Tony Hendra: That Special Blair Bush Relationship; Shades of Doctor Strangelove..
It was truly repulsive watching Tony Blair this week at his last G8 summit. There he was still doing the boyish grin thing, still whinnying about changing our Glorious Leader's so-called mind on global warming, because of that special relationship he has, and still failing miserably to have the slightest effect. It's happened so often before and so ruinously, you'd think Tony might want to give his fellow war criminal a wide berth when the time came to strut and fret his final hour upon the world stage. But no, there he was dutifully presenting his mandrill-like buttocks to our G.L. for one last dose of humiliation.
Perhaps it was the phony neo-Cold War flurry before Heiligendamm - it's staggering the desperate lengths the military-corporate fear-mongers will go to, now that the phrase war on terror is written in inverted commas in every country on the planet - but as I watched the dastardly duo perform their ridiculous nostalgia video, I flashed on Stanley Kubrick's 1964 masterpiece Doctor Strangelove.
As you may recall the movie, (for my money the finest satire ever created on film), revolves around Brigadier General Jack D Ripper an Air Force base Commander and raving lunatic who, convinced that the US is under attack by the Russians, sets World War 3 in motion by issuing orders to his wing of airborne B-52s to nuke their designated targets inside the USSR. Ripper, played to hyper-paranoid perfection by Sterling Hayden, makes nuclear Armageddon all but irreversible by rendering his base incommunicado to any outside control including the Pentagon and refusing to divulge the recall code for his aircraft. The only voice of anything approaching reason inside the madhouse is his Executive Officer, Royal Air Force Group-Captain Lionel Mandrake (one of Peter Sellers' three brilliant roles in the movie), who does everything he can - from cajoling to confrontation to cooperation - to make Ripper see sense, divulge the recall code, stop babbling that he "can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."
In short Mandrake is Blair to Ripper's Bush.
Needless to say Mandrake's deferential, diplomatic I-say-old-chap twittering completely fails to sway Ripper or stop the megadeath-dealing behemoth he has set in motion. Mandrake is just too damn nice to resist Ripper's psychotic world-view:
Ripper: Mandrake, have you never wondered why I drink only distilled water, or rain water, and only pure-grain alcohol?
Mandrake: Well, it did occur to me, Jack, yes.
Ripper: Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation. Mandrake? Fluoridation of water?
Mandrake: Uh? Yes, I-I have heard of that, Jack, yes. Yes.
Ripper: Well, do you know what it is?
Mandrake: No, no I don't know what it is, Jack no.
Ripper: Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face?
Mandrake: Um, no Jack...
Within Kubrick's larger satire of the self-destructive insanity of arming ourselves with the most ludicrous (and cowardly) weapons ever conceived by man, is a smaller more precise satire of "the special relationship" that's supposed to exist between the US and Britain. (Worth noting that because Hollywood refused to, Strangelove had to be produced and shot in London). In fact 43 years ago, back when Tony Blair was still an ink-stained schoolboy, Kubrick nailed just how one-sided and - from the British POV - impotent and deluded is the myth of influence over Washington on which the youngest Prime Minister Britain elected in two centuries, squandered his considerable talent, a brilliant career and his place in history.
The moral of Tony's sorry tale is one for future British PMs - as well as for the neo-cons' darling new little puppy-dog in the Elysee Palace. But Kubrick's larger satire has a modern resonance too: the military-corporate behemoth for which George Bush is not much more than a seedy doorman, is as set as ever on its mad, destructive course. Yes the enemy has changed - though you can often quite comfortably substitute 'terrorist' for 'communist' in Dr Strangelove - but Armageddon is still hoped for by lunatics on both sides of the current demonology and the scenarios for how it might be managed are if anything even crazier than they were in the Cold War.
More to the point not only has the military swollen to a size beyond conception, but its omnipresence in every area of policy where the US interfaces with other nations is a guarantee not of peace or "victory" but of decades if not generations more conflict, terror, misery and devastation. Tony Blair was unable to change the behemoth's course either in its devastation of Iraq or the coming - and incalculably worse - devastation that will result from global warming, not because George Bush is a stubborn blockhead, but because the behemoth doesn't want to change its course. Its course guarantees it far too much power and wealth. And one of its fundamental axioms unsurprisingly is that the military not only knows what it's doing, but must be left alone to do what it does best.
One of the more delicious speeches in Doctor Strangelove rings as true now as it did the year the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan:
"...Clemenceau once said war was too important to be left to the generals. When he said that, fifty years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought."
One wonders how many members of our current military command would have a huge problem with those sentiments? Some possibly, but most I suspect would consider them - if only privately - quite plausible.
Stanley Kubrick of course put these words, along with an enormous stinking cigar, into the mouth of Brig. General Jack D. Ripper, raving lunatic.
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7:21:32 AM 
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