Je Suis......Memed Out

About sixty minutes was all it took for 129 mainly young people to die and for another 352 to be wounded, their bodies raked by bullets and shrapnel, as Islamic fanatics, their hearts black with hate for the infidel and his depraved Western civilisation, fired off round after round from their ubiquitous AK47s and casually tossed grenades into the piles of wounded afterwards just in case some were still alive. This latest attack, Paris’s second in a year and one of the worst terrorist atrocities committed in modern Europe, was an Islamic declaration of war, and one that the West must respond to. The Clash of Civilisations, so long predicted and so long avoided, is finally upon us and to win this war the West will have to become what it has so long feared to be, a people whose belief in their culture, faith and values is as strong as our enemies is in their religion. Strong enough in fact to wipe ISIS and radical Islam off the face of the earth or at least drive it out of Europe. Anything less and Europe at least will be lost to Islamic barbarism for centuries.

For years those who have decried Islam and warned of its slow encroachment and insidious usurping of our culture have been dismissed as racists, Islamophobes and fascists while Islamic appeasers, multicultural zealots and politically correct apologists have paved the way for the West’s pending subjugation. Indeed ever since the Iranian revolution in 1979 when the Shah, a Western backed puppet, was left dangling while the West effectively betrayed him and his westernised country, abet a corrupt and shabby interpretation of one, and left Iran to its fate while the Ayatollah’s  revolutionary guards did their stuff, we have misjudged and misunderstood the Islamic world and the Middle East in particular. No more so than in our ludicrous embracing and encouraging of the Arab Spring, which led, body-part by bloody body-part, to the Friday 13th massacres in Paris.

Rarely has the West’s liberal intelligentsia shown itself to be more self serving than over the Arab Spring, where, from its first stirrings in Tunisia which saw President Zine El Abiding Ben Ali pack his bags and flee to Saudi Arabia, Western governments have dumped old and loyal allies and thrown in their lot with the new kids on the chopping block. Seemingly with little or no understanding of who the trendy ‘rebels’ are or what a new government created by these romanticized ’freedom fighters’ would  look like? Or indeed what kind of society would emerge by overthrowing the existing regime? 

To the dreamers that make up much of the West’s liberal Establishment or among the Young Turks that swan around Washington’s Capital Hill clutching their iPhones and whooping at every Arab Spring posting on Twitter; Tunisia would become a democratic wonderland full of Starbuck cafés where the bright young things of the day could discuss new ideas like LGBT rights, Safe Place Apps and Global Warming. This was just too wonderful! And it was….

After Tunisia came Egypt’s moment and following a big ballyhoo in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, lots of shouting, a police charge on Camel back, Egypt’s 30-year rule by President Hosni Mubarak, ended. Mubarak, who had supported the Allies in the first Iraq war and committed Egyptian troops in the 

campaign to liberate Kuwait, who had risked assassination several times by his opposition to radical

Islamist movements, and made treaties with Israel. Who had, in fact, proved himself a reliable ally to the West on many, many occasions and a stabilising factor in a region known for its volatility was 

effectively sacrificed on the alter of Western liberal ideology and hypocrisy. 

For while Mubarak’s regime was plagued with corruption and allegations of brutality against his opponents this had not prevented the West from maintaining good relations with Mubarak, who was generally viewed favourably by Western governments up until the Arab Spring. So it was vaguely revolting to see Prime Minister Cameron on the first flight out to greet the military rulers who were keeping the lid on things following the ousting of Mubarak. Britain he said was a true friend to Egypt, though he should perhaps have prefaced that with fair-weather. Cameron also said that “there really must be a move to civilian and democratic rule as part of this important transition to an open, democratic and free Egypt." Hurrah! 

Not to be left out, a more cautious Hillary Clinton visited Egypt two months later, saying that the 

US was committed to seeing true democracy in Egypt led by a government that reflected the true

diversity of Egypt’s peoples. It was a pity then that that the Egyptian people voted in the Islamist Egyptian Brotherhood party and that within a year the newly elected President Morsi would be deposed and arrested by Army chiefs along with thousands of his supporters, hundreds of whom would be executed. 

This great democratic experiment in one of the most important countries in the Middle East has seen a relatively stable and prosperous Arab country reduced to being run by a military dictatorship, while an ISIS backed insurgency grows in the Sinai region. Its tourist industry is ruined and the country is increasingly riven by strife and the threat of violence and, surprisingly, Prime Minister David Cameron, Egypt’s great ‘friend’ is nowhere to be found. 

After the toppling of President Mubarak, the West’s crusader liberal evangelists were on a roll and 

encouraged uprisings everywhere, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya and Syria were now in their sights. Even

Saudi Arabia was talked about in hushed whispers, if Libya could fall …. then why not the House of Saud, the Mordor of dictatorships gasped the Young Turks.

By now though street protests and catchy hashtags on Twitter had given way to bullets and baton rounds. Yet still the West encouraged dissent, and when it came to Libya we wanted to join in.  

France, England and the US committed jets and led a bombing campaign against government buildings and the forces of Colonel Gaddafi with the result that, a few months later, a terrified Gaddafi was shown being roughed up and shot by a mob of jeering rebel soldiers. Hurrah!

Again, seemingly drunk on the heady mix of revolution and victory, Prime Minister Cameron, along 

with France’s Nicolas Sarkozy flew straight out to Tripoli to big it up with Libya’s gun-totting rebels.

Here, surrounded by armed men and the world’s press, Cameron spewed forth, what, even

then seemed like absolute drivel, and now, with the benefit of hindsight, was madness:

“The Arab Spring is a massive opportunity to spread peace, prosperity, democracy

and vitally security, but only if we really seize it”

The Libya rebels of course seized the opportunity with both hands, murdering opponents, grabbing and selling weapons, fighting amongst themselves, murdering the US’s ambassador, Chris Stevens,

in Benghazi, and generally creating a lawless and ungovernable Hell-hole on the edge of Europe. A Libyan Hell-hole that ISIS started moving into about three years ago and of which they now control a sizeable and growing section around the coastal city of Sirte, which no doubt David Cameron will be visiting soon to explain the marvels of democracy to those citizens that still have heads. 

It was in Syria though that the West’s addiction to spreading democracy amongst Muslim peoples

with no tradition of democracy reached its nemesis. Here President Assad, who has presided over Syria for some 15 years and where, in the historic city of Damascus in an area once known as the Cradle of Civilisation, he allowed all faiths, Christian, Jew, Muslim to worship, and where alcohol was permitted and where, for most, life was pretty tolerable. However Assad is a dictator; Syrian elections allow for no opposition and his regime, like Saddam Hussein’s in Iraq, is Ba’athist, in that it follows an Arab nationalist ideology and allows for no criticism. It can also be brutal in its suppression of opponents but as in Iraq, for the majority of its citizens life was stable, and for many good. 

In fact Syria and Assad, again like Iraq and its former ruler Saddam Hussein, posed no threat to the West, yet buoyed up on Arab Spring mania the West stirred up opposition groups to Assad and egged on the protestors who rapidly went from throwing stones to firing guns and the regime did the same. The West’s liberal pack had now created what they wanted, a civil war against a ’fascist’ style dictator, this was Spain 1936 all over again, with Assad in the role of Franco and updated for the 21st century. 

