Chicken Yoghurt: The case for the Defence Secretary

The case for the Defence Secretary

Saturday, February 11, 2006

Whatever else you can say about Defence Secretary John Reid, he gives good value in an interview. You can imagine that even when he says "I love you", it's hissed through gritted teeth. King Rat in panto beckons.

Nosemonkey, Charlie Whitaker and Jamie K have picked up on Reid and his cry of "let us match savagery with savagery" on Radio 4's Today programme the other day.

What was interesting was that Reid brought the subject up completely unprompted and in relation to the current brouhaha over those bloody cartoons.

We need a dialogue internationally as well as domestically because if we're going to adopt the standard of sensitivity towards various religions, which I believe we should do, it has to apply to all religions. And we can't on the one hand have people demanding that we apply standards which they themselves want to see applied continually but they don't apply them themselves. Now, let me make one final comment on that, which is specific to British troops as it happens. Similarly, we cannot continually have an assymetric, uneven battlefield for our troops where we are facing an enemy unconstrained by any legality, any morality, any international convention and at the same time subject our troops to a level of scrutiny, accountability, media intrusion, questioning and every conceivable opportunity to criticise. So I say, in that kind of world, where we're facing that kind of enemy, let us be very slow to condemn our troops, our forces, and very quick to support them and understand them.

For the record, the interviewer, Jim Naughtie, gave what I thought was a craven response:

Yes, but political judgements must be made about the wisdom of the leaders who do things with the troops.

But then he probably had a script to get through and Reid going off reservation probably rattled the titan of British political journalism. High politics is a much safer area of discussion than low blows, after all.

I thought it was quite the leap between cartoons and abuses by UK troops. Still, it was obviously preying on Reid's mind. It's almost as if he's saying, if you want us to respect your religion you need to accept that our lads may want to give one or two of you a kicking now and again and be expected to get away with it. And you know, he's probably got a point.

Imagine Baha Mousa. As the blows rained down and the eternal darkness folded around him, no doubt his final thoughts were, "In this kind of world, I must be very slow to condemn these troops." Picture Ahmad Jabbar Kareem. As he slipped beneath the water for the third and final time, no doubt in a last moment of clarity he said to himself, "let no-one be in any doubt, the rules of the game are changing."

This passage from Reid puzzles me though:

And we can't on the one hand have people demanding that we apply standards which they themselves want to see applied continually but they don't apply them themselves.

Who does he mean here? Are the Iraq insurgents and suicide bombers demanding to be treated under the terms of the Geneva Convention? Does he mean those in Guantanamo Bay (some, if not many, of who may be innocent)? Or George Galloway? Or is it a straw man? How about Omar Khayyam? Khayyam is clearly an idiot but I didn't see him applying blunt force trauma to a man with his hands cuffed behind his back. (He didn't look much like a suicide bomber to me either. Maybe it's just me but I thought he looked more a like an uncertain just-out gay man, with a thing for Jean Claude Van Damm, trying to fit in at a provincial gay club.)

Is Reid advocating that we be lenient on soldiers who stray from the path of righteousness? So much for hearts and minds on the ground and ideals of justice. Earlier in the same interview Reid said:

There will be blemishes, there will be abuses, I have no doubt that occur. But the difference will be this, Jim: When abuses took place in the past, when these sorts of things by the Iraqi government or others took place under Saddam Hussein they were covered up, now they'll be exposed. The perpetrators were promoted. Now they will be prosecuted.

How to reconcile Reid's two statements? We must prosecute the perpetrators of abuses while being slow to condemn them. That would make for some interesting sentencings in murder cases:

Judge: Slasher McGee, you have been found guilty of eating your wife. While I sentence you to life imprisonment without parole for this crime, I will not in any way condemn it.

Of course, Reid didn't have our lads in mind. He meant Iraqis who beat and degrade, not - as consensus dictates - the "few" "bad apples" in the liberating forces. I suppose it becomes easier to understand when you remember that these statements come from a man who can argue the merits of firebombs over napalm. Reid can believe six morally reprehensible things before breakfast. In order to save Iraq it was necessary to put a bag over the head of a hotel receptionist and beat him to death.

