“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.

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.

Obama is set to announce Clinton as his Minister of Foreign Affairs (or Secretary of State, as it’s called in the US). On the face of it, it’s a curious choice.

Obama previously criticised Clinton for her support of Bush’s illegal war in Iraq. Of course, she immediately withdrew her support once public opinion swung the other way, but back when the American public was still being led up the garden path with fairy tales of Iraq being an Al Qaida hotbed, she was as vocal as anyone about the absolute necessity of invading Iraq.

Clinton, on the other hand, whilst campaigning for the Democratic party presidential nomination, criticised Obama for being naive, inexperienced and generally not up to the job of president. She also condemned him for his willingness to sit down without preconditions and talk to the likes of Cuba, Iran, Venezuela and North Korea.

So, you could conclude that she doesn’t exactly see eye to eye with Obama on foreign policy, but she’s still prepared to work under him as the Secretary of State? Isn’t that a little disingenuous?

It’s not as strange as it seems, of course. You just have to remember that most politicians are duplicitous, conniving megalomaniacs with only their own interest at heart. Then it all starts to make sense.

Clinton has a history of modifying her stance on anything and everything in order to increase her popularity with the general public, thereby improving her chances of career advancement. If the sum of 2 + 2 was a hot political issue and she believed the result to be 4, you can rest assured that her public statements would repeatedly emphasise that the result was, in fact, 5, if that’s what her advisors were telling her the unwashed masses wanted to hear.

Taking the job with Obama, therefore, is nothing more than cynical self-interest. Even if she considers Obama to be an incompetent baboon, there’s no way she’d ever turn down a chance to occupy a powerful office like that. It’s all about the power, you see. Political ambition is all she has left in her vacuous life.

And what does Obama now have to say about Clinton, a woman who voted to send her country headlong into an unwinnable war in Iraq without even first demanding to see the evidence the proponents of said war claimed would unequivocally justify their actions?

He says this: “She is an American of tremendous stature who will have my complete confidence, who knows many of the world’s leaders, who will command respect in every capital, and who will clearly have the ability to advance our interests around the world.”

It’s hard to know how a woman who can support starting a war without caring to see the evidence that would supposedly justify it can command anyone’s complete confidence, much less that of the man about to run the world’s most powerful country.

In fact, what’s the worst possible job you could imagine giving to someone whose judgement has already been demonstrated to be woefully, negligently bad? Minister for Foreign Affairs, is the one that springs to my mind.

Not only does Obama have bad foreign policy, he now has an equally bad foreign minister to enact it. You can at least give the man credit for a perverse consistency, I suppose.

Watch out, Afghanistan. The next four years are going to be harsh.

Well, if that’s true, we can look forward to future elections being won by:

• a woman

• an unmarried person

• an atheist

• a Muslim

• a homosexual

• a pacifist

For the sake of your health, don’t hold your breath.

I belong to a seemingly very small minority of world denizens who see little significance in the fact that Obama is a black man. I find the colour of his skin utterly irrelevant.

In fact, I find any detail you care to mention about the man himself irrelevant, except for his intelligence. One is, after all, electing an office more than the individual himself. If Obama dies whilst in office, another party member will take over the reins and enact the same policies, so it makes sense to look only at the party politics themselves. I find that many, if not most, Americans lose sight of this and are distracted by the individual politicians, their personality, charisma and manner.

Looking just at the politics, then, I see little reason for hope in Obama’s foreign policy. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating. Under Obama, the US will still not be subordinate to the UN. Unilateral force will continue to be applied overseas, if deemed appropriate by the US.

There’s virtually no chance of the US joining the International Criminal Court, either, so there’s no chance of holding the country’s leaders internationally accountable for their crimes abroad.

Military aid to Israel will continue under Obama, which amounts to an implicit approval of Israel’s continuing acts of aggression, occupation and oppression.

The war in Afghanistan will be stepped up, costing untold numbers of lives in that country. Obama sees Afghanistan as the prime front against terrorism, but fails to understand that much of that same terrorism has its origin in brutal US foreign policy over the last 50 years. When others, such as the very vocal Jeremiah Wright, point this out, they are decried and denounced for statements that are “offensive to every American”. The truth hurts.

