In a recent Ephems entry I remarked, not for the first time, on the media’s repeated assertions that Tony Blair (in the words of a Guardian columnist, chosen at random) “famously [sic] insists that there is no connection at all between the actions of his government in Iraq and the threat to the UK from international terrorism.” I pointed out that ‘no, he doesn’t, actually, and never has, however ‘famous’ the allegation that he does. He is even on the public record as stating that he has never said such a thing.’ And I quoted the prime minister’s words at a press conference on 26 July this year in which he explicitly denied having said what he is constantly accused of saying.
Since no-one, to the best of my knowledge, has so far been able to come up with chapter and verse for Blair ever having denied any connection between the invasion of Iraq and the threat to the UK from terrorism, I naively thought that this might be the end of the matter, if not in the national press — I can’t assume that all the editors at Wapping and Canary Wharf (or wherever they are now) read this blog attentively twice a day — then at least in the Ephems community. I should have known better. My post prompted a lively debate on what Blair had and hadn’t said, what exactly he had meant by what he had said, and what might or might not constitute a ‘connection’ between Iraq and the terrorist threat in Britain. My assertion that he had set out his position on the issue quite clearly at the July press conference was scornfully dismissed as deliberate evasion.
One contributor came close to citing two specific speeches by Blair in which he allegedly –
simply and robustly denied that his policies had caused global terrorism or made terrorism worse (see speeches 21 March 2006 on global terrorism and 26 May 2006 at Georgetown on the Downing Street website.) To give an analogy, when asked if by opening the door he wasn’t fanning the flames, he simply says ‘I didn’t light the match.’ I suppose there are also degrees of obfuscation ranging from ‘not making absolutely clear’ to ‘rendering totally unintelligible’.
To enable you to make up your own mind whether Blair’s words on this subject in the two speeches mentioned can reasonably be construed as denying any connection between Iraq (and other foreign policy actions that have angered Muslims) on the one hand, and the threat of terrorism in Britain on the other, and whether the passages in question amount to obfuscation by unintelligibility, here they are:
Speech of 21 March 2006, London: ” A Clash about Civilisation”:
I also acknowledge … that the state of the [Middle East Peace Process] and the stand-off between Israel and Palestine remains a, perhaps the, real, genuine source of anger in the Arab and Muslim world that goes far beyond usual anti-western feeling. The issue of “even handedness” rankles deeply. …So the statement that Iraq or Afghanistan or Palestine or indeed Chechnya, Kashmir or half a dozen other troublespots is seen by extremists as fertile ground for their recruiting – a statement of the obvious – is elided with the notion that we have “caused” such recruitment or made terrorism worse, a notion that, on any sane analysis, has the most profound implications for democracy.
…we must reject the thought that somehow we are the authors of our own distress; that if only we altered this decision or that, the extremism would fade away. The only way to win is: to recognise this phenomenon is a global ideology; to see all areas, in which it operates, as linked; and to defeat it by values and ideas set in opposition to those of the terrorists. The roots of global terrorism and extremism are indeed deep. They reach right down through decades of alienation, victimhood and political oppression in the Arab and Muslim world. [My emphasis -- BLB]
The other is as follows:
Speech of 26 May 2006 at Georgetown University, Washington DC: third of three foreign policy speeches:
In the first [of three speeches], I argued that the global terrorism that menaces us, can only be defeated through pulling it up by its roots. We have to attack not just its methods but its ideas, its presumed and false sense of grievance against the West, its attempt to persuade us that it is we and not they who are responsible for its violence. In doing so, we should stand up for our own values, asserting that they are not Western but global values, whose spread is the surest guarantee of our future security….
