Watch the Flag: Putin Comes to the American Elections

The media has been full of commentary on President Obama and Governor Romney's "aggressive" debate last night at Hofstra University. But as these two mouthpieces of corporate America squared up in their pseudo-boxing contest, the real aggression was taking place outside the gates of the University.

There, Green Party Presidential nominee Dr Jill Stein and her running mate Cheri Honkala, wrapped in the US flag, attempted to gain entry to the debate. Dr Stein pointed out that as she is on the ballot in 85% of states (local nomination rules in the remaining 15% make it virtually impossible for non-Democrat/Republican candidates to gain ballot access) she has satisfied the rules set by the League of Women Voters, which originally ran these debates. At least in theory she could win enough electoral college votes to become President and so, like John Anderson in 1980, and Ross Perot in 1992, she should be allowed to take part in the televised debates. But of course Anderson was a Republican Senator and Perot a multi-millionaire businessman.

Multimillionaire Perot made the 1992 debate

However, as the video below shows, the response of the authorities was not to open up the debate to the Greens, or any of the other "third party" candidates running. Instead, while Obama and Romney posed in their testosterone-fuelled debate as candidates for the alleged "leader of the free world", their Green rivals were arrested and handcuffed, driven to a special facility prepared to hold debate protesters, tied to chairs for eight hours and only finally released in the dead of night. 

This then is American democracy in the 21st century.

Last year, when the Russians staged-managed democracy led to protests on the streets of Moscow, Obama criticised President Putin's handling of the parliamentary elections. After last night's blatant suppression of free speech and democratic protest, America has finally been exposed for its utter hypocrisy in ever castigating other countries (and most especially Venezuela's exemplary elections) for the conduct of ballots and for daring to refer to itself as the Land of the Free.

Watch the video and as the two women are led away by police, one officer hurries to pick up the Stars and Stripes they were draped in when it falls on the ground. "Watch the flag!" he intones urgently.

Yes, indeed, Watch the flag.

Attack of the Drones

The last thing you will ever see ...

Under President Obama, the USA has massively increased its use of killer drones - unmanned, remotely piloted aircraft that seek out and destroy targets with aptly named Hellfire missiles at no risk at all to their operatives. The USAF is now training more drone pilots than "real" pilots, taking its warfare in countries like Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan to a new level. And France, UK and USA waged a massive drone war in Libya, taking out an entire regime without a single loss of a pilot - but with many casualties and massive damage left across the fields and deserts of Cyrenaica. Indeed, so complete was the destruction of key Libyan infrastructure, that one NATO commander complained that "It's getting more difficult to find stuff to blow up."

Historically, war has been limited to some degree by the fact that all combatant sides face the risk of casualties. This is what has led, ultimately, to humans seeking to avoid war - but with that element at least superficially removed, what constraint remains, what limits will not be broken?

America has now killed hundreds, possibly thousands, of women and children in supposedly focussed drone assaults to take out supposed (and sometimes real) terrorist targets, killing on an indiscriminately wide scale that in any other context would be decried by the USA itself as an act of terror, a war crime. Their actions are indeed illegal under international law, but the US abrogates itself of signing up to international law, just as it demands everyone else should observe it. The consequences are to turn both it and its British and other allies into pariahs, creating tens of millions of enemies among the vulnerable and poor by depending on brute force to ensure their continued supremacy, until the day comes, of course, when that will no longer be enough. The unending War on Terror is indeed a war of terror, and its unlimited span a self-fulfilling prophecy, a recipe for endless conflict. One of the types of drones is called the Reaper - and indeed, Obama and Cameron and co may want to reflect on the old saying that you shall reap as you sow...

And this is just the beginning. Many nations are now developing robot armies that, in ten or twenty years time will make drones look like stone age weapons - and the bad news for Obama is that, having set this precedent, it won't just be America and its satellites that will have these armaments. As we stand on the threshold of planetary destruction, we are letting our leaders sleepwalk us into armed oblivion. The Age of the Terminator beckons.

So what are we fighting for again?

"Our country can no longer speak with moral authority" 

                                                  - President Jimmy Carter on President Obama's "kill list"

Fighting for western values in the never-ending War against Terror. Bush and Blair used this line over and over; and so too have their successors, David Cameron in the UK and perhaps even more so "Democrat" President Obama.

In the name of this struggle, constitutional freedoms have been set aside, the centuries old principle of habeas corpus has been ripped up, a surveillance society has emerged across the planet, interventionist wars in Iraq, Libya and now Syria have encouraged intolerant strains of Islamism (paradoxically in the defence of supposedly democratic and increasingly aggressive Israel), and a host of new laws have criminalised previously legitimate acts of protest. The British Government is now proposing to hold some trials in secret, without juries, and the Americans are hinting at an attempt to extradite Julian Assange on a capital charge of treason should he ever leave the Ecuador embassy in London.

Meanwhile in South America, in one week two democratically elected leftwing Presidents have been deposed by judicial coups backed by the USA and its corporate masters. And now we also know that, as more American pilots are now being trained to fly remote-controlled drones from the comfort and safety of offices in the heart of the USA, hundreds and even thousands of civilians have already been killed in their strikes, and President Obama is operating a kill list. With this, he is  permitting Americans to assassinate people around the world in an orgy of international criminality which if, say, the Chinese were doing would probably by now have invited threats of nuclear assault from the White House. Often drones are used to undertake dreadfully (and deliberately) misnamed surgical strikes which slaughter dozens and scores of innocent bystanders - such as a recent mission which involved bombing a public funeral.

It makes you wonder, what is it exactly we are fighting for? What are these so-called western values which apparently set us so apart from the rest of humanity? And if they are so precious, why have they been so readily set aside?

"Oh, I got a live one here!" 

Minding Your Ns and Qs on WMDs - IRAN, not Iraq! Doh!

Well, it's an easy mistake to make...

From Facebook - "Labour: Taking Back Our Party" group


CHECK OUT - THE FIFTY AMERICAN MILITARY BASES SURROUNDING IRAN @ THE ECOSOCIALIST- click HERE

BUSH: "This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. And having said that, all options are on the table."
OBAMA: "“No options off the table means I’m considering all options (on Iran).”

WHY THE LONG FACE?

Obama Campaign To Launch...Missiles at Iran?

