10 Years Ago, Rotherham's Denis MacShane Was Among the Good Guys

Not that multiculti double standards should be defended in any way, and not that Denis MacShane does not deserve what's coming to him, but just a word to point out that 10 years ago, during the Iraq war, the MP for Rotherham was among the good guys. He was not only a supporter of Tony Blair's alliance with George W Bush, he was vocal in his support.

"That's Why We're Fighting the Bastards, Isn't It?"

"It hurts that war, it hurts me," [A. A. Khaliq of Rotherham said in May 2004]. "Blair made a mistake in backing Bush. I support the British troops, but not the United States. We should never have let the U.S. draw us in. We're in with a regime that doesn't listen to anybody. We should pull out."

 … Rotherham's member of Parliament during the same period, MacShane said of Khaliq, "A ways back, this is a guy who was shouting that the Brits and the Americans were wimping out and demanding the 7th Fleet bombard Milosevic when the Serbs were mistreating the Muslims."

"That's Why We're Fighting the Bastards, Isn't It?"

"Going door to door," said MacShane after two days of talking [prior to the June 2004 elections], "I don't get the impression that Iraq is what's on people's minds. It's how things are working out for them. One guy said, 'Iraq's a problem, isn't it Denis?' Then he talked about the young fellow beheaded on television, and he said, 'that's why we're fighting the bastards, isn't it Denis?' "

Then again, Tony Blair's Labour Party was always close to outstanding on the international scene, and (much) less so on the domestic scene.
Click for more vintage MacShane posts on No Pasarán

"That's Why We're Fighting the Bastards, Isn't It?"

In his weekly column in the International Herald Tribune, John Vinocur brings us a story on how the Iraq war is affecting the British government's chances in the European Union elections on June 10, by reporting on the election campaign from "a town where Labor has ruled since the Flood".

"It hurts that war, it hurts me," [A A Khaliq of Rotherham] said. "Blair made a mistake in backing Bush. I support the British troops, but not the United States. We should never have let the U.S. draw us in. We're in with a regime that doesn't listen to anybody. We should pull out."

All this came out like ice, with such little bombast that the visitor offered the school board official an instant conclusion based on what sounded like the controlled rage of man with his mind made up: So you believe Iraq will blow up in Tony Blair's face.

"Oh, on voting day?" Khaliq said. "I don't think so."

This is what newspapers call anecdotal evidence. Still, it's the kind of exchange that Labor cabinet members like Denis MacShane, the minister for Europe, have been hunting down for the past two weekends. Expecting poor European parliamentary results in any circumstances — more engagement in Europe is a tough sell with Britain's economy now outperforming France's and Germany's — Labor leaders have gone back to their constituencies looking for traces of a late spring catastrophe.

After all, in London, the prisoner abuse scandal had a sickening run of new chapters, the America of George Bush did not inspire confidence, and much of the British media was reporting a leadership wobble within the government. That, it was said, could lead to the prime minister's departure in favor of Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the Exchequer, whose label, within Labor, is paradoxically more pro-American and protective of Israel than Blair's.

… In London, Iraq could seem like "an elephant in the dining room," [MacShane] said, but what counted most here was a 3.1 percent unemployment rate in a place once designated as poverty-stricken by the EU, and private home values that have at least doubled in recent years. All on Blair's watch.

Rotherham's member of Parliament during the same period, MacShane said of Khaliq, "A ways back, this is a guy who was shouting that the Brits and the Americans were wimping out and demanding the 7th Fleet bombard Milosevic when the Serbs were mistreating the Muslims."

Which, he points out, wound up happening.

"Going door to door," said MacShane after two days of talking, "I don't get the impression that Iraq is what's on people's minds. It's how things are working out for them. One guy said, 'Iraq's a problem, isn't it Denis?' Then he talked about the young fellow beheaded on television, and he said, 'that's why we're fighting the bastards, isn't it Denis?'"

…In the real world of hard jobs and cheap flights to the sun, in which Rotherham holds charter member status, Labor appeared to think these arguments had their eternal merit. As for MacShane, he could report back: from up here, nothing like disaster in sight.

Incidentally, today is the Duke's birthday — he who once said: "Courage is being scared to death — but saddling up anyway."

