suburbanmusings

In 1992 John Major’s Conservatives scored an unexpected General Election victory over Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party. The Tory victory was partly due to the party’s use of the slogan ‘Labour’s Tax Bombshell’ which adroitly exploited the electorate’s aspirational yearnings. Gordon Brown learnt a bitter lesson in 1992 and New Labour’s subsequent electoral successes were based on a promise not to raise the top rate of income tax and slightly Machievellian threats about potential cuts in public services under a Tory Government.

Despite abundant evidence that even a Labour Government will preside over public service budget cuts after 2010, Gordon Brown seems determined to run a campaign designed to provoke fear over public service cuts under a Tory Government.

Yet the Treasuary’s own figures suggest that there will be at least a 7% cut in departmental funding for public services between 2011 and 2014. The budget deficit for this year is expected to exceed £75 billion; interest payments on the national debt for 2009 alone will exceed £35 billion (the same as the defence budget). By 2013 the national debt is expected to be around 75%. In short the UK’s national debt will soon be unsustainable, unless drastic action is taken.

Brown has already reneged on New Labour’s pledge not to raise the top rate of income tax. The Laffer Curve suggests that raising the top rate of income tax can actually lead to a decrease in tax revenues for the treasuary, as the rich are given an incentive to avoid punitive taxation. Yet even if the rich are taxed ‘until the pips squeak’ it would not be enough to reduce the UK’s national debt to manageable levels.

When a private consumer faces economic uncertainty they reduce their spending, pay off their debts, put off frivolous purchases and aim to spend their money more efficiently. Governments should do the same. It is likely that we, our children and our grandchildren will be paying for the banking recapitalisation and the recession of 2009 through higher taxes. Yet we also have a once in a generation opportunity to reform a public sector that has become bloated and wasteful through two decades of unprecedented boom and Government largesse. The Government operates a £700 billion budget; it is inconceivable that efficiency savings cannot be made. In the 1990s Canada faced a similar public sector crisis but managed to reduce public spending by 20%, without significantly damaging its welfare state; indeed it is also riding out the world recession much better than most other countries.

Unfortunately Brown does not want to engage in adult debate with the electorate or respond to the problems that Britain faces. He simply wants to get re-elected. But Brown has surely misjudged the public mood. The electorate knows that the national debt is becoming unsustainable and surveys indicate that even the poorest workers in society show disdain for those who exploit the welfare state. It is likely that the Torys will win the next election, if not with a significant majority. Yet Cameron and Osborne have also proved reluctant to grasp the nettle of public sector reform. It is important for the future of the country, as well as the electoral success of their party, that they have the courage to do so.

"The burka is not a religious problem, it's a question of liberty and women's dignity. It's not a religious symbol, but a sign of subservience and debasement. I want to say solemnly, the burka is not welcome in France. In our country, we can't accept women prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity. That is not our idea of freedom.”

Nicolas Sarkozy, 22 June 2009.

I wrote about the issue a while ago, but President Sarkozy articulates my basic ideas on the subject more succinctly. Concern for individual human liberty should always trump respect for human ideologies.

This week the BNP became to the first anglo-fascist party to win seats at the European. Yet they won their two seats only by virtue of the ludicrous electoral system used in European elections. The North West and Yorkshire and Humber, which two BNP members now represent, are vast constituencies which return up to eight MEPs. In such a ridiculous system it is possible to finish fifth with 8% of the vote and still gain a seat, as the BNP have done. Furthermore less than 30% of the electorate turned out to vote; in the North West and Yorkshire this meant a collapse in the traditional Labour vote, which allowed fringe parties in by the back door. Furthermore at a time of economic uncertainty and general disillusionment with mainstream politics, populist parties were always likely to able to benefit from the public’s discontent. For example the Green party won 400,000 more seats than the BNP, increasing its vote by twice as much in percentage terms as the far-right party. Outside the white working class mill towns of the North, the BNP vote barely registered, and in the first-past-the-post General Election, BNP participation will largely be relegated to a footnote. There is then a danger of over-emphasising the importance of election of two BNP candidates, after all far-right parties have been prevalent in continental European politics for some years without affecting the status quo.

