Tony Blair is not exactly the Madonna of British politics, constantly reinventing himself. He may have grown older and greyer, but otherwise he has remained remarkably consistent. As he told the Labour conference in Brighton in south-east England: ”I don’t think as a human being, as a family man, I’ve changed at all.” Yet last week he announced the shift: ”I have changed as a leader.”
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/ 24 September 2004
Who could honestly describe the 2004 contest of George W Bush and John Kerry as a domestic affair? This election will be decisive not just for the United States but for the future of the world. Anyone who doubts it need only look at the past four years. Indeed, every citizen on the planet should have a say in who gets into the White House.
They are falling like skittles in a bowling alley. One by one, the arguments for the 2003 invasion of Iraq keep tumbling. First to go was the big one. War was necessary because Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Next was the insistent promise that a US-led conquest of Baghdad would end completely and for ever human rights abuses. The past week has sent one more Iraqi ninepin wobbling.
In American television they call it ”stunting”: the publicity-seeking novelty aimed at luring viewers back to a series they haven’t watched for months. Think cameo appearances by Brad Pitt on Friends. And now John Kerry’s campaign for the United States presidency did some stunting of its own. He, too, introduced a new character.
George W Bush may not have read much history but he likes making it. The recent run of insider accounts of the Bush White House, show the president is a man with a constant eye on the historians of the future, anxious to lend every moment just enough semi-Churchillian gravitas to make him look good in the decades to come. Bush is right about the lack of freedom in the region, but wrong about its solution, writes Jonathan Freedland.
It may thud in at a colossal 957 pages, but Bill Clinton’s autobiography still feels incomplete. One closes this fattest of tomes with a sneaking suspicion that the saga is far from over. Its final words should read: To be continued. Nothing more embodies the divisions in the United States than its leading dynasties, the Bushes and the Clintons.
I confess I used it myself. For a while after the invasion of Iraq it became the smug cliche du jour: Britain, according to this little nugget of conventional wisdom, was the ”gentle occupier”. With pride we pointed out that 30 years in Northern Ireland had taught the British army the softly, softly approach to ruling potentially hostile territory.
Ariel Sharon’s crowd would say that people are unfair to Israel — and the solution equally straightforward: the world should get off Israel’s back. But I draw a different conclusion. It is right to hold Israel to a high standard, right to expose the daily brutalities of occupation. But that standard must be applied equally. But if Israel can be branded an occupier, then so are the United States and Britain, writes Jonathan Freedland.
To the outside world, Israel’s assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin looks either indefensible or inexplicable or both. Some have moral objections to the killing of a quadriplegic cleric, wheeled out from morning prayers; others have legal worries about extra-judicial killings. The key to the assassination is Sharon’s plan to pull out of Gaza. But he has again strengthened extremism.
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/ 20 November 2003
All is calm, inside the bubble. Outside there may be baying demonstrators, clashing with dense lines of fluorescent-yellow police. Outside, a few streets away, there may sit a House of Commons bristling with anger at a war so many millions did not want. Jonathan Freedland takes a peek inside the two worlds US President George W Bush inhabited during his state visit to the UK this week.