When he invited me and my fellow German volunteer Sophie to his monastery for tea and lae pae ye -tea leaf salad- we talked a lot about cultural differences, in particular, Theravada Buddhism, the religion that is being practiced by 89% of the Burmese people. I came to learn that monks in Myanmar do not eat after 12pm and never buy food nor cook themselves. Instead, they collect food in their alms bowls during their morning walks through the village.

In Theravada Buddhism the concept of karma -the idea of a cycle of cause and effect- very much determines everyone’s behaviour. Feeding monks, as well as donating to temples and performing regular worship at the local paya, is a pious Buddhist’s way of accumulating merit. Such deeds, as well as abiding to the five moral rules, (prohibition of killing, stealing, adultery, lying and intoxicating substances), are believed to help Buddhists to be reborn into a better life.

Indeed, what immediately struck me on my visit, was the warm and genuinely welcoming Burmese attitude, leaving me feeling very safe throughout my entire stay in the country. The atmosphere, especially in Bagan, was extremely peaceful and friendly, and this, I am convinced of, can be attributed to the people’s sincere adherence to Buddhist principles. I never locked my bike, and one of the many incidents where the Burmese proved ready to lend a hand was when I got a puncture in the middle of nowhere. A sand painter drove me and my bike on his moped to the next repair centre and even lent me the money I was charged there.

One of my daily highlights was my route to work. Each morning I rode my bike to a school  where I was teaching English over a period of two months.  Somehow, I had chosen one of the most magical places in the world. Bagan is Myanmar’s greatest ancient architectural site where over 2500 red brick pagodas, golden- topped temples and other religious sites are spread out across a plain the size of Manhattan Island.  Every morning I would ride along a dirt road passing hundreds of these ancient pagodas, which had been constructed by several kings from the 11^th to 13^th century when Bagan served as the cultural and religious capital of the First Burmese Empire.  A couple of times I saw a line of about 30 novice monks, walking in height order  in their bright red robes, carrying their empty alms bowls in order to collect breakfast.

One of my most interesting experiences was my first meditation lesson, held by a toothless old monk who didn’t speak any English. One of my teaching colleagues had to accompany me and translated his 15-minute instruction into 5 sentences. It was only when I tried to sit in a comfortable position, eyes closed and concentrating entirely on my breathing – whilst also trying to keep an empty mind free from any thoughts – that my suspicions were confirmed; her translation must have missed some essential part of his instructions. Unfortunately, but maybe not unsurprisingly, a second meditation lesson never took place.

Myanmar is actually still considered a military dictatorship, and although it is not obvious at first sight I soon came to observe some bizarre rules and practices. One of them is the prohibition to have non-family members staying over at night. Although there is no direct control mechanism, neighbours, or other government loyalists, could always report such incidents. The majority of university degrees are taught via correspondence and the different faculties of one university are often located at opposite ends of the city; all of these regulations will surely serve the purpose of avoiding mass gatherings of people, especially of students, which could lead to the discussion of common ideology, criticising of the government and ultimately further protests.

I was delighted when I succeeded to get hold of some editions of the “New Light of Myanmar” -the government controlled, English speaking newspaper whose last page is always the ultimate propaganda revelation: an appeal for patriotism and loyalty to the ‘Democratic Republic’ and other demands such as ‘not to allow ourselves to be swayed by killer broadcasts designed to cause troubles’.

One should know that, because of its ongoing human right abuses, Myanmar is still placed under sanctions by the majority of Western countries. However, since the general elections of 2010 and the following government reforms of 2011 towards liberal democracy and reconciliation, Myanmar’s foreign relations seem to improve. Pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been released from house arrest and allowed to meet with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who visited Myanmar recently announcing several initiatives, including the possibility of full diplomatic relations.

Nevertheless, it is possibly just because of its long Western isolation that Myanmar has kept a unique charm, and its people a particular authenticity, I have not encountered anywhere else. It is just a matter of time when I will be back.

My getting lost isn’t that interesting; it’s pretty standard fizz behaviour. What is important, however, well to me at any rate, is where my getting lost left me. It left me in a place called Holloway, in front of a sign directing me to ‘Her Majesty’s Holloway Prison’. The combination of the words Holloway and Her Majesty left me temporarily convinced I’d somehow managed to wander back to RHUL. Indeed the building I ended up facing was huge and red bricked as Founders is, the only difference was that this massive red monster had no windows. And it was then that my slow, confused brain processed the word prison and I realised where I was.

