Some recommended reading

Back after a brief post-election hiatus I'll start off with something you see on many sites like this but which I don't normally do myself - a round-up of some recent articles; all well worth a read.

First up, the smoking gun. On the Sunday before the UK election information was published that should at the least have ended the careers of Tony Blair and Jack Straw. This was the publication in the Sunday Times of the leaked minute of the high level meeting on Iraq dated July 23, 2002. The minute put beyond doubt that the invasion of Iraq was a premeditated act of aggression in which WMD was used a pretext. It said clearly that "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy". Every voter should have read the minute. Its contents were shocking - particularly the cynicism of Blair and Straw's contributions. Ray McGovern, veteran CIA analyst, gives his assessment here.

Next, a transcript of Naomi Klein, author of No Logo, talking about the new sham democracy in Iraq and how the anti-war movement can mobilise to help opposition forces in that country bring about the real thing.

Independent reporter Dahr Jamail has been showing extraordinary courage over the past couple of years, risking his life to bring the outside world reports of the true situation in Iraq. This interview with Democracy Now in the US sheds more light on an ongoing disaster which the media is finding almost impossible to cover.

This from the New York Times, describing the "gratuitous violence...routinely inflicted by American soldiers on ordinary Iraqis" according to one former US Army reservist. Should be read in conjunction with Tom Engelhardt's "Icarus (Armed with Vipers) Over Iraq"; a brilliant article on the unreported aerial bombardment of that country, which Juan Cole described as "a seminal piece of anti-war journalism".

If the architects of western military projection into the Middle East are genuinely concerned with fighting terrorism, they might consider this article from Christian Science Monitor. Yemen’s Islamic authorities have scored some victories against al Qaeda using methods that do not create more corpses or more terrorists. Those who imagine a fairytale clash of civilisations between the good guys of the western enlightenment and the bad guys of eastern Islamo-fascism, if they can bear to allow some nuance into their worldview, could do worse than to compare the measures described in this article to those described in Englehardt's.

On the indispensable TomDispatch, Michael T. Klare describes the scramble for energy reserves that is shaping global politics in the early 21st Century. Klare describes the global energy equation thus: "Demand is rising around the world; supplies are not growing fast enough to satisfy global requirements; and the global struggle to gain control over whatever supplies are available has become more intense and fractious. Because the first and second of these factors are not likely to abate in the years ahead, the third can only grow more pronounced...Expect a hot couple of decades ahead".

In the New York Review of Books, Thomas Frank looks at the inversion of classic class affiliations in US culture and politics; a phenomenon exemplified by the cleaning lady who voted for George W. Bush because she could never support a rich man for president.

Rahul Mahajan looks at the double anniversary of the fall of Berlin at the end of World War II and the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. His blog's worth returning to on a regular basis.

More of my own articles to follow, including a look back at the UK general election and an examination of how promoting democracy squares with arming Saudi Arabia (here's a taster: it doesn't).