More comment on Cameron's speech
Dave's salesman's patter demeans Britain
Cameron understands PR but he needs to realise that history is
important in diplomacy
Nick Cohen
The Observer/UK
Sunday 1 August 2010
When PR men want to sell journalists a line, their favourite opening
gambit is gross sycophancy. "Hey, I lurve your work," they smarm.
"It's great to meet ya, you've been doing wonderful stuff." Reporters
know they are lying. We suspect they have never read a damn word we
have written. But we remain in danger of being flattered by their
shameless eagerness to please into turning off our bullshit detectors.
Never forget the only job David Cameron had outside politics was as a
PR man buttering-up contacts on behalf of the TV station Carlton,
whose disappearance raised the quality of British television
overnight. "In my experience, he never gave a straight answer when
dissemblance was a plausible alternative," said the Telegraph's
veteran business reporter Jeff Randall, who dealt with him regularly.
"I wouldn't trust him with my daughter's pocket money."
Under Cameron the Foreign Office has become the marketing department
of Great Britain Inc. He has decided that Simon Fraser, permanent
secretary at the Department for Business, should be the next head of
the diplomatic service and run it on commercial lines. He envisages a
future when corporate hotshots and CBI bureaucrats can become Her
Britannic Majesty's ambassadors to far-flung lands the better to cut
deals with the natives. Labour's ethical dimension to foreign policy,
such as it was, is history. Cameron tours the world not as statesman
or democratic leader but as Britain's head of PR, whose job is to suck
up to potential customers until they buy a nuclear reactor or Hawk
jet. If alert listeners catch a direct falsehood in his sales patter,
aides are on hand to explain that he "misspoke" or was misunderstood.
Take as an example Cameron's speech to Turkish politicians and
business leaders last week. It was a dismal exposition of the
consequences of turning a foreign policy into a sales strategy, and
replacing honest evaluations with wholesale evasions. He might have
levelled with the Turks as he supported their bid to join the EU. He
might have said or implied that opposition to Turkey's entry from
Angela Merkel and her many supporters is based on cultural determinism
if not outright racism. Confrontations with militant Islam from the
Rushdie affair through to the ludicrous "cartoons' crisis" have
convinced many Europeans that the borders of Europe should be the
borders of Christendom. The best response for the Turks and anyone
else who wishes to see democracy prosper is to say that the EU
confounded the pessimists and lived-up to its highest aspirations when
it took the rule of law and respect for human rights into the
unpromising territory of the former satellite states of the Soviet
empire.
They could add that Turkey too has tried to abandon its militarist
past, which saw the mass slaughter of the Armenians in the First World
War, the ethnic cleansing of Greeks and Jews, the invasion and
partition of Cyprus and the relentless oppression of the Kurdish
minority. Cameron did just that, and praised Turkish politicians to
the skies for allowing Kurds to broadcast in their own language, and
abolishing the death penalty as they tried to get themselves ready for
EU membership.
But so intent was he on securing access for British companies to the
Turkish market, he lacked the courage to be a candid friend. He could
not add that Turkey's progress had halted, and until it restarted,
Europe cannot and should not allow it into a club whose first task was
to confront the horrors of Nazism and communism the better to overcome
them. He did not dare say that the supposedly "moderate" Islamist
prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is disinterring all the ghouls
from Turkey's past, as he grows ever more reckless in his denial of
atrocity and indulgence for mass murderers.
Erdogan refuses to join the EU in supporting the charges of crimes
against humanity in Darfur the International Criminal Court has
levelled against Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir. On the contrary,
he has invited the blood-soaked brute to Turkey. He has his own
culturally determined, not to say historically demented, grounds for
knowing Bashir is innocent. "No Muslim could perpetrate genocide," he
said.
As with new crimes, so with old. After the US Congress agreed to
recognise the slaughter of the Armenians as the first genocide of the
20th century, Erdogan said he'd expel 100,000 Armenians currently
resident in his "moderate" Islamist state. I think Christopher
Hitchens was alone in pointing out that if Angela Merkel had imitated
his xenophobic demagoguery and threatened to expel Turkish guest
workers because she had taken offence, there would have been mobs
protesting outside German embassies. But because the world thinks that
he is a valuable business partner, the British prime minister couldn't
tell the Turks that their leader was taking them down a dead end. The
only reform Cameron wanted was, predictably, for Turkey to accept the
EU competition charter and open its markets to British businesses.
