“The way they do statistics in the Netherlands is different.”

Evidently then, he can see neither the irony nor the hypocrisy in going cap in hand to his senate to ask for 80 billion dollars with which to keep the US nuclear stockpile such that every other nation should continue to cower in fear of American military might. Well, they are, after all, the only country to have ever unleashed nuclear weapons against another nation and they have an ongoing policy of interference and seeking out armed conflict overseas, so fear is an appropriate response.

Iran hasn’t been involved in a war since the Iran-Iraq war of the eighties, back when Saddam Hussein was the regional golden boy of the US and it was apparently still acceptable to use mustard gas and other chemical weapons on Iranians and Kurds. It wasn’t until the US needed a pretext to start a war against Iraq that the US suddenly became righteously indignant about their former protégé’s war crimes.

I know which nation I fear more out of Iran and the US, and I base that on documented behaviour, both past and present, not fearmongering and lazy Western journalism.

The messianic qualities of the current US president continue to be grossly exaggerated. It just goes to show you how far having an appallingly bad predecessor, the combination of black skin with centuries of white guilt, and a good speech-writer can catapult one.

Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success, since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his would-be rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.

The military did not reveal how the Reuters staff were killed, and stated that they did not know how the children were injured. However, the video clearly shows the two children at the window of the van that had stopped to pick up the wounded.

After demands by Reuters, the incident was investigated and the U.S. military concluded that the actions of the soldiers were in accordance with the law of armed conflict and its own “Rules of Engagement”. Of course they were.

Make sure to watch the film through to the end.

Not coincidentally, I’ve regained some respect for Wouter Bos in the last 12 hours.

Bos wanted to stick to an agreement made by this cabinet in 2007 when it first took office, that Dutch troops would be pulled out of Afghanistan at the end of 2010. Significantly, the majority of the population of this country still support the withdrawal of troops, as do an overwhelming number of politicians in the Dutch parliament. So, what could possibly be the problem?

Well, that agreement was made three whole years ago and you know what politicians are like. Bos’s CDA and CU colleagues felt that the cabinet should continue to discuss all options, which, of course, is not very well veiled political twaddle for wanting to ram their own will down the voters’ throat. Who cares about the will of the people or their elected representatives in Dutch parliament?

NATO recently issued a formal request for the Dutch to stay in Afghanistan beyond 2010, no doubt assuming that those in power would do the usual cowardly thing and bend to the will of their American masters. Not this time, though.

I don’t often find myself agreeing with the PvdA these days, but, to his credit, Bos wasn’t having any of it. An agreement is an agreement, he said, and the will of the people isn’t there to support other options, so why discuss them? No, Dutch troops must be out of Afghanistan by the end of 2010 and I’m not willing to discuss alternatives.

And, with neither side prepared to back down and lose face either towards the other coalition partners or, indeed, within their own party faction, the last drops of goodwill at the bottom of a barrel already more than vigorously scraped evaporated, leaving Bos no other choice but to resign from the cabinet. With that, he took the support of the PvdA with him, leaving the cabinet unable to continue to govern.

For Balkenende, our Harry Potter lookalike prime-minister, it’s the latest of four dissolved cabinets that he has led. Not once in the history of his four terms in office has he managed to see the job through to the end. Either the man is very unlucky or it’s time to draw an increasingly unavoidable conclusion. Time to write your memoires, perhaps, Jan Peter?

The government splintering into pieces is becoming business as usual in this country. Things could be a lot worse, though. Looking around, one could be forgiven for indulging in the wishful thinking that some other countries’ governments would throw in the towel. Seemingly, no scandal is large enough to bring about the demise of the government in many countries, notably the more powerful ones. The politicians themselves have no honour, so they remain in office long after they’ve been exposed and discredited as idiots and liars, and the public who put them there are too jaded to demand their resignation. Democracy in action, people.

