February 2007 Tallrite Blogs

When Weakness Is Strength

In contests, strong people defeat weak people, right? Usually yes, but paradoxically weakness can sometimes be a strength.

A chain is only as strong as the weakest link. If you are that weakest link it can give you disproportionate strength in negotiating with the other links since their survival depends on you.

This happens all the time in coalition governments where the dominant party needs just a few more votes to gain a majority and there is a tiny party waiting in the wings and willing to provide them. In return, however, the small party expects goodies - like juicy ministerial positions - that are out of kilter with the few votes they bring to the table, yet the strong dominant party has no option but to agree. Coalition policies thus end up disproportionately driven by the ideology of the tiny party.

A (parochial) case in point is Ireland, where the huge Fianna Fail party, which sports no fewer than 215 legislators are in a ruling coalition with the tiny (and not much liked - latest poll: 1%) Progressive Democrats, with just thirteen. Yet the PDs hold two of the eight heavy-weight ministerial positions, which effectively means 25% of the power for 6% of the seats (and that 1% in popularity).

Banks also know all about the strength of weakness. They have a saying to the effect that if you owe them a thousand €uro/Pounds/Dollars they have you by the throat, but if you owe them a million then the grip changes hands because you then have them by the throat. The bank dare not countenance default on a major loan. Maybe its millions vs billions, but you get the point.

The much derided President George W Bush is finding himself in the middle of a similar paradox. For the more unpopular he becomes, whether in Congress, in the Senate, among Democrats and even with his own Republicans, the less people approve of him across the country, the stronger he actually becomes. It's not pleasant being hated by nearly everyone, but for him it does have some distinct advantages, particularly since he faces no further election. Ever. It's unrealistic to suppose - no matter what he does - that he can ever regain the approval ratings anywhere close to the dizzy 90s that immediately followed 9/11, and pointless to try.

On the other hand, his approval is now so dismal (in the 20s) it is unlikely to go much lower, and even if it does so what? It won't increase the pain; that's already at maximum.

This gives him extraordinary freedom of action. For, notwithstanding his apparent lame-duck status arising out of his supreme unpopularity, Mr Bush is still the president of the United States and still the commander-in-chief. He can still do stuff. And from his point of view, and to quote the song, things can only get better when he does that “stuff”. He has nothing to lose (though it's true his party and successor do).

The Iraq Study Group, populated by various revered figures, recommended that the way for Mr Bush to solve the Iraq problem was to grovel to Syria and Iran while running away from Iraq. Mr Bush went to some length to tell everyone how much he truly valued the work of the ISG, and then ignored it.

He came up instead with his plan for a military surge to subdue Baghdad, involving much closer integration with Iraqi forces, while making clear that inadequate participation in the plan on the part of the Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki would not be tolerated. Displaying a ruthless streak rarely seen he got rid of the previous commanders in Iraq, Generals Abizaid and Casey, replacing them with General Petraeus, who was the main author of the surge plan.

The surge plan itself has drawn howls of protest, mainly from Democrats - both the politicians and ordinary people - but also from very many Republicans. Indeed so loud has been the wailing and gnashing of teeth and rending of garments that you can't help feeling they betoken a great fear that the plan might actually succeed.

So why don't they stop lame duck Bush in his tracks? For despite the objectors' distinct majorities in both Congress and the Senate they haven't.

Firstly, the Senate voted unanimously to approve the appointment of Gen Petraeus whose specific mission is to deliver the surge that they say they so strongly disapprove of.

Then it was Congress's turn. With its Democratic majority, enlarged by turncoat Republicans, it passed a motion disapproving the surge of which the commander had just been approved. But it made the motion “non-binding”, so essentially pointless. Oh, and at the same time, the Congressmen and women included a sentence saying how much they “support” the troops, a contradictory and equally vacuous term, which will give little comfort to Gen Petraus and his men and women in the armed forces in Iraq.

However next month, they will be voting again. This time to consider the $100 bn requested by Mr Bush to pay for the surge of which they disapprove. Yet - extraordinarily - hardly any of them intends to vote it down, for fear of being blamed for future military failures or excessive American casualties.