We can hope, at least, that Obama will do some good within his own country. Perhaps under Obama, the standard of education and health care for Americans will improve. Anything that can be done to raise the general level of awareness in America that the country is not alone in the world and cannot endlessly continue to use the rest of the world as its own private, vast resource pool without incurring the wrath of many, has to be a good thing.

The wake-up call of 9/11 was a painful opportunity for some much needed introspection, but that call was not heeded. Obama doesn’t understand (or can’t politically be seen to acknowledge) that most anti-American terrorism is born of a desire for retribution, not blind hatred. Better education and presumed consequent increased global awareness amongst the voting populace of America are perhaps the only hope for a more peaceful world, even if they take years to yield any observable fruit.

The days have been punctuated by the excellent Intelligentsia coffee and sandwiches of The Edge, shopping for cheap(er) clothes, and the wearying omnipresence of the two big presidential candidates on the television.

Eloïse has been having a whale of a time with Oma and Opa; Lucas has simply been smiling at everyone, winning hearts and minds, as he is wont to do.

Last night was Halloween, an occasion that is taken quite seriously in this country. It’s a deeply rooted element of American culture and so we took Eloïse on her first American trick-or-treating this evening.

Basically, this involves dressing up in fancy dress and knocking on doors, at which point Eloïse asks, “Trick or treat?”, in a suitably ominous tone. I have a strong association of Halloween with a supernatural theme, but children dress up in all kinds of fancy dress here. Eloïse, for example, was in a mouse costume.

By the end of the evening, she’d collected a lot of sweets and was feeling very pleased with herself. We only let her eat a single piece of it when she got home, but she seemed happy with that.

This evening, I went out with Sarah’s brother, John, and his new girlfriend, Katie, and we drove to Worcester in the neighbouring state of Massachusetts, where the Sisters of Mercy were playing at the Palladium.

This incarnation of the Sisters isn’t my favourite, I have to say. The delicacies of songs like Marian are lost in the faster tempo, the lack of a twelve string and the use of chunky guitars instead of an ebow. The sound in general wasn’t great, with some songs becoming recognisable only after half a minute or so, which is a bit strange for tracks I’ve been playing for a quarter of a century. The original sound isn’t even approximated for most songs. I also lament the lack of a human bass player.

Anyway, tomorrow evening, we fly home to Amsterdam, arriving Monday morning.

Make no mistake, though, this is important; in theory, at least. Whomever America elects, the rest of the world (that’s us!) gets saddled with the consequences; and those, whilst never good, have been particularly dire over the last few years.

We in Europe have no say in this, of course. Whilst America’s foreign policy arguably has more of an impact on our daily lives than our own country’s policy (which mostly just sees us begrudgingly dancing to American pipes), we have little choice but to sit back and hope that the American electorate will get it right.

Unfortunately, though, getting it wrong is a foregone conclusion. A country with a population of 300 million people somehow each time manages the incredible feat of producing just two credible (yes, I use the word advisedly) presidential candidates. Evidently, the entire political spectrum in that country can be neatly represented by two parties, the most liberal of which is still firmly right of centre by European standards.

To Americans, Obama and McCain are as different as chalk and cheese. Progressive Americans view Obama as the salvation of a nation, a shepherd to lead a nation out of the bleak wilderness of the Bush era, a beacon of light in a world currently shrouded in darkness, the imminent new leader of the free world; and other such hyperbole.

By the same token, progressive Americans see McCain as the logical prolongation of the Bush dynasty, a man who would continue to scrap services and indulge the rich, whilst continuing to mire America in Iraq for the next 100 years.

As a European, I view all of this with much cynicism and a fair amount of bemusement. I fail to see the supposedly huge differences between the two camps.

Let’s examine a few facts.

Both Obama and McCain favour continuing the supply of $3 bn per annum in military aid to Israel. Like Bush and Clinton before them, they intend to adopt the pretence of brokering peace with the left hand whilst passing weapons to one of the warring factions with the right. There can be no peace in the Middle East while the US continues to support Israel in its acts of aggression, oppression, occupation and apartheid.

