Lileks delivers a sublime fisking to Le Carre:
On my nightly wander through the alleys of Blogtown I found many sites infuriated by this Le Carre drivel in the Times [ timesonline.co.uk ]. If you haven’t read it, trust me: you have. It’s another dispatch from the alternate universe where the FBI puts the screws to newspapers that run too many anti-war letters, where Bush appears on TV to lead us all in Communion, and a stunned and cowed population shuffles off to the Gruel Factories while top-hatted plutocrats lean from their SUVs and spit thick brown wads of sputum at the losers of life’s lottery. Look: reasoned, principled objections to the war are necessary; we need good debate. But it’s time that the newspapers of the world just say no to the latest chunk of recycled fatuity just because it’s penned by a recognizable name. Better a thoughtful disemboweling of the post-Saddam strategy or lack thereof by Herbert Z. Nobody than another bloody gout of half-digested Quiche Cliché by someone whose name we remember from a tired trawl through an airport bookstore.
I’m pretty sure Stephen King is skeptical about the war, for example. I know his politics. But he hasn’t made the leap so common to others in the scribbling, warbling and gesturing arts - he doesn’t think we’re all dying to hear his prescriptions for Middle East foreign policy. Oh, interview him on the matter and he might pop off, but I can’t imagine him sitting down, firing up a Winston Light, and telling himself that this 1200 word essay will change the world, because people will think: hey, it’s Stephen KING talking! He wrote “The Stand,” and his fictional account of the repercussions of biological weapons programs gives him a unique perspective. Let’s lend an ear!
I wouldn’t have brought this up at all, except for one word bobbing in the torrent of LeCarre’s invective. See if you can spot it. The paragraph is typical for the genre, as it gives the impression of someone in the grip of a hysterical delusion, attempting to shove handfuls of imaginary rats down the sink drain:
The imminent war was planned years before bin Laden struck, but it was he who made it possible. Without bin Laden, the Bush junta would still be trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be elected in the first place; Enron; its shameless favouring of the already-too-rich; its reckless disregard for the world's poor, the ecology and a raft of unilaterally abrogated international treaties. They might also have to be telling us why they support Israel in its continuing disregard for UN resolutions.
The word isn’t “Enron.” (Yes, without the Iraq situation, we’d all be transfixed by the endless Enron story.) It’s “ecology.” Let’s strip away the intervening words and boil it down: “Without bin Laden, the Bush junta would still be trying to explain such tricky matters as its reckless disregard for the ecology.”
This word stuck out for me because of a piece I read over supper. A little profile in the WSJ about the euphoniously named Azzam Alwash, an Iraqi immigrant to the United States who wants to restore the great marsh that once stretched between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. It was an ancient swamp dotted with communities that lived in the sort of peaceable, sustainable style so beloved by the anti-Globos: people made their houses from reeds, for example. Unfortunately for the residents, and for the millions of birds that stopped off at the marsh on their migrations, and for all the other countless details of this ecosystem, the rebel Shiites used the swamp as a hideout.
So Saddam had it drained.
How? Why, he commanded the construction of a 350-mile long diversion called “The Saddam River.” The WSJ article goes on: “This project was followed by even larger hydroengineering schemes: the Mother of all Battles River in 1994, and the Fidelity to the Leader Canal in 1997.”
I googled until I could google no more. I found no pieces by John LeCarre denouncing Saddam’s destruction of a gigantic ancient ecosystem. I found a few LeCarre references to Kyoto, where he worries that criticism of the American viewpoint is being oppressed. And that is utterly typical: specific, large-scale environmental atrocities are less important than the theoretical consequences of American refusal to adopt the Kyoto protocols. Saddam is a local evil, and the world is full of those; such is life. But America is a global evil - and hence it cannot be allowed to remove a local evil, because that would legitimize the existence of something far more pernicious, i.e., us. Le Carre says as much:
I’m dead against Bush, but I would love to see Saddam’s downfall — just not on Bush’s terms and not by his methods.
In other words: when the people of Iraq are liberated, Le Carre will be horribly conflicted. He would have sat in a French cafe in WW2 and spit at the partisans who worked with the Allies, because their armies practiced segregation. Better to be slaves under pure simple evil than free men liberated by hypocrites.
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