Forget the fact that Brash is an incompetent warmonger who desperately wants to be another one of Bush’s poodles. Now you’ve got a bona fide middle-class reason to vote Green or Labour.
“The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign — over 95 percent of all the incidents — has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.”
According to Jack Straw, in response to George Galloway’s quite reasonable point that the cowardly attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq increased the threat of terrorist attack in Britain, “People have to remember that 11 September was in 2001 before the military action.” This cheap little chunk of self-deluded spin is an attempt to weave the story that the September 11 attacks came out of the blue.
Lucky for that “War on Terror†thing ay?
Today I received a copy of Great New Zealand Argument: Ideas about ourselves, edited by Russell Brown, which was surprisingly quick. Presumably it was distributed from within the UK somewhere. It’s a good looking book; the cover appears as if it might be a picture of Russell and his kid walking down a country road (I’ll have to ask him). Well chosen fonts, a good layout and obviously meticulous editing make it easy on the eye too. I only wish I’d been able to get a hardback version as this is a book I’d like to last.
Russell Brown reflects on a great win by the All Blacks over the weekend and notes that he doesn’t hold much hope for Live8.
Russell Brown launches his first book, Great New Zealand Argument: Ideas about ourselves.