So, imagine. There’s a giant hole in the ground a mile deep somewhere in Britain. It appeared in a major populated area. Maybe it is the size of a football field (either type). Let’s say there’s a population of hungry crocodiles at the bottom. Maybe a lion or two. Also hungry. People are falling into this hole, and dying as a result. There’s a big public outcry.
The British Government’s reaction? They commission an inquiry. The panel of inquisitors will be headed by some reasonably distinguished person, usually male. If the hole is considered to be in an important enough area, i.e., the South of England, then the head of the committee will be a Lord or some sort, to show appropriate urgency. The panel will call several expert witnesses over about two years. Everybody will have forgotten about their outrage, and learned to live with the hole. People will still be falling down the hole, mind you, but it will become accepted. Then, after six further months of writing the report, Lord Somesort will publish the Somesort Report. The scab of the old wound will be torn off, and the media and the general public will go nuts all over again. The report will say “Take the animals out and put a cover over the hole”.
The government will not agree with the outcome of the report. Maybe they argue that the hole is not the root cause of people falling, it’s gravity. Maybe they argue there’s not enough money; It’s not the turn of the Millennium, and so there’s no reason to spend money on something you can’t call the “Millennium Hole”, and you can’t divert money to it in the name of the Olympics. So the argument rages on. The Somesort Report is placed on a dusty shelf somewhere and forgotten about.
This is a major part of how politics is done in Britain. We love our inquiries, and our reports, it seems. Why am I telling you this? People are arguing about a report, released yesterday. It was of the other sort, the one that comes from a think tank, so there’s no Lord, and it was not commissioned by the Government. It is the Chatham House Report, and it says: (I quote the Guardian’s paraphrase)
“Britain’s involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan contributed to the terrorist attacks in London”
The report goes on to say that the country is:
“riding as a pillion passenger with the United States in the war against terror”
So at this point I should spend several paragraphs weighing the pros and cons, agonizing about the issues. But you’ve read tons of argument about this already. You don’t want to hear me regurgitate it. You can Google any number of discussions by more well informed pundits. I’ll just say the first thing that came out my mind when I heard of the report yesterday: “Duh!”.
The government does not agree. Everybody is arguing. The report says a lot more than that, and you can read about it in the Guardian here and they have a link to the report here.
[update: Steve Bell cartoon about it here.]
(Alternative ending to our “Hole in the Ground” story, no less illustrative. A small, cute furry animal falls into the hole. The country goes wild with outrage. There are mindless attacks (sometimes violent) by animal rights groups on people who have anything to do with holes. Golfers, for example, and their caddies. The hole is immediately covered. We really love our animals, you know.)
-cvj
July 19th, 2005 at 5:44 am
I like this, the Irish are like this also. But they call them tribunals. But the results are the same. But the action here is to get it on RTE, have people sue in the courts to suppress it, and then broadcast it anyway. BTW, you left out the BBC part in all of this.
July 19th, 2005 at 5:48 am
Oh, yes. You’re so correct. The BBC’s role is important in this game. I shall have to have a rant about that some time. What aspect did you have in mind? -cvj
July 19th, 2005 at 5:54 am
One important difference. Holes in the ground tend to be passive objects, and their causes and remedies are usually pretty simple. If someone falls into a hole in the ground, you can blame them for not looking where they are going, or (if its a man-made hole) blame the hole-digger for not giving proper warning.
Terrorism, on the other hand, is not just a part of the terrain. It is perpetrated by people, people with intents, people that organize themselves to carry out despicable acts. Its more like a group of people that have taken upon themselves the mission of pushing as many people as possible into holes in the ground, if you really want to stretch your ill-conceived metaphor.
The tendency of those usually identified with the political “left” to seek and assign blame only to themselves and their governments, when confronted with such attacks, is extremely strange to me. It strikes me as highly conceited and ethocentric to think that Western governments are the ultimate instigators of all world events and trends.
Over half of Europe was conquered at one time by the nation of Islam. The conquest was not motivated by any “globalization” or “occupation of Muslim lands by the infidels”. Nor was there an “American military presence in Arab lands” (heck, there weren’t any Americans). Nope, they conquered like everybody else in those days — seeking power, money, land, resources, and seeking to impose their superiour culture on the unbelievers of Europe.
Of course such a situation seems impossible to repeat in this day and age. But nevertheless it is the mindset of those that detonate themselves in the busses and trains of London and Madrid. And no amount of self-flaggelation by Europe, and withdrawals of military forces from the hotbeds of Islamic fundamentalism will change that mindset. It may even encourage it, and cause it to spread.