OBAMA TO LAUNCH ELECTION CAMPAIGN ON THE END OF A PATRIOT MISSILE

From the Jerusalem Post:
"Last week, Lt.-Gen. Frank Gorenc, commander of the US’s Third Air Force based in Germany,
 visited Israel to finalize plans for the upcoming drill, expected to see the deployment of several thousand American soldiers in Israel."
http://www.jpost.com/Defense/Article.aspx?id=250249

It has long been anticipated, but it increasingly looks as if American-Israeli strikes against Iran are drawing near. This is in spite of repeated assessments by the Intelligence community that Iran is not actively developing nuclear weapons and in spite of the long standing historical fact that Iran has never attacked another country in modern times. It is worth reflecting though, that Iran is surrounded by hostile nuclear weapon states, including Israel and other US satellites.

But with rightwing Republicans cheered by the emergence of Rick Santorum in Iowa's primary caucuses, Obama will be wanting more than ever to appeal to the voters the surging challenger thanks God for wanting to "cling on to their guns and bibles!"

A bad new year looms in the Gulf. As ever. Arab Spring, followed by nuclear winter?

Iran's nuclear noose:

Iran's nuclear noose - its' neighbours India, Pakistan, Russia and Israel are armed with nuclear weapons, while US & UK forces based nearby in Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, Iraq and Cyprus have ready access to atomic arsenals.

Murder On The Cheap - America's B-Movie "Bomb Plot" Plot

"It reads like the pages of a Hollywood script," FBI Director Robert Mueller conceded yesterday as his officials outlined what is fast becoming a widely debunked and ludicrous set of claims that the Iranian Government was involved in a plot to hire Mexican drug runners to bomb a Washington, DC restaurant and kill the Saudi ambassador to the USA, along with a very precise 100 bystanders.

The handler of this plot, the alleged deep-sleeper (comatose, it appears, for the last 30 years), is Manssour Arbabsiar, an American-Iranian car salesman from Texas, who was allegedly given $100,000 by Iran to set up the plot, the idea being that if Mexicans carried out the attack, no one supposedly would point a finger at the Middle East, let alone Iran.  The Quds Force, a unit within the Iranian military that has been involved in military activities in neighbouring countries such as Afghanistan, has been accused of planning the operation - except that commentators around the world have quickly pointed out that the amateurish nature of the plot and the high risk step of involving Mexican drug dealers would be totally out of character for this highly professional organisation.

It would be out of character, too, for Quds Force or indeed Iran itself to be involved in any terrorist activities against the USA. Quds, set up during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s (when Saddam Hussein was the West's favoured belligerent), has a history of involvement beyond Iran's borders - but only just. It has been active in Kurdistan, Lebanon and Yemen. Its main focus over the years has actually been in its troubled neighbour, Afghanistan, where Iran long opposed the Taliban regime, and actively supported the American invasion of 2001. Indeed, Quds operatives fought alongside the Americans in the attack on Herat, a key point in the ousting of the Taliban regime. Of course, as blogged last year, America was quick to turn on Iran in spite of then President Khatemi's repeated attempts at reconciliation.

With many in the international diplomatic community sceptical of the US claims, which Tehran hotly denies, the story may begin to unravel, though today President Obama appears to be clinging, Bush-like (or Bush-lite) to the ludicrous claims about a bomb plot. Not only would Mexican drug runners appear to be a strange choice of operative for Quds, the alleged price of the deal, $100,000, frankly seems a bit on the cheap side for such an important operation. On the other hand, it might have sounded like quite a large amount to the drug dealer the FBI co-opted to sting the car dealer in return for immunity from prosecution. That said, he turns out to have been a drug dealer with a heart - worrying about bystanders being killed, to which the wild-eyed crazy car salesman reportedly told him “They want that guy [the Ambassador] done [killed], if the hundred go with him f**k ‘em.” 

Iran claims the whole thing is a plot by Obama to distract Americans' attention from the Wall Street protests and bad economic news. While this may well be a side-effect the White House will eagerly wish for, it seems unlikely. The truth may lie somewhat closer to Iran's borders, with the beleaguered Saudi kingdom. The Sunni regime in Riyadh has been nervous of growing restlessness among Shia Muslims in the Gulf states, not least in Bahrain where earlier this year they sent their military to crush the pro-democracy protests. With America very gradually courting other regional powers, the House of Ibn Saud has increasingly needed a perceived Iranian threat to provide the counter-balance and keep America on side with the Saudi regime. And so, if we discount the car dealer simply being an affluent fantasist, we are left with the real possibility that sabre rattling Saudi Arabia, which Wikileaks showed has repeatedly lobbied the USA to go to war with Iran, has been doing a spot of conjuring. President Obama might want to reflect on who his bedfellows are before killing any Persians.

It is possible some rogue individuals, possibly Arbabasiar and associates, have planned something on their own initiative, but Iran itself would have nothing to gain from the alleged plot other than to be confirmed as the bogeyman the American media and political establishment repeatedly portray it as being. Again and again, US sources vaguely imply Iranian sponsorship of terrorism. But the truth is very different - Iran does fund Hizbollah in the Lebanon, but the nature of its support is as often in the form of funding for building reconstruction (especially after the pulverising of tens of thousands of civilian homes by Israel during its 2006 invasion) and health services as any military support. Hizbollah itself, while maintaining a lot of fiery anti-Israeli rhetoric, is now in effect a relatively normalised political party, elected as part of a multi-faith coalition, the March 8 Alliance,  including Catholic and Maronite Christians and Druze, in the Beirut Parliament and part of the governing coalition since January this year.

By contrast, repeatedly under-reported in the west is the ongoing terror campaign against Iran, and especially against its scientific community, by Israel with at least the tacit support of the USA. This "decapitation" strategy was launched in 2009 in the dying days of the Bush Presidency, when Dubbya's hopes of attacking Iran were stymmied by a CIA report that declared Iran was not developing nuclear weapons. Reported in the UK Daily Telegraph, the Israeli Government then sanctioned the use of hitmen to kill Iranian scientists and academics involved in the country's development of nuclear energy.

Since then, they have been busy. Three top Iranian scientists have been bombed to death - the last just a month ago - and a fourth narrowly escaped assassination along with his wife. Claims that the Israeli secret service, Mossad, is behind this have met with silence from Tel Aviv. Given the heavy funding and support the USA provides Israel, paying for nearly its entire armed services (a cost of $8.2 millions of US taxpayers' money every single day) and funding a huge chunk of its economy, there is no possibility that any such activity would go on unless Washington approved. So who, then, are the terrorists?

