The Boy and The Coconut Tree

I am posting this because I wrote it in 2006 as the Iraq war began to wind-down and the post-war chaos was beginning. I am posting this again to remind people what happens when we intervene in another country and go after a bad man and how we claim to be doing the right thing yet do all the wrong things. Syria beware. Originally published June 2006 The latest on Saddam Hussein is that he is on hunger strike. Is he attempting to commit some form of asymmetrical war against the coalition? He has not yet died of starvation, so this cannot be seen as an act of war just yet. He is on hunger strike because "terrorists" have killed yet another one of his defence lawyers. The killing of Khamis al-Obeidi seems to be yet another delay on the road to trial for Saddam, who has been in coalition custody since December 2003. Saddam has asked for international protection for his defence team at his  trial , which is still in its early stages. One assumes the prosecution team is...

According to our chancellor, the British and our politicians will have some soul searching to do following the government's defeat in  parliament last night. Soul searching to do? The British people have a soul and they expressed it yesterday via their parliamentary democracy. We are not cowards, we are not racists, we are not helping the enemy but we are tired of imperialism masked as intervention, of regime change masked as "emergencies" and we are tired of helping out the USA, being the fig leaf to its naked militarism of recent times. The soul of the UK remembers that we helped create the international laws and conventions that we were about to break. We want international interventions to be backed by the international community, most of it not some of it and we want to do the right thing for the people here and in the world's worst places and our politicians cannot accuse us of being cowards or traitors for not wanting to attack Syria. And since the...