Marbury

beating head against table

Here is Lord Goldsmith's closing point to the inquiry today:

Whether or not the military intervention was a matter of policy was right or wrong, I don't think it's for me to judge. But, so far as the legality is concerned, I did reach the view then, and still am of the opinion that it was lawful. I stand by that advice. And I have tried to explain today that it was an opinion that I reached independently, having considered all the arguments and the evidence, and that it was my genuine view. That is the basis on which I have given legal advice, as a professional lawyer, for over 35 years.

And here is The Guardian's Andrew Sparrow, liveblogging that statement:

That's significant. He is not prepared to say that he thought the war was a good thing. It was legal, he says. But whether it was wise is a matter for others to judge. That's not much of an endorsement. As far as I'm aware, there is nothing to stop government law officers saying that they agree with government policy. Goldsmith, right at the end of today's hearing, pointedly chose not to do so.

Did you notice the laser-like speed and precision with which Sparrow locks on to... the most insignificant part of the statement?

That Goldsmith doesn't offer an opinion on whether the war was a good thing is doubly insignificant. Once, because, as Sparrow dimly recognises, it's not his business to comment on that matter, and to do so would cloud his previous evidence. Twice, because his personal opinion on that question makes no difference at all to the question at hand today which - I thought - was the legality of the war. Hence the brisk and clearly "unpointed" manner with which Goldsmith disposes of the question.

The only part Sparrow gets right is the first two words: "that's significant". It's just that they should be referring to Goldsmith's main point: nobody bullied him into endorsing the legality of the war. Hard to accept, isn't it, when we've been assured for several years by virtually every newspaper that this is so (based on nothing much)?

Amidst the endless legal back-and-forth today, that stands as the most significant point to emerge. But because it doesn't fit into the tightly constructed narrative that most of the media decided upon years ago and have been tenderly watering ever since, Sparrow barely registers it.

My head hurts.

true believer

(Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images)

Last night's Newsnight staged a short debate on the Iraq inquiry between David Aaronovitch, a left-wing journalist who supported the Iraq war, and Phllippe Sands, a legal scholar who has made his name as critic of its legality.

The discussion took an absurdist turn after Sands claimed that Tony Blair was now vulnerable to prosecution when travelling abroad to certain countries. Pressed by Paxman on which countries, exactly, Sands came up with Azerbaijan. At which point, Paxman couldn't help himself and all three broke into giggles, with even an embarrassed Sands seeing that this rather undermined his case.

The cheap joke, of course, is that few people would feel their freedom had been severely curtailed if told not to visit Azerbaijan. The more substantial point is that Sands had unwittingly revealed what a strange beast is international law. The idea that Blair had most to fear from a country with one of the worst human rights records in Europe tells you much of what you need to know about that.

There was a moment yesterday when Elizabeth Wilmshurst was asked if Jack Straw's legal qualification meant she took his opinions on the legality of the war more seriously. She replied, "he is not an international lawyer." This was interpreted as a slapdown; Simon Hoggart took it to mean that "(Straw) didn't know what he was talking about." I'm not at all sure she meant it that way, and even if she did, it would be ridiculous to say so. Straw is clearly highly competent. He was getting exasperated with his legal advisers because at times they were offering dogmatic advice without fully considering the ground such advice stands on: the slippery, shifting sands of international negotiations.

For me, Wilmshurst at that moment was revealing (knowingly or not) the partiality of her view. She was seeing things exclusively through the prism of her professional expertise, when the fact is that international law has no fast or firm basis and is constructed from agreements formed through political horse-trading. Lord Goldsmith, in his surprisingly spirited testimony so far today, has been pressing the point that even as a lawyer you needed to have a detailed understanding and regard for real world negotiating processes, and accept the fact that the wording of international agreements is usually deliberately ambiguous.

Hoggart - who as we've seen is rather a fan of Wilmshurst, and understandably so - noted a certain rigidity of approach:

One of the curious aspects of her evidence was that to her, the law is the law, as clear and immutable as the gospels are to a true believer.