We are in difficult days: the neocons in America have long hankered for a military assault on Iran, which is still one of the world's largest oil producers and which sits starkly independently of the USA compared to the Saudi kleptocracy and the fiefdoms of the Emirates. As you can hear in the video below, people like John Bolton, who was Bush's ambassador to the UN, keenly want to provoke confrontation, expressing disappointment at Iran's relatively moderate tone in reply to western sanctions. (It seems Bolton was actively hoping Iran would leave the nuclear non-prolilferation treaty (NPT) to make it easier to garner support for action against Iran).

Somewhere, the scriptwriters are hard at work on coming up with the plot twists and turns (the more bizarre it seems the better) to begin production of the biggest disaster movie yet.

Obama Covers Up Nebraska Nuclear Accident?

A fire has broken out in a nuclear facility in Nebraska. It may not be of the proportions of Fukushima, but there again, as the President of the United States has reportedly ordered a blackout of all news from the plant, we can only hope that is the case. After all, it took the Japanese Government several weeks to admit to the disastrous levels of radiation that even now continue to leak out of their damaged reactors to spread over almost the entire surface of the Earth.

The fire, which broke out after the nearby Missouri river burst its bank a fortnight ago, has knocked out a cooling pool for spent fuel rods. As to how bad it is, there is no news other than that "an unusual event" has been notified to the authorities.

Reassured? No, not likely. We have been here before so many times with the nuclear industry - firstly we are told the plants are so safe that nothing can go wrong; then, when something goes wrong, they assure us that its nothing to worry about; and then as it gets worse, they tell us that the particular reactor or plant is an old one and the problem could not repeat itself anywhere else.

Except that it does - Fukushima was frowned upon by the world as a uniquely stupid place to site a nuclear power plant. After all, it was by the sea in an earthquake zone. So, unlikely to find similar situations elsewhere.

Well, the Nebraska plant is next to a major river on a flood plain. Smart siting?

In March, a Canadian reactor suffered a pump failure and has leached tens of thousands of gallons of radioactive waste into Lake Ontario.

And even in Britain, plans are afoot to recommission a nuclear power plant on the north Wales coast in spite of two recent major (by UK standards) earthquake tremors and being right next to the sea.

Why on earth do we keep buying into the nuclear lie? Supposedly cheap, it isn't - it has never been profitable so governments have had to pay electricity companies to build nuclear power, subsidise them to operate them and now shell out to decommission them. In the UK, decomissioning our existing, aging nuclear power stations will cost in excess of £73,600,000,000 over the next century, a figure substantially eclipsing the bank bailout with no prospect at all of any cash back. And then we have to keep the waste safe for several thousand years - laughable if it wasn't so execrable.

Clean? No, it isn't. And safe, no.

Who knows what is happening in Nebraska? If it is so safe, why has the operating company simply said that rumours of a level 4 nuclear alert "are not how we classify nuclear problems" and why has the President stepped in? This is the man who won an award for transparency - so what is so seriously wrong that he has imposed this ban?

Of course, we may never know. Perhaps in 10 or 20 years cancer deaths in the state will be notably higher, or not. But the fact is that just as Chernobyl even now makes sheep on Welsh hillsides sick and inedible, Fukushima has shrouded the world in its toxic embrace. If Fort Calhoun threatens to do the same, the world deserves to know and know now.

SPREAD OF FUKUSHIMA RADIATION TO EVERY CONTINENT

Apocalypse Not Now: Nothing to be Rapturous About

It is all too appealing to have a laugh at the expense of the followers of Harold Camping, head of the Family Stations Christian radio network, who has predicted that the "Rapture", the first stage of the biblical Apocalypse set out in the Book of Revelations, will take place today. Revelations, traditionally written by St John, but more likely by a number of different authors, is a confusing, dream like book packed with allusions and illusions, mostly relevant to early Christians who were themeselves expecting the world to end imminently over nineteen centuries ago.

According to the Gospels, Jesus spoke of a Day of Judgment , predicting it would happen in the lifetimes of his followers, and couching it in suitably fiery language subsequently used to justify all sorts of atrocities:
"The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." (Matthew 13, 40-43)  and "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!" (Luke 12, 49)

By the Rapture theory, created by a Church of Scotland Minister Edward Irving around 1830, all true believers will be taken up to Heaven just before all this nastiness begins. The rest of us who are "left behind" will then be subjected to great tribulations and violence as the so-called End Times gather pace up to Judgement Day, when Jesus Christ will return and judge those who can go to Heaven (after first living with Jesus on a restored Earth - the New Jerusalem) and those due to suffer the eternal torments of Hell.

It is tempting to dismiss these as wacky ideas on the fringe of religion, easily rebutted by a range of sarcastic activities such as the Post-Rapture party organised on Facebook, or music concerts across the States peppered with "subject to change" notices for events on Sunday. Likewise, some people are ready to make a point - such as non-believers advertising "Gone with the Rapture on Saturday? Can I have your stuff please?" while, more exploitatively, some are making a tidy sum out of offering to look after cats and dogs that are "Left Behind" when their owners ascend.

But this sort of phenomenon can not be set aside so easily. Not only is it tragic that some clearly vulnerable people are taken in by this - the pregnant woman grieving that her unborn child may not be saved; the man who cashed in his life savings to warn others of the impending apocalypse; the terrified mother who slit her children's throats and wrists - it is also the case that, according to one Newsweek poll, as many as 55% of Americans believe in the Rapture at some point soon. Most of these believers also firmly think we are now in the End Times and the consequences, given the well-organised machinery of the wealthy and profoundly conservative American evangelical movement, are deeply political and deeply damaging to the struggle against the very real threats to our species and planet.

As the world faces genuine resource depletion and environmental degradation, many evangelical Christians warmly embrace the destruction, seeing it all as proof of their prophecies and the culmination of their hopes. And these beliefs are transmitted into policy through many in the US Government - as far back as the 1980s, Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, testified to the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant as, given that Judgement Day was imminent, they would not be required anyway. To the incredulity of listening Congressmen, he declared that, 'After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.' 

This is a far from isolated example, with evangelicals deriding many attempts to conserve the environment or seek international peace and disarmament. Ever since the Moral Majority of the late 1970s promoted Ronald Reagan as a "born again" Christian candidate, it has been almost impossible for a non-evangelical to get anywhere in Presidential politics. Some, like Clinton, have exaggerated their beliefs, but Bush Jr held close to evangelism throughout his Presidency, by his own account believing that he received the instruction to attack Iraq directly from God. Barak Obama's more relaxed approach to his faith was infamously used by his evangelical opponents to make a range of assertions from his being a secret Muslim to being the anti-Christ. And these have had an impact - with 18% of Americans believing he is a Muslim according to one poll last August, a figure that rose to one in every three Republican voters. 

