Charles Glass

Ninety-five per cent of the world’s cargo travels by sea. Without the merchant marine, the free market would collapse and take Wall Street’s dream of a global economy with it. Yet no one, apart from ship owners, their crews and insurers, appears to notice that pirates are assaulting ships at a rate unprecedented since the glorious days when pirates were ‘privateers’ protected by their national governments.

“Iraq has become an American protectorate, and America has told Syria that it must, like a rare breed of bird, adapt to the new environment or die. The Syrian Army and Intelligence Services are playing their own imperial game in Lebanon, but their presence there has become as vulnerable to American subversion as America’s forces are to indigenous resistance – with or without Syrian and Iranian encouragement – in Iraq.”

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to more atrocious undertakings; soon there will be no one but soldiers and bandits.

Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’

John Bagot Glubb, a young lieutenant bearing wounds from the war in France, arrived in Mesopotamia in 1920. His assignment was to command armed patrols through the desert of what would become, under...

“This weakened force is holding back the combined weight of the United States and Britain the way Yasir Arafat’s few thousand commandos kept the Israeli Army out of Beirut for nearly three months in 1982. I remember the words of a Palestinian activist in Beirut that year: ‘All the real fighting is done with Kalashnikovs. Everything else is fireworks.’”