Sardanapale

I rarely miss departing politicians.

In fact, their departure is often the only thing that mitigates my dismay at their successor’s elevation.

But I don’t feel like that about Tony Blair, who is leaving at I write. I’m going to miss him. And I believe the British will miss him too – even though they don’t know it yet.

In fact I feel quite alone in my continued admiration for Blair (and as foreigner living in Britain, frustrated that I could never vote for him).

Assessments of legacy in the British media have ranged from the negative to the extremely negative.

The most charitable commentators argue that in his decade in power Blair wasted his talent and misguidedly threw in his lot with a clueless, militaristic US president.

The most hostile critics have treated Blair like a criminal.

A few months ago the TV station Channel 4 broadcast a feature-length satire, The Trial of Tony Blair, advertized in the London Underground by “Tony Blair – Wanted” posters.

There was also a stage play entitled: Called to Account: The indictment of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair for the crime of aggression against Iraq – a Hearing.

Could Blair have done better? Sure. To govern is to choose, and therefore run the risk of getting things wrong.

I certainly object to the rise in taxation, and to public services that remain lousy despite all the cash that was thrown at them.

Personally, I would have preferred a prime minister that combined Hayek’s ideas, Churchill’s eloquence, Washington’s wisdom, and Stalin’s firmness.

But I live in a democracy and that means I am bound by reality and the choices of others.

Given those constraints, I consider getting Blair for 10 years was a bargain.

The undisputed failings that have marred his tenure, in my view, will never eclipse the example of political courage he repeatedly showed to the world.

The man often portrayed as a slave to focus groups and a master of “spin” was in fact the epitome of the conviction politician.

Here are a few highlights of Blair’s career, which I feel testify to his moral fibre:

– Even before his election, he launched a campaign to remove from the Labour Party constitution of “Clause IV”, which called for the nationalisation of everything.

He was warned against antagonizing the Old Left, and told to retain a symbolic provision that no one interpreted literally. But Blair argued that Labour had to be straight with voters, and prevailed over party traditionalists.

Just after winning office in 1997, Blair went to see Clinton, who was on the ropes at the height of the Lewinski affair.

A more focus-group-focused politician would have kept his distance, but Blair heaped praise on his beleaguered host.

Asked by a puzzled British journalist about this unreserved support, Blair simply said it was “the right thing to do” because Clinton was “a friend”. Say what you will about Clinton (I am not a fan myself), but Blair showed decency and courage.

– In 1999, he showed what he was made of in more testing circumstances: Milosevic’s campaign of murder and plunder in Kosovo.

Against strong opposition at home, Blair unhesitatingly backed the bombing of Serbia: “This is simply the right to do.” (That phrase would come up again and again over the years, always appropriately.)

Most courageously, he passionately argued for a ground war when neither other European leaders not Clinton had the stomach for one.

Blair was not casualty averse, and led the “no-compromise” way. He made a moral case to “stand up to be counted in the cause of justice”, to send a message to dictators. His tough stance no doubt contributed to Milosevic’s eventual capitulation.

– In September 2000, he did not flinch during the Sierra Leone crisis. When the “West Side Boys”, a gruesome militia who was terrorizing civilians, took British soldiers hostage, he sent special forces in. He was warned it was a high-risk operation, but he decided it instantly.

The success of the operation did a lot to dispel the memory of the US fiasco in Somalia, and provides a blueprint for future action in Africa.

– His attitude after 9/11was admirable. He immediately went to see Bush and said: you stuck with us during World War II, we’ll stick with you now and fight if we have to.

– On Iraq, Blair was anything but Bush’s poodle. Three days after 9/11 he said the issue of Iraqi weapons must dealt with.

He believed that it was vital for Saddam to be disarmed and in July 2002 made clear the West could not wait for the threat to materialize.

Criticizing Blair for agreeing to an ill-prepared campaign in Iraq is fair. But accusations that he deliberately took the country to under false pretences are nonsense.