Telling people I went to Royal Holloway had led to this ‘mistake’ many times. Plenty of frankly annoying people with a deluded sense of their own comedic value had asked me where I was studying, and on hearing me say Royal Holloway had responded with a ‘haha, in prison are we?’ remark as if they thought they were guest starring on ‘Mock the Week’; to which I had learnt to chuckle obligingly while secretly wanting to pull out my own eyebrows and wear them as ear muffs. However, only once I saw the prison did this dislike of the joke reach new heights.  Women prisons in themselves are far from funny, they are a horrible reality.

For most of us, our understanding of women’s prisons goes as far as the second not-quite-as-good-but-meh-it-still-had-Colin-Firth-in-it ‘Bridget Jones’ film. It appeared on that to be more like an American sorority house than a prison, just with fewer fairylights and a very different kind of bars. The women would sit around sharing life stories and bra sizes while singing Madonna, it didn’t look so bad. However, much as I’d love to believe this fiction it simply isn’t true, like most things in these sort of romantic comedies it is a lie, told to make us feel better and more comfortable. Prison itself is a very real thing and therefore so are prisoners; it would be wrong for us to ignore them. Indeed, ex prison officers have come forward with some startling and upsetting stories about the reality of women prisons that we simply cannot ignore.

Clive Chatterton, who used to be Governor of the women prison ‘Styal’, has told the Guardian some harrowing stories about his experiences there; most strikingly, the shockingly high level of self harm. The number of instances of self injury in 2010 reached 12,663, and considering women make up only 5% of the prison population, they account for nearly half of all self-harming instances.  Though this is incredibly upsetting it is hardly surprising considering that, on Chatterton’s estimation, 6 out of 10 female inmates have a significant mental health problem.

A lot of the women in prison are not the mouthy teenagers society paints them to be but vulnerable and ill young people, often who have been severely physically or sexually abused.  Many of them have never had a stable home or a proper education; since childhood they have been caught up in an illegal world of drugs and crime where they have never properly learnt how to look after themselves or be independent.

I can’t generalise, and I won’t. There are plenty of women in prison who have committed terrible crimes. However, what Chatterton and other prison officers have a problem with, is the high number of first time or minor offences which women are being jailed for. Many magistrates and judges, Chatterton argues, have acknowledged that these women serving two or three weeks in a jail should not really be there, but say they don’t know what else to do with them. There is a far too ready assumption that once you have been convicted as guilty you should be marched straight from the dock into a dungeon and deprived of the sky for an appropriate period of time. Clearly this isn’t working and it is time we asked whether this was the best thing to do, not only for our society, but for the prisoners themselves, who, however much we may like to dehumanise them, are still, and always will be, real people.

There are examples of vulnerable, mentally unstable women being sent to jail for 12 days for stealing something as small as a three pound sandwich. Some will argue that the price of the sandwich is irrelevant, it is the principle. I would argue that we need to stop dealing with principles and start dealing with people. Surely the emotional cost to that young woman is far higher than the three pounds that Tesco, or some other multimillion company lost. Prison should be a last resort and it should never be a replacement for hospitals or other mental health institutes. There are too many examples of female inmates, recognised as needing Psychiatric help, but deprived of it simply because the hospitals don’t have enough beds. While missing out on crucial psychological treatment is in itself disgraceful, the idea that these unhappy and unwell women aren’t even at home being cared for by their loved ones but are in an isolating, unnatural and often upsetting environment seems shocking.

Ever since I started watching Judge John Deed with my mum I have had a terrifying fear that I will be walking along the street one day, humming to myself, when I’m suddenly arrested by a police officer and falsely accused of a crime. No seriously, I really do worry about this. I try to counteract this fear by befriending as many successful lawyers as possible, hoping then that should my worst nightmare come true I could just ring up Steve on speedial and he’d whip me out in an instance. Bridget Jones, for example, had the ever so lovely Colin Firth to fall back on when she had cocaine hidden in her suitcase, and I am, unfortunately, build from the same mould as Bridget Jones.

