Greene’s Insite

Did Benyamin Netanyahu really take an important step forward by committing himself (sort of) to a two-state settlement of the conflict with the Palestinians? Don’t be silly. A Palestinian state that meets the conditions Bibi set -demilitarized, recognising Israel as a Jewish state and abandoning its claim on Jerusalem as its capital- would be a bantustan, not a truly independent entity. Still, so used have we become to hardline, ruthless Israeli behaviour that even this con trick is now being hailed in some western quarters as an encouraging sign that the peace process is once again a going concern. Don’t believe it; the Palestinians themselves aren’t fooled.

What Netanyahu aimed to do was play for time. The election of Barack Obama as president of the United States must have sent a ripple of disquiet through Israel’s nationalist camp. Would the days of limitless, unquestioning American economic, political and military support come to an end? If so, what then? And there was Obama, quick off the mark, dropping all sorts of heavy hints about the desirability of a halt to the construction of further settlements and -from Israel’s point of view- hobnobbing far too chummily with the Arabs. After all, no guy with the middle name Hussein had ever been taken seriously by Netanyahu and suddenly there was one he couldn’t possibly ignore. Hell, this US administration might even stop routinely vetoing anti-Israel resolutions at the Security Council! Other anxieties surfaced: America’s concern at Iran’s nuclear programme might, in time, be matched by a similar unease about Israel’s fully developed and ready-for-use nuclear arsenal. Face it: when the mushroom clouds billow upwards and humans die in their tens of thousands in the blinking of an eye, does it really matter whether the guy who dropped the bombs was wearing a white or a black hat?

So Netanyahu’s subtext consisted of a message to Obama (’seriously Mr. President, we want nothing more than to live in peace and security with our neighbours, but you’ll understand that we have legitimate concerns, the buggers want to kill us in our beds’) and one to his own political friends (’don’t worry boys, we’ll drag this out for as long as we can -four years, or even eight- and hope for better times and a new George W. Bush’). His less subtle message to the Palestinians -unchanged from before- was: ‘up yours buddy’. 

So  if Barack Obama doesn’t want to become the next in a long line of US Presidents to be defeated by the sheer intractability of the Middle East problem, here’s what I think he should do. To the Palestinians he should pledge his full, unwavering support for a fully fledged independent state, with all the trappings of proud nationhood. These must include full territorial integrity, control of their borders, a viable econonomy and a modern national defence force. Equally full and unwavering should be his support of the Iraelis’ right to a state where they can live safely without fear of attack, where they can prosper and start the process of digesting, and ultimately filing away as history, the horrors of the past. The Holocaust lies 65 years behind us and, for that reason, should no longer play a part in driving Israeli policy. Whatever dangers Israel may face in the future, annihilation isn’t one of them.

But words are cheap and pledges of support in themselves will not bring a settlement an inch closer. Without an extra something from Washington, the immovable object and the irresistible force in the Middle East will continue to grind against each other and, at regular intervals, shed each other’s blood. That extra something should be a stern warning to both sides that, from now on, America’s support no longer comes without strings attached. Actually the Palestinians know this already, they’ve been given short shrift on many occasions; it’s Israel that has so far benefited from Washington’s blank cheques.  I feel that if Obama were to make clear to the protagonists that unreasonable intransigence and resorting to violence will forfeit US support and even lead to sanctions things might start moving in earnest. The removal of the word ‘unconditional’ from the language of Obama’s Middle East rhetoric will work wonders.

Something similar, of course, can be expected from this side of the Atlantic. The powerhouse that is the European Union has strong economic tools at its disposal. If the Palestinians won’t play ball, if the Israelis keep stalling, we’ll set Tony Blair on them. To you he may be a greedy, self-serving, sanctimonious squirt and utterly useless with it (I know he is to me) but in Jerusalem and Ramallah he commands great respect. Something to do with him being a recent convert to Catholicism, I believe.   

I’m just back from Spain, where the winter was mild, sometimes a bit rainy but more often beautifully sunny. The fish was fresh, the wine fruity and the carpet of olive groves that covers much of Andalusia as lush and verdant as ever. For four blissful months, blogging was the farthest thing from my mind. Political upheavals, natural disasters, war and pestilence, even the start of Barack Obama’s presidency: what did I care, when there were going to be tapas variadas and a bottle of Rioja crianza for lunch? 

Well, here I am in rain- and windswept Holland finding that, apart from a few familiar features such as a still biting economic crunch, fuel prices at the pump rising -but never falling- at triple the rate of a barrel of crude and a stifling fiscal climate that hits the worst off worst, quite a lot has changed. Not just in this country, but around the world. For one thing -and I believe this may have to do with the new US President’s penchant for straight, honest talking- openness and transparency in government are beginning to spread across the world like an oil slick. Nowhere is this trend more spectacularly on the move than in the United Kingdom. Gone are the days of’ ‘tradition, old boy’ , ‘mum’s the word’ and ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’. The recent publication by the Daily Telegraph of details of how Westminster’s parliamentarians  fiddle their expenses has caused such an eruption of popular indignation and contempt that change -formerly avoided like the Black Plague in a country where even things that were seriously broke never got fixed- is now by general consent seen as the only way forward. And not just a bit of change, no tinkering with a few rules about how many toilet seats the taxpayer CAN be expected to fork out for, or strict minimum and maximum age limits for relatives one wishes to put on one’s payroll, no: a complete overhaul of the entire parliamentary system is in order, nothing less will do.                                                                                                                                                                          

