Tough Questions, Nausea and the Iraq War Inquiry

Admiral Lord Boyce, not a relation of this man, has told the Iraq War Inquiry (or 'iwi') that Tony Blair specifically stated that the aim of the invasion was not Regime Change. I imagine the conversation went a bit like this:

BOYCE: Hey Tony. Say, this invasion of Iraq... we're not going to actually remove Saddam from power, are we?
BLAIR: No, of course not. Whatever happens, we will ensure that Saddam is still in power when we leave.
BOYCE: Phew!

I shouldn't imagine that there are many invasions undertaken for reasons other than regime change. In fact, it's a pretty impossible feat, isn't it? To defeat the ruler of a country, on his own soil, but not try to prise him from the throne of power seems, well, utterly pointless. Of course, I'm not an admiral, or a lord, and I wasn't in Only Fools and Horses. But I'm sure Trigger would think it would be pointless too. And he's as thick as pigshit.

So, Tony Blair's position is getting shakier by the day, and by the time the Inquiry is over, he'll be forced to answer for his crimes against humanity. He'll have been dead for decades by then, but I'm sure someone will dig him up and do something funny to his corpse (you read it here first; my money's on something weird and sexual - or maybe a Marxist student will spray a mohawk on him and throw him through a shop window in the name of, you know, like, something political, yeah?). But at least we'll all feel better. The man seen by many as a monster will have been officially labelled a monster, and future generations will shudder at the memory of that smile. That impish face. That abominably greedy wife. D:Ream (go on, click it).

This leaves me a little uncomfortable. Yes, he cared too much about spin. Yes, he cared too much about money. Yes, he converted to a morally repugnant religious cult upon leaving Number 10. But do all those people baying for his blood really deserve to feel so smug over his slow and inexorable public annihilation?

(Stick around, it's OK. It's me.)

I remember heading off to London on the day of the march against the invasion of Iraq. After visiting the Aztec Exhibition at the Royal Academy of the Arts, I wondered blearily into the throng of people. What I had seen at the exhibition had chilled me; an entire civilisation eradicated by the greed of Spain's rulership, who took the astonishingly finely wrought solid gold artefacts from the cold, dead hands of the conquered, and melted them into fat bricks to be shipped home. One bloodthirsty religion which nevertheless understood the cycle of life, death and rebirth was obliterated by another bloodthirsty religion with its brain completely divorced from the natural world. Men with obsidian swords were butchered by men in metal suits with guns. A myriad torments were inflicted on a powerless populace. Some of the indignities would even shock the sickos behind Wire in the Blood.

As I marched against the war, I thought about the callous disregard the Conquistadores had for Aztec civilisation. When museums in Iraq began to be looted and destroyed, as objects of rare antiquity were lost forever, much to the Americans' utter disinterest, I saw how the exhibition, and the march, seemed to sing to one another. What a sad song, too.

And yet, the discomfort. The feeling that wracks Roquentin when he grabs the door-knob in Nausea became something I could understand. Thousands of people, many of them liberals like me, most of them lefties, all of them for the most part decent, compassionate and upstanding, were opposing the invasion, for fear and in contempt of its inevitable worst excesses; they foresaw what would happen, the collateral damage, the cultural degradation, and time proved them right.

But how far did their compassion stretch? Was it extremely finite, like the compassion of certain liberals and lefties who demanded that troops be brought home immediately, and damn the consequences of abandoning a devastated Iraq to the extremists? Did it stop suddenly, like Thelma and Louise's road trip, immune to the prospect of leaving the Afghan people to fend for themselves against the Taliban, who happen to be the most evil people who have ever lived? For many, compassion was finite. It did stop at a certain point. Some even went to far as to claim that policing the world should be left up to the UN, an organisation served by hundreds of beautiful people but ruled by a spineless, number-crunching bunch of clerks - yes, some said that the UN should be allowed to deal with the world's monsters, even though it had failed spectacularly in practically every single attempt to do so, when it had been bothered to do so; and since it is a mechanism that was designed from the outset to fail, how could it ever succeed? The Rwandan debacle was inevitable, after all. You cannot protect civilians from death squads without using force.

When I hear people calling for Tony Blair's head, I can understand it. He betrayed many of his ideals, and still continues, shamelessly, to do so. But those of us who call for the troops to come home, who say we have no business in Iraq or Afghanistan, are ignoring the plain fact that to allow evil to continue is an act of evil in itself. Not everyone with clean hands is a coward, but also, not everyone with clean hands is a saint.

The invasion of both countries was acted out with considerable arrogance and stupidity. Under-equipped troops fighting an unfamiliar enemy amongst a people made hostile through the indiscriminate use of cluster bombs and depleted uranium rounds makes for a long and miserable war, from which there can be no happy emergence. And yet, the Taliban is being fought. Saddam Hussein, though a secularist leader - such an invaluable commodity in the region - he was also a monster, is now gone. These things in themselves are good (I know they don't exist in a vacuum). Yet the process is plagued with the errors of the allied leadership, errors that have not only protracted the war, but turned it into something thoroughly ugly and irredeemable. In forgetting that murdered civilians cannot say 'thank you', the coalition of the willing made a huge mistake.