This silly, childhood fear built on my excessive paranoia and the fact I can’t live without having something to worry about, has changed now though, into something darker and deeper. It is far too easy to fall far too far in today’s society and we aren’t given enough help getting back up.  Drugs and alcohol is rife, it is easy to get sucked into a gang culture, and somebody as ditzy as me could easily walk out of Boots and forget to pay for her tofu wrap. It is easy enough to say ‘I will never go to prison’, and yes, as long as you behave yourself you probably won’t. But that doesn’t mean the people that do don’t matter, or that they deserve to be forgotten about and given up on completely. Many female inmates are actual criminals; but there is plenty of evidence showing that a lot of them are more victims than anything else. They say we’d all be vegetarians if Slaughter houses had glass walls; maybe if prisons had them too we wouldn’t be as quick to send vulnerable people there to be punished when what they really need is help.

The team usually present from 8-10pm every Friday, but in a bid to raise awareness for Insanity Radio, Chris Smith, Georgia Fish, Jack Gordon and Alice Hopkins will not leave the studio from 8am on 26 March until 12pm on 30 March.

The stunt comes just weeks after Royal Holloway’s Insanity Radio officially became a Community FM Station, launching on 103.2FM. The station hosted a week of celebrations between 5 and 10 March to celebrate the switch to FM transmission. The switchover itself was welcomed in with “Mission: Launch” night at the student union, a space themed event featuring Insanity DJs. The radio station now broadcasts to audiences in Windsor, Staines and Sunningdale.

Insanity FM presenter, Harry Angers, says: “We’ll be going where few student radio stations have gone before”.

The record breaking attempt at Insanity Radio comes almost exactly one year after Chris Moyles broadcast live on air for 51.5 hours to raise money for Red Nose Day.  Moyles was live on air from 16 to 19 March and broke the 37 hour record set by Radio 1 presenter Simon Mayo for Comic Relief in 1999.

The team at Insanity will also be raising money for charity. Alice and Georgia will be travelling to Africa in August and all money raised from the event will go towards their charity work and the local communities they will be helping. Alice will be climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and working with the WorldVision charity, whilst Georgia will be helping out the local community in St. Lucia by teaching in an orphanage, building houses and toilet blocks, and conserving the wildlife.

Georgia says: “Not only is this a great opportunity to get more publicity for our wonderful community station after its new re-launch onto FM, but we are taking this chance to raise money for charity too!”

Donations can be made online at wwww.gofundme.com/georgia-goes-to-africa, www.insanityradio.com/news/100hours or www.facebook.com/georgiagoestoafrica. Supporters of the event can also join the official 100 Hour Event page on Facebook by searching for Insanity Radio 103.2FM.

Over one hundred students occupied Birmingham University’s corporate conference centre in protest at the injunction banning occupations and stationary protests at the university. Their demands included the abandonment of the injunction and no repercussions for students involved in the occupation.

SURHUL President, Dan Lemberger-Cooper, attended the protests at Birmingham University, despite not taking any leave from service to Royal Holloway. In addition, he announced his attendance at two meeting with the College – one with the Estates Management Committee and another with College Finance – on the same day as the Birmingham visit, despite not actually attending.

The 21-year old student representative, Ben Meakin, consequently resigned from his position in the NUS executive committee. NUS Wales President, Luke Young, highlighted the inappropriate nature of Meakin’s involvement in such an act, stating: “His actions have shown a serious lack of sound judgement. This is unacceptable for a member of the NUS Wales executive and is why I asked him to resign.”

In a formal statement, Meakin spoke of his ‘regret’ over the incident: “I sincerely regret my participation in the social event held outside the Guild…I compromised my role as Guild president. This morning [Tuesday 28^th February], I resigned as a member of the NUS Wales national executive committee. My actions go against the fantastic work of the women’s liberation movement, which I fully support. Personally, I am a strong advocate for the women’s movement. This is clear through my work banning the event Carnage coming to the Guild this year. I have learned from this experience and plan to carry on my work here at Aberystwyth University.”

Opinions on the incident are inevitably divided. Many see Meakin’s participation in the game as hypocritical and sexist considering his role in the NUS and his stance on the rights of women. Others are less critical of the Guild president, recognising the informal setting and light-hearted nature of the act. It is a dilemma. Meakin holds a position of authority and of course should act with appropriate responsibly, even whilst on a night out. But he is unavoidably part of a liberal student culture in which such acts are more-often-than-not carried out in good humour. Meakin has shown fellow students respect by resigning his post in the NUS, as well as issuing a formal apology.

The incident demonstrates that issues regarding sexism and sexual exploitation are extremely prevalent, and should never be treated lightly. NUS Wales Women’s Officer, Stephanie Lloyd, spoke against sexism on campus, stating: “We must do everything we can to fight against it. Whilst Ben has joined our movement in the past, his recent actions are unacceptable.”