I find all this wildly exciting. In a few short months the UK seems to have become ready to change from the most hidebound, backward-looking Punch-and-Judy show in the western world into something altogether new and untried: a transparent democracy where MP’s serve the voters rather than the other way around, where only truth is spoken at the despatch box, where grown men do no longer prance about in tights and silver-buckled shoes and where the expenses system will only compensate honourable members for costs incurred in the actual execution of their parliamentary work. Stationery, paper clips and Bic ballpoints, rather than plasma screen TV’s, duck sanctuaries, motor mowers and swimming pools, will henceforth exercise the minds of the good people in the Fees Office. In time, the pall of cynical profiteering will lift from the Palace of Westminster, to be replaced by the shining aura of selfless devotion to the nation’s good. I love it already. Other cash-guzzling, bone lazy, self-serving, pensioned-up-to-the-hilt parliamentarians of the western world: take note. You may well be next. My very personal message, as King of Rumania, to the boys and girls we employ in The Hague is ‘Repent! The Day Of Judgement Loometh!’ Or maybe it loometh not; the Dutch are so used to forking out over the odds that they’ve become indifferent to the bloodlettings they suffer on a regular basis.

In the UK meanwhile, with the doodah having hit the fan in earnest, Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his government -for want of a better word- are staring into the abyss. Granted, the expenses scandal has tainted politicians of all major parties, but New Labour has the dubious honour of out-defrauding the competition by some distance. Not surprising, of course; the snooty Tories with their posh accents and estates in the country can afford to be casual about money. For their part, the woolly, goody-two-shoes Liberal Democrats (most of them anyway) have probity and thrift tattooed on their frontal lobes. But ever since, under that tireless promoter of Middle East peace, Tony Blair, the Labourites left behind their beer and sandwiches and headed for the champagne and caviar, the lust for easy cash has taken a firm hold on them. Money For Old Rope, whyever not? With Tony and Cherie showing how it’s done, cynical self-enrichment has taken over from class solidarity as the Holy Grail of Socialism, UK style.

Whether the British Labour Party will be willing (or able) to reclaim the hearts and minds of its former core supporters (the poor, the weak, the very young, the very old) remains to be seen. Abandoning greedy habits will not be easy, but a general purge of wrongdoers, followed by the imposition of a new, draconian expenses system will help. Still, that is not Gordon Brown’s only problem. Public outrage, now that it has flared up so searingly, will also turn on the failures of Labour in 12 years of power. Going to war on a lie is the worst, but by no means the only,  low point of the party’s disastrous stewardship of the nation. In last week’s local and EU elections, voters remembered with great clarity the selling off of the country’s gold reserves at the bottom of the market, the cynical -or rather: desperate- raid on pension funds, the insulting 75 pence a week increase for OAP’s, the soaring levels of national and personal debt, the  Millennium Dome disaster, the problems caused by unchecked immigration, the cavalier handling and subsequent loss of confidential data, a health system in crisis despite massive cash injections, embarrassing U-turns (most recently over the Gurkhas) and a record of chicanery and skulduggery of which the Medicis would have been proud. Result: electoral disaster now, with more mayhem at the polls to follow.

The funny thing is: ten, twelve years from now we’ll probably be saying much the same things about the New Conservatives.

I wish I’d paid more attention at school when my physics teacher explained the Law of the Communicating Vessels. As I remember it, it had something to do with a number of tubes of various shapes, open at the top and linked to each other at the bottom. Fill the tubes with water and, by dint of the fact that they communicate, the water will reach the same level in every one of the tubes. Pour more water into one of the tubes and the level will rise in all of them to the same height. If I forget something, let me know. Of course, if one of the tubes is cut off from the others, the principle no longer applies. Water poured into the isolated tube will not affect the level of liquid in the rest, and vice versa.

As I see it, that’s what is wrong with the world of finance. Huge sums of taxpayers’ money are being poured by governments into the world of banking, in an attempt to restore confidence and get the economy ticking over again. The banking tube should communicate with the other tubes (with names like ‘manufacturing’, ‘consumer spending’, ‘high street retailing’, ‘mortgage lending’ etc.) for the benefit of the whole. But it doesn’t. Of the zillions of our cash that have found their way into the vaults of many large financial institutions little or nothing has so far be used to relieve the pressure on the rest of us. All that huge capital just sits there; some of it is syphoned off into the pockets of the very greed-driven bobos that got us into our current predicament but that’s it.

In the absence of any sign of largesse from Mister Banker, governments -having fleeced us first- are now trying desperately to improve the economy and stave off a slide into deep recession by means of a raft of what are called ’stimulating measures’. Apparently, Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown has some very useful ideas on the subject, or so he believes. While the bankers, sated with our cash, have closed the shutters and gone for a well-earned nap it’s now industy that’s clamouring for assistance. Car makers in particular are in need of financial transfusion (although if you see what my local Opel dealer charges for a simple service job you might wonder why). General Motors, Volkswagen and Chrysler -once emblematic of corporate success- are in dire straits, as are car makers in China. Manufacturers of microchips and semiconductors, ditto. Computer makers, the same. Share prices are plummetting, thousands of lay-offs announced and all because consumers are not buying.

