World

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

Hague joins Middle East protests…well, as good as

Foreign Secretary William Hague has arrived in Tunisia in order to support to the pro-democracy movement. Unlike his previous visit to Syria, which I think was poorly timed, this one is perfectly-timed. It could even end up looking like George Bush Snr’s visit to Poland in July 1989 when the US president publicly backed the revolutions sweeping across the European continent at the time and gave succour to the pro-democracy movements. Visits like this are so important to help the direction of travel. What people forget now is that in the Eastern Europe of 1989, the history of democracy was as limited as it is today in the Middle East.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Hope on the Nile: Islam Does Not Have All the Answers

Not to grant him guru status or anything but I’m glad that Reuel Marc Gerecht has at last weighed-in on the Egypt Question. I’ve mentioned his writing before and think him one of the most interesting, and in some ways provocative, middle-east analysts. Even if you disagree with him, his ideas are worth serious consideration. His view that President Obama could usefully say “We are not scared of muslims voting” seems persuasive to me. So too his conclusion that it is time to “put an end to the West’s deleterious habit of treating the Middle East’s potentates respectfully and the Muslim citizenry like children.” He writes: Mr. Bush’s distastefulness helped

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Jeb! Jeb! Jeb!

November 8th, 1994 is one of the hinge moments in modern American politics. If you wanted to write a counter-factual chronicle of recent American politics you could do worse than begin with the night George W Bush was elected Governor of Texas and Jeb Bush was defeated by Lawton Chiles in Florida. The 63,940 votes by which Chiles defeated Jeb changed American politics. Jeb, you see, was supposed to be the Guy. He was the Bush who would make it big on the national stage. 1994 changed that, knocking Jeb out the game and opening a door for Dubya. Bill Minutaglio’s biography of George suggests that the brothers’ parents saw

Monday

Daniel Korski

Democracy is now Halal

The popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia have exposed as nonsense the notion, held in many quarters, that Middle Easterners – be they Arabs, Persians, Muslims and Christians – are uncommonly uninterested in democracy. But as former CIA agent and Middle East expert Reuel Marc Gerecht writes in the New York Times: ‘A revulsion against the Iraq war and a distaste for President Bush helped to blind people to the spread of democratic sentiments in the region. It blinded them to the fact that among Middle Easterners, democracy, not dictatorship, was now seen as a better vehicle for economic growth and social justice. Most important, Mr. Bush’s distastefulness helped to

Sunday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Cult of Reagan: President of All Our Hearts

The gushing nonsense that has accompanied the centennial of Ronald Wilson Reagan’s birth can be no surprise to anyone even if, no especially if, you consider it mildly unseemly. “A Republic, if you can keep it” said Benjamin Franklin and Reagan’s beatification is another reminder that the United States long ago became a republic in name only. Or, you know, a RINO.  There’s previous on this, of course, as any trip to Mt Rushmore demonstrates. At least one can say that three of the Gods chiselled there either built or held the United States together (Teddy Roosevelt’s presence shows how false gods are, like a purloined letter, honoured in plain

Saturday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

An orderly transition in Egypt requires Mubarak’s departure

It appears almost certain that the protests in Egypt are not going to stop until Mubarak leaves office. For that reason, Mubarak’s departure seems a necessary step to an orderly transition. The New York Times ‘ latest report reveals that the Egyptian military and US officials are discussing how Mubarak could visibly leave while remaining as the titular president: “The country’s newly named vice president, Omar Suleiman, and other top military leaders were discussing steps to limit Mr. Mubarak’s decision-making authority and possibly remove him from the presidential palace in Cairo — though not to strip him of his presidency immediately, Egyptian and American officials said. A transitional government headed

Peter Hoskin

A disheartening story

A sad juxtaposition between David Cameron’s defence of liberal values and the Times’s interview (£) with Paul Maynard, the Tory MP for Blackpool North & Cleveleys. Maynard – who has cerebral palsy – describes his experiences in what ought to be a bastion of British decency: “Mr Maynard knew that people could be unkind, perhaps unconsciously. Nevertheless his worst experience in Parliament came as a shock. A few months later he stood up in the chamber to defend the Government’s decision to cut the Child Trust Fund. Mr Maynard admits that it was a controversial issue but still could not believe what happened. Each time that he lifted his head,

