Saudi Arabia is building a fence to protect them from the violence in Iraq. I thought our policies were supposed to make the Middle East safer.

Security in Iraq has collapsed so dramatically that Saudi Arabia has ordered the construction of a 550-mile high-tech fence to seal off its troubled northern neighbour.

The huge project to build the barrier, which will be equipped with ultraviolet night-vision cameras, buried sensor cables and thousands of miles of barbed wire, will snake across the vast and remote desert frontier between the countries.

The fence will be built despite the hundreds of millions of pounds that the Saudi kingdom has spent in the past two years to beef up patrols on its border with Iraq, with officials saying the crisis in Iraq is now so dangerous it must be physically shut out.

There is no way left for this administratin to claim that their policies have any hope of making this situation better. In the three years that we have been there it has grown steadily worse, and all they say is "Stay the course".

In the words of the great Albert Einstein, Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Any questions?