His decision in late 2002 to publish the MI6 dossier on Iraq was bold and unprecedented. Although the move backfired, the idea was to be straight with the British people.

And Blair confronted his many critics head on. He took part in televised debates where he was harried and harangued – I remember an angry woman who said he was just like bin Laden in his readiness to bomb innocent people.

In the end, he pulled off a great speech that rallied the Commons behind war. “We will confront the dictators and terrorists,” he said.

– Blair’s reaction to the July 2005 bombings in was inspiring. His former minister Peter Mandelson told the BBC about his handling of the crisis:

He never panics. He thinks of two things. What is the right thing to do, and secondly, what is the best way to communicate it?”

Blair’s speech that evening is worth quoting at length:

“When they try to intimidate us, we will not be intimidated. When they seek to change our country or our way of life by these methods, we will not be changed.

When they try to divide our people or weaken our resolve, we will not be divided and our resolve will hold firm.

We will show, by our spirit and dignity, and by a quiet but true strength that there is in the British people, that our values will long outlast theirs.

The purpose of terrorism is just that; it is to terrorize people, and we will not be terrorized…

This is a very sad day for the British people but we will hold true to the British way of life.”

– You might say: it’s easy to be eloquent after a terrorist attack. This is true – which is why I found Blair at his bravest on relatively minor domestic issues.

He defended genetically modified organisms in a country paranoid about “Frankenstein foods”.

In late 2003, already weakened by Iraq, he put his political life on the line to give universities the right to levy (limited) tuition fees.

Again, he took his crusade into hostile territory, and got insulted on campuses and during TV debates. He also braved the wrath of his Labour Party, but in the end in won in the Commons.

I could go on, and also cite his recent defense of private equity deals, reviled by the left and the media.

My point is not to argue that every one of his policies was right (although he should take some credit for the country’s prosperity), but to underline the moral qualities that made Blair a great leader.

He knew how to listen to both the voice of the people and that of his own conscience.

All those who were close to him have testified that he was shaken by his loss of popularity.

He was not like Margaret Thatcher, whose firmness turned into arrogance over time, and was brought down by her inability to listen even to well-meaning friends.

Blair could listen to them, which is why he eventually agreed to go.

But on isssues he deemed fundamental, he would not compromise – and was prepared to stand firm in the face of widespread hostility.

In short, Blair exemplified Edmund Burke’s definition of political virtue:

“Your representative owes you his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

After his first European summit, French President Nicolas Sarkozy was pleased with himself. He got the words “free and undistorted competition” struck from the objectives of a proposed new EU treaty.

“Competition as an ideology, as a dogma, what has it done for Europe? Fewer and fewer people who vote in European elections and fewer and fewer people who believe in Europe,” he said.

Sarkozy also managed to include the need for “protection” against globalisation included into the preamble of the treaty.

Some observers argue that this language is really harmless, that in practice, the EU economic policy won’t change. The whole point of the exercise, we are told, was to give reassurance to the 55% of French voters who scuttled the previous Constitutional treaty in a referendum two years ago.

Two things. First, that is not the way Sarkozy does not present the changes. Far from minimizing the effects of the new language, he boasted:

“The word ‘protection’ is no longer taboo. It might … give a different jurisprudence to the Commission, (and) a competition that will therefore favour the emergence of European champions.”

And more importantly, I find no comfort in the thought that the preamble to the proposed treaty is full of empty rhetoric.

I had voted for Sarkozy to bury Chirac’s legacy of ritual anti-capitalism and obstructive nationalism. What a fool I was.

In the New York Times Book Review, Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson appraises a book about Clarence Thomas.

The main point of the article – entitled “Thomas Agonistes” – is that the Supreme Court justice suffers from “chronic contradictions”, which Patterson summarizes thus:

“Although he seriously believes that his extremely conservative legal opinions are in the best interests of African-Americans, and yearns to be respected by them, he is arguably one of the most viscerally despised people in black America.

