Tag Archives: iraq

What’s in a name?

thoughtcat,

George Monbiot writes an excellent piece today about an attempt by a Belgian lawyer to try General Tommy Franks for war crimes in Iraq. Belgium is the only country in the world which has, or had until now anyway, a law allowing people to be tried for such crimes even if they were committed outside Belgium or didn’t involve the country. It’s a great story, especially since it “outraged” the US, but sadly the Belgian authorities rushed to amend the law to avoid international embarrassment.

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The Times reports on the incredible feat of endurance that “old Harrovian” Pen Hadow, or Rupert Nigel Pendrill Hadow to give him his full name, has performed by walking solo to the North Pole. The print version of the story also lists some other (ant)arctic explorers including Sir Ranulph Twistleton-Wykeham-Fiennes and Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton. It’s a fantastic result for the guy, no question, and I wouldn’t’ve been able to do it myself, but surely a true world record for a British explorer would be to get to the North Pole with only a name like Dave Grubb or something?

The decline of civilisation

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John Reid, leader of the House of Commons, is reported today to be under fire for saying of Iraq: “I believe there are weapons of mass destruction there. I know we haven’t found them yet, but because we haven’t found them yet no more means that there was not a threat than not finding the money stolen from the Great Train Robbery means that Ronnie Biggs was innocent.” This Prescottesque tongue-and-truth-twister is even worse than Jack “Short” Straw’s “rewriting of history” yesterday when he said “it’s not crucial” now to find the weapons. All this comes despite Tony Blair going on and on like a bloody scratched record for weeks before the war about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction (the expression was of course used so much that he had to truncate it to “WMD”) being the pretext for military action, which we all knew was bullshit anyway. My respect for our politicans just gets lower – at the same rate, in fact, as their respect for the intelligence of the people they claim to represent disintegrates. How can people like Straw live with themselves? Why not just go and get an honest job like being a milkman or something? It might not pay as much but at least it’d be human.

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If you missed the BBC2 programme “The Nation’s Favourite Food” last night, think yourself lucky. My wife and I were watching it while we were eating… never again. This alleged top ten of the UK’s favourite “seduction” foods included strawberries in chocolate, and, of all things, prawns. They also interviewed an inarticulate 12-year-old DJ about champagne, filmed a bunch of sloane-rangerettes blowing up a kitchen in an attempt to make chocolate vodka cocktails, showed Melinda Messenger spitting out an oyster and, perhaps worst of all, filmed Peter Stringfellow. In his kitchen. Cooking a chicken casserole for his girlfriend. I mean, Jesus. It made us yearn for a Get It On bar.

For anyone who doesn’t watch TV or doesn’t live in the UK, this was just the latest TV show in recent weeks claiming to represent the UK’s favourite this-or-that as voted for by viewers. In the past few weeks alone we’ve had the UK’s top 100 film stars, the UK’s top 100 romantic films, the 100 worst people in the UK (all on Channel 4, it should be said), not to mention the soon-to-be-announced BBC Big Read, a poll of the UK’s favourite 100 books. I’m all for anything that encourages people to read, but even that’s a bit of a naff idea (especially as the number one will probably be something I haven’t read). Something else I haven’t read is Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man but this total lack of imagination on the part of TV programme-makers is the Last Straw and would seem to bear out the feeling that The End of Television is nigh. How many more cruddy TV shows can they make on the basis of things voted for by viewers? More importantly, when are TV companies going to realise that the results of these programmes don’t represent the views of the UK but instead just the views of the six people who voted? Plus, the only people who do vote in these things are people who don’t do anything except watch cruddy TV programmes all day. It’s like that exchange in Woody Allen’s Manhattan:

IKE: You’re going by the audience reaction to this? I mean, this is an audience that’s raised on television. Their standards have been systematically lowered over the years… these guys sit in front of their sets and the gamma rays eat the white cells of their brains out… I quit.

DICK: All right. Just relax. Take a lude.

IKE: All you guys do is drop ludes and take Percodans and angel dust! Naturally, the show seems funny.

Conscientious objectors

thoughtcat

Thoughtcat’s agent in West Drayton points me to an interesting piece on the BBC website’s “Real Time” column today headlined “Why I would not kill in war“. Four men – an American GI who served in WW2, a German who refused to join the Nazi Youth, an Israeli refusenik and US marine Stephen Funk – all talk about their anti-war stance.