With Syria, Britain’s Prime Minister Cameron wrapped in the flag of democratic self-righteousness, was on the attack straight away saying to the United Nations in 2012; “Those who look at Syria today and blame the Arab Spring have got it the wrong way around. You cannot blame the people for the behaviour of a brutal dictator. The responsibility lies with the dictator”

A year later Cameron would go on to propose, as with Libya, bombing Syria to help the ‘rebels’ remove Assad. However, unlike with Libya, by 2013 even the most fanatical supporters of the Arab Spring could see that their Spring was turning rapidly to Winter. Further, the Syrian rebels, who the West were arming indiscriminately, were committing atrocities against Christians, destroying villages and butchering captured Assad soldiers. So much so that Russia’s President Putin described the rebels as animals and for the first time the West had doubts over who these ‘rebels;’ were.

Then one of the more shadowy rebel groups fighting in Syria called the al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate, merged with another, even shadowier group, led by a Wahhabi/Salafi jihadist extremist called Abu Bakr ak-Baghdadi. This merger initially went relatively unnoticed in Western circles, which is a pity as the new rebel groups name was: Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL… Now generally known as ISIS this shadowy group is now on a major tour, shooting up cities in Europe and downing airliners. Its followers wear chic black clothes, are wizard on social media, and are known to take a dim view of gay men, women, Christians and non-believers generally, often removing their heads. 

Yet the West, despite helping to create ISIS, destabilising large parts of the Middle East and as a result causing the worst refugee crisis since World War 2 the West continues to avoid tackling the 

growing elephant in the room, Islam, preferring instead to skirt around the issue by hiding in safe places on social media and creating inane visual memes and soft, comforting phrases. As if by giving each other linguistic hugs ISIS will go away. 

Thus within minutes of the Paris attacks beginning, the victims of the attack were busy creating Paris hashtags, illuminating buildings in the colours of France’s flag, denouncing any criticisms of Muslims as racist, and designing a Paris victims peace sign with the Eiffel Tower as its centre. People loved it and the attack’s victims, that is, us, ensured that it went viral. As if by pouring our grief into creativity we could  defeat or pacify our enemies. 

We cannot. Radical Islam hates the West, it hates our culture, our weaknesses and our beliefs. It has no love of art, poetry, literature or music. It hates it. It loathes our heritage and will destroy our libraries, our art galleries, our museums and the places where we entertain each other. It will burn and eradicate all that is not Islam and kill or enslave all those who will not convert or bow to the sword of Islam and it will stamp on your hashtags and pretty logos. That is what is coming. That is what a Clash of Civilisations means.

We created this mess by our meddling, by our ludicrous support of the Arab Spring and by our arrogance and we have to make it right or ISIS, or its successors, will destroy us and all that we love unless we are prepared to fight to save it. To preserve what our ancestors created. If not, then we deserve what’s coming and no amount of hashtags and clever graphics will save us then.

©Nigel Wingrove 2016

WEAKNESS AND LIES: Putting the Nice before the Nasty

On the BBC recently, a reporter interviewed two young Syrian women outside a café in Syria's capital Damascus, both wore modern, trendy clothes, make-up and had their hair uncovered. One women supported President Assad and said that the presence of government soldiers made her feel safe, the other women supported the rebels and believed that government forces had used the chemical weapons that killed some 1400 people on the 21st August. Neither women had any worries about openly speaking to a BBC journalist and voicing their opinions, despite one of them being highly critical of Assad's Baathist regime.

This brief interview reminded me of similar ones I saw conducted with young students and women in Baghdad, Iraq in 2003, just before the 'Coalition of the Willing' blew much of the city to pieces as part of the West's attack on Saddam Hussein in the cause of regime change and, as it transpired, a pointless search for weapons of mass destruction. Young, educated and intelligent Western style men and women were also interviewed in Tunisia prior to their Arab Spring moment, and in Gaddafi's Libya and Mubarak's Egypt, with some of the women in particular being noticeably free of the usual veils and other trappings of Islamic culture that one often expects to see worn. This is perhaps because a by-product of arab dictatorships and Baathist states, was that any dissent or movements like radical Islam or  other forms of religious zealotry which might challenge the existing status quo were ruthlessly crushed. This was bad for democracy, civil rights, and kurdish tribesmen but ironically good for women, order and preserving the nation state.

Now those women and young men are mainly silent, the women in particular are donning headscarfs and veils again, and the young men are joining armed militias, or have become radicalised as they see their once stable country descend into a mix of social chaos, car bombings, social breakdown and anarchy. Their only other option being to get out of the country and start a new life somewhere else. For many the hope and euphoria offered by an 'Arab Spring' has given way to despair and disappointment, with ideas and dreams of democracy now replaced by ideologues and mob rule.

For nearly twenty years the West has chastised and lambasted the dictatorships of Mubarak and Gaddafi and the quasi fascist Baathist regimes of Hussein and Assad, while ignoring the ills of undemocratic fiefdoms like Saudi Arabia and Qatar on the basis that they supply the West with oil, have copious amounts of money and often act as Middle Eastern power brokers when we need some quiet, behind the scenes diplomacy to smooth things over arab style. 

These, undemocratic regimes, whilst not ideal, suited the arab peoples, and would perhaps, with time, have evolved in their own way to be more 'democratic' and 'western', or equally, given the current climes, have become less democratic and more 'Islamic', again depending on the which direction the winds of change were blowing, The Shah of Iran, was famously pro Western, but also like Assad, and Mubarak, a bit of a dictator with a reputation for being harsh with dissenters and critics. So for the Shah, change came wearing black robes, a long beard and a good line in religious zealotry. 

When the Shah and his family fled Iran he also found that the West's friendship is pretty much worthless with many countries simply slamming the door shut in his face when he came to seek shelter. Equally Iran's highly educated female students, doctors and academics suddenly found that their Persian beauty and luscious locks really upset the Ayatollah's fanatical fans and were forced to stop what they doing, act dumb, cover up, and literally burqa-off! 

Indeed ever since the Shah's hasty exit from Iran the West has seemed to stumble from one ill-advised debacle to another, from Reagan's sending of US troops to Lebanon in 1982, an act of folly that resulted in the deaths of 241 US marines in a single day,  to Operation Desert Storm in 1991 - a war that disastrously failed to finish what it had started and consequently paved the way  for the chaotic state of Western involvement in the Middle East ever since.

Two decades of well-intentioned military and diplomatic manoeuvring has followed, some good, but most disruptive and ineffectual at best, and at worst, alienating and sowing the seeds of further conflict. This period heralded in a new kind of Western military approach where political correctness and a desire to do the right things has resulted in a kind of war-engagement lite with Western forces desperate not to be seen as imperialist or anti-Islamic. 
Military commanders are now often as wary of human rights lawyers and sexual equality violations in the ranks as they are about roadside bombs and snipers. 

Indeed, no sooner had the world seen the US and their Allies go into Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq in 2003, then everyone involved wanted out as fast as possible. The fact that ten years later the Allies have made little real progress in bringing the war to a proper conclusion based on a definable victory and are instead desperately trying to extract themselves fully from Iraq and Afghanistan is made even worse with the knowledge that as soon as the last Western soldier leaves that both countries tenuous grip on order will go and chaos will ensue. 