It is incontestable that he has benefited from affirmative action at critical moments in his life, yet he denounces the policy and has persuaded himself that it played little part in his success.

He berates disadvantaged people who view themselves as victims of racism and preaches an austere individualism, yet harbors self-pitying feelings of resentment and anger at his own experiences of racism.

His ardent defense of states’ rights would have required him to uphold Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law, not to mention segregated education, yet he lives with a white wife in Virginia.

He is said to dislike light-skinned blacks, yet he is the legal guardian of a biracial child, the son of one of his numerous poor relatives.”

I will not dwell on the ad hominem gossip about private life, and go straight to Patterson’s critique of Thomas’ public opinions.

The idea that any consistent supporter of states’ rights should retrospectively endorse the racist laws of the old south is a cheap polemic, and Patterson knows it.

The fact that bigots believed in states’ rights does not mean that anyone who supports that doctrine is a bigot.

In the European context, it would be just as absurd for a supporter of the (now defunct) EU constitution to portray all its critics as far-right xenophobes, on the grounds that France’s National Front was against it.

Thomas’ claim to have suffered at the hand of racists does not seem outlandish for someone who grew up in Georgia in the 1950s. It should not stop him denouncing the modern form of ideology that sees racism everywhere today.

That Thomas is at odds with most other black people on many issues, including where their interest lies, is a fact. This fact may show that he is isolated, or perhaps wrong. But it is not a contradiction.

More precisely, it is only a contradiction if you assume that all African Americans, on account of their race, must subscribe to the same point of view.

As for the notion that you cannot condemn a policy that you have benefited from as unjust, it is equally bizarre.

In the dying years of the French ancien régime aristocrats were the fiercest critics of aristocratic privileges. Should they be condemned as illogical and self-loathing or praised for their lucidity?

Closer to home (especially for Patterson), I know a prominent academic whose children went to Harvard but refused to tick the “African American” box that would have given extra points for admission.

Of course, once they were at Harvard, they had to endure the condescension of white students who assumed they had jumped to queue.

You may not share these black kids’ resentment of affirmative action as insulting, but you shouldn’t regard it as a contradiction.

Unless, that is, you assume that prominent blacks belong first and foremost to their group. This assumption lies at the heart of Patterson’s view of “Thomas Agonistes”: by defending conservative positions, the justice is denying a key part of his own identity.

The idea that some officials owe their political allegiance to their own kind is most forcefully states in an open letter to Thomas quoted in the book (entitled Supreme Discomfort. The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas).

The letter, written by a black district judge after Thomas took his seat on the Supreme Court in 1991, urges him to remember his roots and not to let the side down.

“You … must try to remember that the fundamental problems of the disadvantaged, women, minorities, and the powerless have not all been solved simply because you have ‘moved on up’ from Pin Point, Georgia, to the Supreme Court.”

Reciting a roster of notables from the past, the judge told Thomas to see his life as connected to

“the visions and struggles of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Charles Hamilton Houston, A. Philip Randolph, Mary McLeod Bethune, W. E. B. Du Bois, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, Martin Luther King, Judge William Henry Hastie, Justices Thurgood Marshall, Earl Warren, and William Brennan, as well as the thousands of others who dedicated much of their lives to create the America that made your opportunities possible.”

In other words a black judge has a duty, but virtue of his race, to espouse certain opinions.

I’m sure there are good reasons to a liberal, but this legal apartheid is not one of them.

Paul Berman’s article in the New Republic “Who’s Afraid of Tariq Ramadan?” makes dazzling, if lengthy, reading.

It’s the latest – and to my mind the best-aimed salvo – in a debate that agitated much of the trans-Atlantic intelligentsia in the early months of the year.

A few words about that controversy first.

The first shot was fired by the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner who called Dutch writer Ian Buruma and British academic Timothy Garton Ash “enemies of freedom”.

Their chief crime, as Bruckner saw it, was their support for “multiculturalism”, i.e. the notion that all cultures deserve equal recognition.

