This photograph depicts something extremely ugly indeed.

Not the humiliation and torture of Palestinians in their own country, horrific though that is.

Not even the pig-brutal munter in the Israeli Army uniform posing with a smirk in front of them.

Nope, the real ugliness is in her attitude that it was perfectly fine to act this way, to incarcerate Palestinians in their own land, then pose for a picture in front of them like a tourist snapping themselves at the Eiffel Tower or the Taj Mahal.

This sub-intelligent bitch posted these atrocities on, inevitably, her Facebook page. Then took them down when the civilised world was outraged. But today, safe with the assurance that the Israeli occupying forces have no intention of reprimanding her, she has come out batting with the following jaw-dropping lines of madness:

"I still don't understand what was wrong. It was solely to show the experience of military service," she said.

For anyone with any lingering doubts about the illegitimacy of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the humiliation of that land's indigenous occupants and the dehumanising attitudes of the idiot occupying forces, this is all you need right here.

These pictures evoke not only the similar pictures taken by American knuckledraggers at the Iraqi torture centre Abu Ghraib, but also those of many Nazis, posing in front of piles of Jewish clothes and shoes, in concentration camps during the 1940s.

They too failed to see anything wrong in their photos posed before the torture they were committing, because they too failed to recognise what they were doing was torture, was evil, was wrong.

The history of the Zionist project brings to mind those famous lines from the end of Orwell's 'Animal Farm', because now it has become increasingly impossible to draw any distinction between the torturers of Israel and those who once tortured their antecedents in 1940s Europe.

"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

Who now can tell a Zionist from a Nazi?

Algeria's police chief has been shot dead this morning.

These are the passport photographs used by the Israeli hitsquad that murdered a Hamas leader in the Gulf last month.

At least three, possibly four, posed as Irish, thereby putting at risk every single genuine Irish person on the planet who travels to the Gulf or indeed any other state with sympathies for Palestine.

These people are extremely dangerous and need to be found and tried.

And the terrorist government of Israel must issue an apology to the Irish people for hiding behind our good name while they go about their spineless murders.

Is anyone else annoyed that this year's European city of culture isn't even in Europe, never mind in the EU?

I was in the queue at Ben Gurion airport when the Israeli security forces finally caught up with me. Probably, I should have listened to that little voice telling me to exit via the West Bank and Jordan, but I simply didn't have the cash to hand to do it.

So I risked exiting as I came, and they pulled me aside.

First, I was taken to a side room and strip-searched. Then they went to remove my bag. I protested, as images flashed before my eyes of getting fitted up for heroin smuggling or the like. Eventually, unable to remove my hands from the bag, they agreed to let me dress and search it in front of me.

They took everything out and found nothing to be suspicious about. But that only heightened their suspicions.

They swabbed every single item in my bag and tested the swabs for explosives residue. I felt like telling them that the closest I had come to armaments was their Uzis in my face, and the shots pinged at me in Beit Jala from the nearest Jewish settlement, but stifled my tongue. In the end, reluctantly, they decided to let me board my plane.

As they escorted me past the security desk, past my co-passengers (thus arousing their concerns - none would sit next to me on the flight), I decided to match their spite with my own. Rather than go to the gate meekly, I insisted on going to the loo and shopping in duty free.

I was frogmarched to the front of the queue in both by my security detail.

My last memory of Israel was a tourism poster of Tel Aviv on the airport wall as I finally boarded my plane. 'Come to Tel Aviv - The Big Orange!'

How pathetically tragic, I thought. But not so unlikely in a town so suffused with transplanted New York Jews. Here they were, missing the point about how their apartheid city was utterly unlike the magnetic multiculture of NYC.

How sad to be concocting such a transparently derivative nickname for a town once known by its Palestinian name - Jaffa.

As I drifted off to sleep on the plane, across two other seats vacated by my co-passengers (both Hassidic Jews), I thought that no other city would be so idiotic, so basely dumb as to seek to piggyback on the organically derived NYC nickname.

Surely, I felt, only a town with such obvious negatives for tourists (merely a century of history, little culture, the ground zero of Jewish nationalism in an apartheid state at perpetual war with its neighbours) could feel the need for such transparently borrowed plumage.

And I was right, until this weekend I came across tourism references to Bangkok as 'The Big Mango.'

