Greene’s Insite

So here we are: the truth is out. The Westminster government had absolutely nothing to do with the release of Abdulbaset Ali Mohmet Al-Megrahi. It was -and always had been- a matter for the Scottish authorities and them alone. Rumours of an oil-for-Megrahi deal a few years ago are, in spite of the copious evidence to support them, untrue. Believe us, London says, when Kenny McAskill announced that this odious mass murderer was getting compassionate release because he was suffering from prostate cancer you could have knocked us over with a feather. How do I know this? How can I be sure that all the reports of a 2007 lucrative contract for the British oil company BP in exchange for a prisoner transfer scheme that would explicitly include Al-Megrahi are at best a mistake and at worst a fabrication? Because Jack Straw tells me so. I am not aware of the UK holding any other Libyans than Al-Megrahi or of UK nationals languishing in Libyan prison cells, but there you are. Libya now has its native son back and BP can drill for oil off the Libyan coast. Pure coincidence, nothing to do with us, mate.

I have a high regard for Jack Straw. Here is a man who, in spite of tremendous difficulties (such as having been born without a backbone, a set of immutable principles and a moral compass) has risen through the ranks of the Labour Party to hold a succession of exalted posts. They are, in order: Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Lord Privy Seal, leader of the House of Commons and, most recently, Lord Chancellor and the relatively new invention Secretary of State for Justice. Not bad for a barrister who read law at Leeds University. The absence of a spine allowed him to complete  the contortion that turned him from a left wing rabble rouser into the man who won praise from Margaret Thatcher for his draconian anti-terrorism policies, including a plan to reduce, in certain cases, the right to trial by jury. His double-jointedness made it possible to express misgivings about the Iraq war and his great confidence in the Iraqi judicial system while still remaining a loyal vassal of whoever was leading the Labour Party and becoming uncomfortably close to then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Where others who were opposed to the war either quit right away (Robin Cook) or after a period of examining the lie of the land (Clare Short), Jacko kept his nose clean. Why walk out in a fit of principle when there was still so much good work to be done? (A similar ability to ‘go with the flow’ has been perceived in the once ubiquitous Margaret Beckett).

Had the release of Al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds not been a matter for Scotland and Scotland only (just joking; is there still anybody who believes that?) there is every chance that Jack Straw would have joined Kenny McAskill in his passionate defence of certain humanitarian principles held sacred in the UK but sadly alien to the rest of the world. For in the arena of soft-hearted mercy when dealing with suffering miscreants the Secretary of State for Justice yields to no man. Who doesn’t remember his outpouring of compassion in 2000 when, ignoring a spate of international requests for extradion and criminal prosecution, he allowed the Chilean dictator, mass-murderer and close personal friend of Margaret Thatcher Augusto Pinochet, who was said to be too ill to stand trial, to return to Chile? Pinochet cheeckily chucked aside his walking stick on arrival at Santiago airport and lived on for another six years. What chance of Al-Megrahi doing the same? None, I think.

Personally I don’t give a monkey’s about the murky goings-on that led to Al-Megrahi’s repatriation. No one emerges from this tale with any credit, except the man himself. The Scots use the cover of compassion to hide their anxiety at what might have become public in the course of Megrahi’s now dropped appeal; Westminster plays dumb in a matter in which it exercised full control; Americans bluster and cry blue murder without caring whether the guy they want to rot in jail is actually guilty or not. Khadaffi prances on the international stage as if nothing untoward ever happened. The Libyan is now at home and I hope that, like Pinochet, he lives on for a good spell.

Meanwhile, the real murky deal that needs light shed on it is the one that led to Al-Megrahi’s appearance before a politically manipulated court in Camp Zeist. The details of that bear direct relevance to his guilt or, as I am convinced, innocence. This latest kerfuffle over his release isn’t really worth the candle.

