Helmintholog

who is one of the best things about the New Statesman, is not at all euphoric about the Democrat victory, saying they will now form a circular firing squad. But what he says about the Republicans is rather more worrying:

Rumours persist here (and I have heard them repeated at a very senior level in the UK, too) that Bush has actually resumed drinking; I throw this into the mix not to sensationalise, but because I have now heard the rumour repeated at a sufficiently high level that I believe we must face the possibility that it might be true.
Bush was huddled inside the White House eating beef and ice cream on election night with Rove, my friend Josh Bolten, and four other trusted aides who will stick with him to the end. He was not drinking on this occasion, I’m assured – but, more than ever, my depiction of an unstable man living out his final days in office inside his bunker seem no longer to be fanciful. Hemmed in by Democratic foes wherever he looks, determined to be remembered in history as an unwaveringly strong leader, and increasingly detached from reality: now that suddenly becomes a very frightening vision indeed.

The bloke who came to fix our washing machine yesterday turned out to be an ex-squaddie, who had left the army after being blown out of a troop carrier by an IED which killed one of his mates. He was not in the least bit anti-war, though he said Iraq was hell: “You have to watch your back all the time, from everyone, even the Iraqi police”. But he despised the Americans. “Our motto is ‘one shot; one kill.’ Theirs is ‘One magazine: maybe we’ll get someone’.”

He would have rejoiced in the election results, though, and I like to believe that a similar sentiment lay behind this story of another squaddie, a rocket, and his arsehole.

It is also possible, though less likely, that something similar was what George W Bush meant when he talked about the “thoughtful conversations” he had had with Rumsfeld before sacking him. I mean, which one of them could be trusted to put the rocket in the right way round?

A glorious song about Ted Haggard here. Let’s see if I can get it onto thinking Anglicans. The chorus goes something like “Meth and man ass, praise the Lord!” Catchy tune, too.

John Lloyd is a really admirable journalist. I suppose I think that he is the most substantial journalistic supporter of the war: he’s not a drunk; he doesn’t rant or showboat; he’s not unduly impressed by power, but he does respect its difficulty. He is also a damn good editor. So his retreat from Iraq is not a rat-like scuttle, but some altogether larger and more formidable rodent — a beaver, perhaps — moving backwards and snapping at his persecutors as he does. Perhaps the clue to why he got it wrong is found in his fondness for trade unionists: he was a cold war man, and a Moscow correspondent, and he may have just fitted Iraq into that pattern, as Condi Rice did. In any case, here he is on a Downing Street ceremony to honour a murdered Iraqi trades unionist.

First, Saleh’s life and death shows what the stakes are, and remain, in Iraq. Those who hated him, and who hate trade unions, do so because their vision of society is of one ruled by either a party or a faith or both that prohibit, on pain of death, any challenge to a totalitarian reality.
Blair is indeed beleaguered. It is true that there are real advances in Iraq in civil freedoms, but the chaos, mainly in the capital, offsets these and makes government and development hard. Also, the prime minister of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, is under pressure to deliver more, faster, in the way of security, by UK and US leaders anxious to set a date for withdrawing their forces.
But the little scene in Downing Street was larger evidence of a prime minister who knew, as few leaders now do, what the stakes are; the more so since he is tied to one. Through the doughty Labour MP Ann Clwyd, his representative on human rights in Iraq, he remains in touch with a range of groups, as well as unions. He is seeing the gamble he took in seeking the destruction of the regime take a murderous direction. He will be pilloried for it until the day he leaves office, and beyond. Yet he must hope – and so should we, if we value the ideas to which we subscribe – that it will be recognised how much honour he did his country by ensuring the end of a monster.

Only a pedant, of the sort that John Lloyd was, and on other subjects still is, would point out that it was hardly Blair who “ensured the end of Saddam”. We know, because Rumsfeld said so, that the invasion would have gone ahead without us. Nor is it easy to identify “real advances in civil freedoms”: the freedom to walk down the street without fearing death or torture seems to me more important than a democratic constitution which is totally ignored.

But the central mistake is surely the comparison of Iraqi trades unions with Solidarity. Quite apart from anything else, a nationalist and religious trades union movement, such as Solidarity was, would not be pro-American or pro-Lloyd, if it were to emerge in Iraq. And, to do him proper credit, Lloyd does mention that Hadi Saleh, the trade unionist he honours, had been and remained an opponent of the war.

to London today, to interview Tony Judt. Very interesting man: one thing, which may not make the interview, that he said when we were discussing American attitudes to Europe and Israel. Since courses in European history became optional twenty five years ago or so, no one under 35 in the USA knows anything about European history. But there is one exception: in many, perhaps most states, there is a compulsory high school course in holocaust studies, or world War Two, or Nazism — they are all more or less the same, and they all teach the Second World War as if it were primarily about the extermination of European Jewry. Now that may have been the most important thing about it morally, or in retrospect. but it wasn’t the most important thing at the time for anyone outside two groups, the Nazis and the Jews. It wasn’t the most politically important thing about the war. But “most young Americans’ understanding of Europe is shaped by this sense that the dominant characteristic of recent European history is the propensity to kill jews … I worry that in the states we live in a situation, without it even being party-political propaganda, where people grow up with the idea that Europe is permanently disposed to kill Jews, and that only Israel and of course with it America, stands as an impediment against this. And under those circumstances, of course, all criticism of Israel does indeed look like handing gifts to anti-Semites.”