Last week, Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, a place that holds 1.8 million people and is geographically placed between all of the warring factions in the Middle East, was taken by a group called ISIS. The acronym breaks down as Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and there’s one thing above all that you should […]
Casual Xenophobia – “you know the difference”. Or do you?
A few weeks ago, a person I hadn’t spoken to in a very long time came out of the woodwork. To tweet me. How 21st century. The tweet read: “That’s what we need to hear more from, Canadian Lib Dems”. Now, this person and I had never seen eye to eye politically, so him slagging […]
Major Force: Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s rise to eminence in Cairo
The newly crowned president of Egypt recently took time out of his busy schedule posing in sunglasses to address the nation’s General Assembly. “In the long history that goes back thousands of years, our homeland did not witness democratic transfer of power. Now, for the first time, the President-elect shakes hands with the outgoing President, […]
Vladimir Putin as a Butthole Surfers Album
Given the weekend is almost upon us, I thought I’d lighten the tone a little and talk about autocracy. And couple it with what Spin magazine once described as “the worst indie band in the world” in 1993. I should declare in an interest here. In spite of, or perhaps partly because of, the fact […]
Tony Blair is completely wrong about Russia
Blair is on one of his very occasional visits to these fair isles, this time round to give a speech at Bloomberg about the threat of radical Islam. In the oration, he said he thinks western governments need to “elevate the issue of religious extremism to the top of the agenda”. I don’t really see […]
The Geneva Agreement on Ukraine is falling apart already
What is it about Geneva and international discussions that don’t go anywhere? In January of this year, I wrote an article for the New Statesman about the Geneva II talks on the Syrian crisis. That summit didn’t end in an agreement at all, which cannot be said of this week’s roundtable to try and defuse […]
I Don’t Believe Vladimir Putin Really Cares About the Russian People
The reason given by Putin for his stationing of Russian troops on the border with Ukraine is his deep, abiding concern for the Russian people, in whatever nation they live in. At least according to him. This ethos has even been given a name, the very obvious “Putin doctrine”. One of Putin’s spokespeople, Dmitri Peskov, […]
What’s happening in Eastern Ukraine is farce – and the joke is on us
Over the weekend, several towns in eastern Ukraine were taken over by “pro-Russian militias”, including Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, and Druzhkovka. I put the militias bit in quotations due to there being a lot of scepticism on the ground about just how grassroots these uprisings were. Many of the fighters for the pro-Russian cause were sporting fairly […]
WE ARE UNCOMFORTABLY CLOSE TO A THIRD WORLD WAR
Over the weekend, Turkey shot down a Syrian government fighter jet that had apparently wandered into Turkish airspace. The vitriol from both sides was intense and showed the vast deterioration in the relationship between two countries that in the very recent past were warm with one another. In Eastern Europe meanwhile, Russia builds up its […]
AFGHANISTAN: WHAT HAVE WE REALLY ACHIEVED?
Dan Hodges wrote an article on his Daily Telegraph column earlier in the week about how he felt that the war in Afghanistan had been a worthwhile one, describing it as “mission accomplished”. I feel that his piece is a perfect annunciation of everything that is wrong about this particular train of thought. I have […]