Yet the fact remains that almost a million adults voted for the BNP in the European Elections. No doubt BNP supporters are in a minority and the party will never achieve any real power, but it is disconcerting that a sizable minority of voters feel attracted to a party with such a repugnant ideology. It is unthinkable that close to a million voters share the BNP’s core ideology indeed the BNP has been at pains not to run on a racist platform. However the party has found fertile ground by exploiting discontent over immigration, the European Union, Iraq, and political corruption. The BNP won its votes in the old mill towns, divided between white and Muslim ghettos and the largely white working class towns of the M62 corridor. Unfortunately society will always have to deal with a minority that hold repugnant views; but the way to arguments and to offer their supporters an alternative path. The question is why is Labour losing votes it is industrial heartlands and has multiculturalism been a total failure in the racially segregated mill towns?

Hopefully I will be able to write about this I more detail, but first I’m going on a holiday for a week.

I’ve found it difficult to make enough time to post over the last few weeks; a period during which time the reputation of Parliament has been steadily and devastatingly eroded and Labour’s, never mind Brown’s, chances of winning the next election have all but evaporated.

It just so happened that I made a trip to visit the Houses of Parliament just as the fortunes of the institution reached their recent nadir. Pugin’s masterpiece remains a stunning example of high-Victorian architecture which seems to evoke the spirits of the great statesmen of British political history, such as Gladstone, Disraeli and Churchill who once graced its elegant corridors and lobbies. Yet when I visited Westminster I couldn't help but find that the grasping nature of the exposed expenses claims, the attempts by MPs to prevent the disclosure of such information and their great reluctance to acknowledge that any wrongdoing had occurred seemed to taint the place with a shabby and tawdry atmosphere which neither history nor architecture could fully remove.

Despite a reputation for being self-effacing, the British, like most nationalities, are often very good at trumpeting their country’s achievements, both real and imagined. Historians may proclaim the Palace of Westminster as the ‘mother of all parliaments’, politicians may like to imagine themselves as playing Athens to America’s Rome and ordinary citizens may sneer at the prevalence of God in American politics. Indeed parliamentary democracy and the rule of law in most of the Commonwealth and beyond is firmly based on the British model and indeed Britain did slowly but surely build a functioning parliamentary democracy while the rest of Europe toiled under autocracy. And if parliament is currently experiencing its nadir then its apogee surely came in the summer of 1940 when Churchill led declared to the House of Commons that Britain and its allies would continue to lead the free world until it had defeated the forces of Fascism. Indeed the House of Commons itself was destroyed in the blitz and you can still see blast marks from the bombing gouged out of the entrance to the chamber. When the palace was rebuilt Churchill ensured that the scars of war were left in place as a permanent reminder of the sacrifices that were made to save European democracy.

Yet Britain never really experienced a full political revolution and parliamentary democracy was only established after a long and sometimes painful evolutionary struggle; in fact the evolution into a fully a modern democracy was never really achieved. France and America both experienced short but violent revolutions (inspired in many ways by British agitators and philosophers) which destroyed the power of the aristocracy, established written constitutions and articles of individual rights in each country; Britain continues to labour under a system rooted in medieval patronage and laden with anachronisms. For a start 12 Church of England bishops are still allowed to sit in the House of Lords and vote matters of state; even though the rational for a strict separation of church and state is obvious. Furthermore whilst US courts block the teaching of ‘intelligent design’ in the US school system, British state schools can choose which pupils to enrol based simply on their religion. And unlike the Bible Belt, creationism can be taught directly from the Book of Genesis. Unelected peers may continue to sit in the House of Lords and disrupt legislation passed by a democratically elected Commons, more than 100 years after their similarly unelected forebears blocked Gladstone’s last Irish Home Rule Bill, with fatal consequences that we continue to live with. Meanwhile we continue to have an unelected head of state with the power to dissolve parliament and to whom members of the armed forces have to swear an oath of personal allegiance. Indeed the Royal Family’s expenses would make even Hazel Blears blush. For example this week the Times reported that Princess Beatrice (and I’m not sure who she actually is) was guarded 24 hours a day during her recent gap year travels, at an expense to the tax payer of over £250,000. The Royal Family is an anachronism and, although the Queen is comfortably the wealthiest woman in the world, the taxpayer continues to fund the lavish royal lifestyle to the tune of at least £37 million per year, although costs of security and protection, tax breaks and expenses incurred by other bodies are not made available to the taxpayer.

