Enough to make a Jackal puke

Dan Kennedy, writing in the Guardian, is spot on.

US Vice-President Dick Cheney, the real power in the White House during the Bush presidency, is attempting to claim that the invasion of Iraq has worked out well.

Not well for Saddam Hussein, obviously, who was caught hiding in a cellar some five years ago and subsequently executed rather than sent to the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague.

And not well for the people of Iraq, unless one considers the faint autonomy of some of Kurdistan to be worth it.

Of course, the invasion and occupation of Iraq went really well for Dick Cheney himself, as he was able to transfer large amounts of US tax dollars into the hands of his old pals at Halliburton.

Increasingly, as one listens to the whining of Tony Blair about his anguish over the war, or indeed scoffs at corrupt old Bertie Ahern as he pleads to be considered the great peacemaker of Ireland, I have come to realise that the place to hurt these people is in their legacy.

Blair's not stupid, and now realises that his legacy will be ever ruined by his involvement in Iraq. Ahern is rather stupid, but his arrogance and ego demand that history credit him with things he had at best a tangential involvement in (peace in the North of Ireland and the boom economy), rather than the things he was up to his greasy little neck in (endemic Fianna Fail corruption, clientelism and gombeenism).

Cheney is also concerned about the legacy. And he remains in cynical denial about the wrongs he has committed.

His only out now is to try to persuade the rest of us to see things from his twisted point of view - a point of view which says that it doesn't matter if there were no weapons in Iraq, it doesn't matter if hundreds of thousands died needlessly, and it doesn't matter about America kidnapping and torturing people in third countries.

As Dan Kennedy says in his excellent commentary on Cheney's delusions, it is enough to make a jackal puke.

Return of the cult of personality

The election of Barack Obama marks not only the triumph of celebrity politics, but also a potentially dangerous return to leadership cults of personality.

Anyone who travelled in Russia in the 20th century would be familiar with cult of personality politics - the stern statues of an exorting Lenin everywhere, his name and those of his peers scrawled across the streetnames in every town like graffiti.

But today, as Putin and Medvedev offer up their own tributes to that old genocidal maniac Stalin, some personality cults are in a resurgence.

In China, even today, the Mao cult remains vibrant beyond words. The days of the cultural revolution when kids would beat their elders to death with Mao's little red book while chanting his name are still in living memory.

But the fact that his odious, insane visage still smirks from the yuan banknote, the postage stamps, the huge tapestry that hangs over the front of the Forbidden City gates at Tiananmen Square indicates that the Mao cult must still be respected and worshipped today in China, even by those overt capitalists currently running the Chinese Communist Party.

But hard times create new leader cults, and we have seen a number in recent years.

Long before Nelson Mandela left Robben Island, a cult of personality had already grown around him. It was inspired by the traditional yearning for and apotheosising of a lost leader, and Mandela's long absence from the public arena created a tabula rasa - a clean slate onto which his supporters could project their own Messianic desires for him.

Mandela, an elderly man with marital problems and released into an unrecognisable world after decades of incarceration, had no option but to lead the rainbow nation as president. For him to choose otherwise would have been unthinkable.

His audience, one might say congregation of worshippers, demanded it of him. The expectations were sky-high. Looking back on that transition period now, over a decade on, it seems that Mandela did extraordinarily well to fulfil so many of those unreasonable expectations. And perhaps he could not have achieved so much without the unwavering support of his true believers.

So, it is possible that leader cults can be beneficial.

But much more often, they are malignant in some form or another, for the very reason that believers follow on faith and fail to examine or challenge the details of their cult leader's decision making until a tipping point is reached when a series of decisions perceived as wrong or flawed by the following turns into an emotional backlash voiced as betrayal.

In this context, one thinks of Tony Blair, or Clinton. Both assumed leadership with a large faith-based support, by which I mean a cohort of the electorate who believed as an article of faith that the new leader espoused exactly the sort of societal changes that they themselves personally desired.

Initially, it is impossible to disappoint such an electorate, since the very existence of such an electorate depends on and grows from visceral opposition to an unpopular regime. For the Clintonites it was Papa Bush; for the Blairites, it was Tory sleaze and Mad Maggie.

But as time goes on, the fallibility of such leaders becomes evident, and this is the dangerous point, as the faith-based electorate feels emotionally betrayed, just as a true believer might feel their world fall in when their guru turns out to have been taking their savings to buy Rolls-Royces and cocaine.

