Labour Day

Today was a national holiday here in DC and also time for the girlfriend to leave back to the UK. After dropping her at the bus to JFK I headed to the US National Cemetery in Arlington near my hotel. I can see it from my room so knew that I needed to take a walk around it. It was just what I needed for my contemplative and subdued mood and fitted well with a day to remember and celebrate the workers.
The place is so famous from countless heroic movies that its that familiar feeling being there. The big draw is the JFK grave, one of the twentieth centuries most famous Presidents shot down while doing his job. but for me it was the endless matching white headstones that drew my attention. Reading the names of those who died doing their job in wars across the world under the Commander in Chief.
With everything going on with Syria at the minute it is fitting to think about those that loose there life this way. Exactly 11yrs on from a rushed reform of Parliament to form an attack on Saddam Hussian Ba'ath Party in Iraq before the weapons inspectors had time to report, CaMoron did exactly the same with Bashar al-Assad's Ba'ath Party. I can only assume he knew he would lose the vote to play politic. Happily he did and Milliband did a good job. The UN and next weeks G20 are the ways that responsible members of the world community first deal with these issues. These Governments we set up and supplied with weapons by the UK/US by the same Right Wing that is demanding a war to get rid of them and then benefit from the contracts to rebuild.
Assad was trained in the UK and lived in London for a good amount of time. I started this journal just before being in Syria at the start of the troubles. It is amazing country with large Christian, Armenian, Turk and Assyrian populations as well as the dominant Alawite and Sunni's. Its full of warmth, fun and friendly people with a love for life, family and the west. In population terms it is not much bigger than New York at 20 million with most of those people in two cities. At the minute we are matching at amount of people killed in the Mexican drug wars of the past few years. Hopefully a good political resolution can be found next week which results in a new government there and no more innocent people dying.
A wise man wrote that "If you can afford to bomb people, you can afford to help them."
I tipped my Mexican waiters more today.