I really should write a mea culpa about Tony Blair. I’d become more skeptical of him these past few years, especially on domestic policy, but all that has to be balanced now against his piercing leadership in the war on terror. The fact that Britain might be the country to formally prod the U.N. Security Council to act up to its obligations on Iraq is proof enough. But Blair’s matter-of-fact insistence on the profound threat posed by Saddam to the rest of the world rescues the United States from an international isolation it does not in any way deserve. The British tabloid press depicts Blair as Bush’s poodle. Nonsense. He’s Bush’s translator and facilitator. He adds rhetorical nuance and diplomatic finesse to Bush’s gut refusal to risk American citizens’ lives for the sake of pleasing French presidents and the editorial board of the New York Times. Blair and Bush are very different personalities – the down-to-earth Texan, uncomfortable among East Coast elites, yearning for the weekend, compred with the upper-middle-class do-gooder, infused with moral clarity, barely leaving the office. Their relationship is not of identicals but of individual complements in a single cause: ridding the world of terrorist blackmail. Reagan and Thatcher had a similar relationship. One was a big-picture dreamer; the other was a shopkeeper’s daughter with a firm grip of accounting. But they united on ideology, and, despite (or perhaps because of) their personal differences, clearly had a profound affection for each other. In contrast, Bush-Major was a match of overly-similar cautious Tories, and it is their failed international legacy, based on a shared lack of imagination and boldness, that the next generation of leaders is having to deal with. Good relationships, it seems to me, require enough similarity to make them work (i.e. a common goal, or common values) but also enough difference to make them broad-based and supple. Bush and Blair have this, I think, which is good news for all of us. People close to both have told me how well they get along, despite Blair’s up-tight persona and Bush’s laid-back bluntness. (It’s Cherie who finds Bush hard to deal with.) Could it be that both men see in the other something they miss in themselves? Whatever the reason for the bond (which is stronger, I’m told, than that between Blair and Clinton), it couldn’t come at a more propitious moment.
THAT ANGLO-AMERICAN MAGIC II: The interview between the wife formerly known as Madonna, her husband, the movie director, Guy Ritchie, and the New York Times’ Alan Riding was a classic. Mr and Mrs Ritchie are another Blair-Bush, Thatcher-Reagan miracle of trans-Atlantic complementarity. You can see what Madonna sees in Ritchie – that working-class gruffness, the testosteroned good looks, the utterly un-p.c. and therefore almost exotic machismo. And you can see what he sees in her: amazing bod, loadsa cash, pop-cultural genius. But what’s so great about their marriage is how it plays with old stereotypes. The Ritchie household merges the Hollywood power-couple phenom with an old-fashioned husband and bloody wife from London in the 1950s. Ritchie is always calling Madonna, the “missus,” or “the wife.” And, like many British husbands, he can also degenerate into the role of put-upon teenage boy at a moment’s notice:
MADONNA: There are elements in the movie that I would say are reflective of the politics in our relationship. [She speaks to Mr. Ritchie, who is putting on Madonna’s reading glasses.] Don’t stretch out my glasses, Guy, you have a very big head.
RITCHIE: That’s all right, they’re already stretched.
MADONNA: No, they’re not. Take them off.
RITCHIE: All right. Come on, concentrate on the–
MADONNA: Anyway, yes, Guy’s a real macho and I’m a real hardnose, too. And sometimes we come to blows – not physically, but mentally and emotionally. And there is an element, a tiny little element of that in there. I’m attracted to men who are going to stand up to me.
Amen, Madonna. The great thing about Mrs Ritchie is that she’s a feminist woman who still thinks men are hot. She understands essential gender difference, and doesn’t try to erase it, but to celebrate and enjoy it on an equal footing. This is what some contemporary feminists miss – that scorning men for being pigs should not in any way be a barrier to loving them. Madonna wants equality with men, but she sure as hell doesn’t want them to stop being men, testosterone, beer, and all. And in Ritchie, who has the Brit-male-“I’m-gonna-go-down-the-pub-with-me-mates-while-you-do-the-hoovering”-schtick down pat, she has struck gold. He’s got a sharp tongue as well:
MADONNA: I just think I have to be clever about picking the right parts.
RITCHIE: [Reading from a list of Madonna’s movies] “The Tulse Luper Suitcases.” Remember that?
MADONNA: No. But Guy, are you going to read that or do the interview?
RIDING: [To Madonna] Here you can demonstrate your powers of getting him to cooperate.
MADONNA: Guy.
RITCHIE: Yes, darling.
