[St Charles Owl]

The problem these days is we live in a world where everyone seems to have an agenda, and we seem to live in a world where everyone's agenda is reported by someone as being fact!! By there very nature Politicians tend to make decisions for political reasons, these reasons can both help their own personal agenda or that of the country they represent, but there is nearly always an agenda. The media these days are also just as guilty of this, look at the Daily Mail or even the left wing papers, all of them have a desired outcome to their reporting, some political, other financial but always an agenda. Look at CNN over here, used to be excellent at reporting news (and still are when they actually do it) but the doubt cast over their "role" in the Parkland shooting in FL is troubling for such a big and very visible news network.

Virtually every "Western" country in the whole world has had a hand in making huge parts of the Middle East war zones or dictatorships at one time or another. I used "" around Western as Russia, China, India etc are just as likely to meddle in the ME as other countries are when it suits them. Over the years we have forced change in a country in the ME, supported a rebel with a cause or a promise of better democracy or trade or access to oil etc only to then a few decades later have to go back or interfere again to have this regime removed!!! And we have seen successive British, French, Russian, US etc governments make the same decisions time and again and still there is little solution in sight to avoid conflict.

We all want countries across the globe to be democratic in the way they treat their citizens and how they govern. We want Governments to be accountable to their own people first and foremost, and we want the people to have the rights to decide their future like we do generally. We have spent decades trying to impose this on countries, but a lot of these countries are simply not set up that way nor is it their history to run themselves by our standards or democratic governments standards. Just like we cannot impose a religion on a country, nor can we impose a form of governing on them either. We need to work with these countries, we need to encourage them to be good countries but we cannot and should not impose civil war or overthrowing of governments as our way of dealing with them.

For me education is the bedrock of all decent societies. Instead of going to war or invading or bombing these countries we should be working with them to create seats of learning, a school system, a curriculum that encourages math and science and generally over a few generations giving the average man in the street decent education to allow him to be able to make educated decisions about his own future and that of his country. The success of countries such as Jordan should be held up as a model not in terms of their political structure but in terms of their success in being stable, of being for education for all and for being a beacon within a very large war zone!!!! I would rather see us put money into schools and universities.

I don't know the answer but its time for something different. Talking hasn't worked that well, neither has bombing, but money does and always will talk so lets use that in the right areas and maybe, just maybe we might see things improve.

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Robert fisk's article in the independent is very interesting on the subject,and casts doubts if chemical weapons were even used in douma.

https://www.google.ie/amp/s/www.independ...html%3famp

Excellent article, doesn't prove anything one way or the other but certainly throws up some questions!!