Words

BBC News

The UN have come up with a resolution and the vote was unanimous. Full text courtesy of the BBC above.

Meanwhile, Israel has stepped up its actions and Amerika (who have approved the above) has shipped an urgent consignment of "cluster bombs" to Israel on condition that "they use them carefully". Exactly how one uses these waepons "carefully" is beyond this author's imagination.

The last fews days have been busy here in Britain. News of the detail about the present alleged terror threat has emerged slowly, mostly from US and Pakistani sources. The timing of this may have distracted our attention from the mid-east but it does look to be the real thing. Sharing intel with Amerika seems at odds with the secrecy of our own government and Bush seems to have been very quick to capitalise on his fore-knowledge of this operation - using it both to discredit democratic winner Lamont and also for a new speech re-iterating Amerika's war with "Islamic Facists". The latter statement looks like yet another shift in terminology, notwithstanding the fact that for facism to exist there would have to be a central command structure to the enemy.

The very fact that this latest attack was planned by dis-affected British citizens who are ignorantly and blindly walking into the propaganda of a fundamentist cause which has no defined structure nor any sane idealogical outcome is more symptomatic of government foreign policy failures than the presence of any organised army. If a significant threat of consolidated "facism" does ever emerge from the Islamic world, it will more than likely be the result of similar tendencies in the dictates of the increasingly fundamentist attitudes prevelant in the military-industrial complex of the so-called "civilised" west.

Britain learned the hard way with Northern Ireland that communication and compromise were ultimately the only weapons where two intransient forces were resorting to terrorism as a method of warfare. The solution wasn't easy, nor is it even yet fully resolved. But it does to some extent provide a model for an alternative to all-out war. Until the UN can learn to mediate without partiality, the international community will continue to suffer the war games of unmoderated opportunism. Whether the cause of conflict is greed, disaffection or disenfranchisement becomes almost irrelevent.

Later.