The most interesting recent news story was the decision by President Obama to give Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a civillian trial in New York for his alleged role in the mass-murder comitted on 9/11. This is an excellent decision in my view and something that should have been done when KSM was captured in 2003. Bafflingly the relatives of some 9/11 victims don't want KSM to set foot on American soil, as if he will somehow manage to escape custody and live a free life in the US. A free and fair legal system is the bedrock of Western civillisation and denying this right to KSM is arguably as damaging to the principles of a free society as 9/11 itself. The Attorney-General also announced he'd be pressing for the death penalty, which would seem to bizarre punishment for a man who openly craves a martyr's death. It would be far more appropriate to let him rot in obscurity in some anonymous super-max prison, than to reward his peverse world view by making him a martyr.

I caught the last ten minutes of Question Time this week and both panelists and audience were getting rather vexed on the subject of immigrants taking British jobs. Certainly there are many serious problems with mass immigration, particulary with regards to integration and the effect on public services. However, I notice that, in my local bank at least, a number of cashiers are Polish. I would imagine that employers such as banks would much rather employ native English speakers, so if they cannot fill these vacancies with British citizens, at a time of high unemployment, then it presumably means that they do not want the job. Perhaps one problem is that the welfare system does not provide enough incentive for the unemployed to find work, nevertheless if 'native' Brits are not willing to take on such jobs then they can hardly complain if foreigners leave their families and friends and travel hundreds of miles to fill the gap.

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Tom Coghlan has an excellent piece about the situation in the Times today; his observations about rural Afghanistan are spot on and, although rural Afghans have little interest in national politics they do seem to want to see whether the international community will show commitment to the country. Without wanting to lurch into hyperbole, this could be the last chance for the coalition to prevent the slow collapse of democracy and the eventual onset of another in civil war in Afghanistan. The international community should commit full military, political, and nation building resources to Afghanistan for the good of the country, the region and the wider world. Now is not the time to blink.

p.s. on a personal note I’m moving to London this weekend to start a new job, posting is difficult enough at the best of times and I may be incommunicado until I get settled in, so this may be my last post for a couple of weeks.

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I don't really care about the game; I just wanted to be the first to use that pun.

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“We don’t have enough forces to do everything, everywhere, at once”

Gen. McChrystal

President Obama inherited an unenviable set of challenges from President Bush; economic crisis, nuclear proliferation in Iran, war in Iraq, unreformed healthcare and the failure to obtain international agreement on climate change. But while the world economy begins to come out of intensive care, Iraq starts to show some tentative signs of stabilisation and there is a growing consensus for action on the Iranian nuclear programme, Obama may yet see his presidency defined by the outcome of a war which is entering its ninth year.

The war in Afghanistan has been chronically under-resourced since its inception; worse, no clear strategy has ever been outlined by the politicians who have deployed troops to the country. At best coalition forces in Afghanistan can claim to have fought the Taliban to a stalemate, but in many areas of the country they appear to be loosing. After over three years in Helmand British troops often still cannot go 100 yards out of their bases without encountering deadly minefields, eight US soldiers were killed when their base was almost overrun on Saturday, some British frontline units are reported to have suffered 25% casualty rates in their recent six-month summer tour and most tellingly of all, 2009 has been bloodier for coalition forces than the first four years of the war combined. Afghanistan, the war that Obama described as “necessary”, is increasingly unpopular amongst US voters, while at the same time General McChrystal, the top soldier in the country, has warned that, without reinforcements by early next year, the conflict will “likely end in failure”.

The choices facing Obama are stark. Does he agree to McChrystal’s urgent request for 40,000 more troops and risk becoming further mired in a potentially unwinnable conflict that has already lasted as long as Vietnam and may become known as ‘Obama’s War’? Or does he, as Vice-President Biden has proposed, pull back from Afghanistan and concentrate his forces on hunting al Qaeda in Pakistan, in doing so perhaps sacrificing the meagre gains that have cost so much blood and treasure? No doubt this is one of the most difficult decisions Obama will have to take, whatever choice he makes will affect the lives of countless individuals and the futures of at least three countries. But this is the nature of the job that he volunteered to do and, bleak though the situation may seem, McChrystal’s report does offer America the chance to meet its strategic objectives whilst enabling it, one day, to extricate itself from its Central Asian tarpit.

The first question that Obama will be likely to ask himself when considering McChrystal’s request is the one that most of us ask; simply, is it worth the human cost? But while this is a natural question for any compassionate human being to ask, Obama should not allow it to cloud his judgment. In contrast to the Vietnam War, America and its allies are fielding professional volunteer armies; morale amongst ordinary troops appears to remain strong and they are often eager to do job they signed up for, even if they are privately disillusioned with the chances of success.

In essence no-one, perhaps apart from the troops themselves and their families, can really decide whether the war is ‘worth’ the cost. The more pertinent issue is whether the war is necessary and what the coalition’s strategic aims should be.

Since 2001 the major rationale for maintaining a coalition presence in Afghanistan has been the aim of creating a free democratic society, loosely based on the ideas of universal human rights. Yet Iraq has exposed the limits of American power, especially with regard to nation-building, and that was a country with a large bureaucracy and a well educated middle class. In contrast Afghanistan has been at war for thirty years, during which time its population has more than doubled and its economy has collapsed. It is reported to have no more than 200 literate and competent bureaucrats and its Government is amongst the most corrupt in the world.