Both Brown and Cameron have made a great show of talking about making modest reforms of the expenses system; such reform is obviously needed but it doesn’t address the fundamental problems with the British democratic system. Many politicians have absolved themselves of responsibility for their tawdry expenses claims by blaming the system, and in a way they are right. We will always have some MPs who are incompetent, self-serving or downright bad, we will always have religious leaders who seek to impose their ideas on those who don’t share their faith, and we will continue to have an aristocracy that refuses to surrender its lingering privileges. Yet if we maintain a system which allows these groups to pursue their own desires at the expense of greater society, then we only have ourselves to blame.

The bankers that run Britain’s financial services industry are roundly condemned as having been guilty of having caused the credit crunch by their sheer unadulterated greed. The chief executives of many British banks were indeed guilty of greed not to mention myopia, arrogance and recklessness. They are, believe it or not, human beings after all. All humans are guilty of committing what the bible terms as ‘sins’. We have all been guilty of greed, probably on many occasions; we have all also been guilty of lust, gluttony, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. It’s part of what makes us human. The bankers are responsible for their actions but we should not consider that greed, or other vices, are the preserve of one section of society. Our politicians, who are supposed to be selfless public servants, have exploited the largesse of the taxpayer to pay for items as petty as their bath plugs. Out Trade Union leaders insist on six-figure salaries and our GPs command similar rates but refuse to open on Saturdays or in the evenings. Communism, a system predicated on the idea that a selfless bureaucratic class would rule on behalf of the proletariat, collapsed because its leadership was as greedy and power hungry as those in the West who did not pretend to look out for anyone but themselves.

Free market economics is based on the idea that when all people are given the freedom to pursue their own interests and goals they actually benefit society as a whole. For example, in order to make money, a person will sell a product or service desired by his fellow citizens. When a transaction takes place it is a purely voluntary exchange, the buyer wants to use the product or service and the seller wants cash to buy another product or service. This is the ‘invisible hand’ espoused by Adam Smith, the idea that millions of individuals pursuing their own goals will produce an economic equilibrium far more efficiently than one remote bureaucratic attempting to make decisions on their behalf.

The ‘Invisible Hand’ theory was developed by behavioural economists to create Public Choice Theory which was applied to the running of political and public institutions in the 1980s. Public Choice Theory stated that those who on the surface appeared to have chosen selfless public service careers, such as politicians and civil servants, were in actual fact pursuing their own goals, often to the detriment of wider society.

Public Choice Theory was brought to a wider audience by the popular sitcom Yes Minister, which was inspired by tales of civil servants blocking public service reforms that threatened their personal bureaucratic empires.