That's even more pathetic than the Big Orange (which at least has the Jaffa orange heritage to recommend it.)

The Big Mango? Like mangoes don't grow anywhere else, or as if they originated in Thailand? Does a city of immense culture and 13 million people really need to promote itself thus?

I mean, what's their competition? They've got the Western market nailed on for South-East Asia. Burma is a dictatorship, Cambodia suffered a massive genocide in living memory and Laos is as close as you can get to the 13th century outside of Central Africa.

But if this is going to catch on, perhaps we should get in on the ground floor. Galway could be the Big Rainy. Cork, the Big Langer. I'm open to suggestions for Dublin. So are Failte Ireland, most likely.

Please offer your best suggestions ASAP before they start promoting the Big Bollix in America next Spring.

I met the Dude again recently. He's a friend of a friend I don't see much.

The Dude is a lovely fella of Israeli background and has spent quite some time there. He may even have done military service. He's also Jewish. We tend not to talk much about Israel because we tend not to agree on much about that topic.

But I was a little drunk, and I told him I have a picture of Masada up on my wall.

JC: I swear, it hangs above my desk next to the Buddha. I have it there to remind me that Israel fell before and will again.

Dude: That's hilarious. When Israelis visit, they climb to the summit and swear that they'll never let Masada fall again. Everyone in the army has to during their training. But others who aren't in the military will come of their own accord. Even Jews from other countries come and climb up to Masada to swear. It's like an allegiance to Israel.

JC: Really? Is that why they all climb up to the top when there's a perfectly good cable car running all the way to the summit?

Dude: That's for the tourists. I bet you took the cable car. Most young people will climb up the serpent's path. It's a good old hike, but it only takes an hour or so. Only lazy foreigners ever take the cable car.

JC: Or people who don't attribute any mystical significance to marching up a mountain in the desert at dawn when you can get a lift.

Dude: You did take the cable car!

JC: Might have.

Dude: And that's why Israel is here to stay, mate. We can talk about Israel and you'll be passionate and I'll be passionate. You have your opinion and I have mine.
But at the end of the day, it's Israelis who are prepared to march up the mountain in the desert for what they believe in. If you're not prepared to march up the mountain too, how can you expect to overcome those who are?

JC: Were you ever at Masada yourself?

Dude: I took the girlfriend there when I went to visit my parents last year. She loved it.

JC: Well, it is pretty spectacular. How long did it take you to walk the serpent's path?

Dude: She was wearing heels and we had to get back to Tel Aviv later that day.

JC: Cable car's comfy, isn't it?

Dude: So what if I took the path of least resistance that day? You can't climb mountains every morning.

JC: Sooner or later, everyone's got to take the cable car. There was an old fella from the US who took the car up with me when I was there. His daughter was some sort of professor, and he was on crutches, but she left him with me and went to climb.

Dude: But she climbed! She came from America and climbed Masada. The old men can take the cable car as long as there are still younger, stronger people to climb the path. That's why they built the cable car - so that old people could get up there and experience the place.

JC: In summary, people climb the mountain so that there can be a cable car?

Dude: It's the Middle East. People kill themselves and others so that they can live freely. Why are you still trying to make it make sense?

Anyone recall the Bush baby's hilarious 'axis of evil' speech?

It was basically his shit-list of countries that he didn't like. And wanted to threaten. It included various rum locations like North Korea and Iran. None of them places you'd like to wake up a peasant in, but equally none of them currently occupying other people's countries.

So I thought it might be useful to put together an alternative axis of evil list, based on the proportion of misery particular countries are responsible for in the world today.

1. United States of America. Well, who else? Two foreign occupations, the ongoing 'wars' on 'terror' and 'drugs', state-sponsored kidnap and torture, funding Israel. They're really in a class of their own.

2. China. Repeated famines of their own population, the ongoing occupation of sovereign Tibet, the suppression of internal minorities, the sabre-rattling at Taiwan, and some extremely dodgy dealings in Africa.

3. Israel. An illegal state formed on other people's land, currently engaged in a particularly vociferous and unjustifiable genocide of the indigenous inhabitants. 300 dead in Gaza in the past couple of days alone. Israel is the terrorist state destabilising the entire Middle East, with American assistance.

