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Key facts and figures on an illegal invasion, in the eyes of the BBC. 7 years on, several billions later - and guess which country.

Phone subscriptions. Improvement.
Food security. Improvement.
Car ownership. Improvement, 3 times over.
Electricity supply. Improvement (mostly, except the glitch in the last quarterly figure).
Gap between electricity supply and demand. Improvement.
Clean drinking water. Improvement.
Sewerage systems. Improvement.
Violence. Improvement.
Oil production. Improvement (though not compared to the 1979 peak)

... That's it. No more key facts or figures.

What a war! They are clearly well worth fighting.

Obama lies as cravenly, if not as crudely, as George W. Bush ... As a senator, Obama promised he would filibuster amendments to the FISA Reform Act that retroactively made legal the wiretapping and monitoring of millions of American citizens without warrant; instead he supported passage of the loathsome legislation. He told us he would withdraw American troops from Iraq, close the detention facility at Guantánamo, end torture, restore civil liberties such as habeas corpus and create new jobs. None of this has happened.

He is shoving a health care bill down our throats that would give hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to the private health insurance industry in the form of subsidies, and force millions of uninsured Americans to buy insurers' defective products ... Obama did nothing to halt the collapse of the Copenhagen climate conference, after promising meaningful environmental reform, and has left us at the mercy of corporations such as ExxonMobil. He empowers Israel's brutal apartheid state. He has expanded the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where hundreds of civilians, including entire families, have been slaughtered by sophisticated weapons systems such as the Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of victims' lungs. And he is delivering war and death to Yemen, Somalia and perhaps Iran.

From Chris Hedges' Ralph Nader was right about Barack Obama

Is this enough to take our idol off the wall? No, no! He would have done so if he could (and didn't, so he obviously couldn't).

What does it take to take an idol off the wall? It takes another idol to replace him. Until that happens, and unless an idol loses his good looks, his ease, smooth charm and eloquence, he can smooth-charm his way through just as many lies as there are pores to let them out of his athletic body. He isn't there to lead us out of trouble: he's there for us to make-believe the trouble isn't there while he's in charge. And the smoother and more porous his athletic body is, the more we pin it on our walls to gaze at; the more we blame the things he said he'd do, and didn't do, on everyone, except for him.

Until the wall falls down. And even then, the wall fell down despite him, not because of him.

It's easier, more comforting, to cope with walls come tumbling down than it is to have our superheroes falling of their own accord. It's easier to have a superhero who we vote for every 4 or 5 years, and who will do the job of Change for us, mend everything, put things to rights. It's hard and most unsettling to think that superheroes don't exist and we have no-one else to put up on the wall. Or at least - no-one who has the powers of superheroes: the power to do for us what we need to do for ourselves.

I am not blaming Obama for not being super-human. I am blaming humans for believing in those who make-believe that they are superhuman - and cannot see, as Hedges says, that

Social change does not come through voting. It is delivered through activism

So the Independent has joined the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph and jumped onto the we-hate-human-rights bandwagon. Torture the terrorists! Pull out their wives' fingernails! Waterboard the children!

An exaggeration? Not really, if Bruce Anderson's recent article is to be believed. After much 'agonising', he has come to the conclusion that if our secret services were sure that we were threatened by a ticking nuclear bomb, and if they were sure that they had the right man to tell us where it was and how to stop the clock, and if they were also sure that the 'right man' would not crack before the ticking bomb blew up, then there is only one answer: 'Torture the wife and children'.

His words, not mine.

Dear David Cameron

The following two comments have been brought to my attention, I wonder if you could clarify them for me.

1. On the Politics show recently you expressed your belief that 'The moment a burglar steps over your threshold and invades your property ... I think they leave their human rights outside.’ In terms of international law, you are of course wrong, as I am sure you are aware. Until you succeed in your aim of abolishing the Human Rights Act, you are also wrong in terms of national law. Were you therefore expressing a personal desire for international law (as well as national law) to be changed in this respect; and if so, could you clarify which rights you think the burglar should 'leave behind'?

In Cameron's Britain, for example, would it be legal (and acceptable) to kill or subject to torture a petty thief if he/she crosses the threshold of your home? If not killing and torture, where would you draw the line? Perhaps you are suggesting that such people should lose their right to a fair trial, their right to be presumed innocent before being found guilty?

2. You illustrated the 'strange decisions' that the Human Rights Act has given rise to by the following example: 'For instance, you get the decision to give the prisoner hard core pornography. If you had a British Bill of Rights that had more common sense written into it, you could probably avoid having some of these things happening.'

I am surprised that your researchers have not bothered to correct you on this score and indeed that you yourself might actually believe this to be a plausible example of the HRA's effects. Dennis Nilson did indeed try to bring a claim to use the HRA to demand access to pornographic magazines but as you should know, the High Court rejected his claim. It is precisely an example of the 'common sense' nature of the Human Rights Act that it does not entitle prisoners to access hard core pornography.

If you really think there needs to be a serious debate about human rights in the UK and elsewhere, a rethinking of centuries of legal, ethical and political thought, then let us at least have this debate without resorting to falsehoods and propaganda. If it is indeed your view that human rights should no longer be regarded as universal, indivisible and inalienable, in contradistinction to international agreement and international law; and if you would be happy to withdraw this country's previous consent to those principles, then we should let the world and the country know. But letting people know in the context of a false debate about what human rights in fact mean and where they come from is doing human beings in this country and elsewhere no service at all.

I would be grateful if you could respond specifically to my questions about your comments, rather than providing me with a blanket statement on Conservative Party policy.

Thank you for your attention.

antarchi

So many conversations recently which end with a little sneer: 'We can't do that though can we'. Then there may be an afterthought, a killer blow non-sequitur, particularly if you dared to question why we can't do that.

'You'd go back to the stone age then, would you?'

'So al quaeda would just lay down their weapons, would they'

'Well if we're talking about communism [sneer]...' (which we aren't).

We just can't do that; not any of it. Because it's not what we have now, and because the alternatives to what we have now are - well, the stone age, communism, or fairyland. It's obvious.