I, of course, am one such consumer and I resent the accusation that, through my enforced frugality, I am stunting the growth of my country’s economy. Yes, I AM buying less. I haven’t made a major purchase since just before the 2008 World Cup, when I treated myself to a new flatscreen TV. There’ll be no presents at Christmas and the new car will have to wait until the current one falls apart. Eating out has been curtailed, with a surprising side effect: when you do it twice a month you enjoy it more than if you do it twice a week. Less, I assure you, is more. Doesn’t apply to absolutely everything, but there you are.

So what is Gordon Brown doing to get the Brits rushing to the shops again?  Not to put too fine a point on it, he wants them all to spend as if there’s no tomorrow. If they haven’t got the cash to do it, they are encouraged to buy on the never-never, overload their credit and storecards and raid their childrens’ piggybanks. The government itself is leading the way. Already in debt to the tune of trillions, it intends to borrow even more, in the hope that, some day soon, the wheels of the economy will start turning again. Countries around the world, the Netherlands included, are looking on in awe as the British put their grannies up for sale on Ebay and then rush to the shops to buy the latest Blackberry. Will it work?

No, it won’t. You see, the suggestion that all of a sudden the whole world is plunged into financial crisis is complete baloney. Communicating vessels, you see? If things go down the pan in one part of the world, they must be rubbing their hands in glee somewhere else. There wasn’t, from one day to the next, x-zillion dollars’ worth of wealth less in the world. OK, so a lot of national economies are down on their uppers. That means that somewhere, some really smart people with no conscience are sitting on a mountain of unearned cash. Let’s go get these guys, whoever they are, and send them to Guantanamo Bay before Obama closes it down. Those guilty of this astronomic theft pose a greater danger to our way of life -and indeed our actual lives, just wait for the suicides- than Al Qaeda ever did. Yet we spend endless financial and human resources on exchanging pot shots with the Taliban  in the Afghan X-box than on bringing these criminals to justice.

Until I see some sign that my government is ready to stop pumping my money into the pockets of undeserving bankers and jet-setting captains of industry I will be sitting on my savings, guarding them with a loaded gun. No, wait. Better yet: I think I’ll buy myself a villa in Spain, a yacht, an entire vintage of Bollinger and that Ferrari Testarossa I’ve always wanted and then go to The Hague to ask Finance Minister Wouter Bos to pay the bills for me. Fifty million euros will do it. How’s that for the cheapest bail-out ever? Fifty million wouldn’t keep the General Motors boardroom in Courvoisier and Romeo y Julietas for more than a week. I, on the other hand, would never bother Wouter Bos ever again.

We seem to have been living with them for ages already: the Alaska governess who, like a modern Mary Poppins, parachuted down on an unprepared nation to introduce madness and mayhem into the presidential campaign and the entirely man-made financial crisis which, although it began in the USA, is now engulfing most of the western world. Both are essentially American phenomena. Mrs. Palin is the rootin-tootin rifle-toting, moose hunting frontier girl who knows you can’t get a man with a gun, but it’s fun to try. The credit crunch likewise is pure Americana. It is the direct result of rampant capitalism in its purest form; the kind of captalism in which the nation’s riches -the wealth produced by its workers, the tax paid by its taxpayers- are played around with by a bunch of greedy gamblers who might as well be sitting around a Mississippi river boat poker table. Billions are gained and billions are lost in a merry-go-round that will only keep turning so long as everybody is prepared to believe, naively, that today’s setback will inevitably be followed by tomorrow’s stunning success. But if only a few people take fright and stop believing, the bubble bursts; everybody holds on to what he’s got and those who’ve gambled too much and lost go under. Unless, of course, the taxpayer is willing to bail them out.

Were this exclusively America’s problem then it would be easy for me to sympathize. A few words of consolation, some good advice and best wishes for the future: they’d flow out of my keyboard like honey. But I can’t. Thanks to that modern evil known as globalization the world of banking and lending is now spread across so many countries and its workings so obtuse and impenetrable that no ordinary person can ever know what’s going on. Americans can’t afford to keep up their mortgage payments and, somehow related, a European bank goes down the pan. Washington votes to spend billions of tax dollars to keep banks from going under -dollars that won’t now be spent on public health, education, crime-fighting and anti-poverty programmes- while at the same time the entire economy of Iceland lies in ruins. Go figure. I have nearly paid off my mortgage, have no further debts, keep some modest savings in a bank account and can generally be said to be a model of financial prudence. None of the current problems is my fault in any way, but if my bank turns out to have bought up a lot of uncollectable overseas debt and given mortgages to people who’ve no hope of meeting the monthly payments (they wouldn’t tell me, of course!) I could lose my savings overnight, unless the government steps in. In any case, there are not one but TWO ways to lose your savings. They could just disappear without trace or else inflation could reduce their value to diddly-squat over a period of time. Take your pick and, er, thanks Fanny and Freddie.

Nor, I must say, is Sarah Palin merely America’s problem. If US voters do the sensible thing and elect Obama in November (did I just write that? the words are dancing on the page) disaster will be averted and the world can heave a sigh of relief. Sarah can go back to Anchorage for some more moose-killing and gay-bashing. But if they elect John McCain and put young Sarah into the Naval Observatory -the official residence of the vice-president- the nightmarish vision of an old and frail McCain either dying or having to step down for health reasons unfolds. A champion of preemptive military action in the face of a perceived threat against the US, Mrs. Palin could, practically overnight, become Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. Yippee!