A free pass away from the front: a caricature of a NATO future split into boom-boom for the Americans and handing out bonbons for the Europeans

For the first time in years, said one of those attending [the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in Oslo in May], Denis MacShane, a Labor member of Parliament and a former minister of state for Europe in the British government, no Europeans got their heads banged “for not dying and refusing to pull their weight.”

This prompts John Vinocur to ask:

Could that be, he was asked, because the war in Afghanistan was now fully, nonblushingly America’s, even Obama’s?

“Right on the button,” Mr. MacShane said. “The tactics and materiel and commanding general are changing. The emphasis is on special operations. The Americans just don’t need it anymore, this other long battle persuading the Germans, Spanish and Italians to get out and fight.”

Another official, from Continental Europe, requesting anonymity, said he considered the circumstances ones that brush the quasi-historical: in his view, the United States has de facto abandoned the idea of asking Europe to go to war while the administration re-Americanizes the conflict in Afghanistan.

… Pierre Lellouche, who is special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan for President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and who is a former president of NATO’s Parliamentary Assembly, has offered a very critical view of the International Security Assistance Force.

In “L’allié Indocile,” his book about France’s return to NATO’s operational command, he writes that the system for allied engagement in Afghanistan gave individual participant countries “the freedom not to fight and not to make war.”

According to Mr. Lellouche, these countries’ caveats — like fliers’ being restricted from medical evacuation missions after dark, or trainers’ being barred from accompanying their Afghan trainees into combat zones — has meant a “striking” division of labor between the soldiers who are “‘bureaucrats’ forbidden to leave their bases and bunkers” and the “combatants” (think of the British, Canadians, Dutch, Danes and French among the non-Americans).

Mr. Gates and Mr. Obama — the president seemed concerned about these circumstances during his election campaign — now appear to have rationalized them.

I was told by a Brussels diplomat that Vice President Joseph Biden actually informed NATO representatives in February that their countries were not going to be asked for what they couldn’t deliver.

It was, in substance, a free pass away from the front.

… After the president’s trip to a NATO summit in April, a participant close to the U.S. military wondered aloud at a symposium on European-American cooperation if “military-to-military relations are being undermined by the distinction between those who fight and those who don’t?”

For sure, the military missions in support of civilian development and training are central to restoring order in Afghanistan. And indeed America’s experience in Iraq and greater technical capabilities were elements prompting the administration to seize control of the war effort. But a system with high- and low-risk armies legitimizes a caricature of a NATO future split into boom-boom for the Americans and handing out bonbons for the Europeans.

Because It's France, That's Why: Populist Marine Le Pen Not Likely to Benefit from Brexit and the Trump Election

In France, the protest vote is less attractive now that the Americans and Brits have already pulled the trigger

write Jacques Lafitte and Denis MacShane in Politico (merci à HC).

The British and American press are full of alarm and excitement. After the triumph of the nationalist populism that swept Donald Trump into the White House and Britain out of Europe, the next big win in this new political era will be National Front leader Marine Le Pen’s election as France’s next president.

Two years ago we were accused of excessive pessimism and scaremongering because we said and wrote that Brexit would happen. Now we will no doubt be called naïve, wishful thinkers for saying the French won’t elect Le Pen.

The French love to do things differently. And more than anything, they hate to be told they will copy someone else, especially if that someone happens to be “Anglo-Saxon.”

In the early 1980s, when the United States and the U.K. embraced radical liberalism, the French embraced radical socialism. Today, France exports Thomas Piketty but remains immune to political input from across the Channel or Atlantic. Le Pen likes to claim she is the real brains behind Brexit and Trump. The suggestion that ideas may flow the other way would be preposterous.

The French Left turned the Third Way — a hollow slogan from the Blair-Clinton era — into an obscenity, in large part because it was coined outside France. Even François Mitterand’s open-minded prime minister Michel Rocard never referred to it.

Le Pen basked in the media spotlight after the Brits voted to leave the EU on June 23, but polls show she has not benefited from Brexit, not even in the short term. She is still stuck at 25-30 percent support, a remarkably similar level to the French Communist Party in the 1950s and 1960s.

At the time, French communists wanted to shut the borders to foreign workers, attacked European integration as an American capitalist front, and called for the French state to take charge of the French economy. Sound familiar? Le Pen’s National Front agenda is eerily similar. 