The comedian Armando Ianucci has claimed that Yes Minister was as effective as Orwell’s 1984 in promoting public distrust of the state. The Thatcher years and Reagonomics went some way to limiting the power of monolithic bureaucracies and non-democratic organisations and allowed people more freedom to make their own economic decisions. This trend was continued with the public sector reforms implemented by New Labour. However while Public Choice Theory allowed private individuals greater freedom and choice, there are signs that it has been taken to its ideological extreme. To some extent public institutions have been saddled with a new tyranny, the tyranny of target driven incentives. Incentives are an important part of free market economics, and human behaviour in general, yet by applying targets and incentives to public institutions, Public Choice Theory supporters appear to believe that public servants have no altruistic motives whatsoever. For example the introduction of targeted waiting times for NHS hospitals seems to pre-suppose that doctors would have no interest in reducing waiting terms if they did not have an artificial incentive to do so. As a result NHS administrators complain of having to spend more time meeting Government imposed targets than they do running a good hospital. Surely it would be better to assume that the majority of NHS staff do have an altruistic interest in helping people and to allow each NHS Trust the freedom and the authority to make its own decisions on how best to provide that help.

I missed out on The Wire when it was shown on satellite TV but I have just finished watching the first series and I am looking forward to series two starting on BBC2 this Monday. I am not usually a fan of TV drama but the Wire combines gritty realism, with a compelling narrative, strong characterisation and rich colloquial dialogue set against the uncompromising backdrop of the hopeless, decaying city of Baltimore, Maryland. Apart from that The Wire also abounds with numerous economic themes. As seen in the youtube clip at the top of the page, the drug dealers run gangs which mirror America’s greatest blue chip companies in the way that they are organised and run, minus the violence and the narcotic merchandise. The housing projects dominated by feuding drug gangs, pimps and addicts are the home of America’s underclass, but is their plight a failure of unrestrained capitalism or a failure of LBJ’s ‘Great Society’?

The Baltimore Police Department, as portrayed in The Wire, is full of corruption, nepotism and incompetence. Career progression and personal promotion take precedence over protecting and serving the public. Detectives are often more interested in winning a personal battle with the drug dealers then creating a better community and the dead hand of bureaucracy stifles personal initiative and altruism. Yet the tyranny of Public Choice Theory endorsed incentives also encourages Baltimore’s cops to simply bring a suspect to trial regardless of the strength of the case. Worse the pressure caused by these top down targets prevent even the most altruistic of cops from tackling the root causes of the crime that pervades dying cities such as Baltimore.

The Wire raises important economic questions caused by the failure of both right wing and left wing policies, perhaps the answer to these failures lies in the less ideological ‘third way’ pioneered by Clinton and Blair. Maybe only time will tell. The Wire doesn’t provide any answers; it simply concentrates on being a great, thought-provoking drama.

My experience of meetings is that they generally amount to a lot of talking and very little action and this week’s G20 summit appears to have maintained that formula.

We were informed that the world’s leading economies had agreed to pump several trillion dollars into the global economy to stimulate demand. However after the journalists had filed the reports and the city suits had reclaimed the square mile, it became apparent that the summit, while not quite amounting to the Emperor’s New Clothes, reflected compromise on a global scale. There was a consensus that the IMF should be given more power to bail out countries teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and a general commitment to reform global regulation and tax havens. Aside from that the summit’s most important achievement lay in what the G20 decided not to do.

The preamble to the summit’s communiqué contained a strong commitment to free trade and globalisation as the best way of achieving global economic growth and the G20 leaders agreed, on this day at least, to eschew the temptations of protectionism, economic nationalism and dirigisme. Amen to that. If this commitment is honoured then it should prove to be the most effective, not to mention cheapest, way of preventing a global depression. Indeed there are hints that most major economies will begin to see a limited recovery by the end of this year (aided by low fuel and food prices), although Britain’s economy will likely limp into 2010 before it begins to experience its recovery. Although economic recovery will likely be slow in coming and sluggish when it does eventually get going, the point is that it will happen; economic cycles are as inevitable as night and day. Although Government stimulus plays a key role in a speedy recovery, Government spending during this recession, and more particularly intervention in the financial markets, means that taxpayers (and their children) will be paying higher rates for the foreseeable future. It was heartening then to see that Brown has been warned off a further Government stimulus by the combined resistance of the Treasury, Mervyn King and even the German Finance Minister. Indeed with increased public spending, quantitative easing and massive borrowing inflation seems a more dangerous spectre than depression. Furthermore Brown may want to learn the lesson of the over-leveraged banks, should market conditions change.