Over the past four years I’ve had occasion to be grateful, if not for George W. Bush’s feeble intellect then at least for his robust constitution. Barring accidents or assassination there was little risk of the presidency being handed over to Dick Cheney who, in my book at least, is the baddest man on the planet. Believe me, Mike Tyson smells of roses when compared to the warmongering profiteer from Lincoln, Nebraska. Whatever motivated Bush Jr. to deal death and destruction in Afghanistan and Iraq is lost in the fog of the man’s own thought, but with Cheney we know: it’s greed, pure and simple. Whether personal gain is a part of Sarah Palin’s make-up I cannot say, but there’s plenty of other stuff there to scare me to death. Her pro-life fanaticism may extend to the unborn child, but it signally leaves the moose, the polar bear, the beluga whale and the rest of humanity unprotected. Her analysis of global affairs rivals that of George W. Bush for incoherence and uninformed naivete. The best you can say for her is that she is a bit of a looker.  She hides it behind a silly hairdo and owlish glasses, but I’m sure there lurks a bit of a vamp underneath the schoolmarm exterior.  Still, much as I’m convinced that Washington could do with an injection of female beauty (it’s been slim pickings with Hillary after all) there is no way we can countenance the dangers of, one day soon, John McCain slipping in the bathroom or choking on a jellybean. McCain himself doesn’t fill me with a lot of confidence but Palin sends me into a panic.

Still, all this is just anxiety-ridden theory. I just know that, come November, Americans will show they have learned the lessons of eight years of disastrous foreign policy and economic mismanagement and elect Barack Obama as their next president. Then, and only then, is there a chance that the USA will transform itself from a cantankerous self-serving global bully into the powerful force for good, the reliable and generous friend it once was. When (not if) that happens, Sarah Palin will fade into a virtual -and hilarious- existence on YouTube, while a semblance of renewed confidence will invade the world’s money markets and restore normality. Normality, by the way, that demands dramatic changes in the way banks and lenders operate. Frankly, I can’t wait.

Who doesn’t remember that little chick in the half-shell who used to go around blaming his misfortunes on the fact that ‘they are big and I is small’? ‘It’s just not fair’, he used to say as once again he had mucked up a situation. I was always of two minds about Calimero; I pitied him on one level (after all, life can’t be easy if you’re the smallest thing on legs), but at the same time there was something deeply annoying about him.’What this guy needs’, I used to think, ‘is someone even smaller than him.’For I knew, even then, that many of our problems tend to disappear as soon as we have someone we can kick around.

We in the West, with our big hearts bursting and a ready tear in our eye at the merest hint of the big bullying the small, are unfortunately an easy prey for those who have perfected the art of suffering and being put upon in full public view. Our politicians, our media and public opinion have in the past been manipulated to good effect; the Kosovo Albanians and the Bosnian muslims are cases in point. So much better were they  than the Serbs at wailing, hair-tearing and teeth-gnashing with the world’s cameras in attendance that -without bothering to study the exact merits of the claims made on all sides- we waded in, guns blazing, to protect the weak from the strong. In our humanitarian zeal we completely omitted to examine the way the Albanians and the muslims in Bosnia behaved towards minorities in their midst. In order to convince ourselves that we understand a problem we have to be able to reduce it to a simple matter of good versus evil, black versus white.

We’ve made the same mistake again, haven’t we? When, last week, the news broke that Russian troops had come to the aid of the separatists in the Georgian territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and began giving the Georgian forces (who, until then, had been bombing the bejezus out of the South Ossetians, after a bit of encouragement from Washington) a bloody nose we were hoodwinked yet again. This time, the hoodwinker was already a good friend of the West; Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili, whose years of study and work in the USA have made him a committed Americanophile. Just the kind of man the Bush administration would fancy as leader of a former Soviet republic. And so it came to pass. NATO membership for Georgia now seems firmly on the cards, as it does -in a slightly more distant future- for Ukraine. And with that, the encirclement of Russia by western-friendly (read: anti-Moscow) countries would be virtually complete.

Not a situation, you will agree, that a major power likes to find itself in. For the sake of argument: if, at the time of the Cuba missile crisis, Canada and Mexico had announced their intention to join the Warsaw Pact very few of us would be here today. Every self-respecting big boy needs a backyard in which he can dominate -and, if need be, bully- the smaller kids. Grenada, Panama, Cuba and even Chili will be able to confirm that. So I am not at all surprised that the Russian leadership is unhappy with Washington’s plans to set up missile monitoring systems in Poland or with Georgia’s murderous harrasment of pro-Russian Ossetians and Abkhazians. Why, with the Cold War allegedly over, the West still feels it necessary to engage in this Russian bear-baiting is beyond me. Is it? Not really. The truth is: the Cold War was a great boon to the West. It spurred on the development of newer and ever more sophisticated arms (which everyone knew would never be used), it kept the military-industrial complex raking in large amounts of money and it allowd governments to use the threat of an attack by a foreign power to keep the population on side. Now that the reckless military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan have lost them popular support, the Bush Boys are trying to revive that old and trusted battle cry: ‘The Russkis Are Coming!’. Alan Arkin eat your heart out. Dubya’s anointed successor, John McCain, has even had the chutzpah to tell us: ‘we are all Georgians now!’ Is anyone going to fall for this theatrical but meaningless rubbish and vote for him in November? Probably. When a Russian general the other day warned that, by allowing the US to set up an anti-missile shield on its territory (which the Russians firmly believe is directed against them) Poland would make itself a target that, in the event of a military conflict, would be one of the first to be hit, the more rabid elements in the Western media came out with headlines like ‘Russia Says: We’ll Nuke You!’. Not quite.

