Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

Our country is once again without a government. After a 15 hour crisis meeting to shore up the ramshackle remains of a coalition at the end of its collective tether, the cabinet fell at about 04:00 in the night of Friday to Saturday.

Not coincidentally, I’ve regained some respect for Wouter Bos in the last 12 hours.

Bos wanted to stick to an agreement made by this cabinet in 2007 when it first took office, that Dutch troops would be pulled out of Afghanistan at the end of 2010. Significantly, the majority of the population of this country still support the withdrawal of troops, as do an overwhelming number of politicians in the Dutch parliament. So, what could possibly be the problem?

Well, that agreement was made three whole years ago and you know what politicians are like. Bos’s CDA and CU colleagues felt that the cabinet should continue to discuss all options, which, of course, is not very well veiled political twaddle for wanting to ram their own will down the voters’ throat. Who cares about the will of the people or their elected representatives in Dutch parliament?

NATO recently issued a formal request for the Dutch to stay in Afghanistan beyond 2010, no doubt assuming that those in power would do the usual cowardly thing and bend to the will of their American masters. Not this time, though.

I don’t often find myself agreeing with the PvdA these days, but, to his credit, Bos wasn’t having any of it. An agreement is an agreement, he said, and the will of the people isn’t there to support other options, so why discuss them? No, Dutch troops must be out of Afghanistan by the end of 2010 and I’m not willing to discuss alternatives.

And, with neither side prepared to back down and lose face either towards the other coalition partners or, indeed, within their own party faction, the last drops of goodwill at the bottom of a barrel already more than vigorously scraped evaporated, leaving Bos no other choice but to resign from the cabinet. With that, he took the support of the PvdA with him, leaving the cabinet unable to continue to govern.

For Balkenende, our Harry Potter lookalike prime-minister, it’s the latest of four dissolved cabinets that he has led. Not once in the history of his four terms in office has he managed to see the job through to the end. Either the man is very unlucky or it’s time to draw an increasingly unavoidable conclusion. Time to write your memoires, perhaps, Jan Peter?

The government splintering into pieces is becoming business as usual in this country. Things could be a lot worse, though. Looking around, one could be forgiven for indulging in the wishful thinking that some other countries’ governments would throw in the towel. Seemingly, no scandal is large enough to bring about the demise of the government in many countries, notably the more powerful ones. The politicians themselves have no honour, so they remain in office long after they’ve been exposed and discredited as idiots and liars, and the public who put them there are too jaded to demand their resignation. Democracy in action, people.

At least the coalition system here ensures that the politicians ultimately end up trusting one another as little as we trust all of them. You have to at least be grateful that our forefathers built that little bit of amusing poetic justice into the system, don’t you?

Anyway, not much is going to get done here in the next few months. The queen will appoint a demissionary government, whose bums will serve to warm the seats of the next elected government of this land. By its very nature, though, this cabinet won’t be empowered to do much. One has to wonder how the current economic crisis will be navigated. What, for example, would happen if a Dutch bank appeared likely to keel over on Monday? It’s not clear that it could be prevented, even if the political will to do so were there.

Perhaps the hardest question of all is who to vote for in the summer, which is when the next general election will probably happen. No-one’s looking even remotely appealing.

There’s ample material there for another blog entry, though.

The news that Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize travelled around the world today like wildfire. Obama said he was surprised that he had been chosen. I’ll go one better and say that I’m positively flabbergasted.

It seems that one can now be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on the basis of words alone. After all, Obama talks about peace at every opportunity, but what has he actually done to achieve it? Aren’t peace prizes supposed to recognise, oh, you know, actual achievements?

The Nobel committee applauded Obama’s approach of considered international diplomacy and the willingness to make concessions along the way. Whilst these qualities are, indeed, uncommon traits in American leaders, they’re not unusual per se. it does therefore seem as if Obama is being rewarded for the sheer contrast of his presidency with that of his predecessor. Eight years of idiocy, lies and greed from Bush and his cohorts continue to make Obama look better than he really is.

Obama’s approach to international diplomacy is nothing new. Certainly, it’s new for the usually belligerent, unilaterally operating nation over which he presides, but at a global level, one has to wonder why, if the bar is set so low, no other Western leader has received a Nobel prize in recent years. After all, they, too, have waxed lyrical about peace and freedom, urged for talks and emphasised the need for the all nations to share in the responsibility of building a safer world for us all to live in. I’m not suggesting that they also deserved a prize; I’m saying that they didn’t, and neither did Obama.

Looking beyond the poetic speechwriters’ prose, let’s look at a couple of things that Obama has actually done this year to influence peace:

• He has deployed an extra 21,000 troops in Afghanistan and is currently considering committing a further 40,000.

• He has refused to cut military aid to Israel, in spite of the knowledge that Israel repeatedly uses arms manufactured in the US to commit gross human rights violations, as independently determined by Amnesty International.

Those two facts a lone make a mockery of Obama’s being awarded a Peace Prize. Robert Mugabe must be waiting in the wings for a 2010 nomination.

Being seen to broker peace whilst arming one side of the conflict is the kind of hypocritical currency with which observers of US foreign policy are all too familiar. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Obama isn’t so very different from his predecessors.