The Spectator

The world after Mubarak

Experts debate what happens next in Egypt and the countries around it In his retirement, Dwight Eisenhower admitted that the biggest foreign policy mistake of his presidency had been not supporting Anthony Eden over the Suez crisis. How right he was. If Arab nationalism had been strangled in its cradle in 1956 by the vigorous action that Eden, and also initially Hugh Gaitskell, prescribed, then the oil-price hikes of the early 1970s and all the economic woes that flowed from them would never have happened. I doubt there would have been a 9/11, either. Today, instead, we face a situation whereby, since half of Israel’s natural gas consumption comes from

Daniella Peled

‘This is our city now’

It’s strange how quickly a revolution becomes ordinary. For decades, Egypt was the quintessential Middle East police state, but now the sight of freshly sprayed ‘Fuck you Mubarak’ graffiti seems normal. Cairo’s famous traffic gridlock is long gone; the shops are shuttered. Amid the protestors in Tahrir Square, dozens of young and middle-aged men are picking up rubbish and piling it into the scorched carcass of a police truck. ‘Why are we cleaning the streets?’ says one old man. ‘Because this is our city now.’ Cairo It’s strange how quickly a revolution becomes ordinary. For decades, Egypt was the quintessential Middle East police state, but now the sight of freshly sprayed

James Delingpole James Delingpole

I thought I was having a Nobel laureate for tea. Instead, the BBC had me for lunch

Last week I was stitched up like a kipper by the BBC. Perhaps you saw the programme — a Horizon documentary called Science Under Attack. Perhaps you were even among the dozens whom it inspired to send me hate emails along the lines of, ‘Ha ha. Think you know more about science than a Nobel prizewinner do you? Idiot!’ Perhaps it’s time I set the record straight. Last week I was stitched up like a kipper by the BBC. Perhaps you saw the programme — a Horizon documentary called Science Under Attack. Perhaps you were even among the dozens whom it inspired to send me hate emails along the lines

Friday

Daniel Korski

General Hague, attack

William Hague must be feeling that the incoming rounds are coming closer and closer. The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph and now The Times (£) have each allowed their pages to be used as Forward Operating Bases from which to launch attacks against the coalition’s foreign policy. Even in the coalition’s own ranks, dissatisfied foot-soldiers (and a even a few senior officers) think that General Hague has lost his appetite for the fight. Tories talk about a man whose defeat in 2001left a permanent wound, and how the Christopher Myers fiasco left another gash. The government’s equivocal response to events in Egypt has provoked fresh criticism, while the army of eurosceptics,

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

The Pope reopens the international aid debate

Spare a dime for a travelling Ponfiff? The Department for International Development can – and then some. According to their latest accounts, they funnelled £1.85 million of cash across to the Foreign Office to help pay for the Pope’s visit to Britain last September. The money didn’t specifically come out of their ring-fenced aid budget, but it would normally have gone towards DfID operations overseas. “Somewhat surprising,” is how one member of the international development select committee has put it. Whatever your take on the Pope’s visit, this is still a story which reopens the wider debate about development spending. For many people, I’d imagine, it doesn’t make sense for

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Michael Lewis & the Wizards of Dublin

Michael Lewis’s Vanity Fair piece on the Irish collapse is less entertaining than his trips to Greece and Iceland. Perhaps that’s because it’s closer to home. It’s still good, however, and worth your time even if much of it will be familiar. On the other hand, this passage is worth a raised eyebrow or two: A week later the department [of Finance] hired investment bankers from Merrill Lynch to advise it. Some might say that if you were asking Merrill Lynch for financial advice in 2008 you were already beyond hope, but that is not entirely fair. The bank analyst who had been most prescient and interesting about the Irish

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Rooting out the cause of the crisis