Furthermore, the importance of projecting an image appropriate to a chosen role or position of authority can never be emphasised enough.

The results revealed that two-thirds of students admit to taking drugs whilst at university, with the most popular substance being cannabis. Many have also turned to selling drugs in order to pay their way through their education. One quarter of students claimed to have snorted cocaine at some point, as the survey revealed it to be the most used Class A substance, with 14% of those students having needed medical attention or visited a hospital due to this. Many students claimed that the drug was more widely used at Cambridge than at any other university to which they had been. One-third of Cambridge students also admitted to knowing one or more of their friends with a “serious drug problem”, and almost two in five students claimed they used prescription drugs for recreational use. One undergraduate noted that the results weren’t surprising, stating: “many students use drugs as a way to relax and completely disconnect” when faced with the high-stress environment seen at the university. Another student reiterated this, saying that they had turned to drugs in order to manage the stress from heavy workloads.

“It’s hard to juggle a job and studying at Cambridge, so dealing is a quick and easy way for them to make cash to pay for the fees”, a Kings College student commented when considering the reasons behind the results. Another undergraduate claimed that the “relative affluence of Cambridge students” could also provide an understanding of the vast drug consumption seen. The results have provided a blow to Cambridge, which was labelled as the best university in the world in the QS World University Rankings last year. In response, a spokesman for the university claimed: “There is no indication of the validity of this survey, but clearly the university doesn’t condone dealing in illegal substances.”

Both ULU and Royal Holloway are renowned for political inactivity, but Cooper’s motivated left-wing manifesto has shaken student politics. Until 2010, ULU was engaged in no political campaigning, but in the current political climate, with government cuts and increased tuition fees, students sincerely need representation. Speaking to Solidarity, Cooper advises: “the transformation of students’ unions into combative bodies”.

As president of Royal Holloway’s Student Union, Cooper organised an anti-cuts campaign involving a forty-eight hour occupation of the Principal’s corridor on 23rd November 2011. Despite formally being widely regarded as a right-wing environment, the left-wing representative of Alliance for Workers’ Liberty has roused the opinion: “If it can be done at Royal Holloway, it can be done anywhere”. Cooper says: “Royal Holloway has a long history of political inertia, apathy and students that commend pedestrian values. This is certainly changing”.

As Vice-President, Cooper intends to boost ULU’s solidarity with the whole of London and open up the federation to all of the city’s colleges and universities, as well as employees of these institutes. Cooper plans to structure ULU around the “backbone” of the city, so that the organisation can “use its weight to get what London students need.” Cooper says: “We understand and seek to push the importance of workers and students linking up. Unity is strength, non?”

ULU Vice-President Candidate and opponent to Cooper, Ian Drummond, withdrew from the elections three hours prior to the start of voting. Drummond maintained that a third candidate, Ross Speer, was the “best placed candidate to keep a commitment to anti-war, pro-Palestinian, and anti-fascist activism central to ULU’s campaigning”. In a subsequent statement, Drummond attacked the AWL as fascist and Islamaphobic. He warned against voting for Cooper: “this is no time to entrust ULU’s campaigning to someone following such a dismal and dangerous political line”. It is thought that this action from Socialist Workers Party (SWP) organisers was in response to the large body of support Cooper gained from SWP student activists. Speer’s campaign focused heavily on issues of Israel and Palestine with the unfortunate consequence that Cooper’s campaign was wrongly accused of Islamaphobia.

Once again we find ourselves in that curious place that one comes across every few decades in the political consciousness of the nation. It takes the form of a vacuum, void of all progressive thought and leadership, and requires definition and substance, completely unconcerned as to whether that substance derives from the right or left of the political spectrum. As in the late 1970s, the left has failed again to provide an alternative, failed as a credible ideology for change and development.

When I first arrived at Royal Holloway, I distinctly remember the moment as I waited in line for the fresher’s fair when a bearded gentleman draped in the Cuban flag began the usual babble of leftist propaganda. Among the stream of incoherent chatter, I managed to discern the usual words of ‘Palestine’, ‘oppression’, ‘workers’ and ‘rebellion’. He soon retreated after I informed him that Hamas was in fact a terrorist organisation maintaining power through force and tyrannical means, eviscerating their political enemies rather than the party of liberation he described. Here in front of me was the purest example of the Che-student-revolutionary, utterly devoted and yet equally ignorant to the cause for which he fights.

