To clean up a mess, a pair of dirty hands may be what you need

There will be an anniversary later this year which few in the media and probably no-one in government will mark.

On 12 November, it will be forty years since then US President Richard Nixon told the world ‘there are no American combat troops in Cambodia. There are no American combat advisers in Cambodia. There will be no American combat troops or advisers in Cambodia.’ By then the US had been waging its covert war in Cambodia for eighteen months.

It actually caused me to laugh out loud when I saw four former US Presidents and the incumbent – Ford, Carter, Reagan, the elder Bush and Clinton – attending Nixon’s funeral with its orations in memory of a great statesman. Tricky Dicky set the bar so high when it comes to mendacity in public office that no-one has come near him since. Why, even Tony Blair, a byword in Britain for the crooked politician with his on-air ‘I’m a pretty straight sort of guy’ and his deceptions over the Iraq War, isn’t remotely in the same league as Nixon.

The President didn’t do it all on his own. He was ably assisted, in particular by his his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, another man who could look straight into a TV camera and come out with a string of bare-faced lies. Kissinger was untiring in his efforts to prevent any news of the Cambodia bombing getting out, so when there were some leaks he moved vigorously against their suspected source Morton Halpern, an adviser to the National Security Council. Kissinger persuaded the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, hardly a paragon of transparency himself, to put a wiretap on Halperin’s phone. An illegal wiretap.

Amusing, isn’t it? It was illegal bugging that spelled the end of the Nixon Presidency. But it was Kissinger who started the practice.

Now scroll forward through the decades to the present day.

An extraordinary amount of newsprint and air time has been devoted to the troubles of FIFA, the world governing body of football. I have ambivalent feelings about the organisation: some of its decisions strike me as completely reasonable. For example, although it put a lot of noses out of joint in England, denied the opportunity to host the world cup itself, I can’t help feeling that the decision to award the cup to Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022 was entirely right. Neither had ever previously hosted the competition. And there was something squalid about the cosy old arrangement whereby the honour alternated between a set of usual suspects in Europe and another set in Latin America.

However, even if the decisions are right, the process by which they’re reached is hardly edifying. It seems that the way is always littered with grubby little cash payments, and some that are far from little. Even the election of the organisation’s President, Sepp Blatter, to a fourth successive term of office this week was an ugly spectacle: he was unopposed, his nearest rival eliminated just days before as a result of an investigation into corruption. That investigation, run by Blatter loyalists, also exonerated the President from any suspicion of wrongdoing.

Not so much the Thomas Jefferson standard of democratic practice, more Robert Mugabe.

Blatter has promised to turn FIFA into an honest and transparent organisation. A ‘Solutions Committee’ will look into any shady dealings and propose means to prevent them happening again.

And here’s where that forty-year anniversary becomes so significant.

Blatter and Kissinger: made for each other?

Who’s been pencilled in to head that committee? Why, none other than Henry Kissinger.One day FIFA will get its house in order, I’m sure. But I suspect it may take a while yet.



P.S. A footnote on Morton Halperin. He once summed up NATO policy as follows:

‘The NATO doctrine is that we will fight with conventional forces until we are losing, then we will fight with tactical weapons until we are losing, and then we will blow up the world.’

No relevance to the stuff about Blatter. Just seemed worth quoting.

Slow learners in the art of losing

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same

… you’ll be a man, my son, according to Rudyard Kipling in his most famous poem, If. Perhaps it would be nice to add ‘you’ll be a woman, my daughter’ as well, but then Kipling wasn’t perhaps the most progressive of men. I had a lot of time for him until I discovered that he had contributed to the fund for that poor Brigadier Dyer, so cruelly driven out of the Army for carrying out a policing operation in Jallianwallah Bagh which unforgiving folk like me think of today as the Amritsar Massacre.


Spot of unpleasantness in Amritsar: a monument to Brigadier Dyer

Still, Kipling has a point in expressing the sentiment in these lines. You take part; sometimes you win, sometimes you lose; you should take either with equanimity and move on. That certainly is the ideal behaviour of the phlegmatic Englishman, imperturbable in all circumstances.

Which is why it’s a major concern when Sepp Blatter, president of the world football federation FIFA, absolutely rightly accuses England of being bad losers.

FIFA handed the 2018 World Cup to Russia. So what? In the first place, it’s time more places outside the traditional regions of Europe and South America got their chance. In the second place, this is a contest with only one winner and multiple losers and the latter need to take it with good grace. It’s increasingly embarrassing to see our papers bleating on about how badly we were treated.

One reason we lost the bid was because sections of our media have been campaigning against corruption among FIFA officials, and those same FIFA officials decided to punish us by not choosing England to host the Cup. That’s not a cause for regret. It’s a cause for pride. We wouldn’t shut up about how rotten the organisation is, and it cost us the World Cup. That’s called taking a stand on principle and accepting the consequences. The opposite, if we’d muzzled our press and TV on the subject in the hope of succeeding in our bid, would have been craven.



Blatter and Putin:made for each other?



And Wikileaks has confirmed what all of us have long suspected about the debased nature of the Russian Federation. If two thoroughly dishonourable federations join up, who’s to be surprised? Again, why sulk? That’s the natural order of things.

But what shocks me most about the fact that we’re losing so badly is that we’ve no excuse for it. Kipling’s advice is excellent. But in addition, they say that practice makes perfect, and England has an unparalleled track record for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, in sporting competition after competition.

So how come we’re still so bad at losing?