2014 year-ender

The main purpose of year-end reviews, of course, is to hold the ads apart. But they can also serve as a kind of annual check-up on the political health - and also on the economic, demographic and even physical health - of the planet and its teeming human population. So imagine that we are a panel of high-priced medicos reviewing the health status of our most important client, the human race.

The first thing to note is that the client is still piling on weight at an alarming rate - up from 2 billion units to 7 billion in the past 75 years - but continues to thrive, for the most part. And most of the ailments that it worries about are mere hypochondria.

Take, for example, the widespread concern (at least in the media and among what Bob Fisk calls the "think-tank mountebanks") that the emergence of the so-called Islamic State in the no man's land between Iraq and Syria will lead to catastrophe. There will allegedly be a surge in terrorist attacks around the world, a Sunni-Shiite religious war spanning the entire Middle East, or even a global religious war between Muslims and everybody else.

The Sunni fanatics and the Shiite fanatics are far too busy trying to kill each other to have time to spare for attacking non-Muslims. (Besides, most Muslims don't want to attack anybody; they just want to be left in peace.) Quite a lot of the slaughter in Iraq and Syria is driven by religion, but we are still a long way from a religious conflict that directly involves the really important states of the Middle East: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran.

Even the anticipated surge in terrorist attacks outside the region is not likely to come to pass. The only strategic purpose for such attacks by any organized group of Islamist extremists is to gain...