There has been much talk this week about whether it is worth sending boys and girls from free Western countries to die in order to protect a Government that is about to legalise rape and condone the treatment of women as chattel. I have already written about this striking contradiction and indeed little has been made of Afghanistan’s brutal blasphemy laws or the fact that the democratic Government is hopelessly corrupt and incompetent. The real problem lies in the fact that the allies have never agreed to clear strategic objectives for the Afghanistan mission.

One worthy Nato objective is to prevent Afghanistan again becoming a failed state, in which the Taliban allow terrorist groups to setup operating bases from which to attack Western (or Asian) cities. Undoubtedly Nato intervention has also helped to improve the lives of Afghan women through the overthrow of the Taliban and the provision of education and health services for the female population. Yet Afghanistan is still a profoundly conservative society. In rural areas such as Helmand the economic lives of villagers are little changed from medieval times, and cultural memes can date back to the biblical era. Afghanistan is a country in which women can be stoned for adultery, shot dead for appearing on TV, sprayed with acid for attending school and banned from obtaining medical treatment. Women may be gang raped to settle a tribal feud, married off before they reach puberty or sold into domestic slavery to pay off a debt. And while developed countries must do everything they can do combat such cultural memes, it must be recognised that Afghan is society will not change within our lifetimes.

So while every effort must be made to spread universal human rights, the West should accept that Afghanistan will never be Switzerland. Nato’s primary objective must be to reach a point were the country can maintain its own security and is run by a Government that is (relatively) democratic and (relatively) free of corruption. The West can fight Afghanistan’s enemies, but changing the mindset of its people may prove to be an impossible battle; however that’s not to say we shouldn’t try.

The War in Iraq. For many it is the manifestation of a neo-imperialist, anti-Islamic campaign which ought never to have been contemplated and which has brought untold death and destruction on the cradle of civilisation. For others it was a legitimate action designed to remove a brutal dictator, who was a menace to regional security, and an attempt to spread democracy in a country scarred by autocracy.

Depressingly debate about Iraq often resembles a Punch and Judy show with one side of the argument often determined prove that it was right and grasping to extract a worthless apology from the other side. Often, debates about Iraq fail to address issues about how to increase reconstruction, how to improve security, how to sideline the militias, how to reduce unemployment, how to improve infrastructure, how to eliminate al Qaeda, how to safeguard democracy and the rule of law, how to promote reconciliation, how to achieve peace, how to look forward; more often than not it is in couched in terms of 'I was right, you were wrong'. For most columnists and opinion formers Iraq simply provides the opportunity to make the self obsessed declaration ‘I was right’. Of course this is no great source of solace for ordinary Iraqis.

It matters little who was right and who was wrong. Such judgements do not help ordinary Iraqis to find jobs, such self-aggrandisement does not provide infratstructure for Baghdadis, such self-importance will not guarantee a peaceful and prosperous future for the people of Iraq.

It matters little what I think of the decision to go to war and as far as I am aware I have never written about my opinion on the issue. Yet it appears that, if you want to write about Iraq, you must first issue either a self-imolationary mea-culpa or alternatively, an almost triumphalist assertion that the invasion has killed over 600,000 people, depending on your position on the decision to go to war in 2003. So although it is of no consequence here it is; I disagree with decision to invade Iraq for three principal reasons. Firstly war is hell and once unleashed you may sow the wind that reaps a whirlwind. Therefore I think war should only be used in self-defence (although this could include pre-emptive strikes) and to stop mass murder or genocide, even then war should only be waged if the objectives are clear and achievable. Secondly the War in Iraq impeded the reconstruction of Afghanistan and the destruction of al Qaeda. Thirdly I don’t consider that Iraq posed a threat to regional stability in 2003 and it may not have done so until Saddam Hussein died or was deposed, which might have taken decades.

