of a teaching assistant for wearing the veil in school.

As for the first of these, I really don't know where Straw gets the idea he can tell people what to wear to his office. He seems to forget he is THEIR servant, not the other way around—it is not for him to dictate what his constituents wear.

On the other hand, I agree with not allowing veils in school, because I think it must inevitably lead to making schools completely secular. That would be great: no veil, no cross, no boring prayers. I have no problem with parents who want to give their kids religious instruction, but there is plenty of time after school for that. In a diverse and broadly secular country like Britain, religion in the classroom is an inappropriate hangover from earlier days when Christianity was an essential part of national identity. It obviously isn’t now.

Other views: A Muslim journalist in London wore a full-length veil for a day and describes the experience here. For a perspective from a Pinay living in London, see eevil midget.

Why do the Brits have so little national pride?

Because it’s a dump that’s why!

That’s the short answer, but for those of you waiting on a windy railway platform for a train that will never come here’s a slightly longer version to take your mind off your troubles.

First of all, is it even true that the Brits have little national pride? As we will no doubt see this summer at the World Cup, the British hooligan with “Made in England” tattooed on his head is infamous the world over—isn’t that a form of national pride, albeit a perverted one?

Only if you think a rabid dog is “proud”. The outbursts of British xenophobia, heavily laced with self-loathing, that punctuate the world’s news bulletins at regular intervals hold little delight. British nationalism of the “You hate us – we don’t care” variety is a million miles away from the “inordinate self-esteem, a reasonable or justifiable self-respect” that the dictionary defines as “pride”.

Let’s leave lager louts for a moment. A few years ago I was in Tanzania when I bumped into a couple of Indian sisters. Since we were in neither Britain nor India, I wasn’t sure where they were from them so I asked if they were Brits. “Fraid so” they said. 'Fraid so! Ask a Frenchman if he is from France and he’ll puff out his chest and say “Mais, bien sur!” (“But of course”.) I wasn’t offended by my new friends’ reply, in fact I might well have answered in the same apologetic way. It’s the way we talk to each other, ridiculous as it might sound.

The contrasting attitudes of the French and the British to Concorde, the supersonic jet aircraft they built together, are also telling. The French were inordinately proud of the plane, one of only two supersonic aircraft to have entered commercial service. The Brits on the other hand were always quite shame-faced about it because it was late and over budget and a major polluter. I’m not saying the Brits were wrong to feel obscurely guilty about the project, history may record that as a better stance than French amour propre, but the contrast is striking.

So if my proposition is accepted (and it’s open to debate), why is this so? Why do the citizens of a country that only 80 years ago held sway over about a quarter of the world's polulation and a quarter of the world's total land area, a country that has made an enormous and continuing contribution to world culture from Shakespeare to the Beatles—why do these people seem to have such low self-esteem? Why do they apologise to each other for being British?

PS I think it is important to distinguish between pride and arrogance, which the Brits are sometimes, with justification, accused of. Arrogance ("a feeling or an impression of superiority manifested in an overbearing manner or presumptuous claims seems to me to be some sort of bastard offspring of "pride" -- a mutant cousin of genuine pride in your country and its achievements that does not depend on the denigration of others.

London Olympics in 2012: le débâcle

I’ve been full of foreboding ever since that greasy Tory twit Lord Coe managed to persuade the IOC to award the 2012 Olympics to a patch of waste ground in grim London in preference to an already built stadium in beautiful Paris.

The Brits just cannot handle this sort of thing. The French and Germans, yes. The Chinese, of course. Even a small and reputedly inefficient country like Greece can host the Olympics successful. But the Brits?

Let’s take the typical foul up over the rebuilding of Wembley stadium, one of the most famous football grounds in the world.

The original deadline for the £757m stadium, in north London, was autumn 2005 - it was extended first to the end of January and then to the end of March.

And guess what, it’s still nowhere near finished. The cup final (in May) has had to be moved because of concerns that the stadium would not be ready. The company building the stadium lost £106 million last year because of the project and is on the verge of bankruptcy. To cap it all, yesterday:

The Wembley stadium site was evacuated after a 50-tonne steel rafter slipped 3ft, creating an "enormous bang".

About 3,500 workers were cleared from the site of the £757m project, already behind schedule, just before 0900 GMT.

Why did the beam fall down? Because in the rush to finish the stadium, it had been crappily welded. Oh, wonderful.

Mind you, the Wembley fiasco is nothing on what the Olympics has in store for us. You think I’m kidding? The BBC has helpfully provided us with a list of recent, ahem, landmark projects in the UK:

• The Scottish Parliament at Holyrood cost more than 10 times its original £40m estimate and was completed three years late in 2004 for £431m.
• The national air traffic control centre at Swanwick, Hampshire, had been due to open in 1996 and cost £350m. It eventually opened in 2002, having cost £623m.
• The new British Library, opened in 1997 at a cost of £511m. It was three times over-budget - and construction work had overrun by five years.
• The privately-financed Channel Tunnel opened a year behind schedule in 1994, at a cost of £10bn - more than double the original budget.

And they didn’t even mention the Millennium Dome!