4. 'Great' Britain. America's lapdogs in Iraq and Afghanistan. So that makes at least three foreign countries their military are currently engaged in, including their occupation of the North of Ireland.

5. Zimbabwe. Mugabe's syphilitic insanity should not be permitted to stand in the way of the self-determination of these beleaguered people any more.

6. Russia. Putin has seen how America has been permitted by the international community to wander into other countries with impugnity and has decided to emulate them. Their 'near abroad' of former Soviet states remains under constant risk of invasion if they don't tow Putin's line, as Georgia discovered this year and the Ukraine may well the next.

7. Pakistan. Politically in ruins, riven by terrorists in the tribal areas, deeply repressive to women and non-Muslims, Pakistan is a nuclear power with a series of border disputes with equally nuclear neighbours India and China.

8. Somalia. Without any apparatus of government for many years now, Somalia is now a devastated zone of anarchy from which pirates flood in droves to prey on the world's transit traffic.

The list of honourable mentions, where the people are denied democracy and self-determination by unelected elites, runs into dozens, sadly. There is no room to list all the states, on every continent, which refuse to permit their people free rein over their own destinies.

It appears that the phoney war between Iran and the USA/UK has reached the levels of cartoon comedy already.

According to reports, the ayatollahs arrested two 'spy pigeons' who were flying suspiciously near their controversial uranium enrichment facility, which the Western powers allege is being used to develop nuclear bomb capacity.

The ever sober and responsible online editors at Sky News' website have produced this mock-up below of the errant birds:

However, I'm more inclined to envisage the event something along the lines of this:


Only, Dick Dastardly would be wearing a big, bushy Mullah beard, Muttley would be in a burqa and the pigeon would be sporting a Star of David, of course.

Next time you open up the Indo and see a vomit-inducing hagiographic puff-piece about His Royal Highness 'Sir' Tony O'Reilly, remember this.

Or when you wince as the Irish Times lectures you like a prissy maiden aunt about how you should vote in a referendum, remember this.

Or when you peruse the rows of red top tabloids and sneer at the garish pictures of scantily clad starlets and schlock headlines in a superior manner, remember this.

Freedom of the press is a privilege we enjoy. With it comes things we are interested in hearing and happy to be informed about. With it also comes lectures, preposterous opinions, spin, fluff, puff and outright nonsense on all too many occasions.

But that's the point of diversity of opinion and press freedom. It permits all sorts of truths to be told, in a free and open manner.

So please remember that, and remember Mohammed Omer, the young and talented award-winning journalist from Gaza who was this week tortured by the Israelis for having the audacity to speak the truth about his homeland to the world and be acknowledged for doing so in an exemplary manner.

And remember him the next time you hear the Israeli propaganda machine kicking into gear with another well-rehearsed bout of lies about how peace-hungry, reasonable, beleaguered and free Israel is.

Because Mohammed Omer's neck bears the mark of the jackboot that says otherwise. Literally bears the mark.

The overtly, embarrassingly pro-Israel Democratic party candidate is dead.

Long live, erm, the other embarrassingly pro-Israel Democratic party candidate?

No sooner has Zion's biggest fan, Clinton II, finally fallen as a candidate for POTUS, than the actual candidate-elect, a black sunnovaMuslim, goes and offers Israel a united Jerusalem as their capital.

Now, for those whose eyes glaze over at the mere thought of the mess that is the Middle East, I'll keep this microscopically brief:

East Jerusalem has been Arab, both Christian and Muslim flavours, for well over a thousand years. Israel conquered it in 1967 and won't give it back even though the whole world keeps telling them too, even America.

Instead, they built a ruddy big wall around it and are building a ring of settlements around East Jerusalem and kicking out the Arab residents of the city with a combination of eviction orders, refusals to permit sales to Arabs or permitting sales only to Jews, and the splitting of families by the wall.

And yup, that is the shortest I could make that.

Anyhow, those Palestinians look like continuing to roll ones in the craps game of life. No matter who was going to win the Democratic nomination, even the black sorta Muslim guy, is overtly, embarrassingly pro-Israel.

It's some state of affairs for Palestinians to know that the best they can hope for in the next half-decade is for a McCain presidency.

But hey, on the plus side for the good guys, a Sandinista got elected next UN general assembly president.

Yay.

