The sophisticated French

So worldly. So knowing. So aware of all the shades of grey.

Apart from the lies, that is

Andrew Gilligan is apparently unrepentant. Although forced to resign from the BBC after the damning findings of the Hutton inquiry, he appears to have learned nothing from the incident, if his letter of resignation is any guide. The money quote:

"If Lord Hutton had fairly considered the evidence he heard, he would have concluded that most of my story was right ... The government did sex up the dossier, transforming possibilities and probabilities into certainties, removing vital caveats."

But that's not what he reported. What he reported was that the government had inserted false information into its summary of what was then believed about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, and did so over the protests of senior intelligence officials. If he had merely reported that "the dossier reflects the views of most senior intelligence officers, but not of some others," he would have told the truth, but he would not have had a story. For the truth is that most, if not all, intelligence is the subject of some doubt and debate within the intelligence agencies. That's what makes it intelligence � ie informed speculation on highly secretive matters, teased out of whatever scraps of information the spooks were able to collect � as opposed to facts everybody already knows.

Why am I not surprised?

There is something deeply phony about John Kerry: from throwing someone else's medals over the fence in front of the White House to protest the Vietnam War to botoxing his face, multiplied by his sincere and principled bothwayism on every single major issue. And now this. His populism, urged on him by Bob ("I'll fight for you") Shrum, always seemed more gratuitous than most -- worse even than Edwards'. Now we know.

New, improved blog...

Same great taste, way sharper format.

The Mother of All Parliaments

One of the pleasures of spending time in the United States is the availability of C-SPAN. (Okay, that marks me as a terminal loser, but there you are.) And one of the great pleasures of C-SPAN is that it replays Prime Minister's Question Time from the British House of Commons. Pleasure, and sorrow: it's enough to make a grown Canadian cry, so great is the contrast with our own House. The questions are thoughtful, well-marshalled, serious. And the Prime Minister actually endeavours to answer them! Scroll down to the link marked "Prime Minister Tony Blair Statement on Hutton Inquiry Findings (01/28/2004)" This is a lengthier episode than most, and it's riveting. Blair himself is a wondrous public speaker, as is well known. But the general quality is very high, even amid the passions of the moment. MPs, moreover, speak as individuals, spontaneously: you can see Labourites deviating from the PM's line, just as you see Conservatives who are plainly sympathetic to his ordeal (unlike the Tory leader, Michael Howard, who missed an opportunity to take the high road.) Notice how packed the chamber is, members standing in the aisles, etc. This was deliberate: when the House was rebuilt after being bombed in WWII, Churchill (who knew a thing or three about political theatre) explicitly instructed that there should be fewer seats than members, to heighten the sense of urgency on great occasions. Notice, too, how small it is. Result: members tend to speak to one another, rather than just hauling off and bellowing into space. The absence of desks is critical, not only to the intimacy of the place, but also the tone. Who sits in rows of desks? Schoolchildren. Bureaucrats. Prison-workers. Who, by contrast, sits on benches? Judges. Councils of elders. Church congregations. (Also hockey teams - ed. Okay, I didn't say they were saints.) Environment conditions behaviour. If we're ever to have a functional Parliament in Canada, we need to change not just the rules, or the people: we need to change the design of the House itself.

