I knew it was complicated in Iraq, but not this complicated. This report in the New York Times suggests that rather than a civil war Iraq has a state of anarchy (if that isn’t an oxymoron). “The killing in Baghdad in recent months has primarily been the result of sectarian violence, as Shiites have sought […]

I’m not a dove or a peacenik, but you have to wonder how much the massive nuclear armaments still held by the US and Russia play into the decision of paranoid states like North Korea and Iran to develop nuclear weapons. If the US and Russia didn’t have their arsenals, or were genuinely in the […]

Mark Latham adopted a strategy borrowed from US political guru Dick Morris, called “triangulation”. The basis of the strategy is to distance yourself from both the left and the right. Latham’s version of this strategy saw him reading to kids. It also saw him proposing an investment bond for lower-income people that could be used […]

This morning we published a very interesting article by Ted Lapkin on the US Supreme Court decision invalidating the military commissions set-up to try prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. Not having read the judgement I was rapidly gaining the misapprehension from news commentary and reports that the Bush government had been told to close Gitmo. Ted […]

The bombing of the golden-domed Askariya Shrine in Samarra was blamed on Al Qaeda and led to an outbreak of sectarian violence that so far has killed at least 227 and raised the possibility that Iraq might slip into civil war. But it may have had a perverse effect – peace might break out instead. […]

There appears to be forethought in the “spontaneous” eruption of protests against the Mohammed cartoons. This article in the New York Times documents the issue being raised at a December meeting of various middle-eastern leaders. Outrage has been a long-time in the oven. In fact, even longer than one might have thought. The original cartoons […]

Are the Dane’s running a set play here? Just as the furore over the Mohammed cartoons has probably peaked comes a delicately third-party intervention by the Danish head of state. Queen Margethe is quoted by her biographer as saying in an official biography released yesterday: “We are being challenged by Islam these years – globally […]

This article by Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times is the most insightful and iconoclastic that I have seen so far in the debate about the Jyllands-Posten cartoons. A couple of pars gives its flavour: But there are precedents going all the way back to the Bible for virulent reactions to proscribed and despised […]

I was unaware until I read this article that until very recently, Iraq didn’t have its own country extension for the Internet. According to the article: In a sign of progress for the government, Iraq has secured the suffix “.iq” for its new Internet addresses. The government is in the process of creating e-mails and […]

If there is a strong whiff of hypocrisy in our air today then it has wafted all the way from the United Kingdom. The demise of the Leader of the Liberal Democrats in the UK, Charles Kennedy, is as appalling a piece of hypocrisy and total injustice as I have ever come across. The Leader […]