But I don’t expect Amis to be able to think straight; it’d be nice if he could write straight.

*Admittedly this was an explanation of the need to torture innocent people rather than to invade Iraq, but same basic idea.

‘The answer I gave was, I thought, almost tediously centrist. I said that the West should have spent the past five years in the construction of a democratic and pluralistic model in Afghanistan, while in the meantime merely containing Iraq. ’

It’s true he does call Iraq a misadventure (I was wrong that he described it as a success, although he stil seems to think Afghanistan was), but on the other hand, the above paragraph, if it means anything means he wanted the sanctions regime to continue. The sanctions regime called, by the man who ran it ‘genocidal’.

This is a sentence before Amis denies that the West would consider anything ‘genocidal’. Just to make clear: he denies the West would advocate anything genocidal a sentence after he in fact advocates ‘genocidal’ sanctions.

Why does he get paid to write this drivel? And then we remember that the Times is a Murdoch paper.

That place must be riddled with crime

This is astonishing. Amis takes sixteen extra words to say “In my opinion.” Even if he had said “In my opinion (and I’ve read John Updike)” he still would’ve saved eleven words. He could learn something from America’s alleged knack for shortening things.

He also cites “Bennifer” even though Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez split up years ago. (The Affleck-Jennifer Garner pairing is “Bennifer II.”)

Oh yes, and he doesn’t have any kind of point. He does say that Iraq was a “misadventure,” but it’s worth more than a passing mention in a column devoted to the irrationality and love of violence of the Other.

Really, the image accompanies the text perfectly. If it excites our disgust as a crude bit of propaganda, all the better, no?

‘”In my humble”, as one of Updike’s Pennsylvanians likes to put it (sparing himself the chore of saying “opinion”), the name for what happened on September 11, 2001, is “September 11”. In fact, “September” alone may eventually prove adequate – just as every Russian, 90 years on, knows exactly what is meant by “October”. But the naming of September 11, that day, that event, naturally fell to America. And America came up with something pithier: “9/11”. …9/11 is a couple of syllables shorter than September 11, and is to be warmly congratulated on that score. Of course, no one refers to Independence Day as “7/4” – or to Hallowe’en as “10/31” or to Christmas as “12/25” – but such anniversaries are hardly the theme of year-round discussion. Further to recommend it, I suppose, 9/11 sounds snappy and contemporary and wised-up, like “24/7”. True, there is the unfortunate resemblance to “911”, the national phone number for the emergency sevices (the equivalent of our 999), but this distraction pales before 9/11’s triumphant and undeniable brevity. In addition, though you may have your doubts about its appropriateness, and its utter lack of historical resonance (where is the French avenue 7/14, the Italian Piazza 4/25?), 9/11 does have the humble merit of unambiguously denoting September 11.

Or at least it it does in America. In the UK, 9/11 can’t even manage that. Yes, even this menial task is beyond it……, in Great Britain, nearly all our politicians, historians, journalists, novelists, scientists, poets, and philosophers, many of them deeply anti-American, have swallowed the blithe and lifeless Americanism, and go on doggedly and goonishly referring to September 11 as November 9. Why?…’

Amis then goes on to explain that Afghanistan (and Iraq) have been triumphant successes, that ‘we’ (and, remember, ‘we’ not only includes George Bush, but, since the policies being discussed are mainly his, views him as being a kind of ‘Ideal Type’ of the factors being discussed) are ‘Rational’ ‘Reasonable’ and ‘Secular’ whereas ‘they’ are not, that Osama Bin Laden is with no degree of irony or metaphor whatsoever, is literally the heir to Stalin and Hitler. And so on.

And this follows, in some mysterious way, because even though the British should say 11/9,they actually say 9/11. Or something.

So, how many of their lives and ours is “honor” worth, anyway? What would be a sane answer to an insane question?

Please make a goddamn note of it this time. Thanks.