My eyes popped out on their little stalks this morning when I saw this one: Don’t blame Tony Blair for talking to a tyrant If Blair’s phone calls to Gaddafi mean even one less life is lost in Libya they will have been worthwhile What? Whaaaat? The evil Precautionary Principle, […]
Dominique Moisi is a clever and agreeable French intellectual. I met him once over lunch. Here he is, bewailing what he sees as the professional limitations of diplomats who fail to see convulsions coming: In the name of “realism,” diplomats and foreign-policy strategists are naturally conservative. Indeed, it is no […]
Just back from being interviewed by BBC TV for the News at 2200 tonight (and for the BBC News Channel) on the Libyan drama, and in particular what options exist for Western policy-makers. The BBC had picked up my piece here yesterday giving a range of policy options. My formal claim […]
The Government have made a deft, swift and successful power-play to send in armed aircraft and special forces personnel to rescue Britons from the more remote parts of Libya. The planning that will have gone into pulling off this one must have been first-class. Well done MOD/FCO and everyone involved. […]
I previously offered some operational ideas for Doing Something about Libya. One of them was this: expert support for opening of all Libyan regime secret police and other archives asap – let the dirty chips lie where they fall (mainly in Moscow?) The more I think about it, the more […]
Update: welcome Guido readers Imagine you are William Hague or Hillary Clinton, pressed with a real sense of wanting to Do Something to help the Libyan masses. You draw a noisy stick across the bars of the FCO/State Department cage to rouse the bemused and sulky inmates, and demand ideas for action. […]
I have previously written here about the FCO’s approach to ‘consular’ work (ie helping British nationals overseas). See eg here: The media love to pounce on allegations of FCO staff being unkind or inefficient when they find British citizens overseas who have hit trouble. For every hundred people who write in to you […]
How has the FCO managed the Libya and other emergency situations? The only true test of how well the FCO has done is, of course, the absence or otherwise of shrill and ignorant moaning from the Daily Mail. So the FCO clearly passed the Tunisia and Egypt hurdles quite well. What, […]
I appeared on Press TV today in a pre-recorded Agenda programme due to go out on Saturday/Sunday. The subject was Libya, so everything we said probably will be well out of date by then. Press TV, for those unfamiliar with it, is Iran’s official international TV station and so steeped […]
The idiom ‘shooting fish in a barrel’ describes an easy job – you just can’t miss. Mythbusters helpfully experiment with different sorts of guns and containers to show what works best. (Advisory: best not to watch if you are a sensitive fish): But that is a hard task indeed compared […]