Why are the Brits so useless at these projects? Here’s my tuppence hap'nys worth.

• There is very little sense of national pride in Britain. The French (who should have been awarded the 2012 Olympics) could not stand the indignity of failure. The Chinese will not allow the games to be anything but a success in 2008. Yet the Brits will just shrug their shoulders as the extent of the calamity becomes apparent.
• The Brits will never admit something is going wrong. It’s no surprise to me that the authorities at Wembley are trying to make out that the partial roof collapse is a minor matter. In every one of the fiascos listed above I am sure you could find a government minister voicing his absolute certainty that that the project will be completed on time and under budget.
• Ever since Thatcher, the Brits have been wedded to dodgy public-private schemes that never, ever work. Even if they bring in the Australians (Wembley) or the French (Channel Tunnel) the end result is the same, a complete cock-up.

Anyway, whatever the reason, I am absolutely certain that, come about 2010, someone in the BBC will be trawling through the archives to compose an article on why the disastrous plans for the 2012 Olympics are only the latest in a series of such high-profile fiascos. And when you read that article please remember where you read it first.

The shame of the British army

The only remotely amusing feature of the video of the assault by British soldiers on Iraqi teenagers is the way the media are studiously referring to it as an “alleged” attack. I’d love to hear what else the journalists think might be happening. It was always possible to see how the earlier photographs of British “abuse” of Iraqi prisoners might have been faked, as in fact they were proved to be, but the brutish and life-threatening battering of Iraqi protestors I saw on BBC this morning could not have been doctored.

Even more disgusting was the soldier who filmed this spectacle (from a nearby rooftop presumably). Unable to retrain his excitement—which seems to verge on sexual ecstasy at times—we hear the cameraman going "Oh yes! Oh yes! You're gonna get it. Yes, naughty little boys. You little fuckers, you little fuckers. Die. Ha Ha." and then mimicking the teenagers as they cry for mercy “oh don’t hit me”.

One common feature of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib and Basra is that if it had been left up to the authorities, these incidents would never have come to light at all. The only reason both crimes were discovered is that technology has given moronic thugs the chance to film their own crimes and thus to expose themselves. For that small mercy we should, I suppose, be grateful. In fact the British video only came to light because it was being shown to other soldiers, presumably in a spirit of bravado, at an army camp in Germany. That’s nauseating in itself.

For more on the darker side of the British army in Iraq, see here.

Your country needs you – but you aren’t coming

Today’s Guardian has an interesting piece on declining recruitment rates in British army. It seems that now the game is about getting shot up in Basra rather than larking about with tanks on Salisbury Plain, potential squaddies are thinking twice. The article reminded me of Billy Connolly’s brilliant antiwar song “I'm askin' you sergeant where's mine?”:

Oh sergeant is this the adventure you meant
When I put my name down on the line
All that talk of computers and sunshine and skis
Oh I'm askin' you sergeant where's mine?

The fact is, as Michael Moore showed so clearly in Fahrenheit 9/11, most military recruitment involves selling a pack of lies to vulnerable young men with few other options. In times of peace, all you lose is a few years before you can afford to buy yourself out, in wartime you can lose the lot, as Private Scott McArdle found out.

Private Scott McArdle [was] killed at 22 - along with 31-year-old Sgt Stuart Gray, 19-year-old Pte Paul Lowe and a civilian interpreter - by a suicide bomber in November 2004, one week after the Black Watch moved up to their infamous posting at Camp Dogwood, south-west of Baghdad. Scott's immediate family live on Piper Drive, up on an estate on the north side of town, where the houses look like pebbledashed bars of Toblerone. The story of his six-year career in the army says a lot about what pushes local school-leavers towards the military and, as far as its tragic last chapter is concerned, much of what is now serving to put them off.

Scott resolved to join the Black Watch after they visited his school, St Andrew's in Kirkcaldy. "They'll have a recruitment drive maybe three or four times a year," says Martin [his uncle]. "You'll see them round the shopping centres, and they'll go to every high school in Fife and Dundee and Perth, six months to a year before the guys are leaving school. That's what they do; that's why they've got such a big thing here. You're 15, 16, and you think: 'That would be great.'

"Scott wanted to keep fit; he'd done boxing and running at school. And you couldn't get made redundant; there were secure prospects. To him it was a job. He got decent money, and accommodation. And he wanted to travel, to see the world. That's why he originally joined up."
His first spell in the army, including tours of duty in Northern Ireland and Kosovo, lasted until March 2004, when, after a spell in Basra, he decided to leave. He had met Sarah McLaren, a local girl who was now pregnant, and he had resolved to stay in Glenrothes. "He left to be with her," says Martin. "He was a young guy, maybe a bit paranoid, thinking, 'What will she be up to if I'm in Iraq or wherever?' But as soon as he was out, he thought, 'Why did I do that?'"

