CHRISTOPHER SILVESTER
Ishall call him the Unknown Afghan Hero. The BBC footage of the assassination attempt on Hamid Karzai showed a civilian greeting the Afghan president through the window of his limousine. Suddenly, several shots rung out and this civilian, reacting instantaneously, swung round and hurled himself upon the would-be assassin, as did another man, before all three were killed in a hail of American friendly fire. It was a dramatic moment recorded on videotape and beamed into our sitting-rooms, yet so much of the press got it wrong. Reuters reports mentioned that 'both Karzai's attacker and an Afghan bodyguard died in the shootout', though not the civilian hero. The Sunday Times published a photograph of the civilian's bloodied corpse with the caption 'Ominous: one of the men shot after the attempt to kill Karzai'. implying his complicity in the assassination attempt. The Guardian Unlimited website reported that Karzai's US bodyguards 'killed the gunman and two other men, both carrying weapons'. It was bad enough for him to have been killed, but the unfortunate fellow has since either been denigrated or forgotten. I noticed the name of the assassin in one of the papers, but not the name of this plucky little man who stood in the line of fire. Keith Harris, reporting for BBC2's From Our Own Correspondent, noted that the US bodyguards changed their appearance after the shootout. 'Stripped to the waist and wearing turbans, they looked pumped-up, bizarre and dangerous,' he said. Indeed, they resembled Sylvester Stallone in the Rambo movies, the salient difference being that Rambo never killed good guys.
Behind the rhetoric of those arguing that Saddam Hussein should not be allowed to develop a nuclear bomb lies the misconstruction that he is crazy enough to use such a weapon. Saddam may wish to develop a nuclear bomb as his way of strutting his stuff — after all, India and Pakistan did much the same — but his conventional military capability remains hobbled. His Ba'athist regime has not been an exporter of terrorism, unlike the mullahs of Iran, and it has displayed less sympathy than Saudi Arabia for the Wahabist ideology that underlies alQa'eda. Saddam is certainly a monster, but he is surely not seeking some Gotterditmmerung of self-immolation in his native Tikrit. Rather we should recognise that he is a dynast who wants his vile offspring to inherit his kingdom. Enforced 'regime change' seems like a profoundly anti-conservative foreign-policy goal.
In New York at the end of August, I wandered into the 66th and Broadway branch of Barnes & Noble and contemplated with awe the piles of books devoted to all aspects of the events of 11 September 2001. Whether or not New Yorkers are suffering from '9/11 fatigue', this efflorescence of published titles — I counted no fewer than 35 — is proof not so much of American resilience and enterprise as of the apparently boundless American capacity for self-mythologising. Away from this 9/11 section, tucked away on the performing arts shelves, I came across a remarkable book about an earlier, happier occasion when the World Trade Center became, for a day, the focus of intense media attention. In August 1974 the French lunambulisf Philippe Petit walked no fewer than eight times across a tightrope stretched between the Twin Towers, a stunt which was observed by 100,000 New Yorkers from their windows or in the streets below. To Reach the Clouds is Petit's account of how he took six years to plan his guerrilla operation, and how in those days of primitive security he and his team of assistants smuggled up on to the roofs of the Twin Towers the 200 yards of steel cable and the contraption with which he shot it across the abysmal gap. He even wrapped the cable and rigging equipment so as not to cause any damage to the building on the way up. Publishing this quirky coffee-table book in 2002 must have seemed a no-brainer to the marketing people at his publishing house, but, cynicism
about timing apart, I can recommend it as a hymn to human aspiration, ingenuity and courage, and an antidote to all the horror and suffering that is otherwise now associated with the Twin Towers.
It is said that the name Osama tops the popularity charts in Muslim-dominated northern Nigeria, but I was rather surprised the other day to come across an appellation that is similarly freighted with sinister overtones in one of the leafier streets of Notting Hill. I heard a well-proportioned lady in Muslim garb, her light-skinned AfroCaribbean features framed by a nun-like headdress, gently scold her child with the words. 'Quickly, Jihad, put your drink in the bag and get a move on.' Of course, the primary meaning of jihad is not 'holy war' but 'a striving for spiritual good'. However. I can't help feeling this choice of name is impolitic since, as Michael Caine is fond of saying, 'Not many people know that.'
My great-uncle, who long pre-deceased my birth, was named Temple by his father, the then Vicar of Wembley, in honour of the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Frederick Temple. My grandfather, Victor Silvester, was so named because he was born on the day that Mafeking was relieved in 1900, and my father, too, was christened Victor. My mother, born in 1934, was named Marlene, after the film star Marlene Dietrich. Although my half-sister's name, Tara, is traditional Irish, she was actually named after the plantation in Gone with the Wind. My cousin, Jefferson Winston Hack, editor of the fearfully trendy Another magazine, was named after an American president and an English prime minister — although according to a profile in the Times he tells people that he was named after the early Seventies rock group Jefferson Airplane. My own Christian name seems pitifully prosaic, though I have always been happy with it. On the other hand, my friend Sebastian Shakespeare, the distinguished gossip columnist. informed his parents at the age of nine that Toby, the name with which he had been christened, was unsatisfactory on the grounds that it was a dog's name, and so he duly adopted his more exotic forename.
The almost-octogenarian painter Lucian Freud is well-known for, among other things, having an extremely young girlfriend in the Sunday Telegraph writer Emily Beam. I recently watched Freud dash across the busy main road at Notting Hill Gate and was impressed that someone so advanced in years could perform this athletic feat. No wonder he is such an old goat.
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