Another eye-opening visual comparison from Fionn MacCool from Politics.ie. This one reveals the direct similarities between the Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Warsaw in 1940 and the Israeli apartheid wall running through the West Bank today.

Fionn Mac Cool, a poster on Ireland's leading political discussion forum politics.ie as opposed to the mythical giant whose causeway is being privatised by the DUP, made the following eye-opening pictorial comparison between Ireland and Israel.

I think the pictures say it all really.

Okay, they wouldn't let me near Heather Graham, so I'm back.

I see some foot-dragging going on in Israel over the Arab League plan for a lasting peace settlement in the region.

Beleaguered Israeli leader Ehud Olmert, who faces a lot of criticism at home for losing a war with Hizbollah last summer, is quite right to describe the plan as revolutionary, even though it amounts to pretty much what the Arabs offered in 2002.

The difference between then and now is that in 2002, the intifada was at its height, whereas now there's an elected Palestinian government.

The deal on the table for Israel is simple, as most good deals are. Return to the 1967 borders (ie keep the land you stole in 1948, but not the extra land you've been stealing since) and you get normal relations with all your Arab neighbours.

Israel might rather hogtrade for a bit of land around Jerusalem and various settlements in the West Bank, but they ought to give these up and accept the deal on the table. It's the only solution for a lasting two-state settlement that might allow Israelis to normalise their society and live in peace in their region at long last.

The Arabs want to see the right of return, ie all the Palestinians in refugee camps since 1948 be allowed to return to where they were expelled from within Israel. That would obviously undermine the Jewishness of the theocracy, so they don't want to agree to that.

One solution might be to take some of those arms-dealing and diamond industry profits sloshing around Israel and put it into a compensation fund for the refugees, to help them build new lives outside of refugee camps, possibly within a Palestinian State.

You can't always get what you want, as the song goes. Israel will never get a better offer than this, and the Arabs won't be able to force them on the right to return while America props up the apartheid state.

But as we've found in Northern Ireland, if everyone takes a leap of faith and compromises a bit, you just might get what you need.

A solution for the Holy Land after nearly six decades is finally with everyone's grasp. Let's hope they take it.

I'm getting well annoyed by continual attempts by various lobbies to redefine aspects of the English language to suit themselves and their narrow agendas.

The latest stunt comes from those obesity-peddlars McDonald's, who are apparently so miffed at the usage of the word 'McJob' that they want to change it.

Of course they want to change it. The word, which has been current for decades, is understood to mean a crappy, low paying job with few decent conditions and little security in an appalling fast food or other menial environment.

Which is extremely apt, since those are exactly the sort of jobs generally on offer in McOutlets.

But Guardian writer Brian Whitaker has uncovered an attempt by the corporation to redefine the word, as it is apparently insulting to restaurant staff. No it isn't. It's insulting to the corporation. It's the wages and conditions offered by the corporation that are insulting to the staff.

This comes hard on the heels of Israel's continual attempts to redefine anti-semitism as meaning anti-anything Israeli or Jewish. No, anti-semitism is a bigotry against semitic people, as the word clearly expresses.

And obviously Israel would love to change that meaning, since their defence forces, by way of continually terrorising and murdering the semitic people of Palestine, are the biggest anti-semites on Earth.

They've sought to change the meaning by getting sympathetic (ie Zionist) academics in America and elsewhere to write ponderous and dubious essays redefining anti-semitism to mean just what they want it to mean and not what it actually means.

They cleverly plugged into the whole Politically Correct movement for redefining language in order to achieve this. But it's still rubbish, and merely a slimy attempt to eradicate the Zionist responsibility for the bloodbath that is the Middle East.

Languages grow organically. Let people who speak a language decide what words mean, not narrow lobbies with political agendas.

Ever since the homosexual community successfully redefined the meaning of the word 'gay', it has been tempting for other lobbies to seek to put their own sheen on the language.

Don't let them. A McJob is still a McJob, no matter what McDonalds say, and anti-semitism is still bigotry against Semites, bigotry like nicking their land, killing their kids and stealing the money that they're owed.

Congratulations to the delegation of Irish bishops who yesterday called on the EU and Ireland to review their ties to the apartheid state of Israel, after concluding that the Zionist regime had turned Gaza into little more than a large prison for the indigenous Palestinian population.

