THEODORE DALRYMPLE

In the old days, whenever that was, the great advantage of stating the obvious was that one was unlikely to be flatly contradicted: but it is quite otherwise in these enlightened times of ours.

Therefore, when I say that the great object of the British educational system is selfevidently to eliminate all native powers of reasoning as well as to instil an abiding hatred of knowledge, I expect there might be some who would seek to contradict me. No sensible person could deny, however, that the system is supremely successful in achieving these aims.

Last week I was talking to a prisoner about his addiction to heroin.

'Heroin addiction's not a medical problem,' I said.

He looked puzzled, so I explained further.

'During the Vietnam war, thousands of American soldiers became addicted to heroin, but when they returned home the overwhelming majority of them gave up, just like that, without any difficulty at all. Why do you suppose that was?' 'I don't know. I'm not a doctor,' he said. 'But I'm asking you to think. Try to imagine a reason.'

He tried, or appeared to try, but it was all too difficult or unfamiliar.

'I don't know. do I?' he said. 'I mean, I wasn't born then.'

You'd get a better answer from an African peasant who went to the village school for 18 months and believed that his neighbour's banana tree was so prolific because he used witchcraft.

However, current affairs do interest the prisoners, and if they know nothing of the Vietnam war, the same cannot be said of the Middle East. Last week, for example, I was asked by the officers to sec an Iraqi Kurd who had been attacked by several men in the exercise yard.

He was an asylum-seeker who had made some kind of misrepresentation to the Home Office. Needless to say, he was vastly more cultivated, well-mannered and intelligent than the indigenous population: very good reasons why the indigenous population should hate and despise him. I have noticed, by the way, that asylumseekers, on the whole, are precisely the kind of enterprising people that any country not in the last throes of decadence

would be pleased to welcome and integrate, on condition that they expected no official assistance. Britain is not such a country, however, and never will be again.

He had a cut lip, a black eye developing, and a few lumps on his scalp. I asked him what had happened.

'They attacked me because I am an Iraqi,' he said.

'You mean it was their contribution to the war effort?'

'Well, Britain is at war with Iraq.'

'But as a Kurd, you can hardly be much in favour of Saddam.'

'Yes, but this is too difficult for them to understand. I am Iraqi and they are British.'

It is reassuring to know that patriotic feeling, even if sometimes slightly misplaced, still exists among the burglars and crack-dealers of Britain. The death of patriotism has evidently been much exaggerated: many a man in this country is prepared to kick someone's teeth in for his country's sake.

I asked my next patient why he was in prison. He thought about it for a while. 'Attempted law,' he said.

In his circles, offences don't come more serious than that. anarchy? History would suggest not. The United Nations arose from the ashes of a war that the League of Nations was unable to avert. The League was simply not up to confronting Italy in Abyssinia, much less — had it survived that debacle — to taking on Nazi Germany.

In the heady aftermath of the Allied victory in the second world war, the hope that security could be made collective was reposed in the United Nations Security Council — with abject results. During the Cold War the Security Council was hopelessly paralysed. The Soviet empire was wrestled to the ground, and Eastern Europe liberated, not by the United Nations but by the mother of all coalitions. Nato. Apart from minor skirmishes and sporadic peace-keeping missions, the only case of the Security Council acting in a serious matter affecting world order during the Cold War was its use of force to halt the North's invasion of South Korea — and that was only possible because the Soviets had boycotted the Security Council and were not in the chamber to cast their veto. It was a mistake they did not make again. With war looming, the UN withdrew from the Middle Last, leaving Israel to defend itself in 1967 and again in 1973.

Facing Milosevic's multiple aggres i sions, the UN could not stop the Balkan wars or even protect its victims. Remember Sarajevo? Remember Srebrenica? It took a coalition of the willing to save Bosnia from extinction. And when the war was over, peace was made in Dayton, Ohio, not in the United Nations. The rescue of Muslims in Kosovo was not a UN action: their cause never gained Security Council approval. The United Kingdom, not the United Nations, saved the Falklands.

This new century now challenges the hopes for a new world order in new ways. We will not defeat or even contain fanati

cal terror unless we can carry the war to the territories from which it is launched. This will sometimes require that we use force against states that harbour terrorists, as we did in destroying the Taleban regime in Afghanistan.

The most dangerous of these states are those that also possess weapons of mass destruction, the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons that can kill not hundreds or thousands but hundreds of thousands. Iraq is one such state, but there are others. Whatever hope there is that they can be persuaded to withdraw support or sanctuary from terrorists rests on the certainty and effectiveness with which they are confronted. The chronic failure of the Security Council to enforce its own resolutions — 17 of them with respect to Iraq, the most recent, 1441, a resolution of last resort — is unmistakable: it is simply not up to the task.

We are left with coalitions of the willing. Far from disparaging them as a threat to a new world order, we should recognise that they are, by default, the best hope for that order, and the true alternative to the anarchy of the abject failure of the United Nations.

Richard Perle is chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory panel to the Pentagon.