Tony Blair on parenting and respect: speech at Watford, 2 September 2005:
… new laws can’t do it all, in the end they only deal with consequences, but they can signal a new approach and a new determination on the part of the majority that it is time to reassert ourselves. In turn however I believe this only happens if the criminal justice system and its culture also changes. And here is where I want to say something, and I think people may find it difficult but I believe is fundamental to trying to tackle this, the criminal justice system that we have in this country still asks first and foremost, how do we protect the accused from potential transgressions of the state or the police? That is the attitude that the criminal justice system has at its heart, is really that. And I think the first question should be: how do we protect the majority from the dangerous and irresponsible minority? In other words, I put that question round the other way, and a criminal justice system that is not doing the latter, in other words protecting the majority and protecting their right to have respect from other people when they are showing that respect towards them is a criminal justice system that isn’t in fact just, and that is the problem that we have. [My emphasis -- BLB]
Does our prime minister, a qualified barrister, really believe that “the criminal justice system that we have in this country still asks first and foremost, how do we protect the accused from potential transgressions of the state or the police”? Was he speaking from a prepared script that included this extraordinary assertion, or was he on autopilot and uttering the first words that came into his head as likely to go down well with the Daily Mail? Either way, does he really believe it – and, worse, see it as a useful starting-point for a considered reform of our justice system? Pretty disturbing, if so.
< Tony Blair at Watford
Michael Portillo’s weekly Sunday Times column on 11 September 2005 was headed: ‘There is a Tory Blair, but it’s not David Cameron’. No, it’s Tony Blair.
Brian
The Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael Brown ("Brownie" to his friend President George W Bush), humiliated by his boss Michael Chertoff, Secretary for Homeland Security, who took him off the Katrina relief job while leaving him as FEMA director for any other disasters that might come along, has resigned, unsurprisingly and, one might think, in terms of his self-respect, not before time. Asked if he feels he has been used as a scapegoat, he replied, not altogether without justification: "By the press, yes; by the President, no."
< Michael Brown
Brown must bear his share of the blame for the deeply flawed official response to Katrina. But so should the New Orleans Mayor, Ray Nagin; the Governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco; Michael Chertoff; and the President at whose desk the buck stops. But while Brown, humiliated and reviled, was resigning, Bush, flanked by Nagin and Blanco, was doing a sort of triumphal amphibious tour of the stricken city. We have yet to hear what Nagin and Governor Blanco did to get the poor, the sick, the old and the other vulnerable thousands out of New Orleans between her declaration of a state of emergency on the Friday preceding Katrina, and the arrival of Katrina on the Monday, apart from the Governor formally requesting federal help on the Saturday. Where were the fleets of school buses, the flotilla of boats, the requisitioned helicopters? Why didn’t the Governor call out the State’s National Guard during those three days available for preparation? What did the Mayor do to pre-position water, food, sanitation and security arrangements at the convention center and the superdome? Which of them briefed and deployed the police throughout the city? Perhaps all these things were done. If so, we have yet to hear about it.
Another reason for feeling just a tiny bit sorry for Brownie is the slur cast by the American and British media in column after column on his experience and qualifications for the job: the fact that he had served as commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association was irresistibly good for a laugh, but the media generally refrained from mentioning that he had a good deal of other experience, some of it more relevant:
Under Secretary Brown has led Homeland Security’s response to more than 164 presidentially declared disasters and emergencies, including the 2003 Columbia Shuttle disaster and the California wildfires in 2003. In 2004, Mr. Brown led FEMA’s thousands of dedicated disaster workers during the most active hurricane season in over 100 years, as FEMA delivered aid more quickly and more efficiently than ever before.
Previously, Mr. Brown served as FEMA’s Deputy Director and the agency’s General Counsel. Shortly after the September 11th terrorist attacks, Mr. Brown served on the President’s Consequence Management Principal’s Committee, which acted as the White House’s policy coordination group for the federal domestic response to the attacks. Later, the President asked him to head the Consequence Management Working Group to identify and resolve key issues regarding the federal response plan. In August 2002, President Bush appointed him to the Transition Planning Office for the new Department of Homeland Security, serving as the transition leader for the EP&R Division.
