Говори и пиши как The Eсonomist

The United States then made some 30 military interventions in and around the Caribbean in the next 30 years, many of them under Smedley Butler, a marine corps general, who summed up his career thus: "I helped make Honduras "right" for American fruit companies in 1903. I helped make Mexico.safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to col­lect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street... I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12.1 brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China, I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."

As Carl von Clausewitz, a great Prussian strategist, put it: "War is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a con­tinuation of political intercourse carried on with other means."

He had been born during the war, grown up during the misery of the inflation and the restlessness of the postwar years, and had awakened during a new war.

At weekends, a handy man with a spanner, he would get under the hood of neighbours' cars and mend children's bikes. His ranch- style house in Seven Hills sat on half an acre, where he proudly grew tomatoes and zucchini. From 1977 to 1993, however, he be­came Ivan the Terrible, who had roamed the concentration camp at Treblinka in Poland with a whip, or a sword, in his big mechan­ic's hands. As the naked Jews ran shivering from the trains to the gas chambers he would slash off an ear, rip open a belly, or flog them til they fell. He drilled the anus of one man with an auger, and shoved the face of another hard into barbed wire. An expert on engines, he had operated the diesels that pumped out carbon monoxide to kill 870,000 people.

The country was the original home of the young man with explosive underpants who tried to blow up an American airliner over Detroit at Christmas.

When it comes to a 30-year partner of the United States, a man who has helped keep peace in the region and been a durable ally

in the war on terrorism, Mr. Obama is quick to toss Mr. Mubarak under the bus.

We've been studying nuclear waste for 40 years and we still have no idea what to do with it.

There is a long tradition of shooting messengers who bring bad news.

The bomber always get through. Charles Portal was thrilled to learn in 1944 that a single Lancaster bomber had eliminated more German man- hours on its first sortie than the number of British man-hours required to build it, suggesting that all subsequent sorties would be "clear profit".

Swastika — to some a 5,000-year-old symbol of peace — Sanskrit svastika — "good-luck sign," from svasti "good luck".

Next time you bury a beet bottle stuffed with money in a park, you should ponder what cameras and sensors may be hidden in the trees nearby. Like so many other once-solid professions, spying is becoming less of a career and more a job for freelancers.

Precedent suggests that voters unhappy about the economy will dump successful war leaders. The first George Bush's triumph in the first Gulf war did not win him a second term. British vot­ers turfed out Winston Churchill two months after his victory against Hitler. And Mr Obama has not "won" the war against al- Qaeda. Killing Mr bin Laden has scotched the snake, not killed it.

NATO was making in Afghanistan the best of a bad job.

General Tommy Franks describes him as the "dumbest fucking guy on the planet".

George Bush repeated like a scratched gramophone record that Ameri­cans were at war with the terrorists who had attacked them on 9/11, not at war with Islam.

Sun Tzu, a Chinese general, was writing "The Art of War", a book that celebrates cunning by arguing that the way to win is by al­ways doing the opposite of what your opponent expects.

Could Mrs Thatcher have survived as prime minister had the Falklands not been retaken? (In her memoirs, she says not.) Would the Tories have won the 1983 election had Argentina never invaded? (Probably). Lady Thatcher's victory suggested that war could achieve political ends quickly and efficiently.

In 1993 Colin Powell (then the top soldier) told the Senate that when the world dialled 911, the emergency phone number, Ame­rica was expected to answer.

The odour of a police station like the ammoniac smell of zoos all over the world.

And to defend against the invading legions of would-be garden­ers and hotel cleaners, the US-Mexican frontier is also equipped with high-tech military gizmos, such as unmanned spy planes with infra-red cameras.

In England between the 13 th and 16th centuries, extramarital sex was policed with such energy that up to 90% of the litigation handled by church courts was about combating fornication, adultery, sodomy and prostitution. The punishments were often savage. When the Reformation got going in the mid-16th.