Afghanistan campaign should win this year’s Turner Prize
We all know that all politicians, from left to right, lie almost all the time. As fish need water, politicians need falsehoods in order to survive.
So, it always comes as a huge shock when one of them suddenly starts telling the truth – as the French Deputy Ambassador in Kabul did, per cable:
The official version of the US-led campaign in Afghanistan received a blow today with a leaked report that the British Ambassador in Kabul believes that US strategy is wrong and the war is as good as lost. The potentially explosive views were published by Le Canard Enchaîné, which said that they were direct quotations from a diplomatic cable written by François Fitou, the French Deputy Ambassador in Kabul. Mr Fitou reported that Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British Ambassador, believed that “American strategy is destined to fail. The current situation is bad. The security situation is getting worse. So is corruption and the Government has lost all trust.”
Still, let’s not get over-excited about one diplomat, speaking truth to power, because I’m reasonably sure that all parties involved will now hurry to proclaim that these comments were taken out of context, plain wrong – or maybe even, to quote the most monstrously misguided and most moronic statement ever made by a Turner Prize curator, spoken “in the tradition of still-life paintings by 17th-century Old Masters.”
The pickled animals, elephant dung and stained bed of previous years may seem like a hard act to follow, but the Tate is once again courting controversy with the 2008 Turner Prize. Its curators today unveiled a female mannequin on a lavatory and a video of someone smashing crockery and likened the works to the tradition of still-life paintings by 17th-century Old Masters.
Mind you, if that curator would be fired for mendacity and incompetence, he could always become a politician or general. Someone who can compare a shitting mannequin with a Rembrandt would feel right at home in the through-the-broken-looking-glass madhouse of Kabul.
Or we could do even better and end the campaign in Afghanistan, bring the whole circus back to England and enter it as a candidate for the Turner Prize. Looking at previous winners, the Afghan campaign should fit in perfectly and it has a bigger chance of winning the Turner than it ever had of winning the war.
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