Death to Saddam!!

[Gość: Dawid]

Death to Saddam! Said Blair killing million Iraqis

[bonobo44]

March 29, 2003

Are we witnessing the madness of Tony Blair?
Matthew Parris



Most of us have experienced the discomfort of watching a friend go off the
rails. At first his oddities are dismissed as eccentricities. An absurd
assertion, a lunatic conviction, a sudden enthusiasm or unreasonable fear, are
explained as perhaps due to tiredness, or stress, or natural volatility. We do
not want to face the truth that our friend has cracked up. Finally we can deny
it no longer — and then it seems so obvious: the explanation, in retrospect, of
so much we struggled to reconcile.
Sometimes the realisation comes fast and suddenly. It did for me at university
when my Arab fellow student Ahmed, who for months had been warning me of the
conspiracies of which he suspected we might be victims, pulled me into his room
to show me the death-ray he could see shining through his window. It was
somebody’s porch-light. Likewise, the madness of King George III, which came in
spells, was undeniable when it came. At other times the realisation is a slow,
sad dawning of the obvious. Sometimes it is a friend about whom we worry.
Sometimes it is a prime minister.

I will accept the charge of discourtesy, but not of flippancy, when I ask
whether Tony Blair may now have become, in a serious sense of that word,
unhinged.

Genius and madness are often allied, and nowhere is this truer than in
political leadership. Great leaders need self-belief in unnatural measure.
Simple fraudsters are rumbled early, but great leaders share with great
confidence tricksters a capacity to be more than persuaded, but inhabited, by
their cause. Almost inevitably, an inspirational leader spends important parts
of his life certain of the uncertain, convinced of the undemonstrable.

So do the mentally ill. It can be extremely difficult to distinguish between a
person who is sticking bravely to a difficult cause whose truth is far from
obvious, and a person who is going crazy. It took us quite a while to explain
David Icke’s beliefs in the only useful way in which they could be explained —
and he was on the political fringe. A national leader commands vastly more
respect and will be given the benefit of many more doubts than Mr Icke ever
was. Colleagues, commentators and the wider public are usually late to face up
to evidence that the boss has gone berserk, even though the evidence may have
been around for quite some time.

There are good reasons for this. To call somebody mad is bad manners even when
fair comment. To tackle your opponent’s argument by questioning his sanity can
look like a childish copping-out from sensible discussion. How can the victim
answer back?

But the charge is sometimes germane. It may become the only thing worth
considering. Winston Churchill had lost the plot long before the proper public
discussion this deserved got under way. And I myself believe that one of my
political heroes, Margaret Thatcher, began to lose her mental balance well
before the end, and before those close to her allowed themselves to consider
this explanation of her behaviour. For me the suspicion first dawned when the
then Prime Minister devised for the Lord Mayor’s banquet a dress with such an
extravagant train that she needed someone to help her with it into the Mansion
House. This was when she was beginning to refer to herself as “we”, and
treating friends who warned her of her fate as treacherous. A telltale of
incipient insanity is when the victim begins to take a Manichaean view of the
universe.

There are good reasons why those at the top can go quietly bonkers before their
inferiors wake up to the warning signs. The first is obviously deference. “The
Madness of King Tony” might — I accept — seem an impertinent way of discussing
our leader during a war when, whatever application it may have in Tony Blair’s
case, it applies to Saddam Hussein in spades.

Beyond deference, however, those at the top of the pyramid who are anxious to
impress us with truths which are not obvious have another powerful weapon at
their disposal. They can credibly claim to know more than we can be told. To
the man in the street, the most potent of Mr Blair’s arguments for invading
Iraq is that he and George W. Bush are in possession of special intelligence
which supports their stand but which cannot be divulged. And no doubt that is
true. The question is about the amount of support such intelligence lends, not
its existence.

Note from your own experience, as well as from the history books, how those
with a claim which sounds incredible tend to support it by claiming a private
source of information they are unable to share. Joan of Arc heard voices. Ahmed
said he could feel the lethal qualities of the apparent porch-light and
reminded me that his enemies would obviously decoy the ignorant by disguising
death-rays in this way. One or another version of God has been a time-honoured
way for madcap leaders to give their actions an authority not apparent to the
five senses of their audiences. Cornered by reality, “private sources” are the
last refuge of the deluded.

Is Mr Blair among them? Let me outline some of my grounds for worry. Any one of
these grounds might be dismissed as negligible, or indicative of nothing more
sinister than conviction; but cumulatively I find them worrying.

Mr Blair has stopped sounding like a career politician. He has lost the
professional polish of a man doing a job, and developed that fierce, quiet
intensity which, from long experience of dealing with mad constituents, I know
that the slightly cracked share with the genuinely convinced. He has lost his
feel for whom to confront, or when and where, and puts himself into situations
(like the slow handclapping by anti-war women) which do not assist his case.
Historians may point to Mr Blair’s private — but publicised — audience with the
Pope as an early sign of a dawning unrealism about the perceptions of others.
Did he this week stop for a moment to think what impression would be made on
grieving parents by his wild-eyed suggestion (based on misinformation) that two
British soldiers had been executed by the Iraqis in cold blood?

Blair’s long-standing tendency to compartmentalise logic (a habit all
politicians share to some degree) is now being pushed to extremes. The speeches
the “old” Europeans are making — about giving Iraq more time, accepting gradual
progress and not sticking to a literal interpretation of earlier demands — are
exactly the speeches Mr Blair himself gives (persuasively) in defence of
letting the IRA off the decommissioning hook.

This logic-chopping alarms. The Prime Minister has lost his sense of how his
indignation at Iraqi brutality jars, coming from someone attacking a country
whose puny forces are grotesquely outgunned by ours. His anger at the French
(whose position has been consistent and identical to that which Blair held
until a year ago) is inexplicable to those of us who are not doctors. He
displays a demented capacity to convince himself that it is the other guy who
is cheating.

He has started saying things which are not only unsustainable, but palpably
absurd. The throwaway remark to Parliament that he would ignore Security
Council vetoes which were “capricious” or “unreasonable” was more than ill-
considered: coming from a trained lawyer it was stark, staring bonkers. It was
breathtaking. For risibility I would bracket it with Ahmed’s death-ray. The
whole country should have been crying with laughter. That the British media
should have been mesmerised into reporting him in any other way still leaves me
dumbfound