New war resolutions

THE new year has dawned. Traditionally, it is thought of as a time of hope and renewal. Many people force themselves to find something to look forward to. This time that task has been rendered that much harder by the prospect that the year’s first defining event on a global scale is likely to be carnage. A deliberate, controlled, gratuitous act of carnage. An avoidable act of carnage.

And if this assumption proves correct, chances are that the remainder of the year will be filled with its consequences. The assumption itself is based on the observation that the United States of America has no intention of sending its troops into battle during the searing Gulf summer, nor will it wish to sustain over a long period its extensive military build-up in the region.

But what if the United Nations arms inspectors fail to find anything suspicious in time? Will that make the slightest bit of difference? Perhaps. The absence of clear-cut evidence will not, of course, incline the US towards giving Iraq the benefit of the doubt. It would, however, make it extremely difficult for the UN Security Council to endorse a second military adventure in the Gulf. That may be irrelevant for all practical purposes, but it will serve to make painfully clear Washington’s isolation (give or take a Tony Blair or two) in the context of its vendetta against Baghdad.

The fundamentalists in the Bush administration have from the outset looked upon the inspections regime as little more than an inconvenience, and have sought to undermine it at every step. They were opposed to the very idea of George Bush going to the UN, and when Colin Powell temporarily got the better of them, they made sure that the president went to the Security Council armed with an ultimatum rather than a request.

They were hoping against hope that Iraq would summarily reject the aggressive resolution that the council ultimately came up with. When it didn’t, their next ploy was to denigrate the inspections and, in some cases, to malign the inspectors. Administration spokespersons have apparently been instructed to describe the inspections as “unsatisfactory” at every available opportunity.

There may have been cause for dissatisfaction had the inspectors been denied access to suspicious sites. That has not happened: they have been able to visit, with not a hint of hindrance, any place they have wished to, from presidential palaces to baby-milk factories. The trouble is, they have not so far found any traces of anything that could be described as a weapon of mass destruction.

To the decision-makers in the White House, this suggests that the inspectors could be incompetent or corrupt, or that the inspections are not intrusive enough. No matter how thoroughly the UN experts scour the nation, their performance will fail to satisfy the US — unless they are able to come up with at least a few vials of smallpox vaccine, or are able to provoke the Iraqis into asking them to leave the country (as North Korea has recently done).

The US fails to recognize any contradiction between demanding aggressive inspections and statements by some of its most senior officials, including Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, claiming that the process of inspections is a waste of time.

As Arab diplomats at the UN have been pointing out, Washington’s entire approach leaves Saddam Hussein with no incentive for coming clean. Were he, for example, to confess tomorrow that Iraqi scientists have indeed been working on chemical, biological or nuclear weapons in recent years, and that the nation has some such weapons stockpiled which he would now be willing to surrender, what would the likeliest consequence be? “We told you so,” Bush would intone while giving his commanders in the Gulf the go-ahead.

If, on the other hand, Saddam Hussein continues to insist that his arsenals are empty and the inspectors are unable to come up with any evidence to the contrary, the US will simply claim that the Iraqi regime has predictably succeeded in outwitting the UN detectives. A military assault will follow.

Saddam Hussein recently sought to match the US in the propaganda department by inviting his chief foe to send CIA agents to Iraq to seek out dangerous weapons. His audacity failed to elicit a meaningful response from the American side; it would only have made sense to take up the offer had anyone in the White House been seriously interested in averting a war. And he was probably aware of reports that CIA operatives are indeed already in Iraq, armed with money bags, trying to buy the loyalty of Iraqi tribes — a strategy that apparently worked wonders in Afghanistan.

Chief weapons inspector Hans Blix recently called the US and Britain’s bluff by asking them to share their intelligence with the UN teams — if the Bush and Blair regimes are so utterly convinced that Iraq possesses weapons it should not have, then they must know something the rest of the world does not. That being the case, it would surely be logical to share that information with those tasked with smoking out the alleged stockpiles.

Washington’s possessiveness in relation to information about Iraq was crudely demonstrated last month when it grabbed the dossier Baghdad had submitted about its weaponry and bullied the Security Council into giving it copying and distribution rights. The 12,000-page inventory was photocopied in the US capital rather than at the UN headquarters, apparently because of security concerns.

The impetus for American hooliganism became clear shortly afterwards, when it emerged that the non-permanent (and non-nuclear) members of the Security Council could not be trusted to see the whole report, and were offered a truncated version. Only Syria raised an objection.

