"So yes, if you count crimes, it's an ugly record, but it's only the enemy's crimes that count. They're the ones we deplore and agonise about, and so on. Our own, which may be monstrously worse, they just don't enter into our field of vision. You don't study them, you don't read about them, you don't think about them, nobody writes about them...."

Thus, during the endless debate on Iraq over the last year there has been almost no media discussion on the suffering inflicted by the West. The idea that Western sanctions have killed a million people somehow does not register - it simply can't be true. It has to be the product of overheated 'loony left' imaginations, rather than the reason why UN diplomats who ran the sanctions programme resigned in protest. Their words don't count either - they can't matter because their view of the West can't be allowed to matter.

Noam Chomsky once again points us to the fact that, as we are the ones on top, we are not interested in truth.