A properly fastidious friend of half a century’s standing, Robin Fairlie, wrote to me the other day:
"Years ago I wrote in protest to the historian author of a historical production called “The Norman Achievement”. You will appreciate that since Normandy is a peninsula; and so is southern Italy where William the Conqueror’s friends landed up, the word peninsula turns up quite a lot in this book. Spelt invariably as “peninsular”. I did eventually get an authorial response, regretting the occurrence of this “typo” – which has since become near-standard practice in our media. Which reminds me of the even more common habit in my business environment of using “media” as a singular."
To which I replied:
"As to ‘media’ treated as singular, the admirable Bob Burchfield in his third edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage writes: "…media is properly construed with a plural verb or pronoun. But it has swiftly followed agenda and data, and, like them, is often treated as a mass noun with a singular verb or pronoun. We are still at the debating table, however, on the question of the media are/is having a field day in their/its reporting of the scandal. When in doubt use the plural. Above all, never write a media or the medias." (Not sure that I see anything to debate about that, myself, but I bow as always to Dr B.)" Sadly, Robert Burchfield is currently (14 May) ill in hospital in Oxford. All those who value the language and its most genial though rigorous defender will wish him well.
Extracts from a recent Guardian editorial:
"…it should be recognised that the differences in language, religion and culture means that patrolling the streets of Belfast and those of Basra are hardly comparable…" "The events of the last two weeks … means the government will have to think…” [my emphasis]. This must surely set some kind of record, especially in a newspaper which once prided itself on its elegant use of English. (I hope, though, that I haven’t given the impression of having my knife into the Guardian, easily my all-time favourite paper in spite of everything. What else would an ageing man with a beard and sandals read?)
Defunct clichés to avoid: ‘have one’s knife into someone’. Apologies.
A recent letter in the Guardian (there I go again) referred to King Canute — which the writer spelled ‘Cnut‘, thereby giving an awesome impression of scholarship — as ‘delusional‘, clearly under the common delusion that Canute, or Cnut, thought he could make the tide recede by ordering it to do so, when in fact he gave his order to the sea in order to demonstrate to his fawning courtiers that they were wrong to think or call him omnipotent. Others persist in saying that someone who has blundered in a way that damages him has "shot himself in the foot", an image from the first World War where soldiers deliberately shot themselves in the foot to avoid being sent to the trenches. But trying to correct these tiresome misconceptions is like — well, it’s like trying to turn back the tide, I suppose.
There’s nothing new these days about the public announcement of the appointment and name of the new head of the Secret Intelligence Service, SIS, commonly called MI6 (or, often by the Guardian newspaper, ‘M16′). Gone are the days when the identity of ‘C’ was a closely guarded secret, not least because the very existence of SIS was an even more closely guarded secret, although from whom it was kept secret was always a bit of a mystery. The latest appointment however aroused a good deal of media comment, some of it hostile. Unusually, the name of the new ‘Chief’ was already widely familiar: John Scarlett, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee and ‘owner’ of the famous, or infamous, government dossier on Iraq’s WMD, witness in the Hutton Inquiry, ‘mate’ of Alastair Campbell and Tony Blair. Scarlett’s appointment to the top MI6 job, over the head of his predecessor’s deputy (the position from which past appointments to head the Service have generally, perhaps always, been made), has been queried on several grounds.
First, it emerged from the Hutton report and the dossier affair that Scarlett had become personally exceptionally close to the prime minister and his No. 10 staff, perhaps closer than might have been expected from their professional relationships alone. Was this another top job for a Tony’s crony? I doubt if there’s much substance to this. It’s probably a good thing when the heads of the main intelligence and security services get on well with the prime minister and his immediate staff. The prime minister seems not to have played any part in the choice of Scarlett beyond endorsing the recommendation of the selection panel set up to advise the foreign secretary and prime minister on the appointment, so there’s no serious indication of nepotism or other impropriety here. But it’s perhaps legitimate to wonder whether Scarlett would be able to establish an equally satisfactory relationship with a Tory prime minister in the event of a change of government during his tenure, after having been so close to the Blair people.
