Dr Nile Gardiner: a British defector in Washington

Few people rile me as much as neocon media poodle Dr Nile Gardiner, which the BBC's Newsnight feel they must occasionally honour with a satellite link, whenever there's the need to show the posh-sounding side of the ultra-right of US politics.

I do believe Jeremy Paxman last Wednesday did it somewhat tongue in cheek, when Nile was invited to rather sheepishly defend the possibility of bombing the Iranian nuclear facilities to further the War on Terror. I can't find a BBC link to Nile's shaking ramblings but to me, he appeared genuinely afraid of what he was saying himself. Gardiner is one of those media string puppets who almost makes Bush sound like a hare-Krishna chanting peacenik... An armchair general of the most bellicose type...

Dr Nile Gardiner, who's got a PhD in British Imperial History (whoopeee!!!), was a former foreign policy adviser to Maggy Thatcher but obviously still far too much of a leftie for this side of the pond. So he defected to the ultra-right and joined the Heritage Foundation as a Lomas Fellow in Anglo-American studies.

Well, we're all mightily glad over here that this piece of well-polished trailer trash has left these isles, as we're not having a great shortage of zealots who're most willing to sacrifice everything Britain stands for, to promote a "war on terror" that's failing on all fronts and is risking to send the world into the kind of pandemonium that right-wing airheads describe as "the clash of civilisations".

This not too distant relative of Dr Strangelove is also an advocate of "shoot first, ask questions later" but on a grander, global scale, advocating to defeat Iraq first and find the motivations for starting the war once it's over (back in 2003)...

And in 2005, our power poodle is firmly in favour of Britain's continued presence in Iraq, no matter what. From his piece "The Case Against British Withdrawal from Iraq":

The Undermining of British Power. Retreat is not a word that figures prominently in British military vocabulary, and Britain has an unrivalled record of military success over the past 300 years. A British withdrawal, even for political and strategic rather than military reasons, would prove damaging to Britain’s prestige and standing and force a negative revaluation of Britain’s role in the world.

Obviously, what the British people think about all this has got nothing to do with anything. Well, Blair, Straw et al certainly don't take the plebs into account...

It's hard to see what exactly drives people like Dr Nile Gardiner. Is it plain stupidity? A long list of academic achievements has never been a guarantee for intelligent thinking or critical analysis, that's for sure.

Or is it plain cynicism of the kind "one man's death is another man's bread"? Sure, wimps like Nile Gardiner will never contemplate taking part in the fighting himself, in the US they've got an under-privileged class of mercenaries-under-economical-duress for that purpose anyway. Although sending Nile to Iraq to fight a few insurgents could be beneficial: looking like a sperm cell with glasses could just cause a few fatalities by death by unstoppable laughter...

No, I suspect it's a bit of both: Dr Gardiner is one of those neocons who have dug a hole for themselves and now... just keeps digging, at everybody's expense...

As an irrepressible media whore, Nile nonetheless continues to make a dangerous contribution to the war on terror by making the world a far more dangerous place, see his "media appearances" on this page.

Dr Nile Gardiner, in the name of peace, we beg you, please sign up to the US military and go on a tour of duty in Iraq. Go on, show us your bottle, it might just shut you up terminally...

James Wolcott on Dr Nile Gardiner

Keywords: Dr Nile Gardiner, terrorism, Iraq, Iran, Civil Liberties