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A. Pedant

 
Credit where credit isn't due

Curiously, only the other day, I was thinking of one of Private Eye's funniest covers, based on what is arguably Phil’s most famous utterance. The Duke of Edinburgh is saying to Brenda

‘Our children have all done pretty well,' he says.
‘Yes, they’ve all become princes or princesses,’ Brenda amplifies.

Lo and behold, this great perception has just been trumped by Dick Cheney:

In his first television interview since the presidential election in November, Cheney displayed no regrets and gave no ground to his many critics within America and around the World. He summed up his record by saying: "I think, given the circumstances we've had to deal with, we've done pretty well."

You can read the full article here. Here is some more from the sage Cheney

He referred to a comment from Hillary Clinton likening him to the Star Wars character Darth Vader. "I asked my wife about that, if that didn't bother her. She said, no, it humanises you."

Some human!

But his lack of any introspection over the decisions made under his watch – in contrast to Bush who recently said he had been sorry about the false intelligence over Iraq – will renew Cheney's reputation as a combat[ive] and uncompromising vice-president.

Though no weapons of mass destruction were ever found, he insisted that Saddam Hussein had had the capability to produce them.

"He had the technology, he had the people... We made the right decision," he said.

As a point of information, in no meaningful way is this quoted assessment correct. It never was. It's probably best to let one of the former Weapons Inspectors – Scott Ritter - deal with another of Cheney's more extreme, self-serving remarks. This comes from Ritter's Grauniad piece titled 'Dick Cheney's fantasy world'

Cheney defended the invasion and subsequent removal of Saddam from power by noting that "this was a bad actor and the country's better off, the World's better off with Saddam gone". This is the argument of the intellectually feeble. It would be very difficult for anyone to articulate that life today is better in Baghdad, Mosul, Basra or any non-Kurdish city than it was under Saddam. Ask the average Iraqi adult female if she is better off today than she was under Saddam, and outside of a few select areas in Kurdistan, the answer will be a resounding "no".

I have been saying this sort of thing for many years, haven't I Myfanwy?

Invading Iraq and removing Saddam, the glue that held that nation together as a secular entity, was the worst action the US could have undertaken for the people of Iraq, the Middle East as a whole and indeed the entire World. For Cheney to articulate otherwise, regardless of his fundamentally flawed argument on WMD, only demonstrates the level to which fantasy has intruded into the mind of the vice-president.

Here's the link to Ritter's full article. People who claim that Iraq under the religious nutcases is better than Iraq under Saddam, in virtually any way at all, have serious perception problems. Or is it that they actually enjoy lying?

Labels: Dick Cheney, Iraq, Saddam, Scott Ritter

posted by josh at 1:42 pm

 
On getting 'it' right

During the nineteen forties, India was given its independence; its constitution was secular. Meanwhile, the dual Pakistan states were created for Muslims. At the time, this partition was seen as a wise move in that it reduced the terrible bloodshed at the time. Until recently, despite the rise of India's BJP, an aggressively conservative, religious party, I would have been inclined to agree that partition was, on the whole, a fine piece of judgement, even though some of the detail, e.g. Kashmir, may not have been handled correctly at the time.

Faced with the current deteriorating situation in Pakistan, one wonders whether, after all, it might have been better to stamp on religion and encourage secularism in a larger India, without a separate Pakistan. (I mean, what civilised country would, these days, call a major/capital city after a religion? Well, I suppose there's Stalingrad, now Volgograd, and Leningrad, now Sankt Petersburg, but Islamabad…What sort of nonsense is that?)

Whether or not partition was a mistake, it would now indubitably be better for the West to be dealing with a unified, albeit fractious, monolithic India, than with two nuclear-armed countries, where one at least is full of antipathetic religious zeal.

As the Irishman said, 'I wouldn't start from here, if I were you'. Quite! So how did we get here?

Many years ago, I watched a fascinating documentary – I guess it was in the late seventies or early eighties - about Afghanistan under Najibullah, supported by the Russians. I wish I could remember more but the part that made the biggest impression was seeing girls going to their new school and sitting down learning sensible things. Unsurprising to us, but then, in an Islamic country, that was absolutely unacceptable. In researching this piece, to help my memory, I read several articles that indicated that Afghanistan was moving in a democratic direction under Najibullah.

If there's one thing that Communist countries have a name for, it's for educating their children, both boys and girls. And they do it very, very well. Their literacy rates are excellent. The UK currently has many examples of these people, brought up under Communism, from behind the former Iron Curtain. Their countries having joined the EU, these young people have come here to work. (And I'm not talking about legendary Polish plumbers but about Slovenians, Slovakians, Czechs, Estonian and Lithuanians.) They work as opticians, receptionists, shop assistants, even as wine waiters. They are competent, well-educated, polite, and they have the most beguiling accents.

Faced with a Communist regime running an Islamic country, what's the best thing to do? Apart from cheer, that is. All you have to do is wait: no need for invasions or anything of that sort. You simply wait for education to do its work, and for the educated masses to dump the religious straitjacket, ditch the Communism and join the consumer society. It's easy when you think about it. The film I saw was optimistic about Afghanistan, despite its troubled history.

So, what did the Americans do? They provided the religious fundamentalists, the Mujahideen, with arms and support with a view to expelling the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. Such strategic naivety!