For Clinton, there are still pockets of faith fans around the world, as his $100,000,000 earnings since leaving the White House indicate. But domestically, it turned for Bill when he started bombing African hospitals and cheerleading Israel.

By the time he was caught with his cigar in the intern and was facing impeachment proceedings, the faith-based fanbase in the US had largely evaporated in anger and betrayal. The result was that decent, genuine Democrats like Kerry and Gore failed to get elected.

The Obama moment for Britain came with Blair's epochal 1997 election. A generation out of power, Labour had had to entirely reinvent itself. Then on the eve of power, their leader John Smith died. Blair emerged from the resulting power-tussle as the bright-eyed, smiley, youthful face of hope in British politics.

How strange it is today to think of that Blair in the context of the gormless fool insisting that he was right to ignore the will of his people by sending their troops to die while occupying someone else's country, because his religious faith told him it was right? But when Blair first became Prime Minister, he was the blank slate onto which dreams where projected.

We're in the same position now in relation to Obama, a tabula rasa himself whose employment record is hidden and patchy, whose main achievement is to have written two bestselling autobiographies that ironically reveal little about him.

His high oratory, his tendentious catchphrases and his lack of a political record allow his believers to project onto him whatever their personal desires for the future may be.

Obama created this situation, but in a way has become a victim of it. It is not his fault that the Aboriginals now believe that they will get greater rights in Australia because of his election, or that Hamas believe a two-state solution in Palestine can be achieved under Obama's watch.

These are merely exotic examples of how people outside of America have been infected by the Obamania. Global leaders too have been falling over themselves to position their nations as Obama's new best friend.

The result, as the ever-excellent Matthew Parris points out in today's London Times, is that there is now a dangerous unanimity about Obama which is likely to go extremely sour in a very ugly way. As Parris points out, governance is a lot more about 'No, you can't' than 'Yes, we can'.

Personally, I don't see a Mandela in Obama. The track record isn't there. The bravery isn't there. The inate intelligence isn't there. Obama does have Mandela's charisma and possibly exceeds him in oratorical skills. But that's simply not enough.

We're entering a serious global recession. America is bleeding from two unwinnable wars and the world's approbrium. China has it economically by the privates. Russia is intent on dictating within its own self-defined sphere of influence and seems prepared to roll out the guns if opposed.

It would take a politician of some great genius to extricate themselves from all of those problems, never mind reverse the stratospheric deficit, ensure universal healthcare for Americans and all the other many, many promises Obama made during the Presidential campaign. And that doesn't even account for the unseeable, unknowable problems that await.

As Parris says, no messiah has come among us and miracles are not now possible. Despite this somewhat obvious reality, otherwise intelligent people have abandoned sense and rationality in relation to Obama's election.

Sadly, they will be the ones most disappointed when realpolitik intervenes. They will be the ones who feel viscerally betrayed, and who will round on their hero for not living up to the fantasy in their heads.

And Obama's supporters really now need to start paying close attention to his actions rather than his words.

The appointment of Rahm Emmanuel as Obama's chief of staff is not good news for much of the world. Emmanuel was Bill Clinton's fundraiser, which raises concerns in itself, but is also a hardcore Zionist whose father was a Zionist terrorist against British rule. Add this to Veep Joe Biden, the self-proclaimed 'best friend' of Israel, and you can see quite quickly that the Hamas hopes for a settlement are utterly in vain.

Not many in the West will be sorry for Hamas. But everyone else will follow down the path of disappointment. The Greens will be similarly disheartened if, as seems likely, Obama appoints a movie star who goes to work in a private plane as his Energy Tsar. And so on, and so on.

The key to avoiding crushing disappointment in an Obama presidency is to monitor it closely. That way, in the words of Matthew Parris, 'the crest of expectation might subside smoothly into the gentle swell of history.'

For those who cried ostentatiously on Obama's election because elderly black American people they don't know, who themselves were generations away from slavery, were pleased;
For those who stood out in the cold roaring 'Yes, we can' like some strange combination of self-assertion class and Nuremburg rally;
For those who take any criticism or reticence about the new messiah as a personal slight;

Your dreams will be dashed. Nothing is more certain.

That doesn't mean you can't keep on believing, though.

