Brilliant poetry

Blizzard by Sean O'Brien

The snow will bring the world indoors, the fall

That saves the Gulf Stream and the Greenland Shelf.

White abolitionist of maps and calendars,

Its Lenten rigour pillowed like a sin, it means

To be the only season, falling always on itself.

To put an end to all analogy, pure cold

That proves what it need never say,

It calls us home again, beneath a drift

In which the figure and the ground collapse -

No more redundancy, no more perhaps.

Look at these attic windowsills, look in the grate -

White after white against the off-white sheets,

The wafers of a pitiless communion

That turns a wood to Mother Russia and the night

To afterlife and then to a snowblind street.

With cataracts and snow-tipped breasts

The mermaids in their brazen lingerie

Wait bravely at the fountain in the square.

Green girls, they think it is their destiny

To offer the ideal to empty air.

Forgive me that I did not understand

That you were actual, not merely art,

That your fidelity was courage, that I failed

To honour you, to recognize your pain,

To grasp that snow once fallen will not fall again.

Now it grows clear: the world is not a place

But an occasion, first of sin and then the wish

That such self-knowledge may be gratified,

While snow continues falling, till we learn

There will be neither punishment nor grace.

By the winner of this year's Forward Prize

My response to Bartle Bull's "Mission Accomplished"

Prospect essayist Bartle Bull wrote a piece on Iraq, which struck me morally bankrupt and politically disingenuous. Fired up in my usual way, I submitted the thoughts below:

One tries, truly one tries to find some redeeming feature in Mr Bull's manifesto. The best one can achieve is this question: even if it all turns out for the best in the best of all possible worlds … in the end ... and not even BB seems to expect that end to come soon (maybe a decade, maybe more) ... at what cost to Iraq, Iraqis, the region and beyond ? What's the fair global price, Bartle, measured in human lives, social disintegration, the loss of moral authority, self-inflicted wounds to liberal democracy and hard cash of the political insanity of the Bush doctrine, to which not even his most fervent acolytes from 2002 - 2003 (and not even his dad for pity’s sake) still subscribe?

You know, it truly doesn’t take a political genius to work out that people can’t sustain forever the ghastly toll of the last four years. But BB managed to take 4,000 words to assert that one day all this will be history and things will be better … maybe. Perceptive stuff BB, perceptive stuff.

Mr Bull would have us believe the answer lies in this type of vacuous analysis: "The assassination in September of Abu Risha—head of the "Anbar Awakening," an organisation of 25 Sunni tribes fighting al Qaeda in Anbar—while unfortunate, will not be material." Forgive me but don’t we need a moral compass any more now that “the dowager capital of Islam, is today a Shia city for the first time since 1534.”

Save us from such sophistry. This article isn't notable because it's the author's most controversial yet. One notes the piece because it's stupidity on a stick.

Blackwater by P W Singer

When we evaluate the facts, the use of private military contractors appears to have harmed, rather than helped, the counterinsurgency efforts of the U.S. mission in Iraq, going against our best doctrine and undermining critical efforts of our troops. Even worse, the government can no longer carry out one of its most basic core missions: to fight and win the nation's wars. Instead, the massive outsourcing of military operations has created a dependency on private firms like Blackwater that has given rise to dangerous vulnerabilities.

Read the full article in Salon

Photo: Chris Curry/The Virginian-Pilot/ZUMA Press
Blackwater USA Academy recruit Gregory Collier screams to team members during an executive protection drill at the Blackwater USA compound in Moyock, N.C., on Aug. 2, 2006.