Prior to joining FEMA, Mr. Brown practiced law in Colorado and Oklahoma, where he served as a bar examiner on ethics and professional responsibility for the Oklahoma Supreme Court and as a hearing examiner for the Colorado Supreme Court. He had been appointed as a special prosecutor in police disciplinary matters. While attending law school he was appointed by the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee of the Oklahoma Legislature as the Finance Committee Staff Director, where he oversaw state fiscal issues. His background in state and local government also includes serving as an assistant to the city manager with emergency services oversight responsibilities and as a city councilman.
Mr. Brown was also an adjunct professor of law for the Oklahoma City University.
A native of Oklahoma, Mr. Brown holds a bachelor’s degree in Public Administration/Political Science from Central State University, Oklahoma. He received his J.D. from Oklahoma City University’s School of Law.
Footnote (15 September 2005): There has been controversy about alleged misrepresentation of some of Brown’s past experience, such as the accusation that he had been "assistant to the City Manager" and not "Assistant City Manager", and that the FEMA website biography of him, quoted above, may have misrepresented his qualifications in other ways also. Time magazine has published a useful analysis of these allegations and of Brown’s spokesperson’s answers to them. The FEMA website seems to have amended the biography of Brown in response to some of these suspicions, as indicated in the passage quoted earlier. The version currently on the FEMA website was last updated on 11 September. It does not record Brown’s removal from responsibility for the Katrina relief effort, nor his subsequent resignation as Director of FEMA. However, on another page, updated on 13 September, the website records that:
R. David Paulison was designated by President George W. Bush to serve as Acting Under Secretary of Emergency Preparedness and Response and Acting Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency on September 12, 2005. Mr. Paulison was previously appointed by President Bush and confirmed by the United States Senate as the Administrator for the U.S. Fire Administration in December 2001.
And on yet another web page dated 12 September FEMA carries the press release with Michael Brown’s statement on his resignation as Director.
Brian
An NBC report filmed in recent days in a Walmart store in New Orleans is on the Web at http://wimp.com/orleans/ (you may need to unblock pop-ups). It’s hard to imagine this going on in front of a television camera and crew. Guess who’s joining in?
But none of us should feel too holier-than-thou about this. Comments on recent posts both here and in other blogs have reminded (or informed) us that there is clear evidence of looting having taken place, sometimes widely, during the London Blitzes (air raids) in the second world war when houses and shops had been damaged by bombing; after earlier natural disasters in the US; after Cyclone Tracy had virtually destroyed the Australian city of Darwin in 1974; and of course during the mayhem that accompanied the liberation of occupied Europe at the end of WW2. There must be many more examples. It seems to go with the territory.
One should also resist the urge to write comments containing the words "thin veneer".
Trivial postscript: When is someone going to tell the BBC (and Gordon Brown, among about 59 million Brits) that New Orleans is pronounced roughly ‘New ORLins‘ (or, as the President of the United States calls it, ‘NAWlins‘), not ‘neworLEENS‘ — or, with an uneasy feeling that its French origins ought to be recognised, ‘neworLEEuns‘?
Brian
This is a message from a New Yorker, written last Saturday, 3 September 2005, and headed "Weird News about the Red Cross":
I’ve been watching the TV news coverage of the horrific situation in New Orleans (and elsewhere) over the last few days, and it suddenly occurred to me last night that not only was there no evidence of the National Guard or any sort of army presence in New Orleans, but that the Red Cross wasn’t in sight. In every disaster like this around the world – and particularly natural disasters – the Red Cross is usually one of the first organizations to be there supplying food, water, blankets, medical aid and immediate relief. But the Red Cross didn’t seem to be at the Superdome, which is where all the evacuees had been officially sent, and where research and rescue operations were taking the people rescued from their homes.
I called up the Red Cross this morning to make a donation, and I asked – before I donated the money – why the Red Cross wasn’t in New Orleans. They told me to call their press office (or some sort of public affairs department), which I did. They told me that Homeland Security was in charge of the entire operation, and that Homeland Security had instructed the Red Cross NOT to go to or give aid to New Orleans. They were told to set up shelters and provide immediate relief in other parts of the state and in the neighboring states. They were told that New Orleans was being evacuated, and that providing relief to evacuees would hamper those evacuation efforts.