"Who now remembers the Armenians?" asked Adolf Hitler as he ordered
the extermination of the Jews. Not David Cameron, who could not even
remember that Britain fought Hitler alone in the Blitz as he sought to
suck up to Obama by declaring that Britain was America's "junior
partner" in 1940.
His wilful amnesia makes his denunciations of Pakistan seem
simultaneously accurate but devious. We did not need documents on
WikiLeaks to tell us that elements within the Pakistani intelligence
services are on the Taliban's side. But he ought to know that the
Taliban has also murdered thousands of Pakistani civilians in
atrocities that the western media barely bother to cover. For Cameron
to say that Pakistan was exporting terrorism without acknowledging
that Pakistanis were also victims of terrorism, was simply playing to
the prejudices of his Indian listeners the better to persuade them to
cut deals with the throng of eager British businessmen he had brought
in his wake.
Watching him tour the world, I feared that our new centre-right
government thinks it can take a holiday from history and concentrate
on the lucrative and agreeable business of finding new contracts for
BAE and markets for Tesco instead. History has a habit of teaching
people the hard way that there is no easy escape from political and
moral responsibility. If you do not seek to mould the world, the world
will most certainly seek to mould you.
Cameron understands PR but he needs to realise that history is
important in diplomacy
Nick Cohen
The Observer/UK
Sunday 1 August 2010
When PR men want to sell journalists a line, their favourite opening
gambit is gross sycophancy. "Hey, I lurve your work," they smarm.
"It's great to meet ya, you've been doing wonderful stuff." Reporters
know they are lying. We suspect they have never read a damn word we
have written. But we remain in danger of being flattered by their
shameless eagerness to please into turning off our bullshit detectors.
Never forget the only job David Cameron had outside politics was as a
PR man buttering-up contacts on behalf of the TV station Carlton,
whose disappearance raised the quality of British television
overnight. "In my experience, he never gave a straight answer when
dissemblance was a plausible alternative," said the Telegraph's
veteran business reporter Jeff Randall, who dealt with him regularly.
"I wouldn't trust him with my daughter's pocket money."
Under Cameron the Foreign Office has become the marketing department
of Great Britain Inc. He has decided that Simon Fraser, permanent
secretary at the Department for Business, should be the next head of
the diplomatic service and run it on commercial lines. He envisages a
future when corporate hotshots and CBI bureaucrats can become Her
Britannic Majesty's ambassadors to far-flung lands the better to cut
deals with the natives. Labour's ethical dimension to foreign policy,
such as it was, is history. Cameron tours the world not as statesman
or democratic leader but as Britain's head of PR, whose job is to suck
up to potential customers until they buy a nuclear reactor or Hawk
jet. If alert listeners catch a direct falsehood in his sales patter,
aides are on hand to explain that he "misspoke" or was misunderstood.
Take as an example Cameron's speech to Turkish politicians and
business leaders last week. It was a dismal exposition of the
consequences of turning a foreign policy into a sales strategy, and
replacing honest evaluations with wholesale evasions. He might have
levelled with the Turks as he supported their bid to join the EU. He
might have said or implied that opposition to Turkey's entry from
Angela Merkel and her many supporters is based on cultural determinism
if not outright racism. Confrontations with militant Islam from the
Rushdie affair through to the ludicrous "cartoons' crisis" have
convinced many Europeans that the borders of Europe should be the
borders of Christendom. The best response for the Turks and anyone
else who wishes to see democracy prosper is to say that the EU
confounded the pessimists and lived-up to its highest aspirations when
it took the rule of law and respect for human rights into the
unpromising territory of the former satellite states of the Soviet
empire.
They could add that Turkey too has tried to abandon its militarist
past, which saw the mass slaughter of the Armenians in the First World
War, the ethnic cleansing of Greeks and Jews, the invasion and
partition of Cyprus and the relentless oppression of the Kurdish
minority. Cameron did just that, and praised Turkish politicians to
the skies for allowing Kurds to broadcast in their own language, and
abolishing the death penalty as they tried to get themselves ready for
EU membership.