Resigned to her fate

thoughtcat, , ,

So Clare Short’s finally resigned, huh? If there’s ever a modern-day equivalent of the fable of the boy [sic] who cried wolf, this has to be it. But what’s even more irritating than the fact that Short didn’t follow through her threats to resign before or during the war, when it would have had a tad more credibility, is that she does make some good points in this interview, such as describing Tony Blair as less Washington’s poodle than its “fig leaf”, adding, “Fig leaf number two is ‘blame the French’.”

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Shopping in Tesco’s today, I came across a shocking product, “Get it on”, which described itself as a “sex fruit and seed bar”. Sex, in Tesco’s?? Disgusted by the mere thought of it, I examined the label closely: The Food Doctor, which makes the bars and others in the range, claims that its combination of rye, pumpkin, hemp (hemp??! in Tesco’s??), banana, figs, mango and gingko biloba “support the flow of blood to the extremities… The rest is up to you.” Of course I popped two in my basket immediately (one for me, the other for my wife), covered them with a copy of the Guardian and proceeded warily to the till. I got home, we tore off our wrappers (of the bars, that is), and… well, sadly I have to report that it was less than erotic. In fact, half a mouthful and we were put off just about any kind of romantic activity for the rest of the evening…

Stuff in the news

thoughtcat, ,

The Independent today carries an obituary of Rose Augustine, “champion of the classical guitar”, who was a big fan of Cuban music and was still going to work at the offices of Guitar Review magazine when she was 85.

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I was interested to see a report in the Guardian a few days ago that a 15-year-old Essex schoolgirl who was banned from school after organising an anti-war protest and “not wearing school uniform” has been allowed by the High Court to return to her classes. The judge described her as “very silly”, which sounds a bit Pythonesque to me. Mr Justice Collins also said that Liberty‘s view on the matter, that her original exclusion was in breach of her rights to free speech and freedom of assembly, was “totally the wrong way to look at it”.

What a waste

thoughtcat,

The Independent reports that up to 13 Iraqis died when US soldiers fired on a group of people in Fallujah protesting about the the Americans’ occupation of a school, which they wanted reopened. The soldiers said some people had guns and they felt threatened. Well, to stop feeling threatened they could perhaps try leaving the country. Obviously some policing needs to be done by someone, but preferably by people who know what they’re doing. If the US is at all serious in its claim that the war is “over” and the people of Iraq have been “liberated”, it must put a stop to these Wild West-style shoot-outs. Amnesty International says: “the USA and the UK [must] deploy forces in sufficient numbers and with the right training and equipment to restore law and order, until Iraqi police forces can operate effectively.” Apart from the killing of those 13 people, the saddest part of this story is that the formerly mild-mannered headmaster of the school in question now says he is willing to become a martyr to avenge the Americans.

Elsewhere in the Independent, it is reported that David Blunkett says Labour could benefit from a supposed “Baghdad bounce” boost in support among its working-class voters at the local elections this week. The home secretary says criticism of the war is “a class issue”, implying that only the middle classes opposed it. When I went on the march through London on 15th February with two million other people, I didn’t notice much of a class divide, David, although I guess you probably weren’t there to see for yourself (no sick pun intended, but I don’t know how else to put it). Anyway, as ever it’s reassuring to see a Labour politician – the home secretary at that – exploiting the class divide to win cheap political points.

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Meanwhile, spamming (sending junk email that is, not slapping people on the forehead) has officially become a criminal offence in the US state of Virginia, according to this report from Internet Magazine. A BBC 10 O’Clock News item on this subject also found that up to half of the millions of emails people now receive worldwide every day are unsolicited adverts for various rubbish, and even more incredibly, something like 90% of all spam ultimately derives from just 180 people around the world. All of which reminds me, I must update Spamcat…

Liberating stuff

thoughtcat,

Internet Magazine reports that a group of archaeologists and art historians have established a website in an attempt to publicise Iraqi treasures looted in recent weeks so that they become too high-profile to sell.

This comes on the same day as paintings by Van Gogh, Gauguin and Picasso were “liberated” from a Manchester art gallery.

The paintings in question have been immediately valued at £1m… not so the Iraqi treasures.

