My latest piece over at The Commentator looks at why it took so long to arrest Ratko Mladic, and why our leaders tend to opt for gradual escalation rather than decisive blows to the head: In late 1996 I sent a secret telegram to London arguing that the massively expensive […]
Here is leading human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC talking about the Mladic arrest, in standard terms. Apart from this: He could – and should – have been taken into custody between 1996 and his disappearance in 2002, but diplomats then did not trust international justice: "The capture of Karadzic […]
Here is the text of President Obama’s speech in Westminster Hall. Well received more for powerful delivery and ‘feel-good factor’ than substance. Before he left Washington the President gave an important speech on the upheavals across the Arab region and what it all meant for the Middle East. Text here. […]
Here is an astonishing mistake by President Obama – he today signed the Westminster Abbey guest-book using the wrong year. This is much more embarrassing than ex-President Clinton getting his Balkan Ms in a twist earlier this week. Thank goodness these fine leaders are not G W Bush, otherwise we’d all […]
A colleague of mine from old FCO days has a droll self-immolatory story about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the IMF who now faces serious criminal charges in New York. Years ago there was a tradition in the FCO that an Embassy would send short reports back to London if […]
Here is a strange piece at Forbes which I picked up via Twitter by Anne Doyle, an American woman who is big on Powering Up! women in general. She quotes what she asserts to be three ‘stunning examples of the cultural headwinds that women are still up against’. What are […]
Now and again we find via the Web a piece so smart that it changes the way we look at things. Such as this one over at Slate by Thomas Nachbar on the emerging assertions that Bin Laden was ‘assassinated’ or even ‘executed’ by the Americans. Read the whole thing, […]
Remember the kitschy post-WW2 Yugo-monuments? They are doing the Internet rounds. But … what is this over at Instapundit where Megan McArdle is guestblogging? CREEPY/COOL abandoned Soviet war monuments in the former Yugoslavia. Posted at 12:41 pm by Megan McArdle
Here is my first-ever piece for a new website, The Commentator, looking at some of the tired and/or snide arguments against the US action against Osama Bin Laden which are now busily infiltrating the BBC and other parts of the British media. Including this passage, on where the Prime Minister hit […]
Hurrah. In the days and weeks to come all sorts of information about the mission to capture/kill (or was it only the latter?) will gush out. It is already clear that the Americans had been painstakingly trying to get to Bin Laden via his main communication trail, namely a highly trusted […]
