A Week Is A Long Time

This week has begun with the revelation that Osama bin Laden, an extremely tall and not remotely Pakistani-looking man, had been inhabiting for some time a large compound in an affluent, non-Pashtun garrison town a mere two hours' drive from the capital city. And rather charmingly, though also tellingly, retaining its colonial name. For that town was in, wait for it, Pakistan.

Bin Laden had been accompanied by at least two wives, one another obvious foreigner from the Arabian Peninsula, the other actually drawn from the local population, together with a number of other relatives. He had even been noted for giving pet rabbits to local children. Is it conceivable that the Pakistani authorities were unaware of his whereabouts? No, of course not. Is it conceivable that the governments sending, in some cases, boys still in their teens to die in ostensible pursuit of him in Afghanistan were unaware of his whereabouts? No, of course not. The Pakistanis have questions to answer. But they are not the only ones.

So, following first that and then today's verdict of unlawful death in the case of Ian Tomlinson, this week would be rounded off perfectly by another statement of the blatantly obvious, namely that Tony Blair and those informing him knew all about the impending 7/7 attacks, but at the very least permitted them to happen, the better to take down the old Michael Howard Play Book from the shelf, as well as, bizarrely, to justify both the ongoing wars that the bombers frankly blamed for their actions, and yet further such misadventures in the future. If the verdict fails to say that, then file it with, in that case, the equally preposterous Hutton "Report". Now, how about a Coroner's Inquest into the death of Dr David Kelly? Who could possibly object to that...?

Dear old David Aaronovitch, once the Soviet Union's place man at the top of the NUS, was on PM, still blathering on that Blair had not lied about Iraq, and even suggesting that it is an Arab thing to doubt the word of politicians and their media courtiers, whom the British way is to trust without question. Not for the first time, I was confronted with the fact that the fiercely secular Ashkenazi Marxist-nationalists that were so important in taking both the United Kingdom and the United States to war in Iraq, against the wishes of almost every other person in at least one of those aggressor states, are in fact as separatist as their distant cousins among the Hasidim, and know, if anything, even less about the British culture of which they are in no sense a part. Thank goodness for Ed Miliband and Maurice Glasman.

As for Aaronovitch's view on Blair, just as the former's book on conspiracy theories took no account of the fact that Robert Runcie had urbanely conceded the whole of Gareth Bennett's case in Humphrey Carpenter's devastating authorised biography, so he now takes no account of the fact that Blair, wholly unaccustomed to any proper questioning, has admitted on television to Fern Britton that he never believed in the existence of Iraqi WMD but would have invaded Iraq anyway. Britton is this country's greatest living interviewer. Is Aaronovitch our worst ever commentator?