However I do not know that I am right, nor do I have the authority to claim that I am right. It is certainly possible to put forward a case that the war in Iraq was morally justified, after all it did result in the removal of a genocidal dictator and it has produced democracy in a country scarred by years of totalitarian rule. Tragically at least 100,000 people have died in Iraq since 2003; yet the vast majority of these deaths have been caused by Iraqi on Iraqi violence. It is clear that latent hostility between elements of the Sunni and Shia was fermented by Sadarists and Shi’ites during Saddam’s long rule. Sunni and Shia were at war throughout Saddam’s reign, in fact they have been at war since the Battle of Siffin in 657. Furthermore it is inevitable that Saddam’s regime would have fallen at some stage, probably through when he died of natural causes. In the power vacuum that would have ensued it is likely that a power struggle would have erupted which was similar, or even worse, than that which took place between 2003 and 2007. Indeed it is the coalition forces that protected Iraq’s democratically elected Government from the Sadarists and the Ba’athists who were trying to overthrow it. And while the death of every innocent human is an indescribable tragedy, human suffering does not by itself create an immoral or unjust war. For example the Second World War caused the deaths of around 60 million people but few would argue that the war was immoral. Likewise the Korean War took the lives of at least a million Korean civilians, but when one compares North and South Korea, the moral purpose of the war becomes more justifiable, even if its execution does not. Even the Falklands War, in which a thousand men died for a few square miles of barren, isolated island, seems morally justified on the balance of evidence. That does not mean that Coalition Forces have not committed some reprehensible crimes or appalling blunders during operations in Iraq. For such actions the US and its allies should take full responsibility.

Perhaps the key point is that opinion on the decision to go to war is a personal choice, to be respected. Of course the people who are amongst the best qualified to pass comment on the war are the Iraqis themselves. Yet such is the din caused by our chorus of self-justification that their voice is rarely heard. The BBC recently commissioned a poll of Iraqis about life in their country.

The poll asked:

Q8. From today’s perspective and all things considered, was it absolutely right, somewhat right, somewhat wrong, or absolutely wrong that US-led coalition forces invaded Iraq in spring 2003?

Absolutely Right
19%

Somewhat Right
23%

Somewhat Wrong
28%

Absolutely Wrong
28%

Refused/don’t know
2%

So in inspite of everything that has happened in the last 6 years Iraqis themselves are split on whether the invasion was right or wrong with 42% stating that it was absolutely or somewhat right and 56% saying it was absolutely or somewhat wrong. This response has fluctuated since 2004 and it is likely to do so again in the future.

The poll also asked:

Q24. An agreement between the Iraqi and U.S. governments says all U.S. troops are to be withdrawn by 2011. Do you think U.S. forces should leave sooner than that, stay longer than that, or is this timetable about right?

Leave sooner than 2011
46%

Stay longer than 2011
16%

The timetable for withdrawal is right
35%

Refused/don’t know
2%

Again we see a range of opinions with 46% of Iraqis wanting US troops to leave before 2011 and 51% of Iraqis agreeing that the three year timetable is appropriate or even hoping that US forces will maintain a presence in the country beyond 2011.

Perhaps the most encouraging results were as follows:

Q15. There can be differences between the way government is set up in a country, called the political system. From the three options I am going to read to you, which one do you think would be best for Iraq now?

Strong leader: government headed by one man for life
14%

Islamic state: where politicians rule according to religious principles
19%

Democracy: government with a chance for the leader to be replaced from time to time
64%

Refused/don’t know
3%

This is clear evidence, were evidence needed, that democracy and freedom are universal and not Western values and are supported by the majority of Iraqis. However a significant minority maintain support for dictatorship or religious rule, something that may, or may not, cast a shadow over Iraq’s future.

