dug 
I had meant to post a proper comment re the demonstration as I only had time for the flippant post below on the day. There are hundreds of reasons to worry right now, but the one thing that keeps coming back to me is how Orwellian the whole circus is becoming.
I think I first picked-up on it when the US announced their “Ministry of Homeland Security”. How did America go from being a beacon of democratic checks and balances—the nation were a president can be impeached—to Black Shirt country overnight? I can understand how 9/11 might have been a Lusitania moment, but there is no Kaiser. Essentially, the President is supposed to use appropriate force. Instead, Bush has decided to get Biblical and do a lot of “striking down”. In essence, pursuing the creation of an imaginary ‘Pax Americana’ where and US citizen could walk to the end of the empire unscathed, protect by the knowledge that should any harm become him the response would be swift and terrible.
In occupied France, if one villager struck at a German soldier, the whole village would be executed. This is the kind of thing that is necessary to enforce this kind of Pax. I suppose we’ve started along this road: you bomb two of our buildings to shit, we will bomb somebody-near-to-you’s country to shit (as I write this, I realise this is a crude over-simplification, but my heart tells me that the US should be bigger than that—in victory magnanimous as Churchill said…).
I would really appreciate someone explaining to how this is a viable long term policy. In particular, if the nation doing the bombing to shit happens to hold most of the world’s wealth and consume most of the world’s energy, I don’t see how this scenario could build a world I’d want my daughter to grow up in.
So we need to re-claim the language. Next time someone tells you it’s appeasement, tell them bollocks, that has nothing to do with it. Spurious comparisons to Suez or Poland just won’t do. As responsible world citizens, we need to step back, think, and look at the big picture.
Is it appropriate to make adherence to a UN mandate a fulcrum of the debate? How can this be justified when the whole world knows that Sadam is far from the worst offender in town (I believe the US and Israel hold the two top positions in the sin bin). Can it be right that we only make a big deal out of the resolutions that suit us?
I can only hope the American people see the error of their ways and chuck out the monkey. This is the most God fearing nation on earth, but they still manage to execute more citizens per year than anybody else. If they can fiddle the commandments, maybe they could compromise on George Bush…