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Hello again.

I've been away for nearly three weeks, and as I've moved and started a job, I did wonder if this particular form of solipsism was worth continuing. But then I received two encouraging messages (you know who you are), so I figured I may as well carry on.

Reviewing the past three weeks is not going to be simple, so I won't bother. This will be pretty stream-of-consciousness, for which my apologies.

First, why do Liverpool not look convincing? We stumbled past West Ham and Maccabi Haifa, were just awful against Sheffield United and yet deservedly beat Chelsea in the Community Shield. I always get nervous watching Liverpool because there's always the slight fear that they might just throw it away, especially against weaker opposition (which is a really annoying habit they've had as long as I can remember). Chelsea and Man Utd don't do this: when they go ahead, game over. They're a bit like Tiger Woods., who brings to mind Walter Hagen's comment on Bobby Jones: "when the goddam amateur gets to the tee, you guys give up."

Second, what is the precise point of David Cameron?

Third, if you ever volunteer to look after a relative's delinquent cat, make sure that it isn't the fortnight when said relative is having the kitchen replaced. And that said relative has a functioning phoneline.

Fourth, go to Stratford-upon-Avon if you get the chance. I've just seen the Henry VI trilogy, which was outstanding, and not only because Henry was played by a Yalie. Gripping from beginning to end, which is something like ten hours. Shakespeare can be the most quietly revolutionary playwright in English; by the end of Part Three, as chaos sown in Part One is harvested with a vengeance, you long for nothing more than the removal of the corrupt, power-mad, selfish aristocracy ('nobility' is a sick irony by this point).

Harold Pinter once said that he didn't know what his plays were about. If you don't know, mate, why inflict them on the rest of us?

Fifth, go to Hay-on-Wye. Hay is a small town in the middle of the countryside, on the Wales-England border, and for no obviously good reason it's the second-hand book capital of the UK. I picked up a couple I wanted and also stumbled over a book called 'Saddam Defiant' by Richard Butler, who resigned as head of Unscom due to what he described as Iraqi intransigence. In the book (published in 2000), Butler clearly states that he believes Saddam to be in active and successful pursuit of WMD.

More interesting is the result of googling 'richard butler saddam,' as it leads to a contemporary BBC website. The following are quotes from the public cut-and-pasted, with my annotation:

"...if Saddam is not responsible enough to care for his own people, then we must shoulder that responsibility by lifting the sanctions. What Saddam does within his own borders is a matter for the Iraqi people and the Iraqi people only. If the Iraqis are happy living under such a brutal dictator, then that's their lookout" (this man is barking)

"The reality is that Saddam Hussein a leader and should be left alone. It is up to the Iraqis to determine their future with no help from outside."

"Give Iraq food, medicines and full-blown democracy then Saddam will fall" (do some people even think about what they write?)

"Over 1.5 million people have died in Iraq from malnutrition and starvation over the last ten years. This is a direct result of the embargo against Iraq enforced primarily by the US and the UK. This organised and legalised genocide is an atrocity" (this commentator was from San Fransisco).

Not everybody was from California, of course:

"America and the other allied countries should have had the bottle to deal with Saddam at the time of the Gulf War and not embark on this long drawn out sanction process."

"I do agree that Saddam is a threat to the world and his people. However, it does make me wonder what the UN inspection team has been doing for the last 10 years. "

"While sanctions since the war have clearly not prevented Iraq from continuing to rebuild its military capabilities, or to give up its weapons of mass destruction, the suggestion that the West was in some way responsible for the deaths of Iraqi citizens by using sanctions is extremely short-sighted. "

In 2000 there were three terrorist-supporting countries adjacent in the Middle East: Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. Now there is one.

Sixth, in happier news, I managed to contact BT and reactivate the phoneline in my new flat within 12 hours. Hurrah.

Seventh, I'm feeling quite at home here and have been made to feel very welcome. Watch this space for more on adventures in education.

A Victory, and a Defeat

The victory was Liverpool's deserved, if rather laboured, 2-1 Champions League win over Maccabi Haifa, who could have been forgiven for having other things on their mind. We were competent without being comfortable or convincing: it's to be hoped that this was just early-season rustiness rather than being a sign of long-term weakness. On last night's performance, we should be able to sneak through, whichever neutral venue hosts the second leg.