How we enjoyed it when Senator John Kerry the flip-flopper earnestly told the world in 2003, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion [for the Iraq invasion] before I voted against it”. Well, the rest of his party and many Republicans seem to have caught a similar disease.

But what on earth are the disapproving legislators playing at? I don't think even they know. All they can observe is that the lone lame duck moron, at the weakest that any American president has been in a generation, is somehow turning out to be stronger than their combined might of 435 Congressmen/women plus 100 Senators.

Mr Bush, for better or for worse (and I think for better) is getting his way. The American/Iraqi onslaught prompted by the surge is happening, and though it's still early days, the results are already encouraging.

	The Iraqis have reported that Abu Ayyub al-Masri, who replaced Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (killed last year) as the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, has been wounded, his aide Abu Abdullah al-Majemaai captured and his second in command, Abu Adawa al-Majahami killed;
	Muqtada al Sadr and the heads of his Mahdi Army militia have fled to Iran, and
	as a result the security situation in Baghdad appears to be calming, with a dramatic reduction in sectarian killings, from 40-50 per night to just ten.
	The Iraqi prime minister is calling the surge a “dazzling success”.

Only time will tell whether this is a temporary or permanent improvement. But the outcome for the moron is straightforward: things either get better (good for him) or get worse (no change for him). He can't lose. His weakness is his strength.

And this strength, viewed through an adversary's telescope, can be enlarged further by the adversary's imagination. People can become intoxicated with the exercise of power, but they can also be regarded by others as intoxicated without actually being intoxicated.

Remember how Mrs Thatcher, against all expectation and to considerable consternation around the world, re-took the Falkland Islands from Argentina? From then on, many regarded this middle-aged house-wife prime minister of a clapped-out medium-sized country as a heavily-armed madwoman drunk on power, who must be approached with extreme caution. In particular, the Chinese Communists who run China suddenly started taking her seriously in the negotiations over the future of Hong Kong, a colony they had long proclaimed their willingness to march in and seize at any time. You could never tell what that madwoman might do if provoked too far. Britain and Hong Kong were no match for China in any confrontation, yet the madwoman reputation turned their weakness into negotiating strength. As a result of the subsequent negotiations between Britain and China, Hong Kong was given a fighting chance at a democratic future that it would never otherwise have had.

Well, Mr Bush has earned a bit of a madman reputation of his own (all that Bushitler guff). Combining this with his strength-through-weakness will also serve him well if he has the courage and will to confront the other great existential challenge of our times.

Iran.

Few but the most obtuse can doubt the ingrained malevolence of the theocratic regime that runs Iran. Since it first invaded American sovereign territory in 1979 (the US Embassy in Teheran) and suffered no adverse consequences, it has been inflicting on Western targets a steady dose of outrages, always with virtual impunity.

Iran created Hezbollah in 1982 as its militant arm to do its dirty work abroad (including, last summer, in Lebanon). In turn Hezbollah also sports its own militant arm, Islamic Jihad.

Over the years, Hezbollah has been very busy and very effective. Professor Victor Davis Hensen reckons that before 9/11 it had killed more Americans than any other terrorist group in the world.

In his usual methodical style, Mark Humphrys lists and links its murderous antics. I have incorporated some more from Camera (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America).

And then there is the still-valid death fatwa (with bounty) imposed by that late, unlamented paedophile Ayatollah Ruholla Khomenei on Salman Rushdie in 1989 for writing the Satanic Verse, because it is irreverent towards the prophet Muhammad. It has not (yet) been carried out, though a number of publishing staff have been killed or injured.

Meanwhile, in case we are still slow-learners, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has told us that Israel must be wiped off the map, and former president Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani would like to use nuclear weapons to do so. And he's not bothered about retaliation because Iran is so big he thinks it can absorb it.

This is today's Iran under its depraved theocratic dictatorship. Given this utterly amoral track record, if its openly-expressed nuclear ambitions do not constitute a threat to Western civilisation (not just Israel), I don't know what does. If there is one thing we should have learnt since 9/11 (indeed since Karl Marx's Das Kapital and Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf), it is that when totalitarians threaten bad things, you cannot afford not to believe them. It's the one area where they don't tell lies (unlike many democratic politicians issuing empty threats!).