The missing pages contained, among other things, a list of the firms — most of them based in nations that are permanent members of the council — that had, before 1991, supplied Iraq with components of chemical and biological weapons. The American companies in question had invariably done so with the acquiescence of federal authorities, during the Reagan and Bush Senior administrations — many of whose stalwarts are now key members of the Bush Junior brigade. The past is clearly not a different country, but they are reluctant to revisit it all the same.

As the indefatigable John Pilger recently noted, Cheney and Rumsfeld, along with Deputy Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz and Zalmay Khalilzad, Bush’s ambassador to the “new” Afghanistan, are among the founders of the Project for a New American Century, which two years ago came up with a report charting US aims in the 21st century. Not surprisingly, many of its key recommendations have been accepted.

Among these was the instruction that in the event of Bush coming to power, Iraq should be a primary target. Not because of its military capabilities, nor because of the nature of the Ba’ath Party’s dictatorship. Pilger quotes the report as saying: “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”

In other words, for all the passion lately invested in the concept, “regime change” is not an end in itself but the means to an end. That end can be spelt out in three letters: O.I.L.

A subsidiary objective is to ensure that no harm comes to Israel. And the latter gave proof of its willingness to chip in when Ariel Sharon announced Israeli intelligence agencies had evidence that Iraq had been transferring its so-called WMDs to Syria. Damascus responded with a stout rebuttal, but the damage had been done. The charge is just plausible enough to create doubts, and to bolster Washington’s line, even though Iraqi and Syrian Ba’athists have always been at loggerheads. However, had the charge been credible, chances are it would not have been publicly aired — not, at any rate, by the crude Sharon, himself a formidable weapon of mass destruction. Yet it does fit in seamlessly with American efforts to insinuate, subliminally or otherwise, that Saddam is up to no good. “US suspects Al Qaeda got nerve agent from Iraqis”, The Washington Post announced a couple of weeks ago. On delving into the small print, however, it quickly becomes obvious that the insinuation is based on little more than wishful thinking.

Meanwhile, The New York Times, citing Pentagon and administration officials, tells us that “the Defence Department is considering issuing a directive to the US military to conduct covert operations aimed at influencing public opinion and policymakers in friendly and neutral countries”. The report specifically mentions Germany (which recently made clear that it would contribute not a single deutschemark to the war effort) and Pakistan. As if there was not enough disinformation being dished out already!

Must all hope, then, be abandoned? Perhaps not. There are always counter-examples to the seemingly inexorable drift towards inhumanity. Such as Kenneth Nichols O’Keefe, a former US marine who fought in the first Gulf War and was disgusted by the experience.

He intends later this month to lead a convoy of perhaps hundreds of Europeans and Americans into Iraq. Not to kill Iraqis but to express solidarity with them over their plight by acting as human shields at key installations.

O’Keefe is under no illusions. “We will run the risk,” he says, “of being maimed or killed — but .... I would rather die in defence of justice and peace than ‘prosper’ in complicity with mass murder and war.”

It is a worthy gesture. And a brave one, too. Yet it cannot entirely allay the impression that another low, dishonest, devious and bloody year has just come to an end.

Welcome to the next one.

E-mail: mahirali@ozemail.com.au

EU: integration with a difference

WHEN in 1982, the council of ministers of the European Community (as the European Union was then called) failed to approve of necessary funds for celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the European Community (established in 1957), Peter Dankert, the Dutch President of the European parliament compared the EC to “a cardiac patient, too demoralized to celebrate even his own birthday.” But within three years, in 1985, not only was the patient sitting up in bed but was fit enough to be up and about. The decision to have a single EC market by 1992 and to conclude the Single European Act proved a significant milestone on the road to European integration.

even before the recent decision of the Copenhagen summit to admit ten more states into the European Union, the EU was the world’s largest economic bloc. With a single market comprising 375 million people with free movement of goods, services, capital and (to a great extent) labour, throughout the community, and a common currency already adopted by twelve of the existing fifteen states, the EU is a role model for regional cooperation.

By virtue of its two permanent seats on the UN Security Council, its close relations with the US, its role in Nato and its extensive links with Third World states, the European Union plays an influential role in shaping the political and economic contours of the emerging new world.

The just concluded EU summit in Copenhagen and the recent Nato summit in Prague, which have been instrumental in bringing within their fold formerly communist East Europe states, represent the successful culmination of a decade of

East European foreign policy-making. The Nato summit extended the defence alliance to the Baltic and the Black sea while the EU summit advanced the European Union to the gates of St. Petersburg and the Balkans.