When, as latest news reports suggest, Lockerbie convict Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi will sometime this week be set free from a Scottish jail, an administrative end will have come to one of the worst, most shameful miscarriages of justice the world has seen in recent years, or possibly ever. I say ‘administrative’ because, with al-Megrahi’s health effectively ruined through medical neglect (not many prison inmates under constant obervation  nowadays face death from untreated prostate cancer) the injustice will follow him right into his unnecessarily early grave. Forget any bullshit about this being an act of compassion: sending him home to Libya now that his demise seems imminent will save the Scottish authorities further unwanted expense and a flurry of equally unwanted bad publicity.

What angers me most about this hideous affair is that, at the time of the ridiculous show trial in Holland’s Camp Zeist, it was already clear that there was no evidence available that would stand up in any normal western court. What clinched the case against al-Megrahi was the testimony of a dodgy Maltese shopkeeper with a tenuous grip on the truth and a poor recollection of facts. (The shopkeeper’s name, by the way, was Gauci, which just happens to be the surname of a hot operatic favourite of mine, soprano Miriam Gauci. I hope fervently that they’re not related, but Malta is a small country.) The ‘evidence’ that sent al-Megrahi to his doom, under examination, wouldn’t have convicted a jaywalker. Not surprising, because everything, absolutely everything, to do with the case militates against al-Megrahi’s guilt.

I am aware that, in the wake of the terrible act of terrorism against the PanAm airliner -270 innocent dead is a ghastly toll- emotions ran high, both in the UK and the United States. Acts like that, I fully agree, must not go unpunished and the sooner the guilty are collared, the easier it is for the relatives of the victims to find closure and get on with their lives. Even at the time, rumours were buzzing around the world of western intelligence that Iran was most likely involved. After all, five months earlier a US warship in the Gulf had shot down an Iranian civilian airliner; by mistake, as Washington insisted. That might -some say ’should’- have fulfilled the prime requirement in proving a criminal’s guilt: establishing a motive. The other requirement, opportunity, did not enter the equation at all for, as we all know, in the world of international terrorism there’s always a way where there’s a will. Trouble was: Iran is rich in oil and militarily powerful. Any retribution for Lockerbie would inevitably be costly, dangerous and time-consuming. Somebody mentioned Syria as a possibility: no good, same story, except the oil. An easier, quicker fix was obviously needed.

I have no idea who it was that hit on the Libyan variant (dammit, I can’t know everything) but what’s certain is that it had, from a western point of view, obvious merits. Libya had oil, its leader Khadaffi, after exchanging a series of blows with the United States, seemed keen to come in from the cold and become a respectable world leader and car designer, there was a deal on there. All the west needed was some names, preferably names of people professionally involved in international skulduggery. Where better to look than the Libyan intelligence service? We all know what happened next. Two names were produced, Khadaffi -after some hemming and hawing for public consumption- handed them over and justice was on its way. Next came the Camp Zeist trial, where a bunch of superannuated Scottish dodderers sat in judgement as western (read: American) prosecutors pulled the wool over their eyes. So there we were, in rural Holland: two defendants, a battery of international journalists, a prosecution that knew what it was after, a bench that was half asleep most of the time and not a shred of serious evidence. Sorry, I take that back. There was serious evidence that Iran was involved, but it was not admitted in court. (The fact that, only recently, al-Megrahi had instructed is legal team to publish the evidence may well have caused the sudden upsurge of ‘compassion’ that has come over the Scottish authorities.)

It didn’t matter, of course. The two men in the dock, in the absence of support from their own government (which had sold them down the river) didn’t stand a chance of justice. After all, who was going to complain? Not Khadaffi, who had international respectability on his mind. Not anyone, in fact, except a few independent minds around the world who saw the whole thing as an exercise in cynicism, a convenient stitch-up of a couple of nameless, unlamented patsies. Their views appeared, in print and on the internet, but they were not heeded. I was one of those and still am.

In the most bizarre twist of all, al-Megrahi’s co-defendant was found not guilty and allowed to return home. That left the ultimate, familiar outcome: the world was told that the bombing of the PanAm airliner over Lockerbie in 1988 was the work of a single man, one with no previous record of terrorist activity or intent, a man with no accomplices, not doing his government’s bidding; a man with no discernible personal motive, a man implicated by no solid evidence of any kind: forensic, circumstantial or even testimonial. He had no reason for doing it, yet he did it; that’s what we’re supposed to believe. Do they think we are all stark raving mad?

Abdelhaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi, you don’t know me but I want you to know that I am your friend. Hilary Clinton may want you to rot in jail (there are votes to be had in America for those who take that position), but I know you are innocent. My most fervent hope right now is that, insh’Allah, you will still somehow recover from your illness and live out your life in the bosom of your family.

Good to see that the Find Maddie Campaign is ticking over nicely. New suspects pop up with some regularity -most recently a British paedophile being treated for cancer in Germany, a Portuguese market trader of  ”gipsy appearance”  and another British man in jail in the UK-, adverts calling on the public to keep looking (“she might be next to you”) continue to appear regularly in the British tabloid press and presumably financial contributions to the capaign fund keep flowing in. I say this (about the money) because little has recently been heard of the McCanns’ plan -first mooted in april 2008-  to write a book about their ordeal. At the time, a deal possibly worth two million pounds was mentioned, at a time when the existing Find Maddie campaign coffers were running disturbingly low.

Still, with their unerring talent for raising doubts in the minds of even the most sympathetic members of the public, Gerry and Kate McCann have decided to embellish the newspaper advertisement not just with the familiar picture of Maddie aged 3  but also with a computer generated image of what she might look like at the age of six. And what a lovely girl it is! Beautiful eyes, with the tell-tale mark of course, shiny hair combed back behind her ears: a picture of health and happiness. A girl that is obviously being well looked after. Every bit the Maddie we might have known today….if she hadn’t disappeared over two years ago and suffered an as yet unknown fate.

I remain unwavering in my personal conviction that little Maddie is no longer alive. How she died and at whose hands I cannot say; no theory, however outlandish, can be entirely discounted. Identifying a guilty party is well-nigh impossible in the absence of a body or a shred of forensic evidence. Any remains found could always be identified via DNA, but evidence pointing at a killer (or killers) will inevitably degenerate with the passing of time. How much time I don’t know, you’d need a trained medic to tell you that. But let’s not dwell on this, the McCanns believe Maddie is alive and that’s all we have to go on. If she is, though, then what? If indeed she was abducted by some hideous paedophile and subjected to unspeakable horror and abuse she’d be a hollow-eyed waif by now, possibly on drugs, underfed and in ill health. A far cry from the girl with the cheeky grin that the McCanns would have us believe could be Maddie as a six-year old.

So, assuming that Gerry and Kate aren’t stupid, what’s the point of the photographic update? I see two possibilities. Either the McCanns have an inkling that Maddie is indeed dead but, for their own reasons, want to keep the campaign going (you can get used to receiving big cheques in the post) or they believe that she may have been stolen to order, possibly for resale to a well-to-do childless couple. Only in a case like that is there any likelihood that she would look as hale and hearty as she obviously does in the newly concocted picture. It’s a long shot, admittedly, but stranger things have happened.

But finding Maddie alive and well, happily living with a new family is probably the worst case scenario for the McCanns. A girl of six, who has just spent two happy years with a new identity, new family, new friends will be entirely different from the toddler left on her own in a holiday apartment in the Algarve in May 2007. At such an early age, the process of learning new things, adapting to new situations and forgetting what was takes place at breakneck speed. By now she may have no recollection of ever being called Maddie. I know what I’m talking about: when I was nine I went into hospital, I came out again nearly two years later. Older than Maddie is now, with the contact with my family intact, I still had enormous problems readjusting to life at home, fitting in and getting on with my next of kin. Not to put too fine a point on it: for a long time I felt closer to the man who, for the past eight months, had been lying in the bed next to mine than I did to my own mother. Imagine a young, impressionable child, entirely at ease in her new life, reacting to a family she hasn’t seen for over two years! Or much longer, depending on when she would be found. Gerry and Kate would be strangers to her; and disruptive, unwanted strangers at that. Claiming Maddie back in such circumstances would be a recipe for disaster.

But as I said, this is probably a fantasy scenario. Maddie McCann is dead. But until her remains are found and identified, the circus will continue. Not with my money, though.

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.