The other legacy of Afghanistan and Iraq is that both wars have not only made the Allies timid and scared when it comes to further involvement in the Middle East generally but have created an almost phobic reaction when it comes to 'boots on the ground', a mindset that led directly to the Allied enforced no-fly zone over Libya in 2011 as that way the West could be seen to be doing something but without any real risk to Western lifes. It was also a perfect example of the West's increasing obsession with being seen to be doing the right thing, not just by ourselves, but by our enemies as well. 

Nolonger can we fight a war to defeat an enemy and win the peace, now Allied forces must win hearts and minds as well. Enemy culture and religions must be respected and the horrors of war hidden by 'surgical strikes', 'precision bombing' and drones, and amongst all this targeted killing, wars that used to take days or weeks to resolve now drag on for years, with, bar a few selected deaths and the occasional 'collateral damage', deaths, particularly Allied deaths, kept to 'acceptable' levels.  It is as if the Middle East were some grotesque video game in which players 'take out' opponents but lose points if they whack a civilian and at each level of the game the difficulties increase and the rules change slightly. The players also don't know how many levels there are or what they have to do to win? So as games go this one could go on and on.

It is telling that after George Bush's much maligned 'War on Terror' and numerous verbal faux pas's, that President Obama has been acutely careful not only to do the absolute right thing, always, but to take no risks either, in case the risk also proves to be wrong. President Obama's choice of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State has been equally safe, as in effect by spending her time flying around the world she has been championing Obama's world view that the American President, and by extension the American people, represent 'like' rather than 'might'. As Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton has effectively shaken lots of hands and clocked up lots of air miles, but in terms of foreign policy, she, and by extension, President Obama, have done nothing other than pursue the 'like me' agenda.

This emphasis on being liked also explains the US's embracing of the Arab Spring from the outset, firstly in Tunisia, then as it was fanned by Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites, in Egypt and Libya. Both Obama and Clinton could see that the bad guys in this populist scenario were Mubarak and Gaddafi, and despite Mubarak's previous pro Western stance, he was, like the Shah before him, unceremoniously dumped by the US and UK.  This was X-factor politics writ large, the people wanted Mubarak and Gaddafi out and the West, seeing a chance to be both popular and populist at the same time, obliged. What the West hadn't thought through, as they hadn't with Iraq and Afghanistan either, was

happens next?  

The US and the West's championing of the Arab Spring had allowed the Arab peoples to became intoxicated by the idea that change was not only possible but desirable and that if the old regimes resisted and fought back then the US and the West, as they did in Libya, would step in to make change happen. Indeed the West's intelligentsia and politicians really should have known better, but they were so caught up with creating a new arab style "I Have a Dream" moment that reality was put on hold for the duration. Or at least until Gaddafi was dragged out of a storm drain and shot in the head and Christopher Stephens, the US ambassador in Benghazi, Libya, was murdered by a militia led mob. By the time Egypt and Libya began to collapse into violence and anarchy and Syria's arab spring moment had gone from street protest to all-out civil war the West knew that they had messed up. In computer game terms, they were back at the beginning with the highest difficult level possible imposed. Not a good place to be.

Syria, in fact, had ruined everything in the 'nice' stakes. Up until recently the West was somehow managing to avoid the elephant in the room that is Egypt, and the US's illustrious Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, had conveniently stepped down to prepare for a run at the Presidency in 2016 thereby avoiding anything too unpleasant in the way of questions as to why Ambassador Stephens had been left unprotected in Libya… Then civilians started being gassed in Syria and the West finally had to face up to the mess they had inadvertently done so much to create.

Syria's crisis is too extreme to be ignored for there is no disputing the ghastliness of a gas attack or, horrifically, a napalm bomb in a school playground. Yet with no concrete evidence that it was Assad's troops that were responsible for the gas attack and the legacy of two decades of misadventure in the Middle East the West is naturally reluctant to get involved and to take action against Syria. Yet having said that it would and should get involved and bomb 'selected' Assad targets, the West's consensus driven political leaders are now showing democracy and leadership at its worst, and back-tracking as fast as they can. Now damned if they do, and damned if they don't.

In the UK having rushed to get a vote for an, in my opinion, ill-advised attack on Syrian military targets as a way of punishing Assad and his regime for allegedly using chemical weapons, UK MPs have now effectively lost their nerve and rejected any possibility of war. In the US, President Obama, ever mindful of doing the right thing and conversely of not doing the wrong thing, has skilfully absolved himself of responsibility and put it to congress who can now vote for or against military action against Syria. 

A great hurrah has greeted this Presidential act of smoke and mirrors, while in the UK MPs are saving face by congratulating themselves that they have reinvigorated the constitution and stood up for democracy and peace. Yet this is not democracy, it is a kind of dumbmockracy, in which fear of making and taking an unpopular decision has made weak and fallacious men present themselves to the world as strong and resolute when in fact they are neither. Democracy is about doing and standing up for what you believe to be right even if they are unpopular, or in this instance possibly wrong. Better to have said they would do nothing. 

For the last twenty years the West's foreign policy has struggled to balance its new values of political correctness and anti imperialism with both its past and the growing threat of radical Islam within a volatile Middle East. In this the West has been helped considerably by the weakness of a Russia struggling to adapt to its post communist self, and a China where communist orthodoxy was being sublimated by a rush to embrace wealth and capitalism. 

Both countries transformational difficulties ensured that the West has had almost twenty years of being top dog and to establish its new power base and adapt its evolved democratic doctrine to the needs of a 21st Century world. Instead it has frittered away its years of strength by worrying about enforcing and championing issues of sexual politics, political correctness and climatic change and being liked rather than concentrating and consolidating itself as the doctrine of power regardless of whether that made them 'liked'. 

In the background, while the West has been agonising and theorising about governing and exercising its power in a consensual way, other countries have been adapting and growing in strength. Now a reinvigorated Russia and China, along with an empowered Iran, sit behind President Assad's Syria and watch as the West's key countries and  the world's current superpower try to avoid doing what they think is right in order to avoid, effectively, making an unpopular decision. This is niceness at any price and by pursuing this option the West is creating not a safer and fairer world, but are showing off their weaknesses. By doing so they are potentially heralding in a darker and more fractious world. A world in which new old powers will soon re-assert themselves and the established ones will rue the day that they chose to be Mr Nice over Mr Nasty.

© Nigel Wingrove, 2013

Muscles in Search of a Tussle

Cameron and Obama having been caught like a rabbits in a cars headlights during the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt now seem determined to show the world that not only are they on the side of protest but that they stand shoulder to shoulder with the rebels in Libya. That they are, verbally at least, ready to fight and shed blood to topple the dreaded Gaddafi. Cameron in particularly seems to have been pumping himself full of testosterone and watching old Jean-Claude Van Damme movies with the result that he seems to be issuing blood-curdling threats against Gaddafi's regime on a daily basis. 