And as for the Anti-Christ rumour? It may seem bizarre, but it has been covered and analysed by national news networks, used by the Republicans to whip up Christian votes and, of course, been plastered all over the internet.  Take a look at the video at the end of this blog - Americans live in truly superstitious times. Exchange even the briefest messages with US Evangelicals, as I have done through this blog, and you will soon be told Obama's policies on healthcare, tax and the environment are the work of Satan and yet more signs of the truth of apocalyptic prophecy.

Not all dogs go to heaven after all....Evil puppy!

Especially in the Middle East, the evangelicals are at work, desperately undermining any attempts at a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. Believing the Al-Aqsa Mosque should be demolished and the ancient Jewish temple of Jerusalem rebuilt on its site as part of the Apocalypse prophecy, the Christian Zionist movement within American evangelism has advocated and even contributed to funding the appalling wall that has been constructed around the Palestinians on the West Bank.
Many additionally believe a range of supposed prophecies which identify the restoration of Israel to its Biblical age borders and a great conflagration with its neighbours as important steps on the path to Rapture and Judgement, things to be helped along rather than guarded against. Consequently, they lobby hard and generally successfully for American political and military aid to Tel Aviv.

So this extreme mode of religion closely informs the politics of the most powerful and destructive nation on the Earth. With one in twenty of the world population but gobbling up almost a third of the Earth's resources, the USA is absolutely critical to the survival of our planet as a place habitable by humans and other species of life. It needs to take the lead in environmental action, on cutting pollution, recycling, reducing consumption and distributing fairly.

What those who oppose them struggle to get our heads round is that, in the Evangelicals' Universe, environmental collapse, wars, terrorism and disease are not to be eschewed or regretted. Rather, they are to be embraced, full-on as we race towards what they see as the glorious destiny of all true Christians. Nearly 40% of Americans in a recent survey believe the Japanese earthquake and tsunami were visited on Kobe because Japan, to them, is a godless nation. With nearly 50% of Americans believing they are a special people in God's eyes, Evangelical America is a real threat to all of us, particularly as the USA's inevitable economic and military decline in the coming decades will clearly challenge this deeply held belief.

So, as those of us who deride the nonsense of Mr Camping smugly sip a glass of wine or two this evening, we would nevertheless do well to keep a relatively sober view of the power of the belief in the Apocalypse, and both the ardent desire and all too real ability of many Americans to make one happen, whether God is ready or not.

"I've Been Expecting You, Mr Obama."

As somebody wrote to the Guardian this week, it didn't take much to get the Royal Wedding off the front pages. From the restraint of "Osama Bin Laden is Dead" in the UK Guardian to "We Got The Bastard" in the Philadelphia Daily News, the assassination of al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden dominated the headlines - with the notable exception of Britain's Daily Telegraph which just couldn't quite let go of that wedding. As the week wore on, we were treated to all sorts of diagrams of the assault on his hideout, fake photos of his bloody corpse and, perhaps uniquely, the photograph of President Obama and his closest aides watching the attack live via a miniature satellite camera mounted on the helmet of a US Navy Seal.

In spite of the supposedly impartial evidence of the camera, the official version of the attack changed several times - first, there was a firefight, culminating in Bin Laden using his wife as a human shield before both were shot dead. Then, later, the wife emerged alive and relatively well. She had run at his attackers, but he hadn't hidden behind her. Indeed, it turned out that only one person shot a couple of rounds at the Navy Seals as they landed in the compound, only to be quickly killed by them. Bin Laden was found in minutes, by which time his unarmed son had been killed. The Sheik himself was also unarmed and, by some accounts, naked. But after making a "threatening move" was shot twice - once in the chest and once above the eye.

So why was he killed? Why not instead arrest and arraign him for the murders of 9/11?

The reasons are infinitely more complex that the claim that he made a threatening gesture towards his attackers. They are rooted in the complicity of the USA in arming the antecedents of al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the hills of Soviet occupied Afghanistan back in the late 1980s. They cover too the link between the Bin Laden family and the American Establishment - while the conspiracy theories that George W Bush was somehow involved in 9/11 remain seemingly far-fetched, a few incontrovertible facts do raise questions, not least that the only plane permitted to leave the USA after the attacks that day was a private jet chartered by and containing members of the Bin Laden family. Would even the Obama Administration have wanted this mutuality to be exposed and highlighted in any trial?

The death of Bin Laden of course also makes better headlines - and doubtless in due course better movie films - than his capture. And of course the opinion polls already show a huge bonus for President Obama.

And yet, longer term, what does it mean? What about all the hubris of the crowds chanting "USA! USA!" outside the White House following the announcement? What of the fact that the US Government appears to now sanction an illegal policy of assassination?  What of the illegal disposal of his body at sea, in breach of all the domestic laws of the USA and international rules around casualties of war? What still distinguishes western policy and actions from the actions of our declared enemies? If we do genuinely believe and wish to be different to the likes of Bin Laden, don't we need to behave and judge ourselves by our own standards rather than by what we perceive to be his?

Perhaps we have to ask what the values we claim to defend actually are. One commentator on the BBC last night vituperatively described the latest video of Bin Laden, seized from his compound by the Americans, as useful to America as it portrays Bin Laden to be "pathetic". Why? Because he was living in a pretty bare house and the video showed him sitting with a blanket over his shoulders. 

Of course, what we had been led to expect was more that Bin Laden would have been set up like a latter-day Ernst Blofeld, safely screened off from the world in some amazing super-technological fortress under a  mountain, surrounded by hordes of fanatical followers ready to die for him. The spartan compound in a Pakistani town was not quite the SMERSH complex the media had in mind. Yet this in itself betrays the lack of understanding of what Bin Laden and al-Qaeda are about.

Read some of Bin Laden's speeches, and they could have been made by any left-of-centre politician. He calls repeatedly for social justice for the poor, a resolution of the Palestinians' miserable condition and for the disengagement of the USA from its unhealthy relationship with corrupt Arab dictatorships like Egypt's pre-revolution Mubarak and the Saudi King. Unlike these men, the success of al-Qaeda for many Muslims was centred on the fact that Bin Laden, like many Arab leaders in history, was motivated by belief rather than self-gain. He came from a rich family - the easiest thing for him to have done would have been to have embraced their fortune and, as his other family members have done, enmeshed himself in the oil-soaked kleptocracy of Saudi Arabia.

