The Burden of His Cash

 The Wall Street Journal ran a headline yesterday that I had to read multiple times through to even begin to understand. I had to rub my eyes and blink. Surely there had to be a mistake somewhere. I knew all the individual words. But I couldn't seem to fit them together into some rational meaning. The words couldn't be saying what they seemed to be saying. 

"Trump Plan Backs Tony Blair as Postwar Gaza Leader," the headline read. 

Wait... Tony Blair? That Tony Blair? Which Plan Backs Who as Postwar Gaza What? 

But yes. My eyes did not deceive me. The article goes on to report that Trump is indeed circulating a plan to Arab leaders that would install Tony Blair—the former UK prime minister—as "interim administrator of Gaza." A sort of colonial viceroy, one supposes, to take control of whatever remains of the devastated enclave after the current invasion and re-occupation.

It does indeed appear, then, that Blair might be coming back for a second act of his colonial career almost as darkly farcical as the first. We who grew up in the Bush years of course knew him for the "special relationship" he seemed to have with the U.S. president—memorably satirized in a poem of that title by Harold Pinter—and which led him to join Bush's murderous crusade in Iraq. 

Now, he seems to have a "special relationship" with Trump as well—enough so that the latter wants to appoint him as a colonial administrator of another one-time British colony (only "temporarily" of course; it is in the nature of such colonial adventures to often be deemed "temporary"—just an "interim" measure until the natives can be educated for self-rule). 

Of course, Blair's involvement is being discussed in humanitarian terms. He is floated for the job because of his historic role as a peacemaker in Northern Ireland and for his ongoing charitable work around the world. 

But recall that Blair and Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq was also billed as a "humanitarian intervention" meant to "spread democracy." The "good intentions of conquerers"—as the historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote at the time—always "belong in the sphere of imperial rhetoric." However—he adds elsewhere—"one should always be suspicious when military powers claim to be doing favors for their victims and the world by defeating and occupying weaker states." 

I suppose a Tony Blair–administered Gaza—with at least some Palestinian people living within it—is preferable to the Israeli far-right's vision of an ethnically-cleansed enclave given over to settlement development; or the proposal Trump previously seemed most attached to—namely, to expel its entire civilian population and remake the territory as a beachfront destination resort (presumably, yet another way for Trump to use the powers of his office to enrich his own family). 

Tony Blair serving as temporary "administrator," then, is not the worst of all the options on the table. 

But from the larger perspective of history—no one in future generations is going to be fooled by what's happening here. No one will think the through-line in Blair's career was a saintly humanitarian mission to make peace through war and bring democracy and freedom to the benighted natives. 

Quite to the contrary—they see the pattern here as a one-time British prime minister involved in a suspiciously large number of projects to re-occupy and administer (however "temporarily") terrain that was once part of the British Empire (first Iraq, and now former Mandatory Palestine). 

And given the appalling bloodshed and displacement and starvation and ruination and horror in Gaza that has prepared the way for the return of British administration, one can only feel that we are repeating the darkest days of British colonial ruthlessness and ambition. There is the same soaring rhetoric of imperial "uplift"—the "civilizing mission"—the "burden" that Britain's leaders are kindly willing to shoulder on behalf of humanity—hypocritically disguising the same blood-stained reality. 

As Wilfrid Scawen Blunt wrote—in some of the best lines of criticism of British imperialism ever penned:

[T]he last scene is played in death's red charnel house.

The Saxon anger flames. His ships in armament

Bear slaughter on their wings. The Earth with fire is rent,

And the poor souls misused are wiped from the world's face

In one huge imprecation from the Saxon race,

In one huge burst of prayer and insolent praise to Thee,

Lord God, for Thy high help and proved complicity. [...]

These Lords who boast Thine aid at their high civic feasts,

The ignoble shouting crowds, the prophets of their Press,

Pouring their daily flood of bald self-righteousness,

Their poets who write big of the "White Burden." Trash!

The White Man's Burden, Lord, is the burden of his cash.