The legacy of the Bush-Blair years, and the post-9/11 madness, is never far from the surface of things - as much as Cameron or Obama might wish. This weekend there were calls for an inquiry into the death of Dr Kelly, the weapons expert whose whistle blowing cast doubt on some of the dodgy dossier claims pre-war - conspiracy theory has it he was not a suicide. The ongoing debate about the situating of a mosque proximate to the hallowed ground zero is another open sore - and a sign of the intolerance levels in America, a place barely healed by the election of its first African-American president. Now, Tony Blair - the man second-most-responsible for what deputy PM Nick Clegg has called an illegal war - is to donate all the money from his memoirs to a rehabilitation gym for wounded soldiers. This is admirable. A pity it is much too little too late. However, we must forgive Mr Blair, insofar as he seems to be seeking penance. I am not sure we need forget what he has done so easily.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?
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Also, while the war might have been bone-headed and a strategic misallocation of resources, it was no more or less illegal than other recent conflicts. The artifice of whether a war is legal or not can never be determined in any definitive way as there is no legal entity above the sovereign nation-state. The United Nations, for all its charms, is pretty much as President Bush once described it: an elegant debating society with excellent snacks. And while we're at it the UN did provide a resolution that arguably covered the war.
I'm not endorsing the war but I do object to a revisionist pile-on where people use inflammatory terms like "illegal war" as a way of turning up the rhetorical heat.
So that's how you describe a war in which countless thousands of innocent civilians perished? No wonder you choose to remain anonymous.