The simplicity of these chimeric ideals reflects its childlike naivety. As these students dream of fighting the old battles and selling the Socialist Worker in the 1960s, they forget how the world has evolved into a far more intricate and interwoven web of body politics, liminality now eclipsing the traditional divisions of the spectrum.

The political establishment of the British Left, and indeed their supporting subsidiary groups, have sacrificed their primordial characteristic of change and progression for populist politicking, endeavouring the regain the halls of power. Mr Milliband and the limp wristed palm waving of his shadow chancellor seem more concerned in demonizing the Tory caricature that belongs to the 1950s, than actually fighting to protect the rights and interests of their followers.

Just the other day the Ministry of Defence announced that the cuts to the number of servicemen in the British Army would be increasing from 7,000 to 20,000. At the same time unions across the sectors of the economy continue to announce the demands for the protection of their own pensions and pay. The statue outside the TUC in London depicts a person holding out a hand to a fellow man in need, the embodiment of humanitarian care and solidarity. Perhaps the unions could appreciate that whilst they protect their own pockets, there are others who remain penniless and disengaged from society. Perhaps they could encourage the intrinsic value of people’s work rather than the reward of the pay packet.

Even in our own leadership in SURHUL, the student movement has become deluded by the cry to protect fees and facilities, diluting the campaign against university privatisation. What could have been a stand against a concentrated and defined policy has merely ended in a spurious and half-hearted occupation, acting as a generalised expression of dissatisfaction. Even Comrade Cooper himself, falling into his own grandiloquent obsessions with waging war on Westminster, has abandoned the true needs of his students to the more capable members of the sabbatical administration.

Playing the old games of slinging statistics across the floor of the Commons and satisfying the public with figures rather than ideas, remains too easy a tactic for the opposition. Whilst the Labour Party remains inert in its own chaotic struggle for identity, the unions will continue to pursue the eidolon of the revolutionary.  Unfortunately, the adoption of a more sophisticated approach to politics does not appear to be replacing the stagnating populism of the British left any time soon.

Today on the aftermath of 2008’s Credit Crunch with unemployment reaching historic levels in developed and developing economies it is worth asking:  Are we suffering again from a bad attack of economic pessimism? Is Keynes prediction still a feasible one? Are we capable to escape the ‘bubble-capitalism’ we have relied on for the last decades?

In order to answer these questions, first we need to understand the basis on which Keynes predicted our successfully escape from the “Economic Problem”.  It is very likely that he got to the 100 years figure by calculating the increase in wealth given the “interest compounding” and the experience of Britain in the XIX Century. But he also based his conclusion in a key assumption.  In contrast to classical economic theory that treat all human needs as insatiable Keynes differentiated human needs in two categories: “those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow humans beings may be and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfactions lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows”. It is only relative needs that are insatiable.

Keynes believed that the key to solve the economic problem was to achieve a more equalitarian society that will lead us to the satisfaction of the absolute needs of all human beings and as a result of the relative needs. According to him the key determinants of the speed in which we were going to reach the solution of the economic problem were:  a) our power to control population growth, b) our determination to avoid wars and civil dissensions, c) our ability to foster science and scientific developments and, d) our ability to reach an equilibrium between global production and global consumption. While we have more or less successfully managed to control population growth, the destructive effects of wars (not everywhere though) and we have continued to innovate at a fast speed. It is clear that we have failed to find the correct rate of accumulation and therefore equilibrium between global production and consumption.

In fact, the increase in inequality in developed and developing countries in the last decades has deepen such disequilibrium by producing a shift in resources from those whose absolute needs are not yet satisfied to those that have theirs satisfied, thus depressing aggregate demand and therefore economic growth producing high levels of unemployment around the world.

Without the willingness to achieve a better distribution of resources the global economy has relied on the creation of asset bubbles to foster economic growth for almost three decades (i.e. the dot.com bubble in the 90’s or the housing bubble that broke in 2008 creating the Credit Crunch). Moreover, the high concentration of income that has deepened the disequilibrium between aggregate demand and the global productive capacity has at the same time increased the dependence of governments and families on credit to satisfy their “relative needs”.

The prospects for the Global Economy in the New Year are alarmingly negative. Does this mean we are suffering from a bad attack of pessimism again? Or, are the current economic problems the effect of our inability to recognize the central role of equality in the last decades?

