MICHAEL BURLEIGH

As of today my blog has moved to this http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/ site. I hope commentators will simply go there to continue reading my thoughts on events.

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And so to the Ten O’Clock News. Brown’s anniversary as PM. The polls are lousy, but you would not know it, since flashing up images of Brown and Cameron, the BBC managed to display Brown on 48% and Cameron on 28%- with no apology at any point for this major reversal of the reality (incidentally Cameron is on 46% at present). And so on to a review of what a Tory administration might do. There was not much flesh on the bones in the four reports by BBC luminaries, BUT, each segment contrived to use old fashioned black and white footage to insinuate that the Tories wished to take us back to the 1950s. We had a family fireside scene (circa 1950), whereas in reality the Tories are fully cognisant of changes in human relationships…….and then yuppies with their champagne (circa 1987) were contrasted with dole lines. The BBC’s political editor contrived to speak about ‘the men who may run Britain’ (showing Cameron, Osborne and Hague) as if there are no females in the shadow cabinet. A little later on Question Time, David Dimbleby was not exactly forensic in his questioning of Yvette Cooper, the motormouth Treasury spokesperson, about her and her husband Ed Balls’s curious mortage arrangements. By contrast, Dimbleby had been briefed, by the BBC Newsnight programme going out at that time on BBC2, about further revelations about Tory chairperson Caroline Spelman’s odd remumeration of her nanny, a story being worried to death by little Michael Crick, even though it concerns events ten years ago. A couple of weeks ago my wife sat next to a rare being- a conservative who works for the BBC. She volunteered that after the Nantwich by-election and Boris’s victory in London, the Lefties in the BBC had turned nasty and were really out to get the Tories. Last night’s none too concealed evidence of bias and malice confirmed this.

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The Tory culture spokesman seems to have a very narrow definition of his remit since his recent speech is primarily concerned with using tax breaks to increase private philanthropy in the arts. Sure, rich people should buy a Rubens, enjoy it, give it to the nation after their death, and get tax rewards for their generosity, as happens in the US. But, surely, having identified Britain’s ‘broken society’, the Tories might just want to consider the contribution of the arts, film, television and music to the ills they have identified. Or is condemnation of Guy Ritchie’s cynical gangster films, or rap music that revels in mindless violence, a step too far for any young thrusting patrician making what my friend George Walden calls ‘a career in the masses’?

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For once I listened carefully to BBC Radio 4’s ‘Start the Week’- risking cutting my throat by being negligent while shaving. Kenan Malik was splendidly lucid about his new book on race, which I must get this morning. Sir Ian Kershaw talked about his new collection of essays on Nazi Germany, the subject of his entire life’s work. He had a lot to say about the moral indifference of ordinary Germans towards Jews during wartime. A lot of interruptions came from one Eva Figes who has apparently written a memoir about the tribulations of yekkes (German-Jews) in Israel, as seen through the perspective of the family maid, who went there and then came back ‘because they all hate eachother’. The maid’s odyssey was secondary to Ms Figes’s extraordinary views on contemporary politics. She launched into a tirade about contemporary Israel, comparing it with Nazi Germany and blaming it for 9/11. Only Kenan Malik demurred, regarding the last point, saying quite rightly that Israel had nothing to do with attacks that were plotted from the mid-1990s onwards. There was total silence, which some might construe as ‘indifference’, from Kershaw- notwithstanding the fact that after forty years of academic study of the Nazis he might be well-placed to dismiss such a despicable comparison, which is also being insinuated vis a vis the US neo-cons in such other bien pensant products of our age as Philippe Sands’ recent ‘Torture Team’. Comparisons between Israel and apartheid in South Africa are bad enough- Israel does not have a scientific/theological theoretical apparatus justifying suppression of Arabs- but this is one of the most pernicious falsehoods of modern times. Israel is not trying to exterminate its Arab population- they have the vote and are represented in the Knesset. What it is trying to do, and maybe we feel embarassed by it, is to defend itself against fanatics who fire rockets at its civilians.

