Iraq at the Sydney Writers’ Festival

Australian commentator Jim Nolan wrote this for the Australian back in May and has sent it to us for posting as his personal view. It is well worth a read, even if one doesn’t know the work of Lewis Lapham, whom he criticises.

The Sydney Writers Festival has perhaps demonstrated more marketing flair that it previously has been given credit for by choosing Harper's magazine editor Lewis Lapham as its keynote speaker next week.

After all, Grumpy Old Men, in which British cultural celebrities bemoan today's world, has been a runaway ratings success for ABC TV. Lapham's recent form is as the grumpiest of George W. Bush haters, specialising in claims of a ``crushing of dissent'' in the US. Among the local bookworms, it's a sure bet that Lewis won't be troubled by dissent; not a single comfortable prejudice is threatened to be disturbed.

In an article publicising Laphamp's gig here, The Sydney Morning Herald's New York point man Mark Coultan treated him to all the rigours of a gentle ear blowing, branding him the ``thinking man's Michael Moore'' (I kid you not). Lapham seemed only too pleased to accept this accolade. Allowing that he was not personally acquainted with the fat fraudster's work, he graciously conceded that anti-Bush film-maker Moore's ``heart was in the right place''.

Lapham's antipodean evangelical tour features the ``stifling of dissent'' (guess by whom), the subject of his recent book, Gag Rule: On the Stifling of Dissent and Suppression of Democracy. The wags at the US press blog Spinsanity summed it up its first chapter as ``40 pages of Sloppiness: The Factual Errors of Lewis Lapham's Gag Rule''. Funny; all the errors seem to go one way, making Bush look worse.

According to Lapham, ``Bush learns his lessons in geopolitics from Hollywood''. Sorry to spoil the illusion, but it's a view not shared by another Bush critic and Yalie, history professor John Gaddis, in a lecture last month that he warned ``contains material that some may find disturbing''. Following publication of his book Surprise, Security and the American Experience (Harvard University Press), which contained numerous serious criticisms of Bush's foreign policy, Gaddis found himself not crushed but invited to the White House to discuss his work with the National Security Council and the President.

Gaddis reports on his meeting, which he assumed would be a formal meet-and-greet: ``There followed a 20-minute conversation with Bush asking all the questions. After which we found, cooling their heels outside, Secretary of Defence [Donald] Rumsfeld, Under-Secretary of Defence [Paul] Wolfowitz and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General [Richard] Myers. `This is Professor Gaddis,' the President said, waving the book at them. `I want you all to read his book.' Well, I don't know how you would have responded in such a situation, but I was somewhat surprised.

``I'd been told, first of all, that the President never read anything beyond his daily press and intelligence digests. So it was certainly a surprise to find that he had read my book, and that he had done so ahead of his own staff ... ``I'd been told, second, that this was an administration that could not take criticism, that it listened only to people who agreed with it. But the criticisms I'd made didn't seem to bother anyone.''

But why should Lapham spoil a good meme with the facts? Lapham's pontifications on matters international seem every bit as disconnected as Moore's. How about these gems for progressive thought from Lapham taken from the Coultan interview? The coalition should ``get the hell out of Iraq'', he says, adding humorously that we should give everyone including Iran nuclear weapons and drawing breath only to stigmatise Australians as ``imperial cannon fodder''.

Coultan fails to report asking a single difficult question about these, well, eccentric, declamations. The straitened circumstances of the Herald's bureau it seems, deny its correspondents the benefits of Google, because a single Google web search on Lapham, and the willingness to use the information, would have made the interview much more interesting.

Herald readers and the likely fawning audience at Lapham's gabfest are spared the unseemly details of Lewis's -- how shall we put it? – Dan Rather moment in last September's Harper's, which contained a report by Lapham of the Republican convention, written, unfortunately, before it occurred.

Of course, confronted with such a gotcha moment, Lapham, similar to his soulmate Moore, spins like a dervish. Slate website writer Jack Shafer describes the moment with relish. Lapham, he says, both apologised for the fictionalising, calling it a ``mistake, a serious one'' and a ``mix-up'', and defended it as ``rhetorical invention'' and ``poetic licence.'' In a Slate article headed ``Lewis Lapham phones it in: Figuring out what's wrong with Harper's magazine'', Shafer continues: ``Every overtaxed journalist phones it in from time to time, but few dare make the call from a parallel universe, as Lapham did, and then step forward to rationalise it. This moxie all too often informs whole issues of Harper's, which has grown increasingly pompous and predictable in recent years.''

When Lapham's analysis is so little sustained as to reach back only as far as the last disconnected, denunciatory sentence, why should he trouble to come to grips with real problems in the real world? Better to describe the world in caricature, ex cathedra from, in Shafer's apt description, closed, Foucaultian boxes.

And what about the challenges faced in Iraq? Take Lapham's advice or listen to those who don't enjoy the luxury of selectively pontificating from a parallel universe. Senator Hillary Clinton said she wanted ``to send a message of solidarity'' to Iraqis following the January elections. ``It is not in anyone's interests for the Iraqi Government to be brought down before it even can get itself together by violent insurgents.'' Clinton said there should be no timetable imposed on the US for withdrawal from Iraq because it would be a signal to insurgents and terrorists, ``a green light to go ahead and bide your time''.

Solidarity: there's a fine old concept largely lost on the angry Left. Moore can find it within himself to express solidarity only with those who would kill Iraqi democrats, including trade unionists.

Tony Blair displayed a rather clearer grasp of this dilemma than Lapham: ``I am very proud of the fact that we have got a democracy in Afghanistan, and people are trying to get a proper functioning democracy in Iraq, and we will stick there and see the job through because that is what we do. ``And if that happens, the reason why there is such an attempt to destabilise the political process in Iraq at the moment is because I think that those people who are causing these terrible terrorist acts in Iraq, they have a very, very clear strategy. They have a clearer strategy in my view than many people do in this country and other parts of the West.

``They know that if we succeed in Iraq, that extremism is finished, and that is why they are trying to stop the Iraqi people, helped by us, achieve their democracy, but we have got to stick there and see it through.''

Lapham's obsessions fit this picture: ignore Saddam Hussein and the jihadists and the real problems posed by Iraq and bang on about Bush, Blair, and so on. Lapham is grumpy and he means to stay that way.

Jim Nolan is a Sydney barrister. Lapham gives the opening address at the Sydney Writers Festival on May 25.