It is true that much good work has been done in improving the lives of women and promoting a more free society; but most Afghans, particularly in the rural areas, are culturally closer to the Taliban than they are to the ideals of the West, (this is a country in which 80% of women are illiterate and a journalist is serving a life sentence for distributing an article about women’s rights under Islam). Even if Obama agrees to McChrystal’s request for 40,000 extra troops, that would still mean there were only 140,000 soldiers tasked with rebuilding a country of 28 million. In short the coalition only has enough manpower to concentrate in certain areas, indeed coalition troops are still to set foot in the vast southern half of Helmand Province. Women will continue to be treated as chattel in these untouched, isolated areas and rural communities will continue to live in medieval poverty; unfortunately it may always be so. The coalition succeeding in removing the brutal Taliban regime but it does not have the capability to transform Afghan culture in the short-term, even if it chose to do so.

Instead Obama must base his Afghan strategy on two pragmatic and hard-headed conditions, America’s national interests and its ability to achieve its goals. A full withdrawal from Afghanistan is clearly unfeasible; it would inevitably lead to civil war and the fall of the Karzai Government. An Afghan-Taliban regime would then be free to step up its already fierce insurgency campaign in Pakistan, a dangerously unstable nuclear-armed state. Furthermore veteran Taliban and Islamist fighters would be free, indeed would be enticed, to spread their Jihad to India, China, the ‘Stans’, the Caucasus, South East Asia, the Middle East and the West.

America then cannot cut and run, but the only objective which is seemingly achievable in the medium term is that of an Afghan Government that is relatively free and relatively incorrupt and a security situation which is stable enough for Afghan forces to take over the fight with minimal reliance upon coalition forces.

If Obama settles upon such an objective, then McChrystal has outlined the strategy and the tactics which could make it achievable; but it will require a multi-pronged approach over a long period, it will be time consuming, it will be expensive, it will be bloody and above all, it will be ugly.

Firstly the isolated rural areas should be left to the Taliban; the coalition does not have enough resources to be everywhere at once. McChrystal has already advised that he wishes to concentrate his forces in the towns and the centres of power where they can provide security for the people. America should take the lead in ensuring development projects that really improve the lives of locals are implemented quickly and efficiently, bypassing corrupt local officials. This would help to improve security, stability and Governance in populated areas and restrict Taliban influence.

If Obama authorises a further 40,000 troops it could give the coalition greater flexibility to raid Taliban opeerating bases and keep its influence from the population centres. McChrystal has also declared the coalition forces should be more concerned with protecting local civilians rather than killing Taliban. Use of firepower and air strikes should be scaled back in heavily settled areas and priority could be given to providing security rather than engaging in pitched battles.

McChrystal believes that there should be increased efforts to turn less ideologically committed members of the Taliban and reintegrate them into society. Turning former insurgents was key to the success of the surge in Iraq, and full financial and diplomatic resources should be made available for this project. Obama should even countenance the participation of the Taliban in democratic Governance.

However this campaign will not be won simply by killing, isolating or turning the Taliban. Indeed the Taliban will probably be active in the region for decades to come, much like the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia or FARC in Columbia. Crucially the coalition will rely on Afghans to form a (relatively) coherent state and take responsibility for their own security, thus allowing coalition forces the chance to withdraw with their strategic objectives intact.

This 'Afgan element' is likely to be the lynchpin of Obama’s Afghan strategy and unfortunately it represents by far the biggest challenge. The brazen corruption which was so evident during the recent re-election of President Karzai is likely to have hugely damaged the reputation of democratic Government in the eyes of ordinary Afghans. It is unrealistic to expect the country to achieve a Jefforsonian democracy in eight years; however, some form of functioning central Government is crucial if Afghanistan is not to fall back into civil war or theocratic dictatorship. Obama could put pressure on Karzai to agree to a second round of voting, but corruption seems endemic, and at this stage it is difficult to see how far America can interfere in the running of what is still a sovereign state.

It is impossible, indeed it is not desirable, to kill every last Talib. Any coalition exit strategy will depend on the readiness of Afghan forces to take over responsibility for their country’s security. McChrystal wants to expand the Afghan Army to 134,000 by December 2010 and achieve an eventual Afghan police and army strength of 400,000. If Obama and Nato provide extra resources it is feasible that this could be achieved, but it is not just a question of numbers. Afghanistan is poverty stricken and it would probably need international funding to permanently maintain an army of this size. Furthermore the current Afghan Army is plagued by ill-discipline, drug use, corruption, paedophilia, and incompetence. It remains to be seen whether the Afghan state could maintain an army which could hold off the Taliban by itself. History suggests it is possible; after the Soviet withdrawal in 1988 the Afghan National Army was able to hold back the Mujahideen until the Central Government, (shorn of Western and Soviet financial support) finally collapsed in 1992.

As flag draped coffins continue to be flown home few of us would want the awesome responsibility faced by Obama as he decides whether to send more men and women to be killed or maimed thousands of miles away from home. If there was any doubt about the gravity of the decision it was dispelled by the matter-of-fact warning contained in McChrystal’s report that if the surge is authorised it is likely that in the short-term "Afghan and coalition casualties will increase."

But we should also heed McChrystal’s warning that “Failure to provide adequate resources also risks a longer conflict, greater casualties, higher overall costs, and ultimately, a critical loss of political support. Any of these risks, in turn, are likely to result in mission failure." If Obama authorises the surge and McChrystal’s strategy is successful we are still likely to be left with a Government tainted by corruption, a country mired in poverty, human rights for women and others as far away as ever and a stubborn and bloody rural insurgency. Few in 2001 would have seen this outcome as a victory, but given the challenges faced today, simply avoiding defeat may represent an unlikely success.

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“In the past fifty years the Muslim world has been catapulted into modernity. From my grandmother to me is a journey of just two generations, but the reality of that voyage is millennial. Even today you can take a truck across the border to Somalia and find you have gone back thousands of years in time.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s life story, ‘Infidel’, is not the most elegantly written book I have ever read, which is understandable when you consider that English was the fourth of five languages that she had to learn during her young life. However, the narrative of a young girl fleeing the problems of the Third World to start a new life in the West and her concurrent intellectual voyage of discovery, neatly encapsulates what, in my opinion, is one of the defining issues of the early 21st Century.

