The Frontman

by Harry Browne

  Leaving aside the familiar difference between such twenty-first-century pronouncements and Bono’s unwaveringly one-sided pronouncements against IRA ‘terrorism’ when the Irish Troubles had raged, his formulation appeared to accept that the prospective invasion of Iraq was simply a response to terrorism. In comments directed toward his friends in Washington, he added: ‘It would be wise at this moment in time to think about the mistakes that have been made. Irish people have a little bit of experience with terrorism, and America has none.’74

  That statesman-like fence-sitting was clad by the media as an anti-war statement, and seemed to go down reasonably well. Bono clearly felt encouraged to say some more, and the perfect occasion presented itself in Paris the following week, when Bono was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour. An anti-war statement here, where his host Jacques Chirac was leading the ‘old Europe’ pressure for no war without UN Security Council agreement, could never be construed as radical. Why, it was practically just good manners: ‘How can you not be for peace? I think America has no experience with terrorism or even with war. In Europe, we know a little bit more about these things. We must not make a martyr out of Saddam Hussein. He’s good at propaganda. Let’s not make it easier for him.’75

  This pulling of historical rank on behalf of ‘old Europe’ was perhaps just a tad rude to the Americans, who had after all experienced some brutal terrorism and, further back in history, a bloody civil war; and it still left him with Tony Blair to address. Bono did so with his customary aplomb: ‘Tony Blair is not going to war for oil,’ he said. ‘Tony Blair is to me a great politician. He is sincere in his convictions about Iraq but, in my opinion, he is sincerely wrong.’76

  This, it must be said, was smooth positioning. Bono, he made clear, was not some crazy radical accusing the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ of representing corporate interests in Iraq; he wasn’t screaming ‘No blood for oil!’; he was not even worrying about the consequences for Iraqi civilians of an attack, nor of the sanctions that had been starving and sickening them for twelve years. No, he was merely on one side of a respectful difference of honest opinion among right-minded men about the best way to deal with terrorism, so as not to make it worse. The enemy, let there be no doubt, was not merely ‘terrorism’, it was also that master of propaganda, Saddam Hussein.

  In a story that appeared on the MTV website just as the war was launched, he expressed clearly to a US audience the limits of his support for, and opposition to, the war:

  With the unimaginable levels of economic, cultural and military weight that the United States has, there must come humility and restraint … I’m all for President Bush trying to scare the sh— [sic] out of Saddam Hussein, but you have to bring along the rest of the world … People need to understand what this is about, and I support them all the way to the point where they go to war without the United Nations behind them. That is a mistake, because that looks like the US doesn’t need to explain itself, and I think it does.77

  Bono construed the threat to shower bombs and missiles on a sovereign country, then invade it, as an effort to scare the shit out of its dictator, and fully approved it. The execution of that threat, he cautioned, required further explanation, that was all – or else it might be construed as, horror of horrors, a mistake.

  Then, having supported them ‘all the way to the point’ where they went to war, as they did, without a UN resolution, Bono showed no further sign of opposing the war. On the contrary, as the carnage of violent occupation piled up in Iraq over the following years, he cooperated with the British and US governments in what was, in effect, the most extraordinary effort to rehabilitate them in the eyes of the public as leaders of the global anti-poverty crusade, the saviours of Africa (see Chapter 2).

  The grotesque irony of this effort was not lost on everyone. After Bono did a photo-op with Blair and Clinton to promote African debt relief early in 2005, Jim Kerr, singer from the band Simple Minds, accused him of ‘sucking up’ to ‘creeps’:

  How can Bono, having graced concert stages for over two decades, draped in the white flag of peace and screaming ‘No More War’ [sic] at the top of his lungs contemplate praising and back slapping Tony Blair? … I can’t believe that anyone could fail to identify that no matter what gesture Blair may make towards African debt relief, his slippery hands are currently dripping in the fresh warm blood of Iraqi men, women and children.78

  Bono paid Kerr no attention. When the leaders of the war-making world, Bush and Blair foremost among them, gathered in Gleneagles, Scotland, for the G8 summit in the summer of 2005, they were greeted not by the massive peace protests that would have been the very least they deserved, but by a pop concert, a backstage pass for Paul Wolfowitz, and a vast demonstration of welcome.

