Crane-hangers and Head-choppers. Again.

The events of the Falklands war are now exactly equidistant between the present and the second world war. For many of you, as for me, for whom the Sun's front pages, the news of the sinking of Sheffield announced by Ian McDonald in sombre tones, the taking of Stanley, are as fresh as yesterday's breakfast, that will come as a shock. Sir Henry Leach, our Falklands First Sea Lord, actually saw active service in WWII. The current FSL, Tony Radakin, wasn't even commissioned until 1990, eight years after the Falklands.

I throw that in to demonstrate how rapidly the civilian experience of war passes; the jingoism, flag waving, anxious dedication to news output, simple emotions and sense of loss at every setback, shared grief for our inevitable losses. Somehow the 2003 Gulf war didn't count- perhaps it was too easy, or over too quickly, or had too little public support or absent innate rightness to count. So we have whole generations now on social media who not only missed the Falklands experience but who would be hard pushed to point to Iran on a map first-try. It's not much consolation that our domestic ignorance is likely a little less than the ignorance of Americans in this respect; No, that's Colombia. That's Nigeria. Whoa, now not even the right hemisphere. My generation will not only be largely able to stick a finger on the land of the crane-hangers first time but to name the seven nations it borders, or at least four of them.

Not only are we civilians as a whole less capable of expertise and of balanced judgement, more ignorant of geography and of geopolitics, but everyone now feels utterly entitled to call themselves an expert; the Tik Tok (I bet you haven't even heard of it) generation, who are also convinced the planet has caught fire and will burn up by next Thursday, have now convinced themselves that WW3 is here*, and war will destroy us all before climate change. By Wednesday, say. There is nothing that can be said to them to convince them otherwise.

Well, the proxy war between the crane-hangers and the head-choppers in which we and the US have been caught in the middle has taken a new turn; the Donald may actually now succeed in pulling US forces out of Iraq and Syria, assisted by the Iraqi parliament, allowing them to assault eachother directly. Let them get on with it. Saudi oil is less important for the US; as soon as it reaches $60bbl the US frackers come on stream.

So no great pronouncements from me today. Let's watch this one. Calmly, as we do.

*As does the Daily Express - which I always imagined anyway was written for teenagers.