Of course some columnists go beyond self-aggrandisement and, although they class themselves as ‘anti-war’ they support violent resistance and their imposition of their own views on Iraqi society. Seamus Milne, is an editor at the Guardian newspaper. He once described the Iraqi insurgency as a “classic resistance movement with widespread support”. In a recent hoplessly innaccurate and rambling article Milne effectively called for the Iraqi resistance (Iraqis generally use the term ‘terrorists’, but what do they know?) to murder British and American soldiers, (although a Marxist he shows little understanding of international working class solidarity).

Of course Milne did not have the courage to air his views directly and instead employed the classic trick of using a local intelocuter to advocate his beliefs; neatly allowing Milne to disclaim them should the need arise. Milne claims to have spoken to Sheikh Abu Yahya, the leader of a ‘mainstream’ resistance group. Although as the resistance has been reduced to fanatical Islamists and Ba’athists it is unclear who, exactly Sheikh Abu Yahya represents. Certainly he does not represent Iraqi voters as he views the deomcratic process as "illegitimate and corrupt". Instead Milne's article lauds the man who declares "We will continue fighting until the last American soldier leaves Iraq, however long that takes".

Milne concludes:

"There is no question that the US has suffered a strategic defeat in Iraq. Far from turning the country into a forward base for the transformation of the region on western lines, it became a global demonstration of the limits of American military power. But the failure of the resistance to bridge the sectarian divide and become a truly national movement is, as Abu Yahya acknowledges, an achilles heel that could yet allow the US to salvage long-term gains from the wreckage. If Iraq is to regain its sovereignty and control of its resources, and the US is to leave the country altogether, that weakness will have to be overcome."

Of course a democratic Iraqi Government has complete control over its own resources and it has agreed to a phased withdrawal of US troops from its territory (something that hasn’t happened in Germany, Japan, South Korea or Britain). But sitting in the comfort of his London home Milne presumes to know better than the Iraqi Government or the Iraqi people who have made it clear that they have had enough of war and resistance. He advocates that the resistance contnues to wage a war to evict an American army that is already planning to completely withdraw from Iraqi streets by August 2010. Presumably the suicide bombings, the car bombings, the firefights, the murders, the kidnappings, the terror, the destruction, the turmoil; it is a price that Milne believes Iraqis should pay so he can write a victorious opinion piece. It is a shocking and disgraceful article for a supposedly respectable national newspaper to publish. But take solace in this thought. Seamus Milne can claim to be right if he chooses to do so. He may work for a national newspaper and no doubt has a high opinion of himself. But he is a voice in the wilderness; in reality he is a nobody, his words have no more effect on Iraqis than these words. It is the opinions of the millions of ordinary Iraqis that will ultimately decide Iraq’s destiny, provided they are allowed to make their voices heard and people are prepared to listen. However they got there, they may now have that chance.

The Times today carried an article about Mullah Abdullah Zakir, a former detainee at Guantanamo Bay who was released after assuring, first the Americans and then the Afghans, that he wanted nothing more than to live out the rest of his life at peace and with his family. The Taliban has since confirmed that Zakir is now its top commander in Helmand Province. The Times reports that Zakir was captured in the lead car of a convoy of top Taliban leaders in December 2001. Subsequent evidence has suggested that he is a master bomb maker and his release from custody coincides with a nearly 300% increase in IED attacks in Helmand Province, which have resulted in the deaths of 44 British soldiers.

I have already written about the fact that many of those in Guantanamo are pretty nasty characters, indeed five high-profile detainees recently signed a statement which delcared that they were terrorists to the bone. It is clear that Zakir is of the same sinister ilk. However, no matter how evil a person is, there is no moral legitimacy in locking them up without trial or representation and the use of torture is a particuarly abhorrant stain on America’s moral reputation. We also know that the clumsy and brutal use of ‘Gitmo’ has helped America to lose crucial support on the Arab street and has played straight into the hands of Islamist recruiting sergeants.