The really annoying thing is, of course, that Washington is waging this propaganda war on Moscow knowing full well that military action of any kind against Russia is totally out of the question. Their hope is that, by constant harping and misconstruing Russian acts and intentions, they can provoke Moscow into doing something unwise. So far, though, president Medvedyev and prime minister Putin have behaved like models of restraint. The West should do the same and refuse to fall for the chicanery of the Georgian president. But that, given the uncontrollable rush of warm motherly love we habitually reserve for the small when they’re in trouble with the big, may well be too much to ask. And so, along with the totally avoidable dead and wounded in Georgia, truth, too, has once again been added to the list of casualties. Beep, beep.

Somehow -don’t press me for an explanation- the Netherlands has in recent years acquired a reputation as a place where wrongdoers from all points of the compass come to be tried, judged and punished. Just why a small, inconsequential nation with a blood-stained colonial past, some of the most loutish football hooligans on the planet, under constant foreign criticism of its permissive attitudes towards drugs and sex, should be deemed the right place for dispensing that rarest of commodities -impartial justice- is a complete mystery to me. What’s wrong with Denmark? Or Cuba? Nor does the justice for which foreign defendants have so far been hauled over to the Low Countries particularly impress. The Dutch generously handed over an old army base, Camp Zeist, to a bunch of Scottish judges, who proceeded to convict and jail two Libyans for the bombing of a PanAm airliner over Lockerbie in December 1988 without having been given a single crumb of hard evidence. At the Yugoslavia tribunal in The Hague, former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic died in circumstances reeking suspiciously of medical neglect just as his defence was getting underway. His potentially explosive evidence and his planned questioning of certain high-ranking politicians about the true events of, and background to, the war in Kosovo never materialized. That was a pity, for there is much to be known about the nature and history of the Serbian-Albanian antagonism (not to mention all the other ethnic, cultural, sectarian, tribal and territorial antagonisms that have led to the Balkans’ many centuries of bloodshed) that remained obscured by the fog of war and the shockingly biased coverage of the conflict by the western media.

Shocking anti-Serb bias is also what awaits Radovan Karadzic, former president of the widely unrecognized Bosnian Republika Srpska. He will take up residence in his prison cell soon. Had he been arrested a month earlier he might have been in The Hague in time to share a joke and a few nips of plum brandy with Naser Oric. Naser, a former commander of Bosnian Muslim forces in Srebrenica, was tried by the Tribunal for having presided over the massacre of several thousand Serbs. At the beginning of this month he was acquitted on the fairly ludicrous pretext that the prosecution had ‘failed to prove that Oric had been in control of his men’. A line of defense that, you can be damned sure, will be denied Karadzic…or indeed the yet to be arrested Ratko Mladic when they face charges of genocide connected with the massacre, also in Srebrenica, of thousands of Bosnian Muslim men and youths.

The news of Karadzic’ arrest was welcomed especially warmly in the Netherlands, where the failure of Dutch troops stationed in Srebrenica to prevent the slaughter of the Muslim males has left deep mental scars and lingering feelings of guilt. The boys of Dutchbat, inexperienced in war and not equipped for serious fighting, had little option but to let the superior Serb forces do as they pleased. Maybe that trauma will recede, as the highest ranking Bosnian Serb steps into the limelight. For the Yugoslavia Tribunal itself, the imminent arrival in The Hague of a really big fish is nothing less than a godsend. The Court, which started its work in 1993, has hardly covered itself in unbiased glory: the list of persons indicted for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia is heavily dominated by Serbs, with a few handfuls of Croats and some token Albanians and Bosnian Muslims thrown in to create a semblance of impartiality. The rate of acquittals and dropped indictments among Albanians is surprisingly high, by the way. How can this be, after a multi-sided civil war in which -how could it be otherwise- all parties committed gruesome acts of mass murder, rape and ethnic cleansing? How, moreover, do we ever expect the old enmities in the region to be buried after such a lack of even-handedness? Far from working towards closure, the Yugoslavia Tribunal, with its insistence that some parties are guiltier than others, is storing up big trouble for the future. Judging Radovan Karadzic -or anyone else, for that matter- by an abstract, generalized notion of good behaviour for events presided over at a time of utter chaos and confusion and in a climate of unbridled fury and hatred is a complete nonsense.

The fact that my country offers itself up so readily as the venue for such high-profile legal travesties angers me. Karadzic has been declared guilty as hell by media and politicians around the world, so either have the courage of your convictions and shoot him like a dog or let him go free. Impartial justice, not bloody likely.

