Obama's Handshake Cartoon

On The Wisdom of Crowds and The Instincts of Cowards

They think themselves lions, stallions, perhaps the more imaginative among them unicorns or some rare form of tropical cuckoo, but the truth for anybody with the eyes to see it is that most politicians are pure bred mule. They are our ultimate beasts of burden. They carry our heaviest loads on the stoutest of legs because the political process has bred them that way. Crossing the stud Circumstance with the bitch Necessity we produce these strange snorting hybrids with small brains and hardened backs, able to move intractable loads over rough terrain. Yet they’re also cautious beasts. They move slowly on the hoof and even the best of them are rarely amenable to changing direction or choosing the hard trail over the easy.

It’s the nature of their existence that politicians want to be liked by their masters. The cycle of election and re-election encourages the characteristic moderation obvious in their species. The political system is inherently reactionary and this is one of the great benefits of our parliamentary democracy. No one government, in theory, can harm it enough within four years to destabilise the country.

The great irony, of course, is that this breeds a tendency towards caution that ensures that the majority of our politicians remain largely anonymous. They never get the fame they so obviously crave. We only remember those rare few with the red flash of devilment in their eyes. It’s the wilful and bold who catch our attention, those that relish the difficult decision and the principled defence. Those politicians we rightly remember as either great representatives of the state or twitching fools who led us ankle deep into our historic follies. Sometimes the separation between the two is hard to distinguish. Margaret Thatcher was, for some, our finest post-war Prime Minister because her convictions were stronger than those of the weak gents hanging around the old Tory Central Office. Others consider her a divisive ideologue whose policies continue to harm the country which has never truly recovered from the splits her policies deepened and spread.

Which brings us to Syria…

This side of a nuclear Tehran, no subject wears down the scratching post as quickly as Syria. You can trouble your skull until the bone flakes under yours nail but you’ll find no answer to the question ‘what do we do next?’ This ethnic civil war is as deathly and impenetrable as the darkest well of the deepest missile silo. Yet despite the complexity of the situation, it doesn’t stop newspapers from printing polls that boldly proclaim that the British public are against intervention in Syria by about two to one.

I’m never sure how to take these figures other than with an antacid. News reports present them as unquestioned statistics. The implication is that there is an innate wisdom of the crowd that politicians should heed. We’re reminded that the very same democratic process put them into power, so perhaps it’s no surprise that politicians never dismisses the numbers by pointing out the obvious truth that all polls are an exercise in canvassing the ignorant.

In 2008, a poll of 3000 UK teenagers revealed that a fifth of them thought that Sir Winston Churchill was a fictional character and 47% thought Richard the Lionheart was a figure from English myth. Presumably, nearly six years later, many of those teenagers are now adults able to express equally profound insights about a situation that has baffled most Middle East analysts.

This problem has long been held as one of the faults of democracy but as Winston Churchill said ‘democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.’ Of course, less often quoted was Churchill’s statement from 1919 when he wrote that ‘I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes’ which just goes to prove that even the wisest of us can be misguided at times.

I’m not saying I’m any more enlightened than the average teenager or the man routinely voted the greatest Briton of the twentieth century. I’m as stumped as anybody about what would make a suitable response to Syria’s use of chemical weapons against its own people.

America argues that we must do something because genocide by nerve agents should never be tolerated by the international community. They conveniently forget that the West did nothing after Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds of Halabja in 1986, let along their use of chemical weapons throughout the Iran Iraq war in which America supported the Ba'athist regime. The only difference is this time they drew a line in the Syrian sand that Assad deliberately stepped across.

At the same time, we’ve seen the problems of limited involvement in the past. In the aftermath of 9/11, questions were asked about the Clinton administration’s limited response to the 1988 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Had Clinton been bolder, the critics argue, the horrors of the Twin Towers might not have occurred.

Then we have the examples of Iraq and Afghanistan, where American might was thrown at a problem and the whole thing quickly developed horns and a poisonous bite.

So we have three examples from recent history: of doing nothing, of doing very little, and going all in with troops on the ground. Somebody has to now choose which path to take.

The most likely outcome is that Obama will take Clinton’s line. America warships will stand off the coast, destroy a few bases and this whole exercise in saving face will have only cost them a few hundred million dollars in cruise missiles. Syria will protest but things will soon return to the potent state of twisted normality once Assad realises that he’s got away with a geopolitical slap on the wrist.

That, however, has almost become a secondary issue. Ignoring the rights and wrongs of action against Syria, what has the last week shown us about the political processes in the UK and US now that the Prime Minister asked Parliament to vote and the Commander in Chief has now passed the problem to Congress? Some claim that democracy has been served and that this is the end of conviction politics. But is that really what we expect of our leaders?

