Of Badgers and Men

     It is interesting that leaders of western democracies seem to want to kill people in the middle east. They always say they are doing it for the good of the inhabitants of the countries they attack and yet after completion of their military campaigns they leave each country in a worse state than it was before their intervention. After exercising their "kinder, cleaner machine gun hand" our democratic leaders leave behind them a trail of chaos, violence and fear.  This is true of Iraq and Libya and soon it will be true of Afghanistan. Many would argue that it is already true. Now it seems that the people of troubled Syria may require our leaders' special kind of supportive gesture.

     I disapprove of the Assad regime and it may well be responsible for a deadly poisonous chemical attack upon some of its own people and if this can be proved to be the case then a decision upon action which insists that justice be done, preferably diplomatically rather than militarily, might be considered.  And so,  it's difficult to understand why the leaders of the western democracies are unwilling to wait for the UN investigation team examining evidence of the use of chemical weapons in Syria to file its report.  This impatience does not rest easily with democratic principle. It is as if they are saying, "It is more expedient for us to shoot to kill now and answer Joe Public's questions later." 

     Well here in the UK our political leaders have not yet been able to give themselves permission to rub out those of their citizens they don't like, so they have diverted their aggression toward badgers who they are gunning down because they may be a cause of the spread of bovine tuberculosis - though the scientific evidence for this is far from convincing. 

     Those responsible for leading the cull of the badgers say that if shooting the badgers takes too much time, then, in the name of efficiency, they will turn to using poisonous gas to speed up the process.



Postscript

8 pm August 28th : the Labour Party has forced the UK prime minister David Cameron and the  coalition government he leads to climb down from its intention to initiate immediate military action against  Syria. No further decision will be taken on this issue until the UN investigators have completed and presented the report of their investigation. Good news for the time being but sadly no good news for the badgers.