Before Globalisation started its inexorable recent rise in 1945, human societies and cultures tended to develop at differing rates and along divergent paths. Native American tribes, isolated from the rest of humanity for up to 10,000 years, and Australian Aborigines, isolated for up to 60,000 years, did not diverge greatly from the hunter-gatherer societies from which all humans originate. Other great cultures certainly held differing beliefs and ideas but there was no great divergence in human society until the late medieval period slowly morphed into what may be loosely termed as the Western European Renaissance and then the Enlightemnent. Around this period, somewhere between the time of the Gutenburg printing press, Martin Luther, Montaigne, Voltaire and Spinoza, European culture began to develop along a path which was distinctly different from other societies.

Europe’s history is a story of constant flux, a narrative of sectarianism, persecution, slave-trading and imperialism; but also enlightenment, reformation, revolution and intellectual and social evolution. European rationalism and intellectual enquiry culminated in the emergence of physics, chemistry, biology, geology, modern philosophy, industrialisation, medicine, modern literature and economics, which fundamentally changed not only ordinary peoples’ way of life, but also the way they viewed the world. In the first half of the twentieth century this human story reached its climax as ordinary people saw their lives fundamentally changed through industrial, political, social and sexual revolutions; but also through two world wars, numerous civil wars and the most terrible genocide the world has ever known.

Whilst this 500 year long human story utterly changed the way that Europeans lived their lives, it led to a ‘Great Divergence’ in which European life and thought differed fundamentally from the dominant ideas of other cultures. In short, by 1969 Europeans were generally free to choose how to live their lives (so long as they did not cause harm to others) and were generally free to choose their own (secular) Government, to say what they wanted (within reason) and to choose the extent to which they observed a religion, (if they chose a religion at all). These seemingly simple principles were, and are, in many ways the antithesis of cultures in which the twin ideas of family honour and religious absolutism were, and are, held as unquestionable concepts.

Until 1945 Globalisation was a tangible but weak and largely latent process. After World War Two, a revolution in communications, trade and economic growth led to an unprecedented intermingling of different cultural beliefs and ideas. Most fundamentally of all for Western Europe, from the 1970s onwards it experienced one of the biggest migration of peoples ever known by humanity.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was brought up in a culture in which the rights of the individual were totally subservient to the diktats of her religion, her family and her clan. She was circumcised in the name of family honour, her father effectively married her to a man he had met two hours earlier without her consent and she was told only to obey and not to enquire about her religion. Her family fled Somalia, a state destroyed by four decades of Communist dictatorship and two decades of clan warfare and anarchy. She lived in Saudi Arabia, a racist totalitarian theocracy and Kenya, a country mired by tribal hatred, endemic corruption, terrible disease, and poverty that grew with each passing year, before fleeing a forced marriage to claim asylum in Holland under false pretences.

Hirsi Ali describes how her Somali grandmother had been bewildered when she first encountered electric lights and radios. Her own first impressions of the West, (clean streets, rubbish disposal, buses that arrived on time, men and women treating each other as equals, even cheese graters) set her on the long road of empirical analysis and intellectual discovery which eventually led her to reject the cultural and religious dogmas which had been instilled in her since birth.

Yet while Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who crucially lived amongst indigenous Dutch rather than émigré Somalis, made a personal journey which led her to reject the diktats of absolutist religion and the concept of ‘honour’, many others have taken the physical journey but remained trapped in a mental cage. As a member of the Dutch parliament Hirsi Ali commissioned a study which found that between October 2004 and May 2005, eleven Muslim girls were killed by their families in just two of the twenty five provinces of the Netherlands. It was clear that there were problems with integration and mass-immigration in a liberal society. Hirsi Ali became an outspoken critic of the concept of multiculturalism which she believed encouraged immigrants to live in physical and cultural ghettoes, in which women could be beaten or even killed by their husbands without fear of punishment by the law, and in which free will, critical thought and social integration were stifled. Ayaan Hirsi Ali eventually made a short film called 'Submission' with the Dutch director Theo Van Gogh, in which they advocated the opening of a dialogue on equal terms between Muslim women and Allah.

Then, one day in Amsterdam, Theo Van Gogh was approached in the street by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch-Moroccan. Bouyeri pulled out a gun and shot Van Gogh several times at point blank range. Van Gogh collapsed and begged Bouyeri, “Can’t we talk about this?”; Bouyeri shot him four more times and slit his throat with a butcher’s knife; he then stabbed a death threat against Hirsi Ali to Van Gogh’s chest. Hirsi Ali has been forced to live in hiding ever since.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s story tells us a lot about the fundamental issues facing the world today and my own halting attempts to address these issues are a leitmotif of my blog. The failed states and civil wars of the post-Cold War Third World, Islamic state-theocracy, mass migration, cultural dislocation, the rise of religious fundamentalism and the failings of multiculturalism in Western Europe. Hirsi Ali’s life has been dominated by these themes but they are issues which the entire world also faces today; from 9/11 and 7/7 through to Iranian nuclear programmes, the integration of immigrant communities, international dialogues, the war in Afghanistan and Iraq and the failure of Governance in states such as Pakistan and Somalia. The stories of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and many others like her help us to understand why we face such problems; but they also raise the question: why have others who have shared similar experiences taken such a different path and what can we do to reach out to them?

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Royksopp: Remind Me

A knowing take on the often compartmentalised nature of modern life, cool graphics too.

M83: Kim and Jessie

It's okay, they're French, it's art. I think.

The White Stripes: Fell In Love With A Girl

Primary chords, primary colours. And not a computer graphic in sight.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Maps

You don't need clever concepts when you have real tears.

Feist: 1234

This is what the world will look like when global peace is achieved, and everyone starts shopping at GAP.

