… and economy appear more a tragic failure of diplomacy and less the callous destruction of a rogue country of 93 million?My concept of metastability was articulated in a futures paper I collaborated on for an energy-sector client shortly after returning from my tour on Op TELIC (a tour spent very much in the rear with the gear). In it, I talked about an Iraq on the edge of state failure, in which the state as such no longer existed, and only local economies and security structures supported local life. This is a walk-and-talk in my sports kit, which includes my pretending not to have walked through nettles with bare ankles. Anyone listening to this as a podcast might wonder why I went from speaking to my phone in a confidential tone to shouting over the sound of a waterfall. It’s because I walked over to a waterfall while filming outdoors. Please feel free to feed back whether this sort of film works better / as well as / worse than the pieces to camera I record in my study.

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