Marbury

bush and blair: incompetent war criminals

I've always thought it a bit mad to believe that Bush and Blair conspired to "lie" about the existence of Iraqi WMD, rather than genuinely, mistakenly believing Saddam had them. Apart from anything else, why would you make up a huge lie in full knowledge that you would be found out? And, if you were going to engage in said deceit, wouldn't you try harder to ensure you weren't found out?

During the research for my book, Born Liars (which, perhaps disappointingly, is not a fearless exposé of Bush and Blair but an investigation of the role of deceit in our lives) I conducted a fascinating interview with Kevin Woods, a retired US army officer, former member of the Joint Forces Command and veteran of the 1991 Gulf war. After the 2003 the US army asked Woods to conduct a "lessons learned" exercise, focusing on what Saddam's government had been thinking and doing in the run-up to war.

Woods and his team interviewed hundreds of former senior members of the Iraqi army and government, and were handed tapes of Iraqi government meetings, including meetings chaired by Saddam. It took them about five years to piece the story together. There's too much of interest to cover here - you'll have to buy the book - so I'll focus on what Iraqi officials said to him about WMD.

Woods was surprised to find that many of the Iraqi officials had drawn the same conclusions about Iraq's WMD as the West had done. Saddam constantly signalled that he was playing the West along when he denied he had WMD.

Woods asked the regime's head of research into WMD whether he had ever thought it possible there was a secret WMD programme that even he didn't know about. The official nodded. Yes, he had thought it a possibility. After all, he explained, the government was extremely compartmentalised and secretive, and everyone lied to everyone else. Only one man knew everything.

"Also", he continued, "Your president said it was so!". Iraqi officials had been impressed by Bush's certainty, and thought of the CIA as an intelligence service of legendary prowess which wouldn't make a mistake like this. (This raises the Heller-esque possibility that some Iraqis were telling Western intelligence that the WMDs existed because they believed Western intelligence when it said they existed).

Saddam had constructed a hall of mirrors into which everyone, including the West, had allowed themselves to be drawn into. When the U.S military turned up in Iraq and discovered no WMD, they were amazed. So were Iraqi officials - not so much because it turned out that Saddam had been bluffing, but because they couldn't believe that Bush would be so stupid as to neglect to take the precaution of planting some WMDs on Iraqi soil, so that the Americans had at least something to "discover". To their minds, it was incompetence of the highest order.

willingham on gove

As a complement to my previous post, it's worth reading this one by Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia.

It's a short commentary on a speech Michael Gove gave this week to the Social Market Foundation (reported on here by the Guardian; the full text is here, and definitely worth a read.)

Gove's speech focuses on one of his core themes: the importance of knowing stuff. Somewhat mischievously, it borrows from one of the left's heroes, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (it was Gramsci, of course, who inspired Green Gartside to name his band Scritti Politti, which many consider to be his greatest legacy).

Willingham, respected and influential by educators and policy-makers in the States for his lucid and sensible applications of cognitive science to education, explains why Gove is right in his approach (if not necessarily his policies) and why - at least judging by his response to the speech - Stephen Twigg doesn't get it. He concludes:

Mr. Gove is rare, if not unique, among high-level education policy makers in understanding the scientific point he made in yesterday's speech. You may agree or disagree with the policies Mr. Gove sees as the logical consequence of that scientific point, but education policies that clearly contradict it are unlikely to help close the achievement gap between wealthy and poor. 

Willingham's post here.

gove derangement

Photo: Evening Standard.

First post in ages and it's about Michael Gove. Marbury's muse works in mysterious ways.

I am prompted by this piece in the New Statesman, by the normally thoughtful and perceptive Rafael Behr. It's a commentary on the bizarre, oversold, astoundingly pompous Observer "exposé" of some Twitter spat I can't even be bothered to relate. (As journalists spend more and more time on Twitter, they are becoming more convinced of its centrality to national life).

Behr goes on to express his concern that the Department of Education under Gove has become a "law unto itself". His evidence for this is that Gove's special advisers are loyal to him and boast of their independence from the department. Behr goes on to say, somewhat confusingly, that Gove has "broken" the entire department to his will, as one would, presumably, break in a wild stallion (I'm sorry if you're now thinking about Gove, topless and sweating, disciplining a horse.)

Shockingly, according to Behr, Gove is using his department to force through his political agenda. My God. A cabinet minister, elected on a clear manifesto, is getting his civil servants to implement it? Why on earth isn't this a bigger scandal?

For his crimes, Behr calls Gove a Bolshevik, which is rough stuff coming from a New Statesman political editor. He concludes that Gove is in "ruthless pursuit of his own personal revolution." Blimey. Beria was ruthless. As for "personal revolution" - what does that actually mean? It's not like Gove is forcing schools to put his picture in every classroom (though this is the the kind of thing he's regularly accused of by certain parts of the press). He is simply doing the stuff he's been saying he was going to do ever since he became shadow education secretary. New Statesman readers may not like it, but then they haven't liked much about the last thirty years (joke. Joke!).

But this is mild stuff. Every day brings a new anti-Gove rant, and one of the odd things about them is how ill-informed they are, how smug they are in their own ignorance. You often hear it remarked, as if it's an accepted truth, that Gove has a backward-looking, evidence-free, unthinkingly reactionary agenda. But Gove is more abreast of current policy debates than most of his critics. Scholars like E.D Hirsch and Daniel Willingham, influential in the States, have been arguing, from different directions, and with a great deal of evidence, that, for instance, knowledge is a pre-condition of so-called "skills" like creativity, and that tests are a good way, not just of assessing progress, but inspiring pupils to greater efforts. If you can find, from the last couple of decades, a better argued, more evidenced, more cogently expressed case for a policy agenda than this then I'd like to see it.

What is it about Gove that bends even sensible minds out of joint; that drives intelligent people absolutely batty with rage? His programme is really just a continuation of the last government's, just speeded up. I don't remember the left burning effigies of Alan Johnson.

There's some weird personal stuff going on that I can't even begin to explain (much like Blair, the very sight of him seems to make some people's eyes flash red and the green pen to jump out of its scabbard).

But I think the deeper problem is that Gove came into government to get big things done, and he is doing them. We're not used to that in this country. We find it downright offensive. And that explains a lot about the mess we're in.