The gist of the problem with Blair and Bush

Terrific column by Hugo Young pointing out that Blair effectively surrendered sovereignty when he decided that the UK should throw in its lot with the US. Quote:

“Intelligence, in other words, has become a flexible friend, a political instrument. Its chief agent, John Scarlett, moreover, has become a crony of No 10 rather than a distant and detached truth-teller. Among the many corruptions this war has brought about, we can therefore say, is the degradation of what was once advertised, and globally agreed, to be a jewel in the Whitehall apparatus.

This happened for a prior reason, which is not new but deserves frequent repetition. The intelligence, culminating in the dossier, had to fit a prior decision. This has been the great over-arching fact about the war that Blair will never admit but cannot convincingly deny. He was committed to war months before he said he was. Of course, he wanted it buttered up. He wanted a UN sanction. He fought might and main to push Bush in that direction. But he was prepared to go to war without it.

He needed this skewed intelligence to make the case, and he didn’t really mind what he had to say to get it. He had made his commitment to Bush, stating among other extraordinary things that it was Britain’s national task to prevent the US being isolated. But he was also in thrall to the mystic chords of history. He could not contemplate breaking free of ties and rituals that began with Churchill, and that both Downing Street and the Ministry of Defence – the Foreign Office is somewhat wiser – have cultivated, out of fear and expectation, for decades.”

People in glasshouses…

… shouldn’t throw stones. (Also, they should undress in the dark.) One of the more nauseating aspects of British press coverage of the Hutton Inquiry is the vicious attacks on the BBC delivered daily by the right-wing print media. To describe this sermonising as sanctimonious cant would be to dignify it. But yesterday’s Guardian carried a terrific piece by its editor, Alan Rusbridger, which beautifully pricks the bubble. He’s particularly good on Murdoch’s Times and Conrad’s loony Telegraph.

I expect that nobody will come out of Hutton looking good. But the BBC (though it made some mistakes) looks better than most. The Corporation should, however, now revise its policy of allowing BBC journalists to convert the celebrity they acquire as a result of doing their BBC job into freelance celeb employment. Andrew Gilligan, for example, the BBC reporter at the heart of the inquiry, should not have been allowed to write columns in rabid right-wing newspapers like the Mail on Sunday. Ditto for John Simpson, the former Foreign Editor of the BBC who was forever writing books and columns in reactionary periodicals about his adventures at the licence-fee payer’s expense. Ditto for the sanctimonious Fergal Keane — the nearest thing the media world has to Wackford Squeers. Journalists should never be celebs because that makes them the story.

Googled!

I wrote once that Google was one of the wonders of the world, but even I am regularly amazed by it. Recently Quentin discovered that if you type arithmetic expressions into the search box, then Google provides the answer. It will, apparently, tell you everything from 5+5 to the speed of light in furlongs per fortnight. But now comes something even wackier. Someone’s written a hack which uses Google’s image search to ransack the web for random photographs. Think of the Web as a giant collection of shoeboxes and you’ve got it. Amazing what people take pictures of.

Mein Camp

Simon Waldman is Director of Digital Publishing at the Guardian. He also publishes a really nice Blog. Some time ago, someone gave him a 1938 copy of Homes and gardens magazine which had a gooey, gushing piece about Hitler’s country retreat in the Bavarian Alps. It was the usual tosh. The predominant color scheme of Hitler’s “bright, airy chalet” was “a light jade green.” Chairs and tables of braided cane graced the sun parlor, and the Führer, “a droll raconteur,” decorated his entrance hall with “cactus plants in majolica pots.” (Gosh — nothing changes.) Simon scanned the piece and put it on his site. Then he received a message from the current publishers of H&G demanding that he take it down. So he did, and wrote a nice reply to the Editor. But of course by then the thing was all over the Net. The case raises interesting issues about copyright and fair use, as the NYT pointed out this weekend.