A Rare Digression into Current Affairs;

So, tearing myself away for five minutes from pop music, packing up my belongings and generally moping around indecisively, I can’t help but notice that it's all kicking off in the Middle East at the moment.

What’s started it all off then, the more naïve observer might be tempted to ask. Well, I mean, who cares, what is it that EVER starts these things off..? Same old bunch of shamelessly nonsensical playground crap. So it goes.

One element I find particularly eye-opening though is the ‘accidentally’ recorded conversation between Bush and Blair, recorded the other day at the G8 summit. For interested parties who might not have seen it elsewhere, here it is in full (link);

BUSH to Blair: "I think Condi is going to go (to the Middle East) pretty soon."

BLAIR: "Right, that's all that matters, it will take some time to get that
together ... See, if she goes out she's got to succeed as it were, where as I
can just go out and talk."

BUSH: "See, the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hizbollah to
stop doing this shit and it's over."

BLAIR: "Who, Syria?"

BUSH: "Right ... What about Kofi? That seems odd. I don't like the sequence of it. His attitude is basically ceasefire and everything else happens."

BLAIR: "I think the thing that is really difficult is you can't stop this unless you get this international presence agreed." ...

BUSH: "I felt like telling Kofi to get on the phone with Assad and make
something happen. We're not blaming Israel. We're not blaming the Lebanese government."

Now initially, none of that seems TOO damning. I mean, in view of both leaders’ records for cheerfully skewering their own reputations in public at every opportunity. Bush’s blinkered pro-Israel stance is of course teeth-grindingly wrongheaded and self-serving, but it’s also tediously well-established. Aside from that, he appears to at least have an awareness of what’s going on and what he’s going to do about it, which is more than can be said for most of his public appearances. His last few sentences even sound like something a reasonable man might say. He even uses the word “irony”!

The more one reads the above transcript however, the more subtly alarming it starts to become. You see, whenever I watch/hear/read reports of international diplomacy in the news, I've always kind of assumed that we're getting a highly simplified version of events, and that in reality the important people concerned (regardless of my low opinion of their politics and morals) must spend a long time on things, painstakingly working through the economic concerns, hidden agendas, social consequences and likely public/media interpretation of their decisions, compiling and reading reports, consulting people in the know for advice etc. etc. – basically that beyond their necessarily bland and one-dimensional public statements, they must at least UNDERSTAND the various deeper levels to what is going on in the world and why, see their allies and their enemies and who has what to lose and what to gain, talk it through extensively in private with representatives of the other nations involved before deciding on any action and, y’know, generally take all this into account when formulating their evil sche… I mean, er, diplomatic strategies.

What the transcript above suggests though is that to a certain extent it actually IS just a case of "ok, so we'll make so-and-so go over there, and they'll sort them out, and maybe you go and make such-and-such shut up, and I'll give blah-blah a call, but don’t tell so-and-so or he’ll act like a jerk about it", as if they were working out a cantankerous PTA meeting or something.

Maybe we can reassure ourselves with the idea that we are merely listening to the mumbling figureheads representing larger and far more competent bodies of subordinates (ala Yes Minister), but the scary thought persists that maybe it really IS that chuckleheadedly simple.

And meanwhile the bombs continue to fly and people die, not even for the more traditional reasons of geo-political greed and calculated power-mongering, but just through plain… dumbness.

It’s kind of mind-boggling.