Marketed Forces

Ostentatious wealth, lack of social mobility, institutionalised sexism and a robust belief in the moral value of punishment are not the only things Arab states have in common with the British Conservative Party, according to a report by Transparency International. All seventeen of the governments surveyed are characterised by secrecy and nepotism, with networks based on family ties and the use of powerful agencies as personal fiefdoms. "Corruption contributes to instability and creates insecurity," lectured the director of Transparency International's Defence and Security Programme sternly. Indeed, from the way some people carry on it might almost be thought that there were profits to be made from war. In the gloriously-democratised Iraq, you can buy a divisional command for £1.3 million, which is just about the way things worked in the British army during the pre-Crimean Golden Age to which the Bullingdon Club seeks to return us. In the case of Britain's biggest weapons market, Saudi Arabia, the government does not even bother to report the amounts it spends, which represents a distinct civilisational advance over the traditional and cumbersome Whitehall method of lying and then being found out.