The Guardian gets a lot of stick but, every now and again, they have some extremely fine writing. Here’s some.

Now we seem to think every terrorist attack puts us in the same rank of suffering as the generations of 1914-45. In reality, our century is, so far, an easy one for Europeans and Americans; to imagine we reel from our own little Verduns and Stalingrads is as dangerous as it is nonsensical.

I often wonder whether the reason that European attitudes about war are so different from American attitudes is because of the numbers. 58,249 in Vietnam vs 700,000 British in WW1 and 6 million Jews and 20 million Soviets in WW2.

3000 dead in Iraq is a terrible, terrible tragedy. But 20 million is a folk memory that will last for generations.