After all, Stalin and Mao killed tens of millions of their own people and are still adored by many.

They're right to riot in Finglas

I think so, on balance.

Are they making a shite of their own neighbourhood? Yes.

Is the violence largely conducted by kids buzzing on cheap alcohol? Of course.

Is street violence going to solve the problems facing their community? No chance.

So why do I think they're right to riot in Finglas? Because I don't see what other option they have.

I remember rioting as a kid. That was in Belfast, during the Troubles. We went out to throw rocks and molotovs at the RUC.

There were political justifications, of course. The hunger strikes. The oppression. The fact that we were second class citizens in our own land.

But primarily, we rioted because we had no amenities, and nothing else to do, and were fed up of a system that rubbed our nose in the shit all the time, a system that treated us like animals. If we were going to be accused of being animals, we felt, we could show them what animals could do.

Revisionists, or at least Republicans, would have you believe that our rioting was civil unrest, an uprising, a liberation movement. Perhaps it was all of those things.

But what the rioting in Belfast decades ago, and the rioting in Lhasa last week, and the riots in Finglas in recent days have in common is that the people who live there are objecting to a system that grinds them into the dirt the only way they can, the futile method of tilting at authority figures.

Finglas is a terribly deprived area. It is ridden with gangsterism and drug abuse. Anti-social behaviour thrives because the Gardai give it a wide berth. Schools are poorly funded and bulging at the seams with kids. Even those kids who want to better themselves have the odds heavily stacked against them.

Even if they obtain the necessary schooling to improve their lot, they will then suffer the postcode bigotry of employers who automatically consign job applications from D11 to the bin.

Less than 4% of students at Trinity College come from working class backgrounds these days. The kids of Finglas know that the Celtic Tiger dream marketed at them in the media does not apply to them and never will. Social mobility has never been so static in Ireland. The rich get richer and the poor get their bus routes cancelled.

Local politicians don't bother with places like Finglas because there are no votes there. And in a circular movement, the people of places like Finglas don't bother to vote because no one in authority ever listens to their concerns.

So where can the people of Finglas take their concerns? Eventually, anger bubbles over, the sole amenity of cheap alcohol and drugs kicks in, and the concerns get expressed on the streets.

I did the same myself and feel no shame over it. Two decades on, the oppression I suffered as a youth has been alleviated and addressed. The voice of my community is now heard in government.

But I have a sneaking suspicion that Bill Clinton and Tony Blair won't be taking a special personal interest in Finglas. I suspect the rioters of Finglas will be painted as boozed-up animals rather than people crying out for liberation from deprivation. I hope they get the same result I did, but I fear they will not.

And if they continue to be ignored, then eventually there will be more riots, and riots with increasing severity and regularity. Eventually people will die, local people and Gardai.

They aren't animals. They don't love squalor. They want better lives that are being denied them. The government should listen. Because they're right to riot in Finglas until they do.

The boom keeps getting boomer!

As if the ongoing housing market collapse wasn't enough, now the government have the following little problem of rising unemployment to contend with.

Most concerning is the fact that these jobs are being lost in the services sector, the area we were supposed to excel in after abandoning our manufacturing base and most of our agriculture to elsewhere.

There is now a sizeable segment within Fianna Fail who appear to be unhappy at the prospect of having to clean up the economic mess they themselves created. For them, the smarter move would have been to lose the last election, and then cast Fine Gael and Labour as a bust coalition once again.

Thanks to the hubris of Bertie and his unshakeable desire for a third term, they're now stuck with having to deal with falling house prices and rising unemployment, while trying to keep the three mutually unintelligible aspects of their coalition - the Greens, the PDs and the FF genepool independents - all happy.

It's gonna end in tears.

But for Bertie, sure he can just hand the poisoned chalice over to the anointed successor and vanish, a la Tonee B-liar, off towards a happy twilight on the international statesman equivalent of the chicken and chips circuit.

Rumour is he fancies the Euro-presidency. Nice work if you can get it. So for Bert, the boom just keeps on getting boomer, just as long as he can keep nasty Justice Mahon away from his financial details.

For the rest of us, falling house prices, significant unemployment, inflation and economic difficulties lie ahead.

Will he make a thousand days?

Sorry for the delays in updates. I've been busy.

So, obviously, is Tony Blair.

