We speak of course of Barack Obama's Nobel speech and Tony Blair's recent comments on the Iraq War. Let's take the lesser figure first.
I.
Since leaving office, Tony Blair has dipped his blood-smeared snout into various corporate troughs, amassing millions, while simultaneously becoming one of the great whited sepulchres of our day, making a great show of his conversion to Catholicism, his "faith foundation," and so on. He has even lectured at Yale Divinity School. But this holy huckster looks more haunted every day. The glaring, bulging eyes, the frantic rictus of his grin -- indistinguishable from the grimace of a man in gut-clenching pain -- and the ever-more strident, maniacal defense of his war crimes give compelling testimony to the hellish fires consuming his psyche.
Next month, Blair will go before the Chilcot Inquiry, a panel of UK Establishment worthies charged with investigating the origins of Britain's role in the invasion of Iraq. Although the worthies have been remarkably toothless in their questioning of the great and good so far -- the smell of whitewash is definitely in the air -- the inquiry has at least performed the useful function of bringing the forgotten subject of Iraq back into the public eye, while collating and confirming, with sworn testimony, much of what we have learned in dribs and drabs over the years about the rank, deliberate deceit behind this murderous catastrophe. One choice bit that has emerged from the inquiry is the revelation that the centerpiece of Blair's case for immediate war -- the claim that Saddam Hussein could hit Europe with WMD-loaded missiles on just 45 minutes' notice -- came from unconfirmed, third-hand gossip passed along by an Iraqi taxi driver.
As Blair's turn on the well-padded Chilcot cushion draws near, he has launched frantic efforts to keep his testimony secret while at the same time trying to undercut the rationale for the whole war origins inquiry, which has focused on the professed justification for the invasion: disarming Iraq's (non-existent) WMD. So last week, Blair gave an interview to a friendly, timorous chat-show host in which he made the brazen admission -- no, the proud boast -- that he would have found a way to drive Britain into war with Iraq even if he had known for certain that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. (And of course, given the nature of the "intelligence" that Blair used in his pre-war WMD claims it is certain that Blair was indeed certain that Saddam had no such weapons when the invasion was launched).
Blair's admission has drawn a remarkable response from another Establishment
mandarin, Sir Ken Macdonald, who served for five years as Director of Public
Prosecutions under Blair's government -- and now works in private practice at a
major law firm"alongside Tony Blair's wife, Cherie. The headline in The Times puts it plainly: "Intoxicated by
power, Blair tricked us into war." In his column, Macdonald
writes:
The degree of deceit involved in our decision to go to war on Iraq becomes steadily clearer. This was a foreign policy disgrace of epic proportions and playing footsie on Sunday morning television does nothing to repair the damage. It is now very difficult to avoid the conclusion that Tony Blair engaged in an alarming subterfuge with his partner George Bush and went on to mislead and cajole the British people into a deadly war they had made perfectly clear they didn't want, and on a basis that it's increasingly hard to believe even he found truly credible.
...Mr Blair's fundamental flaw was his sycophancy towards power. Perhaps this seems odd in a man who drank so much of that mind-altering brew at home. But Washington turned his head and he couldn't resist the stage or the glamour that it gave him. In this sense he was weak and, as we can see, he remains so. Since those sorry days we have frequently heard him repeating the self-regarding mantra that "hand on heart, I only did what I thought was right." But this is a narcissist's defence and self-belief is no answer to misjudgment: it is certainly no answer to death. "Yo, Blair," perhaps, was his truest measure.
Macdonald also gives us a sneak peek inside the workings
of the elite, with observations that doubtless apply equally well across the
ocean:
In British public life, loyalty and service to power can sometimes count for more to insiders than any tricky questions of wider reputation. It's the regard you are held in by your peers that really counts, so that steadfastness in the face of attack and threatened exposure brings its own rich hierarchy of honour and reward. Disloyalty, on the other hand, means a terrible casting out, a rocky and barren Roman exile that few have the courage to endure. So which way will our heroes jump?
We must hope in the right direction for it is precisely this privately arranged nature of British Establishment power, stubborn beyond sympathy for years in the face of the modern world, that has brought our politics so low. If Chilcot fails to reveal the truth without fear in this Middle Eastern story of violence and destruction, the inquiry will be held in deserved and withering contempt.
