Helmintholog

Well, semi-acoustic music for the mind and body — there’s a real audio link direct for those of you who get the Country Joe reference and just want to hear it.

Makes a nice contrast to Matthew Parris, who has the only good argument for Bush’s re-election in the Times today. The short version is simply this: Bush’s grand design will fail utterly, but it must fail utterly and publicly if the dream is to lose its power. If he loses the election this year, there will always be a suspicion that it might have worked; only by giving him another term can the dream of Empire be as completely discredited as Labour was before 1979. Much as I admire Matthew, in this instance I would rather be prematurely right. It’s good, though, to find someone who is even more pessimistic about human nature than I am. He always makes me feel irredeemably liberal and progressive.

Can the words “As secretary of defense, I am accountable for them. I take full responsibility.” not be followed by these. “The president has therefore accepted my resignation.”?

It seems an offence against grammar that they were not, as if the meaning of “responsibility” had simply been abolished and when Rumsfeld spoke of “reponsibility” he was in fact using an Azerbaijani term for boiled sweets, which just happened to be a homonym for the English word.

It reminds me of the time when a Soviet-era poet was jailed for seven years for foul crime of denying that freedom of speech existed in the Soviet Union. Destroying the meaning of “democracy” seems to me much less serious than destroying the meaning of “responsibility”. Plenty of fairly decent societies have functioned without much democracy. In the end, perhaps, democracy is largely a mechanism for forcing the powerful to take responsibility. But no society is worth defending — no society is even a society — where “responsibility” means nothing at all, and where a man can keep his job after admitting full responsibility for photographs like this:

U.S. military officials told NBC News that the unreleased images showed U.S. soldiers severely beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death, having sex with a female Iraqi female prisoner and “acting inappropriately with a dead body.” The officials said there was also a videotape, apparently shot by U.S. personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young boys.

I ask again: in what dungeon dimension can you take “full responsibility” for the video’ed rape of young boys and still be retained in office?

It took the Americans about ten or fifteen years to convince themselves that they had not been defeated in Vietnam, and another ten or fifteen to convince themselves that they had actually won, as a majority apparently believe today. The retreat from Iraq shows every sign of being just as delusional, but nastier. The American papers’ coverage of Iraq is like the Zionist accounts of Palestine: there aren’t any natives, or at least, none that matter. The result is unrecognisable to anyone who reads any other papers. Here, for example, is William Safire, in the New York Times, and a couple of hundred other papers: “There is never any free ride to freedom. If Iraqis do not take up the opportunity now made available to them by the sacrifice of outsiders, they will slip back into a new dictatorship, with new torture chambers and mass graves.”

So, if the Americans are driven out, they will never be able to admit for a moment that they have in fact been defeated by the Iraqis. There will instead grow up a vicious mythology of the stab in the back. It will be the fault of the Liberals, of the Europeans … Anyone, in fact, who thought this adventure would come out badly will be blamed for its failure.

I can quite believe that British troops are capable of beating up Iraqi prisoners, but when I read the — quite convincing — counter-attacks on the Mirror’s photographs my first reaction was national pride: at least our army is still the best int he world at black propaganda.