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Tate Britain has a wonderful little show of mainly nineteenth century pictures of the Near East, which is loosely pegged around Edward Said’s book. Actually you don’t need to have read ‘Orientalism’ to enjoy the show. My favourites were a marvellous Reynolds of a western lady in eastern costume, a stunning picture of a carpet market by an artist called Mueller- like a cavernous Piranesi with the light let in, a tiny Lawrence view of a courtyard, and a couple of Wilkie portraits of, among others, Ali Pasha, the Albanian who used Egypt as a base for rebellion against the Ottoman Turks. I was less keen on the Holman Hunts- something about the colour he used- and the landscapes weren’t upto much either. In a sense the exhibition was fascinating because so little of it did more than scratch the surface: travellers the artists remained. More culture tonight, a concert of American music at the Wigmore Hall, courtesy of Irwin and Cita Stelzer who have sponsored it. Since my knowledge of music is so slight that I declined to go on Humphrey Barclay’s ‘my music’ or whatever it is called, I’ll spare you my thoughts on Gershwin et al…… 

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A fascinating morning discussing terrorism with the former President of Spain, Jose Maria Aznar, at Policy Exchange, the liveliest thinktank in Britain. The event was packed. Senor Aznar and his National Security Advisor could not have been more charming and well-informed interlocutors. Unlike many academics who pontificate about terrorism, Senor Aznar knows about it, not least because Eta nearly assassinated him in April 1995 with a massive car bomb. ‘My car was more powerful than their bomb’ he quipped. The three armed bodyguards accompanying him suggest that the threat is real alright. The discussion afterwards was very good. The amazingly articulate Field Marshal Lord Guthrie totally rejected the ‘its good to talk’ line, reminding us that the British Army (and Loyalist paramilitaries) had a lot to do with inclining Sinn Fein/IRA to a more receptive stance……Lord Owen also posed some interesting questions. The vote of thanks was moved by Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, the former head of the Counter-Terrorism Branch, who spoke very warmly about my book Blood and Rage, which he is recommending for training purposes. I signed several copies for the (many) counter-terrorism officers in the audience. Had a useful chat with the Israeli ambassador afterwards, as well as the High Commissioner of Singapore.

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The Times Higher Education Supplement informs the world that academics are irreligious because they are cleverer than everyone else. In case readers have never glanced through it, the THES is a sort of trade union mag, largely consisting of members of the ‘profession’ whining on about how badly paid, neglected, irrelevant, irreverent, marvellous or “whacky” they are. I’ve never been struck by the ‘intelligence’ of anything published in it since its invariably where donnish articles wind up after they’ve been rejected everywhere else. Funny how someone who is genuinely intelligent, the writer and journalist Nick Cohen, recently wrote in the Observer that he always knew what academics thought about everything before they even managed to open their mouths. Funny too how the excellent Minette Marrin has highlighted the fact that when the Archbishop of Canterbury recently advocated licensing sharia law, his many critics remarked that he belonged in universities where people are paid (by us) to talk obscurely and fatuously about the issues of the day.