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I was, perhaps, a little harsh on Mr Greenspan who is, after all, a fallible human being like the rest of us. Greenspan may well have been over-reliant on low interest rates to help the economy recover from the dotcom crash and 9/11, and he may well have underestimated the potential risks posed by the deregulation of the securities markets. However Greenspan was well aware of the vagaries of the financial system following his chairmanship of the Fed during the 1987 stock market crash, the collapse of savings and loans companies in the 1990s and the bankruptcy of the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund in 1998. Indeed the leitmotif of Greenspan’s autobiography is the recurring turbulence which afflicts financial markets and the challenges associated with this problem. Despite his reputation as a ‘free-market fundamentalist’, Greenspan is not an ideologue and his worldview appears to be based on observation and rational analysis, rather than inflexible ideology.

No doubt with the benefit of hindsight we can see that more could have been done to lessen the impact of the Credit Crunch and important lessons have been learnt by regulators, financial institutions and politicians. However, it is clear that a perfect system cannot be achieved and that financial markets will experience crises in the future, reliant as they are on human nature.

Greenspan gives a broadly similar view in an interview with the BBC, stating:

"It's human nature, unless somebody can find a way to change human nature, we will have more crises and none of them will look like this because no two crises have anything in common, except human nature."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8244600.stm

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The BBC today reported that Hackney Borough Council had painted over a popular mural by the grafiti artist Banksy. Despite the fact that the piece of art was on private property and the owner had not given permission for the ‘work’ to be carried out, the council used taxpayers’ money to cover the popular local attraction with a coat of thick, black paint. Such a display of ignorance and petulance should not be surprising, however.

At the risk of generalising, my experience of local councils is that they are run by people who have enough self-importance and pig-headedness to pursue a career in politics, yet lack the intelligence and imagination needed to win a national seat.

Unfortunately local politicians still have plenty of opportunity to exercise arbitrary power; virtually every town in Britain has been plighted by post-war tower blocks, shopping centres, urban motorways and multi-story car parks. In his current tv series, 'Saving Britain’s Past', architectural critic Tom Dyckhoff presents an episode about Bath City Council’s attempts to destroy the town's unique architectural heritage, due to a complete lack of imagination or cultural awareness by local politicians. Pressed to comment on his decision to demolish dozens of Georgian terraces in the 1970s one Bath councillor stated “It seemed the right thing to do at the time . . . we had many Georgian houses and we were going to get a shiny new shopping development out of it." A similar menality still prevails in Hackney Borough Council.

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Last week's devestating terrorist attacks on Government buildings in Baghdad show that, despite the withdrawl of US troops, Islamists and Ba'athists are still intent on destroying Iraq's sovereign Government and imposing their ideology on its people. Iraq will surely suffer more such attacks in the foreseeable future. But the extremists have been contained and they may, one day, be defeated. Kurdistan remained largely peaceful after 2003 and Islamists never gained much support. In the above link Jayir Gul presents an interesting report from the region which offers a glimpse of how Baghdad could look five years from now, if the extremists are defeated and Iraqis make the right choices.

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Oliver Cromwell

In the twentieth century, the various Communist attempts at creating utopian societies using centrally planned economies all ended, without exception, in political tyranny and economic failure. This outcome was inevitable whether the experiment was tried in Cuba, Poland or Cambodia. Communist states failed because even the most efficient bureaucracrats cannot predict or respond to the almost infinite number of economic decisions made by individual consumers every day. Furthermore the lack of economic freedom stifled innovation and technological development and living standards stagnated. It was also inevitable that Communist states would become tyrannies because Communist leaders were convinced that their ideology was perfect and that it would result in a perfect society; therefore criticism or alternative political views prevented the establishment of the utopian state and were to be repressed.

In the latter quarter of the twentieth century the failure of the great Communist experiment became obvious. In the late 1970s, Thatcher and Reagan became heavily influenced by the ideas of the economist Milton Friedman, who essentially argued for a return to the classical economical model first espoused by Adam Smith. Free market economics was also successfully adopted, or adapted, by a number of Asian states and territories, including Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan and, most importantly, China. The advantage of free market economics is that it is essentially a form of ‘negative’ freedom and allows humans to act upon heir own individual wants and needs. The principle of supply and demand, rather than a centralised bureaucracy, decides prices and production levels in a vastly more efficient way. Human ingenuity and inventiveness is allowed the freedom to create new products and technologies. In short human beings, who generally choose to work to provide for their family or improve their lot, are allowed to fulfil their economic potential. Classical economics holds that humans are essentially rational beings who, by acting in their own self-interest, provide benefits for the rest of society. As Adam Smith wrote

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.”

Although Milton Friedman was a hugely persuasive intellectual, and indeed laid the intellectual groundwork for the record reduction of global poverty in the last part of the twentieth century, he was close to being an ideologue. Some commentators now talk of ‘free-market fundamentalism', perhaps a rather bland term, but it is clear that, as the world became richer and more globalised, some political and economic leaders may have begun to believe that free market economics alone could create a utopian society.

As Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan encouraged further de-regulation of the financial markets during the late 1990s, believing that the rational self-interest of bankers would negate the increased risk to the financial system. Following the Credit Crunch, however, Greenspan candidly stated that he had "found a flaw ... in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works".

The flaw is, I think, that, contrary to ‘fundamentalist’ classical economic thinking, humans can be irrational and sometimes stupid risk takers. Sometimes they do not act in their own interests; sometimes their own interests clash with the interests of others. So while 99% of the time economic freedom may unleash the best of humanity, occasionally it can also indulge the worst aspects of human behaviour.