It is almost certain that the Chilcot inquiry will
produce little more than the usual blood-flecked whitewash. Certainly, Tony
Blair will face no official action for his crimes; he will not even lose any of
his corporate sponsors, unlike the heinous Tiger Woods, whose sexual intimacy
with consenting adults is obviously far worse than the murder of more than one
million innocent people. (We'll never see Woods lecturing at Yale Divinity
School now!)
But keep looking at Blair's face; watch, year by year, as it
brings forth the hideous fruits of the inferno within. For as one of his
illustrious countrymen once put it: "Murder, though it have no tongue, will
speak with most miraculous organ."
II.
"A
narcissist's defense." As a description of Obama's Peace Prize speech,
Macdonald's phrase could hardly be bettered. But the intense, near-pathological
self-regard in the speech was not Obama's alone, of course; we must do him the
credit of acknowledging that in this regard, at least, he was what we so often
proclaim our leaders to be: the embodiment of the nation. His soaring
proclamation of American exceptionalism, in a setting supposedly devoted to
universal principles of peace, was breathtaking in its chutzpah -- but entirely
in keeping with the feelings of the vast majority of his countrymen, and the
ruling elite above all.
Many have already remarked on Obama's adoption in
the speech of Bush's principle of unilateral, "pre-emptive" military action,
anytime, anywhere, whenever a leader declares his nation is under threat. This
approach -- which Bush called "the path of action" -- was roundly scorned by
critics of the former regime, many of whom now scramble to praise Obama's
"nuanced" embrace of aggression. But again, let us give credit where it is due;
in this aspect of the speech, Obama did in fact go beyond Bush's more narrowly
nationalist conception, saying: "I -- like any head of state -- reserve the right
to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation."
Thus Obama would,
apparently, extend the right of unilateral military action to "any head
of state" that feels the necessity of defending his or her nation. But of course
this is just empty verbiage, a pointless, bald-faced lie that not even Bush
would have tried to get away with. Would Obama accept a unilateral, pre-emptive
strike by Tehran against Israel, where legislators and government officials
routinely talk of attacking Iran? Would Obama cheer the "right" of Russia to
strike unilaterally at Poland if the U.S. "missile shield" deal, now on hold,
was suddenly consummated? Would Obama support a unilateral strike by India at
Pakistan -- or vice versa -- in the still-seething cauldron of tensions on the
subcontinent, where both nations legitimately feel threatened by the other?
Would he support the right of Kim Jong-il to "defend his nation" by attacking
South Korea the next time there is a threatening border incident there?
No, it is clear that only the United States -- and its allies, like
Israel -- are to be allowed the supreme privilege of unilateral war. The line
was inserted in the speech simply because it would sound good in the moment, and
create a temporary emotional reaction that might carry listeners past the
macabre incongruity underlying the entire event: giving a peace award to the
bloodstained leader of a military machine hip-deep in the coagulate gore of two,
vast, civilian-slaughtering wars.
Obama staked his boldest claim to
American exceptionalism with a passage that he lifted, almost verbatim, from his
West Point speech just a few days before (see here and especially here), when he announced his second massive escalation of the
war in Afghanistan:
Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest -- because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other people's children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.
Here is chutzpah -- and hubris -- raised to the level
of the sublime. Obama has taken the words he used to instigate the certain death
of thousands of human beings and the acceleration of hatred, extremism, chaos
and brutal corruption around the world -- and offered them as justification for
the hideous, unabashedly Orwellian doctrine at the core of his speech: War is
Peace. In this perverse inversion of values, Obama, as a warmaker, is actually a
peacemaker, you see -- and thus a legitimate heir to the legacy of Martin Luther
King Jr., who was evoked at several points in the speech. (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
And here we
come to what was for me the most revolting part of the speech. And perhaps the
most significant too. All the cant about America's altruism and "enlightened
self-interest" in killing millions of people -- Indochina was one of many
convenient blank spots in Obama's historical survey-- for the sake of all the
children of the world (red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in our
sight) was just par for the rhetorical course. It was nothing that had not been
said many times before, including the references -- so lauded by Obama's liberal
apologists -- to those inadvertent "mistakes" America seems to keep making; out
of a surfeit of good intentions, no doubt. But I don't think an American
president has so openly and directly traduced the work of Martin Luther King Jr.
and Mohandas Gandhi before. (And to do it while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize,
no less! Oh, that sublime brass....)
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