Let us now praise famous er, men

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Tomorrow, Cambridge University will give an honorary degree to Carl Djerassi, Professor of Chemistry at Stanford, and one of the few people alive to whom the description of polymath might properly be applied — see here if you have any doubts. He’s the guy who invented the contraceptive pill, and could thus be said to have changed millions of lives, and indeed whole societies. I particularly liked his account of how he came to have an Austrian postal stamp dedicated to him.

Another honorary degree will go to David Crystal, one of the world’s leading experts on language (and also one of the most depressingly prolific authors in any language). There was a dinner in my college tonight in his honour, and to my delight I wound up sitting next to him at dessert where we had an intense discussion about Blogging and its significance. It turns out that he’s done a second edition of his book, Language and the Internet, to catch up on what has happened, linguistically speaking, on the Net in the years since the first edition came out in 2001. (Just think: when he was writing the first edition, ‘google’ wasn’t a verb!) I look forward to seeing the new version.

Take a break

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Exhausted by concern over the G8 Summit, I thought I would take a break in the Gleneagles Hotel, where the great event is to be held. Sadly, the hotel was unable to offer me accommodation between July 3 and 9, but I could make a reservation for the 10th. Nice range of choice, too — all the way from a ‘Classic Double’ (soon to be known as a Blair-Brown) @ £340 per night for B&B, to the Royal Lochnagar Suite @£1600 per night. I’m sure all those poor folks in Africa will be touched by the thought of the Lords of the Universe communing on their behalf in such modest surroundings.

My good friend, the late Charles Alan Wright, used to stay at Gleneagles — in a suite. I knew Charlie was rich (he was Richard Nixon’s lawyer for a time), but I didn’t know he was that rich.

The big lie

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The root cause of Tony Blair’s credibility problem is that he took Britain to war on a false prospectus. But the really interesting question is how he got into the mess in the first place. The answer is, in essence, simple. The Bush administration had decided soon after the 9/11 attacks (or perhaps even before that) to attack Iraq. Blair, for reasons still unclear, had decided that whatever the US did, the UK would support. From that single decision, everything then followed. But since there was no rational justification for Bush’s deteremination to oust Saddam, Blair had to thrash around for a justification he could sell to the British parliament, and the British people.

What I hadn’t realised, until I read this remarkable piece by Mark Danner, is how early the decision to go with the Yanks was being discussed in Whitehall.

Danner’s piece is based round a leaked minute of a meeting held in Downing Street on 23 July 2002 (yep — 2002) in which the entire thing was discussed. Here’s an extract which gives the flavour of the discussion:

C [Sir Richard Dearlove, Head of MI6] reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

(Emphasis added.)

Witnessing history

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Robert Hopkins was a US Army photographer assigned to make a pictorial record of the 1943 Yalta conference between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin which sealed the fate of Eastern Europe (and of a lot else besides). He’s published a riveting account of the event, larded with intimate details and some of his pictures.

This is not a piece about high politics, but about the daily life that goes on in the background and yields clues to the personalities involved — FDR in a jeep which has been made presentable by the addition of oriental rugs; or two maids making up the President’s bed. A five-hour drive over cratered roads to get from the aerodrome at Saki in the Crimea to the Livadia Palace — with the entire 90-mile route lined by Russian troops, each one in sight of the next. Bedbugs everywhere. Piles of caviare — but no decent food — for breakfast. FDR made Stalin a Martini but remarked that he couldn’t add a twist of lemon because he didn’t have any. The next morning, a lemon tree appeared. Stalin had had one flown in from Georgia overnight. Unforgettable.

Go on. Be an idiot.

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A lot of general promotional advertising is daft, but the campaign run by Accenture, the big consulting firm, is completely bonkers. It features Tiger Woods, who may be a great golfer (though now past his best) but is not widely known for consulting services.