Secondly, there seems to have been a quite unnecessary, and wholly undesirable, degree of secretiveness about the selection process. Downing Street referred all questions about the details of the procedure to the Cabinet Office, which merely kept repeating that the usual procedures had been followed. The selection panel had been headed by Sir David Omand, the government’s ‘security and intelligence coordinator’ and permanent secretary of the Cabinet Office. According to a useful account of all this by Peter Preston, former editor of the Guardian, in the Guardian of 10 May 2004, the Downing Street official spokesman, asked in a lobby briefing who had been the other members of the selection panel chaired by Omand, gave the memorable reply that "it [wasn't] our policy to provide details of Civil Service Commission practice". Only in Britain could an official spokesman get away with such an extraordinary statement. If it isn’t "our" policy to provide details of Civil Service Commission practice, it jolly well should be, and it’s greatly to be hoped that when the long-delayed Freedom of Information Act comes into force next year (2005), it will soon be used to extract some information about these hitherto unrevealed practices of the body responsible for the appointments and impartiality of our civil servants.
But the third and much more substantial reason for concern over Scarlett’s appointment must be that in his capacity as Chairman of the JIC (and an SIS officer with a distinguished career in that Service), his work on the government’s Iraq WMD dossier, conducted in very close collaboration with Campbell and other members of the No. 10 Downing Street staff, made an unprecedented breach in the hitherto impregnable firewall between the collection, analysis and interpretation of intelligence on the one hand, and the conduct and public presentation of government policy on the other. Once drawn into the realm of policy discussion, advice and formulation with ministers and their policy officials, intelligence officers are inevitably exposed to the pressure and temptation to doctor the intelligence material which they interpret and present so as to make it support (or cast doubt on) particular policies or policy proposals which they are simultaneously recommending or questioning in their policy roles. Such doctoring may happen almost unconsciously, in the selection of the intelligence submitted to ministers, in its interpretation, or just in a certain slant in the way in which it is reported. One only has to read the evidence given to the Hutton Inquiry to see how easily this can happen, with No. 10 pressing the intelligence community for ever more evidence of Iraq’s possession of WMD and programmes for developing them, and senior intelligence officers desperately urging their subordinates to conduct yet another search for material to satisfy No. 10. It should be for ministers and their officials to decide what weight to give to impartially supplied intelligence in formulating their policies, and then to find the most persuasive ways of presenting those policies to the public: not for intelligence officers to search their files for snippets of intelligence that can be made to appear to support policies already decided. It’s reported, accurately or otherwise, that a number of senior and middle-ranking SIS officers have been worried by Scarlett’s apparent breach of these fundamental principles in the context of the writing of the dossier: if so, it’s easy to imagine how they must feel about his appointment as their Chief. Still, the Omand panel was apparently adamant that Scarlett was the best man for the job, and if they were right, it couldn’t have been right to appoint anyone else. Might it not however have been prudent and tactful to defer the appointment and its announcement until the government has seen the report of the Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction currently being conducted by Lord Butler, former Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service, and four eminent colleagues, in case their report turns out to include criticism of John Scarlett — which could be even more embarrassing than otherwise now that Scarlett has already been awarded the top prize in his Service? Anyway, it would obviously be irresponsible to suggest that those interested in the Butler Review, its membership, terms of reference, methods of procedure, etc., after they have visited its website by clicking on the link in the last sentence, should then compare it with a very funny spoof of the same website whose website address is most improperly close to that of the real website — and which indeed is the first result thrown up by Google if you do a search for ‘Butler Inquiry Intelligence’. So I make no such irresponsible suggestion.