The “mystique of respect for others” is a very dangerous thing when applied to repressive groups, and Buruma and Garton Ash stood accused of sanctioning “the oppression of the individual”.

How so? They had criticised the Dutch writer Ayaan Hirsi Ai, a fierce critic of Islam, and had warned against a hard-line stance towards Islamists.

To Bruckner, this “tolerance harbours contempt” for victims of fanaticism. Multiculturalism, he wrote, was the “racism of the anti-racists”.

Buruma and Garton Ash were not willing to stick up for liberal democracy, just like the useful idiots who lent their supports to the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century.

Bruckner wrote:

“It is astonishing that 62 years after the fall of the Third Reich and 16 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an important segment Europe’s intelligentsia is engaged in slandering the friends of democracy.

They maintain it is best to cede and retreat, and pay mere lip-service to the ideals of the Enlightenment.”

Buruma and Garton Ash rejected the charge – fairly convincingly I thought – pointing out that they had a track record of opposing anti-Western sentiment.

“Liberal democracy must be defended against violent extremism,” wrote Buruma.

He added that revolutionary Islamism was “indeed a threat to our free society.”

Both Buruma and Garton Ash insisted that they were just as outraged by terrorism as anyone – they just argued that targeting a whole religion for opprobrium was not the right way to tackle Islamic violence.

Others joined the fray.

The Bruckner lot branded their opponents as fellow travellers of a new form of totalitarianism; Buruma called his attackers “Enlightenment fundamentalists”.

Berman’s piece is the most considered contribution to the debate, and it weighs heavily on the side of Bruckner.

Although his main target is Tariq Ramadan, Buruma is faulted for going easy on the Swiss Islamist in a profile written for the New York Times Magazine last year.

Writes Berman:

“All in all, Buruma judged that, despite the controversies and accusations, Ramadan the philosopher offers, in Buruma’s words, “a reasoned but traditionalist approach to Islam” based on “values that are as universal as those of the European Enlightenment.”

He judged that Ramadan’s values, although “neither secular, nor always liberal,” offer “an alternative to violence, which is, in the end, reason enough to engage with him, critically, but without fear.”

This was not quite a ringing endorsement. Still, it was an endorsement.

It conveyed the unmistakable implication that Ramadan, the worthy interlocutor, stands for more than himself, which is why engaging him might be useful – in order to discover the human and philosophical principles that Western and Muslim hearts and minds might share in common, and to bridge the divisions, and at last to achieve, between the West and Islam, a cultural peace.”

For Berman, Ramadan glosses over the deep links between the Muslim Brotherhood, founded by his grandfather, and the ideologue of modern jihad Sayyid Qutb.

And Buruma took Ramadan at face value: he pulled his punches when he knew better:

“Ramadan offered his misleading explanation that Qutb and Grandfather al-Banna never knew each other, and Buruma left it at that. Salafi reformism?

Buruma failed to notice Qutb’s prominence among its intellectual leaders. Anti-Semitism? Ramadan is “one of the few Muslim intellectuals to speak out.”

And why one of the few?

It was as if, without realizing what had happened, Buruma had quietly come to accept Ramadan’s overall thesis, and had begun to look upon Ramadan as the voice of the masses, and the masses as a population hopelessly steeped in the vapors of authenticity; and had come also to look upon the liberal intellectuals from Muslim backgrounds as insignificant because, in their liberalism, they are demonstrably inauthentic.

Ramadan ended up being “one of the few Muslim intellectuals” because the other Muslim intellectuals, being liberals, did not count.

Or worse, the other Muslim intellectuals, being liberals, sometimes stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the non-Muslim liberals, whom Buruma had decided to dismiss as neocons.

This is a pretty big development, if you stop to think about it, and one that might explain the oddly ingenuous press that Ramadan has been receiving.

For if people like Ramadan and the other Islamists do speak for the oppressed and the downtrodden, and if Ramadan is a pretty good guy compared with most of his fellow salafi reformists, then shouldn’t we make every effort to view Ramadan in the best of lights?”

