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Stars, Stripes, and Ramblings |
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Written by Austin Mitchell
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02 August 2006 |
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Tony Blair performed so well on his US visit it made me feel proud but also guilty about attacking him for so long. He got a great reception though not as much coverage as Fidel Castro’s illness.
Tony’s more popular here than at home, not because he’s Bush’s poodle, but because he’s a better Bush putting Dubya’s instinctive prejudices far more eloquently and convincingly. Indeed he’d make a far better Republican President
It was a three for the price of one visit.
1)Try to persuade Bush to call off the Israelis - a failure.
2) Sign an agreement with Swartznegger about global warming as if California were an independent state - a success. Despite Arnold’s suggestion that Blair should be the new terminator. Tell that to Charles Clarke.
3) Appear at the Murdoch-Fest at Pebble Beach resort - a dues payment. I’m amazed that it didn’t lead to a three hour panegyric on Fox TV.
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Support for Israel is pretty well universal here. Only Pat Buchanan speaks out against it.
Every time Israeli troops are on television they’re in American uniforms, American helmets carrying American weapons and driving American tanks. So people assume they’re GI Grunts. Every time Hazbullah appears it`s always the same piece of endlessly repeated film of goose-stepping, black uniformed thugs strutting before a grandstand filled with mad mullahs.
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Catching up on all the books which have poured out in the last year. The ones I`m reading are devastating critiques of Bush, Iraq, economic policy, the corporate takeover of Congress, and all the excesses and tax fiddles of extravagant wealth which has been so much favoured while ordinary people have been squeezed.
Most devastating is Thomas Ricks: Fiasco; the American Military adventure in Iraq. This is a brilliant insider exposé of the political, intelligence and military failures which created the mess the US (and us as assistant lavatory cleaner) is now stuck with.
All these exposés make me jealous. Everything is so open in the US. There are so many powerful congressional and senate enquiries unearthing the evidence. Then there are so many informed journalists able to mobilise it, plus so many embedded in the structures of Government, Defence, Wall St., and the Securities and Exchange Commission to tell us what’s really going on.
RESULT? Anyone prepared to read the big books and long articles which result gets the inside story in all its baseness and chaos.
In Britain we get only what authority wants to give us. Self-serving lies. |
