Seeking Perspective

In a few hours I will be herded into a plane and launched westwards at 500 mph to arrive in Oakland 2 hours after I leave Fort Lauderdale... and I am then going to be cheerful and polite to what will seem like the audience for the Sermon on the Mount, but will in fact just be a large bunch of relatives gathered to witness the marriage of two young hopefuls. Time to say goodbye for a few days to all this:I am very happy they have decided to make the commitment, and all that, and I don 't even mind hanging out with assorted relatives. After all I did marry into the family 14 years ago and they have all been nothing but wonderful to me ever since (the prevailing sentiment at the time was that at least my wife hadn't married "Ed" even though I was an unknown quantity compared to her last boyfriend). I do wish they weren't tying the knot at 8,000 feet in a place where temperatures drop to 40 degrees. I haven't seen my breath in years.

Its just that I'm feeling grumpy at the moment and I've got things I want to do to move on and make a fresh start. This weekend is my scheduled weekend off but the days surrounding it are swapped out so I will be repaying my colleagues in the weeks ahead for covering for me, which means my time off will be shredded for several weeks to come. That adds to my sense of a lack of closure.

So, in order to seek a balance I went to the movies yesterday afternoon. I had a hair appointment earlier in the day but in a moment of keys disease the hair dresser had apparently forgotten so she came late and dealt with my mop in short order. Which was very good of her as I needed it, but she wasn't dressed to cut hair and I could only think that she had something more interesting on her plate before her daughter got out of school in a few hours.

The movie was a documentary titled No End in Sight which laid out in stark detail the chain of events that led to the destruction of Iraq after the US invasion. And the destruction of lives:It was detailed blow by blow account of the lack of planning, the lack of attention paid to details, the lack of discussion, about what to do with an entire country once you own it. "The Pottery Barn rule" as Secretary of State Powell put it at the time. It is clear in the film that the US was hell bent on breaking Iraq with no idea how to take responsibility for dealing with the breakage after the invasion. $1.5 trillion down the drain.

Worse than that was the stark human cost, brought home once again by the implications of the lack of planning. The film pointed out that in World War Two the allies planned for two years how to rebuild Europe. The US planned for 50 days how they were going to govern Iraq, and then threw the plans out the window and went with political whims.

George Slocombe, to his credit, agreed to be interviewed and he came out of it very badly. The senior advisor to the Civilian Provisional Authority, he was a political hack who never visited Iraq and made decisions that the film argues were disastrous, and their consequences affect us today. He looks entirely normal and all I could think of as he spoke was that old phrase "the banality of evil." Perhaps in his case it should be re-phrased as the banality of stupidity but his motivation for wrecking post-invasion Iraq will never be known.

In the grand scheme of things I have it pretty good. On today's daily images on the BBC News page we see men trolling for trash in a canal in Indonesia and street children idling in India.This is where I live and what I have to come home to; I can't let myself forget how lucky I am: A Broken Vespa really doesn't amount to a hill of beans. Time to take stock and get over myself.