But according to Berman, this is a sham. It is true that Ramadan disapproves of terrorism – but

“there is a cost in having it both ways, in noisily affirming his place within the salafi reformist tradition while pretending that terrorist components of the movement belong only to a distant offshoot; or in affirming his own disapproval of violent action while exalting his grandfather’s memory…

The cost is a little smudge of ambiguity in Ramadan’s own position….

But what is his final message with regard to violence? It is a double message.

The first message condemns terrorism. The second message lavishes praise on the theoreticians of terrorism.”

Berman also takes Buruma to task over his argument that people like Ramadan, who refuse to tackle Islamism head on and have credibility with ordinary Muslims, are in a better position in influence them than Hirsi Ali.

“This ought to be a familiar argument – it was more or less the argument that Sartre invoked in order to explain why he refused to condemn the USSR.

Sartre invited his audiences to think of the industrial suburb of Paris called Billancourt, where the ignorant workers believed in communism and the Soviet future–and he did not want to demoralize the downtrodden, to désespérer Billancourt.

And so Sartre bit his tongue; if the workers were going to learn the truth about the Soviets, it was not going to be from him. And Ramadan is right not to désespérer Brick Lane (a Bangladeshi area of London) by offering a simple straight-out condemnation of violence against women.”

In conclusion, Berman contrasts the present restraint to the unanimous outcry among intellectuals that followed the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989.

“During the Rushdie affair, courage was saluted. Today it is likened to fascism.

How did this happen?

The equanimity on the part of some well-known intellectuals and journalists in the face of Islamist death threats so numerous as to constitute a campaign; the equanimity in regard to stoning women to death; the journalistic inability even to acknowledge that women’s rights have been at stake in the debates over Islamism… ; the inability to acknowledge how large has been the role of a revived anti-Semitism; the striking number of errors of understanding and even of fact that have entered into the journalistic presentations of Tariq Ramadan and his ideas… – what can possibly account for this string of bumbles, timidities, gaffes, omissions, miscomprehensions, and slanders?

Two developments account for it. The first development is the unimaginable rise of Islamism since the time of the Rushdie fatwa. The second is terrorism.”

I am not buying all of Berman’s arguments, and have some sympathy with Buruma’s, but this article makes fascinating reading.

I am struck by the power and clarity of Berman’s arguments, but I don’t buy every single one of them.

I find him sometimes harsh on Buruma and Garton Ash, who after all belong to the same intellectual family as him, the anti-Marxist left.

The fact that both sides have valid points makes the confrontation all the more interesting.

It raises crucial questions for which there are no easy answers: who are the West’s enemies: Jihadis? Islamists? Muslims?

Can a culture be totalitarian? After all, the totalitarian monstrosities of the 20th centuries did not rest on ancient cultures but on their destructions, and on the banishment of history.

Is the notion of Islamofascism a valid one? Is there such a thing as an “enlightenment fundamentalist”?

I have no definitive answers to these questions.

If you want to form an opinion for your self most of the debate can be found on this site.

Below is what Tony Blair had to say on a key issue of our time in a valedictory essay published by The Economist this week. I’ll miss this man.

“I fear the world, and especially a large part of Western opinion, has become dangerously misguided about this threat (of terrorism).

If there was any mistake made in the aftermath of September 11th, it was not to realize that the roots of this terrorism were deep and pervasive.

Removing the Taliban from government seemed relatively easy. Removing their ideology is so much harder.

It has been growing for over a generation. It is based on genuine belief, the believers being people determined to outlast us, to be indefatigable when we are weary: to be strong-willed and single-minded when we have so many other things to preoccupy us…

People make much of the fact that in each area of conflict, the extremists take a different shape.

They point to the historical absurdity of, for example, Iranian elements linking up to the Taliban. Above all, they say, their weapons, numbers and support are puny compared with ours.

