Thoughts from London

Perfidious politics and broken promises
Some time next week the people of Sri Lanka will know who will govern them. Whether they are governed for months or years will depend on which side is elected, for a continuation of the confrontation politics seen in recent months cannot be ruled out.

Those who have experienced political perfidy over decades will say with Shakespeare, a plague on both your houses. Others only accustomed to more recent rascality in politics will probably seek solace in the claim that there is little to choose between Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Public cynicism and disgust in politics and politicians is neither new nor a product of our own environment. While we were still under one colonial power or another, satirists and writers in the west were already dismissing politics as a game played for personal profit and be damned with public concerns.

In the early 18th century, the English satirist Alexander Pope wrote "Party spirit: the madness of the many for the gain of a few." Later that century the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat said in one of his letters: "What good is a political party to a people without bread."

But one of my favourite observations on politics is the one by that irrepressible wit, Groucho Marx: "Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies."

The more one reads about the dark and cavernous world of American and British politics the more one begins to believe in the wisdom of Marx - Groucho not Karl.

It is only in the last year or so that the public has come to learn about the devious and dangerous politics that made the Anglo-American coalition to invade Iraq and the prevarications that kept their people from knowing the truth.

The reasons so convincingly presented at the time by the president and the prime minister as though they alone were privy to the truth and they were only sharing part of it with their peoples, have since then proved to be false or, at best, misleading.

The fact is that they were not being truthful with the people or at least, as Groucho Marx says, were diagnosing the affliction incorrectly. President George W Bush's former chief counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke accuses Bush of putting pressure on him to find evidence of Iraq's involvement in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Clarke's recent book "Against All Enemies" tells in greater detail than the what former counter-terrorism adviser said on the CBS current affairs programme, how President Bush was determined to blame Iraq too for the al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington.

That is because Bush had made it an article of faith to attack Iraq and finish the job the elder Bush had failed to do. The White House has made vigorous attempts to discredit Clarke, calling him a disgruntled man because his job had been downgraded and he was not allowed to wield the power he enjoyed under former presidents.

But the more the Bush administration tries to disgrace the man the more it backfires. For one, Clarke is not the only former White House official to expose the Bush administration's fixation with Iraq. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill had already said how a section of that neoconservative clique that shaped US foreign policy was determined to unleash their venom on Iraq.

So if the 9/11 terrorist attacks had not occurred, the younger Bush surrounded by advocates of war in the administration such as Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, egged on by neoconservative ideologues, would have found some other excuse to attack Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein so that Iraq's oil wealth and location could be controlled to satisfy US strategic interests.

If Blair was shaking hands with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi last week, it was not because Libya publicly announced it would abandon its nuclear programme. As the International Atomic Energy Agency experts found, Libya hardly had a nuclear programme and even if it pursued the plan it could not have produced weapons for several years more.

Here again it was political pretence. On the one hand Blair was trying to mislead the public into believing that Gaddafi abandoned his nuclear programme because of the war on terror and the attack on Iraq.

This is nonsense of course. Gaddafi found it convenient to come in from the cold and Blair thought he could use this to justify the war on Iraq. Incidentally, British firms would benefit heavily from this cordial new relationship.

The lesson in all this should be clear enough. To believe in politicians and political promises is like the childhood belief in fairies. But then fairies are not entirely missing in the political landscape of today.

Now that we have so many research institutes, NGOs studying this, that and the other and pollsters who produce statistics at the drop of a dollar, would it not be worth recording all the promises made by campaigning political parties and their leaders over the years and see how many of them have been kept and how many conveniently forgotten.

The first part of the exercise might take some time. After all, our politicians have not been short on election pledges. But the second part should be relatively easy. So few of the promises publicly made have been kept. Take such a simple promise as bringing down the price of bread or sugar. If the pledge-makers come to power, the price of bread will drop in the first few days. But then, for how long? Two or three months later bread prices jump by more than the initial reduction. Why, because economics begins to tell.

Then all the blame falls on the ubiquitous world market. Even the rise in the price of a bundle of gotu kola from one rupee to ten rupees is traced to neo-colonial exploitation in this age of globalisation as, no doubt, the JVP must have said in recent days.

Whether it is the free-market policies of the UNF or the Marxist shibboleths and the mixed-economy spouted by whole or part of the new Alliance, the only ones who will ultimately benefit are the party-faithfuls and hangers on.

As for the average Sri Lankan who has any faith left in politics there is still a way out. He can get himself certified. That might even qualify him for higher office. And why not? A little more madness will not matter, really.

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