It begins to look as if the abuse of Iraqi prisoners and other civilians has been somewhat less prevalent among British troops than with the Americans, although the Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, had to acknowledge in the House of Commons on 10 May that there had probably been some bad cases in the British sector, with serious allegations both from our own troops and from Amnesty International, all apparently promptly investigated and with some prosecutions imminent. One of these alleges the killing of at least one innocent Iraqi civilian by British soldiers, something several degrees worse even than torture, and there are reports of several more wholly inexcusable killings by British soldiers. Hoon also admitted, under intensive questioning, that British troops had been hooding Iraqi prisoners, contrary to military instructions going back to the time of Edward Heath’s government, and said this had been stopped last September as soon as it had come to light, prompting the question why it had been allowed to happen at all. It emerged that a report to the Coalition by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on ICRC visits to Coalition detention "facilities" between March and November last year had been delivered to the U.S. Iraqi civilian administrator, Paul Bremer, in February this year (2004), and Mr Hoon said that a copy of the report had been given to Bremer’s then British deputy, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who passed it on to the British military in Iraq, who passed it back to their headquarters in London — where nobody saw fit to show it to British ministers, even though it included reports of abuse in British as well as American detention centres. The excuse for this omission, apparently accepted by Geoff Hoon and, by implication, Tony Blair, was that the passages in the ICRC report referring to alleged abuses by British troops had already been identified and investigated before the delivery of the report: no further action by the British authorities had therefore been required: so there was no need to tell ministers about the report. No sooner had the Defence Secretary’s statement in parliament been reported in the press than the Foreign Secretary publicly corrected it: it now seems that the report found its way to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in London via a French legal adviser to the Coalition but that Greenstock didn’t receive or see it after all. But this can’t affect the central points: officials of the FCO or Ministry of Defence who saw the report should have shown it at once to ministers: British ministers should have taken immediate action with their American counterparts to press for an end to such unacceptable behaviour: and the government should take much more seriously its responsibilities as a senior partner in the Coalition, not just confine its concerns to the activities of British troops and officials.
There are at least two worrying aspects of all this.
First, abuses of Iraqis by the Coalition involving degrading treatment and violence right up to the level of systematic torture are, or should be, of immediate and pressing concern to all the governments of the Coalition, whether they have been committed by American, British or indeed any other Coalition forces. This kind of behaviour by any of the Coalition forces has the most serious possible implications for the whole Coalition, not just for the Americans, with disturbing consequences for the Coalition’s relations with the Iraqis and hence for the prospects of eventual success of the whole Iraqi enterprise. It passes belief that any British official or military officer, in Iraq or in London, could have failed to recognise the importance of the ICRC report and the obvious need to bring it to the immediate attention of British ministers. It manifestly called for immediate consultations at the highest level with the Americans about its policy implications, and about how to handle the fallout from the inevitable publication of the substance, if not the actual text, of the incidents it described. Meanwhile we’re bound to wonder whether the climate created by the scorn and disregard for international law exhibited by George W. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld and the rest, in disowning America’s international obligations, and above all in going to war in deliberate defiance of the Security Council and the United Nations Charter, may not have affected the attitudes of American soldiers, gaolers and interrogators in Iraq towards their own legal and moral obligations. What’s sauce for the goose…
Secondly, it’s time for our ministers to stop seeking to excuse their failures and shortcomings by claiming not to have been told what has been happening in their own departments or in their own spheres of responsibility. The old saying that ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’ applies, or ought to apply, to government as much as to the law. One of the top priorities of a responsible minister must be to ensure that he or she is fully and promptly informed of any event, practice, document or other development likely to affect policy or to arouse public or parliamentary concern — indeed, of anything that might need to be reported to the prime minister, to parliament, or to the people. Any half-sensible minister will make absolutely certain that his or her senior and middle-ranking officials are fully aware, and frequently reminded, of their responsibility to report such matters to ministers, however daunting the thought of confronting a minister with potentially disastrous news. The dismissal of a few officials who fail in this elementary duty can concentrate the minds of the rest in a most salutary manner. The phenomenon has been cropping up with melancholy frequency recently: the prime minister "wasn’t told" that the 45-minute warning about Iraq’s supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction applied only to battlefield weapons, not long-range rockets or artillery; Geoff Hoon, as Defence Secretary, "wasn’t told" that his own department had decided to out the luckless Dr David Kelly as the source of the reports in the media of the government’s action in consciously including misleading information about Iraq in the famous WMD dossier; the former immigration minister "wasn’t told" that sections of her department were admitting large numbers of immigrants without doing proper checks on them, indeed without apparently doing any checks at all. Parliament should never again have to listen to a minister pleading that "It’s not my fault, guv: I never knew, did I?" The Opposition, the back benches and the media should be replying in unison: "Well, you should have known, and it’s your fault if you didn’t."
