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Mr Perle: ‘Look, I know the country. I’ve travelled there only recently. What you say is a travesty of what is actually going on in Britain. Most of the population continues to eat McDonald’s and watch violent Hollywood movies. That suggests to me that the United States is in control of 99 per cent of the country. And in the small towns, people still vomit in the gutter, and punch one another, late on Saturday nights — just as they always have. We’re there to protect that way of life.’ ‘But, Mr Perle, only the other day a pro-American woman, Barbara Amiel, had her entire pro-war column blown up in the Daily Telegraph, an area assumed to be under American control. It was believed to be an inside job. The bomb is thought to have been planted by the management. If that can happen at the Daily Telegraph, no pro-American is safe.’ ‘I don’t deny that terrible things are still happening, like the assassination of that poor lady; or, depending on the position of her Hollinger share options, rich lady. No compound can be made completely secure. But the explanation for that particular atrocity was a complex one. She may have been assassinated for reasons unconnected with the war and more to do with some arranged marriage. I myself worked with her most recent husband. We fell out. He claims Henry Kissinger and I threw a lot of money at him, and he had no alternative but to trouser it. So, at the moment he is trying to assassinate me. Not that I’m suggesting that he assassinated her, so far as I know. But I admit that pro-American forces temporarily lost control of certain parts of the Daily Telegraph, as they did Fallujah. We still have Charles Moore at the Telegraph, though. His column is pro the war.’ ‘But that’s not true of Moore’s rival religious leaders. For example, Ayatollah Williams is preaching against the war.’ ‘My own view is that we should have arrested Williams some time ago. I don’t see why the Church of England Triangle, around Canterbury, should be a no-go area for Coalition forces. Martyrdom is what Williams wants. Let’s give it to him. It’s time to kick some cassock. This is a society which respects only force.’ ‘But it’s not just the Christians who are against you now. The Conservative leader, Mullah Howard, has just called on Tony Blair to distance himself from President Bush. And the Conservatives are pagan. They lost power partly because of their belief in sex-after-government. Also, Conservative columnists are more and more against the war.’ ‘That’s all the more reason why the country will not be stable until the British people are not allowed to govern themselves.’ The above was partly inspired, for good or ill, by listening to Richard Perle on the Today programme this week trying to justify United States policy and actions in Iraq. It should be conceded that he made rather a good job of it. The test of a controversialist is not in defending a good cause, but a difficult one. We can all easily defend a good one. Whether America’s cause in Iraq was originally a good one is something which is as yet unclear, and perhaps only for history to decide. But it is a cause which seems to have gone wrong. It is also one which will for ever be associated with the neoconservatives, and the Republican Right. They are allied or overlapping, but not synonymous, groups. Among other things, many being Democrats ancestrally, the neoconservatives tend to be liberal on social questions; the Republican Right does not. But they share something which they do not share with traditional British conservatism or the older American republicanism. The neoconservatives especially, but also much of the Republican Right — each constitutes a kind of tenured intelligentsia. Traditional Conservatives have always opposed such forces. In the 19th century, and some way into the 20th, socialism was espoused by intellectuals who had nothing much to gain from it materially. There were not many jobs or salaries for a socialist thinker. Sinecures in think tanks never cushioned Shaw or Wells. They had to make a living from their pens in the free market. They did not have to toe a think tank’s line. But by the time anti-socialists of my generation came along, socialism, and state-interventionist liberalism, had become a source of employment for intellectuals in universities, on newspapers and in bodies dedicated to ‘research’. If such intellectuals did not propagate the line of those institutions, they could be out and their standard of living would suffer. Some time in the late 1960s and early 1970s, neoconservative and Republican right-wing intellectuals in America, and some British Conservative intellectuals, spotted all this. It spurred them on. But as they grew stronger and more influential, the rich — some seeing in them the prospect of governments that would tax wealth less — began to finance anti-socialist and, in America, anti-liberal intellectuals through think tanks and publications. The same comfortable fate befell anti-socialist thinkers as had befallen socialist thinkers. Many a right-wing intellectual became as dependent on their employers as left-liberal intellectuals were. Plenty of British right-wing intellectuals enjoyed free trips to the United States for conferences sponsored by such bodies. The institutions could thus reassure themselves that not all Europeans were anti-American. Only right-wingers lucky enough to work for reasonably tolerant publications could write more or less what they believed. No one could deny that Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, for example, was ‘right-wing’ during those decades. He was, however, able to write what he liked. So when we hear American thinkers defending this war, we should listen out for the think tank that pays them. Doubtless some of them would do it even if they were not paid. But a few poor neoconservative intellectuals would not go amiss. Finally, such people use ‘anti-American’ as a synonym for anti the present American administration. We British Tories who believe that in the interests of Britain — and Toryism — it would be good if Senator Kerry defeated President Bush look forward to the neoconservative and Republican Right denunciations of a Kerry administration. Then we can accuse them of ‘anti-Americanism’. |