There is no evidence to suggest that the average Member of Parliament (or, indeed, member of Congress) is any more enlightened about Syria that any member of the public, albeit, one of the few who still buys a newspaper. Not every politician voting on Syria will have had a thought-through position on the crisis. Few will have studied the evidence. Our MPs voted on one issue but will have judged it on a thousand unrelated news stories. Some will have ignored the situation in the outskirts of Damascus and voted ‘no’ because they still remember Tony Blair’s dossier of WMDs. Some will have voted ‘no’ with an eye to their pay packets and the next election. Some might have voted ‘no’ simply to spite the Prime Minister. At the same time, some will have voted ‘yes’ because they believe in the politics of red lines in the sand or because of they have a munitions manufacturer in their constituency or because they get some twisted sexual gratification from the idea of it being in their power to launch cruise missile attacks and their new mistress will be impressed… At least two missed the vote because they didn’t hear the division bell ring.

My point is that what we saw last week might have been democracy in action but it was also a decision made less informed and based on the whims of people less qualified to judge. The result was shared indifference, an unclear moral position, and no single person standing up to say ‘this is what we will do and I take the responsibility for these actions’. To put it more succinctly: aren’t there some instances when it’s simply not acceptable to say that 51% of our country believes what you did to be a crime against humanity?

Syria is a gnarly problem but whatever the Prime Minister had decided it must surely have been superior to the current impotent display of political manoeuvring and point scoring. The term ‘conviction politics’ may have fallen out of favour but is this really the best alternative we have? There is nothing wrong with conviction pacifism as there might often be a reasoned case for action. Rightly or wrongly, Tony Blair acted out of his convictions and he was judged by those actions. Whether you agree with him or disagree with him, he acted as a Prime Minister should. Instead, Cameron and Miliband have created a situation in which no decision was taken. We threw a coin and decided to abide by the result. That is worse than appeasement. It’s abandoning principals in favour of a boorish yob neutrality borne out of ignorance. We would have been served just as well turning the debate into a glitzy ITV primetime show, completely with a telephone vote.

Our political system might be a democracy over the course of five years but it is run day-to-day as a constitutional monarchy in the same way that the United States America is a presidential system. Both Prime Ministers and Presidents are meant to make hard but informed decisions based on the best advice of experts and the evidence provided by the intelligence community. It is the role of voters to judge them on those decisions at the end of their terms is office. By placing the question before the House of Commons, David Cameron abdicated his responsibility for the most difficult decision of his Prime Ministership. His motivation for doing so was supposedly his belief in parliamentary democracy but it resembled shrewd politics. Had the Commons voted for military action, he could have moved forward with a mandate that absolved him of blame. In the case that they didn’t vote for action, he steps back, as he’s done, with a shrug of his shoulders and a clear conscience. In either case, he doesn’t have to stand by his decision.

David Cameron washed his hands of Syria the moment he knew he could no longer be blamed for choosing the wrong action or the wrong inaction. He is hoping that responsibility diluted is no responsibility at all and he might be proved right. It has played well with the country and won’t hurt him at the next election. But self-interest has always been one of the very few convictions he has as a politician. He is our affable, likable Prime Minister who loves the job he does so long as he doesn’t have to make any hard decisions. He’s a consummate politician, wanting to be loved by all and, for that reason, he’ll be ultimately remembered by few.

To Protect or Sever: The New American Politics in its Teenage Years

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And the animated gif version if you've not got Flash.

These teenage angst-ridden years of the twenty first century should go down as the decade when mistakes were made and hard lessons learned. ‘Stand up tall, son’ would be his words if the century had a keen-eyed father cut from the Henry Fonda cloth. ‘You’ve made an ass of yourself but you’ll be stronger for it.’ Cue a gnarled hand slapping a young shoulder before the father retreats to his makeshift mound and throws another pitch in this idealised tableau of the American rural homestead.

Except politics being politics, it’s hard to believe that any lesson will be learned from the current groundball fuckaround emanating from the White House. A secret spying programme collecting the phone records of millions of American citizens run by the National Security Agency, the phone phreaking, geekier and downright spookier cousins of the CIA: well, there sure isn’t a hell of a lot about that you’d want to emblazon on a t-shirt and wear to a wedding.

It seems that politics in America have suddenly been split into two camps: those that firmly believe that national security must come before individual liberties and those that firmly believe that national security must come before individual liberties. And for those of you not paying much attention at the back: yes, that’s right. Both Republicans and Democrats are slowly running their fingers down the same script and muttering identical lines.

