Breathing Difficulties

He has a chronic lung condition, he had a stroke last year, and now Julian Assange has been diagnosed with Covid-19. They are determined to kill him, the easier to wage war on Iran. Iranian-made drones on the Russian side in Ukraine are suddenly considered newsworthy.

We know what the protesters in Iran are against, but what are they for? There are all sorts of Iranian dissidents, but we are determined to concentrate on the ones whom we might like, and whom we hope might like us. How did that work out in 1979? Being an enemy of bad people does not necessarily make one a good person.

Bringing us back to Ukraine, where the suicide bomber of the Kerch Bridge does seem to have been a Syrian, one of the IS fighters who have been brought in via NATO Turkey. It is no wonder that General Sergei Surovikin has been called in on the other side. But the attack itself was planned by British Intelligence, just as there are serving British Officers in the command room of the Saudi war on Yemen, the cause of the biggest humanitarian catastrophe in the world, but affecting people who do not "look like us". We know these things. They are not secret. Ignoring them is purely an editorial choice.

By whatever means and on whatever basis, a nuclear-armed Permanent Member of the United Nations Security Council has decided that Crimea, Luhansk, Donestsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson are not even its colonies, but integral parts of its homeland, so that what that state would perceive as an attack on any of them would be met accordingly. If the line from GCHQ is that the Russian Army is clapped out, which would be perfectly true, then that Army is obviously no threat to us. Would you die for which country Kerch should be in? Nor should you.

All of this is just the reality. It always will be. Call it "the rules-based international order". Or grow up, and join those of us who have always mocked to scorn the suggestion that there was any such thing. The bombing of Ukraine is limp-wristed compared to that of Yugoslavia, or Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Libya, or Syria, or Somalia, or Yemen. Take it up with the Palestinians.