despair

at work... still!!!
listening to led zep's song remains the same - and a fine fine cd it is too.

and to bring a downer on my mood some thing from the guardian newspaper

"Jacques Chirac, the French president and leader of Europe's anti-war camp, made no bones about his views when he declared that the US-led invasion of Iraq and toppling of Saddam Hussein had opened up a "Pandora's box which none of us can shut"."

and

""Is the world today safer than before the overthrow of the appalling Saddam?" Patten asked in the European parliament last week. "Is global terrorism in retreat? Are we closer to building bridges between Islam and the west? Is the world's only super-power more widely respected? Have the citizens in our democracies been treated in a way that will encourage them to give governments the benefit of the doubt next time they are told that force needs to be used pre-emptively to deal with an imminent threat? I simply pose the questions. The answers are well known.""

(for whole article go here )

the sad part of it all is that the only people to blame are those in power in the UK and the USA.
i'll be the first to admit that i was not against the war per se (oh hell now i am sounding like kerry) but i was never a believer in the reasons that bush, blair et al cited.
me i thought saddam was a bastard and probably the world and it's granny would be better off if he were gone.
(the only problem with that view is - if you take out that dictator where do you stop?)
so instead of being honest bush and blair ran through the litany of wmd's, links to terrorism and to osama etc etc. only belatedly talking about human rights and democracy.

perhaps the real reason was bush and the neocons thought it was time to close out old business and to get themselves some nice oil (cuts down on the reliance on the saudis).
blair i have no idea why he did it, other than he thought it was the right thing to do.

now we have a situation where saddam is gone - but the whole area looks as if it is going to be more and more destabilised and therefore a more clear and present danger to us all than it was before the invasion/liberation - or whatever we want to call it.
and the iraqi's are no closer to democracy than before.

but what does democracy mean.
in the usa bush and kerry indulge in negative polling over contested war records. when the questions should be what are you going to do for the poor and needy in your country and in the rest of the world.
(america is the hyperpower and frankly we need it to be governed properly and not in the interests of a minority of it's people).
while over here blair pushes through the fox hunting ban (like most of us care) and for some bizarre reason this ends up with a threat to the democratic running of the country. now that is a nice lesson for the people in iraq.
perhaps we should teach them fox hunting and then ban it.