Syria

Is there any country in the Middle East that the War Party does not believe has nuclear weapons? Oh yes, of course there is. The one that really does have them.

On and on Israelis and their yes men go about how backward Israel's neighbours are. Yet they allegedly have nuclear weapons facilities all over the place.

Everyone laughed at the cack-handed attempts engineer a war against Iran. But a war against somewhere has to have been launched too early for President Obama (or President McCain, no warmonger he, I suspect) to be able to prevent it.

So it looks like it's going to be Syria that does the honours, despite its large Christian population (much swelled by refugees from Iraq, on which and on much else see Robin Harris), its British-educated President, the fact that even Tony Blair used to quite like it, and the inescapable reality that secular authoritarian regimes in the Middle East are better bulwarks against Islamic fundamentalism than are arrangements such as we might prefer closer to home.

As Harris writes:

"The oppressive Syrian regime, which continues to make trouble in Lebanon, has, like Jordan, provided safe haven for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Christians. Indeed, secular authoritarian regimes may in such countries be preferable to weak, more open governments that allow Islamic extremists to flourish."

Has the War Party learned anything from Iraq? No, of course not.

And just how anti-British does a country have to be before the War Party stops doing its bidding? Compared to hanging teenage British conscripts with barbed wire and photographing it, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson seem almost anglophile. Though not quite.