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I am not known as a softie on terrorism. However, I can see no sensible grounds for extending the period of detention for terrorist suspects to 42 days. Admittedly the public supports it, but then the public would also probably support crucifying convicted terrorists along the Mile End Road. Although the former head of counter-terrorism has come out- after his retirement- to support the measure, the head of MI5 was distinctly lukewarm on the subject in a press release. As Conservative security spokesman Pauline Neville-Jones said last night, there has been no case where such an extension was necessary. Moreover, in order to muster a majority, and to avoid a humiliating defeat, Gordon Brown’s team have built in so many caveats that the resulting measures seem ludicrous. Senior judges and MPs themselves will have to be convinced as to why a suspect should be detained beyond the existing 28 days. I bet the intelligence services will love sharing sensitive information- and inevitably how it is gathered- with that lot, who in turn will love being hauled back from their constituencies, hols and official trips abroad to ponder these issues. Oh, and for those wrongfully arrested, there is a £3000 per diem compensation package- from a government that, disgracefully, has yet to adequately or fully compensate people affected by the 7/7 bombings. Finally, Britain’s long-standing presumption of innocence until proven guilty will surely be undermined if juries are made aware of judicial and parliamentary extension of a suspect’s detention. Presumably that is why the public prosecution authorities are opposed to these measures? In truth this legislation has nothing to do with counter-terrorism, but everything to do with Brown’s attempts to paint Cameron as soft on terrorism, a slur I have comprehensively demolished in STANDPOINT magazine. It is the clamp Brown is jamming into the cliff face of his freefall in public estimation. Thanks to the douceurs being offered to Labour’s left-wing rebels (a miner’s club here, a new road there) in 20 minute phone calls from a PM they have hardly heard from, not to speak of pork barrel bribes being handed out to Ulster’s DUP (and rumour has it the offer of a peerage to the egregious Shami Chakrabati Queen of Liberty) the government will squeeze through at 6pm tonight. It really doesn’t deserve to. In the long term, the vote tonight will not reverse Brown’s precipitate decline anyway, as house prices fall, food and petrol prices soar, and people wonder why in a decade of prosperity, no money was put aside for bad times, instead of being pissed up the public sector wall. Parallel revelations about INCREASING poverty, social divisions, educational failure, violent crime and so on will see this tired government out.

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The hundredth death of a British service man or woman in Afghanistan has been the occasion for many grave ruminations on that mission. Many commentators have highlighted the gap between the government’s trumpeting of the ‘nobility’ of the cause with the inadequate pay and resources they commit to it. A few more cosmetic home-coming parades in Glasgow or Leeds won’t bridge the further gap opening up between the military and society.

Part of the problem is mission-creep or shift and an epochal identity crisis in the purposes of our respective militaries. Initially a coalition went to Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban regime which was aiding and abetting Al Qaeda, which had just killed nearly three thousand people in the US, including the largest number of British victims of any terrorist atrocity. The US prioritised hunting and destroying these terrorists, after a series of incompetencies allowed many of them to escape; once NATO became involved, the emphasis shifted to reconstruction, in which the US administration was utterly uninterested. NATO itself was and is disabled by a series of national caveats, including Germans who won’t go on patrol without accompanying ambulances, and a Luftwaffe that refuses to fly at night. The US detached its own Operation Enduring Freedom (the hunt for Al Qaeda) from the NATO command structure, and then weakened its own endeavours by subtracting so many assets for the invasion of Iraq. The US also approved of large tracts of the country remaining in the hands of drug-dealing, revenue-stealing warlords, while NATO attempted to spread the writ of the marginally less corrupt Kabul government of Hamid Karzai. There were further rifts about what to do with the sea of opium poppies: did you eradicate them from the air (as the US wished) or treat the problem field by field as NATO thought more discriminating and less environmentally hazardous? Should soldiers be an extension of the Drug Enforcement Agency? Are we prepared to see NATO break apart on the sacrifical altar of Afghanistan?