Related: Is the Le Pen Party Extreme Rightist or
Is It Actually a Reincarnation of the Communist Party?

Maggie Thatcher, The Grim Reaper; But More and More French Are Echoing Her Aversion to Taxes

A look back:

Seven months ago, Margaret Thatcher passed away, and the leftist teachers of civility lessons did not heed their own tongues, with Libération calling her the "symbol of the 1980s' ultra-capitalism" and the grim "reaper."

• Civility? Not Applicable for a Conservative — Even When It's at His or Her Funeral

But now, writes Arnaud Leparmentier — in an article whose (English-language) title is taken from a famous Iron Lady quote to the members of the EC, « I want my money back » — "the French are becoming more English." So far "it is a great secret" but, like the Anglo-Saxons, "they are starting to revolt against taxes. … to hear them, protest against their tax BILL, you would think they were Margaret Thatchers. 'I want my money back!' hammered the Iron Lady to Europe."

C'est un grand secret. Les Français deviennent anglais. Non pas parce que leur industrie est encore plus moribonde que celle de leurs voisins outre-Manche. Non plus parce qu'ils partagent la nostalgie d'une puissance fanée et se rassurent dans une quelconque expédition postcoloniale. Encore moins parce qu'ils enverront tous à Strasbourg en mai 2014 une palanquée de députés europhobes. Non : parce qu'ils se révoltent contre les impôts. Une première depuis l'instauration de la TVA, qui fit la gloire éphémère de Pierre Poujade à partir de 1953. A les entendre protester contre leur avis d'imposition, on les prendrait pour Thatcher. « I want my money back ! », serinait la « Dame de fer » contre l'Europe.

Rendez-moi mon argent ! Les Français sont las de payer car ils ont l'impression qu'ils n'en ont pas pour leurs impôts. L'antienne de la gauche qui proclamait « il ne faut pas moins d'Etat mais mieux d'Etat » ne fonctionne plus. Le mensonge de Jean-Marc Ayrault, qui prétendait il y a un an que neuf Français sur dix ne seraient pas touchés par les hausses d'impôts, a aggravé la défiance.

« Savoir tailler »

 … En France, l'école keynésienne est toujours là pour justifier la dépense : quand la conjoncture est mauvaise, il ne faut pas l'aggraver ; quand elle est bonne, il ne faut surtout pas casser la croissance. Acide, le blairiste Denis MacShane déplore : « L'art du jardinier n'est pas de planter, mais de savoir tailler. » 

2012 Trial Awaits the Frenchmen Involved in the Oil for Food Corruption Scandal

Ten years of searching for evidence in the oil-for-food corruption scandal involving Iraq's Saddam Hussein should bring Charles Pasqua, Total, and the oil company's CEO (Christophe de Margerie) to trial in Paris in 2012, writes Le Monde in an unsigned article. Believe it or not, of 17 Le Monde readers (many of them skeptical of their country's justice system where the élites are concerned), a couple actually praise George W Bush (or at least credit W) for his actions (without mentioning it was war) in bringing the corruption to an end.

Meanwhile, in an op-ed, Denis MacShane reminds us that the reason the Iraq War was allegedly "illegal" was due to a refusal to adopt a second resolution by… a communist Politburo (in Beijing) and a neo-authoritarian close to the Russian oligarchs (in Moscow) — and that, far earlier than the threat of a French veto.

La guerre en Irak a été illégale parce qu'un Politburo communiste en Chine et un néo-autoritaire proche des oligarques à Moscou ont refusé d'adopter une deuxième résolution de l'ONU et ce, bien avant la menace d'un veto francais.

Any time that a French president is faced with popular pressure, his response consists in hurling a stream of invective at the Anglo-Saxons

Any and every time that a French president is faced with popular pressure

writes Denis MacShane in Le Monde,

his response consists in hurling a stream of invective, as a form of reflex, at the Anglo-Saxons.

EU

"The EU will be shaped by Britain and France – also by its other 23 Member States."

—Denis MacShane, UK Member of Parliament and Minister for Europe

It is statements like these, in which the influence of the 23 other Member States seems like an after-thought, that rightfully makes some wonder whether certain European states are exercising too much power in the EU.