Let us go back to the immediate issue: Iraq. We can argue forever about the merits of removing Saddam. Our opponents will say: you made terrorism worse and point to what is happening there. I believe differently. I believe this global terrorism will exploit any situation to further its cause. But I don’t believe that its cause is truly to be found in any decision we have taken. I believe it’s cause is an ideology, a world-view, derived from religious fanaticism and that had we taken no decisions at all to enrage it, [it] would still have found provocation in our very existence. They disagree with our way of life, our values and in particular in our tolerance. They hate us but probably they hate those Muslims who believe in tolerance, even more, as apostates betraying the true faith. [My emphasis -- BLB]
I have no time for Tony Blair, whose policies and actions in Iraq and whose assault on our civil liberties at home have shamed his and my country. In my strongly held view, the sooner he steps down, the better for (almost) all of us. But the many genuine and grave charges against him are undermined by the inclusion of accusations that won’t stick. One of these — there are others, unfortunately — is surely the canard that he has “famously” or “consistently” denied any link between Iraq (etc.) and terrorism: or that at best he has ducked the issue by obfuscation and evasion. The passages quoted above acquit him, it seems to me, of all such charges. Not only is his position on this issue made very clear: it is also right. The foreign policy issues to which many Muslims angrily object are indeed linked to terrorism in the sense that they are exploited in order to incite people to commit criminal acts of violence and then to try to justify them when they have been committed. But the link is not a causal one: the invasion of Iraq, and the west’s failure to resolve the numerous other conflicts around the world involving Muslims, have not caused the terrorism, and if they had not been available to be exploited for terrorist purposes, other issues would have been used with the same consequences. Above all, it would be intolerable for any government to shrink from policies or actions that it believes to be right, necessary and in the country’s interests, purely for fear that they could be exploited by a small minority at home to incite and justify the indiscriminate murder of innocent people. We can never let the murderers’ blackmail dictate our country’s policies at home or abroad. There are other and better ways of tackling the terrorist threat, and other and better reasons for tackling the root causes of Muslim anger whenever it is peacefully expressed. For once, Tony Blair has got it right.
But I don’t expect anyone else to agree!
Brian
I’m much indebted to Tony Hatfield for drawing attention, in his indispensable blog “Tony’s Ramblings”, to a wonderful story on the BBC News website. Here it is, in its entirety:
Eleven bailed over stolen coach
Eleven people have been bailed after being arrested on suspicion of stealing a 30-seater coach. Northumbria Police said the coach was taken in the early hours of Sunday morning from Neville Street in Newcastle, near to the railway station. Police were alerted by the vehicle’s owner, Robin Hood Travel, and stopped the coach as it headed south on the A1, near Washington Services. All those arrested are from the Nottinghamshire area, police said.
The eleven — eleven! a cricket team, perhaps? — suspected coach thieves are all from the Nottingham area, and the coach was stolen from Robin Hood Travel. Where on earth was Maid Marion? I suppose we shall never know: this has all the hallmarks of a story which died the moment it went out, the dénouement buried in some dusty Newcastle police station file. Unless brave Robin contrives to steal it in a daring raid, pursued by the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham. And who, we may ask, has recently been clandestinely robbing the rich to pay the poor? A burly Robin Hood, no less, cunningly disguised as a son of the manse from Scotland. Now what would Gordon need a 30-seater coach for? To transport the entire Blair Cabinet to Beachy Head, perhaps? We know it was heading south….
Brian
And it will be a sight better than some blogs I could mention that are produced by more conventional means!
(With grateful acknowledgements to the Financial Times magazine, 26-27 August 2006)
Former US President Jimmy Carter's comments on Tony Blair in an interview in yesterday's Sunday Telegraph are, or should be, compulsory reading. It's fashionable nowadays to dismiss Carter as an insignificant figure, even to laugh at him, but for my money he's greatly underrated, and I believe that history will take a much more positive view of him (not just because of his opinion of our prime minister).
Perhaps the most perceptive thing Carter is quoted as saying about Blair is this:
Asked why he thinks Mr Blair has behaved in the way that he has with President Bush's belligerent regime, Mr Carter said he could only put it down to timidity.
