Exit for Bertie

I wanted to say something smart and relevant a few days ago about Bertie's announcement of depature but nothing good came - I'm still a bit confused and unconvinced that the 'Ahern era' is indeed at a close. He came to power just as I was beginning to take cognisance of my political surroundings, and has been there for all of my adult life. So while the world went from technology bubble to 9/11 to Iraq to Climate Change, there has always been Bertie - immovable, the set stock pattern of Irish political life.

A few words about his virtues. Certain tricky things can only be worked out by people who are consummate, pre-programmed politicians - the ever-friendly, glad-handing, back-slapping whats-the-craic-lads types, people who are at base shallow and cynical, but who know that the price of power is eternal smiling vigilance in the face of the wary voter. Bertie Ahern was such a man - "ruthless, cunning, devious" when he needed to be, but, out in the world, a smily-wavy man, a joker, hand permanently extended to greet the next potential Fianna Fail supporter. Nobody likes this person - the fakery and fronting - but everybody falls for him. And, more than likely, the majority of people vote for him.

We don't go to such people for vision or purpose or inspirational leadership. We don't quote their speeches, or ape their habits, or consider them prime movers in world-historical terms. But these are exactly the kinds of people who can figure out how to finangle a knotty situation and bring intractable problems to resolution. Someone needs to coax and charm and wheel and deal, to lard the gears with effulgent flattery. Someone also needs to be persistent, dogged, unrelenting - as if outside Tolka Park on a Friday night, shaking hands and making nice in the cold, going after every last vote, enquiring after grannies and hip-operations and housing lists. Certain problems need time and effort and an unhealthy barrage of manpower.

Bertie Ahern was that sort of politician, and the stalemate in the North was that kind of problem. He didn't do it alone, by any means, but his contribution may just have been the decisive nudge from the South to keep things rolling, to make sure problems were ironed out (or properly ignored), to ensure people were kept cordial and smiling and - above all - working toward some kind of final settlement. What was wrought by the Belfast Agreement was not perfect in any sense, but it reflected the efforts of the man who helped raise it - an ill-formed, wholly-functional, overly-pragmatic edifice, designed not for beauty but for work. And work it did. It is to Ahern's endless credit that the edifice still stands today, and that it has set the boundaries for a stable and lasting peace in the six counties.


The flipside of all this is, of course, the dispiriting, enervating, utterly-defeating way that politics in Ireland has continued to be practiced. Ahern represents all that is febrile and frightful about our public life - the Galway tent, the narrow vision, the lack of commitment to the public good, the disregard of the most cursory ethical standards, the lack of proper policy goals, the extraordinary incompetence in spending public money, the shame and shallowness of it all. And all of this was lacquered over by a thin film of diversion and deceit, an unwillingness to be forthright and honest about matters large and small. Only yesterday did he completely invert the actual import of events when he went after the Mahon Tribunal as "low lives" for their "harsh treatment" of Grainne Carruth. That such a claim was bizarrely at odds with the readily-available facts at hand, it was remarkable that no journalist present didn't muster the requisite courage and say - "Hang on you fraud, you were the one who lied and forced an innocent woman to take the stand!"

Much of this was, of course, of a piece with the reigning political culture within Fianna Fail, stretching back to the salad days of Chief Haughey and his myriad accounts. In a way, Ahern never really emerged from the Boss's shadow, and forever represented a throwback to a meaner, less scrupulous, less honest politics (we'll see if Cowen, whose heritage is that of a different FF wing, can banish Haughey's crooked atmosphere for good). That Bertie has presided over great economic growth is without dispute, and his early management of our fiscal affairs proved very smart indeed. But in the run-up to the 2002 election, prudence and thoughtfulness were thrown out the window, and all serious management of the way we spend public money seemed to go elsewhere entirely. In the last seven years, Fianna Fail have not been responsible stewards of our finances. As a result, we are left now with a steadily-cooling, over-exposed economy, a faltering property market, a serious dearth in competitiveness, and dim prospects ahead. Infrastructure was not properly invested in - not was education - and this could cause Ireland severe problems in the short term.

All of this without mentioning the manner of Ahern's ignoble exit - forced out to divert concern about his financial records away from the Government. He does not appear to anyone as spectacularly corrupt on the Haughey scale, but, as has been long established by the tribunal, he breached the public trust on several occassions, and in serious ways. As his evidence grew more contradictory and less convincing, leaving was only one way to salvage the reputation that he had so assiduously cultivated - Bertie the plain man of the people, a simple son of Dublin. This wasn't an act - my dad saw him in Fagin's the night before he gave his notice - but it was an affectation that grew more and more implausible, as records emerged showing that his varied accounts runneth over with friendly, unexplained cash donations, at a time in Irish life when most people (my parents included) had to get a Credit Union loan for an oven.

We will have to await the tribunal's no doubt Tolstoyan report to get the full picture on Bertie's finances. But it is not an altogether harsh judgment to say that Bertie's legacy may be viewed as one massive achievement in the North, an early, competent manager of the boom, but marred by a series of significant failures - in health, education, and transport. His triple-electoral success bestows upon him the historic imprimatur of the Irish people and he was, above all, an unrivalled politician, an expert on doing what politicians need to do more than anything - get votes. History may, in the end, judge us more severely than it judges him. But, as Adlai Stevenson once quipped - "In a democracy, people usually get the leaders they deserve."

Is There No Decency At Last?

Christopher Hitchens has been well off the mark in some of his recent dispatches, but only he could skewer the Clinton "misspeak" over Bosnia so thoroughly.

