Following the handling of the Asian tsunami disaster, the United Nations has come under fire. Said one columnist of London’s The Times on Monday, ”The blunt truth is that on international crises ranging from war in Iraq to the waters of the Indian Ocean, the UN is philosophically redundant, structurally irrelevant and bureaucratically ossified.” Or is it? And what could usefully replace it?
When I was a child, we had a big book of black-and-white photographs at home. One has always haunted me, though it was only much later that I found out where and when it was taken. It’s a night-time scene of two black men in rags, hanging from a tree.
In the outer security zone of the Palestine and Sheraton hotels in Baghdad, beyond the tanks, are the Al-Andalus apartments and the Al-Andalus Internet café. It was there that – last Tuesday night over a cup of Nescafé – I first learned about the David Beckham story. It was not easy to piece together.
Long before I arrived at the Iraq frontier I was thoroughly alarmed. On our 320km desert drive through Jordan, my driver, Ziad, wound me up. ”Near Baghdad,” he said, ”many Ali Baba! Three hundred kilometres, very bad!” The previous night, waiting at Heathrow for a long-delayed plane to Amman, I’d seen the news: four unarmed Americans killed driving through the Iraqi town of Falluja.
The Iranian spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei this week managed to get to Bam, three days after the earthquake that may have killed 30 000 of his fellow Iranians. President Mohammad Khatami followed soon afterwards.
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/ 18 November 2003
Men sharing a girl is, if you think about it, as gay as kissing on the lips after a goal; it is a way to have sex with your comrades without actually touching them. That is, in summary, the opinion of my analyst friend on the strange phenomenon of “roasting”, as expounded in most newspapers recently by Nicholas Meikle.
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/ 15 January 2003
Matt Barr is 21, the same age that I was the year the Vietnam War ended and the last disgraced vestiges of American intervention were airlifted over the rooftops of Saigon. In the next few months, if the war against Iraq looks like going ahead, Barr plans to be part of a human shield protecting potential civilian targets.