That really rings bells. Blair is generally criticised for many failings, but his timidity is rarely one of them. In fact it's evident in many of the otherwise inexplicable things he has done, as well as his failure to lay down stiff conditions for his support of the US attack on Iraq: his repeated premature dismissals of close political allies on inadequate evidence, for fear of facing accusations of cronyism in the Tory press; his extreme reluctance to stand up to the demands of the police and the security services for ever more powers; his fear of incurring the hostility of The Sun newspaper and other Murdoch organs; his prolonged reluctance to go ahead with reforms of the House of Lords and the Lord Chancellorship; even his preoccupation with strong leadership — the stress on being decisive even when wrong. Old Jimmy has hit a vital nail on the head.
Brian
Thanks to my distant kinsperson (if that's an acceptable term) and friend, the poet Ruth Fainlight, I have just belatedly read a fascinating and thought-provoking speech delivered in April 2004 by Professor Haim Harari, a theoretical physicist, Chair of the Davidson Institute of Science Education, and former President of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, about the roots of the problems besetting most of the middle east and the western response to them.. The full text of the speech is well worth reading: its unintended leak to the Web caused a considerable stir at the time, so many will already be familiar with it, but it's new to me.
One of Professor Harari's many controversial theses is that the Israel-Palestine conflict is not actually central to the region's overall problems or to the way that those problems impact on the rest of the world. His detailed illustration of this proposition can't easily be waved away. He is also critical of the West, especially the Europeans, for what he sees as a failure to confront the challenge posed by militant Islamicism, and for the western tendency to encourage its extremism by vainly attempting to appease it. Of course this is (very properly) a view of the situation as seen through Israeli eyes: but it's perhaps as well to remind ourselves occasionally of the Israeli point of view as well as of the more familiar viewpoint of the Palestinians and others in the Muslim world.
The following extract, about suicide bombing, gives the flavour of the professor's address:
[T]he real fear [of suicide bombing] comes from the undisputed fact that no defense and no preventive measures can succeed against a determined suicide murderer. This has not yet penetrated the thinking of the Western World. The U.S. and Europe are constantly improving their defense against the last murder, not the next one. We may arrange for the best airport security in the world. But if you want to murder by suicide, you do not have to board a plane in order to explode yourself and kill many people. Who could stop a suicide murder in the midst of the crowded line waiting to be checked by the airport metal detector? How about the lines to the check-in counters in a busy travel period? Put a metal detector in front of every train station in Spain and the terrorists will get the buses. Protect the buses and they will explode in movie theaters, concert halls, supermarkets, shopping malls, schools and hospitals. Put guards in front of every concert hall and there will always be a line of people to be checked by the guards and this line will be the target, not to speak of killing the guards themselves. You can somewhat reduce your vulnerability by preventive and defensive measures and by strict border controls but not eliminate it and definitely not win the war in a defensive way. And it is a war!
What is behind the suicide murders? Money, power and cold-blooded murderous incitement, nothing else. It has nothing to do with true fanatic religious beliefs. No Moslem preacher has ever blown himself up. No son of an Arab politician or religious leader has ever blown himself. No relative of anyone influential has done it. Wouldn't you expect some of the religious leaders to do it themselves, or to talk their sons into doing it, if this is truly a supreme act of religious fervor? Aren't they interested in the benefits of going to Heaven? Instead, they send outcast women, naïve children, retarded people and young incited hotheads. They promise them the delights, mostly sexual, of the next world, and pay their families handsomely after the supreme act is performed and enough innocent people are dead.
Suicide murders also have nothing to do with poverty and despair. The poorest region in the world, by far, is Africa. It never happens there. There are numerous desperate people in the world, in different cultures, countries and continents. Desperation does not provide anyone with explosives, reconnaissance and transportation. There was certainly more despair in Saddam's Iraq then in Paul Bremmer's Iraq, and no one exploded himself. A suicide murder is simply a horrible, vicious weapon of cruel, inhuman, cynical, well-funded terrorists, with no regard to human life, including the life of their fellow countrymen, but with very high regard to their own affluent well-being and their hunger for power.