At the Copenhagen summit, which concluded on December 13, ten member states were given the green light for accession to the Union in 2004. These include Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Slovenia in Eastern Europe, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania in the Baltics, and Malta and Cyprus. This enlargement and eastward expansion of the EU to accommodate ten more states, bringing the total membership to 25 is a giant step towards closer integration and unification of the European continent.

European Commission President Romano Prodi, hailing the decision, declared that “for the first time in history, Europe will become one because unification is the free will of its people.” He further said, “Our aim is one Europe and to make our continent a bastion of democracy and peace.”

With more than two dozen states in the expanded Union competing for attention and with the new entrants weighing in with their own priorities, the decision-making format of the European Commission and the council of ministers would have to be suitably adjusted if the enlarged Union is to function effectively. The ‘Convention on the future of Europe’ is in the process of drafting a new treaty which is expected to address some of the problems of integration.

Public opinion in a number of member states will also have to be further mobilized in support of the enlargement of the Union since the accession treaty pertaining to additional membership will have to be ratified by the parliaments of the fifteen existing members, the parliaments of the ten new entrants as well as by the European parliament and in some cases, through referendum.

It has been a cliche for European representatives to say that “the EC (now EU) was built on France-German reconciliation.” In the SAARC, regrettably, the France-German (substitute Indo- Pakistan0 reconciliation is yet to take place!

The EU’s positive image was seriously dented by its failure to reach a political consensus in time to pre-empt the tragedy of Yugoslavia / Bosnia in its midst. This reflected the inability of the EU’s common foreign and security policy to establish an effective coordinating mechanism to handle serious political and human crises, including dismemberment and civil wars. The Treaty of Amsterdam of 1997 has only partially rectified the situation by providing for limited majority voting in given situations, instead of the previously required consensus, thus enabling willing member states to adopt a proactive role in certain circumstances, even when other member states preferred to stay out.

This points to the existing dichotomy whereby economic integration within the Union represents the community’s supra- national character while the ‘Common Foreign and Security Policy’ (CFSP) still rests on a mode of inter-governmental cooperation prompted by the reluctance to subserve national sovereignty in sensitive diplomatic and defence areas to a common EU stance on a given issue.

On Turkey, the EU summit failed to set a firm date for opening accession negotiations.

The question of when to commence negotiations with Turkey, either in July 2005 as proposed by German Chancellor Schroeder and President Jacque Chirac of France or earlier as demanded by Ankara, was shelved till December 2004. This too was made conditional on Turkey “addressing swiftly remaining shortcomings in political reforms, particularly relating to human rights and protection of minorities.”

Although opinion in the EU member states on Turkey’s membership had been adversely affected in the wake of the anti- Islamic fallout of the 9/11 events, a number of factors provided Ankara with a certain leverage in the run-up to the Copenhagen summit.

These included US lobbying with the EU in view of Turkey’s strategic importance to Washington, especially in the context of the Iraq situation, the EU’s keenness for Turkish assent to unification of Cyprus to enable the divided island to enter the Union as a unified state and the need for Turkish assent to outstanding proposals for a grant of certain NATO facilities to the European Rapid Reaction Force.

The summit’s decision to postpone negotiations till December 2004 and its reiteration of the conditionalities demanded of Turkey came as a big blow to the Turks whose Prime Minister Abdullah Gul described the decision “as impossible to accept.”

What they said

As usual, many people said many things in 2002, and many people ate their words, with mustard and relish on them.

Sen. Trent Lott to his speechwriter: “I have to say something for Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday, and I want it to be something everyone will remember. And while you’re at it, write up a dozen apologies and also my resignation, in case my toast speech lays an egg.”

Karl Rove, the political advisor to the president: “The party of Lincoln has to do something to win the Afro-American vote.”

Aide to Secretary O’Neill: “He can’t fire you. The entire country would be up in arms and your dismissal would cause another Saturday Night Massacre.

Vice President Gore’s agent: “Al, if you don’t want to be president, I can get you a 13-week contract on ‘Saturday Night Live’.”

A lumber lobbyist to the Secretary of the Interior: “If you can’t see the redwood trees for the forest, then I say let us cut down the trees.”

The advisor to Queen Elizabeth, “If he keeps Diana’s papers, then sue him. He is nothing more than a butler, and you’re the queen.”