Both Adam Smith and Milton Friedman strongly believed that Governments did have important roles to play in free-market societies. Perhaps people such as Alan Greenspan came to believe that free market economics was flawless, or that any potential flaws were unlikely to cause significant wider problems. This week David Cameron, the future Prime Minister barring an extremely unlikely event, attended a seminar with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a professor of risk engineering and author of the bestselling book, The Black Swan. In his book Taleb uses the metaphor of ‘Black Swans’ to warn of the natural human instinct to ignore the risk posed by highly unlikely events that might have enormous consequences. Basically a 21st cenutry development of the rather more succinct theory that ‘Shit Happens’.

Over the last two hundred years free market economics, in its various guises, has helped to bring unprecedented benefits to humanity. However, Cameron and other political leaders have been recently provided with plenty of empirical evidence, should they have needed it, that capitalism is an imperfect economic system. So while leaders of the future must ensure that they continue to develop a system that has been largely successful, they should be careful to avoid the carelessness of complacency or the conceit of ideology. After all the problem with perfect systems is that they rely on imperfect humans to work.

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The Queen is the owner of the seabed up to 12 nautical miles from the British coast. The paper states that the Crown Estate is engaged in negotiations with energy companies over 20-year rental agreements for parts of the seabed designated as the locations for huge new windfarms which are aimed at reducing the UK’s carbon emissions.

The Sunday Times says that the Crown Estate is looking to “extract a heavy price for the rental agreements” and is demanding rent at three times the market rate.

It would be nice if the UK’s territorial waters were held in trust for the nation by the Government; however, the Queen, who is comfortably the world’s wealthiest woman, is likely to be the legally recognised owner of what is, in effect, private property. I doubt whether anything (legal) could ever be done to change that.

So while the Royal Family absurdly claims to play a crucial role in our democratic state, it continues to use its position of privilege to enrich itself at the expense of the nation. The increased off-shore rental costs incurred by the energy companies will inevitably be passed onto to consumers in the form of higher energy bills. Not only is the Royal Family impeding the UK’s attempts to reduce Global Warming, it is effectively fleecing the taxpayer into the bargain. Unfortunately feudalism is still alive and well in the UK today.

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Although neither bank is likely to make decisions on the thorny issue of bonuses until the end of the year, for some the scale of the profits sits uncomfortably alongside the fragile signs of growth in the real economy. However, the potential stabilisation of the banking sector is surely a good thing for society; no economy can make a full recovery without a strong banking and investment sector. Furthermore large profits mean a proportionally large windfall for the beleaguered treasury and perhaps even a tantalising promise that the Government may be able to turn a profit on its bank shares, albeit several years down the line.

So although large profits in the banking sector can be illusory, as Lehman Brothers and other blue chip investment firms have demonstrated, strong performances by Britain’s banks are a welcome sign.

The financial sector could not have survived the credit crunch without the intervention of the Government and the Bank of England as lenders of last resort, but it remains to be seen whether the surviving firms have learnt any lessons for the future. We will almost certainly see an improvement of the regulation governing the financial sector, perhaps even the return of a firewall between investment and retail banks. But, of course, that’s all very technical and rather arcane stuff. Which is, perhaps, one reason that media furore regarding the credit crunch has tended to centre on the issue of bonuses.

No-one can say for sure what role, if any, bonuses played in causing the credit crunch; however, the bonuses paid out to the top executives of the bailed out banks were quite rightly seen as being unacceptable. The question is will bonuses remain a contentious issue as the normal economy begins to recover from the recession? Bonuses awarded to top bankers seemed to bother few before the credit crunch and, after all, multi-millionaire footballers are lauded by working class supporters every week from the terraces of British football grounds. During the long period of economic growth of the last two decades, British society, to paraphrase Tony Blair, seemed to be extremely comfortable with people getting extremely rich.

Populists have responded to the Credit Crunch by calling for punitive measures on the super-rich, but punitive measures can have the affect of deterring foreign investment and destroying wealth creation. The fact is, in a free society, it is very difficult to tell private citizens what they may or may not pay each other for a particular service.

Indeed, the country’s top union leaders have all recently enjoyed inflation-busting salary and bonuses increases, while encouraging union members to endure pay-freezes for the remainder of the recession. Tony Woodley, joint leader of Unite, saw his pay and benefits package increased by 20% from £88,359 to £105,761 last year. Bob Crow, the far-left leader of the RMT rail union, saw his pay and benefits rose by 8% to £91,646 in 2008. Strangely, for a union leader, Crow claimed “I don’t really know if my pay rise was inflation busting”. Jim McAulson, leader of the British Airline Pilots Association had a pay increase of 8% to £107,000 last year and said of the pay increase, “I would like to think it was because I do a good job”. And that’s the issue, no-one can really dictate to private citizens that their privately earned income is unjustified.

It is clear that the financial sector relies on the Government as a lender of last resort and, as such, it surely has some responsibility to ensure that it makes a positive contribution to British society as a whole. It remains to be seen to what extent wider society is concerned about the earnings of other private citizens following economic recovery, and there is certainly no general desire for punitive measures against the very rich. There is some scope for reform of the ‘bonus culture’ to ensure that investment banks pay sufficient attention to risk management, but such reform will only be truly fit-for-purpose if it is done on a global scale.

In the meantime the top-performers in banking, as in football, continue to command the top rewards. It was recently revealed that Stephen Hester, the Government appointed CEO of taxpayer owned RBS could earn up to £9 million, depending on the bank’s performance in the coming years. However, if Hester can turn the bank around and allow taxpayers’ shares to be sold back at a profit, who’s to say he wouldn’t be worth it?

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Rowland Manthorpe has an interesting little post about luck, and why some seem to enjoy more of it than others. Rowland writes that chance is by definition events that are out of our control, but luck is something than we can, at least partially influence. Rowland quotes psychologist Richard Wiseman.

“Lucky people are social magnets who build “networks of luck”. They have a relaxed attitude towards life. They are open to new experiences. Lucky people listen to their hunches and gut feelings, and they anticipate good fortune in the future. They expect their interactions with others to be successful.”

