... surely JP should do the same!
Long Live Labor
Why I'm for Tony Blair.
By Christopher Hitchens
By the way it's well worth following the link to the article about the pronunciation of 'Wolfowitz' within the Labour endorsement. (Or if you prefer you can go straight to it here.)
2 comments:
Excellent article. As you know, Hitchens' position is basically where I started the election campaign.
I have had some wavering moments along the way, especially when I saw/heard Labour politicians mouthing off, but every time the Tories nearly had my vote one of them would sound off too.
The current media frenzy about Iraq has basically put me back where I started, and the Hitchens article strengthens that conviction.
Completely agree. Fantastic article. I've also wavered on this election ... but the hypocrisy of the tories attacking Blair on the war appalls me.
Here's an extract from Charles Moore in the telegraph that puts it very well -
'The night before, I watched Channel 4 News disclose the summary of the attorney-general's advice of March 7, 2003.
It gave me a certain malicious pleasure to see Blairite techniques of spin used against their inventor, but the "revelation" revealed almost exactly what you would have expected. Lord Goldsmith pointed out, which everyone knew, that the legal basis for war would be stronger if there were a second UN Resolution, and he weighed carefully and inconclusively the arguments for attacking Iraq without a second resolution.
Even Jon Snow was not quite equal to the struggle of making phrases like "on the one hand" sound explosive. World exclusive: the Government's legal adviser gave legal advice.
The next day, when Tony Blair felt forced to give another day to the story by releasing the full text of the advice, Bishop Snow (he has an increasingly grand ecclesiastical air, don't you think?) had hardly any time on his programme for a rather interesting piece of news - that following democratic elections in Iraq, a cabinet had just been formed.
Imagine how the Right Reverend Jon would have blessed such an enterprise if it had been brought about by the UN (which, of course, it couldn't have been).
I hope, when this election is over, that BBC licence-payers and Channel 4 viewers will ask why these channels decided to concentrate on about a quarter of the true subject matter of the election, and in a way that favoured the agenda of the Liberal Democrats and the Robin Cook wing of the Labour Party.
But it is the fault of the party leaders, too, that we are arguing over such barren ground. This thing about lying was settled more than 2,500 years ago in the paradox of the philosopher Epimenides. He was a Cretan, and he declared that "All Cretans are liars"; so either he was lying about Cretans and therefore they weren't all liars, or he was telling the truth about them, in which case he couldn't have been a Cretan.
All politicians, as it were, are Cretans, and therefore it profits them nothing to attack one another on this point. This is why there is a convention in the Commons that all its Members are "honourable" - not because it is true, but because it has to be the working assumption.
Ever since John Major, under Labour pressure, invented the Nolan rules by which MPs receive exterior invigilation for their conduct, they have in effect declared that they are not to be trusted. And on that point, if on no other, voters seem to believe them.
The consequence is that people tell opinion polls both that they think Mr Blair is a liar and that he would make the best Prime Minister. It is not as illogical as it sounds: if you believe that all politicians are liars, you might as well vote for the one who lies the best.
I remember a cartoon by the late John Glashan in which a beautiful woman lounges on a sofa while her dark-haired suitor paces up and down the room: "Lie to me again!" she cries.
That's what the voters said to the seductive Tony in 2001, and I suspect, though by a lesser margin, that they will say it again next week. (By the way, the biggest lie that they currently want to hear is that the economy will be just fine: Mr Blair and Gordon Brown are obliging.)
People keep on attacking Mr Blair about the war in Iraq because they see it as his weakest point. Certainly it displays his cavalier way with facts, his scorn for the process of government, his poor planning.
But it also shows qualities that are inextricably associated with leadership - courage, persuasiveness, energy, a big view about where his country's interests lie, a capacity for action and decision and, unlike Eden over Suez, a capacity to win.
If he had acted the other way - if he had turned aside from America, thrown in our lot with continental Europe, and withdrawn our troops from their global role - he would have reawakened all the old beliefs that Labour can't maintain our most important alliance, can't back our forces and is run from the Left.
The Tories would have had something to say at last, and a Conservative leader would be heading for Number 10.
So I'm sticking by my theory, so far proved right in the two cases in which it has been tested, that all the main Iraq "warmongers" - George W Bush, John Howard in Australia and Tony Blair in Britain - will be re-elected.
Anglo-Saxon political culture still has enough self-confidence not to fear leadership in war, but to see it as a necessary attribute of a robust democracy. Which is a good thing.'
Post a Comment