This, it seems to me, is perceptive, and chilling. It's hard to fault it.
In an interview given a year later, in 2005, Professor Harari summed up as follows the main misapprehensions that he seeks to question or correct:
* The world crisis is not centered on or dominated by the Israeli-Arab dispute.
* Terror must be faced by a two-prong attack: an aggressive military campaign against terrorists and their protectors and a massive campaign for women['s] equality, literacy, openness, human rights and rule of law in the Muslim world.
* The European attitude of apeasement is dangerous and futile.
* International law today is unable to address the issue of terror sponsored by states which deny their support.
* Media coverage of terror is intrinsically slanted, partly because of the asymetric situation, partly because of the fear factor and partly because of the dependence of media on local talent
* In the Israeli-Arab conflict it is important to distinguish between the conventional level of the dispute (where will the borders be, settlements, land, water, etc) and the "annihilation level" of the dispute (destroying Israel, "right of return"). The conventional level is solvable, the annihilation level is not.
There's plenty in the Harari world view that many of us will disagree with: the role of military action in defeating international terrorism, for example (although in the specific case of Israel there may be no acceptable alternative to the resort to military force in some circumstances), and the asserted inadequacy of international law to cope with necessary action against terrorism, although it has to be admitted that some of the practical examples of this inadequacy cited in Harari's address are bound to make you think. But the professor raises some uncomfortable questions that have become even more pertinent and pressing since he spoke.
Brian
Language can be abused in unwitting self-betrayal, by clothing platitudes in pretentious and trendy costume, or by plain old-fashioned murder. Examples abound.
Sometimes our politicians use language not to convey information or opinion but to give themselves away by unintentionally revealing language, inviting praise for resonant misjudgements that betray with appalling clarity the underlying reasons for their past blunders. Here is Tony Blair addressing Rupert Murdoch and his acolytes (of all people) in conclave in the Californian resort of Pebble Beach on 30 July 2006:
The era of tribal political leadership is over in Britain with "rampant cross-dressing" on policy set to become a permanent feature of modern politics, Tony Blair told News Corp executives… He also insisted he had "complete inner self-confidence in the analysis of the struggle" the world faced over terrorism and security. He defended boldness in his political leadership, saying: "In these times caution is error; to hesitate is to lose", adding that his worry has been that he has not been radical enough in his leadership….
"In these conditions political leaders have to back their instinct and lead. The media climate will often be harsh. NGOs and pressure groups with single causes can be benevolent, but also can exercise a kind of malign tyranny over public debate.
"For a leader, don't let your ego be carried away by the praise or your spirit diminished by the criticism and look on each with a very searching eye. But for heaven's sake lead."
You're liable to pay a terrible price if you put unquestioning trust in your 'inner self-confidence in [your] analysis' and your 'instinct', if you act in haste on the basis of them without considering the possibility that you may be wrong, and without listening to other more cautious voices, all in your eagerness to 'lead'. Tony Blair has paid that price too often. Yet he glories openly in his own folly, mistaking his self-betrayal for boasting. Perhaps it went down well with Mr Murdoch.
Other politicians use trendy but cloudy language to give an impression of wisdom and sharp perception without actually saying anything. Look out for 'deliver' and 'ownership', used in mystifying contexts, for examples of this. New Labour people are keen to deliver all sorts of things that bear no resemblance to letters or parcels, and to extend ownership of things not widely regarded as belonging to anyone. Now David Cameron nips nimbly onto the bandwagon in his Observer article disowning Margaret Thatcher's policies on the ANC and sanctions against South Africa:
[W]e should not pretend that our actions can quickly 'deliver' the progress we all want to see. That requires people in Africa to take ownership of their destiny. That sense of ownership and responsibility, and the positive outcomes it creates, can be seen clearly in the political situation in South Africa today. …
Roelf Meyer, Minister for Constitutional Affairs in the last apartheid regime… was clear about the principal factor in [the post-apartheid government's] success: the fact that South African leaders took ownership of and responsibility for their situation and focused on their people's future.