One of Michael Jackson’s lackeys: “Hang the baby over the balcony so your fans can see him.”

The U.S. official who was asked why the U.S. permitted Iraq to stock up on nerve gas antidotes: “We warned Iraq they could only use it with a doctor’s prescription.”

The CIA official who assured the president: “Take our word for it. The North Koreans don’t have a nuclear bomb, and if they did our people would know about it.”

The saleslady at Saks who said to Winona Ryder: “This dress would look beautiful on you. Why don’t you try it on in the dressing room?”

The bishop to Cardinal Law: “I’m sure all the pope will do is ask you to say three Hail Marys.”

CEO of a multibillion-dollar worldwide corporation: “Dr. Kissinger, you can either investigate the Sept. 11 affair or you continue consulting for us at an enormous fee — but you can’t do both.” Jack Welch’s lawyer: “Your wife has no right to ask for any money from you. We want this to be a friendly divorce.”

Phillip Morris lobbyist to Mayor Bloomberg: “Do you have a light?”

National security advisor to the president: “Here is the Iraqi report by the UN inspectors. Do you want me to read it to you? “

President Bush: “No. Let’s roll.”—Dawn/Tribune Media Services

One face, many masks: OF MICE AND MEN

AS you probably know, the great forest of Sunderbans in Bangladesh is the home of the world-famous striped Royal Bengal Tiger. Unlike the politicians of Pakistan (and maybe of Bangladesh too) tigers do not change their stripes. Nor do they pose as tigers today and zebras tomorrow.

But they do become fond of human meat sometimes and then they are classified as man-eaters and are a menace to the local village population. Our politicians too can be a menace, but thank God, they haven’t tasted human blood yet — literally, that is — though many of them have otherwise been known as blood- suckers.

Human beings think they are clever, cleverer at least than man-eating tigers. So, on the advice of the World Wildlife Fund (according to a report from Dhaka) they have adopted a stratagem to protect unwary villagers of the Sunderbans from man-eaters by providing them with ugly-looking masks that men working in the forest are supposed to wear on the back of the head.

The idea apparently is that the man-eater should take one look at the terrifying mask and slink away, thinking this was something out of Dracula or Frankenstein from which it had better keep away. the Fund experts seem to be sure the tiger will never ask the mask-wearing villager to turn around and show his real visage. They know that tigers do not go in for fine details.

Neither do the people of Pakistan, for that matter. That is perhaps their only similarity with tigers They know that their politicians, their elected representatives, government and opposition leaders, big businessmen, religious divines, intellectuals and legal eagles, all have two faces. But they never bother to look for the real man behind the public face.

Since the peasants and field workers in the Sunderbans wear a mask on the back of the head, one can at least make them turn around and disclose their real self. There is no reported case, but a clever tiger in the Sunderbans could, if he were a stickler for detail, growl at the mask and check if it was genuine or was meant to camouflage a frightened human face.

But if the tiger was really not bothered (like the people of Pakistan) or was in the pay of the World Wildlife Fund, it would just emit a bad-tempered roar and walk away, in search of a maskless human face. Which goes to show that the Wildlife Fund in Bangladesh is doing a fine job as long as it is kept in funds.

In Pakistan too, it is the funds that count. To prove this, one of the first acts of PM Zafarullah Jamali was to provide them to the newly-elected MNAs for self-development. There is also the fact that here our leaders in various fields wear too many masks, one on each side of the head. Some of them have been doing so for such a long time that they have themselves forgotten what they looked like when God made them. Were they to be shown a photograph of their original face they would be apt to exclaim, “Sorry, never saw the blighter before.”

The writer and PR official Munir Ahmed Sheikh, may God bless his soul, (he certainly had one) once wrote a sort of reportage on the heart bypass operation that he had had in London a few years before he died. He had become quite friendly with his physio-therapist, a no-nonsense woman. Despite Munir’s best literary and non-literary persuasion she was unable to appreciate the Pakistani male’s attitude towards the female sex. In despair she ended the discussion by saying, “You people are two-faced.”

She could not have spoken a truer word. And this was only about women. Had she been enlightened at some length on our attitude to other aspects of life, like politics, religion, education, commerce, personal integrity, etc., she would have found that even the expression “multi-faced” was inadequate to describe us. It certainly does not do full justice to the many roles that we can play with the ease of character(less) actor.