Issuing threats is fine of course if one can back them up, playing to the world's gallery and saying that you're going to bomb Lybia, or send in troops or unilaterally enforce a no fly zone, when the UK's armed forces are so depleted that they'd now be hard-pushed enforcing a no-fly zone over the Isle of Wight let alone Libya is just crass. In fact all Cameron has done is draw attention to the UK's military weakness, his own volatility and capacity for decision making by petulance.    

Obama too, along with his coterie of diversity experts and human rights advisers, has been falling over himself to look at one with Libya's rebel fighters and cool and caring to the rest of the world. Image and how that plays out on YouTube and Twitter rather than realpolitik now seem to obsess the West's leaders with Obama now so cautious not to be seen putting a foot wrong that he made himself look shallow and vacuous during Egypt 's uprising and then overzealous trying to compensate for past errors when Libya's protests escalated into civil  war. 

This is sound bite politics with foreign policy now being dictated by how it plays out on Twitter, with solutions wanted in days and alliances that were built up over decades now

abandoned with a click of the delete button. In France, President Sarkozy, who like Obama had been all over the place during Tunisia's and Egypt's uprisings, has gone even further in his attempts to be 'in' with Libya's rebels First France recognized them as Libya's rightful leaders and then sending in France's jets to bomb Libya within seconds of securing UN support for a no fly zone. No doubt we will soon see Sarkozy and Carli wearing matching Keffiyeh scarfs. Tres Cool.

Yet who are the rebels that Obama and company are so keen to be associated with? Are they really the ernest young Facebook, pro democracy crusaders so beloved of the West's media  or are they Islamist fanatics who will replace Gaddafi's dictatorship with one of their own? The West has no idea. Certainly not the CIA whose director was reduced to watching Al Jezeera and CNN to find out what was happening during Mubarack's final days or the UK's Foreign Secretary Willaim Hague,  whose overseeing and involvement in the sending of a 'small diplomatic team' to Libya which was then captured by Libya's rebel forces along with an SAS squad sent to rescue them made Hague and the UK look ridiculous. 

More riduculous still is the West's rush to recognize, endorse and interfere in Middle East affairs at a stage where existing order is still in a state of flux and new rulers and governments have yet to emerge. In both Tunisia and Egypt it is very unclear who or what grouping will end up in control though in both countries the radical forces of Islam are increasingly showing their hand with many symbols of Western and Christian culture being attacked, closed or abolished. Yet within days of Mubarack's forced exit Britain's monarchial leader David Cameron was in Egypt shaking every hand presented to him without the faintest idea of who they were and what they represented. What mattered was that he was there first, in the flesh and on TV with the Tahrir Square celebs. 

Yemen and Syria are now subject to daily protests and violent state put downs and in Bahrain protest has been virtually crushed thanks to nearby Saudi Arabia loaning tanks and soldiers to Bahrain's ruling royal family. Yet in Libya, where nature was taking its course and Gaddafi's forces were on the verge of winning their internal civil war against the rebels, the West has seen fit to interfere militarily, enforcing a no fly zone and bombing Gaffafi's troops into oblivion.

The result has been a reversal in the rebels forces fortunes, with the rebels recapturing cities thanks to Nato air support meaning that the country could end up split in two or, possibly, depending on how much Nato wants to big it up, the use of ground forces to ensure Gaddafi's demise and defeat.  Whatever happens what would have been a violent but quick ending is now in all probability going to be a long drawn out, inconclusive mess with the West faffing around trying to maintain the moral high-ground while the Libya people continue suffering.

Yet this new liberal-left moral jingoism is also totally selective, with no help for Bahrain's Shia rebels who were being mowed down by the King's forces or the slaughtered in Yemen being offered. It is also ill conceived  with the West's might seemingly being committed on an emotional whim rather than national or strategic interests and with no planned exits or long term goal other than being seen to have been good in righting a selective, morally approved, wrong. 

That the move into Libya's affairs was orchestrated by France's vainglorious Sarkozy and backed by a reluctant US President should have been warning enough that this was probably not the best move. That it wasn't was obvious after Obama's brazen attempts to distance the US within days of the first bombings. That, and the emerging news that many of the rebels are sympathetic to, or supporters of, Al Qaeda show that far from Cameron bigging up our foreign policy he's actually dumbing it down. 

THE LEFT’S OBAMANIA IS PAVING THE WAY FOR A NEW RIGHT!

Almost two years ago the world, or rather the soft, left-leaning, socialist part of it, heralded the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States as akin to the second coming. Obama was the new Messiah, a man whose politically correct lineage and black skin made him irresistible to a large section of the democratic West. Here finally, was their 

champion! A man whose polished prose and cool demeanor were so much more sophisticated than the incumbent President George Bush whose folksy delivery and often tearful connections with ordinary people drew derision and scorn from the media savvy Obama camp. Yet two years on hope has turned to mope and Obama’s joyous “Yes We Can” catch phrase is mocked as “No We Can’t”. Why?

Why indeed? Maybe it is because the Left are hardly ever right. They are either ridden with bitterness and invective as, fore instance, in their treatment of, and reaction to, the policies and personalities of Reagan, Thatcher and Bush; or, as in their embracement of the peace movement, Israel / Palestine, the Soviet Union, Nuclear Disarmament, Iran, environmentalism, multiculturalism, civil rights, racial and sexual politics and ultimately Barack Obama in whose diminutive figure all their causes were to be embodied, they become zealots and idolators. And like all idolators who invest all their hopes and fears in a single individual or cause, they are bound to be disappointed.

Obama is not God, nor is he a particular impressive politician, but he is black and for our new Establishment this was his greatest qualification and one behind which a myriad of causes could rally. Global Warming! Obama’ll Fix It! The Financial Crisis! Don’t worry Obama’ll Fix it! Terrorism! Iraq! Afghanistan! Education! Health Care! Whatever it is Obama’s The Man! The only trouble is, Obama isn’t The Man. In fact no one could ever be The Man that the Left expected Obama to be. Except God, and even God might have bulked at the Left’s ‘Fix It’ list.

Obama’s biggest mistake after putting on the mantle of the Messiah was to try and live up to the people’s expectations. Instead of focusing say on solving the financial crisis Obama stormed in with Healthcare Reform, global warming taxes and a whole raft of social engineering projects that guaranteed more government, more spending and no real job creation. The US is a country that espouses individualism and low taxes so these measures were stirring up a hornets nest that crystalized in the formation of The Tea Party. 

Further Obama’s cronies may have mocked Bush’s emotional responses and failings but they showed that for all his faults George W Bush was human. Whilst Obama’s cold logical reactions and seeming indifference to his nation’s fallibilities only further exacerbate the sense of disappointment among his disciples. This has also given the wider public the impression that their new President has descended not from Heaven, as the Left seemed to think at his inauguration, but from the Planet Vulcan.

When Obama won in 2008 the Left lost all sense of propriety, with political commentators and pundits behaving more like star-struck groupies at a pop concert than hardened hacks. As this piece from the Guardian from the 5th November 2008 shows:

“There had been tears all evening ... “America, we have come so far” he said, as if the entire nation were gathered before him. “We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do.”

He also had a message to the rest of the world, one that will be welcomed almost everywhere. “To all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from Parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world - our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.”