Perhaps Mr Cameron's enclosure of 'deliver' in quotation marks is a sign of grace: this abuse of the word makes him uneasy. But does he really think that Mr Meyer is telling us something radical or helpful when he attributes the South African government's 'success' (my quotation marks this time) to the fact that it used such power as it had to govern the country, and that it took decisions affecting the future (as distinct, we may assume, from the past)? Or does the trendy language mean more than that? If so, it eludes me.
Journalists are sometimes as guilty as politicians in their murderous assaults on our beautiful language. Here's another treasurable example in today's Observer, from a piece by David Smith about a blogger arrested in Syria:
It is believed his detainment may be linked to articles he has written on a political website.
Leaving aside the coarsening effects of that all-too-common omission of the indispensable 'that' after 'it is believed…', probably the work of a subeditor working on the principle of old-fashioned telegrams where copy is costed by the word, what about this term detainment? Disappointingly, the OED Online confirms that the word did once exist, indeed has a history going back to 1586, but with no recorded use (until today) since a law report in 1883, the year when my father was born. David Smith or his sub-editor should be put in detainment.
Brian
Today's London Sunday Times has a genuinely alarming story about the latest alleged antics of members of our New Labour Government — alarming because of its revelation not only of a near-criminal waste of public money, but also, even more spine-chillingly, of the conspicuous lack of common-sense and judgement of the idiots concerned. The story, worth reading in full, begins:
Call my life coach, not a spin doctor
Isabel Oakeshott, Deputy Political Editor
PATRICIA HEWITT and other cabinet ministers are receiving "life coaching" at taxpayers' expense to help them cope with the pressures of government. Chartered psychologists are each being paid an estimated £250 per hour to act as mentors to the health secretary and her senior civil servants.
In a new training technique being used widely in Whitehall, ministers and their staff are assigned personal coaches, whom they are expected to treat as "critical friends", using role-playing sessions to prepare for running the country. A string of other government departments, including No 10, the Home Office, the Foreign Office, the Cabinet Office, the Department for Transport and the Treasury, are also using chartered psychologists, at an annual cost estimated at several million pounds.
One firm, ER Consultants, teaches ministers and mandarins how to improve their "emotional intelligence" and encourages them to "download" their problems.
Let's hope that it will turn out to be untrue. But don't bet on it.
Hat-tips: my wife, as usual, and old mate David Tothill.
Brian
An old friend, an inexplicably obsessive cricket fanatic, has just telephoned in a state of high excitement about the collapse today of the fourth Test match between England and Pakistan. My first thought was that the Pakistanis must have walked off in protest at racist insults from the spectators. Happily it turns out that they had not walked off at all: they had declined to walk on after the tea interval, in protest against the (Australian) umpire's accusation that they had illegally tampered with the ball, and his action in taking it away and making them play with a new one. When the Pakistanis failed to come on after tea, the umpires waited for the statutory two minutes and then removed the bails, signalling the end of the match. It has now been announced that the umpires had acted correctly and that by its failure to appear when play was supposed to resume, the Pakistani team had forfeited the match.
There are various ironies in all this: Pakistan was well placed to win the match, had it continued; relations between the Pakistani and England teams have been (and apparently remain) extremely cordial; at one point the Pakistanis trooped out onto the field to signal their willingness to resume play, but neither the umpires nor the England batsmen followed them out, so they returned to the pavilion; the Australian umpire has, I'm told, a history of controversy in other matches over which he has officiated — but in this case he apparently has the backing of cricket's international governing body, the ICC (don't ask me what that stands for) so presumably he will continue to umpire matches elsewhere, leaving a trail of drama behind him.