I’m fairly horrified by this, and I wonder whether this has been picked up by any press or media. Does Homeland Security have the right to tell the Red Cross NOT to go into disaster zones? There is no evidence that providing food and water and medical aid to those poor souls in the Superdome would have in any way hampered their non-existent evacuation.
Am I paranoid, or is this particularly scary?
No, the writer of that message isn’t being paranoid, and yes, the story is very scary. Amazingly, the American Red Cross website confirms that the Red Cross was indeed barred by the National Guard, the local authorities and the Department of Homeland Security [but now see the footnote below and the first two Comments] from entering New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina:
Hurricane Katrina: Why is the Red Cross not in New Orleans?
Acess to New Orleans is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities and while we are in constant contact with them, we simply cannot enter New Orleans against their orders. The state Homeland Security Department had requested–and continues to request–that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city. The Red Cross has been meeting the needs of thousands of New Orleans residents in some 90 shelters throughout the state of Louisiana and elsewhere since before landfall. All told, the Red Cross is today operating 149 shelters for almost 93,000 residents. The Red Cross shares the nation’s anguish over the worsening situation inside the city. We will continue to work under the direction of the military, state and local authorities and to focus all our efforts on our lifesaving mission of feeding and sheltering. The Red Cross does not conduct search and rescue operations. We are an organization of civilian volunteers and cannot get relief aid into any location until the local authorities say it is safe and provide us with security and access. The original plan was to evacuate all the residents of New Orleans to safe places outside the city. With the hurricane bearing down, the city government decided to open a shelter of last resort in the Superdome downtown. We applaud this decision and believe it saved a significant number of lives. As the remaining people are evacuated from New Orleans, the most appropriate role for the Red Cross is to provide a safe place for people to stay and to see that their emergency needs are met. We are fully staffed and equipped to handle these individuals once they are evacuated.
Of course this is not to say that the American Red Cross isn’t doing excellent work elsewhere in the huge area devastated by Katrina. But those responsible for keeping them out of New Orleans, at a time when thousands of people there desperately needed the kind of support that the Red Cross traditionally supplies, must surely sometimes wonder, in the wee small hours of the morning, whether the terrible price, paid by so many desperate, stranded people in the flooded city, of the ban on a Red Cross presence was really justified by the incentive to evacuate (how? to where?) that the ban was apparently intended to provide. Was it really right to starve people into evacuating, which is what it amounts to? Leaving aside the morality of such a policy, was it even necessary? Most of those left stranded in the city seem to have been desperate to get out; receiving Red Cross support until they could do so would hardly have persuaded them to stay.
Another fatal decision that surely merits re-examination when the dust has settled and the flood waters have begun to recede.
Important footnote (9 Sept. 05): Please now see SR’s Comment below and my reply that follows it. SR has helpfully pointed out that it was the Louisiana State Department of Homeland Security, under the authorty of the Louisiana State Governor’s office, not the federal department of the same name, that banned the Red Cross from New Orleans. This of course puts matters in a very different light and the foregoing needs to be read accordingly.
Brian
PS: The message quoted above from New York was written by Louise Barder, American citizen and New York resident. Yes, we are by chance related (Louise is my daughter, sister of Owen).
‘The guy who runs this building I’m in, Emergency Management, he’s responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, “Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?” and he said, “Yeah, Mama, somebody’s coming to get you.” Somebody’s coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Friday… and she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night! [Sobbing] Nobody’s coming to get us. Nobody’s coming to get us. The Secretary has promised. Everybody’s promised. They’ve had press conferences. I’m sick of the press conferences. For god’s sakes, just shut up and send us somebody.’
‘We had Wal-Mart deliver three trucks of water, trailer trucks of water. FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] turned them back. They said we didn’t need them. This was a week ago. FEMA–we had 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on a Coast Guard vessel docked in my parish. The Coast Guard said, "Come get the fuel right away." When we got there with our trucks, they got a word. "FEMA says don’t give you the fuel." Yesterday–yesterday–FEMA comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in, he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards on our line and says, "No one is getting near these lines." Sheriff Harry Lee said that if America–American government would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn’t be in this crisis.’