  Bono did not bear the full responsibility for this, not by a long shot. We have no reason to believe he approached and created that event as cynically as, say, Blair clearly did, by the evidence of his own memoirs (see Chapter 2). Gordon Brown himself evidently played a close role in moulding activists into the image of the British government. Still, Bono must have had an inkling of the purpose he served. Bono’s role in using Africa to whitewash Blair and Bush is reminiscent of the host who presents an attractive cake to guests, and, asked if he made it himself, replies, ‘I made it … possible.’ Bono was necessary, if not sufficient, for the task of presenting the dainty dish that was set before a deceived public that summer. He has not suffered nearly the opprobrium he deserves for helping to reshape a global peace-and-justice movement into a cheering section for those who led the slaughter in Iraq.

  History has already proved a harsher judge of Bush’s bona fides, and Bono’s reputation will be haunted by the images that trailed through 2002 and 2003 of his stroll in the Rose Garden – perhaps flashing a juvenile peace sign for the cameras, or is it a V for victory? – then having a quiet word in the president’s ear. Those images may prove to be the most enduring of his career on the fringes of American politics. As Richard Dienst writes of one such image,

  To a well-trained, cynical viewer, this photo does not need to be decoded at all, because the cynicism is built right into it. The image does not simply advertise that some kind of deal is being struck: the image is the substance of the deal itself. The only question is whether or not it is a good deal, and for whom.

  It is easy to imagine what people will say: Bono and Bush are simply using each other. Bono uses his celebrity to pressure Bush on debt relief and AIDS funding for Africa. Bush uses Bono to show that he is somehow in touch with popular tastes, and somehow sympathetic to the causes Bono espouses. Nobody will be surprised to see the pomp of state power mingling so freely with the glitz of pop stardom. Nobody needs to believe that these two men are actually having a serious conversation about the issues of global poverty. Instead everybody will assume that each of them has a good, if vague, reason to be seen in public with the other.

  As Dienst also notes, ‘During the same period that the [Bush] administration had such a hard time scraping together just over $4 billion for the Millennium Challenge [another name for the Sachs multilateral anti-poverty project], it spent more than sixty times that much on Iraq.’79

  When Bush stood beside Bono on a White House platform in January 2002 and said, ‘Bono, I appreciate your heart’, you could nearly imagine that Bono had torn that organ from his chest and given it, tied up in a ribbon, to the president. Bush was clearly enjoying the largely make-believe contrast between president and rock star: ‘Here’s what I know about [Bono]. First, he’s a good musician. Secondly, he is willing to use his position in a responsible way.’80 That word ‘responsible’, as every child knows, generally translates as ‘obedient’.

  James Traub of the New York Times, an admirer of Bono though not of Bush, summarised what Bush meant by ‘responsible’: ‘Bono says, in effect, I am willing to shed some of my liberal credibility on you.’81

  Bono, cornered by the press afterwards, did exactly that: ‘We just had a meeting wit
h the President of the United States about the emergency of AIDS. It is the crumbs off our table that we offer these countries. And it is not good enough.’ Bono threw his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the Oval Office for emphasis. ‘The President of the United States doesn’t think it’s good enough.’82 As noted previously, Bush eventually thought AIDS funding for Africa was good enough to feature it in his 2003 State of the Union speech, just before the section that signalled his unwavering intention to attack Iraq.

  A decade later, in a BBC interview, Bono was unrepentant: ‘Even though people said “George Bush is using you”, I beg to differ. I think we used him. And I think he wanted to be used, it turned out, in that way. We found that piece of him that wanted to show the world what he was for as well as what he was against.’83 But what if the things that Bush was for, including endless war, runaway military spending, abstinence education against AIDS instead of condoms, deals with Big Pharma instead of generic drugs for the developing world – what if all those things killed more people, and made poverty and inequality more intractable, than more radical alternatives? Just what was Bono using Bush for?