But so intent was he on securing access for British companies to the
Turkish market, he lacked the courage to be a candid friend. He could
not add that Turkey's progress had halted, and until it restarted,
Europe cannot and should not allow it into a club whose first task was
to confront the horrors of Nazism and communism the better to overcome
them. He did not dare say that the supposedly "moderate" Islamist
prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is disinterring all the ghouls
from Turkey's past, as he grows ever more reckless in his denial of
atrocity and indulgence for mass murderers.
Erdogan refuses to join the EU in supporting the charges of crimes
against humanity in Darfur the International Criminal Court has
levelled against Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir. On the contrary,
he has invited the blood-soaked brute to Turkey. He has his own
culturally determined, not to say historically demented, grounds for
knowing Bashir is innocent. "No Muslim could perpetrate genocide," he
said.
As with new crimes, so with old. After the US Congress agreed to
recognise the slaughter of the Armenians as the first genocide of the
20th century, Erdogan said he'd expel 100,000 Armenians currently
resident in his "moderate" Islamist state. I think Christopher
Hitchens was alone in pointing out that if Angela Merkel had imitated
his xenophobic demagoguery and threatened to expel Turkish guest
workers because she had taken offence, there would have been mobs
protesting outside German embassies. But because the world thinks that
he is a valuable business partner, the British prime minister couldn't
tell the Turks that their leader was taking them down a dead end. The
only reform Cameron wanted was, predictably, for Turkey to accept the
EU competition charter and open its markets to British businesses.
"Who now remembers the Armenians?" asked Adolf Hitler as he ordered
the extermination of the Jews. Not David Cameron, who could not even
remember that Britain fought Hitler alone in the Blitz as he sought to
suck up to Obama by declaring that Britain was America's "junior
partner" in 1940.
His wilful amnesia makes his denunciations of Pakistan seem
simultaneously accurate but devious. We did not need documents on
WikiLeaks to tell us that elements within the Pakistani intelligence
services are on the Taliban's side. But he ought to know that the
Taliban has also murdered thousands of Pakistani civilians in
atrocities that the western media barely bother to cover. For Cameron
to say that Pakistan was exporting terrorism without acknowledging
that Pakistanis were also victims of terrorism, was simply playing to
the prejudices of his Indian listeners the better to persuade them to
cut deals with the throng of eager British businessmen he had brought
in his wake.
Watching him tour the world, I feared that our new centre-right
government thinks it can take a holiday from history and concentrate
on the lucrative and agreeable business of finding new contracts for
BAE and markets for Tesco instead. History has a habit of teaching
people the hard way that there is no easy escape from political and
moral responsibility. If you do not seek to mould the world, the world
will most certainly seek to mould you.
Middle East
Saturday, 31 July 2010
Abbas Momani
The death of five Israeli servicemen in a helicopter crash in Romania
this week raised scarcely a headline.
There was a Nato-Israeli exercise in progress. Well, that's OK then.
Now imagine the death of five Hamas fighters in a helicopter crash in
Romania this week. We'd still be investigating this extraordinary
phenomenon. Now mark you, I'm not comparing Israel and Hamas. Israel
is the country that justifiably slaughtered more than 1,300
Palestinians in Gaza 19 months ago – more than 300 of them children –
while the vicious, blood-sucking and terrorist Hamas killed 13
Israelis (three of them soldiers who actually shot each other by
mistake).
But there is one parallel. Judge Richard Goldstone, the eminent Jewish
South African judge, decided in his 575-page UN inquiry into the Gaza
bloodbath that both sides had committed war crimes – he was, of
course, quite rightly called "evil" by all kinds of justifiably
outraged supporters of Israel in the US, his excellent report rejected
by seven EU governments – and so a question presents itself. What is
Nato doing when it plays war games with an army accused of war crimes?
Or, more to the point, what on earth is the EU doing when it cosies up
to the Israelis? In a remarkable, detailed – if slightly
over-infuriated – book to be published in November, the indefatigable
David Cronin is going to present a microscopic analysis of "our"
relations with Israel. I have just finished reading the manuscript. It
leaves me breathless. As he says in his preface, "Israel has developed
such strong political and economic ties to the EU over the past decade
that it has become a member state of the union in all but name."