"In the long run democracy is far more stable than a dictatorship," said Reid. There are those who would disagree. Israel's Shin Bet security service chief for starters. But what we bleeding hearts and fetishists for the rule of law forget is that while we've installed democracy in Iraq, if the harbingers of that democracy want to use a few tactics borrowed from the deposed regime to make their life easier and - if we're going to be honest here - to pass the time, it's all for the Greater Good. Be slow to condemn.

In the interview Reid also paraded his so-called intellectual credentials when he said, with regard to the current chaos in Iraq:

I've used before the old expression "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will"

The expression is from Antonio Gramsci, reputedly a favourite of Reid's. It would have gone over many listeners heads (including this one's), had Peter Hitchens, who featured in the item on the contemporary relevance of the Far Left, straight after Reid's interviews, not blown the whistle. It's a phrase Reid's fond of, using it over and over and over. Reid's been in many a hopeless situation - Health, Northern Ireland, Defence - but he'll fight and he'll win. He'll dream the impossible dream.

It's a typical New Labour trait poking above the surface: take something potentially engaging and inspiring, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, until it's reduced to a platitude. Like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of the Mona Lisa. Of course, quoting Gramsci makes him sound much cleverer and better read than if he'd said "many a mickle makes a muckle" or "you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs" (which, in the various contexts Reid has used the Gramscian line, aren't a million miles away semantically.) The thing is, New Labour rhetoric is like the chimp you put in a suit and teach to eat with a fork. It's very impressive - but he's still a chimp when the bill arrives.

It turns out that Gramsci was quite the clever guy and still speaks to us from beyond the grave via the medium, Madame Google. No doubt, in the cases of Baha Mousa and Ahmad Jabbar Kareem, Reid could bring another tenet of Gramsci to bear:

He who by profession has become a slave of trivial details is the victim of bureaucracy.

Personally, I prefer:

The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.

That would truly be something to aspire to although, I think, beyond the likes of me. Immediately, this might be a more useful one to adopt and try to live by:

My practicality consists in this, in the knowledge that if you beat your head against the wall it is your head which breaks and not the wall... that is my strength, my only strength.

Update: In his own piece about Reid's appeal for see-no-evil, Nosemonkey said:

So, what's going on? Has Reid got wind of another Abu Ghraib-style war crime? Is he trying to cut something off at the pass?

It looks very much as if Reid was...

BBC News: MoD to probe Iraq 'abuse' video
Pictures from a video allegedly showing British soldiers brutally beating a group of Iraqi teenagers have been published by the News of the World.

I feel like Bill Hicks in that, in a reverse of the perceived wisdom from the anti-war crowd, I'm for the occupation but increasingly against our troops. I'm not sure I agree with Nosemonkey in his reaction to the NOTW story:

No one could have predicted the massively over the top response to publishing those crappy cartoons. The News of the World was and is fully aware of the potential for a violent response in publishing this story. Yet they went ahead and ran it anyway, putting British troops in further danger, isolating them further from the average Iraqi. In a regular wartime situation, that could be considered tantamount to treason.

It's those troops who will be to blame if this comes home to roost, those beating Iraqis and "kicking a dead Iraqi in the face" for not much more than shits and giggles. It would be amazing if stories of beatings at the hands of British soldiers weren't already doing the rounds in Basra and, in the nature of embellishment in the telling, weren't less lurid than the story in today's papers. And it's not like this is the first time British soldiers have kept souvenirs. The detainee's been out of the bag for a little while now.

But at least we now know what Reid meant when he said in his Radio 4 interview:

And we can't on the one hand have people demanding that we apply standards which they themselves want to see applied continually but they don't apply them themselves.

It looks like he meant the Murdoch press. At least that's one mystery solved. Go get 'em John. I look forward to him raining fire and brimstone on an institution he'll be abasing himself in front of come election time.

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