Confronting nonsense: Tariq Ali on Blair's UK

Rough Music: Blair, Bombs, Baghdad, London, Terror By Tariq Ali Verso 2005 Review by Nicholas Holt If you ask me where to find a good book on Islam and the Middle East, I'll send you to Tariq Ali's 2002 Clash of Fundamentalisms. I don't think I've ever been asked about a good book on present day Britain (and it's not a bad idea to check in on Bush's trans-Atlantic lieutenant in missions accomplished) but if I was, I'd direct the curious reader to Ali again, this time to Rough Music: Blair, Bombs, Baghdad, London, Terror. Rough Music emerges from the events of July 2005 when, in Ali's words, "the murderous chaos of Blair's war in Iraq came home to London" in the form of four suicide bombers who killed fifty-six morning commuters. Two weeks later, security forces kept the body count growing when they murdered a young Brazilian electrician on his way to work. For 100 pages, Ali examines the reign of Tony Blair, a prime minister under whose direction the Labor Party (for whom the socialist "Red Flag" is, ironically, the traditional anthem) "maintain[s] the Thatcher model but in a nicer, more touchy-feely way." Ali declares Blair's "disastrous foreign policy," propelled by a loyalty to US policy he compares to the "coital lock" of screwing dogs, to have been enacted in a Britain of "hollowed-out national life, and the solidification of a government-media consensus into an impenetrable bubble" as well as an "unrepresentative, unreformed electoral system," a besieged right to jury trial, an "authoritarian social agenda," and a declining national arts culture. Having read this book, I find it difficult to determine if the British executive is a thick headed moron or a smooth operating Machiavelli, a question I have likewise not resolved concerning my own. Consider Blair's reaction to the July bombings in London: "We are not having any of this nonsense about [the bombing having anything] to do with what the British are doing in Iraq or Afghanistan, or support for Israel, or support for America…. It is nonsense, and we have to confront it as that." Ali points out that Britain's experience with its first colony, Ireland, and the terrorism/resistance prompted by invasion and occupation there, might serve as a guide to the present inhabitant of Ten Downing Street (provided he is interested or competent enough to seek it) especially considering the recent declines in sectarian violence in the North and the means by which they were achieved. Indeed, Ali draws close parallels to the colonial wars fought last century in Derry and Belfast with those fought now in Kabul and Baghdad and includes an essay by IRA/Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adam recalling his torture at the hands of British security forces, which was documented Abu Ghraib style for torture-porn trophy photography. Are Ali's fears for Britain valid? Are the Brits listening to Blair's Bizzaro World explanation of death on London's mass transit as the slack-jawed Yanks who nodded along loyally with Bush when told airplane-wielding mass-murders took down the Twin Towers because they hated our freedoms? The answer is unclear, though it's worth noting that Blair's margin of victory in his last election (21.8 percent) was even slimmer than Bush's (32 percent). And, despite Ali's fears that things are getting as crappy over there as over here, Rough Music itself is a cause to keep British spirits afloat. Many of Ali's own essays sampled for the book first appeared in the major UK newspaper the Guardian, as did Adams' essay on torture in the time of "the Troubles." It's hard to imagine USA Today running regular columns by Noam Chomsky or the New York Times publishing Leonard Peltier's prison memoirs. So something must still be running right over there.