On Monday -with what seems to me unseemly haste- the Dutch First Chamber, Senate, Upper House or whatever you want to call this collection of 75 creaking elder statesmen and women gave the go-ahead for Dutch ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. The road is now clear for our head of state Queen Beatrix, to affix the royal signature to the document and deliver what used to be a free, independent nation into the hands of a bunch of unelected power-crazed foreigners in Brussels. Funny thing is: the Queen, unlike the presidents of Poland, the Czech Republic and Austria, cannot refuse to sign. Many many years ago, for what seemed very good reasons at the time, the Dutch made sure the monarchy became a purely ceremonial affair and stripped the Palace of all executive powers. The advantage was mutual: the important political decisions would henceforth be taken by the democratically elected representatives of the people, while the monarch was no longer required to risk his life leading his troops into battle or send his henchmen round the country to extort money from the poor. There’s now a government with a popular mandate to do it for him..or her.

Brilliant thing, democracy. Once you’ve tasted its benefits you want everybody else to enjoy it too. So strong is our urge to draw the world’s oppressed and disenfranchised into our wonderland of “a general election every five years; that’s all you get so shut up and consume” that we’re willing to cause merry hell in many parts of the globe. Afghanistan, Iraq, Sierra Leone and Somalia are among the countries with first-hand experience of our selfless drive to spread sweetness, light and the Big Brother franchise throughout the known universe. Next, I hear you say, must surely be Zimbabwe, whose hapless citizens live every day that god gives under the cosh of a cruel dictator, a madman who is worse than -or at least as bad as- Hitler, an evil fiend who, with malice aforethought, brought his country to the brink of ruin. No wonder that the leaders of the G8, gathered on Hokkaido to address the huge economic and environmental problems that threaten us, took time out to call for severe sanctions against Mugabe and his regime.

Cheerleader during this game of “Let’s Get The Bastard” was -and is- British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. He’s been telling us for some time now about his disgust at the sham election that gave the Zimbabwean leader a new term of office. This surprises me, for when it comes to ruling the roost over millions of people without a shadow of a mandate Mr. Brown is doing rather better than most. His job of Prime Minister -indeed, his very presence in Parliament- rests exclusively on the fact that 24,278 people in the handkerchief-sized Scottish constituency of Kircaldy & Cowdenbeath voted for him in 2005, giving him a majority of merely 18,216. Moreover, on being anointed the successor to Tony Blair, Mr.Brown ducked out of a general election that would have given his leadership at least a semblance of legitimacy, for fear that he might lose it. I imagine that, had the Zimbabwe elections been free, fair and peaceful, Robert Mugabe would still have come away with a few more votes than Brown.

Joining in the Hokkaido chorus of condemnation were other luminaries, such as the strutting French peacock Nicholas Sarkozy; America’s George W. Bush, who knows a thing or two about snatching victory from the mouth of defeat; the Italian Silvio Berlusconi, who can only stay out of jail by being in office; the Portuguese windsock Jose Manuel Barroso, whose political convictions once switched in a thrice from communism all the way to right-of-centre; Germany’s Angela “Mutti” Merkel who thinks the war in Iraq was a really good idea; the Canadian PM Stephen Harper, so new in the job that he hasn’t had time to blot his copybook and, representing Russia, Vladimir Putin’s glove puppet Dmitri Medvedev. Huddled together on their square yard of moral high ground they felt it incumbent on them to aim darts of righteous anger at Mugabe and his government.

I am not for a moment suggesting that there is nothing wrong with the present and past behaviour of Robert Mugabe. He is, by all accounts, capable of extreme cruelty, he brooks no opposition, stops at nothing to have his way and nurtures an especially fierce hatred of the white man. It would be impossible to call him a democrat in the western sense of the word, but then: democracy is a concept with which the entire African continent still grapples in vain. It is no coincidence that, however loud and vociferous the anti-Mugabe rhetoric in the rest of the world, hardly a peep has been heard out of Zimbabwe’s neighbours. I believe this to be because, secretly, they find that there is a lot to admire in the old firebrand. He is, after all, one of the hands that rocked the cradle of the newly liberated state, once the despised white supremacist regime of Ian Douglas Smith had been ousted from power. Along with a handful of comrades in arms (most of whom later became his rivals or even enemies) he fought a courageous struggle, in the course of which he suffered many privations –including a ten-year spell in prison. Of the heroes of Zimbabwe’s liberation, he is the only one who remains politically and ideologically active. He has to be, for in his mind the struggle against white domination goes on. His great project -handing all of Zimbabwe’s land over to its black population- is not yet complete. He knows he’s running out of time, so his methods have become more brutal than ever. This, in Mugabe’s perspective, is not the time to hand over the reins to Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC, whom he sees as a bunch of appeasers seeking an accommodation with what remains of the enemy.

Still, for all his brutality and blinkered hatred, Mugabe is a man of principle, of substance; a man who believes that, as the creator of a free Zimbabwe, he has a natural right to rule it until he drops dead. We may beg to differ, but what we may not do is revile him as if he were some worthless vermin. His good and his bad qualities are all larger than life. His place in history as a flawed hero is assured. Can we say that for the transient little blots on the landscape that presume to govern us? I don’t think so.

I am, if you hadn’t noticed, a Dutchman. One’s nationality (one of the least avoidable accidents of birth, certainly one that no amount of embryo screening can protect you from) seems, for many people, to be a source of immense satisfaction and pride. I have never seen it that way. Having been born in Amsterdam in October 1940 does not make me co-responsible for the masterworks of Rembrandt, the invention of the microscope or Holland’s great 3-0 win over Italy at Euro 2008. I am an ordinary man of no particular achievement and the fact that I’m a member of the same people that produced the inventor of the CD, the first westerner to beat the Japanese at judo and the idiot who developed the Senseo coffee pad machine is pure accident. I accept neither praise nor blame.