I hope that when they address their concerns to An Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, they will be listened to. I hope also that their meeting with Ahern will result in a severing of trading ties with the regime, which was accurately described by the Bishops as conducting an injustice upon the Palestinian people.

Injustice is a very mild word for stealing someone else's homes, systematically killing them and herding them into large open air prisons behind huge walls (see above and here), harrassing them as they try to move about and work in their own land, and denying them access to their families and medical treatment when they find themselves on the 'wrong' side of such illegal barriers.

The illegal Israeli regime, which has long survived only due to being propped up by American money and weapons, is always quick to denounce those who condemn the horrors they perpetrate as anti-semitic.

In fact, they are the true anti-semites, as they steal the land from the Semitic Palestinian people and allocate it to fake Jews imported from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia to serve as soldiers and service industry underclass to the Ashkenazi elite.

It is high time, as the Bishops have said, that the people of Europe stand up and denounce this shoddy, apartheid regime and the genocide they are seeking to commit on the Palestinian people.

And it is high time that our own government showed some leadership in this regard by severing ties with such an abhorrent entity.

I've been thinking all week about the Iranian conference on the holocaust, and all sorts of things are disturbing me about it.

Obviously, there are the initial concerns about holocaust denial in general. Western media coverage has been vociferous in its condemnation of the motley crew of white supremacists, rogue rabbis, neo-Nazis and other dubious types who gathered in Tehran to 're-examine' the holocaust.

I share the concern that so many varied interests would seek to deny the mass murder of millions of people. It is certainly deeply worrying to see so many bizarre fellow travellers gathered together with the intention of casting doubt on the historical veracity of the holocaust.

But there are plenty of other things to get concerned about in relation to this conference. The first would be the erosion of the concept of journalistic objectivity. When BBC correspondents happily say that one must 'take sides' when reporting a story, I get very worried about whether even good old Auntie Beeb can be relied upon to provide objective reportage rather than propaganda anymore.

The result of this lack of objective reporting is that we in the West fail to either understand why this conference was convened, nor what it's ultimate purpose is.

In one sense, it is a knee-jerk response to the 'freedom of speech' defence offered by Danish newspapers and others after they published derogatory cartoons about the prophet Muhammed which were deeply offensive to Muslims worldwide.

And in that regard, one is forced to ask, in what way has the West's adherence to the Holocaust come to resemble an article of religious faith? We have laws in countries like France and Austria that send people to jail for questioning the holocaust, just as we once had laws on heresy.

Whether these laws genuinely impact upon the ability of historians to examine World War Two is debatable, but there is no doubt that they act as a genuine infringement upon the concept of freedom of speech.

Then there is the issue close to Iranian President Ahmedinejad's heart - the formation of Israel in Palestine following World War Two. Like so many Muslims, especially his Arab neighbours, Ahmedinejad is outraged by the continuing atrocity committed on the Palestinian people by the Jewish state.

His analysis traces the formation of the state of Israel to European guilt at how the Jewish population of Europe was treated during the 1930s and 1940s, and he has asked in the past why a Jewish homeland could not have been created in Europe instead of on Palestinian lands following the war.

And that, unlike querying the historical veracity of the holocaust, is a fair question to ask. But the West's continuing Holocaust guilt ensures blind loyalty to the Zionist state, so that our media tends to ignore or seek to justify Israeli atrocities committed against the people whose homes, lands and lives they stole and continue to steal.

There is little doubt that the Iranian President would wish to see the eradication of the state of Israel. He has said as much in the past. But despite how Israel and their US supporters would like to spin it, this is not the same as calling for a second holocaust. Basically, Ahmedinejad's position is that the Jewish homeland should not be located on land stolen from others.

The whole issue of holocaust denial is more complex than many in the West realise. Thanks to continued Israeli and general Jewish insistence that there was only one holocaust (usually with a capital H for added effect), we are generally left in ignorance about other genocides which were equally horrific, such as the Turkish holocaust against its Armenian minority which inspired the Nazis, or indeed the Naqba which Zionists perpetrated upon the Palestinian people.

Intriguingly, the official Israeli position in relation to the Armenian holocaust is that it didn't happen. Why is this their position? Because secular Turkey is one of their few friends in the entire region, and because Turkey itself still has laws to lock up people like this year's Nobel laureate in literature Orhan Pamuk for 'defaming Turkey', when they highlight this atrocity in Turkey's history.