Instead he chose jihad, although in the end it was one which the Western Establishment grossly exaggerated and used to promote its own interests via domestic encroachment of civil rights and foreign military adventures into Iraq,and now Libya. Bin Laden by contrast can be seen to have risked and lost his life for the cause of ordinary people, downtrodden and repressed by regimes largely put in place and sustained by the West (and lauded by the British Royal Family).

And it is by not understanding this that the Americans have made a crass and long term error in killing him. Indeed, given everything else, being killed in precisely the manner he has been was perhaps the only part remaining to be written of the Osama bin Laden narrative. Like Abu Ayyub, the companion of the Prophet who died before the walls of Constantinople in 674, the sacrifice of bin Laden will do nothing to diminish his standing. And that he lived such a simple life will likewise raise his legend higher still.

While the thousands murdered on 9/11 by the dreadful actions of Bin Laden's associates were slaughtered in such a dramatically awful manner, what we forget are the thousands who perish, unrecognised and unrecorded, at the hands of the agents of the West in wars, famines and through the injustice of our sponsored puppets in scores of countries. Notably, in one tract from 2004, Bin Laden talked of how seeing the bloody aftermath of women and children killed in tower blocks bombarded by the US Sixth Fleet in the Lebanon in 1982 was the seminal moment he first thought of an attack on the iconic Twin Towers.

30,000 Lebanese, many, many of them civilians, were killed in these days by the US and its Israeli allies during their invasion of that country, a fact conveniently forgotten in the West, just as we are contentedly moving on from the carnage of Iraq. It is this ignored, invisible war of attrition against the impoverished of our planet that gives rise to the likes of Bin Laden, that shaped his ideological justification of jihad and which the grasping leaders of the West continue to ignore at the peril of us all - because this is the real War without End.

Bloody Oil

So, in one sense it is not news. Ask anyone why the West gets involved in overseas wars and the answer nine times out of ten is "oil". The public know this, and somehow cynically accept it, bemoaning the fact, but often simultaneously setting it to one side, perhaps in the hope that, while it is necessary for the sake of our current carbon fuel-dependent societies, it can't really be that bad. Can it?

Well, yes it is, and worse. We heard earlier this year, Tony Blair's sanctimonious defence of his toadying up to George Bush over the bloody war in Iraq, shifting from his original claims about weapons of mass destruction to defending the objective of regime change, allegedly because this would be good for the Iraqi people. The tens of thousands of deaths, the millions of refugees and the immense damage to infrastructure caused by his activities were all apparently worth it on these grounds.

And this week, we have found out for certain just exactly who all this mayhem was for.

The "Independent" newspaper in the UK published a series of emails showing how in the months up to the Iraq invasion - when Blair was publically insisting that war might still be avoided - BP and other oil companies were busy petitioning the UK Government for a slice of the anticipated post-war bonanza. They even went so far as to claim that if the Iraqi oil fields were privatised (rather than kept in the hands of the new supposedly democratic government to hel rebuild the country) this would represent an apparent reward for the UK's support of the American invasion.

So now we know, our troops were there to kill and be killed so that, in return, BP, a big multinational company with a deeply tarnished history of involvement in killings and corruption in the Middle East, could get a reward.

And it duly has. Unreported, unfocused on by the complicit western media, the Iraqi state was dismantled following the war. Its assets were sold off to foreign companies and individuals - many of them Israelis - and among these BP benefited with good deals on acquiring huge stakes in large tracts of the rich Iraqi oilfields. Even where they don't own the fields, the oil companies make a killing, extracting oil at less than $1.15 per barrel and selling them on at over one hundred times (or, put another way, 10,000%) that cost. They were by no means the only oil company involved, and the American government was even more generous to its friends, such as Halliburton and Blackwater, in doling out Iraqi money, largely unaudited and unaccounted for. But Blair's sickening insistence that he acted out of pure motives and a desire to do the right thing finally stand exposed as nothing more than a squalid deal with big corporations - both of the oil and non-oil varieties.

And what of now, in Libya? Again and again in recent weeks, the Gaddafi regime has been portrayed as somehow uniquely brutal among Middle Eastern despots and so deserving of unique treatment by the West. Even although Gaddafi's government has now offered an internationally monitored ceasefire and elections for the leadership of the country run by the UN, the mysterious coalition of rebels continue to receive unqualified western aid in spite of rejecting the offer. We are indefinitely underwriting a bloody war with allies of dubious provenance even although the other side have accepted more than the original demands of the United Nations.

Why? It could be for oil - but with just 2% of the world's reserves, while rich, Libya does not represent to carbon cornucopia that Iraq offered. And BP was already well-ensconced with the Gaddafi regime, so regime change could potentially disturb rather than assist their exploitation of the country's richest natural resource (although, of course, any Middle Eastern war is handy for oil companies in facilitating a rise in prices at the pumps - entirely unnecessary and unjustifiable, but easily sold to an unsuspecting public).

Libya offers other delights for western companies, however, just as Iraq did but other states like Bahrain and Egypt did not. Both Saddam and Gaddafi, for all their brutal faults, came from socialist backgrounds. Acquiring power was not purely about self-aggrandisement, though both men clearly revelled in it. It was also about using the state for the benefit of the citizens, however totalitarian in their control of their citizens they sought to be. Consequently, both Iraq and Libya under their respective tyrants had large public sectors and enjoyed some of the best education, health and welfare systems in the world - all free of charge. And, of course, all hanging like ripe fruit to fall into the bags of privatising privateers when the American juggernaut crashed into town.

Under the neoliberal philosophy that continues to inform American and British foreign policy, "freedom" is not at the end of the day expressed via the ballot box or by the mass of citizens. When they talk of freedom, it is in  fact about free markets - about private enterprise and the supposed freedom to buy and sell, accumulate, speculate and profit. Hence, under this philosophy, oil as a bounty for blood is more than acceptable - indeed, it is necessary, it is the whole purpose of the exercise. And not just oil - just as whole segments of Iraqi public services have been auctioned off to western-owned interests, so Libya now holds the same tempting prospect.

It is for this reason that so much of the opposition to the West in the Arab world stems from a religious starting point. Although castigated in the West as wild-eyed bearded ones lusting for blood and vengeance for ancient slight, groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Hizbollah in the Lebanon are widely supported by their people because they are grounded in ethics and principles diametrically opposed to the corrupt regimes such as Mubarak's sponsored and sustained by the West (the USA for example, paid for Mubarak's brutal security services for most of his rule).

