Qana...

Good post from Moorish Girl on Qana. ItinerantSphinx on the whole situation as viewed from the perspective of one of the evacuated expatriates well worth reading as well.

On a vaguely related point, while I was at parents' I retrieved my copy of Craig Murray's Murder in Samarkand (the order was sent there for reasons it would be too tedious to explain) and read it over the weekend. Fascinating: I've always been slightly sceptical about Murray, though I think he's clearly in the right more than in the wrong: though I still have a few quibbles I'm less doubtful about him than I was. The book is absorbing simply as an illustration of how the Foreign Office works these days (little different from how it has for the past 100 years so far as I can see, and not all of the change there has been is for the good) and utterly depressing in it's conclusions. I'll write more about it when I've digested it a little more.

I ought to be utterly shocked to learn that even with the example of Saddam Hussein (and others before him) staring them in the face, British and US foreign policy continues to be so moronic and short-sighted that it is considered an acceptable tradeoff to prop up a brutal totalitarian megalomaniac, with substantial amounts of taxpayers money as well as encouraging noises, for fear of Islamic fundamentalism. But I'm not.