There's evidently an element of farce in this mini-saga, but it's very sad for Britain's large Pakistani population (including very many Brits of Pakistani parentage or grand-parentage), already feeling somewhat battered by Pakistan's ambiguous role in the so-called war on terror. But I confess that the heart sinks a little at the prospect of weeks of post mortem all over the media, with the experts ponderously comparing today's events with long forgotten cricket controversies involving Wally Hammond and Ranjitsinji in 1906.
Hats tipped to Tony's 'Retired Rambler' blog — no, not that Tony — for his comments on the extraordinary story of the passengers on a flight due out of Malaga for Manchester who refused to remain on board in the company of two fellow-passengers "reported to be of Asian or Middle Eastern appearance" who they thought were behaving suspiciously, although according to some accounts they were doing nothing more suspicious than sweating heavily. The two men were removed from the aircraft, "questioned for several hours" (according to the BBC report) and eventually allowed to board a later flight.
For some reason this dreadful episode reminds me of the weekend Financial Times's interesting survey of the situation in a number of countries' airports as regards the draconian restrictions on permissible cabin baggage following the revelation of the UK plot to bomb aircraft flying between the UK and the US. According to the FT, British airports (as of 18 August) were "back to a near-normal service… Passengers boarding at UK airports may carry one laptop-sized case as hand baggage. They cannot take liquids aboard." In Spain
"the new restrictions apply only to flights to the UK, US or Puerto Rico. Passengers have to check in three hours before departure and have shoes and hand luggage X-rayed at the boarding gate. They can carry no liquids or gels except for milk and juice for babies, and medicines. … Iberia said those restrictions, and the 45cm by 35cm by 16cm size limit for carry-on bags, applied to flights bound for Argentina as well as the US, UK and Puerto Rico."
Argentina? Why Argentina?
Here is a real gem added as a draft entry last June in the wonderfully authoritative online Oxford English Dictionary (subscription):
"yada yada, int. and n. DRAFT ENTRY June 2006
colloq. (chiefly U.S.).
A. int. Indicating (usually dismissively) that further details are predictable or evident from what has preceded: ‘and so on’, ‘blah blah blah’.
B. n. Trivial, meaningless, or uninteresting talk or writing; chatter. Cf. BLAH n.
Example [one of several -- BLB]: 2005 Hoosier Times (Bloomington, Indiana) (Herald-Times ed.) 20 Mar. F5/5 The EULA, or ‘End-User License Agreement’, is the yadda yadda yadda that you agree to when you install software on your computer. It's usually pages and pages of stuff that no one reads."
I'm baffled by the huge fuss over the German novelist and Nobel Literature prize-winner Gunter Grass's admittedly belated revelation that he had been recruited as a teenager, in the final months of the second world war, into the Waffen SS, the élite fighting arm of Hitler's SS. Grass says, credibly, that he never fired a shot and there's not the slightest suggestion that he personally participated in any of the criminal activity for which the SS was notorious. What makes the whole thing even more mysterious (to me, anyway) is that Grass has never made any secret of the fact that earlier in his teens he was a keen 
Nazi and a member of the Hitler Youth. Since he was later compulsorily drafted into the Waffen SS, that fact doesn't seem to me materially to affect what was already known, nor to make it significantly worse. Many commentators in Germany are nevertheless saying that the huge moral authority built up by Grass, not only through his novels and other writings but also through his political activism, as the conscience of Germany and the scourge of those who were reluctant to come to terms with the Nazi past, has been ruined by the discovery that he, of all people, has hitherto kept secret the facts about his membership of the SS. Others have rallied to his defence.