The Hutton inquiry

Lord Hutton's report (full text here) is extraordinary in several respects. He has resisted the temptation to play to the press gallery's preconceptions, or popular cynicism. He has not come down with a false even-handedness, just to throw everyone a bone. Neither has he expanded his remit beyond the question he was asked, to include the weapons of mass destruction issue or the government's handling of the war. Rather, he has answered the question he was asked, and answered it in the most forthright, commonsensical way: namely, that no one "killed" David Kelly: David Kelly killed David Kelly. Which was obvious enough from the start. If there is anything the inquiry established, it is that there was no need for an inquiry. Certainly, the BBC screwed up, notably its reporter Andrew Gilligan: Kelly never said what they said he said, nor was he the "highly placed intelligence official responsible for drafting the dossier" they claimed he was, since he wasn't highly-placed, wasn't an intelligence official, and wasn't responsible for drafting the dossier. So he was wronged, and so was the government the BBC accused of faking the data with which it took the country into war. No doubt, also, the government was too clever by half in allowing his name to be released by the ludicrous "twenty questions" routine. Not that there was anything wrong in identifying the BBC's purported source. It just should have been forthright about it. For Kelly was hardly the victim of the piece. Even if he hadn't said what Gilligan said he said, Kelly had broken strict MoD rules merely by talking to him without authorization. Nor was the Gilligan interview the first such occasion, having previously been interviewed by Susan Watts, Gilligan's BBC colleague. And, what is more, he'd lied about it, to a Parliamentary committee (a lie which was exposed by the intervention of Gilligan, who was coaching the Liberal Democrats on the committee on what questions to ask.) Granted, he was probably mortified at being caught in a lie, discomfited by having to appear before the committee, distraught at being chased by the press, concerned for his career prospects, insulted at being described as a "mid-level" bureaucrat -- all those things. But people do not ordinarily kill themselves in such circumstances, not unless they are already in deep psychological trouble. The notion that has underscored media coverage of the affair from the start, the very premise of the inquiry, that Kelly was "driven" to suicide by a heartless government/reckless BBC, has at last been exposed for what it is: sentimental bunk.

Turks and Caicos now!

The dream of annexation has apparently not died. I remember when Dan McKenzie, MP, was named ambassador to the Turks and Caicos in the Mulroney years, mostly to get him out of the country. But the geostrategic imperative of obtaining a warm-water port remains....

Given the importance of his wife's money to his campaign, you'd think somebody would have come up with le headline juste for Kerry's come-from-behind win: "Ketchup Victory"

A couple of instant lessons from the Iowa primary. One: protectionism is once again proven to be a failure as a vote-getter. Dick Gephardt made it the central message of his campaign. He got 10% of the vote, in a state he has spent the last several decades trying to win. Two: opposition to the war is not as strong as some believed, even among Democrats. The two frontrunners, Kerry and Edwards, both voted to authorize the president to go to war. Dean, the anti-war candidate, did not even gain a majority of those voters who professed themselves anti-war, suggesting that they had other issues on their minds. He rose to prominence by courting those with a visceral dislike for President Bush, but in the end those voters, pragmatically enough, voted for the candidate most likely to beat him. So it's Kerry, Edwards and Dean going into New Hampshire, where they will be joined by Clark (and Lieberman, though his campaign seems to have fizzled). Gephardt's toast. Dean may be after New Hampshire.

(An old post)

Everybody knows Larry Spencer's views on gays are unrepresentative of the Alliance as a whole, right? There goes the (eastern, secular, pinko) media again, tarring everyone with the same brush. Except it's clear he isn't alone in these beliefs. Too many other Alliance MPs have expressed broadly similar sentiments in public over the years -- describing homosexuality as a "lifestyle choice," for example, or regretting its decriminalization -- for this to be put down to a media conspiracy. Nor is the parliamentary caucus necessarily unrepresentative of the base. Somebody has to keep electing these guys. I know, I know: certain Liberal MPs have said much the same sort of thing, not to mention Elsie Wayne's outburst, without their parties being condemned by association. But that is simply to make my point: this isn't an issue that divides parties, per se, so much as it does cultures -- specifically, urban versus rural, the emerging Great Divide in Canadian politics. What all these MPs have in common is that they represent rural or at least non-metropolitan parts of Canada, which do not share in urban Canada's increasingly laissez-faire attitude to homosexuality. What makes it a partisan issue is that most Canadians live in cities: 80% of the population overall, half in just the top 10. Needless to say, these have been rather barren ground for conservative parties in recent years. Indeed, such is the Liberal dominance of the cities that they can pretty well put together a majority without need of any rural seats whatever. Conservatives, on the other hand, can only hope to govern by winning seats in both urban and rural Canada. Which means that on this, as on other cultural issues, they must perform a rather uncomfortable straddle, presenting a more modern face to urban voters without alienating the rural base. I don't think this is impossible, though it will be tricky. In broad terms, it amounts to standing up for the rights both of homosexuals and of those who believe homosexuality is an abomination. What does that mean? It means accepting, once and for all, the principle that the state must not discriminate against homosexuals, even with regard to the right to marry. At the same time, it means upholding the rights of private organizations and individuals to dissent from the public orthodoxy, at least in matters of conscience. (Discrimination in hiring is another matter.) I don't mean to imply this should be just an electoral calculation. There are good, principled reasons why conservatives should come to terms with homosexuality, if not as a legitimate social phenomenon then at least as a fact of life. At the same time, there are good, principled reasons why some conservatives find that difficult. Finding the balance between them is as much a moral as a political quandary.