At least the coalition system here ensures that the politicians ultimately end up trusting one another as little as we trust all of them. You have to at least be grateful that our forefathers built that little bit of amusing poetic justice into the system, don’t you?

Anyway, not much is going to get done here in the next few months. The queen will appoint a demissionary government, whose bums will serve to warm the seats of the next elected government of this land. By its very nature, though, this cabinet won’t be empowered to do much. One has to wonder how the current economic crisis will be navigated. What, for example, would happen if a Dutch bank appeared likely to keel over on Monday? It’s not clear that it could be prevented, even if the political will to do so were there.

Perhaps the hardest question of all is who to vote for in the summer, which is when the next general election will probably happen. No-one’s looking even remotely appealing.

There’s ample material there for another blog entry, though.

It seems that one can now be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on the basis of words alone. After all, Obama talks about peace at every opportunity, but what has he actually done to achieve it? Aren’t peace prizes supposed to recognise, oh, you know, actual achievements?

The Nobel committee applauded Obama’s approach of considered international diplomacy and the willingness to make concessions along the way. Whilst these qualities are, indeed, uncommon traits in American leaders, they’re not unusual per se. it does therefore seem as if Obama is being rewarded for the sheer contrast of his presidency with that of his predecessor. Eight years of idiocy, lies and greed from Bush and his cohorts continue to make Obama look better than he really is.

Obama’s approach to international diplomacy is nothing new. Certainly, it’s new for the usually belligerent, unilaterally operating nation over which he presides, but at a global level, one has to wonder why, if the bar is set so low, no other Western leader has received a Nobel prize in recent years. After all, they, too, have waxed lyrical about peace and freedom, urged for talks and emphasised the need for the all nations to share in the responsibility of building a safer world for us all to live in. I’m not suggesting that they also deserved a prize; I’m saying that they didn’t, and neither did Obama.

Looking beyond the poetic speechwriters’ prose, let’s look at a couple of things that Obama has actually done this year to influence peace:

• He has deployed an extra 21,000 troops in Afghanistan and is currently considering committing a further 40,000.

• He has refused to cut military aid to Israel, in spite of the knowledge that Israel repeatedly uses arms manufactured in the US to commit gross human rights violations, as independently determined by Amnesty International.

Those two facts a lone make a mockery of Obama’s being awarded a Peace Prize. Robert Mugabe must be waiting in the wings for a 2010 nomination.

Being seen to broker peace whilst arming one side of the conflict is the kind of hypocritical currency with which observers of US foreign policy are all too familiar. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Obama isn’t so very different from his predecessors.

In his favour, he is vastly more eloquent and charming. Add to that the fact that he has come along at a time when the American public have never been more desperate to believe in something, and his meteoric rise seems all but inevitable. That the gullible, television-fed masses of America are helpless, willing fodder for Obama’s hollow promise of a better world is one thing, but shouldn’t we expect a more considered verdict from a Nobel committee?

Perhaps not. These same people hand-picked Al Gore for the same prize just a few years ago.

At best, this award is a prize of encouragement, an expression of hope. It’s to say: you’re on the right track; we like what you’re doing; please continue. It’s not a reward for any achievement already banked.

To Obama’s credit, he recognises that his goals, not his achievements, are being rewarded and states that he feels ill at ease having his name mentioned in the same breath as some of the previous recipients of the prize. He feels his name doesn’t sit well next to theirs. On that much, at least, Obama and I can agree.

Obama has said he will donate the prize money associated with the award to a good cause. One can only hope he doesn’t choose to add it to the Israeli military aid budget.

• Ordering the closure of the detention camp in Guantanamo Bay (although it’s still outrageous that he’s given them a year to do so). The existence of that place is an abomination and makes any claim to having a free society absurd.

• Ordering the cessation of torture by the US military. Again, civilised countries do not torture (or put to death, for that matter) their prisoners. There’s no word yet on capital punishment and I’m not holding my breath.