Both Obama and McCain say that they are prepared to disregard the UN security council when determining whether to go to war. Neither camp apparently has any respect for international law, yet both are hypocritical enough to criticise other nations, such as Russia, for the same flagrant disregard. If the UN is to have any meaning, all nations that wish to be regarded as respectable, democratic states must submit to its authority. The same applies to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, another institution for which the US has (even greater) disdain.

Both Obama and McCain are critical of Iran for its ongoing commitment to nuclear technology, yet the US has a fearsome nuclear capability, as does Israel. I’m no fan of Ahmadinejad, but I don’t see an argument for denying Iran nuclear technology — even if that means weapons — whilst nations such as the US and Israel have them. Obama fears an arms race in the Middle East if Iran develops nuclear weapons, but he curiously doesn’t fear it enough to stop selling arms to the nation from which Iran would be seeking to protect itself. The double standard here is ludicrous and dismisses any notion that the US is truly interested in achieving peace in the region.

You see, to get elected in the US, you have to support Israel. Not only the large Jewish lobby, but also American Christians are, by and large, sympathetic to Israel; much more so than Europeans. I attribute this to a couple of things. Firstly, there’s the much more one-sided portrayal of the conflict in the American media. Secondly, a large number of fundamentalist Christian Americans believe that the presence of Jews in the promised land is necessary for the fulfilment of biblical prophecy. That’s Armageddon, by the way, and I, for one, would like to avoid it.

McCain supported the invasion of Iraq and continues to favour a long-term American presence there. Obama, on the other hand, favours stepping up operations in Afghanistan, because he believes that to be the main breeding ground of terrorism. Both conveniently ignore the fact that much of the world’s terrorism has its origin in America’s disastrous foreign policy, which for decades has sought to enrich corporate America, achieve absolute military superiority, and sequester huge quantities of the world’s natural resources in an attempt to assuage the insatiable appetite of a populace addicted to an unsustainable lifestyle.

Hundreds of thousands of lives have already been lost due to this myopic policy, and the loss will continue under either Obama or McCain. Only the theatre of operations and the associated media limelight may change.

Speaking of death, neither candidate has said anything about working to abolish capital punishment in the US. Civilised nations do not execute their miscreants; it’s as simple as that. In fact, even most uncivilised nations draw the line at executing children, but the US continues to flout international law by occasionally putting a child to death. There are scarcely words to describe my revulsion towards this. See this Amnesty International report for more details.

Neither candidate supports homosexual marriage, which effectively means that neither candidate supports equality under the law. This is a basic human right, not to mention part of the American constitution. Even Spain has legalised same-sex marriage, and they still torture animals for sport in that country.

So, perhaps the above serves to illustrate somewhat why I fail to perceive much of a difference between the two main American political parties and their chosen figureheads. Whilst they diverge more convincingly on domestic policy, you’ll have to forgive me if I can’t find it in myself to consider their effect on their own nation anywhere near as relevant or as important as their effect on the rest of the world, including its ecology.

Those of you going out to vote this November, do so with your conscience. In my opinion, a vote for either Obama or McCain is ultimately going to leave you with blood on your hands. In your position, I wouldn’t vote at all.

To not vote is viewed by some as akin to apathy or, at the very least, as an implicit abdication of one’s civil responsibility, by dint of which one forgoes one’s right to complain about the country’s elected leaders.

Bollocks.

Not voting is not akin to apathy. Rather, conscientious abstention demonstrates a proud conviction. It embodies the twofold rejection of an inherently undemocratic electoral system and a farcically piss-poor choice of candidates, under either of whom the world will not be a safer place

Seven years on from the levelling of the World Trade Center and most Americans still don’t understand why America is so deeply reviled across the world. I keep waiting for the penny to drop, but it never does.

After the events of 11th September 2001, I remember thinking that some good may actually come from the horror of what had unfolded. I thought that America had been so fundamentally shaken that it may pause for political self-reflection; that it might hold its past behaviour up to the light, blush and mend its ways.

No such luck.

I’m still waiting for the penny to drop.