Latest column from Mr Cohen here.

Almost everyone discusses the second Iraq war in the passive voice. It’s as if a censor in the head clips out every mention of the crimes of Baathists and Islamists from their prose. So we read that an interpreter for the British army was assassinated; Iraqi Christians are the victims of a pogrom; British soldiers have been killed by roadside bombs.

Schoolchildren learn that they must always say who is doing what to whom. In the case of Iraq, many find it impossible to declare who is killing interpreters, Christians and soldiers, and why. Clear English might threaten preconceptions, and that would never do.

The Archbishop of Canterbury is proving a master of the evasive style. Returning from visiting Iraqi refugees in Syria last week, he declared: ‘Women in Christian communities were regularly forced to wear the hijab and were followed as they went to church.’

Yes, yes, Your Grace, but who is forcing and threatening them? He couldn’t speak plainly, because if he admitted that al-Qaeda in Iraq kill Arab Christians for being Christians, he would have to accept that their persecution isn’t the responsibility of Britain and America, but of the psychopathic adherents of theocratic ideology.

I suppose the Archbishop sees himself as a liberal, but Tories can be just as slippery. In his speech to the Conservative conference, David Cameron declared: ‘I think that if we have learnt anything over the last five years, it’s that you cannot drop a fully formed democracy out of an aeroplane at 40,000 feet.’ Almost without exception, the British servicemen and women who are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t RAF pilots sent on a preposterous mission by a Labour government to drop democracy like bombs. They are squaddies on the ground fighting totalitarian enemies in close combat. The leader of the opposition must read the press reports of their deaths - or have aides who can read them for him - but can no more acknowledge their sacrifice than the Archbishop can face up to the true nature of al-Qaeda. Denial makes better propaganda.

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More on refugees here.

Of all the Iraqis seeking asylum in the UK, only about one in six is allowed to remain…

A right to travel and attend being upheld here.

Merkel says Mugabe has right to attend summit