Leadership matters

As we are about to begin the haunting journey through Holy Week (which needs to be lived as if we didn’t know the outcome), I have been doing two things: listening to the new Bruce Cockburn album and reading Tony Blair‘s A Journey.

Holy Week takes us with Jesus and his friends through places of apparent confusion to a place of dereliction and apparent abandonment. Some time ago Jesus ‘set his face to Jerusalem’ and knowingly entered the heart of political and religious power. This place in which God is blasphemed, his people exploited and political integrity compromised is the place you go to if you have a death-wish… or a point to make or a change to bring. The rubbish dump outside the city is riddled with the gallows used to humiliatingly execute those who dare to challenge Rome.

Read the Gospel accounts and it is clear that Jesus knew where he was going and what was likely to happen there; but, his friends travel with an optimistic misconception about their enterprise. And, ultimately, instead of their hero doing the stuff of religious vindication and political victory, he seems to walk directly into the trap set by the imperialists and their puppets. Why does he do this and why doesn’t he explain himself to his friends? Why doesn’t he avoid the personal pain and suffering and the radical disappointment and disillusionment of those who might now feel conned?

Well, part of the answer lies earlier in the Gospels when Jesus, immediately prior to his public ministry, faces up with ruthless honesty to the most fundamental questions of his character and motivation. In the desert, away from distraction, he cannot escape the questions: Are you in this for the power and glory? Are you really prepared to deny your own material needs in order to stick to your course? Do you really have to walk the way of pain and suffering – surely there must be another way? If you really are the Messiah, why must you walk this way and suffer such an apparently futile fate?

All of this goes against ‘normal’ assumptions about power, rights, purpose and value. Having faced it in the desert, now Jesus faces the reality as he walks towards the place where his commitments will be tested and he will discover whether or not he has been deluding himself.

Yet, his friends just don’t get it. He doesn’t try to tell them what they won’t understand. He knows that they will have to learn their own way – that there is no short-cut to re-shaping their world view or their fundamental assumptions about who and how God is. He has to let them do this in their way and in their time – and he can’t spare them the pain of it all. No short-cuts, no easy explanations, no false comforts, no escapism. (And we must resist the urge to leap too quickly from Good Friday to Easter Day without living – and enabling others to live – through the sheer bewildering emptiness and horror of Saturday. Sunday makes no sense without the experience of that desolation and sense of deep disappointment.

But, where do Tony Blair and Bruce Cockburn fit into this? The answer is: indirectly and tangentially, but interestingly.

I deliberately waited to read Blair’s book until the rather tedious and predictable judgements on it and him had gone away. There was little in the immediate criticism of the book that was enlightening. As Blair himself recognises (repeatedly) in the book, prejudices about him - his motives and the nature of particular events – are not going to be changed by Blair’s own account. Views are too entrenched. However, the best he can hope for is that people will understand why he took the decisions he did – particularly in relation to Afghanistan and Iraq – and on the basis of what information. He asks for comprehension, not agreement.

What has surprised me in the book is Blair’s honesty about the failures and his generosity to those who made his life and work difficult. And I now wonder whether my resistance to his defence of George Bush’s intelligence and integrity actually says more about me than it does either of them.

However, what I have found most intriguing is the way Blair draws lessons of leadership from his experience – albeit with the benefit of hindsight. The most explicit discourse on this comes in the chapter on the Northern Ireland conflict and the Good Friday Agreement. But, he illustrates well the loneliness of leadership and the agonising nature of decison-making when the loud voices around you want you to decide differently. Even if a million people march against you and accuse you of lying, how do you do what you believe to be right rather than what is either popular or expedient?

Now, I am not defending his decisions regarding Iraq; that’s for him to do. (And just to nobble those who might selectively quote me and accuse me of associating Blair with Jesus… it is the phenomenon of leadership demands that I am thinking about, not the nature of the messianic!) What I am interested in here is the matter of authentic leadership when the heat is on. What sort of leadership is it that prefers not to face the challenges of action (as opposed to loud words and empty threats) and looks to political expediency or electoral popularity as their principal guide when taking far-reaching decisions? In Blair’s case, he recognises the charge of the ‘messiah complex’ and does seem very sure of his own rightness. But, that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t right to make some of the decisions he did. As he states, only he could make them and make them he did.

