World

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Obama’s War: Same as the Old War

President Barack Obama speaks in Eisenhower Hall at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Photo: Roger L. Wollenberg-Pool/Getty Images The text of President Obama’s West Point address is here. I didn’t watch the speech, but having read it I think it can be summarised, broadly, as “More of the Same, Only More So”. It’s an intensification, I think, of the existing strategy rather than a radical new approach to a series of interlocking, intractable problems. Increasingly the Afghan campaign reminds me of that old Irish joke: “Can you tell me the way to Limerick?” “Well, you wouldn’t want to start from here.” But here is where we are.

Daniel Korski

Welcome to Obamastan

After months of deliberation, endless consultation and reams of paper, President Obama came to the same conclusion that he himself had reached only a few months ago, and that which his handpicked commander, General McChrystal, had arrived at more recently: the US-led intervention is just, right and demands more resources. As usual, Obama’s oratory was impressive – though without the personal anecdotes he normally works in. He rejected comparisons with Vietnam and evoked World War II with a reference to President Roosevelt. The West Point cadets added a kind of battle-evoking gravitas that Obama, who has never worn a uniform or been in war, often struggles to evoke. His new

Janice Warman

Africa sets an enterprising example

The hills of Michimikuru are a little piece of heaven: pickers in brightly coloured scarves move slowly through the chest-high bushes of the vivid green tea-fields beneath the slopes of Mount Kenya. But as the saying goes, local colour is other people’s poverty. Just ten kilometres to either side, the desert is encroaching; the mountain’s snowcap is melting; and soaring temperatures, droughts and storms mean the crops of the country’s primary export often fail. It’s the scene of a remarkable initiative, co-funded by the British fair-trade company Cafédirect and the German Ministry for Economic Co-operation and Development, to help the 9,000 small growers of the Michimikuru Tea Company to adapt

Elisabeth Jeffries

Can we pump carbon back beneath the North Sea?

Few people have ever seen them, except perhaps from a plane. Yet these huge, remote structures have stood planted in the North Sea, buffeted for decades by wind and wave, pumping cash into the UK economy. They are the hundreds of oil and gas platforms which churn out the equivalent of 2.8 million barrels of oil per day. But there is a strong likelihood that the North Sea will within a generation return to the unbroken grey expanse of the mid-1960s, when the first offshore rig struck gas. If the government’s predictions are accurate, most of the rigs will have tumbled by 2035. Approximately 470 installations are to be decommissioned,

Tuesday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

For Taipei exile and others……………

I’m writing about the Swiss referendum for the magazine this week. In lieu of a blog on the same issue I thought I’d direct you to a different blog which reveals the even-handed and objective manner in which the BBC views the vote. Its Islamic Affairs Analyst, Roger Hardy, has described the referendum as an example of something called “Islamophobia”. Perhaps he means the same sort of “Islamophobia” some of us Zionist reactionaries are possessed by when we see Muslim savages stoning women to death in Somalia. Mr Hardy has also been taking questions from the public and demonstrating his analysis of Islamic affairs; he has asserted that the almost

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Afghan Conundrum | 1 December 2009

Like Yglesias, I guess one ought to have an official “What I Think About Obama’s Escalation in Afghanistan post”. And the truth is that I don’t know. Don’t know whether Obama’s new strategy will work, don’t know if it is wise or enough or too much or just about right. And I’m intensely suspicious of anyone who celebrates it and, most especially, those who immediately claim that it’s insufficient, reckless, half-hearted or whatever. Because (almost) none of us have a clue, really, and pretending that we do does no-one any good. What may be said, with all due caution, is that the administration is doing its best to make the

Daniel Korski

There are troops – and there are troops

The waiting will soon be over. Later today, the President Obama is expected to order around 34,000 troops into battle, including into Helmand province. This surge will be added to the additional 500 troops Gordon Brown committed yesterday and what sources tell me are cast-iron troop offers by another eight countries, including Turkey, Australia, Montenegro, and Georgia. If all these countries do sign up to send more troops, the credit must primarily go to Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the NATO Secretary-General, who has travelled far and wide in the attempt to drum up more military muscle. No doubt Gordon Brown will claim that his two week effort was key in securing

Peter Hoskin

The clock is ticking on Iran

When I visited Israel last year, various sources there were convinced – adamant, even – that Iran was within a year or two of creating an atomic bomb.  That may or may not have been the case, but it’s still ominous that that hypothetical timeline is nearly up.  We can all too easily forget that, in the background to all the column inches and comment pieces expended on Iran, there are genuine and pressing concerns that the country is on the cusp of becoming a nuclear power. Which is why the two latest news stories from the country are particularly worrying: the capture of a racing yacht by the Iranian

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The American Way of Empire

Actually, the existence of any such imperial ambitions is generally denied, even though the US has been an expansionist power almost since its inception. The inter-war years of “isolationism” are the great exception, not the natural way of things. At least not in Washington. Still, we are where we are. Two recent columns, by Thomas Friedman and David Frum respectively, are worth considering when one ponders the state and fate of the American Empire. First, Friedman writes about the anti-American “Narrative” that dominates muslim opinion. This, he says, is most unfair since: Yes, after two decades in which U.S. foreign policy has been largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims or trying

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Iraq inquiry we should be having