– Aaron Broussard, President, Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, on NBC Meet the Press, Sunday 4 September.
For the full transcript of the whole programme, including a defence of his record by Secretary for Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, click here.
< Secretary Michael Chertoff
Thanks for drawing attention to these and other items in the programme to my wife and to Stygius.
Brian
There’s no need to repeat here the accusations that are blowing up a storm of criticism of the adequacy and timeliness, or lack of them, of the US federal government’s response to the devastation of New Orleans and surrounding areas by Hurricane Katrina. But the interesting question has been raised elsewhere: would the response to a similar disaster in Europe, and the behaviour of its victims, be any different? Others may know of European parallels: but there’s also an instructive comparison to be made with the destruction of the northern Australian city of Darwin by Cyclone Tracy on New Year’s Eve, 1974. I was in Canberra at the time and was one of the first people outside the Northern Territory to learn of the disaster half-way through Christmas Day, almost all of Darwin’s external communications having been blown away by Tracy. I visited Darwin just a few days later and found a lunar landscape of almost total destruction. There are of course major differences between the two disasters — but also some similarities, notably that in both cases the scale of the destruction necessitated the evacuation of virtually the whole city.
To quote the official account of the cyclone and its aftermath,
Early on Christmas Eve, Tracy passed the western tip of Bathurst Island, north of Darwin, turned around and began to accelerate towards the city. From midnight until 7.00am on Christmas Day, the cyclone passed directly over Darwin, with its ‘eye’ centred over the airport and northern suburbs … The rainfall was torrential and winds were officially recorded at 217 kilometres per hour (unofficial estimates placed them as high as 300 kilometres per hour). Houses and other buildings disintegrated under the onslaught, accompanied by the sounds of flying debris and breaking glass. With the cyclone’s passing, 49 people had died in the city and another 16 were lost at sea. Many more were injured. In all, 70 per cent of Darwin’s homes were destroyed or suffered severe structural damage. All services – communications, power, water and sewerage – were severed.
The account continues:
At the time of the cyclone, Darwin’s population was estimated at about 48,000. With essential services all severed, together with the risk of disease, and with food and shelter at a premium, a sizeable part of this population was evacuated. While many people left of their own accord by road, others were evacuated compulsorily by aircraft. The airlift began on Boxing Day [i.e. 26 December, less than 48 hours after the cyclone had struck] and over the next six days more than 25,000 were evacuated to southern cities. For the next six months access to the city was regulated by means of a permit system…
Once word of the disaster reached the southern states, Major-General Alan Stretton, Director-General of the Natural Disasters Organisation, was placed in charge of the rescue effort. He arrived in Darwin late on Christmas night [i.e. some 24 hours after the cyclone] and remained until 31 December. Emergency committees were established to deal with such matters as accommodation, clean-up, clothing, communications, evacuation, food, law and order, sanitation and health and social welfare. The defence forces played a major role in cleaning up the city and suburbs. …
Within two days about 10,000 people had left, about half by road and half by air. It appears that after this initial outflow the desire to evacuate dissipated – there was a growing feeling that it was better to "stay and see it out". However, Stretton was committed to reducing the city’s population to a "safe level" of 10,500, and he implemented a number of measures designed to make evacuation very attractive. … Stretton was supported by the government, which promised full reimbursement of personal costs consequent on evacuation. The momentum of the evacuations was regained, and in the end 25,628 people were evacuated by air, and 7,234 left by road. By 31 December 1974 [one week after the cyclone] only 10,638 people remained in Darwin. …
The Darwin Reconstruction Commission was formally established on 28 February 1975 by the Darwin Reconstruction Act 1975. It had the principal task of planning, coordinating and undertaking the rebuilding of Darwin. Between 1975 and 1978 the Commission let contracts worth more than $150 million and coordinated the construction and repair of more than 2500 homes as well as other construction projects.
