Scared Himself

clipped from www.timesonline.co.uk General Musharraf has declared martial law in Pakistan. Chuck Prince is being pressed to resign as chief executive of Citigroup, the world’s largest bank, apparently because of losses on sub-prime mortgages. The oil price has risen to $96 a barrel; the gold price has risen above $800 an ounce. That is the world in a nutshell, an international crisis, a credit crisis, an energy crisis and a dollar crisis. On Saturday, as well as watching Arsenal’s enthralling match against Manchester United, I listened with care to General Musharraf’s justification of his decision to impose a state of emergency. In the past, I have always been impressed by his soldierly calm in a crisis. On this occasion he obviously wanted to scare his audience, particularly his English-speaking audience. He certainly scared me, because I thought that he had scared himself.