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Even when you’re working from home and doing what you want to do you still have to put up with Mondays. A typical Monday today, grey and depressing, and not much done. At one point I was so bored I even Googled for myself. As usual I didn’t appear within about the first 342 pages of search results but I was intrigued to read the comments of one Richard Cooper who did, in this story about a wax museum in Las Vegas which has added a Saddam Hussein figure to its range of exhibits. This has, naturally, proved so controversial that visitors are flocking from all over to see it, denounce it and pose for photos with their hands around its throat. The Richard Cooper in question (a Vietnam vet and retired firefighter from Virginia) says about Saddam, “I believe in the Old Testament: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” Hmm… one to add to Thoughtcat’s “Richard Coopers I’m Not” page (under construction). Also quoted is a relative of one of the people killed in the World Trade Centre attacks, who tragically proves what propaganda can do by saying she believes 9/11 was the work of Saddam. She comments that she’s “totally offended” by the statue, adding: “Killing him wouldn’t be enough.” Eh?

The poetry and the bollocks

thoughtcat, ,

Ex-Python Terry Jones continues his excellent column in the Observer with a piece headlined Mr Blair’s dark days, in which he echoes my own sentiments from 18th April about Tony’s “worst fear” about the war, i.e. that it’d cause him to lose his bloody job.

On a lighter note, elsewhere in the paper there’s a lovely profile of performance poet John Hegley, who says that poetry “is the opposite of speaking words which are mundane. It’s words that are charged, it’s vibrancy, mystery, aliveness, intensity – and bollocks.”

The axis of anti

thoughtcat, ,

The Observer reports that a wave of books critical of the US stance on the war have become bestsellers in that country, with Greg Palast‘s The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men and Noam Chomsky’s 9/11 forming the “axis of anti”.

The same issue of the paper also prints a version of an excellent speech by actor and director Tim Robbins in which he says “Basic inalienable rights, due process, the sanctity of the home [in the US] have been compromised in a climate of fear.” He goes on to relate a great story of how his 11-year-old nephew stood up to his schoolteacher who was ranting about Robbins’ wife Susan Sarandon‘s anti-war stance.

The Independent today features a savage article from John Pilger about the aftermath of the war, warning against the “unthinkable” of what was done and both that and our reactions to it becoming “normalised”. (The Independent however has since started to charge for archived articles at the rate of £1 a time; I have my doubts about how long that’s going to last.)

While we’re on the subject of the war, I must put in a belated plug for playwright David Hare’s beautifully written piece from the Guardian on 12th April, “Don’t look for a reason”, sub-headlined “All the explanations for this war are bogus – Bush only invaded Iraq to prove that he could.” Hare also points out what I mentioned a while back about the lack of a leader in the anti-war movement. I have to wonder if Tim Robbins, who played a nastily ambitious US politician in his brilliant political satire Bob Roberts a few years ago, would consider running for office…?

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Meanwhile, poet Christopher Logue writes a nice piece about his friendship with the late Leonard Cohen-inspirer, Sir Paul Getty. He writes that when they first met, Getty was surrounded by books, many of which were poetry, among them “a selected edition of Robert Herrick, the loveliest book I had ever seen, and an example of wonderful English bookbinding. From, I think, the Doves Press, it had a soft green leather cover studded with a hundred primroses tooled in gold. ‘You see,’ he [Getty] said, ‘when you open it,’ opening it, laying it on the side table, ‘it stays open. And when you close it,’ closing it, ‘there is an almost silent gasp.'” Which will probably end up in next week’s Pseud’s Corner, but you have to admit that books just don’t do that anymore, do they?

The most deluded man in the world

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Several papers report today on an interview Tony Blair granted the UK’s war-friendliest rag, The Sun, in which Tone confides with characteristic disingenuousness that he considered resigning over his stance on Iraq and that he was “upset” when the UN didn’t pass the second resolution. It’s hard to imagine a more minty piece of humbug than this: if millions marching through central London (and just about everywhere else in the world) to protest against the war, and the vote of some 150 of his own MPs in opposition to the government’s action didn’t convince him to either quit his post or oppose military intervention himself, what, exactly, would have done?

The Guardian (which headlines its report, “Blair feared for premiership over war” – what, in the past tense?) also quotes Blair: “The most terrible thing for someone in my position is to end up losing your job for something you don’t really believe in.” Final proof, then, that the killing, “orphaning”, maiming and general destruction has always come second to our illustrious leader’s preservation of his own career.

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So, farewell, then, Sir Paul Getty. When I read the news, I couldn’t help but think of the great line from Leonard Cohen’s song Jazz Police: “Jazz Police are paid by J. Paul Getty / Jazzers paid by J. Paul Getty II…”