yonmei

04:46 pm: Fred again.
The plaidder asked, and I answered:

1. What's a yonmei?

A typo. "Yonmai" is a Chinese word that means what my middle name means. But when a friend sent me a jade seal Christmas 2002, with a scribbled note that said the character carved on it was "Yonmai", which was my name, I mis-read her handwriting as "Yonmei", and decided to have that for my livejournal name.

2. Under what circumstances would you be prepared to say, 'whoops, I was wrong, guess we really DID need to invade Iraq?'

If it turned out that Iraq really was planning to attack the UK, and really did have the means to do it. I'm not sure I would have supported invading Iraq if there were any other means of stopping this attack, but I would have to concede that definite plans to attack the UK that could actually be carried out, and looked likely to be carried out, would make the UK's attack on Iraq legal.

Full-scale invasion? Um... I suppose if it had been combined with fully-funded actions to make Iraq a better place (plans in readiness to hire Iraqis to rebuild the damage done by the two Gulf Wars, years of sanctions, Operation Desert Fox, and Operation O.I.L., as just one example) and if it had been a proper UN operation, not an all-American action with a British flavour - well, I might have had to concede that it wasn't as bad an idea as it looked.

Full-scale invasion combined with aerial bombing, use of cluster bombs in urban areas, and jittery untrained soldiers who shoot civilians because they're scared? I can't think of anything that would ever make me agree that was a good idea.

3. Is Blair goin' down? If so, when, and how?

No, I don't think he is.

There are two ways in which he could go down. One, he could lose the next General Election (lose his seat, or Labour no longer be the single largest party in Westminister). Two, he could be voted out as Prime Minister, and someone else voted in.

The next General Election is (probably) May 2005. I think it highly unlikely that Blair would lose his seat, and I think it highly unlikely that Labour will lose the election. There is, at present, not even a sound Opposition in the House of Commons to face off against Labour: the nearest thing to it is Labour's own backbenchers, and they won't split to form a new party, because they tried that in the 1980s and it didn't work then.

Tony Blair could, in theory, be voted out of his position as Prime Minister by his own party, at the next Labour Party conference in October. Really, though, the only way I can see that happening is if the Labour Party becomes convinced that Tony Blair as PM will lose them the next General Election - and I don't think that'll happen. It isn't in any way clear who they'd get to replace him: Gordon Brown has been mooted as a possibility for years, but though he's a sound Chancellor, it's not at all clear that he'd be an electable PM, and as a Minister, he could not ethically run against Blair unless Blair had agreed to resign. Robin Cook might be a possibility - he's scarily intelligent and a good speaker - but he's always said he's "too ugly" to be PM.

Blair said all along that if the Hutton Enquiry findings were that he was a liar, he would have to resign. Which to me said clearly that he was sure the Hutton Enquiry would not find that he had lied. And it didn't.

4. If it's not Scottish, is it crap? Discuss.

This statement can be broken down into four parts.

There are things which are crap (C): there are things which are not-crap (C1).
There are things which are Scottish (S): there are things which are not-Scottish (S1).

If S1, then C is False. The discussion that I would find interesting is not that equation itself, but the mentality that leads to it.

5. What's your prediction on how long it will take for the British to pull out of the 'coalition'?

I'm not sure that we will. First, because (making a wild generalisation here) I think that Brits take more for granted than Americans do that in war, soldiers get killed and wounded. So the sixty deaths to date of Brits in Iraq will not, in themselves, turn public opinion against the war: and any mass attack that killed very many British soldiers would, more than likely, actually see public opinion rising in favour of the war. (An exception to this are deaths caused by "friendly fire" - especially when the US refuses to admit that it made a mistake that led to the British deaths.) Second, because I think there's more of a feeling that it's too late now: once we're in, we're in, and we stay in. Third, because I think it quite likely that the US will in any case do a mass withdrawal of troops in the near future - and when that happens, the British military will have to withdraw, unless the American troops are replaced by an equivalent multi-national force. How likely is that?

But considering the 'coalition' generally, as the US and the countries that support it whatever it does, it seems historically unlikely that we'll ever get a Prime Minister again who will defy the US even as openly as Harold Wilson did over Vietnam. Ever since WWII, the UK has sided with the US: it's a long-time political tradition that would be hard to break. Conservatives ally themselves with the US more, and more enthusiastically, than Labour does: but it remains to be seen how far the US can depart from being an ally and still have UK Prime Ministers support the US as if this was an alliance, and the UK was not a client state.

As usual, if you want to continue this meme, ask for Fred in the comments below. (If you've tried to interview me before and I haven't yet answered your questions, post a reminder. And a link. And a threat. Several threats would probably help. Bribes would be nicer.)

Okay, so Picard/Toby....