"A
recent poll tells us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam
was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre. But the
American public is not merely being misled. It is being browbeaten
and kept in a state of ignorance and fear. God appointed America
to save the world in any way that suits America. God appointed Israel
to be the nexus of America's Middle Eastern policy, and anyone who
wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American,
c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist."
America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs, and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War. The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything
Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As
in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy
of the world are being systematically eroded. The combination of
compliant US media and vested corporate interests is once more ensuring
that a debate that should be ringing out in every town square is
confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press. The religious cant that will send American troops into battle is perhaps the most sickening aspect of this surreal war-to-be. Bush has an arm-lock on God. And God has very particular political opinions. God appointed America to save the world in any way that suits America. God appointed Israel to be the nexus of America's Middle Eastern policy, and anyone who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American, c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist. God also has pretty scary connections. In America, where all men are equal in His sight, if not in one another's, the Bush family numbers one President, one ex-President, one ex-head of the CIA, the Governor of Florida and the ex-Governor of Texas. Care for a few pointers? Dick Cheney, 1995-2000: chief executive of the Halliburton oil company. Condoleezza Rice, 1991-2000: senior executive with the Chevron oil company, which named an oil tanker after her. And so on. But none of these trifling associations affects the integrity of God's work. In 1993, while ex-President George Bush
was visiting the ever-democratic Kingdom of Kuwait to receive thanks
for liberating them, somebody tried to kill
him. The CIA believes that "somebody" was Saddam. Hence
Bush Jr's cry: "That man tried
to kill my Daddy." To be a member of the team you must also believe in Absolute Good and Absolute Evil, and Bush, with a lot of help from his friends, family and God, is there to tell us which is which. What Bush won't tell us is the truth about why we're going to war. What is at stake is not an "Axis of Evil" but oil, money and people's lives. Saddam's misfortune is to sit on the second biggest oilfield in the world. Bush wants it, and who helps him get it will receive a piece of the cake. And who doesn't, won't. If Saddam didn't have the oil, he could torture his citizens to his heart's content. Other leaders do it every day -- think Saudi Arabia, think Pakistan, think Turkey, think Syria, think Egypt. Baghdad represents no clear and present
danger to its neighbours, and none to the US or Britain. Saddam's
weapons of mass destruction, if he's still got them, will be peanuts
by comparison with the stuff Israel or America could hurl at him
at five minutes notice. What is at stake is not an imminent military
or terrorist threat, but the economic imperative of US growth. What
is at stake is America's need to demonstrate its military power
to all of us -- to Europe and Russia and China, and poor mad little
North Korea, as well as the Middle
East; to show who rules America at The most charitable interpretation of
Tony Blair's part in all this is that he believed that, by riding
the tiger, he could steer it. He can't. Instead, he gave it a phoney
legitimacy, and a smooth voice. Now, I fear, the same tiger has
him penned into a corner, and he can't get out. Blair's worst chance is that, with or
without the UN, he will drag us into a war that, if the will to
negotiate energetically had ever been there, could have been avoided;
a war that has been no more democratically debated in Britain than
it has in America or at the UN. Welcome to the party of the ethical
foreign policy. I cringe when I hear my Prime Minister lend his head prefect's sophistries to this colonialist adventure. His very real anxieties about terror are shared by all sane men. What he can't explain is how he reconciles a global assault on al-Qaeda with a territorial assault on Iraq. We are in this war, if it takes place, to secure the fig leaf of our special relationship, to grab our share of the oil pot, and because, after all the public hand-holding in Washington and Camp David, Blair has to show up at the altar. "But will we win, Daddy?" "Of course, child. It will all be over while you're still in bed." "Why?" "Because otherwise Mr Bush's voters will get terribly impatient and may decide not to vote for him." "But will people be killed, Daddy?" "Nobody you know, darling. Just foreign people." "Can I watch it on television?" "Only if Mr Bush says you can." "Hush child, and go to sleep." Last Friday a friend of mine in California
drove to his local supermarket with a sticker on his car saying:
"Peace is also Patriotic". It was gone by the time he'd
finished shopping. Dissatisfied with Sherbone School, le Carré persuaded his father to send him to school in Switzerland. He studied at Berne University (1948-49) and after the military service, which he did in Austria, le Carré returned in England. Le Carré studied modern languages at Lincoln College, Oxford, graduating in 1956. He was two years as a tutor at Eton, teaching French and German, and then joined the Foreign Service. In 1959 le Carré became
a member of the British foreign service in West Germany. Later he
was a consul in Hamburg. During his years at the operational section
of MI5 le Carré met John Bingham, who encouraged him to write
and read the manuscript of his first novel. Bingham, the pen-name
and family name of Lord Clanmorris, was one of the two men who inspired
le Carré's famous character, George Smiley: "Short,
fat and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money
on really bad clothes..." Bingham, who had published crime
novels, never accepted the picture of Intelligence Services le Carré
gave in his books. "As far as John was concerned - and many
others too - claims of good intent were guff. I was a shit, consigned
to the ranks of others shits like Compton McKenzie, Malcolm Muggeridge
and J.C. Masterman, all of whom had betrayed the Service by writing
about it." Le Carré denied decades that his work in Germany had an espionage character, but he has gradually broken his silence and talked about this side of his life among others in the BBC document The Secret Service (prod. 2000). At Lincoln College he apparently kept his eyes open for possible agents recruited by the Soviet Union. Later le Carré moved from MI5 to MI6, and he was in Berlin when the wall was erected. His own experiences inspired him to write a large novel which became CALL FOR THE DEAD (1961), his first spy thriller. The book introduced George Smiley, but was followed by a completely different kind of work, A MURDER OF QUALITY (1962), a detective novel set in a boys' school. After the success of his third novel, THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD (1963), le Carré began to devote himself full-time writing. His aim was to portrait the intelligence world from a new view - "When I first began writing, Ian Fleming was riding high and the picture of the spy was that of a character who could have affairs with women, drive a fast car, who used gadgetry and gimmickry to escape." With his breakthrough novel le Carré established an alternative form to the James Bond cult and a new type of hero. Graham Greene considered it the best spy story he has ever read and J.B. Priestley wrote that the book was "superbly constructed with an atmosphere of chilly hell." The novel won le Carré the Somerset Maugham Award. George Smiley's character is
based on more or lesson two true life persons: Lord Clanmorris,
who wrote novels under the name John Bingham and who worked for
MI5, and Vivian Green, who was Le Carre's teacher at Oxford.
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