But I’m not only Dutch, I’m also a European. I never realized I was; in my youth Europe was a large territory, divided up into many individual states that resembled each other in absolutely nothing. The Dutch were good at keeping the water out, the Germans drank beer and ate sausages, the Italians picked pockets, the French were good at sex and force-feeding geese, the Scandies rolled about naked in the snow and so the list of nationality-based prejudices went on. The great joy was that, from Holland, you only had to travel a little way in any direction to cross a border and find yourself in a completely different culture, with different money, a different language, different cuisine, different everything. Europe, blissfully, was a patchwork quilt made out of many old skirts, or (as the much-missed Anna Russell might have suggested) a skirt made out of many old patchwork quilts.

Those halcyon days of ‘vive la difference’, of innocent but deeply felt xenophobia are now behind us. Ever since France and Germany decided that they didn’t trust themselves never to wage war on their neighbours -and each other- again, this continent has been steered towards ever deeper union. Economic union was the goal in the beginning and I admit there was something to be said for that. As Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber pointed out as early as 1967, the Americans were getting far too big for their boots. Burgeoning US economic power, he warned, was goin to swamp us all, unless we joined forces and stood up to them at our supermarket checkouts. As a result European economic union was conceived, and not a moment too soon. Since the words ‘economic union’ suggested a future of flourishing trade and neat profit, even the terminally standoffish British decided to join, followed by a raft of much poorer (but not exactly stupid) countries around the Mediterranean.

Now, with economic union ticking over nicely, the unelected dinosaurs in Brussels have decided that the next step must be political union. Not only that, but this ever closer union must expand, expand, expand. Already the notion that such totally different countries as Denmark and Romania could successfully become regions within one superstate is ludicrous. What if nations like Azerbaijian and Kazakhstan start knocking on the door? So an all-powerful central authority, unelected and largely faceless, is to hold the thing together. To make this possible, the European Constitution was drafted, taking far-reaching powers from the national parliaments of Europe. Not surprisingly, it was rejected, first by the French, then by the Dutch. Several other countries, like Germany, weren’t allowed a referendum, although the public mood there was also strongly against. The Dutch and French No vote effectively scuppered the Constitution…but no fear: it is back under the name Lisbon Treaty. Sounds less threatening, doesn’t it? Forget it, it’s the same document, with a few meaningless alterations.

Today it’s up to the Irish, as the last and only country to get this chance, to throw this abomination where it belongs: in the bin. So this is my heartfelt plea: come on you Great Gaels of Ireland, whose wars were always merry and whose songs were always sad, save us from Lisbon! You’re Europe’s only hope. Mess it up now and whatever future we might have had as a prosperous, happy and free band of friendly nations will gurgle down the plughole. Vote NO and I promise you, tonight I’ll get wrecked on Guinness and Tullamore Dew. And when tomorrow comes, I bet you I won’t even have a hangover.

I certainly don’t wish the lady any harm, but it’s now time for Hillary Clinton to bow out gracefully and pursue some other goal in life. She’s a pretty impressive woman and, with the exception of ruling the roost at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, there seems little she couldn’t achieve, either in politics or business. The desperate tenacity with which she has been hanging on in a campaign that had already seemed lost for some time evokes images of Rasputin who survived several attempts on his life. Poison didn’t do it, shooting didn’t do it, even a whack with an axe on the back of his head didn’t do it. Still he kept breathing and pretending that all was well, until they pushed his head into the Neva River; which turned out one assault too far for the durable Siberian. Today, for the Neva read: the Montana primary.

The importance of Obama’s nomination is difficult to overstate. Of course, if he doesn’t beat John McCain in November, much of the significance of this achievement will inevitably be lost and America (and with it the world) will carry on much as before. That there are still millions of American voters who find that an enticing prospect is both mystifying and deeply worrying. But look: millions of Americans now have no difficulty accepting the notion of a president of mixed race. And, to be fair, Hillary has demonstrated that the country is equally ready to welcome a woman to the Oval Office. That she is not that woman (at least not yet) is largely due to the tone of her campaign and the unstinting support of her husband. I’d love to be a fly on the wall when the Clintons sit at their kitchen table tonight to review the state of affairs. “Thanks Bill”. I can almost hear the bitterness in her voice.

And that is precisely why the one mistake Barack Obama must not make is pick Hillary as his running mate. Yes, on paper this may seem an unusually powerful ticket, it might bring the party together (or not), it might give the Democrats a bigger chance to win in November than Obama would have with another vice-presidential hopeful. Still, it must not happen. I’ve been trying to imagine how, if I were Obama,  I would feel going to bed in the White House knowing that, a few miles to the northwest at Number One Observatory Circle, the most ruthlessly ambitious couple in American politics were kicking the furniture out of sheer frustration. Toss and turn all night I would, as hideous dreams would torment me.  Newsreel footage of Dallas’ Grassy Knoll and JFK’s limousine going round in my head would make me break into a cold sweat. The angry faces of the Clintons would appear to me, making hissing noises before morphing into the even angrier faces of the Macbeths. Did I say the Macbeths? No, it’s Friedrich and Ortrud from Wagner’s Lohengrin!! Help! Is that a horse’s head under the duvet?