I’m looking at two pages in last week’s Financial Times Magazine. The first shows him hacking his way out of what appears to be ferocious rough. The slogan reads “Never be intimidated. Go on. Be a tiger”. The back page of the mag shows Tiger bending down to consider a putt. Slogan reads: “Waiting for local conditions is rarely an option. Go on. Be a tiger”. What, pray, has this to do with anything? And who gets paid to produce this garbage?

Interesting fact #2354: Accenture (in itself a daft name, produced by corporate brainstorming) emerged from the wreckage of an earlier international firm, Andersen Consulting.

Interesting fact #2355: the current CEO of Accenture is one Joe W. Forehand. Maybe he will drop Tiger in favour of a leading tennis player. At least they could then talk about ‘forehand drive’.

The Iraqi quagmire

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It may not be top of the news agenda any more, but the situation in Iraq is terrible. This week’s Economist has a sobering Special Report. Here’s an extract on how the home-grown Iraqi security forces (on which the Bush Administration bases its fantasies about early withdrawal) are faring:

A recent night-time raid with Iraqi soldiers and police commandos in Khalis, a mostly Sunni district north of Baghdad, illustrated both progress and shortcomings. The Iraqi officers were stirred to issue orders to move only on learning that their American mentors—part of a new scheme to embed 10,000 American troops in the ISF—were on the way. The orders then sparked terror in the ranks. Soldiers asked to be excused from the mission, complaining of sore limbs or faulty weapons. Many took sedatives, which Iraqi troops use to control their panic. “Better they take drugs than run away,” an Iraqi officer explained. “Most of these guys haven’t had much military experience or training and the insurgents are ferocious.”

Having encircled the first target-house, the stoned warriors charged, firing their Kalashnikov assault rifles into the night sky. Inside the house, they grabbed two youths and shot a third in the shoulder as he tried to escape. They then ransacked every room, found a video camera and several cassettes and threatened the prisoners with summary execution. The youths admitted to having filmed insurgent attacks. Both were soldiers of the old regime and former residents of Fallujah. The injured prisoner received no medical attention as the ISF rampaged on to the next target.

It gets worse…

No wonder they were scared. The past two months have seen a staggering explosion in violence, even by Iraq’s standards. Over 1,000 people have been killed, mostly by some 160 suicide bombers. On June 14th, a suicide bomber killed 22 people and injured more than 80 in Kirkuk, an oil-rich city disputed between Kurds and Arabs. Throughout this week, dozens of bodies of soldiers and government contractors were found littered across western Iraq, most of them shot in the head.

So much for the notion that Iraq’s elections in January had quelled the insurgency—a delusion to which some American officials are still prone. “I think everyone understands that it’s getting better every day,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Gibler last week in Mosul, which was hit by over 30 suicide bombers in April and early May. “Of course, every nation that’s got IEDs [improvised explosive devices] and drive-by shootings and suicide bombers has definitely got some security issues, and this country has got those. But we’re working to change that.” The colonel received a phone call minutes later, informing him that four of his men had been injured by a suicide bomber.

There’s no way out. If the Americans pull out (as Bush and Co would like to do), the country will rapidly degenerate into worse violence. If they stay, the only way to make progress is to pour in yet more troops. That’s my definition of a quagmire.

Africa and the G8

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The G8 plan to save Africa comes with conditions that make it little more than an extortion racket.

Thus George Monbiot, writing in the Guardian.

Good piece, by a writer who, like yours truly, chokes on the notion of Blair & Co as ministering angels to the world’s poor.

eBay digs deeper

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Healey’s First Law of Holes: when you’re in one, stop digging. Advice lost on eBay’s management, which has discovered that dealing with St Bob Geldof is not at all like handling Wall Street.

Yesterday, St Bob attacked eBay because people were selling Live 8 concert tickets on it for vast sums. eBay replied primly that the sellers were doing nothing illegal. Geldof then called for people to put in “impossible bids” to frustrate the sellers. Some conscientious folks obliged, putting in bids like £10 million. Now they discover that they have been blacklisted by eBay — at the same time that eBay has decided to ban the hitherto “perfectly legal” ticket auctions.