The role of the Australian armed forces is especially noteworthy:
The three branches of the defence forces played major role in the relief operations. The defence contribution was effectively deployed through liaison with the local committees. Early on 26 December naval aircraft left southern bases for Darwin, with urgent supplies and personnel. Seven naval ships left Sydney at 11.30 AM on 26 December. The Navy was to play a special part in the clean-up of Darwin – difficult, distasteful and sometimes dangerous work. The Army flew specialist personnel into Darwin. Through them, rations, stores, equipment, and specialist vehicles were supplied. The entire RAAF transport fleet was involved in the airlift of supplies into Darwin, and the airlift out of 9,678 people who were evacuated by military aircraft.
In addition to the whole transport fleet of the Royal Australian Air Force, numerous commercial and private aircraft were used to help with the evacuation: some of the QANTAS aircraft broke the then world record for the number of people carried in a single aircraft. Gen. Stretton’s Natural Disasters Organisation organised a nationwide appeal for families throughout the country to offer accommodation in their homes for evacuees and the response was enormous. In the words of Wikipedia,
Most of Darwin’s population was evacuated to Adelaide, Whyalla, Alice Springs and Sydney, and many never returned to Darwin. The town was subsequently rebuilt with newer materials and techniques. Cyclone Tracy was at least a Category 4 storm, although there is evidence to suggest that it had reached Category 5 when it reached Darwin.
As I say, there are substantial differences from Katrina, not least in the scale of the disasters and the numbers of people made homeless (and deprived of electricity, water, transport and sanitation). There is also the major difference that in spite of the torrential rain that accompanied Cyclone Tracy, there was comparatively little flooding in Darwin: so despite the horrendous destruction, the airport runways, once cleared of debris, were almost immediately available for flights in and out, whereas both the New Orleans airports are apparently still under water. [Note, 4 Sept 05: Recent reports show that this is wrong. Darwin's international airport has been open and the runways in use ever since the storm and flood. Hundreds of refugees have been waiting there for evacuation in deplorable conditions.] On the other hand, the resources of the Australian government and services in 1974 (and indeed at any other time) were tiny compared with those of the government of the richest and mightiest nation on earth more than a quarter of a century later: in particular, few if any of the huge, long-range helicopters of the US armed forces, Coastguards, National Guards, and American civilian organisations were available to the Australians in 1974-75, and Darwin is far more remote from the main national centres and cities than New Orleans, Biloxi or Gulfport. [Note: see Comment of 4 September 2005 below for comparative figures.]
To the best of my knowledge, there was no looting, no breakdown of law and order, and no criticism of the government’s response, either as to timeliness or adequacy. The evacuation was carried out calmly and without fuss. The Darwin population was by no means especially prosperous — probably no more so than that of New Orleans — and similarly mixed, with a fairly high proportion of Australian aborigines. Darwin (and Canberra) had less advance warning of the cyclone than New Orleans had of the hurricane. In contrast to New Orleans and the other affected areas in the southern US, Darwin had great difficulty in alerting the rest of Australia beyond the vast dead Centre of the continent to its predicament and needs, as the cyclone destroyed almost all external communications.
My wife has always said, on the basis of the seven years in total that we spent living and working in Australia, that if ever we found ourselves in a tight spot, she would hope that there would be Australians there to help.
Brian
In his article in today’s (2 September 2005) Guardian about the video, released the previous evening, of the British suicide bomber Mohamad Sidique Khan, David Hencke, boldly starts off:
Downing Street was in denial last night about Mohammad Sidique Khan’s tape and al-Qaida’s threat of further action.
A spokesman said Tony Blair had no comment about Khan’s claim linking the bombings directly to Britain’s participation in the Iraq war, a link which the prime minister has consistently denied.
The tape also appeared to link the attack to al-Qaida, rather than suggesting that it was the work of four homegrown bombers.
