The Iraq War Logs make me think of my dad and his friends as young men. My dad was in the navy while I was still a baby. I don’t remember him being in uniform and his role as a medic onboard ship meant he was never in direct contact with ‘the enemy’.

In my dad’s case the enemy was the Argentinians in the Falklands War, a conflict he shipped off to straight after returning early from holiday with my mum. If he had chosen to he could have ducked his responsibility to his ship and colleagues – simply ignored the message left on his door. But he didn’t.

The Falklands was a very different kind of war to the ones we’ve fought in recent years. While it is still a controversial part of Margaret Thatcher’s divisive tenure, it comes with the mitigation that British civilians were under threat. Thatcher deployed the task force to a British colony to free it from foreign invaders. It was a legal military action in the face of an act of an aggression.

The Iraq war was a conflict prosecuted in defiance of international law without the shield of a UN resolution and predicated on a lie. It was undertaken to institute regime change and resulted in the fracturing of the imperfect secular state held together by Saddam Hussein’s reprehensible regime into an constantly shifting patchwork of dangerous political and religious factions.

In Afghanistan, we have failed to defeat the Taliban just as the Soviets failed to defeat the Mujaheddin. We are fighting a war in the cradle of guerrilla warfare, the spiritual home of the resistance fighter, a region that has repelling the foreigner knotted into its DNA. Whatever the politicians and generals claim, it is an unwinnable war in a nation that has never truly been a nation.

When my dad and his shipmates sailed for the Falklands, they were sailing to a war with a known enemy and a defined goal – defeat the Argentine forces and recapture the islands. It made it easy for civilians to flock to the docks to see them off and flock there again to see them return.

But even in a war with such a clear narrative – Britain vs Argentina, the Malvinas vs The Falklands – there were incredibly complex moral questions at play. War is a dirty business, you cannot wage it and leave with clean hands. The sinking of the Belgrano (justified in my view) is still an act that raises tempers while the Argentine troops that invaded and tried to hold the Falklands was made up in large part of teenage forced conscripts send to battle by a military dictatorship keen to bolster its position on the domestic stage with an act of force. 

It was once a truism that the narrative of any conflict is written by the winners. The dominant force would define the parameters of the media coverage and place documents in shields of secrecy for years, diminishing their power by the time they are rolled out in disclosures. Many an old soldier’s memoirs include acts that would be defined now as war crimes. The pop culture notion that World War 2 pitted the moral Allies vs the dastardly Nazis is a reductive playground dream.

The Nazis war crimes were more systematic, more documented. They geared the German state up for the task of warfare and extermination and provided a perfectly minuted record of their planning. We know when the Final Solution was born because we have the minutes of the Wannasee Conference that coined the term. 

The Iraq War Logs that have been released in a coordinated effort by Wikileaks and its chosen media organisations is a leap on in breaking down the ability of the government and military to control the narrative. In the Gulf War, embedded correspondents and night vision footage of smart bombs gave us the illusion that we were seeing the real war but it was only ever a sanitised fireworks display.

While correspondents consistently brought the true and unspun stories out of the conflicts in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, wars waged by the powers in the West have always been more controlled, more packaged up for our consumption. The dirtiest, darkest incidents have only ever slipped out in drips and drabs.

The Iraq War Logs show us the true horrors and corruption of war in something closer  to real time. These are the brutal rough edges of conflict shown to us without the censors red pen, the historian’s desire to show us reality but not too much reality. Even when we’re given the blood-soaked beach scene of Saving Private Ryan, it’s still the ugly face of war with a dash of blusher and rouge to take the edge off.

The Iraq War Logs are the uncensored stream of horror that happens every day in a war zone. It is the story of soldiers, sailors and airmen doing terrible things and having terrible things done to them. People are fed into the machine and what they do within it often defies our everyday logic, shatters our everyday morality.