Of course the now defunct and utterly discredited Bush/Cheney Doctrine maintained that torture and detention without trial were necessary tactics in order to protect the lives of thousands of innocent people. The sophistry of the ‘ticking bomb’ scenario was often wheeled out to provide philisophical support for such an un-constitutional doctrine. But if there really was a ‘ticking bomb’ it seems the last people we would want to rely would be the CIA. Even though Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has admitted to planning 9/11 from ‘point A to point Z’, we are yet to see this (self-confessed) mass–murderer and his co-conspirators put on trial in a civillian courtroom because the abundant evidence against them has been tainted by the pointless use of torture. Worse, it is now evident that the CIA, with all its devlish interrogation techniques, cannot spot a master terrorist from two feet; 44 British soldiers may have paid the ultimate price for such manifest incompetence.

So not only was the Bush/Cheney Doctrine illegal and imoral, it has now been conculsively shown that it does not work. Bush is not the ‘World’s Number 1 Terrorist’, far from it, but his incompetence, arrogance, insouciance and disregard for basic morality and the US constitution during eight years in power, have created problems which may take many years to resolve.

In lieu of having anything interesting to say, here's a great song.

The last two weeks have provided stark evidence that the world, which will always be challenged by difficulties and disagreements, is, in essence, divided between two competing ideologies. Those who believe in using violence and murder to impose their political views on others and those who use peaceful and democratic means to achieve their aims.

Iraq is struggling to shake off the last vestiges of the civil war that nearly ripped the country apart in 2006, but recent progress has been real, tangible and is, perhaps, becoming irreversible. However some of those who imposed Ba’athism on Iraq for three decades and in recent times have murdered soldiers, police, intellectuals, Government workers and those Iraqis deemed to have ‘sinned’ against Islam, continue to employ extreme violence in order to achieve their hateful aims. Today in Baghdad at least 33 people were killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up at a conference aimed at securing national reconciliation and a peaceful democratic future for Iraq. The BBC reported that an Iraqi government spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, insisted after the bombing that there would be "no going back" from the path of reconciliation in Iraq.

"Reconciliation is the response to the devilish acts that try to wreck nationalist efforts between Iraqis,"

It took the Iraqi militias six years of civil war to understand that political violence destroys society. Unfortunately there are those in Ulster who have still failed to learn that lesson in spite of 40 years of bloodshed. The Republican splinter groups, the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA, know that they do not have a fraction of the resources of the Provisional IRA, which failed to achieve its objectives after 30 years of war. Therefore it is evident that their rationale, and murderers can all too often be extremely rational, is to provoke retribution and to draw the army back onto the streets. Such is their arrogance and lack of humanity that they want to re-ignite a bloody conflict in order to achieve their own narrow and pointless political aims. Indeed they consider it to be worth sacrificing the blood of innocent humanity in order to achieve their goal of swapping the passport of one prosperous democratic state for that of another prosperous democratic state.

At least in Ulster and Iraq we can see the light at the end of the tunnel and the majority of citizens appear to have turned their backs on political violence. In Pakistan, where the Sri Lankan cricket team was recently attacked by teenage gunmen, there does not appear to be a tunnel. Since the attack on the cricket team, the Pakistani Taliban has blown up 16 music shops, it has destroyed the shrine of a Sufi poet in Peshawar because it was visited by women, it has beheaded two supposed ‘spies’ and it has murdered 14 captured Pakistani soldiers. And of course the Pakistani Government has surrendered the Swat Valley to the terrorists, who will now impose their backword and brutal version of Sharia law onn the territory, and all that that entails for women and those who want to pursue a free life.

In Ulster and Iraq we can be confident that the collective will of societies now committed to democracy and political reconciliation will, one day, triumph over the evil ideology of the gunmen. In Pakistan on the verge of bankruptcy, with a population that the state cannot feed, educate or provide employment for, it is unclear which ideology will carry the day.