Siempre Fidelísima

It looks as if Cuba did not ban Michael Moore's Sicko after all. But Cuba is the country to which I would move if I really did want a government that persecuted those who engaged in homosexual acts. I have written that many times, in various places. It really, really, really gets under certain people's skins.

Now that there is no longer an American Administration full of people who have never recanted their Trotskyism, President Obama should lift the entire blockade, which only attracts sympathy to this regime that does not deserve it, perhaps most notable as the model for Britain's impregnable pseudo-comprehensive schools by means of which the real, but vigorously self-denying, ruling class perpetuates itself from generation to generation. The Cuban pretend-exiles are in fact economic migrants and free to go back any time they like. Far from being conservative, they merely wish to restore the Cuba that existed before 1959, a giant drug den and brothel for the American super-rich.

But Nick Cohen really cannot forgive anyone who was right about Iraq. Whatever Iraq was like under Saddam Hussein, that was indisputably better than what Iraq is like now. How bad does that make what we have done in and to Iraq? Well, what you have done, Nick. Nothing to do with some of us. Indisputably better for Iraqi women, for Iraqi Christians, and for the Iraqi branch of that most Arab of phenomena, the Anglophile middle class, which you certainly don't get Somewhere Else In The Region. Just for a start. And yes, the Muslim-on-Muslim violence is also the inevitable consequence of the removal of the man who had kept a lid on it.

In fact, he was removed in order to flood Iraq with jihadis, the easier to shoot at them. At least, that was the idea. The Christians were the bait in this Straussian game, which should come as no surprise to anyone, since America and her little helpers are always friendliest towards the most anti-Christian regimes in the Middle East (Israel, Turkey, Egypt, the Gulf monarchs, what Iraq has become) against those most inclusive of Christians (Iran, Syria, Lebanon, the two parts of Palestine on either side of the Jordan, what Iraq used to be).