I can't see that the massive reputation of, especially, The Tin Drum can be affected by the SS revelation. Nor am I a big fan of the contemporary morality that requires all of us to reveal every dubious detail of our private lives and murky pasts, on pain of being dismissed as frauds and hypocrites if we hold back on anything. To be on the safe side, I had better come clean now about my brief career, if you can call it that, as a National Service soldier in the 7th Royal Tank Regiment, serving in what was then the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong with the task and duty of defending that territory against the Chinese hordes. In my own defence I can only plead that I was remarkably successful in carrying out this onerous military task: it was only after I had left the place that Hong Kong fell into Chinese hands. I can't think why I didn't get a medal. Perhaps, though, it explains the lenient view I'm inclined to take of Gunter Grass's similar indiscretion.
Brian
Few of us can remember the name of our newish Secretary of State for Defence, whose profile remains so low that one's in danger of treading on it. However, he has now surfaced briefly in the media in order to reverse the policies of his predecessors by deciding to grant 'pardons' to British soldiers executed during the first world war for cowardice, desertion, and similar offences. This has naturally been welcomed by the surviving relatives of the men concerned, who have long argued that it was a parody of justice to execute these men. Many of them were suffering from shell-shock (or, as we would probably now be required to call it, post-traumatic stress disorder) and probably physically incapable of continuing to perform their military duties in horrific conditions in the trenches. (Others, of course, may just have been cowards, and who shall blame them?) We should rejoice that their families have at last been given satisfaction.
At the same time, it's impossible to feel entirely happy about this brazen attempt to re-write history by imposing twenty-first century values on the actions of people in the early part of the twentieth, nearly 100 years ago. Most of us (in Europe, anyway; some Americans, Iranians, Chinese, etc. are not so sure) nowadays regard all capital punishment as a barbarous injustice, regardless of the offences for which it used to be imposed: if those subjected in the past to what we now regard as injustice are all to be 'pardoned' (legal-speak, of course, for acknowledging that there has been a miscarriage of justice, nothing to do with forgiveness), we ought logically to 'pardon' everyone who has been executed in the past, starting perhaps with the men, women and children executed for stealing a loaf of bread or a handkerchief. How widely are these pardons to be scattered? Even if we shrink from pardoning every last serial murderer ever sent to the gallows, there are question-marks over many others subjected to judicial execution. William Joyce, aka Lord Haw-Haw, was probably wrongly convicted (it's doubtful whether he was a British citizen capable of committing treason against Britain at the time of his 'offences'); Casement might not have been hanged if his reputation had not been besmirched by the sly publication of his diaries revealing him to have been either gay or bisexual; even Charles I only committed the same offence as Tony Blair, i.e. believing in his Divine Right to exercise the Royal Prerogative, and even the prime minister's severest critics might hesitate to advocate that he should be beheaded. We don't on the whole send people to Australia as a punishment any more; should we now 'pardon' the majority of the original British settlers whose descendants subsequently made such a spectacular success of the Fatal Shore? It might be thought more appropriate that they should pardon us.
Well, I suppose the pardons granted to those unfortunate WWI soldiers have done no harm and a certain amount of good; and thinking up plausible candidates from the past for similar pardons now is a harmless parlour game, for which we have to thank Mr — er — Wotsisname.
Brian
The foiling of the UK terrorists’ plot to bomb aeroplanes in mid-air between Britain and the US (still cautiously referred to in the Guardian and elsewhere as the “alleged” plot) has prompted the emergence into the daylight of two particularly unpleasant slanders, one new and specific to the bomb plot, the other old and discredited but seemingly impossible to kill off.
The new and specific slander is the allegation that there wasn’t really any plot at all: that the whole thing is a deliberate invention by the government, the police, the security service and other conspirators, designed to distract media and public attention from the government’s unpopular stand on Israel-Lebanon and to supply a spurious justification for yet another assault on our civil liberties by “Dr” Reid and his power-hungry friends.