I don’t know Tony Blair. I only met him once and our conversation got interrupted before it had got going. But, I feel more intrigued now to understand more about his motivation than I did before reading the book. I am not sure I have changed my mind on key elements of the decisions made, but I understand better why he made them. And, ultimately, regardless of whether or not those around him agree or understand, he still had to decide what he thought was right and not what might be merely expedient in the short-term.

And Bruce Cockburn? Back in 2004 he wrote a song called This is Baghdad. On the Life Short Call Now album, he rails against the misery and destruction in Iraq:

Everything’s broken in the birthplace of law / As Generation Two tries on his magic flaw

Carbombed and carjacked and kidnapped and shot / How do you like it, this freedom we brought? / We packed all the ordnance but the thing we forgot / Was a plan in case it didn’t turn out quite like we thought. / This is Baghdad…

It is angry and horrified and yet offers no solutions. Fair enough. The poet’s job is to illuminate, not resolve.

But, in his wonderful new acoustic studio album Small Source of Comfort he has two songs about Afghanistan. One – The Comets of Kandahar – is a guitar piece about the sight of jet fighters taking off after dark, invisisble apart from the purple flame from the tailpipe. The second is a powerfully moving elegy to dead soldiers. He was about to board a plane at Camp Mirage, a Canadian staging post in the Middle East, when he found himself part of a Ramp Ceremony in which the remains of two Canadian casualties were honoured before being repatriated. He says in the sleeve notes: “One of the saddest and most moving scenes I’ve been privileged to witness… this song is dedicated to the memory of Major Yannick Pepin and Corporal Jean-Francois Drouin”.

The song needs to be heard rather than the lyrics simply read. Like a good Psalm of lament, it is drawn beautifully and tragically from the bowels of the poet:

Each one lost is everyone’s loss, you see / each one lost is a vital part of you and me.

Cockburn’s anger about the conflict is not enough to prevent him seeing beauty in the darkness or compassion in the particular. He also allows prejudice to be challenged by experience.

Discuss…

 

How do you know when you have ‘won’ a war?

I managed to miss Bonfire Night (5 November when we celebrate the burning of Catholics – although that bit is usually forgotten when we chuck the guy on top of the pyre) and the first instalment of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s History of Christianity on BBC4. Instead, I was enjoying a visit to a multi-ethnic parish in Thornton Heath (which has just planted a new Ugandan congregation as a ‘Fresh Expression’) and didn’t get home till 11pm.

A quick glance at the news made me pause. The Prime Minister is to make a statement today on the war in Afghanistan. This follows a number of deaths in the British camp and the growing unease in this country about why ‘we’ are there in the first place. Pity anyone who has to lead a country in circumstances such as these – even if they did lead us into it.

What worries me is this: what would it look like if the war in Afghanistan was ‘won’? Would there be a western-style democracy? Would tribalism be ended? Would there be an ‘uncorrupt’ leadership backed by highly-trained and well-equipped armed forces? Or would it be that children were attending schools and women were working openly in the professions? I could go on.

I think several things worry me about the campaign in Afghanistan:

1. I closely followed the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Paying no great attention to the demands of a human rights world, the Soviet armies went in and applied all the might they could to overpowering the ‘peasants’ from the mountians. Ten years later – and with a huge casualty list – they left with their tails between their legs. Huge firepower and determined violence failed. The arguments used by the West about that invasion/occupation then are now (ironically?) being used by the West to justify its own ongoing involvement. I am not sure that Afghanistan can be ‘re-ordered’ by outside powers to serve their own interests.

2. This campaign is struggling in Afghanistan itself and is clearly being lost in the pubs of Britain. I guess this is because of two things: (a) we see constant images of violence, death, repatriated coffins and weeping relatives of the casualties, and (b) it is hard to find anyone who can easily articulate the rationale behind our presence there. That is not to say there isn’t one; but if it can’t be clearly and simply articulated, then it can’t be communicated – and if it can’t be communicated, it can’t be owned by people who don’t have access to all the arguments and facts.

3. It is hard to know what ‘victory’ might look like, but it is equally hard to know if ‘defeat’ is the only other option. Is it not possible, having learned from the experience, to put armed support into bolstering the security of Pakistan, ring-fencing the Afghan opium trade and persuading more ‘acceptable’ forces to bring order within Afghanistan itself (such as other middle-eastern countries)? A peace-keeping force that was not made up of provocative western types might be possible and would call the bluff on the Taleban’s claim that they are only fighting to get the westerners out.