David Frum is doing a great series on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report. The report is, obviously, US-centric but its argument that the problem was not with the regulation but the regulators strikes me as highly important: “[W]e do not accept the view that regulators lacked the power to protect the financial system. They had ample power in many arenas and they chose not to use it. To give just three examples: the Securities and Exchange Commission could have required more capital and halted risky practices at the big investment banks. It did not. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York and other regulators could have clamped down on

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Coulson’s replacement

Downing Street have announced that the BBC’s Craig Oliver will be Andy Coulson’s replacement. Oliver, who has been editor of both the Six and Ten o’clock news, will bring a broadcasting perspective to Downing Street. Former BBC colleagues stress that he knows how to tell a story in pictures and, in contrast, to Coulson is unlikely to ever become the story. Oliver, who is in his 40s, was never obviously political. He won’t provide the kind of counterweight to Steve Hilton that Andy Coulson did. But he will run an efficient ship. Some people are saying that the appointment shows that newspapers are less powerful politically than they used to

Daniel Korski

Where does it leave Israel?

Israel is in a right state over Egypt’s incipient revolution. Israeli politicians talk openly about the threat from an Islamist takeover, the greatness of Hosni Mubarak, and have even taken to sneer at the West’s hopefulness. Now that President Mubarak has announced he will leave, the Israeli leadership will be looking on in horror. They are right to be concerned. The beleaguered Jewish state has already lost one regional ally in Turkey and does not relish the prospect of losing Egypt too. That would leave only Jordan, a country whose monarchy may be the next casualty of the pro-democracy movement sweeping the region. But it is not just a matter

Tuesday

Alastair Beach

EXCLUSIVE: On the streets of Cairo

Alastair Beach is on the ground in Cairo. Here is his report for Coffee House: As the imam rounded off his midday Friday sermon, the ring of more than three hundred riot police encircled the worshippers. It was no ordinary congregation. A stellar assortment of Egyptian directors, actors and political bigwigs were assembled in an enormous crowd on the pavement outside the Mustafa Mahmoud mosque in Mohandiseen, Western Cairo. Over the loudspeaker, the imam drew polite applause from the listeners when he praised protestors who had turned out for the initial demonstration in Egypt’s uprising a week last Tuesday. But then he put his foot in it. “Democracy should involve

David Blackburn

When will mass protest come to Libya?

As several seemingly permanent Middle Eastern autocracies tremble, Colonel Gadaffi’s Libya rolls on. So far, there have been reports of minor protests in the localities about housing shortages, nothing more. With unemployment standing at 30 percent, the Libyan people are just as impoverished as those in neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt. Gadaffi’s dictatorship is scarcely benevolent, and, as for liberalisation, Libya remains one of the few completely dry countries on Earth. The secret of Gadaffi’s success then would appear to be expressing aggressive anti-American sentiment, whilst suppressing Islamism and democratic opposition at home. And all the while he entices rich Western powers (Britain) with the allure of Libya’s virginal natural resources.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Failure of Realism: Diagnosis Without Any Prescription

These two posts by Melanie Phillips on the situation in Egypt are very useful. Clarifying, even. They merit a response not because it’s Melanie and she’s a neighbour but because she publishes a view that’s more widely held than you might think if you only consulted the broadsheets and the BBC. It may, I think, be summarised as: Barack Obama is throwing Mubarak under the bus and we’ll soon have Tehran on the Nile. A lot of people believe this or fear it the most probable outcome. They may, alas, be proven right. I’m struck, however, by their certainty that the Muslim Brotherhood will soon be running Egypt and, furthermore,

Alex Massie Alex Massie

I Love My Country, It’s the Government I Am Afraid Of

Perhaps Glenn Beck can ask this girl, interviewed in Tahrir Square, if she is just a stooge of the Muslim Brotherhood. Perhaps the “Realists” can ask her that too. Hopey-changey bullshit? Well, maybe. Perhaps the young and the liberal and the educated will receive a desperate, chilling awakening. But this is not set in stone. Plainly this girl does not speak for all Egyptians (and I’d like to know more about what Egyptians living outside the major cities think) but let’s not pretend either that this is a bogus or astroturf uprising. It’s real and its demands are real too. Fear the worst all you like, but these people deserve