Secretary Gates tries to shake his sleepwalking colleagues awake
8:19am
It appears from a secret memo that Robert Gates, the US Defence Secretary, has warned top White House officials that the United States does not have an effective policy for dealing with a nuclear-capable Iran.
Fancy!
The New York Times has reported:
Mr. Gates wrote of a variety of concerns, including the absence of an effective strategy should Iran choose the course that many government and outside analysts consider likely: Iran could assemble all the major parts it needs for a nuclear weapon — fuel, designs and detonators — but stop just short of assembling a fully operational weapon. In that case, Iran could remain a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty while becoming what strategists call a ‘virtual’ nuclear weapons state.
White House sources denied that Gates’s memo was a ‘wake-up call’ as the Obama administration had been planning for
many possible outcomes
to prevent Iran from crossing the line into nuclear capability, let alone develop a nuclear weapon.
I hope we are all reassured.
Daily Mail, 19 April 2010
The past few days have seen the start of the latest series of the popular but vacuous light entertainment show Britain’s Got Talent.
They have also seen the start of an equally vacuous light entertainment show called Britain’s Got Politics. For as a result of the first of the televised debates between the three party leaders, it appears that a hitherto sluggish election campaign has been totally transformed.
What was until that moment a two-horse race has become a three-nag nail-biter. The LibDem poll ratings have shot up into the electoral stratosphere.
A couple of polls even had the LibDems leading the field by one point, in theory putting them within sight of the first Liberal General election victory since 1906.
Other polls claimed that the LibDem leader Nick Clegg was now more popular than Tony Blair at the height of New Labour and — most ludicrously of all — second only to Winston Churchill just after World War II.
Can canonisation be far behind?
And all this as a result of a deeply artificial, carefully constrained television ‘debate’ in which no issues were discussed in any depth and in which Clegg — like the other two leaders — was able to spout nonsense unchallenged. Yet he was deemed to have won hands down, thus zooming from zero to hero in the space of 90 minutes.
One reason why he did so well was that, for many viewers, this was the first time they actually realised who Clegg was. Then there’s the fact that he looked fresh and personable.
Most important of all was his core message: that he was not one of the other two. As a result, he is now being hailed as the biggest celebrity discovery since Susan Boyle.
What has Britain come to when the whole political landscape changes on the basis of the most trite assessment of personality and appearance?
Whatever has happened to serious debate — the need to scrutinise the issues in detail and challenge what the political parties actually stand for?
In part, we in the media must shoulder some of the blame for this sorry state of affairs. In recent years, gossip, celebrity and entertainment have increasingly nudged out serious political coverage. And television is a medium which inescapably focuses attention on personalities rather than on issues.
But most of the responsibility must surely lie with the politicians themselves. For having decided, patronisingly, that the public have no attention span beyond the TV soundbite and the propaganda slogan, it is they who have turned politics into a popularity contest.
It’s not just the recent distressing development of using their attractive wives as political human shields.
Terrified of losing support by telling the public what they think should happen, and then standing by those principles, they have abandoned the concept of leadership altogether.
Instead, they construct policies around what they think the public want to hear. So they pay slavish attention to what the focus groups are saying. The result is that politicians end up saying very similar things - thus confirming the public in their cynical belief that ‘they’re all the same’.
How ironic then that in opportunistically playing to the gallery, they actually turn off the public in spades.
In last week’s debate, Clegg very effectively played upon this prevailing public mood of ‘a plague on both your houses’ by presenting himself as the ‘anti-politician’ politician.
Of course, this itself was a prize piece of cynical spin. But the more the other leaders attack him, the more Clegg is able to say this just proves his point about the uselessness of both main parties and the current political system.
And it’s no use pointing out that a hung parliament would be terrible for the country by inducing political paralysis — because that’s exactly what, in their current anti-politics mood, many voters want.
The leader who has been most badly hoist by his own petard over all this is David Cameron. Too arrogant to listen when people warned that the party leadership was missing the point by a mile, the Cameroons were convinced that the Tories were out of power because they weren’t nice enough, which they conflated with being Left-wing.
So they struck one Left-wing pose after another — support for minority rights or the NHS, reducing everyone’s carbon footprint — while refusing to highlight issues they thought might cast them as the ‘nasty party’, such as immigration or Britain’s place in the EU.
The result is that they have played into Clegg’s hands. Voters think there’s not much to choose between the Tories and Labour — and now that the Cameroons urgently need to attack the LibDems, they find they have left themselves not a leg to stand on.
Thus William Hague’s belated attempt to counter the Clegg effect by claiming that a vote for the LibDems was a vote for the ‘European superstate’ fell flat — because the Tories’ refusal to honour their promise to hold a referendum on the EU constitution has shown they will equally fail to stop Britain being sucked into that superstate.
The same goes for other issues. It’s difficult if not impossible for the Tories to say that Clegg’s promises to lower taxes or increase health spending don’t add up, because the Tories’ own promises on the economy and the NHS don’t add up, either.
Cameron came off worst in the TV debate because he had most to lose. And what he lost most of all was his basic pitch that he represents the change Britain needs. The voters want, above all, change from the politics of insincerity and untrustworthiness.
But in his desperation to show the Tories had changed into the nice party, Cameron’s toe-curling endorsement of the opinion of a ‘black man’ he had met or his throaty encomium to our ‘brilliant, brilliant and brave’ Armed Forces came across with all the sincerity of a gushing starlet at the Oscars.
Those who live by performance often die through performance. Cameron’s patent discomfort in that TV debate was particularly poignant considering that he himself had shot to power through one highly staged event — the faultless delivery (without notes) of his crucial leadership candidate’s speech at the 2005 Tory conference.
And now the public suspect that his over-egged protestations about caring and sharing are just further evidence of theatrical skill — to cover the fact that he and Gordon Brown are, for all their differences, cut from the same venal political cloth.
So Nick Clegg, whose policies have come under no serious scrutiny whatsoever, suddenly becomes the latest Politics Idol simply because he has told both his opponents: ‘You are the weakest link — goodbye.’
The irony of this new politics of personality is that voters require evidence that politicians are genuine, warts and all. Indeed, warts can prove the leader is indeed genuine. Hence the glee with which Gordon Brown ‘confessed’ yesterday to his flaws in ‘presentation and style’ on TV and his inability ‘to be something that I am not’.
This is unlikely to save him on his own account because he has already been judged as Prime Minister and found seriously wanting. But, of course, his real aim was not so much to save himself as help to destroy David Cameron.
So expect to see Brown building on that in the next TV debate. And expect also to see Cameron try a new approach to avoid the same elephant traps.
Who knows — maybe the debates this week and next will transform the political landscape again and yet again. For in the Britain’s Got Politics show, sincerity and spontaneity count for nothing — unless they’re in the script.
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