Could Dean finish third in Iowa? And if Kerry wins, what happens in New Hampshire? He's already third, behind Dean and Clark. But he's close to Clark (for a while, he was in danger of falling behind Lieberman into fifth), and if Iowa makes him the Dean-beater, maybe he pulls ahead. But Clark has so much more support in the south. Maybe at some point Kerry becomes the Clark-beater, if Dean really fades.

Mark Steyn on General Clark, screwball.

Some people just can't let go.

In the bleak midwinter, Bill Clinton sits in the two-story garage out back, kneading memory into history. He scribbles his memoirs in longhand on legal pads, poring over notes and transcripts of his White House years. For the moment, this deadline is more pressing than raising money for India's earthquake victims or promoting peace in Northern Ireland or touring Miami nightclubs with Julio Iglesias. It is also lit by the incandescent question of the 2004 primary campaign: What does it mean to be a Democrat anymore? Having lost the White House and five straight House elections, does the party need to be burned down and rebuilt to have any hope of winning back the hearts and minds of a majority of the American people? Is the shadow Clinton casts over the field more imagined than real? We know a legacy when we see one. Ronald Reagan not only changed the landscape while he was in office, but he also had fundamentally changed his party by the time he left, to the point that Bush the father lost by not being enough like Reagan while Bush the son won because he was. Now Clinton cannot pick up a newspaper without reading about some rejection of his free-trading, difference-splitting, soccer mom-wooing ways by candidates representing "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party." "We're not going to beat George Bush by being Bush Lite," Howard Dean declared last week in Nashua, N.H. "The way to beat George Bush is to give the 50% of Americans who quit voting because they can't tell the difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party a reason to vote again." Take that, Triangulator in Chief. But before Clinton gets too glum, chances are the phone will ring and it will be one of the candidates calling to pick his brain. They want to know how Clinton would campaign if he were up against this President Bush rather than the last one. The old playbook won't work anymore; the landscape is changed, and this George Bush is building a legacy of his own. Whatever their differences, Clinton is talking to all the candidates because, his friends say, they share one goal: ensuring another one-term Bush presidency. And so Clinton is the ghost in all their political machines, massaging Dick Gephardt's message, editing John Edwards' speeches, matchmaking between Wesley Clark and the party rainmakers. If too much time passes between calls, friends say, Clinton gets a little peeved, like a mother wanting her kids to succeed when they head off to college, but not without her help. "He knows what they are going through," says a source who chats with Clinton often. "He has helped them think through their own strengths and weaknesses." But none of the Democrats can do that without first coming to grips with Clinton's, deciding what to borrow and what to bury.

This is the great unreported story of this campaign: Kerry's surge in the last week, in both Iowa and New Hampshire. Nobody saw it coming, and nobody has really explained it. But he's gained 10 points in both states. How?

BBC NEWS | Middle East | US casualties in Iraq rise to 500 This is misleading. The number lost in combat is about two-thirds of that (346 to be exact), as detailed here and here. This is nine months after an invasion that liberated 25 million people. There are no historical comparisons for this (beyond Afghanistan, which did not involve a comparable deployment of US ground troops.) All previous invasions would have come at the cost of tens of thousands of deaths, not hundreds. It is as if, instead of running a mile in just under four minutes, someone were to do it in about 12 seconds.