Unfortunately almost everything about this is wrong, even if similar comments are sprouting like mole castings all over the media lawn. The worst clanger is the assertion that Sidique Khan, in his video, "[links] the bombings directly to Britain’s participation in the Iraq war", whereas (a) Sidique Khan nowhere on the tape even mentions Iraq; (b) he says explicitly that his objection is to the west’s ‘atrocities’ perpetrated against Muslims ‘all over the world’ (an important phrase unaccountably omitted from the Guardian’s purported transcript of the video) — important because it shows that even if there had been no war in Iraq, or if Britain had not taken part in it, Sidique Khan and those who think or feel like him would still be engaged in a ‘fight’ against the western democracies, exactly as Tony Blair and Jack Straw have asserted, on account of what they regard as the atrocities being perpetrated against Muslims in Afghanistan, Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya, etc.; (c) Sidique Khan nowhere mentions his intention to launch a bomb attack in Britain or anywhere else, still less ‘linking it explicitly to Britain’s participation in the Iraq war’, as the Hencke article maintains; and (d) Tony Blair has expressly denied ever having said that Iraq had nothing to do with the bombings (as I have pointed out elsewhere in this blog): he, Straw and other ministers accept that the Iraq war, along with other issues, is exploited by extremists to whip up anti-western sentiment, leading in some cases to involvement in terrorism, which is a far cry from saying that one causes the other. Finally and more trivially, (e) saying that the video ‘appears to link the attack to al-Qaida, rather than … that it was the work of four homegrown bombers’ is an obviously false antithesis: Sidique Khan explicitly praises Osama bin Laden (in a passage also bizarrely omitted from the Guardian transcript) which plainly establishes some sort of link to al-Qaida, and we know that the bombings were the work of ‘four home-grown bombers’ even though, as already noted, the video doesn’t anywhere foreshadow the bombings, so it’s hardly surprising that it doesn’t attribute them to home-grown bombers or indeed to anyone else.
Not bad for three short sentences. Hencke usually does much better than this.
Here, for the record, are the key words from the video:
This is how our ethical stances are dictated. Your democratically elected governments perpetuate [sic] atrocities against my people all over the world and your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters. Until we feel security, you’ll be our targets. Until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people, we’ll not stop this fight. We are at war and I am a soldier. Now you too will taste the reality of this situation.
While on this increasingly dog-eared subject, we might just note the unfortunate impression given, perhaps unintentionally, by Ken Clarke in the opening salvo of his Tory leadership campaign, with his frontal assault on Tony Blair over Iraq. What a pity that Clarke missed the opportunity to put the main emphasis of his criticism on the multiple misrepresentations of the case for war, its illegality under the Charter, the misjudgements about how the invaders would be received, the failure to recognise that there were no WMD, the lack of planning for what would be needed after Iraq was occupied, the failure even to try to put together an EU consensus that might have carried some weight in the White House, and so on and so forth! He made some of these points, but only as a kind of afterthought: his main focus was on the one, probably the only, invalid case against Blair on Iraq:
The disastrous decision to invade Iraq has made Britain a more dangerous place. The war did not create the danger of Islamic terrorism in this country, which had been growing internationally even before the tragedy of the attacks on 9/11. However the decision by the U.K. Government to become the leading ally of President Bush in the Iraq debacle has made Britain one of the foremost targets for Islamic extremists.
This has naturally dominated the media coverage of Clarke’s attack. The irony is that Clarke was evidently aware of the dangers inherent in this line of attack. He continued:
Personally I would have accepted that increased risk as the price of going to war if I had believed that we were driven to go to war for a just cause and a British national interest that could be pursued in no other way. I reject the notion that fear of terrorist reprisals should ever deter a British Government from pursuing an honourable and necessary cause.
Exactly! But how many newspapers or television channels reported that all-important proviso? And how many of them pointed out that Clarke, like Hencke in his Guardian article discussed earlier, went on crucially to misrepresent Tony Blair’s position:
If the Prime Minister really believes it, he must be the only person left who thinks that the recent bombs in London had no connection at all with his policy in Iraq.
I’m not accustomed to defending Mr Blair over Iraq, but surely someone might have pointed out to Ken Clarke that Blair has explicitly denied either holding that belief, or stating it? Still, it made good copy, and will soon be forgotten.
