Gordon Brown, George Bush, Atlanticism and Iran
A good set of comments on yesterday's Sy Hersh thread lead me to write a comment of my own, which rather grew, so it's a post.
I'm still not convinced that Brown's going to back an attack on Iran:
* Brown the Atlanticist - he's much more of an Atlanticist than Blair ever was - Blair's meeting of minds with Bush had nothing to do with admiration for the American Way Of Life, since Bush has shown complete disregard for that, merely using the US for its power and wealth to meet his own ends (which are varied, but seem to boil down to both cheap oil , enriching cronies and imperial ambition at home and abroad). I'm using 'Bush' here as neat shorthand for the whole AEI/AIPAC/Cheney nexus that seems to be at the bottom of what's been fucking things up, no one can argue that Bush came up with them himself, after all. Brown strikes me as more of a classic conservative Republican - the morality is the ice-cold what's-good-enough-for-my-father-is-good-enough-for-me Presbyterian, not the hot-blooded blood-and-thunder Baptist. Conservative v. Year Zero radical, in fact. People like Brown grew up admiring an America that's ceased to exist post-Reagan, that legitimised the chase after wealth and power by means of religion. Post-1980 the chase become all that mattered.
* the Daily Mail. Most read anti-war newspaper, publicised Craig Murray's pure-bred filleting of the Iranian hostage claims (which would themselves make using it as a casus belli trickier), editor great mates with Brown. Brown's election strategy is definitely to appeal to Daily Mail Reading Woman, rather than Sun Reading Man, who isn't going to be tempted by Cameron and doesn't live in middle England marginals anyway. If the Mail approves of Our Boys marching on Tehran I'll eat a copy. No, make that two copies. Of the Sunday edition. The Sun and Times have started being openly hostile, which suggest that Murdoch doesn't feel Gordon is 'on board' to his satisfaction.
* Economic rewards - as the NYT reports, the part of the US business community (who are indeed friends with Gordon) who backed the war for cheap oil, a quick win and new markets are now backing away. Tom Friedman is their spokesman, and he's run out of his famous Friedman Units ('it'll get better in six months'). The Iraq War supporters shrink ever closer to the rabid triumph-of-the-will dead-enders. So Gordon can't rationalise support as good for the economy - the Iraq experience suggests the complete opposite
* Political rewards - 'hey, I've stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the worst-ever US President, a man deeply unpopular with all our other allies, a year before he leaves office with his bloody legacy plain to see and his movement decimated'. What's in it for Gordon?
Indeed 'what's in it for Gordon' should be the question we all ask when we see claims that Gordon is backing Bush/is backing a new multipolar foreign policy/is backing whatever. In the case of Blair and Iraq the Bliar got to suck up to George Bush at the height of his power, have the huge ego boost of ordering men into battle and satisfied his own warped sense of liberal values by persuading himself he was doing good. None of those quite seem to fit the bill if Gordon goes for war - there's not enough Army to order into battle, Bush looks and smells like a dead duck and he doesn't have any pretend liberal values anyway, only genuine conservative ones.
Question for all of us - who would Brown like to deal with in the White House from January 2009? Tricky one. I say Hillary Clinton - she'll bring Bill, who the Labour Party always got on with, but she isn't going to embarrass Gordon by being more left-wing that him.
Other bloggage (British reaction to Hersh has been fairly sparse, perhaps like me it's taken a while to read all six pages):
Lenin's Tomb
Blood & Treasure (who understands very well what Mr. Brown is and isn't)
Booman Tribute on Hillary and Iran
D-Notice pointing out that even Blair didn't manage to get creationist ideology into science curriculums
Crooks and Liars on the US Iran War propaganda campaign - would it work here?
Sic Semper Tyrannis on Hillary and Iran
Think Progress with a couple of links to UK papers, including the Guardian on John 'Bombs Away' Bolton at the Tory Party conference, which is a good guide for you as to where the maddest neo-con around goes for support when in the UK these days. He got interviewed on Sky, too.