• Ordering the cessation of secret CIA rendition flights to transport foreign nationals, kidnapped by the US, to CIA-operated prisons in foreign states, where they were subject to torture. You remember these flights, don’t you? They’re the ones Condoleeza Rice, Bush’s defence minister, denied had ever took place. Odd that Obama feels the need to put a stop to something that never happens.

• Ordering the closure of the aforementioned secret CIA prisons in foreign states.

I must admit, I’m pleasantly surprised by the extent and promptness of some of the above actions.

On the other hand, he told Hamas to end their rocket fire into Israel, but urged Israel only to reopen its border with Gaza. Nothing short of a full condemnation of Israel’s recent actions is acceptable, together with an immediate of US military aid.

Obama also pledged his support for efforts to prevent Hamas from rearming, which is excruciatingly hypocritical, given his country’s continued military aid to the other side. You can’t claim to support the peace process whilst continuing to arm one of the warring factions.

But like I say, credit where credit’s due, even if it is only a drop in a very deep ocean.

I caught only some of it, but I marvelled at the masses, awestruck and unable to see that their new emperor was as naked as they day he was born.

I was surprised that Jesus Christ himself didn’t put in an appearance. You’d almost have expected him to, given the level of rapture that was present. He probably didn’t want to be upstaged by the people’s new messiah.

The new saviour evidently brings salvation from a sordid history of slavery for the blacks and liberation from generations of hereditary guilt for the whites. Everyone’s a winner; except for Afghanistan, Palestine; and anyone else who stands in the way.

At the end of the day, when the rose-tinted spectacles are removed, there’s nothing but rhetoric and histrionics. Only this time, it’s met by blind faith and blinkers by the masses.

Desperate people want nothing more than something all-consuming to believe in, a sense that there’s something more to life than their own insignificant existence. That’s why prison inmates are susceptible to religious conversion and it’s why so many people are now entranced by the lure of an erudite man with half a brain. He represents hope, and for many people, the absence of hope is something with which they cannot cope.

The fact remains: the emperor has no clothes.

• bombed 3 UN schools being used as refugee centres, killing dozens of civilians. An entire family of seven children perished in one of the raids. The UN had given the Israeli army the GPS coordinates of the schools and told them they were being used as refugee centres, after the Israelis themselves had told these people to leave their homes.

• shot at a UN convoy, bringing aid to Palestinian civilians. The driver of a lorry was killed.

• interfered with Red Cross workers trying to help victims of the violence. In one now notorious incident, the Israeli army left several Palestinian children inside a house to starve at the side of their mothers’ corpses. When the Red Cross wanted to search for further victims in the bombed out houses, they were told to leave the area by the Israeli army.

And today, reports reach the world that Israel evacuated around 110 civilians to a building on the 4th of January, and then proceeded to bomb it the next day. 30 people were killed, including a 5 month old baby.

The UN security council accepted a resolution today, calling for a lasting solution to the conflict and unfettered access to the wounded for relief workers. The US actually abstained from the vote. I suppose we should be grateful they didn’t veto it.

It didn’t really matter in the end, of course, because both Israel and Hamas blew off the resolution.

The scale of the Israeli disregard for international law does at least seem to have invoked the ire of at least some at the UN and all of those engaged in helping the victims of the conflict. There are now calls to investigate whether Israel is guilty of war crimes (yeah, I wonder), but let’s not cheer too soon. No-one who cares currently has the political clout to actually make such an investigation go ahead and western reporters still aren’t allowed into Gaza.

While I’m venting my spleen, I mustn’t fail to recognise the cowardly inaction of the Dutch government, who have so far defended Israel with the usual has-the-right-to-defend-itself nonsense, which is intended — and serves — to distract and deflect attention from the atrocities being perpetrated. A lot of people understandably find the notion of self-defence a reasonable one, but what is happening today in Gaza has little to do with defence. Clearly, in the eyes of Israel, the only good Palestinian is a dead one.

