Snowblog's back: I have a good feeling about 2010
Can’t explain it – but maybe its going to be a better year, a better decade than we might have expected.
Yes all the bad news is still there to be harvested. Iraq looks like getting little better, Afghanistan not much improvement there either.
It may be that this will lead to a new era of disengagement and a recognition that what the West regards as “terrorism” can be dealt with more effectively by other means.
The deaths of the seven CIA men in Afghanistan over the holiday period, and the collapse of the Blackwater trial of US security mercenaries in regard to the massacre of civilians in Iraq, are a timely reminder of the West’s own ambiguities about who is allowed to kill whom under what circumstances. So far, so bad.
The re-arrest of Mordechai Vanunu (the man who spilled the beans on Israel’s nuclear bombs) this time for what his lawyer said was a meeting with his Norwegian girlfriend – is the usual depressing stuff, and no good looking elsewhere in the Middle East for a new wave of happiness.
America is reverting to America again after the Obama bubble, but the bubble isn’t yet entirely burst.
And China is China still – her human rights record is creeping to the surface again as the world begins to wonder whether it would be better to relate to a China with whom we are robust and honest, or weak and dishonest. I believe the former will come into fashion and we could see some refreshing pressure building upon the Chinese Communist Party, both from within and without.
Iran may go better than we fear. The man to watch is the Spiritual Leader. Ayatollah Khamenei‘s wagon wheels look decidedly loose.
At home the biggest question of all is the extent to which the electorate will punish all politicians for failing to recognise that the so called expenses scandal (small beer by most other parliamentary systems’ standards) was never about corruption but about the need for wholesale democratic reform in Britain. I believe the UK political classes are in for a severe shock in 2010.
The arts and music and sport will boom and the calls for serious green commitment will surge.
That’s quite enough. Snowblog is back. I look forward to another adventurous blog year!