Learning to be Civilised

Now that the War on Terror has been brought within measurable distance of its end, we may perhaps have time and opportunity to appreciate the cultural impact of the recent crusade for Western values. Certainly the transport minister of democratic, peaceful Iraq seems to have attained an eminently Whitehall degree of sanity on the subject of airports. Puncturing the common superstition that the first human being in space was a Russian, Kazem Finjan held forth upon the subject of space exploration by the Sumerians, their voyages to other planets and their construction of the world's first airport in the fiftieth century BCE. It speaks well of our civilising influence upon the region that a member of an officially freedomised national government can display a knowledge of history to rival that of Western luminaries such as Niall Ferguson, Michael Gove and Erich von Däniken.