The Fanonite

As Poodle begins to reap deferred bribes for services rendered in his capacity as Prime Minister, the excellent Media Lens exposes the sordid record of his Ziocon enabler, David Aaronovitch in selling the Iraq war.

If “The wages of sin is death”, the returns must seem altogether less bleak to Tony Blair. In November, Blair was reported to have received £237,000 for a 20-minute speech before an audience of Chinese entrepreneurs. While his salary as prime minister was £186,429 a year, it now takes him two high-profile speeches to earn the same amount. Analysts estimate that he could earn £3m simply by speaking 50 nights a year. Blair will also supplement his income as an adviser to international investment bank JP Morgan - a job that could net him £500,000 a year. This is all in addition to the £4.5m he is being paid for his memoirs.

Blair also finds himself in a position to reward the journalists who loyally supported him as he deceived the public and waged his wars. A notable example is Times columnist David Aaronovitch who, last November, published an article in the Times based on a three-part BBC TV interview with Blair, The Blair Years, shown later that month. Last July, Peter Oborne commented in the Daily Mail on the news that Aaronovitch had been chosen to interview Blair:

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The real reason Blair was seconded to the Quartet — liquidating Palestinian resistance to occupation — appears ever more clear, writes Saleh Al-Naami

Rabbi Benny Elon, president of the right-wing Israeli National Union Party, was unable to conceal his relief last Thursday when a Hebrew radio news programme presenter asked him about his evaluation of the recent plan devised by Quartet envoy and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. “Finally, even Blair agrees with us on two primary points,” Benny Elon said. “These are uprooting the Palestinian terrorist organisations and solving the problem of the refugees without holding Israel any responsibility for it.”

Revealed the previous day, Blair’s plan for the reform of Palestinian Authority (PA) institutions left resounding reverberations in the Palestinian arena. Factions, elites and the Palestinian public alike were shocked when it became clear that “reform” of PA institutions, as Blair sees it, means ensuring conditions that allow for a tightening grip on Palestinian resistance movements, particularly in the West Bank. The plan draws no tie between this and decreasing attacks on Palestinians by Israel’s occupation army and settlers.

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I don’t know where New Labour rag, the Guardian, finds the nitwits who write headlines for its news articles. So here we have a headline, “Mixed reaction in Middle East as Blair makes debut as envoy“, for an article reporting the enthusiastic embrace of the poodle by one party, whereas the other — the Arabs — unanimously disapproves. That is not a mixed reaction, it is a clearcut affirmation of a decidedly partisan choice from both parties to the conflict. Imagine a headline, ‘Mixed reaction in Europe as Nazi Germany occupies France’: after all, all German’s embraced the move, whereas everyone else disapproved.

I am  not sure what is so mixed about the following reactions:

“George Bush wanted to reward Blair for his hostility to the Arabs,” said Galal Nassar in Egypt’s Al-Ahram Weekly. “In backing Bush’s nominee the Quartet has endorsed a disastrous choice.” Columnist Rami Khouri wrote in Beirut’s Daily Star: “If there is an award for the combined negative credibility of an institution plus an individual, the Quartet and Blair should be its first recipients. Appointing Tony Blair as special envoy for Arab-Israeli peace is something like appointing the Emperor Nero to be the chief fireman of Rome.” 

Now that the father has been discredited, it appears the puppeteers have enlisted Michael Levy’s son as ’peace envoy’ Tony Blair’s new handler. Levy’s son previously worked for Ehud Barak in a junior position. Already in Israel there has been some rejoicing at Tony Blair’s appointment, which is not surprising as the leash still remains firmly in the grips of the British Israel lobby.

Two years back, Jonathan Steele and dear friend Dahr Jamail wrote a powerful piece in the Guardian on the destruction of Fallujah entitled ‘This is Our Guernica’. The analogy was apt and like Picasso’s famous painting, it captured the horrors inflicted on the citizens of Fallujah. In the wake of the US siege and its eventual destruction, in the words of Dahr and Steele, Fallujah was turned into a “decade’s monument to brutality”.

