Det var Søren Kierkegaard som i sin tid forutspådde et verden ville gå
under i et latterbrøl...
"Can it be the director of homeland security, Tom Ridge, dutifully
explaining a few days ago (and 1,300 incarcerated suspects later) why
the FBI still hasn't located a single al-Qaida cell operating in the
USA?"
(...)
"Don't we see that one UN resolution goes with another, that Tel Aviv
and Baghdad are under the same instruction? Don't we see that being
tough on crime involves being tough on the causes of crime (as they
grow, in pain, around Gaza)?"
The Guardian:
This war is farcical, but it is easier to cry than to laugh
The campaign increasingly lacks credibility, from Afghanistan to Iraq
Peter Preston
Monday March 18, 2002
The Guardian
"Do you call me a fool, boy?" "All thy other titles thou hast given
away; that thou wast born with."
We're talking about King Lear and President George W - about the thin
grey line between tragedy and comedy, between pathos and bathos. And we
are walking the line. This war on terror, for the moment, is still a
Ridley Scott sort of movie: all clenched jaws and derring-do. Not many
laughs. But Robert Altman is waiting in the wings, ready to take over as
black hawks go down and black farces begin. Absurdity is its own
comeuppance. Altman's only problem may be knowing which absurdity to
start with. Can it be the director of homeland security, Tom Ridge,
dutifully explaining a few days ago (and 1,300 incarcerated suspects
later) why the FBI still hasn't located a single al-Qaida cell operating
in the USA? "I think we should assume and operate under the notion that
some are still in the United States...."
Some "notion", in very slow motion. Poor Tom's a-cold. Can it be Mrs Bin
Laden, explaining to readers what happened to Osama's kids when the
Taliban banned schools? Oh, we "hired private tutors who taught them
English and Arabic and maths and science. They also trained them to use
the computer". New Labour couldn't have done it better, nuncle. But if I
had to start anywhere this morning, it would be with the Mullah Omar.
If, that is, I - or anybody else - knew where he was. The missing
mullah, after all, is not some malevolent genius, more a muddled
plodder. He's the stocky, luxuriantly bearded village cleric plucked
long ago by the Pakistan secret service to be its not very imposing
front man in Afghanistan. He is, famously, one eye short of a pair (and
three wives over the norm). His political skills, in the days after
September 11, make him a natural contender for the Stephen Byers
Foresight and Planning Award. He's been on the run all winter, mostly
sighted riding a motor bike through outlying villages. He used to be
Afghanistan's leader, an Afghan living among Afghans in a Kandahar house
with animals in the front parlour. Not exactly an unknown quantity. But
the combined strength of western - nay, world - intelligence hasn't laid
a finger on him yet.
Is that a joke? It is becoming one. We may still, just about, nod
sympathetically as Osama does his Scarlet Pimpernel act again. He has
always been damned elusive. Omar, though, is quite another matter. When
he gets on his bike, he makes his secret pursuers - the spies in the
sky, the agents on the ground - seem merely foolish. And once you start
sniggering, there is so much more to snigger over.
Of course the World Trade Centre wasn't remotely funny. Of course the
scenes of smoking rubble evoked sorrow and pity in purest form. But the
rest of the show (to be honest) has been down hill all the way. Anyone
who is anyone in al-Qaida has done a flit, probably to Pakistan (though
Pakistan is deemed on our side, and thus not subject to the kind of
histrionic vengeance Ariel Sharon wreaks on Arafat). The evil empire,
meanwhile, fumbling with a dud box of matches and failing to set fire to
its best training shoes, has signally failed to strike back.
Is that because B-52s, unloading death by the thousand ton from a great
height, have smashed its infrastructure? Perhaps. But we're entitled by
now to inquire: "what infrastructure?" The FBI can't find one. The
paperwork captured in Kabul and surrounds is goggle-eyed scribbling.
Months pass, filled only by hysterical, unfulfilled warnings from US
attorneys general and British chiefs of police. Nothing happens. Osama,
even at the best of times, couldn't bring any momentum to his
atrocity-making; but this is ridiculous. The special forces can't find
the villain and the villain doesn't strike back. Missions impossible
becomes mission wholly improbable.
And that, at root, is the trouble with all this second-phase Saddam
stuff. We were told, if you remember, to expect a new kind of war,
blending the military, the diplomatic and the power of secret
intelligence as never before. But there is, on examination, nothing new
about Mr Bush's latest defence budget. It wants more of everything, to
be sure, but the everything is old, heavy-duty kit left over from Gulf
and cold war thinking. Here, one more time, comes son of star wars to
confront a future menace which present policies are supposedly
obliterating anyway. Nor, from Saudi Arabia to the EU, is diplomacy
faring so well, either (as Dick Cheney has just painfully discovered).
Which leaves the spooks swinging and singing alone. Omar, I miss your
apple pie.
Yet, more than ever, the west needs its intelligence arms to take the
strain. It needs to pick up a few of the real ringleaders. (Radovan
Karadzic would be a start.) It needs to have precise information about
Iraq's biological arsenals that can be used, out in the open, to sway
public opinion, not shiver Tony Blair's timbers in his private office.
It needs to come clean about an al-Qaida threat which is in danger of
becoming grotesquely overblown, swollen by bluster. It needs to get its
thinking in order.
There is no sign of that happening. (Why else should Britain's anxious
generals unburden themselves to the Observer yesterday rather than Mr
Blair?) On the contrary, we're back in the old bind of gab first and
ponder later. We are parking our tanks on Saddam's lawn again without
finding a gate to bring them in through. That's not a matter of
morality. If some ambitious Iraqi colonel, bank account stuffed and
ambition fuelled, put a gun to the old despot's head and pulled the
trigger, we could all rejoice. The Takriti tyrants have ruined their
country and made victims of their people. Doing something about them is,
though, a matter of reality.
Is Israel the final, blood-stained joke? Even Jewish comedians are
finding that a hard connection to make. But it has, in its own grisly
way, become something akin to a joke. When Ariel Sharon randomly rounds
up hundreds of Palestinian camp boys and stamps numbers on them, we know
we can either laugh or cry. And laughing is the harder option.
Don't we see that one UN resolution goes with another, that Tel Aviv and
Baghdad are under the same instruction? Don't we see that being tough on
crime involves being tough on the causes of crime (as they grow, in
pain, around Gaza)? Don't we see that consensus means sharing a purpose,
which also means a common sense of humour? Don't we see how absurd, how
fast, our posturing has become?
Intelligence is not just in the gathering, but in the application too.
So ... out went the candle, and we were left darkling.
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