This misses the central point. Revolutionary communism took many forms. It chose unlikely bedfellows. But we still spent decades confronting it.

This new terrorism has an ideology. It is based on an utter perversion of the proper faith of Islam.

But it plays to a sense of victimhood and grievance in the Muslim world. Many disagree with its methods. But too many share some of its sentiments. Its world view is completely reactionary…

In the Middle East right now, it stops progress in Iraq. It defies the attempts at peace between Israel and Palestine. It is making Lebanese democracy teeter on the brink. That is significant in itself.

But far more significant is the way in which the terrorists have successfully warped our sense of what is happening and why. They have made us blame ourselves.

We can debate and re-debate the rights or wrongs of removing Saddam. But the reality is that if you took al-Qaeda (in Iraq before Saddam’s fall) out of the conflict in or around Baghdad, without the car bombs aimed at civilians and the destruction of monuments like the Samarra Shrine, it would be possible to calm the situation.…

The truth is that the conflict in Iraq has mutated into something directly fuelled by the same elements that confront us everywhere. Yet a large, probably the larger, part of Western opinion would prefer us to withdraw.

That is the extraordinary dulling of our senses that the terrorism has achieved.

In the Palestinian question who gets the blame for lack of progress? The West. In Lebanon—a crisis deliberately provoked by, again, the same forces—who is held responsible? Israel.

In Afghanistan it is clear that the Taliban is receiving support, including arms from, again, elements of the Iranian regime. They have learned from elsewhere.

They believe if they inflict enough chaos, enough casualties of Western soldiers, we will lose the will. It will become another “mess”. And if it does, the problem will be laid at the door of the Afghan government and its Western allies.

In the past few weeks alone we have seen terrorist bombs in Morocco, Algeria, Pakistan, India, and arrests in Saudi Arabia.

Not a single major European nation is immune. In Africa, Sudan, Somalia, even in places like Nigeria where Muslims and Christians live together, terrorism is active.

There is no alternative to fighting this menace wherever it rears its head. There are no demands that are remotely negotiable. It has to be beaten. Period.”

The first video of BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston since his abduction in March is a testament to the totalitarian idiocy of his captors.

The group – the “Army of Islam” – apparently believes that a list of supposed Western crimes reeled off by a gaunt hostage can help raise awareness of the plight of Muslims in Gaza and elsewhere.

But of course, the main crime highlighted in the video is that perpetrated against Johnston.

And a direct consequence will be to further discourage Western journalists from travelling to Gaza to raise awareness of the plight of Muslims.

That is the idiotic bit. The totalitarian bit relates to the ideology and methods of the jihadists.

Testimony extracted at gunpoint and put on display for the enlightenment of the masses is a technique perfected by communism, both in its Soviet and Chinese versions.

The glorification of death and martyrdom is also a totalitarian trope. “There are thousands of our young people who look forward to death like the Americans look forward to living,” another al-Qaeda video exulted after the 9/11 attacks.

The thrill associated with dying and killing was first expressed was the Spanish fascists who shouted: “Viva la muerte.”

And radical Muslims share the common objective of the Nazis and the Communists: the destruction of Western democracy.

Like them, they show particular hatred towards the Anglo-Saxons. The text read Johnston was made to read includes this tirade

“From history, the British worked to bring about the state of Israel, which is the cause of all the suffering of the Palestinian people, and we, the British, are completely to blame, along with the Americans, for the situation in Iraq.”

Which is I find the word “Islamofascism” (coined by Paul Berman) appropriate: Jihadists seek to establish a caliphate through force, and are supported in this endeavor by dictatorships, notably a nuclear Iran.

The phrase “World War IV” – used again by Norman Podhoretz in a recent article – is also justified.

Some balk at this characterization. But since there is an “Army” (of Islam), there must be a war.

And the fight is being taken to the four corners of the world. Gaza is just one of the current hotspots: there are potential fronts on all continents.

The conflict is indeed global. The jihadists dream of doing to all of mankind what they are doing to Alan Johnston.