Another week gone by without a post. I had hoped to blog mid-week but work (that’s right, work) meant that I was too busy. Two lots of freelance work have come my way more or less simultaneously. The longer term implications are encouraging but the immediate impact was instant hard graft with extra effort required getting to grips with the tasks.

This not only meant no bluffing but not much reading or thinking to the blog in any case, and a number of chores put on hold , too. One consequence was that we came close to having a seating crisis. Returning from our Ribble Valley break I’d been determined to strip our 1960s pine dinning chairs. This job has been waiting for at least 5 years for me to get around to it. Although the chairs look shabby with flaking varnish, they are solidly made (in Poland, I think) with proper stretchers. With some dark wood stain to harmonise with the rest of the dinning room furniture we thought they would be good for several more years. So on Sunday last week I painted them with the varnish remover. Then on Monday I learned that I’d enough work to keep me busy all week. Unfortunately, the varnish remover smells really terrible so, not only could we not sit on the chairs, but it was better not to be in the same room with them.

On Wednesday we took delivery of a new sofa which we decided we don’t like enough to want to keep but we’re afraid to sit on it in case we spill coffee on it before the supplier returns to collect it. Meanwhile our old sofa which we would happily have sat on for a few more weeks is sitting outside on the drive (collection due this Thursday). If it hadn’t rained and if there was room in the living room for two sofas, we would have been tempted to bring it inside again.

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As I said there’s not been a lot of time to think about what to post about. However, I have read one excellent article by Mark Bowden in the May issue The Atlantic about the examination of Iraqi detainees that led to the death of Abu Musab al Zarqawi last June.

These interrogations were not torture carried out at Abu Ghraib – though the fear of ending up in Abu Ghraib or somewhere like it did hang over the detainees. They were interrogated at Balad Air Base, an hour’s drive to the north of Baghdad, and their interrogators, who were part of an elite force, relied entirely on their skill and intelligence to outwit the captives, themselves clever sophisticated men.

Apart from the interesting story of the interrogation itself, two furthr interesting points were made. Firstly, that al Zarqawi’s death doesn’t seem to have made the slightest difference to the level of Sunni terrorism in central Iraq. Secondly, the detainees weren’t involved in terrorist cells out of Islamic fervour but because they (and their families) had been pauperised by the rapid dismantling of the Baathist state immediately after the occupation began.

Unlike the occupation of Germany in 1945, the situation in Iraq has not been one where the inhabitants were cowed and demoralised while the occupiers held the moral high ground. Iraqi’s Sunni Arabs are more like those Germans between the wars who believed that they had been stabbed in the back. This frame of mind makes it all the more difficult to know what can be done to turn the Sunnis away from terror tactics. Mark Bowden quotes one of the interrogators saying that there are no incentives for the Sunni Arabs not to join the insurgency. This is the problem that the allies have to crack before they can safely pull out of Iraq.

To pacify the Sunnis the Iraqi government and the allies are going to have to put in place convincing safeguards for them. This probably means a high degree of autonomy for the different regions of the country. It means doing everything possible to ensure that the Sunnis don’t become the target of atrocities in areas where they are in the minority, even if Baghdad ends up like Cold War Berlin and people have to be resettled. It means that the Sunni majority regions must be guaranteed at least a fair share of the oil revenues whether the oil wells are in Sunni provinces or not.

Whether all, or any, of this can be achieved is open to grave doubt. The Sunnis believe that the allies will eventually give them a deal because Iranian hegemony in Iraq is the worse of two evils for the allies. In the meantime they believe that the endless violence does them less harm than their opponents. In this context Condoleeza Rice’s declared willingness to discuss regional security issues with Iran will give them pause for thought. In the end the only arrangement that is going to work is one where the allies give non-contradictory guarantees to all sides AND stay put to make sure that the settlement sticks.

Yesterday’s Sunday Times contained a half page article on Ali Allawi, the Iraqi Finance Minister until last year, in which he argues for an end to Baghdad’s green zone because the exclusion of most Baghdadis from the most attractive part of their city is so galling to them. Allawi is back in England now but when he was a minister he courageously lived beyond the confines of the green zone. Sadly, such a gesture is probably unachievable and, even if the government could persuade the allies to go along with the suggestion, it would be too late for it to do any good.