Don't Mention the War

This is all getting a bit out of hand. Not so long ago there was that nice Toniblair, a jolly nice chap charming the pants off the foreign types.

Mr Reasonable. Mr Peace and quiet.

Lets not squabble about who gets to march around Derry today. Lets have a nice peace process and chew the fat about a new Northern Ireland. See? Have a few beers and chill, dudes.

So how did we end up in this mess. On the verge of steaming into a scrap with a bogeyman thousands of miles away. A bogeyman who has seemingly done nowt but strut up and down on the telly with a Groucho Marx mustache.

Has he invaded Kuwait again? Has he been setting off scuds in the middle of the night? Has he been putting up Mr Blick in dodgy hotel rooms?

I'm trying so hard to work myself up into a a pro-war frenzy. It involves all sorts of stuff, like believing its not about keeping the yanks knee deep in the dirt cheap fuel they think they've a God-given right to. Like believing that this fragile paranoid worldwide economy we've so painstakingly built over the last thirty years is going to cope with all this just fine.

It's just a war after all.

We've had 'em before with no great bother. The last punch-up in the desert was like this big video game, with Stormin' Norman Schwartzkopf giving us a play-by-play super slo-mo of some precision bombing raid. OK there was the endless charred road to Bazra, and the burning oil wells and the depleted uranium everywhere, and the bogeyman still standing afterwards, but the free world was safe again wasn't it?

Well this time its about to kick off regardless. That Donald Rumsfeld more or less said it straight the other day. George Dubya couldn't give a darn about what the rest of the world thinks - not even that nice Toniblair. . All this is part of the ongoing War Against Terror anyway, and the average American thinks the war started eighteen months ago, so what's holding things up.

No International coalition this time, or even a decent pretext. The bow is drawn. The stealth bombers are ready to fly.

And poor old Tony Blair - he's stood by his big mates cross the pond, hoping that the Europeens would join in the bullyboy scare tactics.

Meantime, in the States there's been an official renaming of French Toast. It's now called Freedom Toast. Petty racist anti-French emails are flying across the Internet.

This is very interesting.

Perhaps the Americans will be working on the renaming of other imported concepts that it loves so much. Like Russian roulette perhaps...

B

Big thanks to Steven Barnes for wake-up call. Too right. We we're slacking lately, and you all deserve better!