E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

September's here again, and the long war on terror that began in September 2001 may be drawing to a close - or not.  The past decade has been indelibly marked by several actors on the world stage, and it seems oddly fitting (if a little too neat) that Tony Blair 's memoirs, and the cessation of the American occupation of Iraq, should coincide precisely.  Blair's book confesses to utter anguish, and full-metal resolve - a complex and unlikely admixture - over his decision to invade Iraq; and continues the war by other means against his hapless lieutenant, Gordon Brown , now described as "maddening" and with "zero emotional intelligence". Blair, it seems, was a political animal, shackled to a human handler - all-too-human.  I find it hard to fathom Blair's leap to Catholicism when the Pope was against the war he essentially green-lit, and I tend to find his creepy bonhomie skin-crawling.  Yet, apparently, he was eminently electable.  Why people shou...

Daljit Nagra's poem 'Look We Have Coming to Dover!' is arguably the single most important poem of this younger generation in the past decade. The poem won him many accolades and awards, and led to his being the first "British Asian" poet in decades to be published by a major press like Faber. Furthermore, few poems had been able, up until this one, to bring into their sphere of influence theories of hybridity, cosmopolitanism, post-colonialism and canonicity, with so much wit and flamboyance of linguistic play. It was as if Muldoon and Edward Said had collaborated on a work. The poem itself is in five stanzas, of five lines each, and each stanza presents a visual "steps" form - so that the first line is followed by the next, which is slightly longer, until each of the final lines is rather elongated. The longest lines are fifteen syllables long, more or less. The rhyme scheme is subtle, if there at all. What is immediately noteworthy is the eccentric,...

The news that Tony Blair is the UK candidate for the position of EU president is a revolting development. Blair single-handedly made Labour both electable and unacceptable, spinning a rotten coalition of Guardian and Telegraph readers, that tried to fuse a social justice agenda with Tory takes on war, justice, banking, and privatisation of various sectors of society - in the process making Labour the most draconian, war-mongering, and pro-business government the UK has seen since, or before, Thatcher . Blair's cringe-worthy lies on weapons of mass destruction and dalliance with Bush-Cheney (themselves now staring at a smoking gun back at Langley that makes the Bourne movies plausibly undeniable) make him the least-likely convert to Catholicism since Symons . He is a dreadful politician and a duplicitous weirdo who grimaces artifice. He must not be allowed to run and ruin the EU.