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

Few wars, and few historical moments, present clear cut choices. Especially in the Middle East, a ruined region raped by successive Great Game imperial machinations for over 100 years, whose borders are debatable and often fictively imposed with force, it is unlikely any conflict will present the armchair general and seething metropolitan pundit a black and white cause for just war.  The last Good War was, it seems, WW2 - for though the motives for fighting Germany and Japan might have been imperialistic at core (protection of markets and colonies and borders; and petrol) - the Nazi regime was markedly evil, in ideology, intent, and constant deed. Never mind that Canada was anti-Semitic in the 1940s, and Churchill had mooted winnowing the weak; or that the British invented concentration camps in the Boer War; or that it was the Allies who dropped the doomsday bomb and burned Dresden - even so, the Nazi plan and the Nazi way was - and is - almost the definition of inhumanity. ...

The news from Benghazi is not good .  The West must do more to condemn this massacre, now, and try to persuade its curious ally from continuing down this murderous path.  It seems hard to imagine how BP will be able to justify ongoing business with such a pathological state.

The West - in case we didn't know already and had never read Pilger, Chomsky or Said - has been playing a grand game in the Middle East for more than a century - one of divide and conquer and ultimately control.  At stake, as every kid can tell you, is oil and gas, the lifeblood of the capitalist energy-system.  Democracy has never been uppermost in terms of the realpolitik emanating from London and Washington.  Hence the Shah, Mubarak, Saddam, etc.  Real democracy is messy, and may even elect anti-Western (or yes, pro-Arabic, pro-Islam) parties to power. You can't quite control democracies as well as dictatorships.  Hence, Bahrain, now.  This tiny kingdom is a key US ally in an Iranian zone - but is oppressive and brutal.  Its actions over the last few days of protest are equivalent to what happened in Tianenman Square.  This time, the outrage has been muted.  The problem with such state department cold-eyed pragmatism is that it is not...