Blunkett Resigns

So David Blunkett has resigned, brought down it seems not by news of scandal, but by an email from a colleague in the Home Office advocating ‘no favours but slightly quicker’ – that and the indiscretion of his chat with a biographer and the slagging off of most of his colleagues.

I’m sorry for the man. Even the sight of Thatcher’s distressed departure was not as poignant, but I’m glad he’s gone. Someone described his output as Home Secretary as prodigious. It was. More than one bill a month for three and a half years, tumbled helter skelter from his mind, and as someone else said of him, ‘with never a doubt that he was right.’ In the end, that was what was wrong with Blunkett, not individual items of legislation, but his absolute refusal to confront the idea that he might be wrong. Blunkett is at heart a megalomaniac. He has shown it wherever he had power. His relationship with his mistress Kimberly Quinn, his conflicts with the teachers, judges, police, prison officers, the probation service. They can’t all be dismissed as ‘Hampstead Liberals’, the disrespectful term he used so often in caricaturing his opponents – they aren’t. They just happened - all of them to get in his way.

Who do you think was right?

Medal Of Freedom

Yesterday, George Bush awarded America’s highest civilian honour to three men who served him in Iraq. As he pinned the Presidential Medal of Freedom onto the proud recipients, he painted a rosy picture of their achievement. ‘They have played pivotal roles in great events, ‘ he said, smirking disingenuously . Others might be forgiven if they entertained uneasy feelings that the trio actually made pivotal misjudgements. First, came George Tenet, Director of the CIA during the time that 9/11 was planned and carried out without his knowledge, he who told Bush, it was a ‘slam dunk’ that Iraq had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Then came General Tommy Franks - the man who planned an invasion on the cheap. Other commanders say he should have stood up to Rumsfeld and insisted that if an invasion was to happen, it should involve enough manpower to control the country. The final recipient, and perhaps the most guilty of misjudgement, was Paul ‘Jerry’ Bremer, de facto ruler of Iraq in the months after invasion. Bremer at the stroke of his pen, dismissed the four hundred thousand man Iraqi army and national guard with the chilling words, ‘You have no future in the new Iraq - allowing them to melt away with weapons and become insurgents. This week, Iraqi interim president, Ghazi Yawer complained in a BBC interview, that American policy (Bremer’s policy in fact) had created a security vacuum. "We could have screened people out instead of screening them in, and this could have saved us a lot of hassle and problems," he said, during a discussion of the fact that thousands of newly trained security personnel are absent without leave in the face of an insurgent onslaught.

Bush’s honouring of those associated with the miserable policy in Iraq, discredits earlier recipients of the medal, but also confirms that he is a man determined to manipulate the minds of those he swore to serve.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4090963.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4096741.stm