The Iraq War Logs are studded with shocking details. The full extent of Iranian complicity in IED attacks is exposed as is the use of Iraqi civilians as minesweepers by Coalition troops, the failure to capture the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq and among the most shocking disclosures – Apache helicopter pilots firing on surrendering civilians. It is a list of horrors that makes a long and brutalising read.

Its disclosure occurs while men like my dad, the product of a council estate who joined the Navy as the best option to get out of a dead end town with a paucity of options in a time of economic uncertainty, are still far from home. The Iraq War Logs don’t make things any easier for them as they try to do their jobs in operations the public don’t understand or wholeheartedly support. The best product of these documents would be to end the deployment of British servicemen and women in Iraq and Afghanistan far faster than is planned.

Our continued presence in those nations does not make us safer. That is a fallacy repeated ad-nauseum by politicians whohave failed to provide evidence to justify their claims. We are sending men and women to die on a false premise and while we do we have supported and condoned torture and despicable conduct.

I wasn’t born when my dad went to war and I was only a baby when he was deployed to the Falklands on a second tour. He didn’t see me until I was three months old. There are thousands of men and women who are enduring trying conditions far from home and thousands of Afghan and Iraqi men, women and children who have been ill-served by the decisions our governments have made.

The release of the Iraq War Logs should be used as a catalyst to ask serious questions about our foreign policy but we should also not let Julian Assange go unquestioned. He and Wikileaks are an unchecked organisation, operating only by their own rules. 

Julian Assange showboats and enjoys his role pricking at authority but neither he nor media organisations like The Guardian can truly guarantee that their revelations will not put men and women on the ground in more danger and exacerbate an already combustible situation.

The Iraq War Logs sit in a vast library of documents that previous wars produced but were kept from our gaze. Modern tools have made the disclosure possible but an equally shocking library of evidence could have been produced in 1945 on Allied conduct during World War 2 or 1992 after the Gulf War.

War is a time of brutality and barbarism. It is an experience that can elevate men and women and bring out the best in them in the defence of themselves, their comrades and their ideals or lower them to a bestial, barbarous low that produces inhuman acts and true cruelty. 

For us to judge from in front of our monitors, hands poised at our keyboards is easy. To know how we would truly behave is not. Would you be implicated in one of those articles of shame if you went to war?

Before today when Andy Coulson found himself leading the news bulletins, most people didn’t know who he was. Despite the fact that he has been at the heart of a major media scandal and stood beside the Prime Minister, he wasn’t well-known at all. Of course in the liberal Twitter bubble and among media and political wonks the hacking story was huge but it doesn’t get much play outside of the capital. School kids used to pull the phone hacking trick when I was I was in high school.

In comparison with his famous predecessor Alastair Campbell, Coulson has been low key. He did a quiet and reportedly effective job as the PM’s press secretary and did not appear in news print much outside of pieces on the News Of The World and the hacking claims. By contrast, Alastair Campbell was linked to the exaggeration of the evidence for going to war, frequently appeared in press stories about his aggression and even rocked up to Channel 4 News to put in a particularly bug-eyed performance.

It’s been suggested that Andy Coulson knew about phone hacking at the News of The World. He claims he knew nothing which seems very unlikely. In my opinion, he did know. But the whole issue of phone hacking is being inflated. Phone hacking is illegal and unacceptable but it isn’t the worst crime I can think of and for that matter it’s an act that was perpetrated by journalists of all stripes and at papers for a long time.

Campell gets it right?!

Whatever other publications claim, they simply backed away from that activity before they got caught. The reason the Screws is in the firing line is that it got caught. Before 2001, the practice of hopping into people’s voice mail wasn’t illegal. It was widespread practice prior to that and it kept going after the law changed. Coulson knew. He had to know. Talking to old hacks from the 70s and 80s they speak about tabloid tricks that made phone hacking look like a playground game. Tabloids have always been run by morally dubious people – you don’t kick the hell out of celebrities in print or remorselessly reveal people’s private lives without being a laissez faire about the rules.

