Hear hear, Bill.

I'm not a visceral Brit-basher, but it does gall me to see the US compounding some of the crass injustices already perpetrated by Britain, especially linked to oil in what used to be called the Near East and Middle East. They established and deposed régimmes on the basis of their own interests, and the US is still doing it (I'm still waiting to hear who was the ugly American in Venezuela recently).

The ease with which the British abused their League of Nations mandate to pursue their oil interests in the region is appalling, and Bush's propensity to tear up any treaty or wreck any iternational organisation that doesn't suit him is frightening. Hence my beleif that the UN must be maed workable again: it has been left laughably under-resourced - not least by the disgraceful way in which the US refused for years to pay its dues until on 12 September it woke up and thought a bit of international cooperation mightn't be a bad thing.

I came across a fascinating quote in the (UK) Guardian newspaper recently, and am frustrated that I threw it out as I'd like to be able to cite it verbatim. It cited a British Government Minister in **1926** referring to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine as giving "us our own little Ulster over there" - i.e. a numerically inferior but privileged ethnic group which could be used to control the more numerous (Arab) natives. It struck me as the kind of thing that a propagandist blinded by anti-British sentiment might allege, but we're talking about the Guardian, not the National Enquirer.