It's over 940 days now since our Tone promised to resign. That's nearly three years of lies, war and deceit from 'New Labour.'

Rumour has it he's going to go before the likely-to-be-disastrous Scottish election results.

And about time too.

Try not to cry on your way out the door, there's a good chap.

2007 Predictions

I suppose I am a little tardy rolling out my predictions a fortnight into the new year, but I really did want to chew them over first. Last thing I need is to have you all on my back come December going ner-ner-ner-ner-ner! at me for getting it all wrong.

So here are my predictions for 2007, carefully considered and guaranteed to come true or your money back.* Get down to the bookies now!

Mystic JC gazes into his crystal ball and sees:

1. The NI elections will see a bump in the SDLP vote, but not enough to overhaul Sinn Fein. Both parties will hail their performances as a success. The UUP will similarly close on the DUP and both parties again will claim public support for their strategies. Ian Paisley will then find further nit-picking reasons not to enter power-sharing, and the whole process will end up on ice again, and Northern Irish citizens will still be denied democracy.
2. More American troops will enter Iraq, which will deteriorate further, if that is indeed possible. The US government will blame Iranian influences within Iraq for the upsurge in violence and, with the support of Tony Blair, though without British troops, will attempt to overthrow the Ahmedinejad regime.
3. The destruction of Afghanistan will continue apace, in media silence and to no particular outcry from the Western world. Al-Qaeda will retain a presence there, and British and American troops will start to leave in order to free up manpower for Iraq, and later, Iran. Opium will flow out of the place, children will starve, women will be suppressed and many people will die needlessly.
   
4. Fianna Fail will be returned to power in a bad-tempered election marked by the emergence of negative campaigning for the first time in Ireland. Expect particular trouble in the Dublin Central constituency, where Bertie the cheque signer faces off against the fashion wing of the Republican movement, Mary-Lou.
5. However, the PDs will not be returned to power, leaving McDowell in control of himself only in the Dail, as Mary Harney, Mae Sexton and the rest all bow out ungraciously. The PDs will be behind Joe Higgins' Socialists in parliament after they secure a second seat.
6. The Shinners will boost their number of TDs, but not so much as to create a hung Dail. Bertie will make up the numbers of his government with randomers like Jackie Healy-Rae as he did previously.
7. Enda Kenny will face a leadership challenge, as will Pat Rabbitte. Enda may survive his, but Pat will not. Expect to see Brendan Howlin in charge of Labour by year's end.
   
8. Tony Blair will finally get thrown out of Number Ten, to be replaced by Gordon Brown after a late party leadership challenge from John Reid and some other numpties. 'New' Labour will continue to ignore the needs of the British working class despite the figurehead change, and will continue to leak support to the Tories. The BNP, Respect and Scots and Welsh nationalist votes will all inexorably rise.
9. The Basque peace process will collapse, leading to further sporadic bombings and violence. Shinners will wring their hands about it and talk about the need for dialogue.
10. Conflicts will flare across Africa, in Sudan, Somalia, and along the Western coast. But that happens every year, so that's not really much of a prediction, I admit.
    
11. Manchester United will win the Premiership, leading to the 'mutually agreed' departure of Jose Mourinho from Chelsea. In a fit of pique, he will take Frank Lampard with him to Real Madrid. Whoever wins the Barcelona-Liverpool tie will win the Champions' League.
12. There will be a major spike in oil prices again.

That's your lot! Thanks for listening. Remember, I'm on 5% of all winnings, which can be remitted to me in used notes of either Euro or Sterling (no soft currencies like the dollar, which is going down further this year than a deep-throating hooker). Non-consecutive numbers please.




*Guarantee dependent on acts of God, and of people who think they're God, like Georgie Bush, Tony Blair, Jose Mourinho, etc.

There's more than one holocaust being denied

I've been thinking all week about the Iranian conference on the holocaust, and all sorts of things are disturbing me about it.

Obviously, there are the initial concerns about holocaust denial in general. Western media coverage has been vociferous in its condemnation of the motley crew of white supremacists, rogue rabbis, neo-Nazis and other dubious types who gathered in Tehran to 're-examine' the holocaust.

I share the concern that so many varied interests would seek to deny the mass murder of millions of people. It is certainly deeply worrying to see so many bizarre fellow travellers gathered together with the intention of casting doubt on the historical veracity of the holocaust.

