The Pentagon is obfuscating the costs of the Iraq war by refusing to break down the overall $435bn cost this year of the "global war on terror." This larger cost includes military, diplomatic and foreign aid operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, enhanced security programmes since 9/11 and the medical costs of the department of veterans' affairs. What is clear is that under the new budget, the military and diplomatic costs of the Iraq war were $51bn in 2003, $77bn in 2004, $87bn in 2005 and $102bn this year. And a new congressional budget office report says that even if gradual troop withdrawals start this year, further war costs for both Iraq and Afghanistan during the phaseout will be $371bn. That means that the total Afghan and Iraq war costs of $811bn will be much more than the (inflation-adjusted) $549bn spent on Vietnam.
Baroness Amos is unmoved
Baroness (Valerie) Amos, the leader of the Lords and a member of the cabinet, enjoys a poor reputation with her peers. Despite success as a junior foreign office minister from 2001, and a promising short stint in the department for international development in 2003, she has not shone in the House of Lords.
Why? Her detractors cite her dislike of clubbiness, an inability to reach out to opposition peers, her apparent lack of interest in the business of the house and her generally poor handling of it. These whines got through to Tony Blair before the last reshuffle, and though he was keen to have a black woman in a visible position and in the cabinet, he wanted to accommodate the whiners too. He had tried, last year, to make her head of the UN development programme. She was happy enough to go along with that, but in the end the UN went for Turkey's Kemal Dervis.
Blair's reshuffle bid was to make her chairwoman of the new equality commission, designed to bring together the various different bodies on gender, race and disability equality. But in this case, she didn't want it: perhaps because the chairman of the commission for racial equality, Trevor Phillips, has been putting up such stout resistance to being merged.
Blair, faced with using force majeure, decided the loss of Amos would have been too great, and left her where she remains—much to the almost audible despair of many of the whiners.
Empty seats at the World Cup
Germany has been working itself into a frenzy ahead of the World Cup (writes Hugh Williamson), but not because of any real hope that the team will win—93 per cent of Germans believe they won't. No, it has been the string of embarrassing blunders by the organisers that have caused a typical bout of German angst that it might not be all right on the night.
First there were problems with the ticketing system, then the opening ceremony was cancelled, then a consumer group said many of the stadiums were unsafe. Now there is a danger that—despite the shortage of tickets among fans—many seats will remain empty because sponsors can't find takers for their huge bundles of tickets. Why? Because potential recipients, including politicians and businesspeople, worry about falling foul of Germany's anti-bribery laws if they accept freebies.
Meanwhile, following Angela Merkel's tough rhetoric on Iran's nuclear ambitions, there may be even more empty seats. Members of her government are considering banning Iran's President Ahmadinejad from coming to see his team play.
Holocaust
Promoting "official" history is always sensitive, and on the whole the brief canter through British history in the government's citizenship handbook Life in the UK pulled it off fine. Except for one astonishing lapse. When talking about Jews in Britain, it said that 4m people died in Nazi concentration camps. Not only is this 2m less than the accepted figure, but the vast majority died in death—not concentration—camps. The most recent edition corrects both mistakes.
Centrist gag
Last month, following Ben Lewis's article on the role of the joke under communism, we asked you to send us your best centrist gags. Entries were few, suggesting that the post-ideological society is not strong on political jokes (or satire or plays or novels, come to think of it). Ian Christie wins, for this: Q. How many centrists does it take to change a lightbulb? A. What we centrists want to do is not just change the lightbulb but to offer a real choice of lightbulbs.
Africa's presidents for life
In 1990s Africa, we saw presidents-for-life blocked by term limits or toppled by elections. Now the pendulum seems to be swinging back. Uganda's Yoweri Museveni bribed MPs to abolish the two-term limit so he could extend his 20-year rule. In Chad, President Idriss Deby extended his 16-year rule by giving himself an absurd 77 per cent of the vote in an election. Even Thabo Mbeki is having problems finding a successor. Some think he may try to change the two-term limit and stay on after 2009. One leader who will be leaving next year is Nigeria's President Obasanjo, whose attempt to scrap his country's term limits has been thrown out by Nigeria's Senate.