And isn’t it weird how Iraq has almost fallen off our screens and newspapers now that our troops have left? Aren’t we fickle when it comes to deciding what is important in the ‘news?

 

Dead close

There is a row going on in the United States about the publication of a photograph of a dying marine in Afghanistan. An Associated Press photographer took the photo after being caught up in the ambush. Lance Corporal Joshua Bernard died from his horrendous injuries soon after the photo had been taken, but before it had been published. I picked it up in the Observer.

The response from the US Government was as understandably outraged as it was predictable. US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, said:

I cannot imagine the pain and suffering Lance Corporal Bernard’s death has caused his family. Why your organisation would purposefully defy the family’s wishes, knowing full well that it will lead to yet more anguish, is beyond me. Your lack of compassion and common sense in choosing to put this image of their maimed and stricken child on the front page of multiple American newspapers is appalling.

Understandable though this sentiment is, it begs a number of questions. For example, why is it wrong to show this photo of one man dying when Gates didn’t object to the televisual spectacle of the bombing of Baghdad or good propaganda pictures of dead Taleban in Afghanistan? Why is it wrong to upset the family of an American casualty, but not a problem to show dead relatives of other upset parents who happen to be Middle Eastern or Asian?

This is not a trivial issue and yet I guess it is one of the most difficult moral decisions faced by media organisations daily. War is obscene and death in war is usually unpleasant to look at. We might be inured to violence and death on the screen, but we clearly have to be protected from the reality. When war is remote we easily ignore the suffering or we simply don’t register the anguish and miserable despair it causes to victims – whoever they are.

I remember hearing a sobbing US pilot describing how he had no problem dropping napalm on Cambodian children because he was so high up and so far away by the time the bombs hit the ground that he had no connection to it. After the end of the Vietnam War he saw film of what he had been doing and had a serious breakdown.

And these thoughts have been sparked by my reading of a remarkable diary of Liverpool in the War Years (1939-45). This was handed to me recently and I read it this evening. It belonged to Miss A I Robinson and I have no idea when she typed it up and put it together. It was given to me by someone who thought I might be interested – and I am. I remember growing up in Liverpool where there were still bomb sites in the 1970s and ’80s. My parents and grandparents lived through the bombings and incendiary holocausts launched by Nazi aircraft in the early 1940s and we were told stories when we were children there. This diary should be in a public records office in Liverpool as it gives a first-hand account of every month’s experiences from the beginning to end of the War.

It also includes photos of the destruction. It doesn’t show photos of dying or dead people, but written descriptions are added. It doesn’t shy away from describing the realities of violence and war. Yet I read it at a time and in a culture that is glib about violence. And I read it at a time when churches obsess about sex and say little about the pornography of violence that pervades our lives. We even read the accounts of violence in the Bible without flinching – as if it weren’t real or didn’t hurt someone.

The question is: should the public who fund military action be protected from seeing the consequences of their action? Should war be sanitised in order not to upset us at home? Or should we be exposed to the real world and what it looks like when a young soldier gets blown up? Should we allow a government to be outraged at the ‘insensitivity’ of publication when we know that the real problem is government’s fear that seeing the reality of the violence might turn the heads of those who tacitly support the war? It was the body-bag count from Vietnam that turned American support and it might well be the procession of coffins through Wootton Bassett that eventually affects British toleration of the continuing war in Afghanistan.

I feel considerable sympathy for the family of  Joshua Bernard and considerable contempt for those who unemotionally or unempathetically see the photo only as a ball in a poltical game. But we – and his bereaved parents – can’t avoid the bigger-picture conclusion that (as the Observer article put it) “Joshua Bernard has now come to symbolise something more: the suffering inflicted on America’s sons and daughters in uniform, and the unease of fellow citizens forced to confront the grim truth about their deaths.”

I think we have been welcomed to the real world.

 

The Which Blair? Project

Most of us who gave the Blair government the benefit of the doubt over what became known as the ‘dodgy dossier’ have found it difficult to understand how we allowed ourselves to be duped. Acres of opinion in print and audio-video have followed and one of the biggest questions asked is how you could ever trust someone who appears so blatantly to have lied to the country. The post-governmental Blair has made religion a focus of his attention and the media cynicism about this is almost universal.