Napoleon believed that luck was a personal attribute, rather than a matter of chance and when considering a promising young officer for promotion he is famously supposed to have declared, "Yes, yes I know he's brilliant, but is he lucky?”

Rowland writes that luck favours, not so much the brave, but the confident. I think this is an interesting point, but I think fortune and confidence probably feed off each other. For example, someone who has had a lucky start in life by being good looking, born into wealth or a loving family or by having a strong personality, is far more likely to be confident than someone who had the misfortune to be brought up in a dysfunctional family or experience bullying early in life. Luck breeds confidence and confidence breeds luck.

No-one ever said that life was fair or that it was necessarily easy; indeed chance can often intervene with devastating consequences for the most confident of people or with the redemptive consequences for those confidence is at rock bottom. While people maybe able influence the amount of luck they enjoy, surely they can’t control it entirely, and perhaps the most important thing is to savour every piece of good luck that comes our way.

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We are all aware of the bitter controversy over the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 and, of course, the country’s subsequent descent towards a bloody abyss of bombings, kidnappings and civil war. At times it seemed as if US troops would be stuck in Iraq for decades, or that even if they did pull out, the country would tear itself apart in a genocidal civil war.

I’m not interested in writing about the rights and wrongs of the invasion in this post; that is an issue that is well documented and has been even more extensively debated. However, I am interested in looking at what the future may hold for Iraq, if the country does indeed have a long-term future and, on that front, the recent signs are encouraging.

On 30 June, Iraqis of all religions and races celebrated as US combat troops were pulled off the streets of every town and city in Iraq. Just two years ago it seemed for many in Iraq, and across the world, that this moment might plausibly take decades to achieve. Importantly for Iraq it was the huge reduction in violence seen in Iraq since the end of 2007, and not the terror imposed by Al Qaeda in Iraq or the Mahdi Army, which finally allowed Iraqis to reclaim their streets.

Al Qaeda in Iraq (by all accounts largely made up of Iraqi rather than foreign Islamists) and the Mahdi Army both sought to overthrow the national Government and impose their own rule on the country. The Islamist way of life wasa often brutally imposed on the people of the Sunni Triangle and the story of its empathic rejectection by Iraqi Sunnis is a story waiting to be fully told. Likewise Moqtada al-Sadr saw his Mahdi Army militarily defeated by Iraqi and US Forces in 2008; while the subsequent withdrawal of American combat troops has neutered his populist anti-occupation cause and the Mahdi Army has largely been relegated to Hamas-inspired welfare projects.

That is not to say that Iraq faces a peaceful future. Whatever one thinks about the American presence, the idea that the violence visited on the country was caused exclusively by the US occupation was a misnomer. Indeed the bomings and shootings have continued since American troops left Iraqi streets. Yesterday four Iraqi policeman were killed in separate bomb attacks in Anbar and Mosul. The day before three policemen, one Iraqi soldier, and a tribal anti-insurgent leader were murdered. A handicapped man was also shot dead in Mosul. The week before, four Churches were bombed in Baghdad. Clearly there are still groups that wish to overthrow the elected Government or impose their violent ideology on Iraqi society. Senior Iraqi General Babaker Shawkat Zebarir recently stated that the insurgency had been whittled down to hard-core cells, but lethal terrorist attacks could cotinue to afflict the country for “a year or two or three". For most other countries this would represent a nightmare vision, but Iraq is gradually awakening from its nightmare and the reduction in violence has allowed its citizens to star dreaming about their futures again.

The Iraqi Army passed its first really big test last week, when around five million Shi’te pilgrims descended on Baghdad to commemorate the death of Imam Moussa Al-Kadhim. In the past years such gatherings have been targeted by Sunni suicide bombers, but this year’s festival passed off peacefully, albeit with massive security measures in place. The next big test for Iraq is the general election in January 2010. Major threats to peace and stability in Iraq remain and there are many unresolved problems, such as the increasingly separatist and assertive Kurdish political parties, the large-scale disillusionment amongst Sunnis and the lingering, and still lethal, insurgent groups. But whatever happens it is clear that Iraqis once stared into the abyss, during the dark days of 2007, and devided to take a collective step back from the precipice. Shia politician Haidar al-Obadi recently told BBC News:

"There is no going back to a dictatorship or a one-party system in the country now . . . people have tasted democracy, they have worked on democracy, it is an operation not only at the centre, but also in other areas, in the governorates and in the regions. Nobody can enforce dictatorship again on this country."

Whether the opportunity for Iraqis to dream about a peaceful future has been worth the price paid by so many over the last six years is not for me to say. Yet, with democratic protestors being brutally repressed in Iran, and the Saudi Government as authoritarian and theocratic as ever, Iraq may yet act as well of stability and democracy in a troubled region.

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I have previously written about my concern that the strategic objectives in Afghanistan have long been dangerously loose and ill-defined. Obama has gone some way to making-up for the incompetence of his predecessor by authorising an ‘Afghan-surge’ and by sacking and replacing the ineffective US Commander, General David McKiernan. Indeed 4,000 US marines have flooded into Helmand Province in an effort bring the wild and restive province back under the control of the Afghan Government. Although, in my view, the strategic aims of the Afghan mission remain dangerously vague, I am satisfied that with extra troops and the command of McKiernan’s replacement, General McChrystal and CENTCOM commander General Petraeus there is a chance that the strategic stalemate may be broken.

Despite the lack of clear strategy the Government, and the opposition, still consider that the war in Afghanistan is worth the fight, and the increasingly heavy cost. I’m inclined to say, that on balance, they may well be right. The crucial point is that the decision to fight a war is the most important decision that a Government can make, and in my view it should be at the very top of even the most pressing priorities.

