Double or quits?

Bruce “Brute” Anderson was an inspired choice as an Independent columnist who would disturb the readers’ liberal sensibilities. He’s not stupid and he’s not nice: his trademark is aggressive contempt. All successful political columnists are interested in power and respectful of it, but Anderson has an extraordinary homing instinct for the piles of whoever happens to be leader of the conservative party, whom he will defend until the moment when defenestration becomes inevitable. No more than forty five seconds after that moment, he will have written a remarkably lucid and coherent account of all the poor man’s flaws. Such columnists are in some ways much more informative than the Hugo Young / Tim Garton Ash type, who attempt to write as impartially as judges about the world, irrespective of the wishes of the powerful. When you read Bruce Anderson, you know you are getting an intelligent, unscrupulous man’s assessment of what the powerful want to hear and this provides an insight into their thought processes unavailable by any other means.

Here he is on the ceasefire in the Lebanon. “Israel has failed to secure its objectives, suffering not only casualties, but a loss of prestige, moral authority and military reputation. The US and the UK have also been weakened by their ally’s failure. The victors have been the rogue states and their clients: Iran, Hizbollah, France.”

The point, however, is that he does not reinforce this failure. The rest of the article criticises Lord Kalms, the chairman of Dixons and former Conservative party treasurer, who had erupted at the suggestion that Israel’s actions might be “disproportionate” for making an “implicit threat that he and other Jewish Tory supporters might withhold their donations … Cash for peerages is troublesome enough without adding cash for policies.”

After brushing aside Kalms, he then demands “A Palestinian state … equal in area to at least 97 of the pre-1967 West Bank,”% with a presence in East Jerusalem. This is, he thinks, Israel’s only long-term chance of survival. He may be right.

But it’s not going to happen, at least if you believe Ha’aretz’s Aluf Benn, writing in Salon, who says that one effect of the war will be to kill all plans for a Palestinian state on the West bank — for a reason not obvious until you go to Israel: the West Bank is the hill country, (actually, the historic, Biblical Israel) overlooking the plains where modern Israel was founded. You wouldn’t want hostile rockets up there.

So the real question is how the nutters in the White House will react to this Israeli defeat. Will they suppose that it makes war with Iran too dangerous? Or will they continue to argue that the possibility of defeat proves that peace is too dangerous? Already, there is a choking cloud of angry bloviation rising from the swamps. This is one of those occasions on which I hope, I really hope, that George W Bush’s enemies have wronged him. Because if he really is the kind of authoritarian inadequate “decider” that he seems to be, he might very well roll double or quits with Iran.