But there are plenty of other things to get concerned about in relation to this conference. The first would be the erosion of the concept of journalistic objectivity. When BBC correspondents happily say that one must 'take sides' when reporting a story, I get very worried about whether even good old Auntie Beeb can be relied upon to provide objective reportage rather than propaganda anymore.

The result of this lack of objective reporting is that we in the West fail to either understand why this conference was convened, nor what it's ultimate purpose is.

In one sense, it is a knee-jerk response to the 'freedom of speech' defence offered by Danish newspapers and others after they published derogatory cartoons about the prophet Muhammed which were deeply offensive to Muslims worldwide.

And in that regard, one is forced to ask, in what way has the West's adherence to the Holocaust come to resemble an article of religious faith? We have laws in countries like France and Austria that send people to jail for questioning the holocaust, just as we once had laws on heresy.

Whether these laws genuinely impact upon the ability of historians to examine World War Two is debatable, but there is no doubt that they act as a genuine infringement upon the concept of freedom of speech.

Then there is the issue close to Iranian President Ahmedinejad's heart - the formation of Israel in Palestine following World War Two. Like so many Muslims, especially his Arab neighbours, Ahmedinejad is outraged by the continuing atrocity committed on the Palestinian people by the Jewish state.

His analysis traces the formation of the state of Israel to European guilt at how the Jewish population of Europe was treated during the 1930s and 1940s, and he has asked in the past why a Jewish homeland could not have been created in Europe instead of on Palestinian lands following the war.

And that, unlike querying the historical veracity of the holocaust, is a fair question to ask. But the West's continuing Holocaust guilt ensures blind loyalty to the Zionist state, so that our media tends to ignore or seek to justify Israeli atrocities committed against the people whose homes, lands and lives they stole and continue to steal.

There is little doubt that the Iranian President would wish to see the eradication of the state of Israel. He has said as much in the past. But despite how Israel and their US supporters would like to spin it, this is not the same as calling for a second holocaust. Basically, Ahmedinejad's position is that the Jewish homeland should not be located on land stolen from others.

The whole issue of holocaust denial is more complex than many in the West realise. Thanks to continued Israeli and general Jewish insistence that there was only one holocaust (usually with a capital H for added effect), we are generally left in ignorance about other genocides which were equally horrific, such as the Turkish holocaust against its Armenian minority which inspired the Nazis, or indeed the Naqba which Zionists perpetrated upon the Palestinian people.

Intriguingly, the official Israeli position in relation to the Armenian holocaust is that it didn't happen. Why is this their position? Because secular Turkey is one of their few friends in the entire region, and because Turkey itself still has laws to lock up people like this year's Nobel laureate in literature Orhan Pamuk for 'defaming Turkey', when they highlight this atrocity in Turkey's history.

So Israel itself is happy to deny a holocaust despite posters about it littering every wall in the Armenian quarter of the old city of Jerusalem. But they aren't very happy when the holocaust which led to the foundation of their own state is queried in Iran.

To my mind, the coverage this Tehran conference has received is deeply suspect and disingenuous. The howling headlines in usually sober British broadsheets must be seen in the context of George Bush and Tony Blair's phoney war with Iran, as well as the erosion of impartial reporting.

Blair is off to Turkey at the moment, in an attempt to patch up relations which have gone frosty as the EU backs away from Turkish accession. Will this great warrior against holocaust denial raise the issue of the Armenians with his hosts? Of course not.

And while George Bush seeks to make a case for the invasion of Iran due to a potential nuclear weapons capacity, a case as spurious as the one made against Saddam's Iraq, will he also invade Israel, after Ehud Olmert admitted accidentally to his country's nuclear capacity? Of course not.

We are utterly right to condemn those who would seek to deny the deaths of six million people in the last century in Nazi death camps. They are inhumanly wrong.

But if we cannot understand the reasons that underpin the hosting of this conference, we will inevitably find ourselves watching from the sidelines as America and Britain jihad across the entire Muslim world in order to placate Israel's unending imperialist quest for an Eretz-Israel cleared of its indigenous population and surrounded by weak or occupied Arab states.

The evil that men do

It's not been a great week for world peace so far, when all's said and done.

On the down side, mass-murdering rightist nuthouse General Pinochet kicked the bucket without ever going on trial for overthrowing the Allende regime and subsequently 'disappearing' tens of thousands of people during his reign of terror.