So Israel itself is happy to deny a holocaust despite posters about it littering every wall in the Armenian quarter of the old city of Jerusalem. But they aren't very happy when the holocaust which led to the foundation of their own state is queried in Iran.

To my mind, the coverage this Tehran conference has received is deeply suspect and disingenuous. The howling headlines in usually sober British broadsheets must be seen in the context of George Bush and Tony Blair's phoney war with Iran, as well as the erosion of impartial reporting.

Blair is off to Turkey at the moment, in an attempt to patch up relations which have gone frosty as the EU backs away from Turkish accession. Will this great warrior against holocaust denial raise the issue of the Armenians with his hosts? Of course not.

And while George Bush seeks to make a case for the invasion of Iran due to a potential nuclear weapons capacity, a case as spurious as the one made against Saddam's Iraq, will he also invade Israel, after Ehud Olmert admitted accidentally to his country's nuclear capacity? Of course not.

We are utterly right to condemn those who would seek to deny the deaths of six million people in the last century in Nazi death camps. They are inhumanly wrong.

But if we cannot understand the reasons that underpin the hosting of this conference, we will inevitably find ourselves watching from the sidelines as America and Britain jihad across the entire Muslim world in order to placate Israel's unending imperialist quest for an Eretz-Israel cleared of its indigenous population and surrounded by weak or occupied Arab states.

It's not been a great week for world peace so far, when all's said and done.

On the down side, mass-murdering rightist nuthouse General Pinochet kicked the bucket without ever going on trial for overthrowing the Allende regime and subsequently 'disappearing' tens of thousands of people during his reign of terror.

Ethiopia's former psycho leader Mengistu Haile Mariam was found guilty of committing genocide during his 'red terror' regime that led to mass famine in the country. But since he's hiding out in Zimbabwe with his old pal Mugabe, there's little chance of him facing prosecution either.

Then, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert let slip the Middle East's worst-kept secret - the weapons of mass destruction reside in the Negev Desert under IDF control, not in Iraq at all.

And while mass murderers like Mugabe, Mengistu and others continue to roam free from harm, the might of the West remains pointed at the poor, beleaguered people of Iraq, dozens of whom died in the latest round of bombings.

When will we ever see the West intervene in a genuine tragedy? It was aid agencies who responded to the Tsunami, to the Ethiopian famine. When a bitter little genocide breaks out in Africa, it is the African Union we send in to resolve it, not our own troops.

Countries like West Papua, currently and viciously occupied by Indonesia, Tibet, all but devastated by the Chinese, or Burma, controlled by a murderous junta, could all do with some regime change, but you won't see Tonee or Dubya arranging an invasion in any of those places.

The evil men do is compounded by the lack of action of others. For a petty tyrant like Mengistu or Pinochet to succeed and survive, they require if not the overt support of the West, then at least their tolerance for the regime to continue.

As our governments act to destroy Iraq for at least the fourth time in a single century, it might be pertinent to remind them that their self-appointed roles as global police are not mandated by the UN, and that it is the job of police to protect everyone, and not just their own oil interests.

If they truly wish to spread democracy, let them over throw al-Saud and his Wahhabist state that bred the 9/11 killers. Let them restore democracy to the poor people of Zimbabwe, so tortured by their own maniacal leadership.

If they wish to rid the Middle East of weapons of mass destruction, let them disarm and cease providing support to Israel, whose nukes reside, according to that brave whistleblower Mordecai Vanunu, at Dimona in the Negev.

Remember, Israel has always refused to permit weapons inspections of the Dimona site, and locked Vanunu up for decades for telling the British media about their sordid little secret.

So, why no American invasion of Israel, which is also in breach of a series of UN resolutions? After all, much sketchier evidence (let's say, none whatsoever) was used to justify the current atrocity in Iraq.

If they want peace in our time, let them quit starting all these disingenuous wars that their own people object to. Let them instead turn their attention to the scores of mass murderers that, like Pinochet and Mengistu, manage to retire without punishment.

Of course, to tread down that path would mean to bear close scrutiny for their own war crimes in Afghanistan, in Iraq. It would tempt people to seek to bring Blair and Bush to account for the murder of civilians.

And that would never do.

As I said, it's been a bad week for world peace, and it's only Tuesday.