Meanwhile, Al Qaeda and Mullah Omar regrouped in the badlands of Pakistan, in towns like Quetta, Peshawar, or Miram Shah. Although General Pervez Musharraf marketed himself and his army as indispensable to the war on terror- handing over the odd foreign terrorist in return for about US$10billion which was used to buy kit designed to fight India or which went missing in the Pakistani military-industrial sector- in fact, the ISI and the army have always been sympathetic to the Islamists, using them to subvert Afghanistan and to fight India in Kashmir, with Al Qaeda’s training camps being dual purpose. After the Pakistani Frontier Corps took a hammering in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (a baleful legacy of the British) Musharraf concluded a series of one-way deals with the local chiefs which resulted in Al Qaeda re-establishing its training structures and the Pakistani Taliban menacing hitherto stable areas like the Swat Valley. Emboldened by his weakness (Musharraf was simultaneously crushing Pakistan’s independent judiciary) the Islamists (Al Qaeda, any number of Pakistani groups, including their own Taliban) struck at the president himself in a number of assassination attempts, while openly using the Red Fort mosque to advertise Islamic rule a stone’s throw from Musharraf’s palace complex in Islamabad. The Islamists then directly interfered in Pakistan’s electoral process by killing Benazhir Bhutto, although others may have had a hand in it. All of which is to say that while bringing democracy and stability to Afghanistan may be a noble goal, that country’s problems stem from a lumpen Pashtu refugee population that straddles the eastern borderlands, menacing the stability of a nuclear armed Pakistan as well as Afghanistan. Hidden within that population are Al Qaeda terrorists, against whom the US and Brits launch opportunistic missile strikes, which are deplored by the Pakistani government as a threat to its sovereignty- arguably a claim of stunning hypocrisy. So Afghanistan’s problems largely stem from over the border? Is anyone prepared to see more mission creep in that direction? Meanwhile the war drums reverberate against Iran, which has actually enabled the US to stabilise western Afghanistan and which helped the coalition defeat the Taliban. Meanwhile too, virtually every terrorist conspiracy in Europe has an important Pakistani component, and European terrorists are likely to be the greatest threat to the US itself. As in Iraq, the Afghan government needs to be reminded that our committments are not open-ended; that our publics simply won’t make these sacrifices indefinitely; and that they have to fight for the sort of societies they want. These thoughts were prompted by a reading of Ahemd Rashid’s new book, Descent into Chaos, which at least has the virtue of presenting the local issues in their horrendous complexity, even if Mr Rashid seems to not care one jot about the role of western public opinion in these matters, a view shared by such liberal interventionists as Phillip Bobbitt. Meanwhile our clever stupid Foreign Secretary makes fatuous analogies between the Hindu Kush and the White Cliffs of Dover circa 1940- a line he owes to the German chancellor Angela Merkel, “Germany’s frontiers now begin on the Hindu Kush”, for he is not an original thinker. Like Macbeth the West has now put itself in the position of having waded so far out into the blood that it can’t go further or backwards. It will require epic intelligence and tenacity for the next generation of leaders to resolve this one.

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Slim pickings in today’s papers. A very good column by Nick Cohen in the Observer on conformity in academia. Ludwig Wittgenstein would have been omitted from any self-respecting RAE submission. A thoughful column too by Martin Ivens in the Sunday Times about where Brown and Cameron go next. Otherwise pages of rather tired material on the 42 days detention issue which comes up next week. I have yet to see a persuasive argument for extending the period. In any event, Brown will have had to offer so many caveats to his Labour opponents that the resulting measures will have more holes in them than a colander. Among the book reviews there are several less than enthusiastic discussions of leftist historian Mark Mazower’s bizarre attempts to align Hitler’s ramshackle ‘new order’ with ninteenth century European colonial empires that left civil societies, the rule of law, decent universities, a free press and so forth. Where is their Nazi analogue?

And so president George Bush arrives on his swan-song tour of Europe. “Celebrity” ex-wife Bianca Jagger and crime writer Iain Rankin are already flourishing the metaphorical handcuffs in emulation of George Monbiot’s citizens arrest of John Bolton. Since all the focus is now on McCain and Obama, Bush will simply come and go, stimulating a heightened flurry of activity in Grosvenor Square and nowhere else. Come November the great Atlanticist waters will close over him and Europe and the US will quickly recover from that interlude. One of the great banes of a sunny day in central London is the sheer amount of ambient noise, especially if you are locked inside reviewing different books as my wife and I are. We had our teenage neighbour pretending to be a pirate DJ at about 8am, now it is someone mowing the grass in our square, and in the distance is some anti-knife/gun crime folkfest thoughtfully arranged at our collective expense by Lambeth Council. All of which drowns out the death agonies of the two frogs our cats have caught and are playing with. Any sign of sun and one should flee central London immediately.

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