We needn’t spend much time on this ludicrous accusation. You need to be an especially glassy-eyed conspiracy theorist to believe that such a huge deception, involving so many public servants of whom a clear majority are plainly honourable and conscientious men and women, could ever hope to survive the inevitable inquiries and investigations without being quickly unmasked. Raking up old allegations of security service incompetence or worse — de Menezes, ricin, Forest Gate, and so on — and pointing to the absence so far of anyone being charged, blithely ignores an inconvenient reality: a terrorist suspect may well be arrested and questioned, but eventually released without charge, for several possible reasons which in no way demonstrate that the original suspicions were misplaced. For example, there may be irrefutable evidence which confirms the guilt of the suspect but which can’t be used in court (e.g. because its use would compromise a vital informer, or because it depends on hearsay or telephone intercepts, or because it would alert other terrorists still under investigation, or because it has enabled the police to recruit a new informer). Could those who believe that the latest plot against the aircraft is a fiction, or a deliberate misrepresentation of some harmless fantasy, be the same people as those who believe that the CIA organised the destruction of the Twin Towers, that the moon landing was filmed in a studio in Nevada, and that JFK was assassinated by agents of LBJ? I’m especially sorry to see my friend and former colleague Craig Murray joining this group of eccentrics and obsessives, earning himself a magisterial rebuke and rebuttal from the President of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO).
The second and older slander is the assertion, cropping up once again all over the place, that (in the words of Jon Henley in the Guardian of 16 August 2006) Tony Blair “famously [sic] insists that there is no connection at all between the actions of his government in Iraq and the threat to the UK from international terrorism.” Well, no, he doesn’t, actually, and never has, however ‘famous’ the allegation that he does. He is even on the public record as stating that he has never said such a thing. Here is an extract from his answer to a question at his press conference on 26 July 2006:
Q. …how then can you still deny that there is at least the very possibility that Iraq played a contributory factor into fomenting the extremism amongst some Muslim youths that found its ultimate expression in an act of terror?
Prime Minister: …I read occasionally that I am supposed to have said it is nothing to do with Iraq, in inverted commas. Actually I haven’t said that. If you go back and look at the comments I have made over the past couple of weeks, what I do say is this, … of course people are going to use Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed if you look at what a lot of these terrorist statements say they use both Iraq and Afghanistan incidentally. Often people just talk about Iraq, but they use both of them. They will use Iraq to try and recruit and motivate people. They will use Afghanistan. Before Iraq and Afghanistan, and 11 September, which happened before those two things, they used other things. But I think most people understand that the roots of this go far deeper… And I want to make one thing very clear to you. Whatever excuse or justification these people use I do not believe we should give one inch to them, not in this country and the way we live our lives here, not in Iraq, not in Afghanistan, not in our support for two States, Israel and Palestine, not in our support for the alliances we choose, including with America, not one inch should we give to these people. [My emphasis -- BLB]
Those (and there are many of them in addition to Mr Henley) who persist in claiming that Blair has denied any connection between the UK role in Iraq and Islamic extremist terrorism in the UK have a plain obligation to give us chapter and 
verse for their allegation. Perhaps the evidence exists somewhere: Blair is by no means always consistent. But I haven’t been able to track it down, and until someone produces it, I shall continue to believe that this is one rare charge on which Blair has the right to be acquitted. I suppose I can’t blame Jon Henley, the Guardian and other editorialists, and all the other card-carrying members of the leftish commentariat, for having failed to read, learn and inwardly digest at least two of my earlier Ephems blog posts, on 28 August and 2 September 2005, in which I dealt at my usual inordinate length with both the accusation and also the fallacious and dangerous conclusions that too many commentators have tried to draw from it.
Why do I find myself defending the appalling Blair all of a sudden? (No, don’t tell me.)
Incidentally (my favourite opening of a final paragraph), here’s a question to be pondered by those who think that if Britain’s Iraq policies and actions had been different, the atrocities of 7/7 and the “alleged” plot to bomb US-bound aircraft in the past weeks would not have occurred (and that if the government now reversed our Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon policies, there would be no more terrorist activity in the UK): how do you explain the botched terrorist attack on regional trains on 31 July this year — in Germany?
Brian
