Poppies and politics

Talk about a bumper harvest of opium poppies in Afghanistan. There's certainly been a bumper crop of poppies in Britain round this remembrance day. I can never remember a year when the poppies have been worn so early, so ubiquitously, and where there has been so much pressure on people to wear one.

I went on Sky on Saturday morning to debate with the sports editor of a Manchester paper who was campaigning for all the premier league football clubs to wear poppies embroidered on their kit. Manchester United and Liverpool had refused, despite being denounced by the Daily Mail. This was supposedly an unpatriotic outrage.

It seems to me that, whatever your attitude to the poppy, no one should be forced to wear one. Yet it is already clear that some people are. All newscasters and journalists are obviously told that they must sport one, and their guests are clearly strongly encouraged to do so. When you walk down the street some people wear poppies and some don't, and no one seems to worry too much about that. But they are pretty much uniform for a month or so among politicians and media.

This is all the more remarkable because for most of my life, poppy day was not promoted in this way, even though the memories of the First and Second World Wars were much more recent. Why is that? Well it is impossible not to draw the conclusion that this promotion of the poppy has something to do with Britain's involvement in the wars of the last decade. Government and military want to promote the poppy as giving in some way legitimacy to these wars.
That's the point made by the Manchester sports editor _ that it means supporting what the troops are doing.

Nothing new in that. The poppy appeal was actually launched after the First World War by Earl Haig ..the same Haig who was a general responsible for much of the bloodshed of that war. That's why to many, especially those of us who have opposed these and previous wars, the poppy has always been identified with militarism. Some pacifists wear a white poppy to make this point.

The paradox is that most people in this country (now 73%) want the troops out within a few months. So when many of them wear the poppy they do so not to support this current war but for some other reason. Maybe they are remembering the dead in past wars, maybe they want to express sorrow at the increasing rate of deaths of soldiers this year. Whatever it is, that sentiment should not be used to justify an indefensible war.

How typical that the people busiest promoting the poppy are the politicians , the media and the generals who argue for this bloodshed to continue.

Fraud turns to farce

I hear that Gordon Brown has congratulated Afghan president Hamid Karzai on his reelection. There hasn't of course been an election, or not since the original fraudulent one three months ago when it's generally acknowledged that around a third of votes were rigged.

But that hasn't stopped Gordon. The key thing for the 'international community' from the beginning was to give the appearance that successful elections had taken place. That plan was scuppered when the widescale fraud was reported back on the nightly news bulletins, and when a huge row broke out between UN representatives about whether to accept these tainted election results.

The already problematic second round fell apart yesterday when Karzai's opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, withdrew. The choice _ to go ahead with an uncontested election or to simply declare Karzai the winner _was a no brainer. But now the western powers are stuck with a president lacking any democratic credentials who in truth they would all rather disappeared from the scene.

Still, if the emperor has no clothes, Gordon Brown and Hillary Clinton are certainly not going to be pointing that out. Much simpler to pretend that there really has been a free and fair election and that they have a proper president. So all the congratulations, the plans for a 'unifying programme for the future of Afghanistan', the hope that this will smooth the way for more troops from the US and Europe to fight in Afghanistan.

Because Karzai is essential for one reason only: to provide spurious democratic window dressing that allows the Nato/ISAF operation to continue its war. The generals in Britain and the US are all too well aware that public opinion is turning strongly against the war. That's why they are pushing for more troops now, before it is too late.

So in the Afghan election, where fraud has turned to farce, everyone is pretending there's nothing wrong. The worsening of the war continues to show that the opposite is the case.