Surprisingly, Alastair Campbell made some very good points over here about the events of today and the following paragraph was particularly interesting:

“But what I found surprising about today’s announcement is that he hasn’t really been as big a focus of attention as he might have been. He talked about the time having come when the spokesman needed a spokesman, but I’m not sure it had really come to that. I did a public meeting recently at which someone asked why everyone seemed to know who Tony Blair’s comms director was, but nobody knew David Cameron’s.

I was taken aback and asked for a show of hands. About ten per cent knew it was Andy Coulson. I do sometimes wonder what the media would have been like if I had still been in charge, and had left a phone-hacking scandal behind me.”

The fact is that employing tabloid types to work in government is a bad move. Tony Blair was wrong to employ the dry drunk anger of Alastair Campbell as much as David Cameron was foolish to hope that Coulson could be integrated into government without the bad smell from the phone hacking case following him. But there is an element of hypocrisy in the shrill noises coming from The Guardian after claiming Coulson’s scalp.

Guardian of hypocrisy?

I have written for The Guardian on several occasions and think it is a very fine paper but its record is not spotless:

It failed to protect Sarah Tisdall when she turned whistleblower while working at the Foreign Office (telltale markings were left on documents revealed by the paper after a court order), it used fabricated documents to nail Jonathan Aitken (who utterly deserved taking down however) and has only briefly touched upon the relationship between Wikileaks and seemingly anti-semitic supporter and benefactor Israel Shamir (ironically, he’s a Jew who converted to ultra-orthodox Christianity).

I don’t mean to attack The Guardian. In my heart I’m clearly more of a Graun supporter than a News International fan (though, full disclosure, I have contributed to The Sun and written for The Sunday Times in the past) but I find it hard to take the sanctimony of a paper which itself does not have an entirely clean history.

Newspapers are a dirty business and none of them have a spotless record. However, few can match the Hitler fanboyism that lingers in The Daily Mail’s past.

The Coulson affair clearly matters a great deal in terms of the relationship between the government and the Metropolitan Police but when it comes to the magic question of David Cameron’s “judgement”, it won’t stay around for very long.

Ed Miliband has appointed Tom Baldwin (former Times chief reporter) as his directory of strategy and communications and Bob Roberts of The Daily Mirror as his director of news. I do wonder what those two (particularly Baldwin with his past at News International) might have in their own pasts.

Let’s hope for Ed “we must question David Cameron’s judgment” Miliband has vetted them carefully. We wouldn’t want to see more McBride-style controversy, would we?

My childhood visions of the future were elaborate and optimistic. The scenes were a cut and paste job of robots and megacities, space colonies and jet packs. I gobbled up comics, books and films to feed my future dreaming. Grown up (of sorts), the future feels as if it will be like today but worse somehow. 

In the Alka Seltzer fizz of the nineties, when the long hangover of nuclear confrontation seemed to be clearing, it was so much easier to dream of a shiny science fiction future. It was the big dumb future of the Lost In Space reboot – Daz white spacesuits, men with chiseled Joey Tribiani jaws and terrorists foolish enough to rely on Gary Oldman to get the job done. 

If you were lucky enough to live in a peaceful part of the placid west, the nineties were a kind of nothing decade. The ugly realities of the noughties future were squirming around just under the surface but they were easy to ignore, drunk on cheap credit and reheated pop culture pastiches. 

My nineties was a slow slide from toddler to bullied school boy to tolerated sixth former. At one point, choosing between Blur or Oasis seemed pivotal and whether or not your owned Kappa popper trousers was the difference between success and social Siberia. 

I was 17 when the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 took place. They were at once horrifying and distant. They were something that had happened on TV and virtually everything about them was filtered to me through a speaker, from the Today programme or the 10 O’Clock News. Norfolk was not abuzz with talk of terrorists. 