July 19th, 2005 at 6:11 am
Thanks. The hole was not a metaphor for terrorism. I was not actually really focusing on terrorism at all, and would not have used a clumsy attempt at humour to discuss such a serious matter. I was focussing more on the peculiar manner in which things are done in the political sphere to bring about change, and setting the background for those not familiar with UK politics and would be wondering why people were spending so much time discussing a report which does not seem to be saying anything profound. Note that the report is not saying that it is the cause, but merely that it “contributed”. That’s my point. That time and effort are being wasted over such a rather mild assertion, and the refusal of the government to even consider the possibility officially. I repeat: “contributed”, not “caused”. The terrorism issue is way more complicated, and I did not address it specifically, and probably am not really qualified to do so. Cheers. -cvj
July 19th, 2005 at 9:46 am
Has any one heard about this author called Paul Williams who wrote a book talking about Al Queda already smuggled 20 suitcase nuclear bombs into US soil. And Paul believes that they will detonate them simutaneously in the next 90 days or before the end of 2005? This caught my attention on the Michael Savage Radio Show one day.
Unfortunately this story can not be discarded as pure fiction. I wish I could. Our governmental leaders openly admit the possibility that terrirists have obtained nukes and had them planted on US soil. Our defense secretary openly claimed that something much worse than 9/11 is inevitable, and it is only a question of when, not whether, such a thing could happen.
How are we going to fight death-defying, nuclear-armed terrists? Are we going to rain the whole Muslin world with missiles? It’s unthinkable. I wish physicists have not developed nuclear physics. Once it started and out of the Pandora box, there is no end in sight and soonner and later the whole human race will be wiped out. Can you teach a 3 year old child how to light a match, and at the same time tell him how not to light the whole house in flames? You can’t. The human is that 3 year old who had just learned the excitement of lighting a match, but yet do not know how to safe guard the house.
Quantoken
July 19th, 2005 at 10:55 am
The strange thing about this ‘report’ is that the section that discusses islamist terrorism is 2 pages long, with a single author, a university professor.
No footnotes or sources of information are given – the whole thing is more like a newspaper comment column than the type of government report implied by the main article.
Treating this as purely a political talking point seems a big mistake. How long does an attack actually take to plan and organise from recruitment to deployment? It would be useful to have someone who knew what they were talking abouttry ansd answer that.
If the answer is longer than 2 years, any wave of terror trigerred by Iraq has yet to break, which seems worth knowing.
soru
July 19th, 2005 at 11:08 am
Just for the record, Australia and New Zealand appoint royal commissions etc etc at many times the rate of other democracies. The reports go nowhere if either major party has an established policy on the topic of the report.
July 19th, 2005 at 5:23 pm
As for the BBC part of your story, I believe that you left out the reporter who was lowered into the hole to interview the hungry crocodiles about their dietary habits and wither they thought it a bit cheeky to have the lions dining with them.
July 19th, 2005 at 5:55 pm
Excellent! -cvj
July 20th, 2005 at 12:45 pm
What’s interesting, to push your metaphor a bit futher, is all the holes we ignore completely. Here in the U.S., we had 3,000 people pushed down the terrorist hole in 2001, while we have upwards of 10,000 people pushed down the drunken driver hole *every single year*.
July 20th, 2005 at 12:53 pm
A good point, although I will still not like to claim that my oversimplified hole story is meant to imply that any of these problems are as simply solved as “covering it up”. But I see what you’re saying.
Cheers,
-cvj
August 12th, 2005 at 3:29 am
[...] Despite my earlier remarks about certain frustrating aspects of the political process in the UK, I do remain impressed with other aspects. One of them is the fact that the politicians are expected to take part in extremely penetrating live interviews, where they have no (detailed) advance warning of the subject or the questions. The other thing I like is that fact that the morning radio – in particular the Today program on BBC’s Radio 4 – is the primary medium for this sort of serious political discussion, and as a member of the government, politicians have to rise to the challenge of being interviewed in this format on a regular basis. And oh yes, it can be a bit of a blood sport sometimes listening to a politician’s arguments being dissected live on prime time morning radio. One of the most skilled – probably the most skilled – surgeons in this realm of journalism is John Humphrys. (Pictured right in a photo I cheekily lifted from the BBC site, but only to point back to it.) [...]