The Green Ribbon making the point about the timing of the UK election and Gordon's support for war or otherwise
Tom, I think Bush and Brown
Tom,
I think Bush and Brown are held together by a common set of economic and geopolitical imperatives: the need to maintain control over the resources of the Persian Gulf, a commitment to a global order based around the needs of western transnational corporations and finance capital. A commitment to containing Chinese ambitions and a strong hostility to economic nationalism anywhere in the developing world. These shared concerns far out weigh any tactical differences in policy formation. They are deeply rooted in the economic and political structures of both societies. It's pointless to focus on political personalities, they're irrelevant. The roots of policy are embedded in the strategic needs of big capital, not public opinion or the 'political visions' of leaders. That's just P.R fluff from the political showmen. A distraction.
The institutional roots of policy to not change with governments or elected officials. States are vehicles for privileged sectors of the population - those who control investment, production and distribution. They determine the (narrow) policy spectrum, and set the limited terms for 'political debate'. I think we are now all waking up to just how meaningless elections are under conditions of extreme concentration of private power and wealth. Pretexts change - liberal, conservative, humanitarian, whatever. But policy is consistently the same.
The only independent factor that can alter the power equation is direct public action. That's not programmed into the machine.
Can anyone explain the point
Can anyone explain the point of bothering to vote at the next election? The only thing that is of any interest is the turnout, which is an indicator of how many people out there, who are in the party of the disaffected.
It is this sham of a democracy that we live in, when the only democratic right, is being allowed to vote every few years, for what are basically the same parties.
It's precisely their
It's precisely their differences that I think will lead to them disagreeing with this one - if you support
right now the one person you *wouldn't* support would be George Bush, who has failed to deliver control over Gulf oil and has gambled western interests on a spin of the dice. So far Iran and China are winning the gamble. Plenty of people *did* back him over Iraq for precisely those reasons, but that was 2003 and this is 2007 and the only people who'll back him now are dangerous, clueless radicals like Kouchner in France.
Everything we know about Brown points to him as an extremely cautious operator who doesn't like making decisions and hides when the going gets tough. Not Bush's type, at all. Today's Independent actually quotes someone named:
"It is quite the opposite," said Phillip Giraldi a former CIA counterterrorism officer. "In fact Robert Gates [the US Defence Secretary] was rebuffed during his recent visit to London when the idea was floated.
"Because British mine-sweepers based in the Gulf of Hormuz will be essential to any US action against Iran, US war planners need to have Britain on board," he said. "So far that is not forthcoming."
If Brown is less hawkish than Gates, we aren't going anywhere. Gordon's spin doctors have tried to bugger up the Tories' headlines by leaking the withdrawal of nearly half the remaining forces in Iraq, and you can't chase the Republican Guard over the border with 3000 men, in fact you can't do anything worth a damn. The leak also suggests an early election, since it continues Brown's obvious theme of shooting everyone's foxes, leaving both the Tories and Lib Dems with no distinct policies.
Here's The Mail's
Here's The Mail's story:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=485018
Both Sic Semper Tyrannis and Steve Clemon's liberal foreign policy blog:
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/
welcome Hilary's move on Iran - though point out that last week she voted to declare the Iranian Guards a terrorist outfit (she's saying all things to all men) - and suggest Jim Webb (the ex-Republican turned Democratic Senator for Virginia who fought in Vietnam, has consistently and effectively opposed the Iraq War, and has a son serving there) as her running mate.
What's the reaction of the Daily Mail going to be to John Bolton's unleashing at the Tory Party Conference?
Just a brief reference to the Henry Jackson Society (the US Senator and progenitor of the neo-cons):
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/archives/2005/11/22/inside_the_hawks_nest.html
Britain's own nest of neo-cons based, inevitably, in Peterhouse, Cambridge. There's one Labour member - Denis Macshane - but a brace of now Front Bench Tories very close to Cameron - Ed Vaizey and Michael Gove. The Guardian carries on: "The supporters include a smattering of spooks, diplomats, Times journalists and grandees whom recent events have treated badly: David Trimble, Colonel Tim Collins, Irwin Stelzer (another Cameron fan) and the former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove." I also suspect Dame Pauline Neville Jones is a member.