Do we still have the will to win in Afghanistan? If so, the question the Iraq inquiry should be asking is not “how did we get into this war” – we have had a number of separate inquiries into that already – but “why were the military defeated on the ground in Basra?”. If the Chilcot Inquiry were to focus on that, it might actually serve a purpose: not just in unearthing new information (which it has signally failed to do so far) but drawing lessons that just might help the troops in Afghanistan. I make this point in my News of the World column today. I am in a

Saturday

Friday

David Blackburn

Dodgy doings in the desert

Of all the lunacy engendered by this financial crisis, Dubai’s decision to call a six-month creditor standstill on its chief holding company is the most pronounced. Dubai’s successful but hideous entrepot model depends on the confidence capital markets, and as a rule markets don’t react to nasty shocks with a shake of the head and a song and dance routine. It’s as if plague has descended on every stock exchange in the world; investors are fleeing for safety. Overnight, shares in Asia collapsed between 3 and 5 percent, and the FTSE, Dax and Cac40 have opened around one percent down. Prepare for another black day. Will this blip develop into

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Blond & Liberty

So Philip Blond’s new think tank ResPublica (that’s how it’s spelt, leaving one to wonder whether it’s actually a pretentious electricity company or something) and his “Red Toryism” is this week’s non-Iraq, must-talk-about political gizmo. And my, what an odd beast it is. Blond’s speech on Thursday was a strange thing indeed. Part of the time was spent wrestling with a series of impressively tiny Straw Men (“In order to reclaim a civilised society, market and state should not be regarded as the ultimate goal or expression of humanity”) and rather more of it was preoccupied with the kind of high-falutin’ gobbledegook of the kind favoured by the smarter-dressed confidence

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Happy Thanksgiving

Sasha Obama, the daughter of U.S. President Barack Obama, looks at a turkey named ‘Courage’ during an event to pardon the 20-week-old and 45-pound turkey at the White House November 25, 2009 in Washington, DC. The Presidential pardon of a turkey has been a long time Thanksgiving tradition that dates back to the Harry Truman administration. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images. A Happy Thanksgiving to all my American friends and readers. Thanksgiving is, I think, the best of all American holidays. It’s like what Christmas might be if it weren’t for all the hassle and the vast expense of it all. Nor, blessedly does it have any of the enforced jollity

Wednesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

At last

President Obama will announce his new Afghan policy on Tuesday night at 8pm eastern time, the early hours of Wednesday morning UK time. Obama will announce a troop increase and the signs are that he will send 30,000 plus in reinforcements. This is welcome, the nearer Obama gets to giving General McChrystal the 40,000 troops he has asked for the better. But the process has done the White House little credit and shown Obama to be even less solicitous of the concerns of his allies than President Bush. Bob Ainsworth’s said yesterday that a ‘period of hiatus‘ in Washington had undercut public support for the war in this country. This

Dennis Sewell

How eugenics poisoned the welfare state

We live in a country where the poorest members of society are literally trapped. We pay them millions not to work, simply maintaining them at subsistence level like prisoners of the state. Tied up with bureaucratic regulations and subject to crazy marginal rates of tax, there are few chances to escape for Britain’s welfare-dependent. A million of those out of work have been jobless for a decade or more. They see their chances of getting a job in the future as so remote as to be barely worth considering. The chances of their children ever finding work are beginning to look slim too. The neighbourhoods in which they live are

Matthew Lynn

The mother of all market crashes

Matthew Lynn marks the 20th anniversary of the peak of the Nikkei and asks whether we’ve learned any lessons Twenty years ago this month, as we’ve been reminded by countless documentaries, the Berlin Wall was coming down. Eastern Europe was convulsed by the revolutions from which communism never recovered. But much further east, something else was happening which arguably has had just as profound an impact on how the global economy has developed since then. The rampant bull market in Japanese equities was heading for its final, frenzied peak. For stockmarket historians, 29 December 1989 will always be a key date. On that day, the benchmark Japanese index, the Nikkei

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Cool Pictures of the Year

Nazroo, a mahout, poses for a portrait while taking his elephant, Rajan, out for a swim in front of Radha Nagar Beach in Havelock, Andaman Islands. Rajan is one of the few elephants in Havelock that can swim, so when he is not dragging timber in the forest he is used as a tourist attraction. The relationship between the mahout and his elephant usually lasts for their entire lives, creating an extremely strong tie between the animal and the human being. Photo and caption by Cesare Naldi. The Boston Globe offers a selection of photos from this year’s National Geographic photography competition here. National Geographic’s galleries are here and you

Peter Hoskin

A debased database

As with much police work, the questions surrounding a DNA database come down to one thing: striking a balance between civil protection and civil liberties.  Going off a new report by the Human Genetics Commission, reported on the cover of today’s Times, the government are getting that balance seriously wrong: “Jonathan Montgomery, commission chairman, said that ‘function creep’ over the years had transformed a database of offenders into one of suspects. Almost one million innocent people are now on the DNA database… …Professor Montgomery said there was some evidence that people were arrested to retain the DNA information even though they might not have been arrested in other circumstance. He

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Lou Dobbs 2012?

Apparently it’s a possibility. At the very least such a run would help Dobbs sell a few more books. Whether a Perot-like third party anti-immigration, anti-globalisation, anti-Wall Street crusade will be as appealing in 2012 as it seems right now must be a matter that’s open for discussion. Perot wouldn’t have been nearly so effective in happier economic times and 2012, one trusts, will bring cheerier economic news than 2009. Nonetheless, there’s no point denying that Dobbs represents a set of sentiments that, generally speaking and most of the time, don’t get much of a hearing or great respect in Washington. Still, if one of the most important things in