 | The BBC World Service has ongoing coverage that is clear with the headlines on the hour and has lots of interesting backstory inbetween. They try to stay impartial, despite being based in Bush House (which does have 'Nation shall speak Peace unto Nation' engraved on the facade). BBC Radio Five Live is quite good too. Shame the streams keep dropping out.
This page is close to being an aggregator of journalists blogs, except they change the URL every day |
Last week's Spectator has some good opinion pieces on the war and background. Roger Scruton made a point in his essay about the Anglosphere vs EU/UN split that meshes well with the 'emergent democracy' ideas (he earlier talked about avoiding the tyranny of the majority) :
England gave us other good things besides the richest language and most powerful literature in modern Europe. In particular it gave us the common law. Our law is not a collection of decrees dictated by the sovereign but a developing set of answers to concrete human conflicts, discovered by impartial judges in the courts. It embodies the old idea of natural justice, according to which law stands in judgment over the sovereign and does not merely transmit his decrees. The common law is the true origin of our freedoms, of our safety in the face of state power, and of our ability to lead our own lives, however eccentric, without asking anyone’s permission. The EU has been built upon a conception of legal order that takes the decree (or ‘directive’) rather than the particular case and its ratio decidendi, as its paradigm. This, in my view, is the real reason why the English rebel against it — even those who have no knowledge of the history and the inherited conception of justice that make this rebellion inevitable, obligatory and right. [...]
Our Bill of Rights was taken up and re-affirmed in the first Ten Amendments to the American Constitution. This fundamentally backward-looking document did not destroy the common-law jurisdiction, but upheld it, both endorsing its principles and ensuring that the courts remain the final source of law — which is why the American Constitution can now be understood only through 400 or so volumes of case law. In this and many other respects the US Constitution is heir to the Anglo-Saxon experience of law, as the voice of the people against the sovereign, and the defender of individual freedom against the state. This experience separates both us and the Americans from the history of Continental Europe since the Reformation.
The Telegraph's Opinion Page has a good mix of views, from Peter Simple:
Now Tony Blair has his way and his war. It is, he says, a war against chaos, for which the whole world must unite. So the "war against terror" makes way for the "war against chaos", another war against an abstract noun and as nonsensical as the "war against racism" or the "war against poverty".
Chaos is within us. Will the war against Iraq be the beginning of a process in which the whole world will descend into chaos, no piece of politician's rhetoric but terrible reality, a state from which it may never emerge?
to Armando Ianucci's lament for the 'Stop the War' protests:
the anti-war movement collapsed into the usual non-media-friendly succession of images we often associate with lost causes; threadbare lines of wackily dressed people holding candles, celebrities with masking tape over their mouths, "resting" actresses saying it's all appalling.
Not good. Stop the War was just not savvy, not cynical enough, to steal Blair's 1997 clothes, and make each and every one of its spokesmen look respectable, look the part, on message and on focus, appealing to Middle England.
to Adel Darwish on Saddam's favourite movie:
Saddam's favourite film, he told us that afternoon, was The Godfather - and he seemed, as president, to become the personification of Al Pacino's murderous gangster Michael Corleone.
In that film, the shooting of the Godfather throws New York's underworld into anarchy, confusion and bloodshed. George W Bush and Tony Blair might do well to heed the parallel. The disappearance of Saddam from the scene could throw the region into just such confusion, and they may be in no doubt that Saddam will make every effort to maximise that effect.
Even the Grauniad has a couple of good articles- one on TV's hunger for 'shock and awe', combined with its determination to keep showing news even when nothing is new, and another on the way Cruise missiles changed war.
The Economist explains why people believe complex conspiracy theories
So why does London have richer opinion pages than New York ?
Boris Johnson suggests one reason.
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