While the planes were striking the towers, I was in a history class on the causes of the First World War. I heard the news from a disinterested bus driver who muttered something about Bin Laden. The radio burbled away with theories and static but I didn’t see that footage, the dust and carnage, until my bike ride home from my grandparents. I stopped outside an electrical shop and stared at the bug eye of big screens in the window. 

It didn’t hit me then – my 17-year-old brain was stuffed with thoughts of girls who didn’t know my name and books I wanted to buy – but that atrocity exhibition in the Radio Rentals window demolished the beautiful future dream. The sense that the universe can vaporise you as quickly as a sadistic kid slaughtering ants with a kettle became very real. 

The new century began in September 2001. While the history books we’d been clutching in that class on the afternoon of 11 September made sure to draw lines between war and postwar, there hadn’t been a day in the 20th century when an armed conflict hadn’t been clattering on the periphery. 

The 21st century has just made taking sides and placing bets even tougher. The Soviet Union was the big bad end-of-level boss. In the new century, the enemies were nimbler and harder to catch. Osama Bin Laden was practically mythical by the time the Navy Seals gunned down the flesh and blood vessel in Abbotabad ten years later. 

As the chatter about Iran gets louder, I can hear Things Can Only Get Better being piped into my brain stem, the deja vu flooding my system. We really don’t want a war, say the ministers, while their back-benchers mutter and splutter about how it might just be goddamn unavoidable and how a good scrap is golden for the polls. At the same time we eye Argentina like Jack Palance staring down the goat herder in that Bill Hicks routine: “Pick up the gun…” 

The Arab Spring sprang to life in 2011 but, by the end of the year, while Ghadaffi was dead in Libya, the army was back lording it up in Egypt. Ask the Burmese how easy it is to shift military rulers who’ve spent decades drunk on the idea of power. Depose one man with too much gold braid and a penchant for summary executions and often as not another one just hops up into his place. Democracy should come with a gift receipt.

The future could be stem cell miracles and lab-grown future food for all but I fear it’ll be war for water, blood for oil and the poor pushed out of the cities. The coalition government in the UK is already aching to make the poor, the disabled and anyone else it deems as undesirable get out of London. China picked off the destitute from Beijing’s streets in time for its Olympics, Boris and Dave are just dreaming of the same. 

The hover boards won’t be here for 2015 and space travel is long going to be a jolly for the super-rich with bank accounts so full there’s nothing earthly to spend it on. In Britain, an ageing population and a dwindling birthrate means politics will be as stuffed with the old faces as rock’n’roll has been for decades.

If you think you’re bored with still seeing Mick Jagger creak across the stage, imagine countless years of George Osborne and Harriet Harman until their heads are presenting policy documents from pickling jars. 

The Italians talk about the “caste” that control everything. Everyone in power is old and the young can’t get their feet on the first rung of the ladder. That’s only going to get worse. The rich get richer, the poor get bitter. The riots last summer will start to look like hijinks as the real unrest gets started. 

To my generation, nurtured in the bosom of a boom, the future can seem incredibly bleak. Distracted by reality TV, Twitter and Facebook, you can ignore the hard parts for a while. Then thirty looms up ahead of you and forty is just over the crest of the hill. You don’t own a house. You don’t have a child. You’re nominally free but as trapped as anyone else. 

In Ireland, the Celtic tiger cubs are still clutching their parents credit cards and making an escape to Australia and New Zealand. They realise that the birthright they were promised – cheap property, easy credit and jobs there for the picking – has evaporated in the heavy fog of politicians’ promises. 

The science fiction future of my childhood dreaming is trapped in Star Trek box sets and the idle wittering of techno-utopians. The iPads will get thinner. The computers will get smaller and faster.

The big problems still stretch out ahead of us. Little wins are followed by huge stumbles. On our TV screens, in parliaments, in trading rooms and on the battlefields, it’s the eighties reoccurring. Fukuyama knows he was wrong. History didn’t end, it just looped around on itself and picked up cooler props.