I believe if we want to “solve the economic problem” by 2030 as predicted by Keynes, governments need to regulate better the accumulation of resources and to channel at least the same amount of resources they have spend in bailing out the Financial System to improve the purchase power of the low income families around the world.

The real question is not: How long will it take us to solve the economic problem? But rather, how long will it take us to realize that the only way to solve the economic problem is to achieve a better distribution of resources? How long until we understand the only way is the common good?

The purpose of this article is to address what struck me most about this burst of media coverage in December: across both the national newspapers and TV channels, there was an untrammelled and concerning consensus that the war should be written off as an utter disaster. The media justified such an assessment by implying that the western invasion-occupation in 2003 had created the violent sectarian war that has, since then, ruined Iraq. Now this accusation, that it was the western invasion-occupation that caused the bloody sectarian war, must be refuted. One can do this by contextualizing it with a historical perspective of Iraq under Saddam Hussein.

The observation that Iraq has, since 2003, suffered from sectarian violence is an important one, but to make it as part of the argument that the war has been a disaster is desperately misplaced.

The ongoing sectarian violence in Iraq since 2003 was never a war against the western invasion of Iraq; it was an inevitable consequence of the removal of Saddam Hussein. During his 30-year rule of Iraq Saddam had given a great deal of privilege to the Sunni Muslim minority, but he had also, and for just as long, repressed the Kurdish population and the Shia majority. For example, he deported around two hundred thousand Shias in the 1970s, and killed tens of thousands more over the course of his rule; we know this as their bodies were dumped in mass graves that were discovered across Southern Iraq in 2003.

It was this repressive 30-year rule, not the western invasion in 2003, that fostered the hatred that created the sectarian violence that still divides Iraq. Understandably Shia Muslim’s have used their freedom since 2003 to try and avenge their friends and families for the years of repression and misery they faced, while the rump of Saddam’s Sunni elite are still searching for a return to their former power and privilege.

Once one understands that sectarian violence was inevitable in a post-Saddam Iraq, one also sees that the only way such sectarian violence could have been completely avoided would have been for the west to do nothing to attempt to end Saddam’s tyrannical reign. Now is this really a morally defensible view to have? Remember (or perhaps you don’t?) that Saddam was a man who had, with considerable vim, consistently tried to acquire a nuclear warhead, and had also, with equal gusto, sought to cleanse Iraq of her Kurdish population. But Saddam was a busy man, and he also attempted to expand Iraq’s boundaries into the territory of Iran and then of Kuwait, in what were two frenzied attempts to gain a monopoly of the world’s foremost oil supply. Between 1979 and 2003, the machinations of this genocidal mind had led to the very real deaths of least 1.5 million people.

Despite this moral imperative to act, let us ponder the likely outcome if the governments of the US and Britain had endorsed the view that to do nothing about Saddam was the right thing to do.

With no invasion from the west, when Saddam did eventually die and the all-controlling fear he created disappeared, the world would have still been faced with an anarchic and violent Iraq. Now, when this would have occurred, with no western invasion, Iraq would have experienced far greater sectarian violence and disorder; without the power and wealth of the US military to provide some level of security and stability Iraq would have imploded. It’s not like the Iraqi army could have been relied upon as a source of control; without Saddam it would have been torn apart by a power struggle, led enthusiastically by Saddam’s two amoral and irreconcilable sons Uday and Qusay. In this state of affairs, with Iraq free from western intervention and experiencing a hapless civil war, is it not conceivable that Iraq’s ambitious neighbors would have thought it wise to get involved militarily in Iraq? The Iranian theocracy would come from the east in order to protect Shia interest, the Saudi Arabian dictatorship from the south for the Sunnis, and Turkey would have come from the north to prevent Kurdish independence. In that case, there would not only have been a sectarian war confined to Iraq, but there would have been one that poured out onto the entire Persian Gulf region.

So there you have it, it is not such a good idea to suggest the sectarian violence experienced in Iraq, since our war there, has made the entire campaign as disaster. If you do so, you perhaps unknowingly, but inevitably, pitch your tent in the camp that suggests it would have been a good idea to do nothing to end Saddam’s murderous reign. Moreover, and as I have already said, the fact that the sectarian violence was an inevitable outcome of an Iraq after Saddam, makes it a desperately misplaced, and invalid point in the argument against the western invasion-occupation. Unfortunately, this is exactly the case the British media made last December. Such a case must be disregarded, in doing so we can begin to undermine this worrying media consensus that condemns the 2003 war in Iraq as a disaster.