This reminds me of the full dozen personalities that Alec Guinness portrayed in the film “Kind Hearts and Coronets.” You couldn’t tell one from the other. Or rather it was impossible to say it was the same actor playing all those widely different roles, including those of women. Some of our public men could beat Alec Guinness any day.

Coming back to political leaders and their masks, tigers of the Sunderbans should be grateful for their good fortune and the World Wildlife Fund that they have to deal with human beings wearing just one mask. Imagine their consternation if they were to be confronted by a so-called eminent leader from Pakistan roaming the jungle complete with a whole set of masks, from that of a sanctimonious maulvi to an avid collector of brief cases stuffed with banknotes.

The poor thing would have gone into a spin, and would have been declared unfit as a leonine hero by the local assembly of Royal Bengal Tigers. After that hair-raising experience he would have been good only for the zoo or the Lucky Irani Circus, to impress awe-stricken children by jumping through hoops.

But what about the common people of Pakistan who have to deal with these politicians and religious leaders every day? Haven’t they been able to find them out even after so many decades of first-hand experience? Can’t they now see through the variety of masks that they put on to delude the public? Just witness their range. The humble political worker who actually begs for votes; the crusader who is ever-ready to make the people die for Islam; the elected man who wants to make up the lakhs spent by him on his election; the MNAs and MPAs running after free Land Cruisers and licences and permits and jobs for their near and dear ones; the legislator with the short memory who can’t remember election promises; the minister who has suddenly been transformed from an obsequious petty politician into an arrogant flag-bearer of the ruling regime. And so on.

All these roles require different masks. It‘s a pity, and no wonder, that the common man is bamboozled by each one of them. Which only goes to show that tigers (of the Sunderbans at least) are less gullible than the people of Pakistan.

As quality of life goes downhill

WITH the turning of every year, we expect our lives to improve. As long as the economy continues to grow, we imagine, the world will become a more congenial place in which to live. There is no basis for this belief. If we take into account such factors as pollution and the depletion of natural capital, we see that the quality of life peaked in the UK in 1974 and in the US in 1968, and has been falling ever since. We are going backwards.

The reason should not be hard to grasp. Our economic system depends upon never-ending growth, yet we live in a world with finite resources. Our expectation of progress is, as a result, a delusion.

This is the great heresy of our times, the fundamental truth which cannot be spoken. It is dismissed as furiously by those who possess power today — governments, business, the media — as the discovery that the earth orbits the sun was denounced by the late medieval church. Speak this truth in public and you are dismissed as a crank, a prig, a lunatic.

Capitalism is a millenarian cult, raised to the status of a world religion. Like communism, it is built upon the myth of endless exploitation. Just as Christians imagine that their God will deliver them from death, capitalists believe that theirs will deliver them from finity. The world’s resources, they assert, have been granted eternal life.

The briefest reflection will show that this cannot be true. The laws of thermodynamics impose inherent limits on biological production. Even the repayment of debt, the prerequisite of capitalism, is mathematically possible only in the short-term. As Heinrich Haussmann has shown, a single pfennig invested at five per cent compounded interest in the year AD 0 would, by 1990, have reaped a volume of gold 134 bn times the weight of the planet. Capitalism seeks a value of production commensurate with the repayment of debt.

Now, despite the endless denials, it is clear that the wall towards which we are accelerating is not very far away. Within five or 10 years, the global consumption of oil is likely to outstrip supply. Every year, up to 75bn tonnes of topsoil are washed into the sea as a result of unsustainable farming, which equates to the loss of around 9m hectares of productive land. As a result, we can maintain current levels of food production only with the application of phosphate, but phosphate reserves are likely to be exhausted within 80 years. Forty per cent of the world’s food is produced with the help of irrigation; some of the key aquifers are already running dry as a result of overuse.

One reason why we fail to understand a concept as simple as finity is that our religion was founded on the use of other people’s resources: the gold, rubber and timber of Latin America; the spices, cotton and dyes of the East Indies; the labour and land of Africa. The frontier of exploitation seemed, to the early colonists, infinitely expandable. Now that geographical expansion has reached its limits, capitalism has moved its frontier from space to time: seizing resources from an infinite future.

An entire industry has been built on the denial of ecological constraints. Every national newspaper in Britain lamented the “disappointing” volume of sales before Christmas. Sky News devoted much of its Christmas Eve coverage to live reports from Brent Cross, relaying the terrifying intelligence that we were facing “the worst Christmas for shopping since 2000”. The survival of humanity has been displaced in the newspapers by the quarterly results of companies selling tableware and knickers.