RIDING: We were going to talk about how the two of you work together, and I’m seeing an example of it.
MADONNA: Yeah, well, this is an example of it. I try to exert my power and it doesn’t work.
“Yes, darling.” Two words that help sum up the British male’s essential attitude toward “the missus:” world-weary coexistence. Madonna’s brilliance is to find all that schtick absurd, funny and sexy at the same time. As always, her taste is impeccable.
THE ENEMY WITHIN: Not everyone will be greeting September 11 in a somber mood. Some will be celebrating.
A SADDAM PRIMER: I found this summary of Iraq’s horrors useful and salutary. For the proper context. I still want to urge you to buy and read Michael Ledeen’s “The War Against The Terror-Masters,” the most concise description of the forces of evil we are now confronting. It’s our book club selection this month. Read it and join the argument with Michael himself later this month.
LETTERS: “I was raised to be a Guilty Southern White Boy, but it didn’t take. Real life in the South of the last 30 years has been too complicated for me to work up very much unadulterated “G.” One way you can see the drift of the traditional southern liberal into irrelevance is to read To Kill a Mockingbird, the GSWB’s sacred text. I love that book, but, as a high school English teacher in the Atlanta area, I’m glad that I no longer have to teach it (students in the grades I teach don’t read it). Year by year, that book becomes more and more obsolete as a picture of race relations or any other aspect of life in the South. The day has come and gone for Atticus Finch’s heroism and Tom Robinson’s martyrdom. The legacy of those days is still with us, but now we’re on to something different. Some folks haven’t figured that out yet.” This, more GSWB testimony, the new York Times as Pravda, and why there are only five cool English guys alive, all on the Letters Page this week.
SCOWCROFT AWARD NOMINEE:
“Meanwhile the popular expectation of a knockout blow against the Taliban has been cruelly disappointed. Remember the optimistic remarks a couple of weeks back about the way American bombs were eviscerating the enemy? This has given way to sombre comment about the Taliban’s dogged resistance. Evidently our leaders gambled on the supposition that the unpopularity of the regime would mean the bombing would bring about the Taliban’s rapid collapse. And they also seem to have assumed that it would not be too difficult to put together a post-Taliban government. This was a series of misjudgements. The Joint Chiefs may have been misled by the apparent success – now that Milosevic has been defeated – of the bombing campaign in Kosovo. Perhaps they should have reflected on Vietnam. We dropped more tons of explosives on that hapless country than we dropped on all fronts during the Second World War, and still we could not stop the Vietcong. Vietnam should have reminded our generals that bombing has only a limited impact on decentralised, undeveloped, rural societies.” – Arthur M. Schlesinger, November 2, 2001.
“We Americans can learn to live with minor terrorism, as the people of Britain, Spain, India, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Sri Lanka and most of the world have already learned to do. By doing so, we will ensure that Sept. 11 will not lead to a Third World War and will not change our world forever… Unlike the Gulf War, which was essentially paid for by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Japan, we would have to pay for this war ourselves, and the impact on oil prices and on our economy could be disastrous. And we would wage this war largely on our own: Our supposed friends in the Middle East – King Abdullah II of Jordan, the Turks, the Egyptians and even many of the Kurds – oppose military action. Moreover, such a war might yet produce the vast enemy we currently lack. If we bomb and invade Iraq – surely killing hundreds of Iraqi civilians – if we destabilize the Arab countries, if we permit Israel to deny the Palestinians a separate state, we risk uniting the Muslim world against us and setting off that much-feared “clash of civilizations.” This could lead to a Third World War, a ghastly conflict employing biological warfare, chemical warfare, radiological warfare and even, heaven help us, nuclear warfare. If these consequences ensued, Sept. 11 would indeed be a date that would live in infamy.” – Arthur M. Schlesinger, September 8, 2002.
RICHARD GOLDSTEIN’S NIGHTMARE: Masculine, Mid-Western football fans – and they’re gay.
TIMES WATCH: In yesterday’s Week In Review, under a picture of Soviet spy, Alger Hiss, under arrest for espionage, the caption reads:
The United States forms the House Un-American Activities Committee to root out Communist Spies. Alger Hiss (left photo) was accused of espionage, and perjury charges were brought against him when he denied being a spy before a grand jury. He was convicted in 1951. It was later learned that some evidence supporting his claim of innocence was covered up.
It is also now public knowledge, thanks to decoded Soviet transcripts, that Hiss was indeed a Soviet spy and traitor. Only a few nutcases at the Nation believe in Hiss’s innocence any more. Oh, and the editors of the New York Times.
The Dish 