Just one new year's resolution: To read Robert Fisk's 'The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East'. I have read the excerpts in The Indie, but now I'm going to find time for a 'reading week' to do justice to the book's 1300 pages. Anyway.... here's some Fisk to be going on with:
"The Ed Murrows and Richard Dimblebys, the Howard K. Smiths and Alan Moorheads didn't mince their words or change their descriptions or run mealy-mouthed from the truth because listeners or readers didn't want to know or preferred a different version.

So let's call a colony a colony, let's call occupation what it is, let's call a wall a wall. And maybe express the reality of war by showing that it represents not, primarily, victory or defeat, but the total failure of the human spirit."