Sunday, October 18, 2009

It all started 96 hours after 9/11

It all started 96 hours after 9/11
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/17/david-hare-decade-9-11
'Over chicken noodle soup, fried chicken and mashed potatoes, began to
yield to the dazzling temptation of deliberately pursuing the wrong
suspect. Hey, said the Americans, Let's Look Away'
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David Hare
The Guardian, Saturday 17 October 2009
Article history

President Bush listens as White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card
informs him of a second plane hitting the World Trade Centre.
Photograph: Win McNamee/Reuters

In theatres up and down the country, it used to be that anyone,
whatever their job, was pulled magnetically towards the stage. All
through the day they would find themselves venturing down into the
auditorium. They would casually try to catch a glimpse of the actors,
a glimpse of the action, because that was where their job was rooted.
Today, 10 years into the new century, theatre workers, like the rest
of us, sit staring at computer screens all day, and sometimes all
night. Hardly surprising, then, that this has been the decade of
Looking Away.

Visit us, please, from a previous century and you'll see us walking
down the streets, wired cockleshells in ears, jabbering like lunatics
in a Victorian asylum. It has long been understood in any line at any
shopping till that the electronic will take precedence over the
physical. The queue will wait while the sales assistant answers the
phone. In any given situation, Absence always trumps Presence,
presumably on the grounds that the unknown has more potential for
excitement than the known. "Is he all there?" we used to ask of our
neighbours' idiot children. Now we ask of everyone, "Is he there at
all?"

Every period throws up its own favoured means of mass distraction, but
you're going to have to pull every history book off the shelf to find
a distraction quite as nothing-to-do-with-anything as the US invasion
of Iraq. The decade's significant date of choice for most historians
is taken to be 11 September 2001. An airborne suicide attack on the
twin towers in New York killed 2,948 people of 91 different
nationalities. But if I was going to choose the day when the destiny
of the new century really took shape, then I'd opt for 96 hours later.
On 15 September, George Bush assembled his cabinet in casual clothes
at Camp David (Paul Wolfowitz came without invitation and wore a suit)
and, over chicken noodle soup, fried chicken and mashed potatoes,
began to yield to the dazzling temptation of deliberately pursuing the
wrong suspect. Hey, said the Americans, Let's Look Away.

It was Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, who, on that
occasion, had the foresight to point out that Afghanistan had often
been the nemesis of imperial powers. Britain had got bogged down
there. So had Russia. The attraction of Iraq as a theatre of war was
that it was doable. One hundred thousand Iraqis killed in the doing
might have begged to disagree. But it was also Condoleezza whose face
later expressed a momentary affront to the ever-growing privileges of
the privileged. After Richard Clarke, the graceful counterterrorism
adviser to the US National Security Council, had apologised to the
grieving relatives of 9/11 for his failure to forestall the massacre,
you could see in Rice's sour, magisterial demeanour a rather different
reaction. She wore a scowl that, at the end of decade, you would see
on the faces of leading financiers and politicians all over the world.
Etched deep on her features was a look of pure disbelief. My God, the
ruling class was being held to account!

On our side of the Atlantic, Tony Blair chose to deal with his own
massive wrongness by insisting that it was fair to question his
judgment but not his integrity. And yet by the time he had refined
20,000 ways of saying the same thing – "I was wrong but I'm not to
blame because I fooled myself I was right" – it was hard to know where
integrity began and judgment stopped. Did it even matter? Blair was
already Looking Away, both to his maker in his sky, whose verdict, he
insisted, was the only one he respected, and to his many lucrative
postwar directorships. This was the period in which British foreign
policy colluded with torture to mutate into schoolboy power worship.
Whatever Americans did was right. Whatever everyone else did was
wrong. After Robin Cook was asked to leave his job because Dick Cheney
didn't like him, there didn't seem much point in having a purely
British Foreign Office, since its business could have been more
efficiently conducted from Foggy Bottom.

It suited Anglo-Saxon politicians fine to be able to insist that, if
only they could show us the intelligence, we would know that
civilisation was under sustained, coherent attack. The ceaseless
reiteration of the claim provided perfect cover for ignoring problems.
It's hard to remember a time when things that really mattered received
so little attention. Climate change, the social consequences of the
growing gap between rich and poor, the ridiculous size of the prison
population and the essential corruption of politics – its slide from
representing the public interest merely to representing itself – were
all held to be nothing next to the immediacy of the threat from the
mujahideen. While Blair insisted to uniform derision that there was no
connection between violence against western countries and the
deteriorating situation in the Middle East, Palestine was quietly, and
then not so quietly, strangled. Its society was permitted to splinter
and fall apart. Meanwhile, a wall was built, without negotiation. It
was four times as long as its Berlin prototype, and in places twice as
high.

The construction of the overlooked wall – at a cost, by the way, of
$4bn – was the defining political act of the age. In the name of
security, a whole country resolved to turn its back on its problems.
Bush did a little bit of acting, pretending for a week or two to
believe in a road map to peace, while winking at the creation of a
barrier that would make progress to that peace infinitely more
difficult. Hypocrisy was in style, big-time. Bankers dug themselves,
and then all the rest of us, into the biggest financial hole of all
time, while loudly boasting that their creative innovations had
rendered holes a thing of the past. CDOs, CDO squareds, mezzanines and
all sorts of ingenious credit swaps were touted as the means by which
the laws of economics could be suspended. Then, having spent the last
months of 2008 insisting that the public must bail them out of the
consequences of their own mistakes, so the bankers turned, refreshed,
in 2009 to a second round of blackmail. This time, they said, we must
leave them unregulated. Only by letting them help themselves to as
much money as they wanted could we persuade them to stick around and
lead us out of this mess.

It was a breathtaking performance, rhetorically at least, and clearly
one that contributed to ubiquitous cynicism. Never had George Bernard
Shaw's conviction that all professions are conspiracies against the
laity had greater play. The police, politicians and financial leaders
were the decade's big losers, alongside neoconservatives, admirers of
New Labour and market fundamentalists. Senior BBC executives, with
their self-interested juggling of market and public criteria ("The
BBC's public when we're taking your money, it's private when we're
taking ours") weren't far behind. In the 80s Thatcher had privatised
water, electricity and gas. But in the new century we privatised
virtue. We ceased to believe anyone could be in public life except for
what they could rip out of it. The BBC and ITV could no longer find
professional entertainers to command audiences on a Saturday night.
Only amateurs could be trusted to do the job. From the stuccoed
fastness of Notting Hill, the increasingly creepy David Cameron, our
prime minister in waiting, announced we were entering the Age of
Austerity.

Well, you may ask, what has changed? Human beings have always found
that life has a curious way of slipping away from them. You reach the
end without feeling you've done anything you meant to. For that
reason, I'm reluctant to speak ill of Looking Away. I do a great deal
of Looking Away myself. Who knows? It may be the only way of getting
through. But our inclination to Look Away is the reason we invented
professionals. Their job, after all, is to Look At. A doctor is there
to examine things you prefer to ignore. In Britain the uncontested
hero of the decade became the Polish plumber, the man or woman who
efficiently mended your sink and didn't rob you blind while doing it.
At some point, public figures are going to have to move off the
distraction agenda and on to the real. October 2009, and we wait.

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