Sooner or later we may need to ‘think the unthinkable’ and talk to Al Qaida, according to senior UK police officer Sir Hugh Orde, who cites the IRA precedent. Meanwhile Al Qaida is said to be in retreat, according to the head of the CIA: But now, Mr Hayden said, […]
The BBC website currently has the following headline: Iraqi al-Qaeda commander ‘seized’ Why the inverted commas around the word ‘seized’? There is nothing in the ensuing story to explain why, unless the idea is to imply that the Iraqi forces who say that they have done the seizing are lying or […]
My Blogoir entry on the latest Serbian elections has been run by B92, a leading ‘pro-European’ media outlet in Belgrade. And the comments flow. Mainly negative, which is fair enough. How many Serbs want to hear the views of a former British Ambassador? See eg this one from John Bosnitch who (if it is […]
The website Biased BBC brings together people dissatisfied with tendentious or evidently slanted BBC reporting and analysis. I have had my own moments of supreme dissatisfaction with poor BBC work, so I share their pain. See especially this, when the BBC got it 100% damagingly wrong at the height of […]
More on this subject via Instapundit who compares the bloody quagmire in Chicago to violence in Mosul, Iraq: Still, they’re different: One has crooked officials, violent gangs with their hooks into government and law enforcement, and a culture of corruption that has resisted the central government’s effects to clean it up, and the […]
After leaving the FCO in a noisy cloud of sparks, my former colleague Craig Murray has made a name for himself as an activist promoting all sorts of Progressive Causes. This BBC account from 2004 does a good job in summarising some of the professional issues the Murray saga threw up […]
The BBC reports firm action by Iraqi security forces against ‘militants’ in and around Basra as well as various ‘fighters’ in Baghdad. Not long ago these various violent factions were known as ‘insurgents’. Has General Petraeus done so well with his Surge in killing or neutralising a sufficiently large number of ‘insurgents’ […]
The British Government’s approach on the BAE/Saudi corruption problem (see below) in a deeper way is all about how a country pursues its interests. Part of getting what you want is projecting a sense of Power and Purpose, so that when a negotiation starts others feel cowed by your self-confidence. You establish up-front […]
Back in April 1986 Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe made a powerful speech at the Lord Mayor’s Diplomatic Banquet in London in which he called for an an end to the global agriculture subsidy race. I remember it well, as I helped him draft it. Some changes have happened since […]
This fierce piece by Sam Leith weighs into the British Government’s handling of the Al-Yamamah fraud enquiry: There was enough evidence of corruption in the Al-Yamamah deal to warrant an independent investigation. That investigation … was stopped after an explicit threat to withdraw a big arms contract, and an implicit threat […]
