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Knocking off Mossadegh was simple. Hire thugs from the bizarre.

This is more complex. East vs West.

Await the ‘incident’ that triggers the conflict.

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The thing is, and this is the big sticking point, if George Dubya starts bombing Iran, oil prices will surge to about $150 per barrel. Inflation will start rising, which means my pay will start rising, and UK interest rates will probably rise to 7 or 8 per cent. This will lead to more reposessions, more houses on the market and probably a correction in house prices.

So whilst war with Iran will be bad for Iran, bad for our boys in Basra, bad for Iraq, bad for the average Brit, and probably bad for the UK economy as a whole, it would be a godsend for me. Inflation running at 5% and 8% interest rates would sort me right out in fact.

If I take a deep breath, calm myself down at the exciting prospect of pay rises and a house price correction, I’m not actually in favour of bombing Iran unless they attack us. Like many people my age I’m so cheesed off about £200,000 average house prices that if you caught me on a bad day, say after listening to some middle-aged tosser spend an hour talking about the three empty investment flats they’ve bought and their impending retirement in Spain. Or after one of these nausiating bouts of house porn, you know, the fussy, stuck-up housewife on daytime TV with no job who gets guided around three or four properties all priced at £400,000, none of which are good enough for her because the spare room is too small, there’s only one bathroom or it has a red door or long grass something, then I’d be all in favour bombing Iran to smitherines.

It’s not as if Ahmadinejad speaks highly of us, it’s not as if the Persians have ever done anything for us, it’s not as if they aren’t stirring up trouble for our boys in Iraq, it’s not as if anyone actually trusts him not to make a bomb. In fact every time someone cares to remind me house prices are now 9 times average earnings I often wish George Dubya would just get on with it.

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I believe we can be a friend to the USA without blindly following her every wish. If the special relationship excists then we should be able to say NO NO NO as you would when a friend is about to take a wrong turn.

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To say that going to war with the Nazis is a parallel to the current situation is naive. First of all, we sorted the Nazi problem but we’ve done nothing but make the Middle Eastern problem worse, and war with Iran with make things worse BIG TIME.

The solution is not clear but to sit on our hands for domestic political reasons is reprehensible. Sanctions seems the best way, trying and make life so intolerable for ordinary Iranians that they topple the regime from within, as cruel as it sounds, may the way out.

P.S. Amy Winehouse? Wow Boris, you dont listen to The Arctic Monkeys as well do you?

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Enormous extra amounts of tax are being channelled in to the military – although, I acknowledge, they do need to prove their training and tools every so often – and this country has lost a lot of respect around the world for having followed the US’s policy of aggression when it wasn’t called for.

At the same time, we (the West) are fuelling the ever-strengthening (Islamic) Middle East with more and more money through oil purchase, and making more and more likely future oil wars. Additionally, the UK’s economy is propped up by taxation derived from motor fuels – over seventy percent of your petrol cost goes to Gordon Brown, so little wonder government doesn’t really want to reduce our consumption.

So why, when there is an alternative to oil from the Middle East, are we not developing its production and use, like so many other countries? Why, when the man who developed the diesel engine suggested it should run on plant-derived (renewable) fuel (and demonstrated his engine to the world at the Paris Show running on peanut oil) are we continuing to pour more money into countries like Iran? It may be the British politician’s lust for power, his dislike and distrust of the small man and love of big industry, his fear of change.

Using the countryside to provide fuel for motive power only ended a century ago, when underground reserves of oil began to power the internal combustion engine (instead of grain for horses) and the Chancellor could at last tap into a lucrative new supply of easy money – a sweet flat tax on travel.

There is plenty of (UK government-funded) research to suggest it is not feasable to switch to plant-based fuel, that it pollutes more (!) etc. and to ram this fact home Gordon Brown levies the same punitive amounts of tax on vegetable oil as he does on fossil-diesel. More enlightened nations have a zero tax on it, to encourage its development and use.

The Swiss don’t go around invading other countries, and nobody is suggesting they may be under future threat from Iran’s nuclear missiles. War is a means of controlling people, of individuals making large sums of money through innocent people’s deaths, it is a relict of Man’s past from when we ate each other after a killing. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t defend ourselves, or occasionally make pre-emptive strikes to prevent that from becoming necessary, but Blair’s almost casual (in more than one way) use of the military is shockingly naive.

We are rapidly becoming a global village, like it or not, and future problems look likely to be much bigger than lobbing missiles at each other. People will look back and use the first half of the (21st as a good example of how Mankind failed to meet the real challenge – and how ironic that was when for the first time Man had the ability to play God with Planet Earth and its life forms. Time for us to employ politicians who have grown out of the school yard mentality, who have real experience in life beyond the Bar or management consultancy, who are well-educated and have real balls. They will be needed.

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