Ethiopia's former psycho leader Mengistu Haile Mariam was found guilty of committing genocide during his 'red terror' regime that led to mass famine in the country. But since he's hiding out in Zimbabwe with his old pal Mugabe, there's little chance of him facing prosecution either.

Then, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert let slip the Middle East's worst-kept secret - the weapons of mass destruction reside in the Negev Desert under IDF control, not in Iraq at all.

And while mass murderers like Mugabe, Mengistu and others continue to roam free from harm, the might of the West remains pointed at the poor, beleaguered people of Iraq, dozens of whom died in the latest round of bombings.

When will we ever see the West intervene in a genuine tragedy? It was aid agencies who responded to the Tsunami, to the Ethiopian famine. When a bitter little genocide breaks out in Africa, it is the African Union we send in to resolve it, not our own troops.

Countries like West Papua, currently and viciously occupied by Indonesia, Tibet, all but devastated by the Chinese, or Burma, controlled by a murderous junta, could all do with some regime change, but you won't see Tonee or Dubya arranging an invasion in any of those places.

The evil men do is compounded by the lack of action of others. For a petty tyrant like Mengistu or Pinochet to succeed and survive, they require if not the overt support of the West, then at least their tolerance for the regime to continue.

As our governments act to destroy Iraq for at least the fourth time in a single century, it might be pertinent to remind them that their self-appointed roles as global police are not mandated by the UN, and that it is the job of police to protect everyone, and not just their own oil interests.

If they truly wish to spread democracy, let them over throw al-Saud and his Wahhabist state that bred the 9/11 killers. Let them restore democracy to the poor people of Zimbabwe, so tortured by their own maniacal leadership.

If they wish to rid the Middle East of weapons of mass destruction, let them disarm and cease providing support to Israel, whose nukes reside, according to that brave whistleblower Mordecai Vanunu, at Dimona in the Negev.

Remember, Israel has always refused to permit weapons inspections of the Dimona site, and locked Vanunu up for decades for telling the British media about their sordid little secret.

So, why no American invasion of Israel, which is also in breach of a series of UN resolutions? After all, much sketchier evidence (let's say, none whatsoever) was used to justify the current atrocity in Iraq.

If they want peace in our time, let them quit starting all these disingenuous wars that their own people object to. Let them instead turn their attention to the scores of mass murderers that, like Pinochet and Mengistu, manage to retire without punishment.

Of course, to tread down that path would mean to bear close scrutiny for their own war crimes in Afghanistan, in Iraq. It would tempt people to seek to bring Blair and Bush to account for the murder of civilians.

And that would never do.

As I said, it's been a bad week for world peace, and it's only Tuesday.

Sorry seems to be the easiest word

Teflon Tone is, apparently 'sorry' about Britain's role in the slave trade. I wasn't actually aware that the UK was still trading in slaves. They're not? So why apologise now, two centuries after the evil practice was abandoned?

This stunt is reminiscent of his apology to Ireland for Britain's fault during the Irish potato famine, which was delivered on the 150th anniversary of the Great Hunger back in 1997.

On the one hand, it's sort of nice that Tony at least recognises that these were great wrongs. On the other, his predeliction for looking up anniversaries of horrors to apologise for smacks of PR nonsense.

By apologising for things that happened generations before his birth, he can give the impression of being a compassionate leader, a Christian soul moved by the sins of his forefathers.

But if he really feels the degree of remorse about evil actions committed by the British state, why the reticence in assuming responsibility for those he actually caused himself, such as the current state of Iraq?

And if Blair was genuinely animated about the evil of slavery today, would British troops not be in West Africa, preventing child labour today, or in Darfur protecting the Black southern Sudanese from their northern kidnappers, or in Eastern Europe, where women are being trafficked into the sex industry?

Britain benefited economically from both the slave trade and the Irish famine, and while mealy mouthed apologies are possibly preferable to no apology at all, no reparations appear to be forthcoming.

Both Africa and Ireland remain torn by divisions caused by British overlordship to this day, and the continuum of British influence in the Middle East has been an ongoing reason for the many internecine troubles afflicting that region.

Will Blair's successor one day be apologising to the Iraqi people some time in the 23rd century? And if so, what good will it do them anyway?