It was good to see Mark Gonzales score the winner. On balance, I'd prefer Rafa to sign effective players before cute players, but it's always good if they're both simultaneously.

The defeat was Joe Lieberman's in Connecticut. Apart from a CT friend of mine calling Ned Lamont a sleaze, about which I have no informed opinion, this is a really sad moment. A respected Senator ejected by a one-issue carpetbagger in hock to the madder wings of the Democratic Party. Michael Moore called Senator Lieberman's defeat 'housecleaning,' which was pleasant, but does at least confirm that the New E-Democrats are the sort of party one wouldn't want to gatecrash.

I would blame Yale students, but it's the vacation. Possibly it's the faculty and my fellow graduate students.

A Lamont voter was quoted in the Times as insisting that Connecticut was antiwar and that this would send a message to Washington. Not just DC, darling. Even if you were to assume that Iraq was the proximate cause of the plot to detonate transatlantic aircraft, which is a very dodgy assumption (proximate excuse might be more accurate), who on earth is going to benefit from America cutting and running NOW?

Still, if you elect Lamont to the Senate in November, maybe they'll take notice and leave Connecticut till last.

Wouldn't count on it, though.

Liverpool FC

Losing to Kaiserslautern, Grasshopper of Zurich and FC Mainz, hardly three of Europe's giants, can only be regarded as a quite appalling warm-up for the season.

I thereby assume that Rafa Benitez ordered the team to look like a bunch of incompetent losers in order to lure everyone else, beginning with Maccabi Haifa, into a false sense of security.

The Middle East, again (or still)

Someone who doesn't like Jews: Mel Gibson.

Someone who really doesn't like Jews: the guy in Seattle who shot and killed six Jewish women because they were Jewish women.

People who really really don't like Jews: Hizbullah.

Just hoping to add a sense of proportion.

I was talking to my godmother today. I love my godmother and owe her a lot, not least my copy of Pilgrim's Progress, but she is one of those socialists that can only be so because they are from the comfortable middle-class, and who has perennial fits of nostalgia for the good old days of nationalised industry (in today's case, British Gas).

It sounds so plausible: one producer, one supplier, no need to pander to shareholders: why, in fact, aren't nationalised industries the way forward?

That's for another time. Today's point is that the entire Middle East problem was caused by the removal of Palestinian land, the consequent lack of hope among generations of Palestinians, America's use of Israel as a 'pawn,' America's invasion of Iraq for nefarious reasons (alluded to but not specified by my father), and our need to improve the quality of life in these countries that produce terrorists, and also (incidentally) reclaim the moral high ground by not overdoing the response to any terrorist act.

I know that I appear to have become, by default, America's biggest supporter in the UK, but I can't be the only person slightly perturbed by the definite sense that America and Israel are big enough to 'take it' and that we only antagonise terrorists by going on the offensive.

The awful thing about this, of course, is that it's totally plausible. It all boils down to a simple question: do you believe that there is a serious existential threat to the 'western' way of life? And then if so, what do you propose to do about it?

Which is why it can still be argued that Iraq was the least bad option to take. It's bothersome to hear arguments like 'at least Iraq was stable under Saddam' (and presumably he made the trains run on time), but again, it's more than a little true. It depends how highly you value stability and freedom, and whose stability and freedom. I have no concern in theory for the political system under which a country operates, which is why I wish American commentators would stop trumpeting Israel's democracy as a de facto halo, but I have even less time for the view that the millions of Iraqi voters were merely 'playing at democracy.'

Look: there are people who don't want a democratic Iraq, and often the same people want to kill their fellow Iraqis. This is hardly a step backwards from Saddam and not much of a step forwards; but now there isn't a genocidal maniac in charge who wants WMD. And, apropos Vicki Woods' curious piece in Saturday's Telegraph, the fracture of Iraq may not be such a bad thing after all. I'm constantly told it was only a British invention anyway.

And, despite my father, I still can't think of a more plausible reason for the Americans going into Iraq than the one they gave.

The Daily Mail: an apology

That is, an apology for a newspaper. Yesterday's Mail (Aug 1) was bought randomly as my mother needed something to read, and lo and behold if there wasn't another slack and silly article by Sir Max Hastings. I guess I should take it as a slightly belated birthday present.

First, a quick mention for Paul Scott's attempted hatchet job on Mel Gibson. It's obviously too much to expect any lay reporter to have a decent grasp on soteriology, but the combination of pejorative language and inflated gossip is...well, crass, although it's patched together with the competence you'd expect from a professional.