In this speech, and with his victory, Barrack Obama has drawn a line under the last eight years, ending an American era that few will mourn. For today marked nothing less than the first day of the Obama presidency.”

Few mortal man, land even fewer politicians, warrant such clap-trap and of course receiving it is destined to disappoint and preordained to fail. Now that the world faces even greater uncertainty as the prospect of a second, darker wave of the financial crisis looms and political polarization follows as consensus gives way to self interest. Obama, far from unifying Americans around a ‘shared destiny’, has set them at each others throats. Not for decades has there been so much anger and mistrust of government and this anger is not going away, it is growing. 

In Europe, where the Left rejoiced and celebrated almost as if Obama had been elected head of the European Union, hopes that some egalitarian wonderfulness would seep out of the US and envelope the world have been dashed as realpolitik and the economic realities caused by decades of government overspending sink in. 

Europe and the US now face decades of high unemployment and falling living standards with the ever present threat of civil unrest, racial division, and political and financial collapse hanging over them like an acrid smog, irritating and at the same time, frightening. 

Worse for nations used to their creature comforts and being top dog, the West’s role in the world’s pecking order is under threat as never before and in this as in everything else Obama has been found wanting. in his desire to be all things to all men Obama has weaken rather than strengthen the US abroad. Dithering or circumventing problems and by striving to please the antiwar brigade at home and those who see conflict and fighting terrorism as a series of wrongs rather than enforcing rights, Obama, like so many on the Left in Europe, has undermined and underwhelmed, when he should be been wowing and winning.

At the very time the West needs strong charismatic leaders, and decisive action it’s strongest country is failing. Its financial sector has already shown itself to be driven by greed and then weak when it should have been strong. Now at the behest of those same financial charlatans the President is seeking refuge in cheap exports, QE, and inflating away America’s debts with trillions of undervalued dollars. The irony is though that he may just be stoking the fires of revolution instead and paving the way for a President that is strong enough to restore the West’s place in the World Order and in doing so be hated by the Left and derided by Europe’s intelligentsia. In fact, that is how it should be, and by achieving such loathing, he or she, will show him or herself to be a true successor to Reagan, Thatcher and Bush, and worthy of the title, President.

SEE NO EVIL, HEAR NO EVIL, SPEAK NO EVIL

One can now add to that proverb, WRITE NO EVIL, if the ‘we’re all one society, appeasing, down-on-my-knees-begging-you-please, Islamic loving, inclusivity obsessed, multiculturally aware, touchy-feely, rightwing-hating, individual freedom go-to-hell, I care more than you care and the State knows best’ Guardian newspaper gets its way.

In this Saturday’s edition (21st August 2010) under the headline ‘Rightwing Blogs lead ‘War on Islam’ the Guardian gave vent to an hysterical rant against rightwing opinion and female blogger Pamela Geller in particular. Written by Chris McGreal, peace and blessing be upon him, it was a ludicrous attack on activist Geller that ultimately says more about the soft mainstream Islam-loving chattering classes and their fear of the new right than it did about Pamela Geller.

For the left the rise of grassroots activist movements like the Tea Party Radicals, the English Defense League, new political parties or the relentless rise of the right on the Net via the Blogosphere and related websites has usurped the left’s old street protesting stomping ground. Once the Left basked in the knowledge that ordinary people were by and large on their side, Trade Unions could muster thousands of followers, students were generally of the left, radical politics, activism and mass movements were of the left, and the right, where was the Right?

The right, in fact, was either perceived as Conservative, straight, male, Christian and white or shaven-headed, cranially-challenged, bigoted, straight, male and white. Worse, both were seen as being partnered by dull, plump, child-bearing dullards who were either Thatcher clones or broken bones and, who were, bar the odd exception, utterly asexual or sexless.

The left may have had followers of both sexes, but their dedication and pursuit of the monosexual being meant that each partner was often bearded, sandal wearing and obsessed with their diet, and as such were accompanied, in the main, by a bizarre array of multi-sexual, transsexual, cross-dressing, muesli-munching, hormonally-challenged, dungareed wearing, saddos whose idea of a good time was reminiscing about how much they’d collected for the striking miners in the eighties and planning their party of parties to celebrate the imminent death of Margaret Thatcher. Yet lurking on the edges of these leftwing clans were some of the world’s beautiful people, radical chick, could also be radical chic. From black-clad, capitalist-killing members of the Baader-Meinhof gang to free-lovin’ little rich girls, the left had them all.

But not any more. The Right got a growing army of discontented, sassy women and, at its head, Sarah Palin, a Republican hockey-mum and moose-hunting, heaving-bosomed, far right goddess who gave every red-neck American their biggest hard-on in years. Palin came along at a time when the US right was in free fall and the United States was still reeling from the aftermath of September 11th, Hurricane Katrina, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, foreclosures and the Credit Crunch and the election of the first black President of the United States. These events, momentous and challenging, happened at a time when the incumbent Republican President Bush was floundering and failing to take a lead. The American people wanted change and got it big time in the election of President Obama, a man whose radical, left leaning agenda, would soon galvanize the grassroots right in ways not seen in the US for years, if at all. It is this grassroots movement in the US, and from the US to the rest of the world, that is so alarming the left and its mouthpieces like the Guardian.

The left’s goon squads are now on the attack and when they attack they attack big time, first, as with Sarah Palin, they will attack their target in the media, they will ridicule and besmirch your family (as long as you’re white), your religion (as long as its Christian) and your character and if that doesn’t work the left runs to their legal friends to find ways of shutting you up, shutting you down, and banning you or all three.

For the UK left and the soft left establishment our Democracy is not enshrined in law or laid down in a Bill of Rights, it is fluid, changeable, and bendable. Not so much a constitution as a flexible solution to a problem should it arise, and as the new left creates laws, like for instance the law of religious hatred, so the left’s legions of litigators utilize them to silence and cajole its enemies. The UK’s array of new gagging orders are both vile and one of the single biggest attacks on free speech the UK has ever seen.

It's no coincidence that the abolition of an antiquated law like Blasphemy, which only applied to Anglican Christians and was hardly ever used, should, in fact, have heralded in a vastly more effective and draconian law that made it a crime to incite or promote religious hatred, a catch-all phrase that can mean anything and effectively protects Islam and other religions from criticism. Likewise protest movements like the English Defense League can be banned from marching if the local, often politically motivated, police think the EDL’s presence might upset the local residents.

Expect to see the ‘threat of disorder’ wheeled out again and again now when EDL and similar bodies attempt to march. Beyond that, the Commission for Racial Equality is heaping one legal challenge after another on the British National Party in its stated aim of bankrupting the party and destroying it for good, thus effectively denying a voice to a million voters. Would such a tactic, say used by the Conservatives against the Communist Party or the Socialist Workers Party, have been any more acceptable? The EDL and the BNP may well be unpleasant and be represented by some pretty ghastly individuals but their growth is indicative that something in society is wrong and shutting them down is not going to make the root causes that created them go away.

