With John Le Carré:
On what he regards as the hypocrisy with regard to western attitudes to Africa:
“Corporate power does not want democracy, it is damned uncomfortable. It likes to deal with the bosses, it likes the bosses to guarantee they can quell the population. If you’re an anonymous Dutch oil company opening up an oil well in say Nigeria, you really don’t want to be told that there is democratic objection to what you’re doing. You want to be told ‘you pay off the right guys and get on with it.’”
“We can’t live like that any more, these are unsustainable attitudes. Unless we can bring some kind of real social structure to these places at the same time that we seek to exploit them, we shall simply store up more of the stuff we’ve been living with lately.”
On what he see as ’shameless public lies’:
“We live in a very strange time when we have gone to war against a country which presented no threat to us on a basis of lies.”
“The lies began relatively small. The lies were ‘these are the reasons we’re going in’ and they were fabricated. They weren’t necessarily constructed lies, they were the convenient cherry picking of little truths that had never been verified and they were magnified into a completely false scenario.”
“That scenario has had to be backed up increasingly by bigger lies. So the Bush line now is that ‘democracy is just round the corner in Iraq’, and from the little beautiful nucleus of democracy in Iraq, we’re going to see it spreading all over the Middle East.”
Shameless liars?
“Blair is still protesting that by being in Iraq we are protecting ourselves. The intelligence reports and everybody else tells us that by being in Iraq, by doing what we’ve done in Iraq, we have fermented radicalism, we have invited radicals to bond together and in fact we’ve made our lives much more dangerous and we screwed up the Middle East. In a word, we have.”
On his criticism of the way the ‘war on terror’ has been fought:
“We not only overreacted, we overreacted against the wrong enemy. The resources we should have been able to deploy and deploy democratically or with proper measure were falsely distributed into the war against Iraq. That’s an absurdity.”
“I think that many of the measures we’ve taken, supposedly in the war against terror have had the effect, by design or otherwise, of making us more frightened and in a curious way more vulnerable, more responsive. I think we’ve played the terrorist game. We’ve overreacted, and exaggerated the danger, exaggerated our own fear. It’s still far more dangerous to cross the road in Piccadilly than it is to get in the [London] underground and we should remember that.”