There are no words to describe my disgust for the actions of this rogue state, governed by villains and cowards who have repeatedly shown themselves to be bereft of all human decency and empathy. Loveless sociopaths, the lot of them.

I feel similarly about Israel’s puppet-master, the US, which funds the israeli military and supports Israel’s apartheid regime, human rights abuses and countless war crimes and atrocities. Expect more of the same from Saint Obama, who has pledged his support for ally Israel many times. A vote for Obama was a vote for Olmert.

The new 3 hour per day ceasefire is a bad joke. Relief workers say they can’t even begin to make a dent in the mountain of human misery that Israel has already caused, utilising such a brief window. And even that 3 hour window wasn’t instituted until the US finally relented and put pressure on Israel to make a gesture of goodwill after it shelled UN schools in the Gaza Strip.

What country shells UN schools, for crying out loud? Do you see any of the so-called axis of evil states doing that? No, there’s only one nation that would dare do such a thing, secure in the knowledge that it is virtually exempt from the international laws that govern the behaviour of other countries. As long as its lord and master, that other notorious rogue state and the greatest threat to world stability, the USA, continues to apply one law to Israel and another to the rest of the world, Israel need fear nothing from the international community.

Don’t talk to me about Hamas and the need to stop the shelling of Israeli towns across the border. Nothing justifies the actions and tactics that Israel employs, which is one of the reasons the country is so reviled in the first place. Israel is the engine in the anti-semitic machine. It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.

At 23:15, we put Eloïse in the pram, wrapped Lucas in the sling, and headed up to Hallgrímskirkja, the famous church located on a square where many of the side-streets heading up from Laugavegur converge. Many people head there to watch and set off their fireworks, so we thought that would be a good place to go.

People clearly can’t wait for midnight, because the sky was already incandescent a good twenty minutes before the witching hour commenced. The air was acrid with the stench of spent gunpowder. An ambulance crew carted off the night’s first casualty, who had probably fallen victim to beer, rather than an errant firework.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of Amsterdam on New Years Eves long past.

At midnight, all hell broke loose. I struggled without a tripod to take some usable photos of the mayhem exploding all around me. Fireworks are tricky things to photograph well. Eloïse and Lucas remained surprisingly calm as explosions shattered the night sky.

I couldn’t help but spare a thought for the people of Gaza, who, for days now, have also been subjected to loud explosions of a much more sinister nature. One can only hope that continued international pressure on the shameful government of Israel yields fruit sooner, rather than later.

But I digress.

As we headed home, it was close to 01:00, and people were busy piling into the city’s many clubs and bars for one of the all-night parties going on at most of the city’s nightspots.

In other news, protesters stormed our hotel this afternoon and disrupted the traditional annual broadcast that features the prime-minister and other politicians, discussing the country’s future in the year ahead.

People are pretty pissed off here by what has happened to the country’s economy in recent months and tempers are running high. Many are calling for the resignations of the country’s leaders and I can’t say I blame them.

We were walking across Austurvöllur when the shit hit the fan. Fireworks and other projectiles were thrown, the hotel was stormed and occupied, a policeman was hospitalised and a few protesters were arrested. Numerous people were squirted with pepper spray and dragged away by their friends. Video footage is now available at various locations around the Net.

I managed to get to the front of it all and take a few close-up photos of the police staring down the protesters. People were standing right in front of the police, calling them fascists, giving them the finger and spitting at their feet. The police kept their cool, though, and a full riot was averted.

The broadcast was forced off air, though, because the TV company’s cables caught fire and were damaged. The protesters thus achieved a major objective, causing massive disruption to the proceedings.

It was one of the more unusual things I’ve witnessed in Iceland. Like most things Icelandic, it was more low key than it would have been in another country. The police here clearly have less experience of dealing with public disobedience, which is refreshing.

Almost everything was closed today and it will be even deader tomorrow. Most shops don’t actually reopen until Saturday, giving people plenty of time to recover from the hangovers incurred tonight.

What a great day.