  DREAMING WITH OBAMA: WASHINGTON TO PALESTINE

  Bono has rarely missed an opportunity to praise George W. Bush for his efforts on behalf of AIDS and Africa. As he insisted as recently as 2011, ‘He’s a controversial figure … but I can verify that at the very least there are a few million fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers that would not still be with us were it not for him’.84 He never mentioned those who owed their deaths, rather than their lives, to Bush.

  All the same, even Bono, the consummate salesman, would have to admit Barack Obama was an easier sell than Bush. In 2006 Oprah Winfrey had called Bono ‘the reigning king of hope’, but the singer seemed happy enough to relinquish his crown to the man who had made ‘hope’ his unique selling point when elected to the White House in 2008. As we saw in Chapter 2, Bono had featured Obama prominently when he edited Vanity Fair in 2007, and, given the new president’s African origins and global popularity, it would have been astonishing if Bono had done anything other than seek to make an ally of him. The Obama campaign, in turn, used U2’s ‘City of Blinding Lights’ as entrance music for the candidate in the run-up to the election.

  Extravagant flattery followed for years to come. Obama, he said shortly before the president visited Ireland in 2011, ‘represents the best of the political class’:

  Whereas Bill Clinton is a very physical person in a room, he puts his hand on your shoulder, he’s a great emotional arm-wrestler, Barack Obama has the demeanour of one you would play chess with. And then, of course, his secret weapon is his flash of a smile and a wicked sense of humour. He’s very funny. You don’t expect that from the chess player and that’s his charm, and it is literally a winning smile because it’s hard to stand up to – because it isn’t insincere. A lot of politicians need to control their smile, it’s like you can see the wires [laughs], but there’s absolutely nothing fake about this man.85

  In the same 2011 interview, however, Bono hinted that ‘absolutely nothing fake’ Obama was not always happy with the portrait of Africa that emerges from Geldof/Bono-style advocacy (note Bono’s reflex to add heft to ‘Africa’ with additional verbiage, though at least this time it is not ‘terrible beauty’):

  Obama was, and is, very keen to avoid the cliché of this majestic continent of Africa being portrayed as supplicant. I think that offends his African side and that’s very understandable. Sometimes, with people like myself or Bob [Geldof], because our job is to raise the alarm, the drama that’s necessary to get people to take unnecessary loss of life seriously means that you can project an image of the continent that’s not dimensional or accurate. I have always found in my dealings with Obama that he’s very keen to stress a relationship with Africa that is horizontal, not vertical – i.e. partnership not patronage.86

  All this admiration for the way Obama talked about Africa is perhaps a substitute for being able to cite things that the first black president had actually done for Africa. In the financially straitened Obama years, there were no major and visible new initiatives to match Clinton’s debt-cancellation or Bush’s AIDS programme, whatever the limits and contradictions of those achievements. Could Obama’s legacy on Africa be simply that he told Bono not to be so condescending about the continent?

  Nothing, however, could staunch the flattery. Having willingly swept Bush’s militarism under the carpet for so many years, Bono was positively admiring of Obama’s version, especially the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan:

  I guess he could have flattened the compound, but as with so much to do with this President, he shows his brains over brawn; the lives of the women and children were, under Obama’s leadership, a critical part of the calculation. I don’t believe it was an execution, as some have suggested. The safety of the Navy SEALs was and should be pre-eminent.87

  Again with the women and children – though it appears that this time they take second and third place in Bono’s mind, behind the Navy SEALs. The idea that the ‘safety’ of US troops attacking a compound full of civilians in a country in which the US was not at war should be ‘pre-eminent’ is some indication of how far Bono had come from ‘Bullet the Blue Sky’. However, while mere photo-ops with Bush had earned Bono the anger of many US (and Irish) liberals, his lavish praise for Obama put him firmly in their company. Obama’s policy of targeted drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere – effectively killing some of the people Bush would have merely tortured, and taking hundreds of women and children with them – was still, in 2011, largely uncontroversial, evidence of the president’s ‘brains over brawn’, and had bipartisan support in the US.