Bacevich and Kamm

I've pointed before to Oliver Kamm as the sort of "Atlanticist" eager to see John McCain in the White House, on the basis of him favouring a more interventionist foreign policy. Andrew Bacevich, meanwhile, is more of a stay-at-home conservative type, disadinful of foreign adventures and concerned about the deleterious effects an unwieldy military aparatus has on a free republic.

Here is an interesting instance of the former taking on the latter. A couple of things stick out though. Mr Kamm does his very best to try and chain Bacevich to the thought of historian Charles Beard, an isolationist who regarded American military action abroad as harmful to the republic. The anti-interventionist Beard does indeed feature in Bacevich's writings, but is part of a more general mosaic of 'realist' thought that he is drawing from. In an essay published a little while ago, Bacevich expanded on this:

There is, to be sure, a self-consciously amoral Old World strain of realism, a line running from Metternich to Bismarck in the 19th century and brought to these shores by Henry Kissinger. But there also exists a distinctively American realist tradition that does not disdain moral considerations. This homegrown variant, the handiwork of prominent 20th-century public intellectuals such as the historian Charles Beard, the diplomat George Kennan, the journalist Walter Lippmann, and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, provides a basis for seriously engaging the moral issues posed by international politics.

It is, in fact, Niebuhr and not Beard who is the most serious influence on Bacevich - the Cold War pastor who saw the world as it was, was unafraid to use power for good, but who was suspicious of America's moral pretensions, anchored, as they were and are, to delusional fantasies of military dominance. Any attempt to paint Bacevich as some kind of ressurected Lindbergh, unmindful of evil and sedulous in the use of power, will come unstuck, just as Kamm's does.

A few other differences between Mr Kamm and Professor Bacevich: one has had extensive experience in the military; one teaches foreign relations at an eminent university; one has published scholarly works on American foreign policy; one has lost a son in the Iraq war; and one has been, consistently, correct in his analysis of that conflict. That person is not, I might add, Mr Kamm.

Beijing Again

Norm directed me to this very elegant piece of reasoning, concerning a Beijing boycott, sent to him by Jonathan Quong. It goes much, much further into the mechanics of arguing for a boycott than I could have done, and does so in a spare, lucid, generous way. I'm speaking next Wednesday at the Historical Society in Trinity on this subject, and hope to employ some of these very arguments, and so I must declare an early note of gratitude to Mr Quong for setting them out in such a direct and convincing manner.

I would take issue, however, with one stage of the argument: the contention that we "are each under a duty of justice not to participate in, or benefit from, projects or activities that involve violations of other people's rights." Mr Quong assumes this statement, though "stringent", to be "uncontroversial". I'm not so sure.

It is, of course, preferable that people avoid involving themselves in projects that directly violate the rights of others. Torturing people in attempts to extract information is definitely not on. The example given by Mr Quong- declining a dinner party invitation on the grounds that slave labour is used- is pretty open and shut: no thanks. Another example, say, would be not investing your money in companies that, while offering a healthy return, are contributing to genocide.

But, beyond these flourescently obvious cases, their exists a vast, penumbral grey zone, in which any statement promulgating a strict "duty of justice" becomes very problematic: "projects and activities" seems to me a very spacious remit indeed. Without trying to bring in a specifically Christian element, I think its fairly safe to say that we live in a 'fallen' world - a hard, unfriendly place fully-laden with deeply intermeshed injustices, which, however diligently we try, we cannot rid ourselves of. The oranges we buy, the shoes that we wear, the cars we drive, the news we watch, the money we make - all of it, at some point, passes through some stage of production whereby, somehow or other, it is connected to a human rights violation, even if that violation is only minor. An "activity" such as injecting money into the American economy by buying the New Yorker every week might, through a succcession of financial mutations, go to pay the salary of a CIA worker skilled at waterboarding. The taxes I pay can be funnelled, via a "project" like Irish Aid, and a series of graft and theft, into the Treasury of a toxic African regime. And so on, ad infinitum.

In the face of this, any abstract "duty of justice" that is not more rigourously defined falls short of responding to the world as it is. This is not to refute Mr Quong's point; only to add a qualification.

But another, related, issue is when rights are in conflict. Any broadly conceived and "stringently" enforced "duty of justice" doesn't take account of the necessity of sometimes settling for the lesser evil. It's not very edifying to say so, but sometimes, human rights must be overlooked in favour of the greater good. This, obviously, will not always be the case, but a realistic worldview simply can't dispense with this abiding truth. In my own view, its in the tangle and tumult of experience, and not in generalised, postulated "duties", that we must locate the drive to protect human rights. But in doing so, we must also accept that we cannot always protect them, and that, in some way, we may inadvertently - and inescapably - be violating them. Thus a "duty of justice" will, to my mind, simply not always work.

All this does not, however, entirely absolve us of our moral responsibilities. A boycott of Beijing is, in my view, the realistic option for athletes who take seriously the promotion of human rights, and who do not wish to participate in the glorification of a horrid regime. And fair play to Mr Quong for tackling the issue in such a bracing manner.

4000 - and counting

Of all the comment about the US toll in Iraq reaching its next grisly milestone, this stands out as all that really needs to be said.

Bacevich and Obama

One of the books that made conservatism intellectually attractive to me was Andrew Bacevich's The New American Militarism, and he's been making the cogent conservative case against the continuation of the war for a good while now. Here he is making the conservative case for - surprise - Obama.

McCain's merits?

Oliver Kamm still reckons that, like himself, John McCain was "right" about the invasion of Iraq. Leaving aside how anybody can really be "right" about a conflict so fraught with moral complexity and political ambiguity, he then goes on to say that the "Western alliance" would be "well led" by a McCain presidency. Judging from other evidence, though, this seems questionable indeed.