Now the left is moving on Bloggers, blogger and campaigner Pamela Geller is, according to the Guardian and Civil rights groups, guilty of "hate speech" for her repeated warnings of "Islamic domination" of the US. Further she has, according to the McCarthyist left leaning political monitoring group, The Southern Poverty Law Centre, mixed political exploitation with ‘hate-mongering‘. As a result Geller has, according to the Law Centre’s spokesman Marc Potok, ‘crossed the line from legitimate debate’, as it is in his words, wrong to ‘talk about conspiracies on the part of Muslims to dominate the United States’.

The whole article was implying that Pamela Geller and her ilk must be silenced, that their attacks on Islam and Muslims amounted to hate-speech and as such were committing a verbal ‘crime’ punishable by law. This is the left’s answer to everything now. If it offends ban it, gag it, silence it. The left has created a chaotic world of mass immigration, moved peoples from country to country without any thought as to the consequences, it has promoted lifestyles which are often at odds with people’s beliefs and done so regardless of the indigenous population. Now when grassroots movements against these decisions grow amongst the people the Left actively seeks to destroy those movements and deny the people a voice.

The Left and the mainstream Establishment will silence the people at its peril because every time a moderate is silenced, is mocked, or his ideas pilloried, then the more extreme will become his efforts to be heard and the more extreme his need to make the state and the establishment listen.

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

Watching the news, reading the papers and seeing our politicians in the UK, in Europe and in the US could make one feel that the excitement and impending sense of economic doom predicted by so many since the end of 2007, 2008, last year and this year, was over. That the world had moved almost effortlessly from sub-prime crisis, to credit crunch to ‘lets have lunch’ without anyone getting hurt, give or take the odd Greek bank worker and the occasional British Prime Minister voted out of office.

The stock markets have lurched, inched, spurted and crawled inexorably upwards in recent months and commentators and the media instead of using scary words like crash, depression, the Thirties, mass unemployment, social breakdown, collapse, credit crunch are now soothing us with words like; employment, new jobs, low interest rates, controlled cutbacks, bank lending, work force, skills, cohesion and of course everyone's current fave, coalition. Of course there are still a few yobs out there on the fringes swearing and shouting expletives like; double-dip, recession, deflation, inflation, pensions, baby-boomers, pensions, rising unemployment and, lest we forget, Quantitative Easing. But generally the world is calm. Or is it?

The world’s decision to use a Keynesian approach to solving its economic woes has temporarily calmed things, but the stimulus has been at a massive cost, particularly in the US where the home of capitalism has shown itself to be weak in the face of crisis, preferring the soft option, high taxes, Healthcare Reform, and delaying hard choices for the future. Yet that future could only be months away. Already the effects of the first stimulus are waning, consumer spending is slowing again almost before it started rising, house prices are still falling, new house building can barely get it together to erect a flag-pole let alone a new house and meanwhile evermore foreclosures beckon as debt carries all before it. Yet the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration’s only answer is another, bigger, stimulus package, more Quantitative Easing and ever more spending. It’s like having maxed-out all your credit cards, mortgaged and remortgaged the house and borrowed everything you can from the bank and your friends, yet you still believe if you can just borrow more it’ll be alright.

The effects of the first stimulus are fading because it didn’t create anything meaningful and props up businesses that should close. More money will just prop them up longer and create more meaningless jobs and when its removed or its effects wane then the failing businesses and McJobs will go to anyway. Better to get the pain over and build anew than risking a bigger collapse and hyper inflation in the months and years ahead. Stimuluses only work if there’s something to stimulate, if the patient is dying, then sometimes its kinder to let him die..

In the UK too, talk of cuts are beginning to be talked down and the threat of big cuts to social services moderated. The UK though will have to wait until October this year to find out exactly what is to be cut so it would be churlish to harp on and heap criticism on the Breakback Coalition before they have had a chance to show their true colours. I suspect though that given their current moniker that they will be multi-coloured as they try to be all things to all men. In which case they’ll please no one and disappoint all.

The US and potentially the rest of the West could be heading towards a double-dip recession or, in reality in the US, a full-blown, no-nonsense Depression, where nature will do what the governments of Bush, Obama and the Federal Reserve have failed to do and that is to burn away the rubbish so that a new economy and new businesses can rise from the ashes. The only genuine alternative is the half way measure of hacking away at the economic mess through cuts, but it remains to be seen if the UK coalition government has what it takes? If we have then we may avoid America’s fate, if not we to may see the dark clouds of Depression before too long.

TRIUMPH OF THE ILL

The National Health service and the Welfare State have come to be used as interchangeable terms, and in the mouths of some people as terms of reproach. Why this is so is not difficult to understand if you view everything from the angle of a strictly individualistic competitive society. A free health service is pure Socialism and as such it is opposed to the hedonism of capitalist society.

"The collective principle asserts that... no society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of a lack of means."

Aneurin Bevin, Labour politician who played a key part in the creation of the NHS and Welfare State.

"Marxism taught him that society must be changed swiftly, intrepidly, fundamentally, if the transformation was not to to be overturned by counter-revolution."

Labour leader Michael Foot on Anuerin Bevan and the creation of the Welfare State

When in 1945, Clement Attlee, the leader of the victorious Labour government stood poised to take over government from the wartime coalition having vanquished its charismatic head, the Tory leader Winston Churchill, at the polls, he must have felt tremendous excitement at the prospects for change that lay ahead of him, but daunted too, no doubt. Daunted by a country left broke and broken by six years of war, by a Europe almost destroyed and with millions of its people dead, daunted as well by a population that was sick of war, hardship and suffering and who wanted societal change in a big, major way.

Fearful too probably of a glowering, threatening Stalinist Russia whose liberation of Poland, Hungry, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, the Ukraine and numerous other smaller states had turned into occupation and whose desire for the h-bomb, nuclear capabilities and promoting communism by force would beget the Cold War within years. Fearful also perhaps of the expectations of his party and most of all of his party's supporters, the electorate, who had been promised the introduction of a Welfare State and a National Health Service as recommended by the Beveridge report three years earlier. Yet Attlee and his fellow supporters could never have envisaged the beast they were to unleash nor the wider changes its creation would have on the social fabric of the UK in the years ahead.

It's probable, though, that the man Attlee choose as his welfare champion, Nye Bevan, did know and in fact would have welcomed the change for he would have known that this was a change that, short of a revolution or seismic social upheaval, was irreversible. What Bevan could not have foreseen though was how weak and loathsome the introduction of the welfare state would make the population. For how could the introduction of a system designed to protect all from the adverse effects of poverty, hunger, sickness, homelessness and unemployment end up ultimately undermining and threatening the very people and the state it was set up to protect?

No one advocates a society that would see the ill die or the sick left to rot at the side of the road while the fit and able strut past seemingly oblivious to their plight rather it is the degree to which the state intervenes and our response to it that matters. Bevan saw the creation of a welfare state not just as an act of benevolence by the state but rather as a Trojan horse that would, with its promise of a ‘cradle to grave’ support system, herald the end of the old order. For Bevan the England of class, and the Tory party that he perceived as representing it were; ‘as far as I am concerned... lower than vermin’.

