Two months after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, Dick Cheney was told about a meeting that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri had had a month before the attacks around a campfire...
The presence of the international community in Kabul is heralded by the intrusive squawk of car horns. Unmarked vehicles, with darkened glass and blazing lights, force their way through the chaos...
I want a hero: an uncommon want When every year and month sends forth a new one, Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, The age discovers he is not the true one. Byron, Don Juan For the...
In Baghdad the Iraqi government is eager to give the impression that peace is returning. ‘Not a single sectarian murder or displacement was reported in over a month,’ claimed...
For societies that decide to memorialise victims of persecution (genocides, invasions, civil wars, military dictatorships, police states), notions like deterrence and aversion come quickly into...
In southern Iraq, just south of Amara, the main city of Maysan province, the British military base at Camp Abu Naji was preparing for the night. Set at the northern end of the marshlands between...
Shortly before the invasion of Iraq, George Bush’s economic adviser, Larry Lindsey, estimated that the war would cost $200 billion. ‘Baloney,’ Donald Rumsfeld fumed, offering a...
At one end of the desolate park that stretches down from the public buildings of Asunción to the bay adjacent to the Paraguay River, where conquistadors first found refuge in the 16th...
The arrival of bluetongue in eastern England in the late summer of last year was not a surprise. There were large outbreaks of the virus among farm animals in Belgium and the Netherlands, close...
Regis Debray has led the fullest of lives, embroiled in ideology, controversy and action. As a young man at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, he sat at the feet of Louis Althusser; he trained...
African oil is sweeter and lighter than Middle Eastern crudes and in recent years it has begun to look increasingly desirable. For political reasons, it became especially attractive after 9/11,...
Does Britain need a written constitution? Of course it does, which is why, as Anthony King points out at the start of this readable and illuminating book, it has one already. Whatever its...
The breaching of the barrier between Gaza and Egypt by Gaza’s imprisoned population dramatised two fundamental realities about which Israeli and US policymakers have been in complete...
Publishers love moaning. The piles in Waterstones are too big, the number of titles stocked too small; advances are too high, supermarket prices too low; TV steals readers, except when it...
The voters queuing outside the Olympic Primary School in Nairobi’s Kibera slum on 27 December were sure of two things. First, that if a free and fair election were held, Raila Odinga and...
The US defence and intelligence community launched a pre-emptive strike at George Bush and Richard Cheney on 3 December. The new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released that day concluded:...
‘To ask me to check my Christian beliefs at the public door is to ask me to expel the Holy Spirit from my life when I serve as a congressman,’ declares Mark Souder, a conservative...
If you want to know what is happening in the mind of the average teenage boy you must follow the action of his thumbs, because the eager digits that might once have flicked through the pages of