Here is Archbishop Desmond Tutu boldly advising President Obama in an article written for the BBC: In the first days after 9/11, the United States had the world’s sympathy, an unprecedented wave of it. President Bush squandered it. Obama too could easily squander the goodwill that his election generated if […]
There’s a lot of it about now. The FCO has a goodly bunch, albeit with tone of unrelenting ‘corporate’ cheeriness, eschewing anything controversial/awkward in policy or philosphical terms. When I was in Warsaw the FCO timidly experimented with some blogs for internal FCO consumption only, allowing some of us a […]
The new Obama administration has made a fine old mess of this one: When the vice president, the secretary of state and the national security adviser all say you have been tapped to be the next United States ambassador to Iraq, odds are it’s a done deal, right? Apparently not […]
Every year round comes Davos, where the Important gather to comfort each other and then tell us less important folk what they really think. The Davos Journals by NRO‘s Jay Nordlinger are neatly turned reports on the mood, style and substance of these grand deliberations. This is a good example […]
Now and again you see something that lifts the standard for us all. Here is a superb analysis by Jason Lee Steorts at NRO of the foreign policy process and Iraq – looked at through the eyes of a poker player – which gives us numerous insights into how things work […]
The BBC: US President Barack Obama has used his first formal TV interview since taking office to reach out to the Muslim world – saying Americans are not its enemy. Most ‘respectful’. Not that many similar broadcasts by his predecessor made much difference. Meanwhile that vasty Stimulus Package is working its […]
How dazzling is President Obama? So dazzling that he didn’t merely give a dazzling inaugural speech. Any old timeserving hack could do that. Instead, he had the sheer genius to give a flat dull speech full of the usual shopworn boilerplate. Mark Steyn. Who else? When I try to explain […]
President Obama’s inauguration speech of course attracted huge interest. And intense analysis. See eg this breakdown of how often he used the words I, You, They and We. And this subtle look at it from the point of view of Greek rhetoric, pointing out pathos, bathos, logos and even anaphora […]
Trundling across Poland’s snowy steppes on the train from Warsaw to Krakow yesterday, I missed the Inauguration. As for George W Bush, Christopher Hitchens’ assessment is good enough for me: … it is the events of Sept. 11, 2001, that explain the transformation of George Bush from a rather lazy […]
My first personal encounter with something resembling War was back in April 1986 when the USA attacked Colonel Gaddafi – one of my very first postings described the episode. That event was, of course, not really War as currently understood – more a one-off action of ruthless retaliation aimed at […]