Tony Blair left office and set up the Tony Blair Faith Foundation under the leadership of some of his most trusted aides from Downing Street. If you read the papers and follow the blogs, you would have almost no option but to think that Blair is a rich bloke who plunged us into a stupid war and then turned his mind to loony stuff as a way of compensating for the loss of power. Scepticism about the Foundation is, in my experience at least, widespread. It is equally misguided.

Interesting, then, that a (religious) sceptic like John Rentoul should put a different perspective in today’s Independent newspaper. He begins as follows:

‘What do you think about religion? Yes, I hate Tony Blair too. No wonder foreigners find our national conversation hard to follow. This week, Christopher Landau, the BBC religious affairs correspondent, broadcast a radio documentary about the former Prime Minister’s faith foundation. Even before it went out, it provoked a response.

The general view seems to be that Blair resisted invitations to go on about his religious belief while he was Prime Minister but doesn’t half go on about it now. This is, it is alleged, at best cowardly and at worst mendacious. I am no fan of Blair’s religiosity, but I can detect nonsense if it is right in front of me.’

He then goes on to question much of the received wisdom about Blair and will probably make himself unpopular by daring to challenge some of the media-driven myths about the man and his faith – particularly the ways in which these have been reported or (mis)quoted. He summarises: ‘Religion: some people who don’t have it assume that it means hearing voices telling you to do crazy things. Other people who do have it assume that their difference of opinion with Blair’s decision has (their own version of) divine authority.’ He then concludes with a statement of common sense: ‘I don’t do religion, but if Blair’s faith foundation can do anything about such a large [Muslim] misconception, I’m all for it.’

Rentoul faces the problem that any rational person would have to address sooner or later: would we prefer it if Blair was going around the world enriching himself for purely personal gain? Or interfering in other people’s politics? he has been remarkable in having vacated the political scene in the UK precisely in order not to interfere or be seen to interfere.

I have been involved in interfaith work for a number of years now. I engage with senior leaders of all the world’s major faiths in a peculiar context: the Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions in Kazakhstan. This morning I met with a Kazakh Senator and other officials at Lambeth Palace as the invitation to me to lead an Anglican delegation (on behalf of the Archbishop of Canterbury) was handed over. My experience of this initiative since September 2003 is that, whether we like it or not, religion is a major factor in world politics and life and has to be taken with the utmost seriousness, even if you think the content of other people’s beliefs is bunkum. (Kazakhstan holds together 130 ethnic groups and over 40 religious groups in a country the size of Western Europe and with a population of 15 million.)

The biggest challenge in such work is to understand the worldview from which people speak and within which they think and see the world. This is demanding because it means getting inside the head of another person and looking out through their eyes – listening through their ears. Any linguist knows that speaking another language is not a matter of simply swapping one set of words for another, but  that some things cannot be translated at all because the ‘depth’ of the concept cannot be shared by someone who comes from outside. (I write as a former professional linguist working in Russian, German and French.) We will be working with the complexities of language and worldviews again on 1-2 July when the Third Congress takes place in Astana.

I share the concerns about the Iraq War and the tight relationship with Bush’s America. Too many questions remain in my own mind about what that was all about. But I know the people who run the Tony Blair Foundation and they (a) don’t hide from frank questioning, (b) deal openly and professionally with people who might be expected to resist anything to do with the Foundation and (c) take seriously and intelligently some of the most pressing religio-political questions that will face the world in the next few decades.

Rather than looking for quick fixes to urgent problems, they are setting up schemes from bringing (particularly) young people from different worldview and religious contexts into contact with each other, using new technology. They are taking a long-term view of educating huge numbers of young people about ‘religion’ per se and intelligently doing so in the wider context of social, medical, economic and political realities in different parts of the world.

Like John Rentoul – but for different reasons – I am all for anyone doing anything to improve religious intelligence anywhere they can. It would help enormously if some of the campaigning ‘rationalists’ in this country would join in examining our own philosophical assumptions and presuppositions, listen attentively to those whose worldview is different, and model respect for those whose view seems to be obviously and self-evidently silly.

Having had several spats with people over recent weeks, I had probably better work on this myself.