Dancing with Kissinger's Ghost

Michael Gove's column in praise of the IDF gives the corpse of satire another kick...

Previously: The 24 Worst Columns of 2024, Part 4: Sexy Starmer, doctor dictators, Farage fan fiction, and armageddon...

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This newsletter ended 2024 with my annual rundown of the year’s worst columns. We’re only nine days into 2025, and Michael Gove has already made a play for inclusion in this December’s chart. Writing for The Jewish Chronicle, his piece is headlined The IDF should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, opens by quoting Donald Rumsfeld, and contains this glib quip:

Why not nominate the men and women of the IDF for the Nobel Peace Prize? Provocative, perhaps.

“Provocative, perhaps.” Gove is the guy at the dinner party who wants to start a row to alleviate the boredom between the starter and the main course. Gove is always that guy. He was that guy in his first incarnation as a journalist and he was that guy when he was in government, making changes to the national curriculum that were as much about trolling the libs as they were honestly ideological.

To a certain sort of person, Gove seems very clever. He’s got the tendency to make comments with the shape of wit but without its enduring aftertaste. In the case of this particular column though, he was trying for weighty not witty. The trick he wanted to pull off was combining that ‘provocative’ top line with chin-stroking seriousness that might somehow justify it.

So he begins with that Rumsfeld quote:

It may no longer be fashionable to quote Donald Rumsfeld, but the former US defence secretary was right more often than he was wrong. And he was never more right than in the words he uttered when he was appointed in 2001 and repeated when he left office in 2006: “Weakness is provocative. Time and again, weakness has invited adventures that strength might well have deterred.”

Rumsfeld — a key member of the neocon gang whose attitude to strength led to the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan — saw compromise and diplomacy as weaknesses. There’s a more useful Rumsfeld aphorism to apply to Gove’s column though: “It is possible to proceed perfectly logically from an inaccurate premise to an inaccurate and unfortunate conclusion.”

After rhetorically exhuming Rumsfeld, Gove turns to quoting a US politician who is still alive and active:

As if ever we needed reminding of that truth, the words that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke as he prepared to leave office this month have only reinforced it. He said, in an interview with the New York Times: “Whenever there has been public daylight between the US and Israel and the perception of pressure building on Israel, we’ve seen it, Hamas has pulled back from agreeing to a ceasefire and the release of hostages. With this daylight, the prospect of getting a hostage and ceasefire deal over the line becomes more distant.”

Gove greets the quote with exaggerated surprise, despite the Biden administration ultimately letting Israel have its way at every turn, then shifts into lecturer mode:

The history of the last century – and beyond – shows terrorist actors and aggressive states are more likely to strike, and to carry on with a conflict, if they sense weakness and irresolution on the part of democracies. From Britain’s ambivalence on whether it would intervene on the eve of the First World War to Osama bin Laden’s preparing the 9/11 atrocity while the Clinton White House was pressuring Israel to sign a peace deal with the Palestinians, the impression of inconstancy is the incentive for attack.

In that dodgy attempt to link the Oslo Accords with Osama, Gove is indulging in some more neocon nostalgia. Remember how secular dictator Saddam Hussein was meant to be connected to Al Qaeda in the fictional but rhetorically useful Axis of Evil? In this Goveian model of history, there is no space at all for any kind of peace process. But remember too that Gove opposed the Good Friday agreement and wrote a pamphlet in 2000 called Northern Ireland: the Price of Peace which compares the deal with appeasing the Nazis and condoning paedophiles’ desires.

Of course, Gove wasn’t going to write about civilian casualties in Gaza in The Jewish Chronicle but his column positions Israel as the saviour of the region. In his telling, prisoners were freed from Syria’s jails purely because “Israel weakened Hezbollah, Hamas and their sponsors in Iran”. Having knocked over that domino, he sets a few more toppling with Russia weakened by the war in Ukraine and unable to resupply its mercenaries in Africa without a puppet regime in Damascus.

Having established his inaccurate premise, Gove finally reaches his inaccurate and unfortunate conclusion:

Terrorists defeated, tyrants toppled, democracy defended and Ukraine strengthened: None of this would have happened if the Biden-Blinken team had had their way. Maybe it’s time Joe and Antony made amends to Bibi before they leave office on January 20. Words are all very well, but what about something more tangible? Why not nominate the men and women of the IDF for the Nobel Peace Prize? Provocative, perhaps. But as a sign that Team Biden finally recognises that it’s weakness that really is more provocative than strength, it would be truly enlightening.

Tom Lehrer said that “political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.” That was in 1973 so we’ve had almost 52 years of satire spinning in its grave. Gove isn’t serious about suggesting the IDF for the Nobel Prize but he’s deadly serious about making anyone who has an issue with Israel’s actions angry. It’s column writing as both fan fiction and trolling.

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