World

Since September 11, Britain has lost one war and is not winning another. But the question of why this is the case remains depressingly low down the agenda. There is remarkably little interest in why the “British army was defeated in the field in southern Iraq”, to quote Gordon Brown’s and David Miliband’s favourite counter-insurgency expert, David Kilcullen. Today, the Tories launched their green paper on national security with speeches by Pauline Neville-Jones and David Cameron. The document is a mixed bag. But the Tories deserve credit for squarely facing up to the fact that Britain is now an “incubator of extremism and an exporter of terrorism”. They are also

Google’s decision to publicly confront the Chinese government over cyber attacks that have been hitting Google customers for the past year or so poses a difficult challenge for the Obama administration. The threat by Google to shut down its operations in China over the attacks is the first public acknowledgement by a major US corporation of the attacks which the US intelligence community has known about for almost a decade. The facts are that China has been waging a cyber war against the US government and companies that involve literally millions of attacks each day. Every major US corporation operating in China has been targeted, as have universities, research laboratories

The Spectator will have to amend its list of political scandals because if the sinisterly-named Selwyn Black’s allegations stand up, then Iris Robinson’s in a league of her own. An older woman seduces a toy boy and strives to set him up in business: this is a remake of The Graduate with high politics thrown into the mix.    There is a further, potentially serious complication. The BBC allege that DUP leader Peter Robinson was aware of his wife’s financial misdemeanours but neglected to inform the appropriate authorities, as the ministerial code dictates he should. Robinson denies this with the tenacity of a man fighting for his political life. The delicate

The failed terrorist attack on a North West Airlines plane last month has reignited the debate about just what can be done to improve the performance of America’s intelligence agencies. Despite spending close to $100 billion since the attacks of 9/11 nine years ago, it has become clear in the aftermath of the failed attack that all the old problems that were identified after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon still remain: Intelligence is not shared effectively and the analysis of available data remains weak. To the reformers inside the intelligence community, none of this is exactly news. As money poured in after 9/11 there was

The execution of Akmal Shaikh has brought China to our frontpages, and to the forefront of diplomatic thinking, as the New Year begins. The question is not just how to respond to this single and, in many regards, sad event – but how to deal with growing Chinese power more generally. How will we shape our relations with China for this decade and beyond? It would obviously be wrong to end all UK-China links over Akmal Shaikh’s execution. The Labour government’s use of pique as a guiding principle of foreign policy had little effect on Russia and will not move China. Nor should anger over the excecution – however righteous

As Melanie Phillips says in her article for this week’s issue of the magazine, the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab highlights the role of other, less frequently discussed, countries in Islamist terror. One such country is Yemen, where Abdulmutallab is thought to have trained at an Al Qaeda camp. The US believes there may be a few hundred al Qaeda fighters in Yemen, centered on a group of key network leaders who are operating a number of camps.   Yemen has slowly been getting more international attention. A few weeks ago I was meant to go on Al Jazeera, but my appearance was cancelled at the last minute because, I

If you’re looking ahead to 2010, it’s a safe bet that Iran is going to be an even bigger issue than it was this year.  The violence currently rocking the country is an echo of June’s presidential election, and a reminder, too, of the continuing internal pressure that the Iranian regime faces.   The question now is whether that will be joined by external pressure of some form.  After provocation after procovation on Tehran’s part, it’s hard to envision the West keeping its “hand of friendship” outstretched much longer.  But it’s also unlikely that  Barack Obama – his eyes on the domestic polls – will want to talk too tough

Bang! ‘Mr Schuringa then saw a ‘burning object’ – which he said resembled a small, white shampoo bottle – between the student’s legs. Mr Schuringa said: ‘It was smoking and there were flames coming from beneath his legs. I pulled the object from him and tried to extinguish the fire with my hands then threw it away.”’ – Daily Mail.  How can we best help them, these angry young Muslim imbeciles who want us all dead, but are too thick to do anything about it? Abdul Farouk Umar Abdullah, a Nigerian, is the “syringe bomber” who attempted to detonate a device on an aeroplane above Detroit on Boxing Day, but