Don't get me started......

During a fairly lengthy lifetime I have wondered as I pass through this Vale of Tears why the world is always in or on the point of war, famine, pestilence, financial crisis, economic collapse, and, latterly, terrorism, Islamification, climate change or some other God-awful calamity.

I have now had that Damascene moment.

It is because from the beginning of civilisation our rulers and leaders have always been utterly, totally, irredeemably stupid. And arrogant (what kind of person believes he is fit to rule over us if he is not?), deranged, remote from reality, delusional and - in modern times – elected by us, the passengers on this ship of fools.

Britain has only produced two great Prime Ministers since Gladstone. The US has only produced one great President since – well – Abe Lincoln. France has produced one megalomaniac Brit-hater and a succession of nobodies, no-hopers, and embezzlers. Russia has produced only monsters and psychopaths.

My case begins with the American Civil War – or if you are in Texas, the War Between the States.

It was the first ‘industrial’ war. The troops were equipped with rifles that fired a bloody great lump of rifled unsheathed lead that did terrible damage and was almost always fatal regardless of the part of the body struck. And yet it was fought using the same tactics and manoeuvres as in the Napoleonic Wars as if the weapon of choice was still the musket. The opposing armies lined up shoulder to shoulder well within range of each other because that was the way it had always been done. And this went on for four years. In all that time, nobody seems to have queried whether there was a better way.

The upshot was 500,000 dead, give or take a thousand or two. Extrapolated to the current population this was the equivalent of 6 million. The US has never really recovered. It was the biggest butcher’s bill in American history, notwithstanding WW1 and 2.

Cut to WW1.

Not one lesson seems to have been learnt from the American experience. Our leaders allowed the worst bloodbath ever to continue for 4 years also, almost wiping out the flower of Europe and civilisation with it. At the end, the victors imposed terms on the vanquished that made WW2 a certainty. Winston told them as much in 1922. In the meantime our masters created the Great Depression which was only really resolved by the war, not by Franklin D’s Brave New World. We also had the Balfour Declaration and the carving up of Arabia in a cynical disavowal of the promises given to the Arabs in return for being on the side of the goodies against the beastly Turk.

Which brings us slap up-to-date and the ‘new’ dimension to this opuscule.

As Osama has been terminated with extreme prejudice, as they say in the Pentagon, what is the justification for staying in Afghaniscam? The short answer is that there was no justification in the first place that has ever been explained to us voting-fodder. Several years ago we were told that the British Army would be engaged for 18 months to drive out Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda quickly scarpered and is now resident in Somalia, the Yemen and various other dusty hell-holes. Ordinary folk like us knew from the beginning – and some knowledge of previous adventures in Afghanistan - that waging war on the Taliban, who had done us no harm, was unwinnable.

Osama has been living in great comfort in the Pakistani Sandhurst to which, having outlived his usefulness, he had been lured to enable the Pakistanis to give the CIA his exact co-ordinates and preserve the billions of Yankee greenbacks on which the army depends for its livelihood.

It stands out like a greyhound’s gonads that this operation must have been planned for some time and it is impossible to believe that it was carried out without the connivance, at the very least, of Pakistanis military intelligence. It is no coincidence that one of the first reaction from Cameron was support for the Government of Pakistan.

It demonstrates with absolute clarity that anti-terrorist operations should be surgical strikes by small groups of specialists, not all-out war.

And after the bleeding corpses come the bleeding hearts. The SEALs are asked why they killed him. The obvious answer is ‘Because that’s what we do!’ Kinda spoilt his day.

Taking a step back to Iraq, I was in Jamaica in the run-up to Gulf 2 and went around confidently telling the locals that it was all a game of bluff to get Saddam to come clean on his WMD. But of course he couldn’t because he had none (as Dubya and Bliar well knew) but he couldn’t say he had none because then his own bluff would have been called. I couldn’t conceive that our side would seek to overthrow the only secular regime in the region and open up a Pandora’s Box of Islamic fundamentalism. A Jamaican colleague said presciently that it would put UK ‘in the crosshairs of terrorism’.

But they did. Why? Did George receive the Call from on high to bring democracy and enlightenment to the heathen? Did Cheney and Rumsfeld have visions of the vast profits to be made by Halliburton?

So off they went to war with half the troops the Generals thought necessary because Rummy said they had enough to win the war. Sure they did. But they didn’t have enough to win the peace. The humblest Lance Corporal would have known that after the surrender the priorities would be (1) disarm the enemy forces and send them back to their barracks, (2) secure all the armouries and weapons dumps, (3) secure the likely targets for serious looting, like museums and galleries. (3) send the civil servants back to their desks.

‘And what became of it at last?’ quoth Little Peterkin.

‘Why, that I cannot tell’ said he ‘but t’was a famous victory’.

Well, we know it wasn’t.

Step forward, Paul Bremmer. Did he do any of the above? Nope. He did the very opposite, so we had the Bremmer Balls-up and thousands of deaths as a consequence.

And another thing.

Politicians despise us.

They believe that because of office, superior education, large IQs, and privileged lifestyle that they are superior. A current example of this is the puerile campaign over the AV referendum (which nobody wants but is getting, whereas everybody wants a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty as promised and nobody is getting). Both sides have paraded luvvies and celebs to persuade us to their point of view. Eddie Izzard, indeed – an unfunny tranny whose opinions on anything political (or just anything) are not worth a bucket of warm spit, as LBJ memorably put it. What makes our political masters imagine that we will be influenced in our views by a bunch of nancy boys who by their very profession live in a world of make believe?

Did Dave really think he could get away with a deliberate lie that AV would cost a fortune because of all the voting machines that would have to be bought when the Electoral Commission said that it had no intention of buying any? Or that the money saved would be spent on the NHS? He really is a man of straw.

The whole charade has been an insult to the intelligence of the average vote. You may think that this is not saying much, but my experience tells me that you will get more collective commonsense out of a bunch of ordinary people whom our politicians might think are as thick as mince ‘n tatties than out of the whole of the House of Commons.

As for foreign aid, don’t get me started!

What is needed is a moratorium on government, just as a diseased gut may recover from a period of starvation.