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Blair’s Wars — John Kampfner

Published on September 2, 2007Leave a comment

Cover of Blair's Wars

Blair’s Wars
John Kampfner
401 pages including index
published in 2004

Tony Blair is the first UK prime minister to take his country to war five times in six years. It’s this for which he will be remembered, especially for the last war he started, the War on Iraq. Yet, ccording to John Kampfner in Blair’s Wars, Blair was never that much interested in foreign policy until well after he became prime minister. It’s this seeming contradiction that forms the heart of this book, an examination of what drove Blair to go to war so often and how he managed his wars.

John Kampfner is the current editor of the New Statesman and before that was a longtime foreign correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, chief political correspondent for the Financial Times, as well as political commentator for the Today programme at the BBC. In all a fairly typical representative of the political media elite, who describes himself as leftist and whose opinions, as showcased on his website, are firmly in the mainstream of British politics, even if not necessarily shared by the British voter.

This background is echoed in Blair’s Wars: this is a book about the politics behind the wars, not the wars themselves. So there’s plenty of material about how Blair tried to get UN approval for the War on Iraq, how he succeeded or failed to persuaded the Americans to do something or to not do something, all from an insider’s point of view, with various senior advisors describing their roles in these processes. Kampfner is very good at describing the mechanics of this, but it is all treated somewhat like a ballgame, in that who wins these behind the scenes political struggles and the struggle itself is given more attention than what the outcome of such a struggle means.

In de Ban van Fortuyn — Jutta Chorus and Menno de Galan

Published on August 6, 2007Leave a comment

Cover of In de Ban van Fortuyn

In de Ban van Fortuyn
Jutta Chorus and Menno de Galan
462 pages, including index and notes
published in 1990

The murder of Pim Fortuyn on May 6th, 2002 was the first political murder in the Netherlands to have happened since the seventeenth century. As such, it was the end of an era, a catalyst for change whose consequences are still being worked out today. Dutch politics lost its innocence that day. Fortuyn’s murdered thought he saved the Netherlands from a very dangerous man, but in reality he only succeeded into making Fortuyn into a martyr, a handy symbol for lesser people to sell their politics with. Though the movement he founded has now almost disappeared from politics, Fortuyn’s legacy lives on.

Fittingly, In de Ban van Fortuyn (which means something like “Captivated by Fortuyn”) opens with the day of his murder and the immediate aftermath of it, before it trackbacks to Fortuyn’s youth and early career, then to slowly move forward through his stormy career, his murder and what happened to his party afterward. The authors are two well respected Dutch journalists who were already following Fortuyn, almost from the start of his political career. The result is a well told history of Fortuyn, sympathetic to Fortuyn himself, if not necessarily his politics, but without losing their objectivity.

The Arms Bazaar — Anthony Sampson

Published on July 22, 2007Leave a comment

Cover of The Arms Bazaar

The Arms Bazaar
Anthony Sampson
340 pages
published in 1977

Anthony Sampson made his reputation through a series of books examining the realities of economic and political power in Britain and the world. His Seven Sisters for example describes the history of Big Oil, while his most famous work, The Anatomy of Britain, first published in 1962 and regularly updated, investigated the ruling classes in the UK. The Arms Bazaar
is a logical extension of this work, setting out the history and current practises of the international arms trade.

Now The Arms Bazaar was published in 1977, in a world very different from the one we currently live in. The Cold War was still more then a decade away from ending, the Soviet Union in fact seemed more strong then ever, while both Iran and Iraq were still ruled by friendly dictators and the Vietnam war was only two years in the past. At first glance then, The Arms Bazaar seems
to be only of historical interest, a current affairs book whose current affairs has long since become history.

That would be wrong however. The world may have changed a lot since 1977, but the realities of the arms trade have remained the same. A book like The Arms Bazaar, which explains the history of the arms trade, its inner workings and how it influences both the domestic politics and the foreign policy of countries like the UK, France and the US, is therefore still relevant. It helps that Anthony Sampson is able to explain complex issues in a way that makes them easy to understand, without simplifying them.

Year 501: The Conquest Continues – Noam Chomsky

Published on July 15, 2007Leave a comment

Cover of Year 501

Year 501: the Conquest Continues
Noam Chomsky
331 pages
published in 1993

Noam Chomsky has long been a bogeyman not just for the American right, but also the “moderate” left. He has been accused of everything, from being an apologist for Pol Pot and Milosevic, to being reflexively anti-american. If you actually read his work you know here’s no ground for those accusations, but who reads someone who everybody in the mainstream media portrays as an anti-american clown? Even when we should know better, we do get influenced by what we read and hear; I know far too many people who would like Chomsky but who are turned off by what they’ve heard about him.

If you could only get those people to read one of his books, they would, if not agree with him, at least realise that Chomsky has good reasons for condemning America’s foreign policies, that it isn’t a kneejerk anti-americanism that drives him. That book should not be Year 501: The Conquest Continues however, as this is such an angry, ranting denouncement of everything the US has ever done wit its foreign policy that it would turn off anybody who wasn’t already convinced of America’s general mendacity. It’s hardly a subtle or gentle introduction to the subject.