While the treatment of Tony Blair’s exit has been predictably unctuous and sycophantic on BBC and the rest of the British mainstream media, outside of the establishment circles, not every mind has been domesticated. In an act of splendid defiance, Michael Sandle has produced art that promises to be the Guernica for our age.

Guardian reports:

The skilfully choreographed end of the Tony Blair decade is about to receive an unwelcome gatecrasher as a centrepiece of one of London’s most popular summer visitor attractions.

A huge and controversial artwork showing the prime minister and his wife, Cherie, being expelled naked from 10 Downing Street amid the chaos of Iraq will be unveiled at the Royal Academy on Wednesday.

Composed in an emotional burst of energy over 10 days by the prominent sculptor and academician Michael Sandle, it will dominate the annual summer exhibition, the world’s largest open-entry art show, which had more than 150,000 visitors last year.

Although some eyebrows were initially raised at the submission, the 4.5m x 1.5m (15ft x 5ft) drawing has been given extra prominence by winning the exhibition’s annual Hugh Casson prize for drawing. The RA’s president, Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, is expected to highlight the Sandle’s work at the academy’s annual dinner this month, which is usually attended by government figures.

The charcoal drawing was modelled by the artist, who is 71 and has sculpted many public commissions, on medieval paintings of Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden in disgrace. The embarrassed central characters outside No 10 are flanked by one panel representing brutality by British troops in Iraq and another showing a pile of Iraqi corpses under an Hieronymus Bosch-like rain of body parts.

The brutality panel is based on the case of Corporal Donald Payne, who admitted inhuman treatment of Iraqi civilians at a court martial last year in which other soldiers in his unit were cleared amid controversy. Sandle has called the panel “Corporal Payne’s Chorus” because the soldier invited others to hear what he called his “choir” of victims screaming.

“I wasn’t going to submit this year, but I suddenly felt overcome with anger at the way Blair has messed up,” said Sandle, who originally thought he had missed the submission deadline.

He worked non-stop, including fixing up the framing required for all entries, after staff reminded him of the 10 days of grace allowed to academicians entering work. “There he was, elected by a huge majority, and he has allowed his vanity to destroy it all,” added Sandle. “He doesn’t appear to feel a twinge of conscience about Iraq because he is so sure that he did the right thing.

“They have talked about the original perpetrators of violence being the ones who should apologise, but what about the 650,000 Iraqis who have died since the invasion? Who is going to apologise to them, and how?” …

The stark drawing, entitled Iraq Triptych, will hang in the exhibition’s Gallery V alongside a group of romantic watercolours and a drawing of British troops on the Somme battlefield in the first world war at an outpost nicknamed Moo Cow Farm…

The gallery was hung by the Scottish artist Barbara Rae after Sandle’s work triumphed in the complex judging process which whittles more than 9,000 entries down to about 1,200. Sandle said: “I was expecting them to find it a dark corner somewhere so this is all a very nice surprise.

“It’s particularly good to have won the Casson prize. I was apprehensive about the whole thing once I’d taken it to the academy. But I’m glad I did. I just had to do it - I thought: this guy just can’t get away with what he’s done.”

Here is a report on how Bremner got Margaret Beckett to spill the beans on her colleagues by impersonating Gordon Brown.

Neocon shitrag Observer reports Poodle’s last visit to the archipelago of fortified safe zones in Iraq and just in case some at home were worried, it reminds us the Prime Minister was ‘upbeat’ and ‘relaxed’. I guess it means ’progress is being made in Iraq.’

Like so many of the things he has been upto lately, we are told his farewell to the troops was ‘emotional’. Touching.

Only a few hours after “a mortar bomb had fallen in the protected green zone near the British embassy and in a weekend when eight American soldiers were killed and 43 Iraqi civilians were found murdered”, Blair told gathered soldiers, “what you have done here is absolutely remarkable”.