Old Friends - The British Queen & The Blood-soaked Emir of Bahrain

It is also why the West is so deeply distrusted in the Arab world - every time Arab people have agitated for freedom, they have been opposed by dictators whose strings have been pulled very firmly either by western governments or by western oil companies or, more often than not, by both. The brutal regime in Bahrain is probably the epitome of this, but in the West, it is exempted from the fate of the Libyan regime. Bahrain is sanitized by the approval of its regime by the British monarchy and the repeated visits by members of the Royal Family (who invited the ruler of Bahrain to kate and William's Big Day just hours after the massacre of 45 protesters on the streets of his capital city), - and besides, we already own everything there anyway; there is nothing left to sell.

But in Benghazi...never mind the crosshairs; its dollars that are in western sights.

Libya war IS about regime change / Britain / Home - Morning Star

Libya war IS about regime change / Britain / Home - Morning Star (click for full M.S. article)

The West has gone far beyond the concept of a protective no-fly zone and is now advocating regime change - even although the rebels are a very uncertain band containing some rather unpleasant passengers. In addition, they have refused to even contemplate any negotiations with Tripoli and gave the recent African peace envoys an incredibly hostile and violent reception when they visited Benghazi to sound out the possibility of peace talks.

Why is such intransigence now being underwritten by an open-ended guarantee to the rebels from Britain, France and the USA for continuing and increasing military support and aid with arms supplies?

What has gone largely unreported is that the revolt against the Gaddafi regime developed from rallies called by religious groups to commemorate the 2006 publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed, which upset Muslims around the world given their faith's injunction not to make representations of any human form, let alone such an important one. Most fundamentalist Muslims see Gaddafi as an enemy of their faith given his closure of Islamist schools, his taunting of the veiling of women and his call for Arabs to "put the Koran away on the bookshelf" as a relic of a former age.

Whilst the Transitional Rebel Council is composed of a rather motley bunch of academics, lawyers and army commanders, many of whom were senior members of the Gaddafi regime until just a few weeks ago, there is much evidence of more radical religious elements running through the revolt. What is for sure is that this is no democratic uprising like the ones in Tunisia and Egypt - where, especially in the latter case, the West were so incredibly hesitant about calling for Mubarak to resign. But, of course, as history has shown time and again, the West's interests and frequently violent intervention in the Arab world has never been about democracy, and indeed as often as not has been to squash the demands of the Arab people for reform.

Gadaffi, of course, is no democrat either. But the West is not concerned about that. His sin, unlike Mubarak and the Saudis, has been to not always toe the line with the West. That makes him no saint, but equally, it begs the question as to why Libya is such a special case as to now require our active intervention, not merely to provide some sort of protective no-fly zone around Benghazi, but to continue every day to bomb large tracts of Libya and say that this will continue until Gaddafi is gone.

Our Masters have decided Gaddafi must go, but sit on their butts in Bahrain as the political opposition is destroyed and people shot on the streets - in the same city as the largest overseas US naval base in the world.

Yet there again, they're Our Bastards, and he isn't.  At least, not one of Ours.

Payback Time for Our Bastards

"He may be a bastard, but he's our bastard."
So US President FD Roosevelt famously said of the blood soaked dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo. Trujillo had risen through the ranks of the army established by the USA after its invasion of the island republic in 1916 to preserve the interests of American banks in debt repayments. When in 1930 a rebellion by oppressed workers and farmers led to the overthrow of the President, Trujillo, by then army chief, deftly absorbed the demands of the rebel crowds, subverted the subsequent election (in which he polled more votes than registered voters) and instituted a personal rule that was to last for over 30 years until his assassination.

Trujillo: a bastard, but Ours.

Trujillo governed by corruption, nepotism, fear and violence - he banned all but his own political party, imprisoned opponents, bought and sold favours with American companies, and killed over 50,000 of his own people - as well as many as 30,000 Haitians massacred during an incursion into his neighbour's territory.But all through his rule, he was a favourite of America - providing Caribbean hospitality for his sponsors' richest citizens as well as a place for them to place their "offshore" investments beyond the reach and audit of any regular authorities. As revolution swept Central and South America in the 1950s, Trujillo and his family were seen as bulwarks of western interests.

And so Roosevelt's dreadful nostrum was deployed, both long before and ever since it was articulated by the great liberal hero, with nauseating regularity. America has installed and maintained dozens of rightwing regimes with violence and corruption at their rotten hearts - Pinochet's Chile being the most blatant but far from isolated case. There, a democratically elected government was overthrown by a CIA coup simply because of its left wing policies. As with so many cases, such as threatening economic ruin if voters choose the wrong way in Nicaragua in the 2007 election, to the sham elections of Mubarak's Egypt, or the weapons and financial support channelled to Saddam Hussein's Iraq during his war with Iran, democracy has never been a genuine feature of American or British foreign policy.

We have happily subsidised these most violent men to suppress the liberal and social democratic movements whose aims have been to establish precisely the same norms of elected legislatures, civic governance and rule of law we espouse in the West. We have colluded with the dictators in painting their most moderate opponents as dangerous, wild-eyed radicals and patronisingly questioned whether people in so many countries round the world are "ready" to govern themselves. Indeed, when Pakistan was passing through a crisis in 2008, former US UN Ambassador John Bolton told the BBC that "Democracy in Pakistan is not in the USA's interests." Just like in the Palestinian Authority when Hamas won the elections, people might vote the wrong way, you see.

Britain has even subsidised sales of weapons to these brutal regimes with taxpayers' money through the Defence Export Services Organisation - this lent billions of pounds of credit to some pretty odious governments in exchange for them purchasing weapons and security equipment from British companies. Consequently, we saw the tragic irony that large quantities of the weapons used against British troops by the Iraqi army in the wars of 1991 and 2003 were actually paid for by the UK taxpayer after Saddam defaulted on his payments. It is to Gordon Brown's largely unsung credit that he closed it down within weeks of becoming Prime Minister in 2007. However, Britain's arms industry continues to be one of the top five in the world, essentially selling to anyone who will pay - frequently involving itself with some palm greasing, as was allegedly the case in the dropped investigation into BAe and Saudi Arabia.

And nowhere has this been more exposed and self-evident than in the current round of rebellions sweeping the Arab world. As Obama equivocated over the crowds in Cairo calling for the resignation of the corrupt and brutal Mubarak regime, there was UK Foreign Secretary William Hague, heavily qualifying his "welcome" of the people's demands with a hope that they would give time for an "orderly transfer" of power. And again this week, Hague has been busy dissembling - reluctantly withholding export licences for supplies of tear gas to the Bahrain government on the same day that its police shot dead several peaceful protesters - but still silent on the demands for an elected parliament.

Of course, the Bahrain monarchy was put in power by the British several decades ago, and has been sustained ever since by the Americans. Indeed, the last significant riots in Bahrain - way back in 1956 - were crushed by the direct intervention of the British Army. The West has billions invested in the small state - "stability", which translates as a pro-western Sunni Muslim puppet regime suppressing the poor Shia Muslim majority, is at a premium.

For decades, we have sponsored these men to crush the legitimate will of their peoples. We have traded with them on the most favourable terms for the West, and supplied them with military muscle, training and equipment to put down any opposition. Our companies have profited from exporting leg irons made in Britain and even equipping the Saudi government with a fully functional gallows. The UK also sold large quantities of crowd control equipment, including tear gas, to Libya just last year. And most cynically of all, as people die for democracy across the Middle East this weekend, over one thousand British and other western arms manufacturers are happily congregating in Abu Dhabi for the 10th and largest ever Idex Arms Fair. Just a short distance from the butchered bodies in Manama, and fully supported by President Obama and Premier Cameron, a huge marketplace of violence is being fronted by large western companies keener than ever to profit from the paranoia of the Princes and Sheiks of suppression.

Oil and blood: the West profits from the Arab world either way.

Withdrawing a few export licences in the dying days of these kleptocracies is far too little, far too late. We may indeed be astonished by the relatively moderate demands of many of the protesters, but if we think that means we can continue to back two horses - pious calls for democracy in public while privately conniving with the dictators to keep them in power - then we are badly mistaken. It is already too late to wish, like di Lampedusa's Leopard, that by letting something change, everything else may stay the same: it is payback time for the bastards, and sooner or later for us.

The demands sweeping the Arab world today are setting an example to people all over the globe. Where it will take us on a planet of rapidly diminishing resources, no one can know. It is a tragic yet hopeful time, whatever the outcome of the dramatic events now playing out. The established regimes will fall in some places, while clinging on in others and trying to absorb and deflect the power of change.

But nothing will be the same again.

(CAUTION - VIDEO CONTAINS DISTURBING FOOTAGE)

Egypt: Obama of the Two Faces

As protests against the Mubarak regime in Egypt grew this week, President Obama could not have been more ambivalent during a television interview about the crisis. In remarks echoed by Secretary of State Clinton, he acknowledged the need for the Egyptian people to be able to have "greater participation" in their Government. But, while he cautioned Mubarak against some sort of Tianamen Square-style slaughter, he employed the old trick of warning the protesters against violence. Things should be resolved peacefully, he proclaimed loftily.

Except how can we expect the demonstrators to remain calm and peaceful in the face of the brutality of the Egyptian regime?

(CAUTION:distressing scenes - discretion advised)

Egypt is effectively a one-party state where a sham electoral process delivered Mubarak a Soviet-style victory in the last Presidential election and his party, the NDP, 420 seats to just one for the main opposition party in the elections held just 8 weeks ago. Consequently, Mubarak's mafiosi has long depended on its viciously corrupt police and secret services to stay in power. Along with, we have learned from Wikileaks this weekend, $1,300,000,000 per annum from the United States in military aid.

Ever since Anwar Sadat travelled to Camp David for the first round of talks with Israel's Menachem Begin and President Carter in 1978, Egypt has played a central role in enforcing American policy in the Middle East. As well as its craven surrender of Gaza to the vicissitudes of Israeli internment, including helping to enforce the current blockade on the beleaguered refugee camp, Mubarak kept his country on message with US objectives during the Kuwait crisis and the Iraq war.  This followed a long tradition of the West sponsoring corrupt regimes like Mubarak's originally as a bulwark originally against Arab socialism and its attempts to democratise the region, and now against the perceived rise of Islamism.

Of course, neither Egypt's protesters nor the revolutionaries in Tunisia a fortnight ago are driven by Islam in particular. In Egypt, many of the substantial Christian minority - some 15% of the population - have joined in what are secular protests. The main opposition party, the Muslim Brotherhood, is in any case more of the ilk of the ruling AKP Justice and Development Party in Turkey, which is based on Islamic values but essentially democratic in its outlook. Contrary to the frankly ignorant views of the British Foreign Secretary, there is no prospect of some fundamentalist religious regime rising in Cairo - unless of course Mr Hague wants to create such an impression in order to justify a violent crackdown on the protests.

Wikileaks has shown that the US has since 2007 tried to play both sides - covertly courting opposition figures like the International Atomic Energy Authority chair, Mohammed ElBaradei, just in case Mubarak ended up in the fix he is in now. But Obama is caught not only by his current equivocation, but by three decades of America and Europe supporting the twisted nepotism and sham freedoms of the NDP and its elite. He may try to ride two horses in his patronising advice to the protesters, but his words are likely to fall on deaf ears.

In the sixth century, the Byzantine Emperors bribed the Ghassanids, petty Arab chieftains, to defend the borders of the province of Palestine against the emergent Muslims in Arabia. When the Arab armies came out of the desert, the Ghassanid rulers found themselves deserted en masse by their troops and the Islamic ghazi warriors swept into Palestine and Syria before turning south to conquer Egypt for the Caliphate. Now as then, subsidising corrupt men to rule over reluctant peoples does not pay - rather it makes the reckoning all the harder when it comes.

Which Egypt: What would Ba say of Obama?

ElBaradei has criticised the US for condemning authoritarian regimes in Burma and Iran, but being silent about those  who are "our dictators". As Pinochet's Chile, Somoza in Nicaragua and the Ibn Sauds in Riyadh exemplify, his words ring so terribly true. And this is why for Obama any hope of winning the hearts and minds of the rising revolution in Egypt is now a moment lost. Had he used his own visit to Egypt in 2009 to press for truly fair and free elections, he might have restored some faith after years of collaboration with the Mubarak. But he balked at such a prospect and instead warmly embraced the failing Pharaoh, and now pays the price.

In ancient Egypt, the goddess Ba of the Two Faces was revered as a symbol unifying the halves of Egypt - upper and lower - and her two faces represented her ability to see both sides. Sadly, Obama's two faces are not formed from his perceptions or in any way unifying. His failure to act decisively, this week and previously, simply confirms America's claimed support for genuine democracy to be the fraud that it truly is.

Will No One Rid Us of These Meddlesome Messiahs?

Henry Plantagenet, King of England and Normandy in the tumultuous second half of the 12^th century, brooked little dissent. Imprisoning even his own sons and his wife when he suspected them of plotting against him, the only real opposition he faced came from his former friend, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket.  He had originally appointed him as his placeman, but Becket soon proved far from compliant and Henry was infamously heard to mutter "Is there no one who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?"

Taking him at his word, four knights rode to Canterbury and dramatically slaughtered the Archbishop at the altar of his cathedral . Henry duly professed his horror and did his penance, even submitting to being scourged by the Pope’s representatives. How could they possibly have thought he meant what he said?

Echoing down through the centuries, the story of Henry and Becket seems very relevant to the last fortnight with first the assassination of Pakistani politician Salman Taseer and then the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, which claimed the lives of six bystanders. Although thousands of miles apart, the two stories have many similarities, not least the atmosphere of fear and loathing in contemporary politics in both increasingly religiously fundamentalist countries.

In Pakistan, Salman Taseer, governor of Punjab province was shot dead by one of his bodyguards who had taken umbrage at his campaign to repeal Pakistan's blasphemy laws. These make any criticism of the Prophet Mohamed an offence punishable by death - leading to a number of exceedingly spurious cases where people have been accused of blasphemy for totally unrelated reasons. In one recent case, a low caste Christian woman, Asia Bibi, who offered water to  higher caste Muslim women was charged with insulting the Prophet and is currently under sentence of death. Taseer took up her case, among others, and has paid for it with his life.

Salman Taseer

His opponents have equivocated - not endorsing the gunman, but not exactly condemning him either. Taseer should have been more careful about what he said, should have considered people's feelings, they suggest. It might be terrible that he had been shot, but, the implication is, perhaps he really brought it on himself. Indeed, the assassin, Mumtaz Qadri, has been lauded by many as a hero, standing up for traditional values and Taseer's friends have been warned not to mourn him.

Thousands of miles away in Arizona, a lone gunman, Jared Lee Loughner, loaded himself up with ammo and strolled down to a local "open day" for the public to meet their elected representatives. Targeting Democrat Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, he shot her in the head and sprayed his bullets into the crowd. He killed six people, including a 9 year old girl, and wounded 14 more before being overpowered. Remarkably, although a bullet traversed the length of her brain, surgeons hold out the prospect of a good recovery for Gabrielle Giffords. But the health of American politics is another matter entirely.

Angry America: Tea Party protesting for traditional values

The would-be assassin has turned out to be a loner, but one steeped in the Internet rage of the US Rightwing. Recently coalesced around the informal (but well funded) Tea Party movement headed by former Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, the far Right in the States has a large and growing coalition of the angry. Since the laws on bias in news reporting were removed by the Reagan Administration in the 1980s, the sensationalist rightwing "shock jocks" of American radio and cable TV, like Glenn Beck, have surged both in popularity and in brazen lies. They have, among other tactics, demonised swathes of the population - Hispanics, blacks and Muslims especially to tarnish them somehow as un-American fifth columnists. They have insinuated that both Bill and Hilary Clinton were involved in murder and extortion on their rise to the Whitehouse. Apoplexy reigned when Obama won the Presidency in spite of their best efforts to throw everything at him from not being a true American citizen (giving rise to the Birther Movement), to being a secret Muslim and organising concentration camps for imprisoning conservatives.

The bankrupt ignorance of their cause peaked during the health debate with ludicrous monikers used to describe Obama such as "Communist Nazi". Sadly, their strategy worked and in November last year the Republicans won a significant victory in the House of Representatives, though not the landslide some had anticipated.

Palin's cross hairs target map

But worst of all has been Palin and her acolytes - like many on the radical right using a collection of pseudo-religious and military rhetoric to describe the alleged threats to their country and the response they desire. While often not indulging herslef, she has done nothing to temper or rein in her acolytes and associaes as they rail on about "Armageddon America", the End of Days, 30,000 guillotines purchased to behead Obama's opponents, the New World Order Conspiracy, the sinister Black Helicopters, all of course underpinned by Islam's alleged desire to destroy the USA. Breathtakingly, Trent Humphries, one of the Arizona Tea Party's founders, has even described their movement as a co-victim of the shootings, shamefully disrespecting the deaths and injuries of the real victims.

And the response they prescribe? Time to go on crusade; time to fight; time to target opponents, as in the now infamous cross-hair campaign map published by Palin with Giffords' name shown as a through a rifle-sight. And Giffords own local opponent had encouraged voters to join him in firing machine guns to show their determination to "take back" their state:  "Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly”.

"Satan" Obama

The BBC in is quaintly impartial way has struggled to emphasise that both sides of the political debate in America are increasingly divided from each other and strident in their rhetoric. Maybe; but there is no doubt that it is the radical right wingers who are taking this to the extreme, cranking up rhetoric and undermining both rational debate and encouraging violence. Again and again, it is the radical Right who are found with people in their ranks with obsessions with guns and a propensity to violence. Even in the UK, while hundreds of thousands of pounds of police money are wasted funding agents provocateurs to spy on climate demonstrators and students, it is extreme right wing BNP members and sympathisers who are letting off nail bombs to kill blacks and gay people, or pouring petrol through letter boxes to burn out asylum seekers. I can't recall the last time a liberal was convicted for shooting an opponent, burning property or planning explosions in public places. 

The Arizona gunman almost certainly worked alone and may indeed have mental health problems - but can his ramblings about the American Government and his violence really be divorced from a political atmosphere where it is acceptable to denigrate the President as a traitor because he wants to extend healthcare to poor people? Was he somehow immune to a culture which stigmatises those who do not agree with Palin and her acolytes as conspirators against the Nation under God? Not only Communist - but blasphemers and heretics to boot?

Henry may have genuinely regretted Becket's death, but it was the atmosphere of violence around his Court, created by him, that made it happen. Similarly, Palin and the Tea Party may equally regret the Arizona massacre, but they too need to reflect on their words and actions, and how these have fostered a bellicose zeitgeist where the bullet is as valid as the ballot. They aspire to lead a movement, and consequently they must shoulder responsibility for it too. Likewise, the leaders of Pakistan's teetering democracy need to make clear that violence has no place in their politics. Clauswitz described war as "the continuation of politics by other means". In the hysterical, conflict-charged culture of contemporary politics, we must not allow those with sinister agendas to turn politics into war by other means.

So how far have we come since Henry's knights rode like Sauron's Orcs to do their Master's dirty deed for him in Canterbury Cathedral that dark evening in 1170?  And in such an atmosphere where well-funded, well-organised populists see democracy as just one of several tools to gain and keep power, how long will it be before they saddle up and once again ride out to do their Masters' (or Mistresses') unholy bidding?