But really: 'religious fanatic'? 'Dogmatic approach'? Or, as we know it in the real world, 'believing Catholic.' Gibson may be anti-semitic, but the Mail could be accused of covert anti-Catholicism (and even if he is, what he reportedly did is hardly on the radar of what celebrities impose upon us). And yes, The Passion of the Christ may be 'blood-soaked,' but it's about the crucifixion, what would you expect? And it was indeed 'condemned as being rabidly anti-Jewish,' but not by anyone who actually saw the film, or at least who saw the film without a rabid determination to find anti-semitism.

Enough of such silliness and back to a very smart guy whose own anti-Americanism is painfully obvious, the more so for the recurrent ejaculations of 'we owe [America] a huge amount' and 'no sensible person suggests we should quarrel with the United States' and so on, all of which has the painful ring of 'I'm not prejudiced, but...'

Try and make sense of 'it is not anti-American, merely decently British, to recoil from the notion that US bombs for Israel are being freighted through our airports.' I can't. Is Sir Max saying that it is decently British to be squeamish? Or does this only apply to US bombs? Or bombs for Israel? Can we supply our own bombs? Actually no, we can't - the tenor of the article is a revulsion at Israel's actions against Hezbollah in Lebanon, which Sir Max 'fears' may lead to 'some ghastly atrocity in Britain.' Personally I think it's decently British to recoil from the notion that, should there be another suicide bomber on the Underground, the former editor of the Evening Standard will pin the blame on Tony Blair for supporting Israel.

Even apart from the shrill and wafer-thin argument, Sir Max's bold assertion that Tony Blair is pursuing a foreign policy because he 'heard tills ringing' and wants a pension from 'the rich Republicans whom he loves' is unfortunate. He must have had a very short deadline. And to throw in a hopeful jab at 'US corporations, which have waxed rich and fat' is the sort of lame idiocy that would look bad in the Yale Daily News.

Sir Max admits that most people supported action against the Taliban. The very next paragraph cites President Bush for 'pursuing an ideological agenda of his own which had nothing to do with crushing international terrorism.'

Apart from the hack-use of 'idelogical agenda' as negative words, as if the author was a free-floating mass of pragmatism (with which I won't tar Sir Max), what is this ideology? And what is the agenda, if not to crush terrorism?

We don't know, because Sir Max doesn't tell us. Oh, but it's got something to do with 'neo-conservatives.' But then, Sir Max probably doesn't know. He knows he's furious that Britain is being 'dragged ever deeper into a confrontation with radical Islam...which there was probably no avoiding. We must face it with resolution.'

Of course, that ellipsis covers two and a half paragraphs, and illustrates the splenetic inconsistency. Truly, the Sir Max doctrine suggests clear as day that we had to confront Islamism eventually, but it would have been so much better if we avoided it as long as possible. Presumably this would have been fine if we'd avoided it with resolution.

And if we hadn't gone into Iraq (not, as a sidenote, the 'chaos' Sir Max would like)? Whether you agree with the invasion or not, Saddam would now be funding suicide bombers in Palestine and Lebanon and Sir Max would be inveighing mightily against Israeli actions.

Heigh-ho. How Colonel Blimpish, or (as they say in America), how September 10. But how demeaning of Sir Max to write such a piece.

UEFA and Human Dignity

Hot on the heels of the intriguing news that British schools will be relieved of their requirement to teach right from wrong, replacing it with Human Rights, come the ever-helpful UEFA men who are apparently intending to ban 'anyone guilty of insulting human dignity, by whatever means'.

Now I'm all for people being nice to each other, even in sport. I firmly believe, for a start, that the euphemistically-termed 'sledging' should be banned and removed from cricket. It's nothing more than abuse and calling it a test of mental pressure is insulting self-justification. But one wonders just how far UEFA's regulation extends. A few years ago, Sheffield Wednesday had an away kit that was the exact colour of rice pudding with jam stirred into it, and I reckon wearing that was an affront to human dignity.

As a goalkeeper who once misjudged a very hard pitch and a very strong wind, and contrived to concede a header from the half-way line, I am hoping to find that damn APU player and retrospectively get him banned for insulting my human dignity.

Just think: if these regulations had been in force last season, Sunderland could have legitimately sued all their opponents.