Hoggart seems to think this is a good thing.

strike that metaphor

The Guardian's Simon Hoggart gets all sweaty under the collar about Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the former Foreign Office lawyer who resigned because she disagreed with the legality of the Iraq war:

The Iraq inquiry burst into life yesterday, thanks to a quiet, thoughtful yet furious woman who ripped into the government like a genteel but very hungry lioness.

A what?

He goes on to compare her to Princess Diana and Judi Dench as "M" in the Bond movies. To be fair to Hoggart he must have had to file this in a hurry, whilst his blood was up.

ouch again

Marc Ambinder is one of the shrewdest, most mature and clear-headed  US political commentators around (and reasonably sympathetic to Obama). So when he says something like this, it has a certain bite:

Appearances deceive, but it appears as if the White House chose the wrong battles in 2009 and lost every one.

pointy-heads vs fat cats

David Brooks on political populism:

Ever since I started covering politics, the Democratic ruling class has been driven by one fantasy: that voters will get so furious at people with M.B.A.’s that they will hand power to people with Ph.D.’s. The Republican ruling class has been driven by the fantasy that voters will get so furious at people with Ph.D.’s that they will hand power to people with M.B.A.’s.

how to sell a movie

This is from the brilliant Letters of Note blog. It's a robustly-worded memo from Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein to the director (documentary-maker) Errol Morris, whose film Thin Blue Line (which went to win many awards) had just been released. I love Weinstein's straight-to-the-point brusqueness; apart from anything else, it's a lesson in economy of expression.

(Transcript and more background here)

a token effort

"Obama to Seek Freeze on Some Spending to Trim Deficit"

The NYT's judicious choice of the words "some" and "trim" in this headline tells you most of what you need to know about the policy it refers to.

the few not the many

We can mark Rachel Sylvester of The Times down as one of the small (but growing?) number of commentators who grasp the essential point about Blair and Iraq:

The hostility to a man once hailed as a hero is intense, too intense. In my view, Mr Blair made a huge error of judgment in sending British troops to Baghdad — but I find it impossible to believe that he did so knowing that there were no weapons of mass destruction, or that he deliberately set out to mislead the British public.

doctors still living in flat earth world?

Last night I attended an excellent panel discussion at the RSA on the question of free will after the discoveries of neuroscience. The famous Libet experiment (explained here in an old BBC clip featuring a younger-looking Patrick Haggard, who spoke superbly at the event yesterday) seemed to prove that conscious free will is not much more than a convenient illusion. What implications does this have for the way we live, and the way we shape policy on, for example, crime?

Well, you'll be thankful to know I'm not going to get into that this morning (a video of the debate will be going up on the RSA site very soon). I just want to juxtapose it with something else. When the philosopher A.C Grayling (who seemed to be giving an impression of a philosopher rather than actually being one) came to speak, he peered out at the audience over his horn-rimmed glasses and said something like, "I don't expect there are any dualists here, and there certainly aren't on this panel". His point being that the old Cartesian idea that there are minds and bodies and never-shall-the-twain-meet has been decimated in recent decades, as a respectable intellectual position, by the amazing discoveries of scientists studying the brain.

And yet elsewhere this assumption lives on. In this otherwise very good piece in yesterday's Times on chronic fatigue syndrome, everyone, from the writer to the experts to the sufferers, frames the question of the condition's causes as if we were still living in a dualist world. To take one example:

Stephen Holgate, professor of immunopharmacology at the University of Southampton, chairs the Medical Research Council’s expert group on CFS/ME. “As a clinician who sees patients with this group of diseases I recognise there’s a real thing here, it’s not all psychiatric or psychological,” he says.

