On 4 April, a news item on BBC World, introduced as ‘The Israeli Lesson’, dealt with suicide bombing as a potential problem for the Anglo-American axis in Iraq. We were shown footage...
Nineteenth-century empires were often led on from one war to another as a result of developments which imperial governments did not plan and domestic populations did not desire. In part this was...
On 1 April, the Guardian admonished the Prime Minister to remember the importance of living up to his good intentions: Putting Iraq to rights, in Mr Blair’s view, should be the whole...
but the voice-with-a-smile of democracy announces night & day ‘all poor little peoples that want to be free just trust in the u s a’ e.e. cummings, ‘Thanksgiving...
Full of contradictions, flat-out lies and groundless affirmations, the torrent of reporting and commentary on the ‘coalition’ war against Iraq has obscured the negligence of the...
One of the oddities about France’s permanent membership of the Security Council is that its instincts are those of an influential player in the General Assembly. This in turn has to do with...
Whether we agree with it or not, there was always a plausible argument for intervention in Iraq. The Prime Minister might, therefore, have fewer problems with public opinion in the future than he...
Thomas Hobbes, in one of the best known and most abused phrases in the English language, described the life of man in a state of nature as ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short’....
Everyone fears the possibility that the US attack on Iraq will have a catastrophic outcome – an ecological disaster of gigantic proportions, high American casualties, a terrorist attack in...
Pupils at the Albert Einstein Middle School in Sacramento, California are not allowed to wear sandals without socks. Einstein himself would have been sent home to change, sandals without socks...
The prospect of a second war on Iraq raises a large number of questions, analytic and political. What are the intentions behind the impending campaign? What are likely to be the consequences?...
It had been announced that the troops were leaving Heathrow; the withdrawal seemed to be complete by the time I arrived on Tuesday evening. There wasn’t a machine-gun to be seen all the way...
Tony Blair is the most successful politician of his generation. He has transformed the Labour Party from a protest coalition into Britain’s natural and (it seems these days) perpetual...
In 1992, the UN Security Council opened a dossier on breaches of humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions in the former Yugoslavia. Paragraph 5 of UNSC Resolution 771 called on all states or...
Charles Clarke’s reservations about the usefulness of studying classics were more or less on a par with the old schoolboy assertion that ‘Latin’s a dead language,/As dead as...
In the fifth circle of Dante’s Paradiso, the poet and his guide Beatrice encounter the spirit of his Florentine Crusading ancestor Cacciaguida. Together they discourse on the contrasts...
Two days before the general election at the end of January, Israel again imposed a full closure on the Occupied Territories. It was done in the name of normality, which in itself has become a...
Thirty-eight years ago my regiment was ordered to Sarawak, in Borneo, to help in the defence of Eastern Malaysia, which was under threat from President Sukarno of Indonesia. This...