But what of the nations who would not oppose Saddam Hussein? Alright, as maniacs go, he wasn't the worst of the worst, merely abhorrent. So what of those who would not oppose the Taliban? Are they more noble. more decent, more liberal, than those currently soiling their principles in the theatre of war? And what of those people who want us to abandon Afghanistan as if it is some uncompleted computer game you can take back to HMV and trade-in for an Inbetweeners DVD? Are they good people? Did they see this issue of Time Magazine?

Good. It's an elastic concept, unlike its opposite. Was it good to invade Iraq or Afghanistan? Was it good to prize oil as more valuable than blood? No. But here's what gave me my Sartre moment: would it have been good to leave Iraq to the UN, certain that nothing whatsoever would be done to curb Saddam Hussein's tyranny? Would it have been good to leave Afghanistan to the Taliban?

It's a more complicated question that you think. But isn't that always how it is, every damn time?

The Banks Versus Al-Qaeda

(or, Searching For A Shockier Title Than 'I Hate Banks')
Imagine borrowing a few grand from a total stranger, taking that money to a casino, and losing. Losing so bad, your new-found poverty makes Les Mis' Fantine look comparatively chic. Now imagine begging your benefactor for more money, and returning to the casino. Imagine winning big, so big you can build a room in your house just like the room at the end of the Crystal Maze, full of shiny money from the future, so you can leap up and down in there, whooping like a daytime TV audience plant. Now here's the dilemma: do you share some of your winnings with the credulous twit who gave you the money in the first place, or do you just spend your winnings with a bunch of Thai prostitutes on a yacht made of cocaine?

Well, it all depends on whether or not you work in banking. If you do work in banking, presumably you think it's perfectly fine for the taxpayers, with their endless stream of disabled children, battered spouses and unreasonable demands for a quality of life that at least matches that of a lemming being chased into the sea by a pack of Walt Disney thugs, to give you loads of money without expecting any of it back. And, if you do happen to have a good day at the office, and that 3,000/1 gamble on Wayne Rooney doing anything remotely good in a world cup pays off, why should the taxpayer see any of that? After all, it was your genius as a banker, your immense financial nous, that enabled you to spot such a gilt-edged opportunity to turn a huge wad of phantasmal money that doesn't really exist into an even bigger wad of phantasmal money that doesn't really exist but still lets you buy small islands, portable Louis Vuitton chihuahua kennels and Manchester United.

And if the gamble doesn't pay off, and you suddenly owe a scary Russian gentleman twelve trillion phantasmal reubels that don't exist, but still enable scary Russian gentlemen to buy the Arctic while America sits there scratching its balls on the cusp of an international oil crisis, why on earth should you have to foot the bill? After all, it was your genius as a banker, your immense financial nous, that enabled you to lose such a vast - oh no, wait. It wasn't your fault at all. How silly of me.

I've heard that certain South American coca barons have quite the powder trade in order to study banking and finance. With their narcissism, greed, abhorrence of ethical behaviour and desire for giant Ferrero-Rocher made out of ground-up pandas and Siberian tiger pelts, they'd fit in perfectly. "What's that on your CV, senor Hernandez? Ah, I see you've had thirty years' experience in racketeering, extortion and bullying. Congratulations, you're exactly what we're looking for at HSOB. No, sir, that's not a typo. The SOB stands for... well, you can guess what it stands for."

Now, I don't want to change the world, or demand that humanity takes a huge evolutionary leap so that we can forget all this silly money business and just swap bubblegum cards instead (you know, like in Marx), but is it really too much to ask for the banks to take RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR OWN MISTAKES? According to the British government, er... yes, it is. We're plunged into the sweltering depths of a recession that has cost jobs, destroyed the quality of life for the most vulnerable in society, and turned Capitalism into an utter laughing stock, and the people responsible are... well, if I postulated that they might allegedly be snorting cocaine off the severed wing of a Canadian condor on a private island called Timothy (or something equally bleurgh) somewhere off the coast of Arsehole, it might not be far from the truth. Or, the truth might be much, much uglier and infinitely more morally reprehensible. The island might be called Tarquin. Or Dunthievin.

So that's the banks. Not all of them, of course. Some of the banks had nothing to do with bringing civilisation to its knees. Riverbanks for example, or Banksy, Carlton Banks off Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Jeff Banks (whose clothing range had nothing to do with the financial crisis). Yes, some banks are great. Some banks even make you laugh because they danced funny on TV and had a good on-screen chemistry with Will Smith but strangely don't seem to have done anything since. Yes, some banks are fab.

But then again, some banks are contemptible, noxious, utterly parasitical nests of bastards. And just in case you were feeling sorry for those particular nests of bastards who hurled us down the poo-pipe, ask yourself this:

Q: who has done more damage to Britain: the banks or Al-Qaeda?
A: (oh come on, it's easy; now imagine giving Bin Laden five billion of your hard-earned wonga.)

_________

Footnote: Littleorangedogs, commenting on Simon Jenkins' spiffing piece, managed to say the above better than I ever could, in less space. And it probably took him/her less time, too. Gah!