If, Tom, as you argue,
If, Tom, as you argue, Brown is plumping for The Mail and not Murdoch, and if he loses Murdoch's support at the next election but still wins, wonder what the chances are he'll return to the status quo ante, before about 1981, when the Tories (foolishly) withdrew the monopolies legislation which prevented press lords from owning more than 2 national papers. I suspect Brown would get quite a lot of (self-interested) support from other papers for this carve up of Murdoch.
"I also suspect Dame Pauline
"I also suspect Dame Pauline Neville Jones is a member."
She seems a very busy lady. I came across a web site called "Biased BBC" and read this...
"It wasn't 'people linked to' al Qaeda who killed 3,000 people that day, it was al Qaeda itself. Osama bin Laden even boasted of the attacks."
Of course wanting to help out I pointed out that it had never been established that bin Laden had said anything of the sort, indeed he had said...
" I was not involved in the September 11 attacks in the United States nor did I have knowledge of the attacks. There exists a government within a government within the United States. The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; to the people who want to make the present century a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity. That secret government must be asked as to who carried out the attacks. ... The American system is totally in control of the Jews, whose first priority is Israel, not the United States."
I also pointed out this...
http://teamliberty.net/id267.html
Anyway`s some blogged back to me and I ask them if they could give me a link to where bin Laden had said he was responsible beside the ones that so many said were fake video`s? no links came back to me. My posts have since been removed fron the "Biased BBC" web site. They don`t like the truth to get in the way of whatever their aims are (right wing one`s it seems).
http://tinyurl.com/3c6sfy
There's one Labour member -
There are very few neocons left in the UK, but I think you can add Gisela Stuart, Labour MP for Edgbaston, to the list. She did fall out with Tony, though, but from her appearances on Radio 5's lunchtime parliamentary 'discussion' she's definitely a fellow traveller and I remember her having something to do with the HJS. To my eternal shame I voted for her in 1997.
Don't bother with Biased BBC - they'll never spot the real BBC bias in a month of Sundays, since it's towards the Establishment. It's rather subtle, though, but the over-riding narrative of, say, George Bush press conference coverage is to assume he's telling the truth and work from there (questions like 'but the President says the surge is working, are you saying he's just putting a good gloss on it' are common in the following analysis). The assumption that elected/powerful figures drive the agenda is the real BBC bias, the Tories only feel it's against them because they're not in power, but they're too stupid to realise it's actually in their favour.
Tom Spot on post. I think
Tom
Spot on post.
I think exactly the same as you when it comes to the BBC. Since the Andrew Gilligan affair it`s the mouth of New Labour. Still very scary people that run the "Biased BBC" web site,very scary.
There's a hilarious thread
There's a hilarious thread on ARSSE about BiassedBBC which, very soon indeed, manages to get on to Dame Pauline Neville-Jones.
http://www.arrse.co.uk/cpgn2/Forums/viewtopic/t=78559.html
I reckon the BBC have their
I reckon the BBC have their own version of the Nicene Creed, which they all chant at morning prayer:
I believe in one corporate system, maker of all things visible and invisible
And in the Holy British State, which is of the essence of capital, of one substance with the Boardroom
And in the Prime Minister, who is wealth incarnate, cash made man for our salvation.
He makes the poor to suffer, and our share price to ascend into heaven.
Amen
Etc...
Cassandra
Brown's going to be under a
Brown's going to be under a lot of pressure to support Bush's bombing of Iran. Blair would have gone along with it. And as for the Tories, did you see John Bolton's statements at the Tory Party conference on Sunday:
"If we were to strike Iran it should be accompanied by an effort at regime change ... The US once had the capability to engineer the clandestine overthrow of governments. I wish we could get it back."
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/tory2007/story/0,,2180555,00.html
Now who knew John Bolton was an open fascist?
Bloggerheads lists the ten
Bloggerheads lists the ten journalists taken to Moscow in Usmanov's Gulfstream, wined, dined, put up in 5 star hotel, who then write PR creampuff about the great man, and points out the only one to mention the circumstances of how they got to Moscow comes from - the Daily Mail journalist.