This week I wrote about the pressing need to reduce Government spending. I firmly believe that this is the case, even if it means reducing education, health and international development funding. However, I also firmly believe that it is time to increase the defence budget, which has been steadily reduced since the end of the Cold War. If a Government decides that a cause is worth taking lives and sacrificing the lives of its own citizens, then there can be no priority more important. Everything should be done to ensure that the armed forces have the right equipment and manpower to do the job. Furthermore, if a Government decides that its citizen soldiers should risk life and limb, then it has a responsibility to provide them with the best equipment available to the job and the best care available should they be wounded. Clearly, despite the platitudes of Blair, Brown and numerous Defence Secretaries, the Government has failed on both counts.

Even when the Government has spent money on the armed forces it has been wasted on white elephants or projects aimed at safeguarding British jobs rather than providig useful equipment. For example the UK has committed to buying 183 Eurofighter Typhoons at £30 million each and two super-aircraft carriers at a total cost of £5 billion. The fact is that aircraft carriers are unlikely to be needed unless the Falkland Islands are re-invaded. Britain is unlikely to become involved in a future interstate conflict unless the US is involved, and the US has more aircraft carriers than the rest of the world put together, several times over. In the same way the Typhoon is only likely to be used in a future interstate war that would involve NATO allies, and again the US has the materiel to guarantee total air supremacy against almost any foe.

Following the break-up of the Soviet Empire and the rise of Islamism and failed states, the armed forces are likely to spend the next 20 years engaged in small-scale guerrilla conflicts such as in the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Sierra Leone, East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan. In these wars the navy and air force has little or no role to play; the army takes the lionshare of the risks and the fatalities. And for this role the army is chronically undermanned and underequipped. It is no exaggeration to say that Army landrovers are barely more armoured than their civilian equivalents. After suffering massively from IEDs in Iraq the US Army brought out a new generation of Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected (MRAP) vehicles, which are impervious to all but the biggest IEDs. The MOD has bought some of these off-the-shelf vehicles but they have still failed to ensure that all frontline troops have access to these vehicles. The 9,000 or so British troops in Helmand have access to no more than a handful of helicopters, while the 4,000 Marines recently deployed to Helmand have more than 150.

If the Government believes we should fight for what we believe is right then it should bear the financial cost of doing so, which is only fair since it asks its citizen soldiers to make the ultimate sacrifice. Furthermore the MOD should move away from purchasing aircraft carriers and fighter jets in order to safeguard British jobs. Instead it should invest in better weaponry, MRAP vehicles, attack helicopters, transport helicopters, surveillance drones, more troops and better pay and conditions. Of course, in a system in which the MP representing the ship building town of Barrow-in-Furness can be made Defence Secretary, personal priorities may take precedence.

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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.

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"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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7891434.stm

“The population of the Gaza Strip increased by almost 40% between 1997 and 2007, according to the results of a Palestinian census.”

That is a staggering rate of population growth; and the Gazan population is set to double again in the next 20 years. This rate of growth, three times the world average, has very important implications for the future of the region and poses questions about the semantics of the current situation. In 1948 the population of Gaza was approximately 69,000 and the entire Palestinian population was around 2 million. In Northern Ireland, Republicans have often expressed the hope that Catholics will eventually ‘outbreed’ the Protestants. I understand that Hamas have also encouraged this idea and consider population growth as a way of destroying Israel. Indeed the high growth rate of the Palestinian population has long been a source of existential angst for Israel’s rightwing leaders. It was partly a fear of being ‘outbred’ that encouraged Ariel Sharon to pull out of Gaza, and he might well have pulled out of much of the West Bank had he not been struck down by a severe stroke. However runaway population growth in Gaza is not an act of resistance but a result of early marriages and the low availability of contraceptives, but if it continues at its present rate it can only spell disaster for Gaza and the region.

Gaza’s unemployment rate is around 40%. This is partly as a result of war and Israeli sanctions, but it is also because of huge population growth. No country in the world can provide enough jobs for a population that doubles every two decades. Yemen, which has also experienced incredible population growth, has at least 30% unemployment. Furthermore a massive surplus of workers will drive down wages and increase inflationary pressures in the territory. Gaza is not the most crowded place on earth and it is nowhere near being so. However its infrastructure is decrepit and strained to the limit. Further unrestrained population growth may well cause it to collapse. Of course, all countries with exponential population growth face these pressures, not to mention the added problems of increased competition for resources and the effect on climate change. In Gaza, however, there is a political dimension to the issue. Even if a permanent ceasefire was agreed tomorrow, living standards in Gaza will continue to decline in the long run if plans are not made for Gaza's economic future. Poverty, unemployment and disaffection are the recruiting sergeants for extremist groups. Hamas and other groups aim to destroy the Israeli state. If this ideology continues to exploit a disenfranchised population experiencing declining living standards and competition for resources, the result could be fatal for even the strongest peace deal. Population growth may well have disastrous consequences for Palestine, Israel and the rest of the world twenty years from now.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/tennis/7891164.stm

“Dubai could be removed from the women's tennis calendar in 2010 after Israeli Shahar Peer was refused entry to the United Arab Emirates.”

Perhaps this is a tangential story, but to ban an athlete from entering a country because she happens to hold a particular passport makes me wonder whether the world has learnt anything over the last 60 years. It will be interesting to see how many tennis players to turn down the chance for the tournament's $2 million prize as a display of solidarity with their fellow professional.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7891132.stm

“There could be one hundred billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy, a US conference has heard.”