Some say Iran is bluffing, that it is nowhere as near to completing its bomb as many in the west fear. If so, it is playing a very dangerous game. For it was Saddam's subterfuge in allowing the west to believe, wrongly, that he had WMD ready for immediate deployment, which triggered the invasion of Iraq, his ousting, the violent death of his only sons and eventually his own execution.

So back to George Bush, the weakest president any of us can remember.

He has said in the past that he feels he should not leave the “Iran problem” to his successor. Just this month he observed, “It’s an important issue whether or not Iran ends up with nuclear weapons. People are going to look back and say, you know, how come they couldn’t see the impending danger? What happened to them?”

If you think about it, his is a very moral position to take, because it is unthinkable that in America's new anti-war climate the next president will ever be in a position to attack Iran. Good, some might say. But it also means he will never be able to use the threat of force in his negotiations, which will make him far less effective than otherwise. (Or her, if it's Hilary.)

A recent EU report, written by the staff of Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, leads analysts to suggest that Iran may need only two more years to produce its first crude nuclear bomb, which happens to be the time remaining to Mr Bush. It's no good waiting until Iran drops such a bomb on Israel to be convinced of its capabilities plus malign intent.

So Mr Bush is tightening up the rhetoric and screws on Iran.

	He claims that roadside bombs used by Shi'ites in Iraq come from Iran;
	Iranian diplomats/agents in Iraq have been captured who turned out to be Iranian special forces (Al Quds) operatives;
	some suspect America behind two recent bombings within Iran;
	the latest (rather flawed) agreement constraining North Korea's nuclear programme takes it off the table as a potential nuclear ally for Iran.

Whether activities such as these are mere bluster to frighten the Iranians into making a no-nukes deal or preparation for some kind of military strike against Iran no-one except Mr Bush knows.

However, it must be plain to all - and especially the Iranians - that attacking Iran, whether to destroy its nuclear facilities or simply to take out the current theocratic regime, is well within Mr Bush's capability, and if push comes to shove he will certainly do it. Whether his craziness is real or imagined, they cannot afford to dismiss it.

It is his very weakness that gives him strength.

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Gorgeous but Irresponsible
Ségolène Royal

Isn't Ségolène Royal gorgeous?

I know she is the socialist candidate, but I have been secretly hoping she would win the French presidential election, just to brighten the world of international politics. I was not in the least put off by her various recent gaffes, which to me just added to her charm.

	So some Canadian prankster fooled her into thinking she was chatting on the phone with the premier of Quebec;
	she needlessly praised the speediness of the Chinese Communists' justice system;
	she doesn't know how many nuclear submarines France has.

Big deal. Why, a few years back, didn't a certain presidential candidate of a (OK, the) major world power not even know who was leading India or Pakistan, yet went on to win eight years of power?

But then Ms Royal got serious and earlier this month delivered her first manifesto speech.

Prior to this, her staff had held 6,500 “thematic debates” across France; some 2.7 million people allegedly visited her website; 135,000 sent in written contributions. Seventy moderators sorted and stirred all this stuff to produce a “grand synthesis” of “notebooks of hope”, which a team of no fewer than twenty then used to construct her two-hour speech. A “presidential pact”, she called it, with a 100-point programme. Whew!

So with such intensity of research and manpower, there was no chance of gaffes or slips of the tongue. Every word deadly serious.

She delivered her speech in a packed hall near Paris. “A fairer France would be a stronger France”, she declared, to delirious applause.

But what did those words actually say? Well they provided a blueprint guaranteed to drag poor France further down the wealth-destroying spiral it's already locked in. Here's a sample.

She intends to raise the minimum monthly wage to €1,500, which is a recipe for job destruction where joblessness has long been stuck at over 9%.

	With a 35-hour week, this translates to about €10/hour, or 20% more than Ireland's.
	Yet Ireland boasts a GDP per head 45% higher than France's, with half its unemployment rate.

She'll raise taxes for companies with the temerity to distribute profits to shareholders rather than reinvesting them.