* * * * *
"A GRUESOME video showing an American contractor being beheaded by an al-Qaeda linked group in revenge for the “Satanic degradation” of Iraqi prisoners was released yesterday with a warning that his body would be followed by “coffins after coffins”. Nick Berg, 26, was filmed identifying himself in the short tape posted on the internet before being pushed to the floor. One of five masked men put a knife to his neck. Amid Mr Berg’s screams and shouts of “Allahu Akbar (God is greatest)” the man sawed off his head before holding it in front of the camera." The Times, 12 May 04.
No conceivable comment can do justice to this. The fact is enough.
* * * * *
The publication of photographs (and now videos) showing American soldiers terrorising and abusing Iraqi prisoners — parading them naked, hooding them, threatening them with death by electrocution or shooting, forcing them to commit sexual acts, setting ferocious dogs on them — has further aggravated the anti-American sentiment which has taken hold in Europe and indeed in much of the rest of the world in the last year or two. It’s sad that the huge outpouring of sympathy and identification with the Americans throughout the world in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 should so quickly have been dispelled, to be replaced increasingly by anger, fear and disgust as Mr Bush’s administration has persistently ignored and defied both international opinion and indeed international law, boasting that the most narrowly defined interests of the United States will henceforth outweigh all long-term international interests and that the US no longer considers itself bound by treaties or other international agreements and understandings, even including the United Nations Charter. Of course there has always been hostility (often generated by envy and a hint of fear) towards any country which is unashamedly richer and more powerful than others, and whose culture is seen as a threat to the national identity of its junior partners. When Britain was the world’s superpower, she was more interested in being respected than in being liked. The Americans are unusual in wanting to be both liked and (under the current administration anyway) feared, a double trick that’s not at all easy to pull off. The paradox is that millions of people all over the world are indeed strongly attracted to many features of the US: the openness of its society and government, the commitment to its people’s freedom, its wonderfully liberal and versatile constitution, the warmth and friendliness of its people (many of them, anyway), its informality and apparent lack of snobbishness (with some inevitable but rare exceptions), its encouragement of anyone, of however humble origins, to reach the highest positions of wealth and power by hard work and dedication, its success in reconciling all-American patriotism with respect for the national cultures and life-styles of its many immigrant communities; not forgetting the glories of the American landscape, from the magnificent San Francisco harbour to the awesome Rockies, the Grand Canyon and the Manhattan skyline, New England in the fall and the buzz of Key West. In every country there are countless people who dream of the chance to migrate to the United States in search of a better and more glamorous life. Yet there is increasingly also a sense in the other western liberal democracies that in some mysterious way the US has got left behind, complacently self-satisfied in its vast self-sufficiency, increasingly impervious to what has been going on in the rest of the civilised world. It’s surely inexplicable that a country which commands so much envy and admiration in the outside world should persist in the gruesome practice of judicially killing its criminals, when the abolition of capital punishment is one of the key qualifications for membership of the European Community, executions so widely regarded outside the US as evidence of barbarity. Commentators on the revelations of hideous abuses of Iraqi prisoners are increasingly pointing out that the physical and psychological abuse and deliberate humiliation and degradation of convicts in US penitentiaries, often euphemistically given the Orwellian title of Corrective Institutions, is widespread throughout the country to the extent of being effectively systemic. Some American commentators have sought to explain, although admittedly not to excuse, the revelations of torture by Americans in Iraq by the failure of the US armed forces to inform their soldiers and interrogators of the provisions of the Geneva Conventions and to provide them with copies of those texts, as if without such knowledge no-one could reasonably be expected to see that there’s anything wrong with stripping a defenceless prisoner naked, putting a hood on him, shackling him to steel bars in an agonising posture, and threatening to kill him. Anti-American feeling in the rest of the world is bound to be inflamed by this sort of thing. But for those of us who feel genuine affection for that wonderful country and its great people, who have lived there, have much-loved friends and relations there, and have ineradicable memories associated with the place, it’s terribly sad to see international respect for and liking of the Americans steadily ebbing away.
Up-date (June 2008): This file (http://www.barder.com/politics/international/burma/) has become irretrievably corrupted in some way. I have a back-up of it (of course!) but as it is now more than four years old, and events have moved on in Burma since Derek Tonkin wrote it, I am consulting him about replacing it with a new and more up-to-date paper. Meanwhile apologies to those, including the writer of a very recent somewhat less than gracious comment, who have been frustrated by inability to read the original (2004) piece.
Brian