The creation of the welfare state therefore wasn’t just about alleviating poverty and sickness it was also about destroying an old, ruling order. Of cutting the hamstrings of an elite so that no matter what, the welfare state would stay and in that Bevan and the supporters of the new order were successful. Not even Margaret Thatcher’s monetarist gurus Alan Walters or Milton Friedman were able to persuade the party to pursue a policy of privatising the health service. Whatever else, and whichever party was in power the welfare state has been safe and has grown. Each decade seeing new departments, increased budgets, more employed by it, and even more dependent on it, until now over 50 per cent of the UK work force is dependent on the public sector for their livelihood.

Beyond that is a mass of people hidden and lost in statistics who exist totally because of the state, people who are dependent on it for their food, their clothing, their homes, their health and their life, from the day they are born to the day they die. A growing number of people in fact that whose purpose in existing is created by, and is dependent on, the State and in turn whose existence the Welfare state depends for its own existence.

This counter dependency has grown inextricably since the Welfare State’s birth in 1945 and is now at a tipping point as immigration, massive unsustainable state and individual borrowing, diminishing tax revenues and a dwindling private sector work force are combining finally to deny it any more money and to secondly overload a Welfare system that is bloated and put upon to the point of collapse.

Further the dependents and recipients of the State’s largesse are neither grateful nor accepting of their lot, rather a large section of them have become an underclass, criminalized, feckless, and dangerous. Many prey on, abuse and milk the system for all they can, new arrivals in the UK are helped by agents of the State, or advisory bodies funded by the State, or by lawyers grant aided by the State, to get the best possible out of the Welfare system regardless of whether they or their families or their dependents have contributed to its coffers. In fact for many immigrants the UK represents a land of limitless resource for the minimum of input. Not so much a land of the free as of the fee.

Fees, which like the treasury bonds that the Government issues against its borrowing and which are sold on the open markets but which in reality are currently bought by the government with its own money which has been created out of thin air by printing it in a policy euphemistically called ‘quantitive easing’, our welfare state pays itself. Yet it doesn’t stop there as it creates and recruits more and more advisers whose jobs are to find as many new and clever ways as possible of extracting money from their own employer; the welfare state. It is in fact repeating the cycle with more and more demands being made on its own financial resources yet at the same time creating nothing of worth to sell on to third parties. Even the people it nurtures from baby to adulthood in the main become immediate dependents on the state, rather than taxable workers paying contributions to it. And their children in turn will do the same creating an ever-expanding circle that consumes all and creates nothing except more demands on the State.

The dream of a ‘cradle to grave’ welfare state where no one went hungry or was denied help when sick is now in danger of sucking the life-blood out of the population it was set up to help. Now that our national debts have reached levels that are unsustainable our politicians are being forced to address them. Yet even though events are forcing the states hand still no political party has the Will or the courage to tackle Bevan’s beast of burden full on. Instead politicians of all parties fudge the issues or talk in vagaries of a recovery that may or may not happen and which they assume will save the day.

Right now no politician or party will do more than tinker with the Welfare State’s budgets or its vast army of staff or its staggering number of dependents and recipients. Rather the government does nothing, which is fine as long as the resources are there to sustain it. But what happens when the legions of new, non tax contributing arrivals and the constantly demanding underclass and the growing numbers of unemployed suddenly find that the monies running out and there aren’t enough taxes coming in to pay for it? Then what? Borrow more? Tax More? Go to the IMF?

The fact is we have created a monster that has in turn led a large and growing number of people to expect the state to do everything for them regardless of merit or entitlement, Further like its clients, the Welfare State assumes that there will always be enough money there to cover its needs, whatever they are. To the Welfare state its needs are paramount, they usurp other sectors like the military, or the environment, and its budgets are seen as sacred. This bloated state cow is a sacred state cow and as such cannot be touched.

The Welfare State is weakening the country as much as its recipients are weakened by it. People no longer feel compelled to strive or look to provide for themselves instead they look to the state and the state in turn expects to provide. Each is sapping the other's strengths and corrupting the nations Will to do and for people to stand alone and to see the state as a last resource rather than a first resource, The state is consuming money at levels and as a percentage of our GDP that are ludicrous and is spending with a ferocity that borders on hysteria. And like the lottery winners who adopt a policy of ‘spend, spend, spend’ the money is going to run out.

Since 1945 governments have come and gone, chancellors have cut and spent, Bevan’s words and those of his colleagues have faded into history yet his, and Attlee’s, Trojan Horse has morphed from a lean stallion into a bloated beast, its body grossly obese and its strength and spirit sapped from years of abuse and overwork. And despite belated attempts to save it, it continues to consume, grow and decay simultaneously, as if the combined forces of good and evil were, like cancer and non-cancerous cells, constantly waging war inside it.

For more than anything now, the UK is defined by its welfare state and the welfare state in turns defines its people. Some foreigners may still be deluded enough to think that we still wander around in bowler hats and drink tea at the first sign of trouble but most see us for what we are and are becoming, a nation of the ill and the feign, whose priorities are drink and obsessing over vacuous celebrities whose fame, more often than not, is based not on a talent or achievement, but like many of the recipients of state welfare, is merely for existing.

It would be a great irony therefore if the verminous class-ridden society so hated by Nye Bevan was in fact being re-created inversely by the very Welfare State he had set up to destroy it. For soon the government, if they are to maintain their precious public sector untouched and uncut, will have to tax, exploit and cajole and suck dry all that aren’t part of this new Class in order to survive.

Americans in turn should beware of Presidents with Healthcare reform plans....

THE AGE OF THE ELOI

The soft, fluffy, cotton wool mindset that seems to have reduced most of the world's left/right political animals to a sort of sludge-brained Eloi have somehow convinced themselves and, seemingly, most of the population, that the secret of a happy life is now to log-on, dumb-down, spend-large, think-small (if at all) and care lots. Empathy is the new apathy. I feel, you feel, we all feel but ideally I feel more than you. Now, if a butterfly sheds a tear in Japan, there’s hysterical grief in New York.

From President Obama’s recent beer swilling love-in with a policeman and a crabby black professor whose brilliant IQ he demonstrated by breaking into his own house (the professor then cleverly got himself arrested by getting all mouthy with the policeman who had come to check out a reported burglary), to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s lamentable attempt at bonhomie on breakfast TV, our leaders strive to be our mates.

A few weeks ago, when Gordon Brown tried to get all pally with the nation over concerns that hirsute singer Susan Boyle was going loopy and spent his airtime discussing Boyle, while at that very moment Moslem psychos were dicing their British hostages (reader’s may recall that Boyle’s sudden fame and wealth coupled with her inability to shave her face had made her go insane). No doubt the link between sudden fame and madness might go some way to explaining Brown’s own transition from smug and inept, but little known Chancellor of the Exchequer, to smug, power-crazed, I-can-walk-on-water-and-heal-the-world loony, Prime Minister. Our leaders are now desperate to connect with the people and more importantly to be seen connecting with the people. To show us that they ‘feel’ and ‘share’ our concerns: that our issues, no matter how trivial, are now their issues. That these tears of concerns are crocodile tears and not butterfly tears is now irrelevant, if they feel then we feel and vice versa.

