LONDON: The words ‘mission accomplished’ have been deployed on two extremely high-profile occasions over the last two and a half years, and, with hindsight, both of them now seem regrettable. The first time, of course, they were the backdrop to President George Bush’s triumphant arrival by fighter plane on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln where, before a crowd of cheering sailors, he announced an end to ‘major combat operations’ in Iraq. The second happened two months ago, when a plainly exhausted Bob Geldof emerged to deliver his verdict on the G8 summit at Gleneagles, and on Live 8, the massive global network of rock concerts he had organized to heap pressure on the world leaders in attendance. Bono paraphrased Churchill. Geldof, however unintentionally, quoted Bush. “Mission accomplished, frankly,” he said.

So much has happened in the normally quiet summer weeks since then that it can be difficult to recall exactly how huge Live 8 was, and how ubiquitous Geldof had become.

In the three weeks leading up to July 2, the day of the concerts, he appeared on television countless times, sometimes in the company of Tony Blair, and was mentioned in more than 850 British national newspaper articles.

And when, five days later, the G8 leaders pledged a doubling of aid to Africa by $25 billion a year, along with a wide-ranging programme of debt relief targeting the continent’s poorest nations, it was, for once, hard to raise a sceptical eyebrow at the rhetoric of rock stars.

Then — immediately — came the London bombs, followed by a summer of bad news from Iraq, and then the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

An optimist might have hoped that Live 8 had vanished from the headlines because the summit leaders had, as Geldof argued, scored ‘10 out of 10’ on aid and ‘8 out of 10’ on debt relief. A cynic might have blamed the capriciousness of news cycles, or of westerners’ attention spans. Either way, Live 8 largely vanished — from the public eye, at least.

In fact, the murmurings of dissent among the charities associated with Make Poverty History started soon. The promised aid actually included the figures for debt relief, they said; in fact, only $12 billion of new money, not $25 billion, would be available in 2006. The World Bank was trying to water down the debt relief, imposing conditions on the recipient nations; Germany and Italy were letting it be known that ‘budgetary constraints’ might prevent them from meeting the obligations that Blair had persuaded all the leaders to sign up to, in their own handwriting, at Gleneagles.

But the dissenters reserved their strongest words for Geldof.

Later this week, Geldof is due to fly to New York, where the United Nations summit is being held, in an effort, as he sees it, to rescue the G8’s pledges from an onslaught of hostility led by Washington’s controversial UN ambassador, John Bolton. As the volume of dissent has grown since Live 8, Geldof has maintained a public silence. In an interview with the Guardian recently, he ended it.

Geldof is plainly angered by the allegation that Gleneagles, in the words of Christian Aid, was ‘a sad day for poor people in Africa’.

The summit ended with a commitment to 50 of the nearly 90 points set out in the report of the Commission for Africa, the initiative founded by Tony Blair last year with the professed aim of spurring development on the continent. “I’m not trying to big it up,” he says. “But outside narrow national politics... the international experts are just amazed that so much got done or agreed upon... If we get $25 billion that wasn’t there before, where those monies come from doesn’t ... matter. They weren’t there, they didn’t exist, and now we’ve got a means of getting them.” Even if the debt money and the aid money are one and the same? “Everyone knew that! That’s nothing new! Besides, the debt is only $1 billion of $25 billion. But it was always included.”

He accepts, though, that much has changed since July — not least because of Hurricane Katrina, which constitutes both an understandable distraction for the US government and an object lesson in how massive amounts of money can be rapidly commandeered when required. “This natural disaster, this tragedy, highlights what is remarked upon by even the most casual visitor to the United States, which is the limitless-seeming poverty and, among it, the vast number of clearly visible poor,” he says. “Katrina has revealed this, in all its shocking seriousness. Congress, of course, reacted immediately, releasing $50 billion, which may go up to $200 billion. Compare that with the endless negotiations between seven of the richest nations to find an extra $25 billion for an entire continent! Endless, endless.”

Geldof is particularly scathing about the accusation that ‘the G8 said absolutely nothing on trade’ — to relieve the massive impact of export subsidies, which many activists argue is a far more profound problem for Africa than aid or debt relief can ever address.

The issue was never a central agenda item, Geldof says — it was being put off until the next round of the World Trade Organization talks — and the fact that it was discussed at all demonstrates the lasting power of Live 8. “From the get-go, we were told there would be no discussion on trade, that that was being kept for the World Trade Organization round,” Geldof says.

“And yet I did think it might be possible to get a date for the end of export subsidies, which are a grotesquerie that impacts immediately on economic growth in the south and kills people, if you want to use emotional language about it. So in Gleneagles we talked to relevant heads of state, and trade talks were held... What people ignore is that the language they used about trade is so extraordinary. You’re essentially talking about free trade, capitalist economies, saying they won’t use aid and debt as bargaining tools to demand that these countries ‘liberalize’ their economies — in other words, open them up to be ravaged by the far superior strength of our trade goods.”

It is in words like these that the conceptual gulf between Geldof and organizations like War on Want becomes most clearly apparent. To War on Want, the G8 declaration was simply a failure. To Geldof, it was a success because it was signed up to; politicians can always pay lip-service to overarchingly idealistic goals, but they will, he insists, have to pay cash for the promises they made at Gleneagles. The fight now is to save even that pragmatic compromise from being buried under the weight of the 750 amendments due to be proposed by the US at the UN summit.

“From the very get-go, everyone was aware of this: what’s the point of signing up if no one’s going to do it?” Geldof says. At the start of the summer, he says, he rang Tony Blair to suggest the formation of a monitoring committee, made up of high-powered statesmen and women from Africa and the West, to hold the leaders to their declarations. Blair ‘was in complete agreement with it’, he says. To lead the group, he says, ‘what is needed is a figure with post-political authority — a Bill Clinton type figure’.

The Commission for Africa has since come in for criticism from some development organizations, but Geldof says those same groups supported it before. “Either the critics suddenly changed their mind about the Commission for Africa... or we asked for doubling of aid and tick the box!”

But isn’t there a risk, for an idealism-fuelled campaigner such as Geldof, catapulted into the company of world leaders, that one might grow starry-eyed by proximity to power? “Once you engage, by definition you get to know the personalities involved,” he says. “It doesn’t matter to me one whit whether I know them or not. Some I like, some I’m indifferent to.” He sounds as if he means it.

—Dawn/The Guardian News Service