Back to Craig Murray’s Murder in Samarkand – off with his family to Tashkent (Chapter 3). Uzbekistan was one of the fifteen Soviet republics to become independent in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. Craig offers a few paragraphs on the history of ‘Uzbek independence’, without saying anything about what […]
One version is here. Some speeches are good for what they say. Others for how they make people feel. This speech said more or less nothing, but reads nicely now and no doubt sounded good on the day. Or maybe not? This paragraph caught my eye: This is the moment […]
Do we bring up our children to take seriously the difference between right and wrong? We think we do. Not much sign that it is working. One way to catch their attention is to lay out clearly to them that Bad Behaviour has Bad Consequences. That if they do not […]
Moving on to the substance of Craig Murray’s book. Chapter One opens with a description of Craig leaving the Embassy in Samarkand (seemingly early in his posting) to attend a dissident trial. …out I went, still feeling pretty uncomfortable at people calling me ‘Sir’… Part of Craig’s self-presentation lies in […]
Craig cheerfully writes: Much enjoyed your commentary on the Kristina episode. But at some stage you have to face the real question. Nobody now doubts the CIA’s use of torture, by proxy as in Uzbekistan or even direct. And as you know very well, the UK government gets the CIA […]
This is an elegant analysis from my former US Ambassadorial colleague in Belgrade Bill Montgomery about the current state of mind of Republika Srpska, the ‘Serb’ Entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bill argues that RS led by Prime Minister Dodik is pursuing a Montenegrin-style war of attrition aimed at making an eventual […]
There are not too many UN Security Council vetoes. So when one comes along it shows that things at that top table are not in good shape – lack of grown-up consensus and/or serious miscalculation by those who pushed the offending Resolution. Although of course there may be cases where […]
Help! The world’s financial problems are slowing reform in Cuba! It is "unethical" to raise Cubans’ expectations that they might get a tiny bit of extra money from the state to encourage them to work harder/better. Hmm … No. It is unethical not to do so – to imprison all […]
… and there is Lileks, in full flow explaining the magnificence of Wall-E.
Should the EU’s atom-sized sanctions on Cuba be lifted? Why not? They do not matter, as they are a Silly Noise unattached to a policy. The debate of course is not about whether these sanctions make a difference, symbolic or otherwise. It rather is about whether the EU should have […]