So a condition is either "real", or "psychological", body or mind. This kind of thinking, so obsolete that A.C Grayling felt confident nobody in the audience would subscribe to it, still seems prevalent within the medical profession. Even there, things are changing - there's been a lot of recent research into the very real effects of placebos, which work on almost any illness. If a physical process involves a significant mental component that doesn't make it any less "real". Researchers - and some doctors - are concluding that the relationship between the health of the body and the mind is far more complex and intertwined than we've been assuming.

For a much better elucidation of this issue, visit Vaughan Bell at Mind Hacks, starting with this post.

iPrez

Slate imagines Steve Jobs giving this year's State of the Union address:

So today, we're introducing a new plan. It's called Stimulus 2GS, and it's sleeker than any economic recovery package ever created. It's got bridges, it's got schools, it's got broadband Internet. All that, and it's super easy to use—you can control it from iTunes. Pretty cool, huh?

(APPLAUSE.)

Now let's take a look at national security. When we got in here last year, torture was basically OK. We were water-boarding people and doing all sorts of terrible things. If you're the president of the United States, how do you solve this? Hmm. Oh wait, we have solved this. We banned torture. Boom. Now that's what I call an amazing breakthrough.

um...

This Washington Post story on Obama's decision-making is worth reading in full (lots of great detail, including his web habits - he's the first president to have the internet at his desk) but I must admit I rather snagged on this:

"If he was poll-driven, we'd be doing better," one senior adviser said ruefully, adding, "but the country would be in a depression.

I've read this several times and it still doesn't make sense. The White House would be doing better if the country was in a depression?

and somewhere, bill clinton's head explodes

Democrat Marion Berry, an Arkansas congressman from the party's conservative wing, has announced he's retiring. In an interview with a local paper he complains about Democrat presidents, including this one, who ask him to vote for policies that are unpopular with his voters back home. In doing so he claims that Obama has been promising to do what Bill Clinton couldn't, and leverage his personal popularity to save the day:

“They (the White House) just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’ We’re going to see how much difference that makes now.”

(via Ben Smith)

bad news bias

Over the weekend, Britain got two pieces of very good news. First, unemployment seems to have peaked at a significantly lower figure than most analysts were expecting. Second, the overall rate of crime showed an 8% drop, when everyone was predicting a rise due to the recession. Not many media outlets gave either much prominence (the first bit of news barely registered with me; the second passed me by altogether). Instead, the focus was one particular, horrific crime (Edlington), and on the depth of our economic predicament. Good news just isn't news, it seems. Matthew Taylor wonders why:

It’s a cliche that the news focuses on bad things. Over the years various people, from newsreaders to website founders, have tried to get people interested in a more balanced offering.  But our lack of interest in how we have come through the downturn better than we expected, and our willingness to put so much more emphasis on the terrible crimes of two disturbed boys than the benign social trend revealed in the crime stats, underlines the depth of our social pessimism.

foresight and hindsight merchants

Matthew D'Ancona is quite funny about the carefully laid trail of agony memos from Jack Straw and others in the run-up to Iraq:

We have learned that Mr Straw, Foreign Secretary at the time of the war, also wrote a letter to Blair, expressing his doubts about the war's legality and its likely consequences. You can imagine Blair receiving yet another of these billets-doux from yet another of his Cabinet colleagues, marked "Strictly Private: PM's Eyes Only", and sighing in the full knowledge that the letter should really be labelled: "Strictly Private – Unless the War Goes Tits Up, in which case, To Be Plastered Across the Media to Show I Was Trying to Restrain Crazy Tony."

He's also right about this:

Only two men emerge with much credit: the late Robin Cook, who resigned over Iraq with dignity, passionate sincerity, and a Commons speech of true greatness; and (if you believe that the war was justified) Blair himself. Both engaged seriously with the fundamental dilemmas posed by the end of the Cold War and by 9/11: how to wage war on this dramatically new strategic, moral and legal terrain. They drew quite different conclusions, but did so respectfully and with a shared understanding that these questions would take decades, not months to resolve. As for the others: what a bunch of wimps, placemen and hindsight-merchants.