  Indeed, Bono’s admiration for Obama would be quite unremarkable, a mere marker of his familiar, and commonplace, political temperament, if it were not conjoined with an adoration of the US ruling class more broadly. Two decades on from Clinton’s election, Bono was no longer exercised by America’s need to expiate its original sins. It was clear from this Irish interview that it was the president’s office, with its Irish-oak desk, rather than the man that really made him breathless:

  [T]his kind of very, very heightened feeling that you have from being around the White House, whether you try to talk yourself down from it or not, you tend to walk out of there with a slightly different walk from when you went in.

  … I really believe in America – the idea, that is. America is an idea, not just a country, and I think it’s an extraordinary idea and meant to be contagious … I mean, here’s this dude Jefferson who is a complicated guy for sure, but he’s 27 or maybe even younger when he’s writing [the Declaration of Independence].88

  Jefferson was thirty-three, as it happens. But what really impressed Bono was not the Founders’ youth but the fact that they were ‘not just farmers or urban workers; they are the most powerful people in the Americas. If you think of George Washington as the greatest landowner, that’s like Bill Gates, in terms of his wealth.’89 Lest we forget, George Washington’s great wealth (unlikely to have been in the Gates bracket) was measured in the hundreds of human beings he owned as well as the land. What is intriguing about Bono’s rhapsody is the part of the history lesson that really excited him: not democracy, but the ability of a group of rich men to bring about dramatic change, and to do so in the name of a ringingly good idea. The association of this peculiar form of greatness with Bill Gates, who had become something of a partner and patron to Bono, is surely no accident. (For more on the Gates connection, see below.)

  Bono’s version of America’s ‘idea’, in short, is fully in keeping with his own campaigning practice: rich and powerful men making decisions and creating change that they say is in the interests of everyone else – who may or may not get a say in the matter.

  Just as Bono had believed America’s great principles were now ready to be fulfilled at Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, part of his role at the Obama inaugural concert was to declare the
new president to be the embodiment of the fulfilment. Joining the liberal chorus, Bono proclaimed that the inauguration of one black man as US president meant that Martin Luther King’s vision of a multiracial republic of equality, freedom and justice had become reality or – as he put it rather awkwardly from the stage – ‘On Tuesday, that dream comes to pass.’

  One could have tried pointing out to Bono that white households in the US had on average twelve times the wealth of black households (a gap that stretched to 22:1 in the first four Obama years), or that black Americans live an average of five years shorter than whites, but there would have been no point. Not only has Bono generally shown little interest in the reality of poverty anywhere but in Africa, but his basic elite orientation probably meant that, for him, a more multicoloured ruling class really did look like living the dream.

  Anyway, in the middle of ‘Pride (In the Name of Love)’, Bono made another little speech to annotate that ‘dream’ line: ‘Not just an American dream. Also an Irish dream, a European dream, African dream, an Israeli dream …’ Such an odd choice of dreams: two continents, two specific nationalities – what on earth could he be building to now with this dramatic pause as he stalked the platform? ‘And also [further dramatic pause] … a Palestinian dream!’ He turned to face the audience, looking ready to burst with, well, pride, then launched into the song’s final sing-along chorus.90

  Bono’s mini-speech was actually a little confusing. Did he mean that Obama’s inauguration caused the dream to ‘come to pass’ for all those other people too? Hardly. But it really did appear that he believed he had committed an act of great and redeeming courage by uttering the word ‘Palestinian’ in this context in Washington, where in actual fact politicians had for decades been paying lip-service to a Palestinian dream – if by the dream we mean some sort of Palestinian statehood – while at the same time buttressing Israeli intransigence. Indeed, in the quasi-official circumstances it would have been somewhat controversial if Bono had failed to pay the normal lip-service: once he said ‘Israeli’, he would have to balance it with, at the very least, ‘Arab’, if not ‘Palestinian’. Yet in an interview more than two years later he was still extraordinarily impressed with himself for his (first and only) brave intervention on behalf of this oppressed people: