The legacy of the Bush-Blair years, and the post-9/11 madness, is never far from the surface of things - as much as Cameron or Obama might wish. This weekend there were calls for an inquiry into the death of Dr Kelly, the weapons expert whose whistle blowing cast doubt on some of the dodgy dossier claims pre-war - conspiracy theory has it he was not a suicide. The ongoing debate about the situating of a mosque proximate to the hallowed ground zero is another open sore - and a sign of the intolerance levels in America, a place barely healed by the election of its first African-American president. Now, Tony Blair - the man second-most-responsible for what deputy PM Nick Clegg has called an illegal war - is to donate all the money from his memoirs to a rehabilitation gym for wounded soldiers. This is admirable. A pity it is much too little too late. However, we must forgive Mr Blair, insofar as he seems to be seeking penance. I am not sure we need forget what he has done so easily.
THAT HANDSOME MAN A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought. Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that
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Also, while the war might have been bone-headed and a strategic misallocation of resources, it was no more or less illegal than other recent conflicts. The artifice of whether a war is legal or not can never be determined in any definitive way as there is no legal entity above the sovereign nation-state. The United Nations, for all its charms, is pretty much as President Bush once described it: an elegant debating society with excellent snacks. And while we're at it the UN did provide a resolution that arguably covered the war.
I'm not endorsing the war but I do object to a revisionist pile-on where people use inflammatory terms like "illegal war" as a way of turning up the rhetorical heat.
So that's how you describe a war in which countless thousands of innocent civilians perished? No wonder you choose to remain anonymous.