I would just add that D'Ancona's parenthetical qualification is unnecessary. You don't need to believe the war was justified to respect Blair's conduct, just as you don't need to be an opponent of the war to admire Cook's.

blair baiting

The most depressing aspect of the Iraq Inquiry has been its reporting. In particular, the way in which once responsible newspapers have been overcome by anti-war prejudice and Blair-hatred. Every paper, from the Telegraph to the Guardian to the Observer, seems to be straining to emulate the Daily Mail in tone and regard for the facts.

I'm not a huge admirer of Andrew Rawnsley, but credit where it's due. In the midst of a column that sends smoke-signals to the many Blair-haters amongst his readership without quite joining them, he stumbles upon a truth:

It has always suited (Tony Blair) to make his integrity the central issue – a point consistently missed by those who think the case for the prosecution is simply made by shouting "Bliar". What he really needs to be made to answer for are his failures of judgment.

A similar point was made (rather more forcefully) by Nick Cohen last week:

Blair was not a dictator and could not commit British troops to battle on a whim. But his opponents are trying to get round it by maintaining that he won the support of the cabinet and Parliament by lying to them. As someone who approved of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein at the time, and still does, I suppose it's not my place to help them out. But the polemicist in me is offended by the gaucheness of their efforts. As a matter of low tactics as much as high principle, they ought to know that you never level an accusation you can't substantiate because you make life too easy for your targets when you do.

This point has eluded the Observer's editorial team, apparently. The paper's reporting on the inquiry, soaked in prejudice and bias, has focused squarely on the question of Blair's integrity. Today's double-page spread is all over it:

The main questions they want put to Blair on Friday all turn on whether...the PM and his government misled the public, parliament and the armed forces about the case and reasons for war. Seven years and four inquiries on, they want answers at last.

"They" are a group of bereaved relatives of soldiers killed in the war. And they have had answers to just about everything that can be answered, but anyway. In the report, Maureen Shearer, a member of this group, is quoted as saying "he (Blair) lied". The reporters frame this quote for us:

That, in a nutshell, is the case for the prosecution, the charge-sheet against Blair drawn up by critics of the war.

No, it's not. First, this isn't a trial. Chilcot has gone to pains to make this clear, and was presumably hoping that a few responsible newspapers might assist him in dispelling that idea. Second, the paper's team (it took three of them write this stuff) have made no apparent effort to set the comments of Shearer and the other members of this group in context for us. Are they representative of the general opinion of all those who have had relatives killed in Iraq? Or are they one, particularly vocal, constituency within that group? I have no idea. But a responsible paper might have made the effort to find out and let us know. Third, "critics of the war" extend way beyond this group, and they include many people who don't think Blair lied. The relentless focus on this question doesn't reflect the reality of this inquiry, or of the war. It's all about picking the most sensationalistic angle.

This would be merely sad evidence of the Observer's fecklessness, except there's something in the tone of the whole piece that makes it even lower than that - that makes it repellent.

Emotions are still raw and the anger intense. As a result, there is a risk that Friday's session could turn into a disaster. "We are still after him after all this time," said one of the fathers who will attend, Peter Brierley, whose son, Lance Corporal Shaun Brierley, 28, was killed in March 2003. "He [Blair] should be frightened of the families."

Reading the report, I get the sense that the Observer's reporters rather approve of this man's sentiments. They certainly find them useful. Personally, I find the barely veiled threat of violence here unsettling, and deeply unpleasant. But then, I have no idea what it's like to lose a son. My point is this: given the anger of this man and others, it behooves a responsible newspaper to make a particular effort to bring cool objectivity and rational analysis to this complex story. The Observer is doing the opposite; it is exploiting these feelings to juice up its reporting. Every paragraph of what purports (barely) to be an objective report is distorted by a hot-breathed desire to see Tony Blair humiliated. Or worse. I get the sense that nothing short of "a disaster" on Friday will satisfy.