Indeed, it was Javier Solana, the grubby top dog of the EU's foreign
policy (formerly Nato secretary general), who actually said last year
that "Israel, allow me to say, is a member of the European Union
without being a member of the institution".
Pardon me? Did we know this? Did we vote for this? Who allowed this to
happen? Does David Cameron – now so forcefully marketing Turkish entry
to the EU – agree with this? Probably yes, since he goes on calling
himself a "friend of Israel" after that country produced an excellent
set of forged British passports for its murderers in Dubai. As Cronin
says, "the EU's cowardice towards Israel is in stark contrast to the
robust position it has taken when major atrocities have occurred in
other conflicts". After the Russia-Georgia war in 2008, for example,
the EU tasked an independent mission to find out if international law
had been flouted, and demanded an international inquiry into human
rights abuses after Sri Lanka's war against the Tamil Tigers. Cronin
does not duck Europe's responsibility for the Jewish Holocaust and
agrees that there will always be a "moral duty" on our governments to
ensure it never happens again – though I did notice that Cameron
forgot to mention the 1915 Armenian Holocaust when he was sucking up
to the Turks this week.
But that's not quite the point. In 1999, Britain's arms sales to
Israel – a country occupying the West Bank (and Gaza, too) and
building illegal colonies for Jews and Jews only on Arab land – were
worth £11.5m; within two years, this had almost doubled to £22.5m.
This included small arms, grenade-making kits and equipment for
fighter jets and tanks. There were a few refusals after Israel used
modified Centurion tanks against the Palestinians in 2002, but in
2006, the year in which Israel slaughtered another 1,300 Lebanese,
almost all of them civilians, in another crusade against Hizbollah's
"world terror", Britain granted over 200 weapons licences.
Some British equipment, of course, heads for Israel via the US. In
2002, Britain gave "head-up displays" manufactured by BAE Systems for
Lockheed Martin which promptly installed them in F-16 fighter-bombers
destined for Israel. The EU did not object. In the same year, it
should be added, the British admitted to training 13 members of the
Israeli military. US planes transporting weapons to Israel at the time
of the 2006 Lebanon war were refuelled at British airports (and, alas,
it appears at Irish airports too). In the first three months of 2008,
we gave licenses for another £20m of weapons for Israel – just in time
for Israel's onslaught on Gaza. Apache helicopters used against
Palestinians, says Cronin, contain parts made by SPS Aerostructures in
Nottinghamshire, Smiths Industries in Cheltenham, Page Aerospace in
Middlesex and Meggit Avionics in Hampshire.
Need I go on? Israel, by the way, has been praised for its "logistics"
help to Nato in Afghanistan – where we are annually killing even more
Afghans than the Israelis usually kill Palestinians – which is not
surprising since Israel military boss Gabi Ashkenazi has visited Nato
headquarters in Brussels to argue for closer ties with Nato. And
Cronin convincingly argues an extraordinary – almost obscenely
beautiful – financial arrangement in "Palestine". The EU funds
millions of pounds' worth of projects in Gaza. These are regularly
destroyed by Israel's American-made weaponry. So it goes like this.
European taxpayers fork out for the projects. US taxpayers fork out
for the weapons which Israel uses to destroy them. Then EU taxpayers
fork out for the whole lot to be rebuilt. And then US taxpayers...
Well, you've got the point. Israel, by the way, already has an
"individual co-operation programme" with Nato, locking Israel into
Nato's computer networks.
All in all, it's good to have such a stout ally as Israel on our side,
even if its army is a rabble and some of its men war criminals. Come
to that, why don't we ask Hizbollah to join Nato as well – just
imagine how its guerrilla tactics would benefit our chaps in Helmand.
And since Israel's Apache helicopters often kill Lebanese civilians –
a whole ambulance of women and children in 1996, for example, blown to
pieces by a Boeing Hellfire AGM 114C air-to-ground missile – let's
hope the Lebanese can still send a friendly greeting to the people of
Nottinghamshire, Middlesex, Hampshire and, of course, Cheltenham.
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