I am, of course, not for a moment suggesting that the Clintons would ever have violence and murder on their minds. Nevertheless, putting a defeated rival in a position a mere heartbeat away from your own job -the top job- may give rise to all sorts of dark thoughts and secret wishes. No bullets would fly and no knives would go snickersnack, but as we all know: there are all sorts of ways in politics to reach your objective. Better not put temptation in people’s way.  Obama, watch your back!

Funny the way things go: I’ve just returned from spending the winter months in Spain, well away from the Internet and all its temptations -few e-mails, no blogs, no surfing, no buying- and during precisely that time Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been tearing lumps out of each other in the hope of securing the Democratic party nomination. Every time I picked up a newspaper there they were: inching ahead in the polls, or falling slightly behind, losing this primary by a fair margin, winning another by not very much, see-saw Marjorie Daw, Johnny Doe shall have a new master. My fingers used to itch and yearn for my computer keyboard. I wanted to blog like no man has ever wanted to blog before. I wanted to warn the world against the Clinton woman, I ached to tell them to take the leap of faith and throw in their lot with the untested Obama. But I couldn’t.

Now that I’m back it seems that Obama cannot be stopped. After the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, it would take an act of such monumental skulduggery on the part of the remaining superdelegates to swing things Hillary’s way at the last minute that Washington, even at its most unprincipled, wouldn’t stand for it. Obama it is and if I were collective America I would heave a big sigh and say: ‘Phew! That was close. Saved by the bell!’.  I’m well aware that a November vote for Obama is a shot in the dark. But it should be -has to be- better than four years of Bush with a human face. For that is what John McCain is: a gun-toting Republican just like Dubya, only with more intelligence, gravitas and an honourable military record. I’d rather have him for a next door neighbour than Bush -obviously!- but I’d still worry about men who believe there are military solutions to difficult problems.

Hillary Clinton, although she did vote in favour of the invasion of Iraq at the time (hey! didn’t everybody?) would now like to end it. If she should make it to the White House, what better way to continue the great Clintonian tradition of ‘make love, not war’ than a withdrawal from the death trap that is post-liberation Baghdad? If she doesn’t make it, who knows which way she’ll bend in the future? The answer is: whichever way political advancement and a place in the history books lies. For make no mistake: the Clintons may have a few policies that might benefit ordinary Americans but their ultimate purpose is to achieve lasting greatness for the Clinton name. You only have to take one look at young Chelsea to know that, with Hillary’s presidency far from in the bag, they’re already grooming her for a shot at the White House in the more distant future. Like the Kennedys and the Bushes, the Clintons are firm believers in their dynasty’s natural right to govern.

Such boundless ambition, when thwarted, tends to bring out the darker side of the Clinton persona. At the start of the primary season, Hillary seemed a shoo-in for the nomination: riding high in the polls she could afford to treat her rivals with kindness and respect. Sweetness and light she oozed; was there any doubt she was going to be carried all the way to the party convention on a wave of adulation? A Clinton -and a woman at that- for president! Good old Bill back in the White House for a word of advice and some moral support, what voter could resist? Who’d believe that, in the course of the next few months, she would resort to womanly wiles, brazen lies, racist slurs and other dark manipulations to keep her campaign on the road?

Enter Barack Obama, a jug-eared, mixed-race senator from Illinois, with a family background linking him with such spooky places as Kenya and Indonesia. A man who took his religious instruction from a fiery black preacher with extreme anti-white views. To whom could he possibly appeal, except a few disadvantaged black voters of the lower middle class? Ah, but then a strange thing happened. Barack Obama opened his mouth and out came a message of change and hope that Americans hadn’t heard for a very long time. A message, moreover, delivered with resounding authority, couched in colourful rhetoric and with the potential to reach straight into the hearts of all who bothered to listen. Obama was not only new, he was different. He could persuade audiences that the way things are is not necessarily the way things will always be. God, how I long for somebody like that in the Netherlands, where things have, depressingly and unalterably, been the way they are since time immemorial! In no other country that I know is the democratic exercise of casting one’s vote in a general election so predictably futile. But I digress.

The fact is that, in November, America must have a real choice. Not the traditional toss-up between two candidates of the old school of politics, each with their long-established constituencies and well-known priorities and policies. It has to be a choice between the yawn-inducing predictability of what we’re used to (McCain, Clinton) and the exciting newness of the untried and untested (Obama). Lack of experience (of which the senator from Illinois has been accused by both his rivals) is no problem. Even the greatest of statesmen were once rank beginners. No great leader ever emerged, fully developed and Athena-like, from the head of Zeus. So take a chance, America. This man can reach across every divide: racial, religious, economic, educational and cultural; and I, for one, believe he will. Trust him to sort out your nation’s ills. And once he’s done that, he can start sorting out the ills of the world. A win-win situation if ever I saw one. Not to put too fine a point on it: instead of stumbling on as a mistrusted, feared, widely disliked, faltering and self-serving superpower, the USA has a unique opportunity to become, under Barack Obama, the powerful force for true freedom, prosperity and peace it once was…..in a distant, near-forgotten past. Don’t mess up, friends.