The illegal and totally unsuccessful NATO attack on Yugoslavia over Kosovo in 1999 can’t be justified by reference to the Genocide Convention, whose obligations don’t conflict with the UN Charter. Pity Jamie Shea of NATO isn’t asked about these issues by his students [More >>>]
The Chair of the US House Committee on Homeland Security has scorned the Europeans as having no experience or understanding of terrorism compared with post-9/11 Americans. Hard to take from a man who was for years a leading supporter of the IRA’s fund-raising organisation in the US [More >>>]
As well as the broad implications of Tony Blair’s reshuffle of 5 May, there are some interesting (and profoundly worrying) implications for the personalities involved [More >>>]
Contrary to the received wisdom, Lord Carrington’s resignation over the Falklands war was not a case of a minister resigning as a penance for the misdeeds of his officials, as often asserted recently in the Charles Clarke context [More >>>]
The immortal H L Mencken makes a prediction about the Presidency of the US [More >>>]
A well-sourced article revealing the power of the Israel lobby in the US and published, not in the US but in the UK’s LRB, has raised a storm of accusations of anti-semitism, confirming a main thesis of the article [More]
The dangers of widespread deaths in the UK from bird flu caught from birds are limited, but those from a human-to-human flu pandemic all too real. Department of Health information and advance planning are impressive and thorough [More >>>]
Charles Taylor was eased out of the dictatorship of Liberia on the promise that he would be allowed sanctuary in Nigeria. That promise was broken by his arrest in Nigeria to be put on trial for war crimes. This will make it much harder to persuade future dictators to step down peacefully because they won’t trust promises so easily broken [More >>>]
Norman Kember, released from his Iraqi captors by the SAS and others, asks in his homecoming statement: was I foolhardy or rational? One of the easier questions, surely [More >>>]
Description of a head of government (try to guess which one) with a strong belief in his own motives [More >>>]