Last drop of blood
(Sunday 14 December 2008)
GORDON Brown appears as ready to commit more British troops to the unwinnable US war in Afghanistan as his predecessor was to follow George W Bush's bidding in Iraq.
As British military involvement in Iraq is drawing to a close, Mr Brown favours higher British troop numbers in Afghanistan and berates other NATO countries for not doing more.
Clearly, other countries have more respect for their soldiers' lives and are less willing to treat them as cannon fodder for a military occupation based on a fraudulent prospectus.
Mr Brown's eulogy to the latest four British troops to be killed spoke of them having "died in the front line of terror" and, by their efforts, making us "safer in Britain."
This justification for clicking his heels and saluting every command from the White House is not shared by Britain's military top brass or by credible political analysts.
Even British ambassador in Kabul Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles has branded the occupation a "lost cause," adding: "It is shameful that so many have to die in such a hopeless war."
And Afghanistan's US-handpicked president Hamid Karzai acknowledges that the Taliban is essentially a national resistance force, which opposes foreign military occupation, rather than a global sponsor of terrorist attacks.
Far from progress being made to turn Afghanistan into a state in the image of its occupiers, as Mr Brown imagines, the Taliban are expanding their presence and increasing the scale of their attacks.
Two thousand Afghans have died violently this year, 25 million of them live below the poverty line and malnutrition is widespread.
British ministers are notorious for talking tough and pledging to fight to the last drop of someone else's blood, but there is nothing to be gained by staying one more day in Afghanistan.
Patronising
IRISH opponents of the Lisbon Treaty will doubtless afford maximum publicity to the "explanation" given by Britain's Minister for Europe Caroline Flint as to why people in the republic voted overwhelmingly No.
Her explanation sums up the patronising and arrogant attitude of the pro-EU centralisation elite.
The poor simpletons in Ireland apparently rejected the united sound advice of all major political parties, the media, business and farming interests because they hadn't understood the treaty and had been misled by the No campaigners.
Who told her so? It was "some people" she met in Dublin a month ago - presumably the same "some people" who thought, before the referendum, that they could con the Irish people into believing that the Lisbon Treaty was something qualitatively different from the EU constitution that French and Dutch voters had already rejected.
The Irish know better than most the contempt of the EU great powers for people's sovereignty in smaller states and Ms Flint's dismissive comment that, in the event of a second No vote, "we will cross that bridge when we come to it," indicates a readiness to ignore or override the voters' decision.
If and when Brussels, with the connivance of Brian Cowen's quisling government, forces a second vote, supporters of national democracy across Europe will rely on Ireland's electorate to stand firm.
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