An American scientist has estimated that there could be one hundred billion earth-like planets in our galaxy alone. That means that there could be over ten billion trillion
potentially life-supporting planets across the known universe. With such incomprehensible numbers it is surely inevitable that alien life exists somwehere and perhaps nearly everywhere in the universe. Although as Arthur C. Clarke once said:

“Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”

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Repugnant views, however, are not illegal and in a free society we do not ban the British National Party or Holocaust deniers from having their say, provided they don’t incite violence. Furthermore, Ken Livingstone, was allowed to host Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi who promotes suicide bombing, homophobia, forced female circumcision and had this to say about the Jews

"Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them – even though they exaggerated this issue – he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers."

That is an example of incitement to violence, not free speech. David Miliband told BBC News that Fitna stirred up 'religious and racial hatred’, but when questioned he admitted that he had not actually seen the film. Critical thought and the right to express it are fundamentaly important if society is not to stagnate. Today was a bad day for British society.

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This is a crisis because we are comparing the current situation in the financial markets to the great success of the last 50 years. In 1900 there was not a single country with universal suffrage but today more than 120 countries extend that right to their citizens. Since 1945 free trade and open economies have triumphed over closed borders and nationalistic protectionism. It is no coincidence that more people have been saved from poverty in the last 50 years than in any other 50 year period in human history. More than 400 million people have been pulled out of poverty in China alone. But we are ignorant of social history. The West has come to see unending economic growth as a birthright rather than a privilege. A million French people recently held a strike to protest about the economic downturn, as if unending economic growth was written into the constitution. The much bigger strikes of 1968 actually took place during France’s greatest period of prosperity and were led by the students of the Sorbonne, the university that caters for the pampered and priveliged elite of French society. While redundancy and house repossessions are terrible events, the vast majority of people remain relatively unaffected by the economic crisis, so far at least. We should remember that we are materially still far wealthier than we were in the 1970s and certainly even more so than in the Great Depression of 1930s.

While the depression of the 1930s is well remembered in popular culture, it is less well known there was a much longer global depression between the 1870s and the 1890s as well as during the 1830s. However, despite these severe shocks the graphs recording global economic growth since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the 1760s (or thereabouts) show impressive increases in global wealth overall. In the 20th Century the increase in global wealth has been almost exponential. We are comparing our economic situation to a period of perhaps ten or at the most twenty years previously, yet we should really be comparing it to the situation hundreds or thousands of years ago.

Economic historians such as Gregory Clarke have argued that, from the Stone Age 30,000 years ago up to around 1800 AD, there was effectively little or no increase in global living standards. Indeed studies have shown that Tudor peasants lived on the same wages as did their Babylonian counterparts, some four thousand years earlier. Of course these studies are not conclusive, but we can see from empirical evidence that a peasant working the land in 18th century England lived almost exactly the same short life of drudgery and hardship as every one of his ancestors dating back to the Roman Conquest and beyond. It was a life of hard labour from dawn to dusk, with no disposable income, no education, with few material goods and few, if any, rights or priveliges. Up until 1800 that was the sum human experience for those born outside the aristocracy. But the rise in productivity caused by industrialisation stimulated a massive and unprecented increase in the amount of global wealth. The conditions in those early factories of the Industrial Revolution seem terrible today, indeed they were terrible then. But they were not any worse or any better than the conditions that existed for ordinary people before industrialisation. And as new ways of creating wealth emerged, a self-confident middle class eclipsed the power of the aristocracy, upward mobility replaced downward mobility and organised labour was able to form pressure groups for workers’ rights. Starting with the Factories Act of 1833, a multitude of acts guaranteed labour rights and the increase in productivity meant that wages increased steadily, despite the exponential increase in population. The Malthusian trap had been broken for the first time in history. The benefits of the Industrial Revolution are empirically obvious: brick houses with glass windows, slate roofs, electric lights and plumbing in place of mud hovels lit by candlelight, a regular wage in place of subsistence agriculture, political rights in place of feudalism, upward mobility instead of downward mobility, literacy and education in place of illiteracy and ignorance. The meteoric rise in living standards heralded the ascension to power, by democratic means, of the middle classes and, in the 1920s, labour. None of this would have been possible without the increase in productivity, and hence wealth, caused by the Industrial Revolution. Since the 1760s there have been countless recessions and a number of depressions but, in the long run, living standards have risen beyond recognition. A poor man living in the West today can arguably enjoy a better standard of living than any pre-twentieth century monarch.

However, although living standards have improved at an even greater rate since 1945, surveys have consistently found that people are no more happy today then they were 50 years ago. Perhaps part of the problem is that the definition of poverty in the UK can now include not owning a television and we too often equate material wealth with happiness. A few months ago the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that £13,400 per anum (before tax) was the minimum a single person needed to live adequately, but notably and unusually, its budget included such non-consumerist items as walking boots and a bicycle. One of the best times of the life was when I worked at a ski-resort in Canada after graduating from university, when virtually my only possessions were the clothes on my back, my bed and my snowboard. Perhaps having vanquished the tyranny of pre-industrial poverty we have, as a society, allowed ourselves to fall under the tyranny of the unquenchable desires caused by mass-consumerism and clever advertising. The Credit Crunch was effectively caused by everyone, from top bankers to ordinary workers, trying to cash in on the seemingly infinite rise in house prices. In short nearly everyone was tempted by the holy grail of making a huge profit without doing any actual work. Maybe Western societies should now take the opportunity to learn from our long forgotten pre-industrial societies and re-evaluate the importance of the non-materialistic aspects of life.

Of course, limitless progress has become the defining narrative of industrialised societies and we should not underestimate the challenges posed by this financial crisis. Indeed economic gorwth will remain of fundamental importance to future societies. We should ignore the impulses of nationalistic protectionism and the utopian ideologies which have previously caused the world so much ill. But we should also look at the lessons of history and understand how we have come to see materialistic wealth as a birthright. And when the global economy recovers and returns to its steady rate of progress, as it will, we should recognise the dangers of becoming so enamoured by the promises of Mammon. Most importantly we should always remember that we are still the most privileged generation in human history.

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