She'll create a hundred new state agencies, with funds and spending programmes, whose remit will include

	establishing a “national agency for re-industrialisation” to stop outsourcing;
	“guaranteed purchasing power and lifelong housing” to all (yes, all)
	raising of pensions and disability benefits;
	building of 120,000 low income housing units every year;
	requiring every town to build emergency housing for a thousand homeless people;
	paying deposits for tenants who could not otherwise rent apartments;
	requisitioning housing left vacant for more than two years;
	a diploma and a first job given to all young people (yes, given, yes to all);
	creation of half a million “trampoline jobs” for them;
	Payment of an “autonomy allowance” and a loan of €10,000 to every young person entering “active life” (yes, every);
	Raising unemployment pay to 90% of the last salary for the first year;
	Giving free medical care to everyone under the age of 16;
	Providing contraception free to all females under 25;
	creating 100,000 jobs by committing France to “environmental excellence” (whatever that is);
	reorientation of the Common Agricultural Policy aid “towards rural development” (reorientation towards disappearance would make more sense);
	fighting “unfair competition” and outsourcing, by establishing minimum levels of (ie raising) corporation tax.

Yet not a whisper about costs. And apart from that last little hint about raising corporation tax and the earlier one about taxing companies which don't reinvest, not a word about where the money for all this largesse is going to come from, other than a hopeful “reform of government bureaucracy”. Yeh, right!

Nonetheless, she assures everyone, this would “reconcile the French with business to get France out of deficit-spending and achieve social progress”.

Dear oh dear. If only the delectable “Ségo” as she is affectionately known could just stick to blunders about submarines, she would be far less irresponsible and threatening.

I think I've just fallen out of love with her.

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Saint Valentine: From Clubs to Chocolate

In this past week of roses, chocolates and pink champagne, it is interesting to learn something about Saint Valentine who started it all, as largely recounted by Rory Egan.

A martyr for the cause of matrimony and patron saint of love, his remains lie buried in a casket in a Carmelite church in central Dublin. People from all over the world come to his shrine to get their wedding rings blessed or just to say a prayer to this most interesting of saints.

The Catholic church actually recognises three St Valentines. One, a little-known saint, died in Africa. But the two that lived in Italy, one in Rome and the other in Terni, could have been the same person. It is this Roman St Valentine (Valentinus) that we have venerated all these years.

In the 3rd century AD, Claudius II, or Claudius the Cruel as he was known, ruled Rome. Claudius banned marriage, on pain of death, saying it distracted his soldiers and made them less likely to leave their wives to go off and fight. He had a point.

The Christians of Rome, however, thought it a terrible suggestion and still sought to get married. So their priests, one of whom was Valentine, married the sweethearts in secret.

Claudius learnt of Valentine's disobedience and sentenced him to death by clubbing, stoning and then decapitation.

A prison guard friendly to Valentine asked him to help him with his blind daughter, Julia. So Valentine taught Julia to appreciate things with her other senses and to regard her blindness as a gift, another way of “seeing” things. The night before Valentine was to receive his fatal clubbing, he wrote a note to Julia, urging her to stay close to God, enclosed a flower and signed it “From your Valentine”. He was executed the following day, 14th February 269 AD, near a gate that was later named Porta Valentini (now Porta del Popolo). When Julia opened the note she could see the bright yellow crocus inside. Her blindness was cured and the miracle was attributed to St Valentine; which sent him on the road to sainthood. That is why Valentine cards are traditionally signed “From your Valentine”.

In the time of Valentine, 14th February happened to be a holiday to honour Juno - the Queen of the Roman Gods and Goddesses. The Romans also knew her as the Goddess of women and marriage. It had long been a tradition that young men and women - normally strictly segregated - would draw names out of a jar and then spend the day together, which sometimes led to love and marriage.

This is a story to stir all good husbands, fiancés, boyfriends and stalkers to organise, in good time, a card, a few goodies and a night out on the town.

How come St Valentine reposes in Dublin?

In 1865 a young Irish Carmelite priest, Fr John Spratt, so impressed Pope Gregory XVI with his sermons and work with the poor, that he gave him the casket containing the (clubbed) remains of St Valentine, which Fr Spratt brought back to his home church in Dublin.

Now that was a Valentine goodie with a difference, and a bit better than chocolates. Yet those who take their sweethearts out, er, clubbing on St Valentine's day are celebrating his martyrdom in a way they mightn't have imagined.

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