The fact that President Obama is beginning to look as boot-on-your-throat authoritarian as any Republican comes as a surprise only to those of us naïve enough to think we were about to enjoy a four-year long dinner party served from the best china. We thought everything would be so much more civilised with a liberal sitting in the Big Chair at the head of the table. Except it’s usually at this point that History excuses itself and loudly breaks wind as if to remind us that Jimmy Carter’s presidency floundered playing GI Joe in the Iranian desert and Bill Clinton struggled to find and exert the right degree of muscle to supress the threat posed by Bin Laden. Before them, it was Lyndon Johnson who escalated the Vietnam War and John F. Kennedy who walked us to the edge of the nuclear cock pit with the Soviets. Fate rarely presents Presidents with an easy path forward or even allows them to stand on some ideologically firm footing and sometimes that means the facts don’t make easy reading for those partisan to either side.

We expect our Republican presidents to be as carpet-chewing crazy as a dog tied to a hot radiator. When they then unleash hell on some sabre-rattling on the other side of the world, they are merely conforming to the stereotype and Noam Chomsky gets another 1500 good words out of it. The notion of the Republican firebrand looks familiar when written down but the reality is that (rightly or wrongly) Reagan’s doctrine of ‘peace through strength’ is credited for ending the Cold War and (rightly or wrongly) it is said that Nixon’s realpolitiking with China eventually brought the troops back from Vietnam.

Alternatively, we think our Democrats are going to be so mortified by Liberal angst that they couldn’t nail a jelly to a pauper’s door and that every state in the world will soon be outmuscling America. Bill O’Reilly subsequently gets another sixty minutes of prolix and a book in the best sellers. Yet as Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and even Clinton proved, Democrats might not be happy to dance the military two-step but, like Roosevelt before them, that doesn’t mean they don’t know the moves.

Which brings us to the current incumbent in the White House, who should consider having the place repainted grey as he learns that there’s very little presidents do that can ever be considered whiter than white.

The elephant in the room since 11th September 2001 has, of course, been the three thousand lives lost to nineteen individuals who the authorities had failed to identify as radicalised goons in the pay of a psychotic villain. Most days, the elephant stands docile in the corner and Presidents can talk about doing the right thing such as closing Guantanamo Bay and ensuring ‘strong oversight’ over future drone strikes. But then there’s always that one day when the beast’s adrenal gland gets pumping so hard that you better be ready with something more than a handful of peanuts because he’s going to charge. Those are the days that would break the idealism of any President.

And you can sure it will break them because as much as America is a country self-consciously proud of its President, there are still greater forces in the darker places of the American psyche. One powerful force is the paranoid fear of government. Liberty is the biggest concept in the American consciousness and although it is often portrayed as an issue that obsesses the defenders of civil rights on the left, the right are even more paranoid. It’s not the placard wavers on the left who build fortified compounds in the woods and fill them with slavering tattoo-brained neo-Nazis looking forward to unifying the nation under the flag of gang rape and motorcycles.

Against this obsessive wish to be live free from government, the American public expect their government to protect them, making it an impossible covenant that any President signs when they enter office. ‘Love us but don’t look at us’ is what the citizens seem to demand. It accounts for the familiar cliché of retired Presidents speaking about the hard decisions they had to make during their time in office. Yet it’s also a cliché that shouldn’t invalidate the sense of relief, sadness, and profound regrets that most presidents ultimately feel. It is one thing to swear your life and loyalty to a belief or an ideal but it’s quite another to expect others to die for what you feel is morally right.

And that is the message brazenly tattooed on this foolish youth of a century and it might well still be there in its old age: Presidents will now accept the blame for any sin other than the one that left the country at the mercy to another attack like 9/11.

It is the nature of terrorism that they move among us. There is no high level satellite which can mark their convoy driving through a war zone. Governments have to find other ways to tackle the menace and no solutions is ideal. If the collection of metadata is the best way to identify the threats, then should the government collect the data or look the other way? To protect or sever? It’s both a no brainer and a ball squeezer. There is no right decision, just two different degrees of wrong.

Obama has been forced to make a hellish decision, placing his own reputation on the line rather than the lives of American citizens at some point in the future. Both the left and right will accuse him of cowardice, of spying on the American people, of breaking his promise to be a different kind of leader, but you can be also sure that will have regretted this decision even as he thought it the right thing to do.

Welcome to adulthood in the twenty first century. Leave your moral absolutes at the door, though you do retain the right to feel outraged.

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Another piece the died an inglorious death in The Guardian's 'Comment is Free' inbox.

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