PS (3 Sept. 05): It’s been suggested that in writing this I have been less than fair to Ken Clarke and his speech, given Mr Clarke’s undoubted merits as a politician and a human being, and that taken as a whole it was a notably good and effective speech. I agree with that and accept that my remarks earlier here are unduly hard on the man and his speech. He got it wrong about Blair’s alleged denial of any connection between Iraq and the terrorist bombings, but he’s in good company in making that mistake. I still think it was a misjudgment to put so much stress on the assertion that the Iraq war had made Britain more vulnerable to terrorism (with the unfortunate implication that he disavowed later in the speech in an unnoticed qualification) rather than on the blunders and misrepresentations of the lead-up to the war, which he mentioned almost as if they were secondary. This made unbalanced media accounts of his speech inevitable. The full text is, as has been pointed out, almost entirely admirable apart from these two points. It’s hard to believe that the Conservative Party could even consider for one minute choosing anyone else but Ken Clarke to lead them into the next election, especially now that the European issue has had its fangs drawn by the poor performance of the euro and the assassination of the draft constitution by the French and Dutch electorates. But with their lemming-like suicidal tendencies, I suppose they’ll reject him again. Oh, and don’t let’s have any of that nonsense about Ken Clarke being too old for the job. He’s younger than me, for God’s sake….
Brian
In a cogent piece on his blog, Owen Barder has highlighted the mainly negative implications for international development aid policies and practices of the many amendments proposed, at the last moment, by the controversial new US ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, to the draft text that is to be presented for approval to the heads of state and government assembling at the UN in New York later this month (September 2005).
I agree, unsurprisingly, with Owen’s comments. Moreover, in my view the Bolton amendments to the draft text (especially innumerable deletions) affecting policy on international peace and security and the use of force in international affairs are as important and as much a matter of concern as those affecting development, on which Owen naturally concentrates. Many of John Bolton’s proposed amendments are extremely worrying as indicators of current US government policy; some are a weaselly way of declaring disengagement from important international law principles to which the US, like all other member states of the United Nations, is legally committed, but without formally coming clean by announcing the disengagements implied. The sole superpower on the face of the globe should have the courage of its convictions and tell the rest of us how far it now intends to depart from the rules of international behaviour to which it is bound.
Here are some of the more revealing Bolton amendments affecting international peace and security and the use of force in international affairs:
55. [Draft text:] We also reaffirm that the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations regarding the use of force are sufficient [Bolton deletion: to address the full range of security threats and agree that the use of force should be considered an instrument of last resort. 56. We recognise the need to continue discussing principles for the use of force, including those identified by the Secretary-General].
Non-proliferation Treaty: Bolton deletion: three pillars: disarmament, non-proliferation, and the peaceful use of nuclear energy. … also appeal to the nuclear weapon states to take concrete steps towards nuclear disarmament with the objective of eliminating all such weapons… [etc]
International Criminal Court: Bolton deletion: …by cooperating with the International Criminal Court, the existing ad hoc and mixed criminal tribunals… [etc].
Bolton deletion: 119. We invite the permanent members of the Security Council to refrain from using the veto in cases of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.
120. We support the implementation of the United Nations Action Plan to Prevent Genocide and the work of the Secretariat to this end.Bolton deletion: 49. We resolve to take concerted action, through such a system of collective security, based on the United Nations Charter and respect for international law, so as to prevent, mitigate and remove threats to international peace and security… [etc]
Bolton deletion of ‘and security’ after ‘peace’ and ‘collective security and’ before ‘well-being’ in para. 9
3. [Draft text:] We … reaffirm our faith in the [United Nations] Organization and our commitment to the Principles and Purposes of the United Nations Charter, and the [sic] respect for international law [Bolton deletion: so as to maintain international peace and security].
Of course we know, from the actions of the United States in Kosovo — under Clinton, sadly — and (especially) in Iraq under George W Bush, that its government with its British ally no longer regards itself as bound by the rules governing the use of force by states against other states, and no longer in practice respects the role of the UN Security Council in granting or withholding authority for the use of force internationally, as laid down with exemplary clarity in the Charter. Aided and abetted by Mr Blair, the Americans have made a half-hearted effort to foist on us a new ‘doctrine of humanitarian intervention’ which would open the flood-gates (to use a perhaps inappropriate metaphor at this time) to a deluge of self-interested attacks on the weak by the strong or stronger under the all-purpose excuse of forestalling or stopping a ‘humanitarian disaster’ such as genocide: a convenient way to avoid the requirements and essential safeguards of the Charter.