So any pearls of wisdom from a man Britain elected thrice as its supreme leader?  ‘When you go out and talk to the majority of people here they tell you they want to live in peace.’ 

The stupidity of this man, who is referred to endearingly as the ‘twerp’ by Robert Fisk, is clearly beyond ridicule, but how do the ‘finest of Britain’ react to such inanity? “The 200-odd servicemen and women gave him rousing applause.”

Maybe John Kerry was right, when said, “You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

 Finally for a reality check, Patrick Cockburn writes:

Iraq is surely where Mr Blair’s style of politics - his tactic of never admitting error and blandly denying there is a crisis - ran into bloody, catastrophic reality.

His tune never changed: since no mistakes had been made, there was no need to devise new policies. Largely, he was simply endorsing US policies, determined by US domestic politics. Since 2003, Iraq has suffered a series of spurious turning points that have often deepened the crisis. But at no point has there been any sense from Mr Blair’s speeches and statements that he knew much about what was happening in Iraq or the Middle East.

When Robert Fisk is at his best, no journalist comes close to the power and moral authority of his prose.

By great good fortune, I studied linguistics at Lancaster University. Indeed, I read the books of Noam Chomsky, many years before he became a good friend of mine; to be honest, when I read his work, I thought Chomsky was dead. What a pleasure, therefore, to discover that he shared my world - and my views on Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara.

But I have to admit a moment of regret this weekend. Lord Blair is going from us. His self-serving memoirs will, of course, remind us of his God-like view of himself (and, heaven spare me, we share the same publishers) but I doubt if Chomsky’s “foregrounded elements” will save him. A “foregrounded element” was something unusual, a phrase placed in such a way that it warned us of a lie to come.

Take George Tenet, the CIA Ernest Borgnine lookalike who sat behind Colin Powell when the US Secretary of State was uttering all those lies about weapons of mass destruction in February of 2003. It now turns out that George is mightily upset with the White House. He didn’t refer to evidence of WMD as a “slam dunk”, he says - a basketball phrase which I don’t need to explain. He was talking about the ability of the US government to persuade the American people to go to war based on these lies. In other words, he wasn’t lying to the American president. He was only lying to the American people.

I was struck by all this last month when I came across one of Blair’s lies in my local Beirut paper. Sandwiched beneath a headline which read “Saudi reforms lose momentum” - surely one of the more extraordinarily unnecessary stories in the Arab press - it quoted our dear Prime Minister as saying that he was very angry that a review committee had prevented him from deporting two Algerians home because their government represented a “different political system”. The “foregrounded” element, of course, is the word “different”. This is the word that contains the lie. For the reason why the committee declined to return these men to their country was not - as Blair well knew - because Algeria possesses a “different” political system but because the Algerian “system” allows it to torture to death its prisoners.

I have myself interviewed Algerian policemen and women who have become perverted by their witness of torture: one policewoman told me how she now loves horror films because they remind her of the repulsive torture she had to watch at the Chateauneuf police station in Algiers - where prisoners had water pumped into their anuses until they died. I still remember the spiteful and abusive letter that the Algerian ambassador to London wrote to The Independent, sneering at Saida Kheroui whose foot was broken under torture. She was a “terrorist”, this man announced. This is the “different” political system that Blair was referring to. Ms Kheroui, by the way, never emerged from prison. She was murdered by her torturers.

Blair knows that the Algerian security forces rape women to death. He knows this. So how does he dare lie about the “different” political system which allows police officers to rape women? We Europeans now make a habit of lying about this. Take the Belgian government. It deported Bouasria Ben Othman to Algeria on 15 July 1996 on the grounds that he would not be in danger if he was returned to his country. He died in police custody at Moustaganem. A “different” political system indeed.