In his favour, he is vastly more eloquent and charming. Add to that the fact that he has come along at a time when the American public have never been more desperate to believe in something, and his meteoric rise seems all but inevitable. That the gullible, television-fed masses of America are helpless, willing fodder for Obama’s hollow promise of a better world is one thing, but shouldn’t we expect a more considered verdict from a Nobel committee?

Perhaps not. These same people hand-picked Al Gore for the same prize just a few years ago.

At best, this award is a prize of encouragement, an expression of hope. It’s to say: you’re on the right track; we like what you’re doing; please continue. It’s not a reward for any achievement already banked.

To Obama’s credit, he recognises that his goals, not his achievements, are being rewarded and states that he feels ill at ease having his name mentioned in the same breath as some of the previous recipients of the prize. He feels his name doesn’t sit well next to theirs. On that much, at least, Obama and I can agree.

Obama has said he will donate the prize money associated with the award to a good cause. One can only hope he doesn’t choose to add it to the Israeli military aid budget.

Far be it from me to withhold credit where it’s due, so without the slightest reservation, I hereby commend Obama for the following deeds:

• Ordering the closure of the detention camp in Guantanamo Bay (although it’s still outrageous that he’s given them a year to do so). The existence of that place is an abomination and makes any claim to having a free society absurd.

• Ordering the cessation of torture by the US military. Again, civilised countries do not torture (or put to death, for that matter) their prisoners. There’s no word yet on capital punishment and I’m not holding my breath.

• Ordering the cessation of secret CIA rendition flights to transport foreign nationals, kidnapped by the US, to CIA-operated prisons in foreign states, where they were subject to torture. You remember these flights, don’t you? They’re the ones Condoleeza Rice, Bush’s defence minister, denied had ever took place. Odd that Obama feels the need to put a stop to something that never happens.

• Ordering the closure of the aforementioned secret CIA prisons in foreign states.

I must admit, I’m pleasantly surprised by the extent and promptness of some of the above actions.

On the other hand, he told Hamas to end their rocket fire into Israel, but urged Israel only to reopen its border with Gaza. Nothing short of a full condemnation of Israel’s recent actions is acceptable, together with an immediate of US military aid.

Obama also pledged his support for efforts to prevent Hamas from rearming, which is excruciatingly hypocritical, given his country’s continued military aid to the other side. You can’t claim to support the peace process whilst continuing to arm one of the warring factions.

But like I say, credit where credit’s due, even if it is only a drop in a very deep ocean.

Did you see the unveiling of the emperor’s new clothes on television yesterday?

I caught only some of it, but I marvelled at the masses, awestruck and unable to see that their new emperor was as naked as they day he was born.

I was surprised that Jesus Christ himself didn’t put in an appearance. You’d almost have expected him to, given the level of rapture that was present. He probably didn’t want to be upstaged by the people’s new messiah.

The new saviour evidently brings salvation from a sordid history of slavery for the blacks and liberation from generations of hereditary guilt for the whites. Everyone’s a winner; except for Afghanistan, Palestine; and anyone else who stands in the way.

At the end of the day, when the rose-tinted spectacles are removed, there’s nothing but rhetoric and histrionics. Only this time, it’s met by blind faith and blinkers by the masses.

Desperate people want nothing more than something all-consuming to believe in, a sense that there’s something more to life than their own insignificant existence. That’s why prison inmates are susceptible to religious conversion and it’s why so many people are now entranced by the lure of an erudite man with half a brain. He represents hope, and for many people, the absence of hope is something with which they cannot cope.

The fact remains: the emperor has no clothes.

So far, Israel has:

• bombed 3 UN schools being used as refugee centres, killing dozens of civilians. An entire family of seven children perished in one of the raids. The UN had given the Israeli army the GPS coordinates of the schools and told them they were being used as refugee centres, after the Israelis themselves had told these people to leave their homes.

• shot at a UN convoy, bringing aid to Palestinian civilians. The driver of a lorry was killed.

• interfered with Red Cross workers trying to help victims of the violence. In one now notorious incident, the Israeli army left several Palestinian children inside a house to starve at the side of their mothers’ corpses. When the Red Cross wanted to search for further victims in the bombed out houses, they were told to leave the area by the Israeli army.

And today, reports reach the world that Israel evacuated around 110 civilians to a building on the 4th of January, and then proceeded to bomb it the next day. 30 people were killed, including a 5 month old baby.

The UN security council accepted a resolution today, calling for a lasting solution to the conflict and unfettered access to the wounded for relief workers. The US actually abstained from the vote. I suppose we should be grateful they didn’t veto it.

It didn’t really matter in the end, of course, because both Israel and Hamas blew off the resolution.

The scale of the Israeli disregard for international law does at least seem to have invoked the ire of at least some at the UN and all of those engaged in helping the victims of the conflict. There are now calls to investigate whether Israel is guilty of war crimes (yeah, I wonder), but let’s not cheer too soon. No-one who cares currently has the political clout to actually make such an investigation go ahead and western reporters still aren’t allowed into Gaza.

While I’m venting my spleen, I mustn’t fail to recognise the cowardly inaction of the Dutch government, who have so far defended Israel with the usual has-the-right-to-defend-itself nonsense, which is intended — and serves — to distract and deflect attention from the atrocities being perpetrated. A lot of people understandably find the notion of self-defence a reasonable one, but what is happening today in Gaza has little to do with defence. Clearly, in the eyes of Israel, the only good Palestinian is a dead one.