The local job market, it seemed, could not offer anything that made civilian life even halfway worthwhile. At first, Martin - who works in "security ... debt-collecting, stuff like that" - arranged some work for him, though both of them knew it was hardly ideal. Scott also went for training with a company, offering commission-only work selling burglar alarms to the elderly. "The trick," says Martin, "was, 'How would you like a free weekend away, all expenses paid?' So when they get there, they've got this voucher, but they only get the voucher if they spend £800 on a security system. It was just a little white box with a panic button. It would probably cost about £55 in B&Q. But they were also going to pensioners and putting the fear of god in them, showing them articles: '89-year-old woman mugged and killed.'" Scott lasted a day, and never went back.

After three months living on benefits, he decided to return to the army. "He knew he was going back to Iraq," says Martin. "I said, 'Scott - why are you doing it?' He said, 'I'm fed up not being able to get a job that's satisfying.' Sarah was pregnant, and they were planning to get married, and they wanted to have a financial future for the kid.

"As strange as it might sound, I had an inkling he was never coming back that day, when I said goodbye to him. I was never emotional with him, and that day I was. He never had much money, 'cos he was living off the dole. So I gave him money for him and his missus to go and have a meal and make his last night a night to remember. And I said it to someone that evening: 'I doubt we'll see Scott again.'"

Former British Ambassador to Washington delivers a slashing attack on Blair and his gang of "pygmies"

Sir Christopher Meyer has written the first great British political autobiography of the century. DC Confidential is not published until tomorrow, so I base that claim solely on the extracts that have appeared this week in the Guardian, but what a cutlery drawer of knives in the back they contain.

As soon as I read the first extract I leapt to the computer to order a copy for my Mum, who in the very first rank of the abhorrers of the current Prime Minister. I can hear her chuckles already,

Meyer was the British Ambassador to Washington during the lead up to the Iraq war and in a piece headlined “The Pygmies in Tony Blair’s cabinet” he carefully skewers many of the British ministers who swanned through Washington and tried, usually unsuccessfully, to impress their counterparts in the "special relationship". Here he is on John Prescott, the “deputy prime minister”, a job with no constitutional significance that was created only to appease Prescott for not being given one of the great offices of state:

Prescott took his status as deputy prime minister very seriously, insisting always on seeing the vice-president and on discussing the full range of foreign policy issues of the moment. The problem with this was that he never appeared to be sufficiently up on these issues and he always seemed nervous. I would will him on as he sank lower in his chair and talked faster and faster. During the Kosovo campaign he got into a terrible tangle with a senator, to whom he talked about war in the "Balklands" and "Kovosa".

However it is Tony Blair’s lack of an appetite for bargaining (and the contrast Meyer draws between Blair and Thatcher in this regard) that is particularly damning:

Tony Blair chose to take his stand against Saddam and alongside President Bush from the highest of high moral ground. It is the definitive riposte to Blair the Poodle, seduced though he and his team always appeared to be by the proximity and glamour of American power.

But the high moral ground, and the pure white flame of unconditional support to an ally in service of an idea, have their disadvantages. They place your destiny in the hands of an ally. They fly above the tangled history of Sunni, Shia, Kurd, Turkomen and Assyrian. They discourage descent into the dull detail of tough and necessary bargaining: meat and drink to Margaret Thatcher but, so it seemed, uncongenial to Tony Blair.

That certainly has the ring of truth to it.

I also liked his description of Slick Willy’s handshake:

The handshake and its variations occupy a minor but interesting niche in the rituals of American politics. After I had spent a while in Washington, President Clinton would greet me with a firm handshake and a grip on the elbow. The elbow manoeuvre, which betokened a degree of familiarity, showed that I had made modest progress up the ladder of presidential salutations.

Before Clinton left office, I graduated to the upper-arm rub. This involved having your hand vigorously shaken, then dropped, to be replaced by a rubbing of the upper right arm, while a conversation took place. This signalled a greater intimacy than the elbow grip.

I mentioned this to a friend in the White House, saying that I was touched by this gesture of friendship. My friend, disillusioned by the Monica Lewinsky business, commented sardonically: "Friendship, hell! He was just wiping his hand."

Great stuff.

It's curtains for him

At a Scottish Politician of the Year awards ceremony at the Prestonfield House hotel last year the Labour peer Lord Watson imbibed rather heavily. No doubt he was not the only one. However, Lord Watson’s evening started to veer off towards the unknown when towards the end of the evening he skulked into a closed hotel reception room, took out a box of matches from his sporran (that purse thingy you hang around your kilt), and set fire to a pair of curtains. He left the room, only to return to check that his blaze was coming along well. The whole episode was captured on CCTV and he is now in jail for arson. Here is the Mirror’s account.

LABOUR'S Lord Watson was yesterday jailed for 16 months for setting fire to a hotel curtain after a heavy drinking session.

Sheriff Kathrine Mackie said the act was "deliberate and dangerous".

She added: "The potential for serious injury to guests and staff, and for very significant damage to the property, was considerable."

She said jail was the only option as the ex-Scottish Parliament MP posed a "significant risk of re-offending".

The court heard he had a drink problem and had blacked out that night.

Sheriff Mackie continued: "No explanation has been offered for your actions. A large amount of alcohol appears to have been consumed but that neither excuses nor fully explains your behaviour."
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