Partly because they have been brainwashed by the corporate media, partly because of the scale of the moral challenge with which finity confronts them, many people respond to the heresy with unmediated savagery.

Last week this column discussed the competition for global grain supplies between humans and livestock. One correspondent, a man named David Roucek, wrote to inform this writer that the problem is the result of people “breeding indiscriminately ... When a woman has displayed evidence that she totally disregards the welfare of her offspring by continuing to breed children she cannot support, she has committed a crime and must be punished. The punishment? She must be sterilized to prevent her from perpetrating her crimes upon more innocent children.”

There is no doubt that a rising population is one of the factors which threatens the world’s capacity to support its people, but human population growth is being massively outstripped by the growth in the number of farm animals. While the rich world’s consumption is supposed to be boundless, the human population is likely to peak within the next few decades. But population growth is the one factor for which the poor can be blamed and from which the rich can be excused, so it is the one factor which is repeatedly emphasized.

It is possible to change the way we live. Economist Bernard Lietaer has shown how a system based upon negative rates of interest would ensure that we accord greater economic value to future resources than to present ones. By shifting taxation from employment to environmental destruction, governments could tax over-consumption out of existence. But everyone who holds power today knows that political survival depends on stealing from the future to give to the present.

Overturning this calculation is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. We need to reverse not only the fundamental presumptions of political and economic life, but also the polarity of our moral compass. Everything we thought was good — giving more exciting presents to our children, flying to a friend’s wedding, even buying newspapers — turns out also to be bad. It is, perhaps, hardly surprising that so many deny the problem with such religious zeal. But to live in these times without striving to change them is like watching, with serenity, the oncoming truck in your path.—Dawn/Guardian News Service.

A sermon against war

War in February now looks very likely. The die is almost cast. It will be a bitter, hard fought war, baring little comparison to the easy run of ten years ago. With his back to the wall Saddam Hussein will fight in the toughest, cruellest way imaginable, luring the American and British invaders into the Iraqi cities where they will be butchered one by one and they in turn will wreak vengeance, intended or not, on the innocent, the trapped city dwellers.

President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, two men who in their own personal life have avoided war, should read Duong Thu Huong’s searing novel set in Vietnam where she as a young woman fought on the side of the Vietcong. Not only is it the most beautifully written novel I have read this year it tells you about war word by word, until you feel your own eyes have been gouged out, your own corpse hung from a branch, and the dizzying sense of carrion and gunpowder.

Bush and Blair talk of how a liberated Iraq will be, with a new democracy, human rights for all and the end of the horrific torture of Saddam’s opponents and their children (which was first brought to the world’s attention by Amnesty International fourteen years ago and ignored by the British and the US governments which then sold Saddam arms). But the worst of human wrongs is to kill 10,000 people (one Pentagon estimate). No human wrong of that proportion can justify some wildly optimistic scenario for improving human rights. And this is to put it mildly if in the end the US decides to use nuclear weapons, a proposition now seriously considered in the Pentagon.

I will mention a new book for the fireside, “War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning”, by Chris Hedges, a star war correspondent of the New York Times. Hedges made his reputation by covering wars in Central America, Iraq and Yugoslavia.

War, he admits “gives a sense that we can rise above our smallness and divisiveness.... In every society, including ours, is the passionate yearning for a nationalist cause that exalts us, that war alone is able to deliver”. But as time went on he realized he had made a great spiritual mistake.

He has watched war leaders and their fighting machines and the journalists who hang out with them become corrupted by war.

Hedges, who seems to have spent his precious spare moments as a war reporter reading the great works of western civilization, recalls of how, unable to sleep during the war in El Salvador, he picked up Shakespeare’s Macbeth. “It was not a calculated decision. I had come that day from a village where about a dozen people had been murdered by the death squads, their thumbs tied behind their backs with wire and their throats slit”.

He opened the play at the speech of Macduff’s wife made when the murderers sent by Macbeth arrive to kill her and her small children. “Whither should I fly?” she asks. “I have done no harm. But I remember now/I am in this earthly world- where to do harm/is often laudable, to do good sometime/ Accounted dangerous folly.”

Those words “seized me like furies” Hedges wrote. It drove him to write this unusual and searing book, deeply researched but its most precious insights culled from personal experience and his rich knowledge of our great literature in which he excels. If for a moment I thought Bush and Blair would give it time I would happily send them a copy to read in front of the fire.— Copyright Jonathan Power