Ambassador John Bolton
The draft text prepared for the approval of the heads of state and government meeting at the UN later this month includes a well thought out defence of the existing Charter provisions on the use of force. It represents a brave attempt to rescue them from falling into abeyance or desuetude through being systematically ignored and undermined by an American regime which effectively claims the right to behave in whatever way it believes will serve narrow US interests, without regard to its international obligations or the effects of its actions on the carefully constructed framework of rules devised (by American jurists and statesmen among others) in San Francisco in 1945. Mr Bolton’s amendments, including those cited above, need to be seen in this light. Mr Bolton and his master (President Bush) and nominal mistress (Condoleezza Rice) will no doubt get their way over this text. The world will be a more dangerous place as a result.
Brian
You really ought to go and see ‘Crash‘, the directorial debut of the amusingly named Paul Haggis (who wrote the screenplay for Clint Eastwood’s film ‘Million Dollar Baby’). It’s flawed — the New York Times reviewer didn’t like it much, for rather foggy reasons — but absorbingly intricate, intelligent, thought-provoking and sophisticated, as well as being superbly acted and directed. It’s all about race, the interface of the races in Los Angeles and the interface also between racism and private individual experience. Its chief virtue is its skilful use of paradox to represent human complexity: each character initially portrayed convincingly as bigoted later turns out to have redeeming qualities and a capacity for selfless behaviour, with a sympathetically drawn background that partially explains (but does not excuse) the bigotry: and each character initially shown as liberal and virtuous is later shown to be flawed and capable of disastrous behaviour, again for comprehensible reasons. There are no goodies and no baddies in this movie, as perhaps in real life — not necessarily a fantastically profound message, but worth-while and here impressively put across. As Philip French wrote in a generally admiring review in the Observer on 14 August 2005,
This is a world where good people can be forced into acting badly, and ostensibly bad people perform acts of kindness and heroism; where the guilty go free and decent men are spurned and punished; where the wise are baffled and the stupid go accidentally to the heart of the matter.
Performances by Matt Dillon, Don Cheadle and Sandra Bullock, and others in a large cast including a rap artist called ‘Ludacris’ (Chris Bridges) are impeccable and often moving. Two or three set-piece scenes are extraordinarily gripping, at least one of them actually hard to watch. The plot, which interweaves a series of apparently unconnected individual stories yet brings them all into a relationship with each other, is ingenious and satisfying (it has been widely compared with those two brilliant movies, Altman’s ‘Short Cuts’ and Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Magnolia’). There is violence, but it’s integral to the stories and generally turns out to be less gut-wrenching than first appears likely.
Thandie Newton and Matt Dillon in ‘Crash’
So where lies the flaw that makes so many reviewers qualify their praise? The person with whom I saw the film (you’ll never guess who) commented afterwards that for all the tough action, violence and bigotry, it’s really soft-centred: fundamentally implausible coincidences are employed, not only to link the characters and their stories by repeated chance encounters (reminding one reviewer of Anthony Powell’s kaleidoscope of recurring encounters in ‘A Dance to the Music of Time‘), but also to avoid the necessity for the tragic outcomes which are what the logic of real life, and of genuine realism, would require. Almost all the victims of inevitable violence survive, and that’s hard to credit. It’s by no means a case of a Hollywood ‘happy ending’: almost all the characters are unhappy, in a variety of ways and for varied reasons; and there’s no suggestion that by the end of the film, they are going to be any less unhappy. All the same, the coincidences and the improbable survival rates are unmistakeably contrived, and soften the impact of what is nearly a powerful and important film. Go and see it while it’s still on general release, anyway, if you haven’t already.
Incidentally it’s not to be confused with another film of the same name, clever and watchable but sick, directed by David Cronenberg in 1996 about fetishising injuries resulting from car accidents. Very different indeed!
Brian
