This would be a very good moment to institute a call for imposing the Chemical Weapons Convention on the Middle East. The actual Chemical Weapons Convention. Not the version that [Barack] Obama presented in his address to the nation and that media commentators repeat. What he said is that the convention bars the use of chemical weapons. He knows better. And so do the commentators. The Chemical Weapons Convention calls for banning the production, storage and use of chemical weapons, not just the use. So why omit production and storage?

Bear in mind that capitalism is a tiny period of human society. You never really had capitalism, you always had one or another variant of state capitalism.

You know, people talk about [Richard] Nixon's "madman theory." We don't really know much about that. It was in memoirs, by somebody else.

There's a very committed effort to convert the US into something resembling a Third World society, where a few people have enormous wealth and a lot of others have no security.

My speculation is that the U.S. does not want to establish the principle that it has to defer to some higher authority before carrying out the use of violence.

Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.

I don't see any possibility of Britain and the U.S. allowing a sovereign independent Iraq; that's almost inconceivable.