Oxford

[Moses]

www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-oe-kinsley12jun12,0,7389890.column?coll=la-sunday-commentary

MICHAEL KINSLEY

The Left Gets a Memo
Michael Kinsley

June 12, 2005
After about the 200th e-mail from a stranger demanding that I cease my personal cover-up of something called the Downing Street Memo, I decided to read it. (By mentioning 200 e-mails, I do not intend to brag. I'm sure Tom Friedman got many more.) It's all over the blogosphere and Air America, the left-wing talk-radio network: This is the smoking gun of the Iraq war. It is proof positive that President Bush was determined to invade Iraq a year before he did so. The whole "weapons of mass destruction" concern was phony from the start, and the drama about inspections was just kabuki: going through the motions.
Although it is flattering to be thought personally responsible for allowing a proven war criminal to remain in office, in the end I don't buy the fuss. Nevertheless, I am enjoying it, as an encouraging sign of the left's revival. Developing a paranoid theory and promoting it to the very edge of national respectability takes ideological self-confidence. It takes a critical mass of citizens with extreme views and the time and energy to obsess about them. It takes a promotional infrastructure and the discipline to settle on a story line, disseminate it and stick to it.
It takes, in short, what Hillary Clinton once called a vast conspiracy. The right has had one for years. Even moderate and reasonable right-wingers benefit from a mass of angry people even further right. This overhang of extremists makes the moderates appear more reasonable. It has pulled the center of politics, where the media try to be and where compromises on particular issues end up, in a rightward direction. Listening to extreme views on your own side is soothing even if you would never express them and may not even believe them.
So cheers for the Downing Street Memo. But what does it say? It's a report on a meeting of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and some aides on July 23, 2002. The key passage summarizes "recent talks in Washington" by the head of British foreign intelligence (identified, John le Carre-style, as "C"). C reported that "military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy…. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."
C's focus on the dog that didn't bark — the lack of discussion about the aftermath of war — was smart and prescient. But even on its face, the memo is not proof that Bush had decided on war. It states that war is "now seen as inevitable" by "Washington." That is, people other than Bush had concluded, based on observation, that he was determined to go to war. There is no claim of even fourth-hand knowledge that he had actually declared this intention. Even if "Washington" meant administration decision-makers, rather than the usual freelance chatterboxes, C was only saying that these people believed that war was how events would play out.
Of course, if "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," rather than vice versa, that is pretty good evidence of Bush's intentions, as well as a scandal in its own right. And we know now that this was true. Fixing intelligence and facts to fit a desired policy is the Bush II governing style, especially concerning the Iraq war. But C offered no specifics, or none that made it into the memo. Nor does the memo assert that actual decision-makers told him they were fixing the facts. Although the prose is not exactly crystalline, it seems to be saying only that "Washington" had reached that conclusion.
Of course, you don't need a secret memo to know this. Just look at what was in the newspapers on July 23, 2002, and the day before. Left-wing Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer casually referred to the coming war as "much planned for." The New York Times reported Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's response to a story that "reported preliminary planning on ways the United States might attack Iraq to topple President Saddam Hussein." Rumsfeld effectively confirmed the report by announcing an investigation of the leak.
A Wall Street Journal Op-Ed declared that "the drums of war beat louder." A dispatch from Turkey in the New York Times even used the same word, "inevitable," to describe the thinking in Ankara about the thinking in Washington about the decision "to topple President Saddam Hussein of Iraq by force."
Then there's poor Time magazine (cover date July 22 but actually published a week earlier), which had the whole story. "Sometime last spring the President ordered the Pentagon and the CIA to come up with a new plan to invade Iraq and topple its leader." Originally planned for the fall, the war was put off until "at least early next year" (which is when, in fact, it occurred).
Unfortunately, Time went on to speculate that because of a weak economy, the war "may have to wait — some think forever," and concluded that "Washington is engaged more in psy-war than in war itself."
Some people you have to hit over the head. Hey, you folks at Time, what about the Downing Street Memo?

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[Moses]

In darkest Oxford, an Asian is tested to the limit - Nadeem Ahmed, discrimination case against Oxford University tutor
New Statesman,  June 11, 2001  by DARCUS howe

Later this month, Kofi Annan, the secretary general of the United Nations, is due to receive an honorary degree from the University of Oxford. Several societies at the university have asked him not to come -- the Majlis Asian Society, the Pakistan Society, the Russian Society, the African Society and the Middle Eastern Society.

All this is because a young, Brixton-born-and-bred postgraduate student of Asian origin claims he has suffered severe racial discrimination at the hands of a tutor and that the university, at several junctures, has failed to do anything about it.

The student, Nadeem Ahmed, is a former comprehensive school pupil. He was the editor of the school magazine, as well as head boy. He once came to interview C L R James, who lived above the Race Today premises in Brixton. In those days, about a decade ago, a light intellectual breeze filtered easily through corridors of such comprehensives, exciting young minds with pan-Africanism, particularly the history of the fights against Portuguese colonialism and apartheid.


Nadeem went to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London to study philosophy, and was heavily recommended to do a postgraduate degree at Oxford's Oriental Institute. The department is a remote and rather bizarre place, stuck in pre-colonial mode, where some dons are used to studying the natives for their rather odd habits.

One day, a tutor gave a test - a translation from Arabic to English - to his students, who included Nadeem and one other Asian. The two Asians failed, the others passed. Nadeem also failed a resit. He was then asked to leave - although, he alleges, it was suggested to him that he could complete his MPhil in medieval Arabic thought, provided he did not return to take his PhD.

Routine in a university, you may think, but these tests were, Oxford's senior proctor agreed, "flawed as qualifying examinations". One, set by the supervisor, lacked independence and was not double-marked. The other breached regulations because Nadeem was not made sufficiently aware of its status.

Nadeem alleged that the tests racially discriminated against him and that this was evidence of institutional racism at the Oriental Institute. He received support from Tom Paulin, the poet and don, who was his personal college tutor. Nadeem was also supported by Sir Michael and Lady Dummett, founders of the Institute of Race Relations - he is a distinguished Oxford professor of logic, she is the author of numerous books on race and the law.

Nadeem won leave for a judicial review of the university's examination and assessment procedures, but the High Court threw out the case. He then took his allegations of discrimination to Oxford county court, claiming compensation. The authorities spent huge sums trying to convince the court that Nadeem's suit was frivolous and that the court itself has no jurisdiction. A few days ago, they got a whipping. They lost hands down. The Brixton spirit had prevailed over the British bulldog.

It has to be admitted that the authorities at Oxford have recently increased the university's black and Asian intake. And, as is often the case, when the first layer of discrimination is exposed, several layers beneath disintegrate. But Oxford is fighting tooth and nail for the process of change to be done in its own time and at its own pace. However, history never moves that way.

The issue, which was tussled and wrestled over in the corridors of academia, has now spilt over into the public arena. Even the secretary general of the UN has been drawn in. So be it.

COPYRIGHT 2001 New Statesman, Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group

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[Moses]

Born in Minneapolis on July 20, 1953, Mr. Friedman received a B.A. degree in Mediterranean studies from Brandeis University in 1975. In 1978 he received a Master of Philosophy degree in Modern Middle East studies from Oxford.

Mr. Friedman joined The Times in 1981 and was appointed Beirut bureau chief in 1982. In 1984 Mr. Friedman was transferred from Beirut to Jerusalem, where he served as Israel bureau chief until 1988.

He became the paper's foreign-affairs columnist in 1995. Previously, he served as chief economic correspondent in the Washington bureau and before that he was the chief White House correspondent. In 2005, Mr. Friedman was elected as a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board.