Obama maybe in charge of the most powerful nation on earth, but years of touchy-feely rhetoric from the liberal left/right intelligentsia, coupled with his predecessors' failings and perceived gungho US-style Jingoism, have created the USA’s first Presidential enoch. Obama may be black, but his balls are distinctly pink and, judging from the amount of make-up he’s wearing, possibly shrinking as well. So when Iran’s religious thugs stamped all over their people’s valiant attempt at protest it was no surprise that the US uttered barely a word in protest. It should also be no surprise that Iran is now storming ahead developing their nuclear bomb or that North Korea can can lob nuclear test missiles around with impunity . After all, what’s Obama’s new all inclusive US of A going to do to stop them? Have a group hug probably or, maybe, if Obama gets really angry, he’ll stamp his feet and buy a new dress - cos he’s worth it and anyway that’ll show ‘em.

Our leaders though are only reflecting the deeper ‘nicey’ malaise that is sweeping the West. Now that political correctness, health and safety mania, sexual, religious and racial offend-thee-not legislation and a total obsession with making sure that no one is hurt or emotionally upset by life we are collectively dumbing down and regressing so fast that soon we’ll all be on a par with the Taliban. Lest we forget the Taliban are a species that, in 2000 years, has barely evolved beyond the stone-age; not, for them two brain cells when one will do.

It is telling too that the UK’s Foreign Secretary, David Miliband and the Obama administration now want to arrange for talks and hugging with the Taliban. No doubt in this touchy-feely world we can overlook the fact that the Taliban blows up and murders school children in an effort to stop young girls being educated, that men can be killed for shaving and that being caught with satanic objects like a radio will get you thrown into a Taliban slammer. The liberal left/right coalition also conveniently ignores and turns a blind eye to the fact that the Taliban’s treatment of women is on a par with our treatment of battery hens only worse, given that we thankfully don’t stone chickens to death or burn them alive. Oh and lest we forget to the Taliban homosexuality is an abomination, so no same-sex beard love-ins in Afghanistan unless Susan Boyle decides to drop in for a sing-along and a bit of back door action.

We now have a world at the pinnacle of our achievement so far and we can either progress or, in a fit of mass hysteria, embrace a utopia that never was, can be, nor will ever be despite Obama’s pink testicles and Gordon Brown’s Saviour complex. What we have instead is a slowly evolving do nothing, want everything, emotional feel for everyone, upset no one, we are all equal, no gain cos we don’t want the pain, con trick. We are rapidly morphing from a can be, can do people, into a should we, can we, what if population of dullards not fit for anything except emotional turpitude and emphasizing with celebrities.

In the 1960s film version of H G Wells novel the Time Machine, the hero, played by actor Rod Taylor, stumbles across a seemingly idilic scene where young, good looking people sit around a river bank eating and drinking, seemingly without a care in the world. Suddenly a young woman falls into the river and starts drowning. She screams but the people ignore her cries and carry on eating and drinking, oblivious to her plight. These are the Eloi, a people who want everything but do nothing.

Then today a news story broke of a man who drowned in 18 inches of water after his car plunged down a steep bank into a stream. The rescue services and police arrived quickly along with a ‘health and safety’ officer who deemed the bank and water too dangerous for the men present to attempt to rescue the man and consequently a unit with 'water experience' were summoned from 50 mies away. While they waited for the second unit to arrive the men present sat around drinking tea while the man cried for help and died.

In the Time Machine the hero, in despair at what mankind had become, cried out to the Eloi:

"What have you done? Thousands of years of building and rebuilding, creating and recreating so that you can let it crumble to dust. A million years of sensitive men dying for their dreams, for what?!!! So you can swim, and dance, and play”.

Had the film been made now Rod Taylor would of course have hugged them...

DEFENDING THE TORTURERS, OFFENDING THE TORTURED

President Obama’s decision to name the names of those in the Bush administration who sanctioned the use of torture, including possibly Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and ex-President George W Bush, and authorise the release of hundreds of photos of Guantanamo Bay inmates in various stages of abuse, have generally been greeted with glee by the Obama camp and Obamamites worldwide. Bush was loathed, the war in Iraq generally hated and 2001’s Twin Towers attack is beginning to fade into history so the Democrats' decision to ram home their recent election victory by damning the already wounded and discredited Republian party probably seems like a good idea.

Who cares if the CIA is weakened in the process, or that US and, by extension, the West’s national security is compromised, or that the US government is now so driven by partisan interests that it will endanger its own operatives in pursuit of some Republican scalps? Of course torture is abhorrent, and yes of course the US Government in an ideal world shouldn’t be sanctioning its use. But this is not an ideal world and the US and the West is effectively at war with an ideologically-driven enemy whose long term aim is the total destruction of the West’s way of life, its religions, its beliefs, its democracies and who is prepared to use any means, including nuclear, biological and extreme terrorist acts to achieve them.

No doubt President Obama’s new happy-clappy style of global diplomacy plays well with his supporters, raised at they have been on media driven, West Wing style faux politics in which nicey replaces nasty and a few Kennedy style sound-bites will get Iran, the Taliban, North Korea and the world’s assorted US haters to put flowers in their hair and shout hallelujah. Maybe they will and the world will enter a new golden age of peace and prosperity where torturers and terrorists are just bogey men parents conjure up to frighten naughty children and disputes are settled over tea and biscuits and no one gets hurt anymore. Sounds possible.

Seventy years ago, the world was so fearful of war that appeasement, the condoning and tolerating of national aggression by the likes of Hitler’s Germany, Musslini’s Italy and a resurgent nationalist Japan and a revolutionary Russia, became the new peace corps buzz word; better, in fact, craven servility at any price than war. No doubt Obama’s recent declaration of love for Iran’s loony Presindent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his limp response to North Korea’s resumption of long-range missile tests are pointers to Obama’s new post-Bush, post-torture paradise but, personally, I think that they are seriously naïve miscalculations of very dangerous and cunning enemies.

In a world in which strength and power ultimately rule the Bush administration’s adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan may be viewed more kindly by history than they are now. Equally the US’s use of torture techniques to extract information, whilst unpleasant, may also be seen as the lesser of two evils; the greater evil being a successful terrorist attack on US or European soil. If, in the next four years of the Obama administration, there is a successful terrorist attack on US soil, and I believe that there is a strong chance of this, then Obama’s more conciliatory approach to world diplomacy will be partly to blame, if only for encouraging its enemies into thinking that the US is becoming a soft target again.

I personally doubt if torture has any valid use, but then I’m not a soldier, nor am I at the cutting edge of the fight against Al Quieda, but equally I am well aware that things happen in war and in the quasi-legal world of counter-terrorism which are not nice and which, were I a crusading human rights lawyer, might also breach several statutes. However, if it keeps me and the West safe and if that means looking the other way because someone has spat on the Koran or smacked a possible suicide bomber in the face then so be it. For all Bush’s faults it is important to remember that there has been no terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11, will Obama be able to say that after eight torture-free years in office?

It may be that if, in the future, Obama has to stand amidst the ruins of some much loved part of America, as Bush did after 9/11, and address the nation following a successful terrorist attack, that he and the Democrats may yet rue the day that they brought the world of human rights and political correctness into the shadowy world of counter-terrorism where it has no place and no role.

General Sherman over a hundred years ago pretty well summed it up:

‘You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out; I know I had no hand in making this war; and I know I will make more sacrifices today than any of you to secure peace”