And now I have before me Blair’s repulsive “goodbye” speech to the British people, uttered at Sedgefield. Putting the country first didn’t mean “doing the right thing according to conventional wisdom” (Chomsky foregrounded element: conventional) or the “prevailing consensus: (Chomsky foregrounded element: prevailing). It meant “what you genuinely believe to be right” (Chomsky foregrounded element: genuinely). Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara wanted to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with Britain’s oldest ally, which he assumed to be the United States. (It is actually Portugal, but no matter.) “I did so out of belief,” he told us. Foregrounded element: belief.

Am I alone in being repulsed by this? “Politics may be the art of the possible (foregrounded element: may) but, at least in life, give the impossible a go.” What does this mean? Is Blair adopting sainthood as a means to an end? “Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right.” Excuse me? Is that Blair’s message to the families of all those dead soldiers - and to the families of all those thousands of dead Iraqis? It has been an “honour” to “serve” Britain, this man tells us. What gall.

Yes, I must acknowledge Northern Ireland. If only Blair had kept to this achievement. If only he had accepted that his role was to end 800 years of the Anglo-Irish conflict. But no. He wanted to be our Saviour - and he allowed George Bush to do such things as Oliver Cromwell would find quite normal. Torture. Murder. Rape.

My Dad used to call people like Blair a “twerp” which, I think, meant a pregnant earwig. But Blair is not a twerp. I very much fear he is a vicious little man. And I can only recall Cromwell’s statement to the Rump Parliament in 1653, repeated - with such wisdom - by Leo Amery to Chamberlain in 1940: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.”

If you thought your government wasn’t accountable enough, then there is reason for celebration — from now on, it won’t be accountable at all. I am not being facetious here. The trappings of democracy are being lifted one after the other; the veneer is cracking. Nothing has been more damaging to the British democracy than the quarter of a century of Blatcherism. Just when the unprincipled sycophants and careerists of Labour coronated Gordon Brown (or “the Arse”, as Steve Bell prefers to call him) and proclaimed a break with the past (it isn’t so much the Labourites who are making this claim; in fact, it is those who are still deluded enough to vote Labour and want to ease their consciences), the same pack of rats has voted today to exempt themselves from the Freedom of Information Act. Guardian reports:

MPs today backed a controversial bid to exempt themselves from the Freedom of Information Act - a move described by opponents as “squalid”.

The Tory private member’s freedom of information (amendment) bill secured its third reading by 96 votes to 25, a majority of 71…opponents said the real aim of the bill was to block embarrassing disclosures about MPs’ expenses and allowances and accused the government of quietly endorsing a watering down of its own legislation, first implemented in 2005.

Introduced by David Maclean…a leading opponent, condemned the proposed changes as a “squalid” measure.

“I believe it is wrong. I believe it is against the interest of parliament. I believe we are in danger of bringing ourselves into disrepute,” he warned.

And he exhorted MPs: “The House of Commons should set an example to the country of honesty and integrity, not find some squalid little way in order to get out of the law.”

So a Labour MP is quoted as opposing the motion, but these token gestures of dissent are only meant to sustain the illusion that the party still has a progressive component. It does not. At the end of the day, they all defer to the party whip. The example of the two individuals imprisoned for leaking the Bush-Blair memo is instructive. They leaked the information to an ‘anti-War’ Labour MP. And the first thing the MP did is to set his putative principles aside, give a deep thought to his career, and snitch on the whistleblowers by sending the memo straight to Fearless Leader, aka ”the Poodle”.  

Most bills tabled by individual MPs fall at the first hurdle unless they has government support.

Both the government and Conservative frontbench…have given tacit support in previous votes…

Simon Hughes, the president of the Liberal Democrats, described today’s vote as a “shameful day” for the House of Commons.

“David Maclean’s bill and the way it has got through the Commons will clearly diminish respect for parliament,” he said. “But the battle will go on and hopefully the Lords will deliver us from this terrible mistake.

“I hope the public will make their views very clear to the MPs who supported the bill and to the next prime minister that this is absolutely the wrong direction for open, accountable government.”