What on Earth could have motivated such a crazy strategy? All they had to do instead was sit back and wait, perhaps without even providing the Afghani government with discreet material help.

America is a country where Communism, Socialism and even Atheism are dirty words. The fear of egalitarianism is fostered by the very rich who have so much to lose. Socialism can't be allowed to work anywhere in the World because people might want it in the US. This explains why America is so keen to stamp on a less tribal, less religious, gender-equal Afghanistan. D'you know, I once heard a US politician go unchallenged on UK TV when he claimed that there had never been a democratically elected Communist government in any country in the World. I was thinking of Chile… The lie should have been rammed down his throat with a remark such as: 'No democratically elected Communist government has ever survived naked political interference from the US.'

So this is what brought the Taliban and Al Qaeda, morphing from the Mujahideen, to power in Afghanistan. This is what led to 11/9 and other horrors. Here we have two Islamic states next door to each other, with their contiguous mountain areas and backward tribes. There is a vast area where it is a crime for a woman to be unveiled, and where the highest forms of excellence are to memorise the Koran and/or to die fighting in the name of Allah. Total effing nonsense.

Not content with creating a monster in a misjudgement about the nature of 'the World-wide Communist conspiracy', (e.g. Vietnam: more Nationalist than Communist), the US finds itself faced with a religious hydra, that it has created, that suddenly turns its rage on America itself. To put it down effectively in its homeland, Afghanistan, it was essential to have done something about the adjacent tribal areas of Pakistan but this was unacceptable, if not impossible. To compound the error, they attack Iraq, a sophisticated state where religion was discouraged, probably on the way to democracy given some help, as a method of dealing with terrorism. At the time, there was no anti-Western terrorism in Iraq. There is now, though. It takes spectacular incompetence to create terrorism where there is none; step forward the entire US administration. The best we can now hope for Iraq is that it will emerge as a semi-democratic theocracy.

Not only was the invasion of Iraq a catastrophic adventure in its own right, it meant taking the eye off Afghanistan. Having created the Afghanistan problem in the first place, the administration virtually abandons it midway through an attempt at reform. Here's a short piece about the situation in Afghanistan. It begins

After two years in which the violence in Afghanistan has become worse, it is hard to see signs of hope in 2008.

Is it likely that Afghanistan will survive as a democracy of any sort? Currently unthinkable without an occupation force five or ten times its current size. Here's Paddy Ashdown:

He comes with experience from a similar role in Bosnia, but Afghanistan is a far larger task as he acknowledged recently, going as far as saying, "We have lost and success is unlikely".

And what about Pakistan? A basket case I fear. A nineteen year-old, Oxford-educated student in line for PM? Absolute lunacy.

It was my intention to start this year-end round-up of the World situation with a quote from Winston Churchill:

Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing...after they have exhausted all other possibilities.

Apposite enough, but this time they've painted themselves so far into a corner that it's difficult to know what 'The Right Thing' is. It was possible once, but that was in Najibullah's time.

I was going to conclude with another quote, this time from Eisenhower:

Only Americans can hurt America.

Quite right, Ike, but they can do an awful lot of harm to the rest of us, too...

Labels: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, US administration, year-end

posted by josh at 12:37 pm

 
Hitch's challenge

Christopher Hitchens, in his atheistic perambulations around US chat shows, news studios, and other modern versions of the bear pit, has issued the following challenge to all and sundry: "Can you name me a good action done or a good thing done by a believer that couldn't have been said or done by a non-believer?"

As I write this, I'm just hearing that Tony Bliar has, at last, been received into the Roman Catholic Church. This gives me the opportunity to let everyone know that, to compensate, I've just started to worship Satan (Have I got that right? I have such poor vision these days that I may have committed a typo. I was also reading recently that 'Satan' is an anagram of 'Santa'). Now, where was I?

I wonder if we could apply Hitch's test, suitably modified, to Blair's behaviour. We should ask "Do you think that Blair's behaviour exhibited, in any way, the sort of thing you couldn't find in a non-believer?' I'm thinking particularly of his passing off the Iraq decision as something that could only be judged by god.

Yes, I think that is something that only a believer could do: completely avoid responsibility by arrogating a vital matter to 'god'. A non-believer would have put such a decision down to his/her own poor judgement – no hiding in anyone else's beard/church/cloud cuckoo land – and move on, trying to dodge the brickbats from people (like me) who predicted the debacle.

So good luck in your new religious home, Tony Bliar. I wonder how you'll cope with the legacy of your worthwhile achievements: support for abortion and stem cell research for a start. Then there's the crap you'll be letting yourself in for, beside virgin birth, the trinity and resurrection that you're already stuck with. Transubstantiation, eh? No women priests; no female popes… I hope you get a nice, cheap indulgence. Cheaper than a peerage, I'll bet. Don't you still wish you had Campbell to tell Ratzinger that you don't (really) do god?

Finally, here's someone else with something to say about the Church of Rome. Click here. (Sound needed.)

Hmm, I think I may well lose my entry on the list of UK 'God Blogs' for this little bit of petulance…

Labels: Catholic, Hitchens (C.), Iraq, religious belief, Tony Blair

posted by josh at 1:30 pm