World

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Big Brother in Big Sky country

Not welcome in Montana. For shame. A sad story of our times: residents of Belgrade, Montana petitioned the town council for permission to keep chickens in their yards. No-one objected to this. Except, of course, the councillors. Why? Because they could. Apparently the chickens might escape and that could be a problem for the police. Meanwhile, one ghastly councillor suggested there just wasn’t enough room on a 10,000 square foot plot for half a dozen hens.  The usual bullying, domineering nonsense from jumped-up little gauleiters of the sort who infest local councils everywhere. But, as Lexington says, it’s particularly depressing that such a thing happen in the American west –

Daniel Korski

In Afghanistan, more of the same won’t do

Gordon Brown says Britain must not walk away from NATO’s Afghan mission. Yet 73 percent of Britons told YouGov that they want British troops withdrawn. Even more probably think they will fail even if they are allowed to stay on. Yet what to do if you believe, like I do, that the allies cannot simply withdraw without creating a catalytic effect on worldwide Islamist extremism and a regional vortex of violence, which will end in sectarian strife, refugee flows, President Karzai’s toppling, Pakistan’s further destabilisation and irreparable damage to NATO? One last heave, won’t do. Clever initiative, like my own idea of creating an ANA Army Corps of Engineers, will

David Blackburn

Motives for murder

Now that the facts are becoming clearer, it seems that Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s horrific act was religiously motivated. His apparent screams of ‘Allahu Akbar’ confirm that. In addition, it has emerged that Hasan was investigated for apparently equating suicide bombers with soldiers. Allegedly, he wrote: ‘There was a grenade thrown amongs a group of American soldiers. One of the soldiers, feeling that it was to late for everyone to flee jumped on the grave with the intention of saving his comrades. Indeed he saved them. He inentionally took his life (suicide) for a noble cause i.e. saving the lives of his soldier. To say that this soldier committed suicide

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Order is Restored

The peerless Mariano Rivera. Photo: Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images. After eight long, gruelling years the Curse of Bush is finally lifted and the universe is once more on an even keel: the New York Yankees are World Series champions again. For the 27th* time. Hurrah! Fans of other teams may bridle at the notion that nine years without a championship constitutes a famine. But life in Yankee-land is different. In Yankee-years nine titleless years equals half a century of failure by other, lesser, teams. More than any other American pastime, baseball is unipolar. The Yankees 27 World Series victories eclipse all other contenders: no other team has more than 10. Perhaps

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

What’s the Matter with North Dakota?

Photo: Germain Moyon/AFP/Getty Images Plenty, according to Matt Yglesias. Not least the fact that, like its southern brother, it exists at all. The Roughrider State celebrated the 120th anniversary of its accession to the United States yesterday. Congratulations. Matt, however, sees the Dakotas, and their brethren on the plains, as a problem obstructing the Greater Progressiveness of the United States of America: Given that more people live in Memphis, TN than North Dakota it might seem unfair that this large and essentially empty patch of land gets two senators. When you consider that even mighty South Dakota has fewer people than Jacksonville, Florida and that the two states combined contain

Daniel Korski

Must-have-elements under Karzai III: an Afghan Army Corps of Engineers

Whatever happens in Kabul now, the next couple of months will be hard going. Hamid Karzai will form a new government, perhaps with Abdulllah Abdullah. But nobody expects the Karzai III government to be any better or less corrupt than versions I and II. Quite the opposite. In his bid for re-election, President Karzai surrounded himself with chequered figures who could bring him votes: warlords suspected of war crimes, corruption and drug trafficking. None is as influential as Marshal Fahim, his running mate, who has long been suspected of drug-running and other crimes. Expect to look back at the Afghan government’s past performance as a model of probity and efficiency.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

1989 And All That

  I don’t think there’s much doubt that 1989 was the best year of my life. Not so much for me personally, but for the world. True, there aren’t many contenders for that bauble, but even if there were 1989 would be tough to beat. In fact, 1989 was probably the last and best year of the brutal short twentieth century. Matt Welch explains why: The consensus Year of Revolution for most of our lifetimes has been 1968, with its political assassinations, its Parisian protests, and a youth-culture rebellion that the baby boomers will never tire of telling us about. But as the preeminent modern Central European historian Timothy Garton

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The State We’re In

Deficits aren’t necessarily the end of the world but they’re not your best chum either. This chart, pinched from Burning Our Money, is a handy reminder of where we are and the pickle we’re in. Worse than Spain! Worse than the United States! Worse than Iceland! Worse than Ireland! Gordon Brown FTW. Sure, in the long run we’re all dead. But we don’t have to be dead quite so soon, do we? As always, the Nordics fare very well in this sort of caper. But look too at our friends in New Zealand – a model of how a non-Nordic, English-speaking country can still do pretty well for itself. Yet

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Surprising fact about the Iranian opposition: they take Iran’s national interest seriously!

On the whole, Washington cynicism may be preferable to Washington’s special brand of bemused naivete. Consider Jackson Diehl’s remarkable column in this morning’s Washington Post in which he seems astonished to discover that the Iranian opposition is made up of Iranians, not all of whom share the west’s analysis of what Iran should do next. Fancy that! Ataollah Mohajerani, who has been a spokesman in Europe for presidential candidate-turned-dissident Mehdi Karroubi, came to Washington to address the annual conference of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The mostly pro-Israel crowd was primed to cheer what they expected would be a harsh condemnation of Ahmadinejad and his bellicose rhetoric, and

Daniel Korski

The end of special relationships

Today, two of my colleagues, former senior MoD official Nick Witney and US analyst Jeremy Shapiro, issued a hard-hitting report about transatlantic relationships. Their message is simple. Europe has the US president it wished for, but Barack Obama lacks the strong transatlantic partner he desired. With EU leaders heading to Washington for their transatlantic summit on 3 November, Shapiro and Witney caution European governments: an unsentimental President Obama has already lost patience with a Europe lacking coherence and purpose. In a post-American world, the United States knows it needs effective partners. And if Europe cannot step up, the US will look for other privileged partners to do business with. Unfortunately,

David Blackburn

Kabul’s Catch 22

Sky News reports that the Afghan run-off will be cancelled after Dr Abdullah Abdullah pulled out of the vote. It’s unclear whether this report is totally accurate; but if it is it hardly comes as a surprise. As Sky’s Alex Crawford, quoting a senior source, says: “There is absolutely, his words, ‘zero appetite’ for a run-off election with just one unopposed candidate and, therefore, a foregone conclusion as to who was going to be elected. “It would be a return of the current president, Hamid Karzai.” There was no guarantee that the second election would avoid the corruption and security issues that marred the first, but where does this leave

Sunday

Daniel Korski

Freedom of expression is Rose’s war

Last week, Denmark discovered that two US-based men were plotting a terrorist attack against Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that outraged hard-line Muslims by publishing the infamous Muhammad cartoons in 2005. Allegedly, the two men planned to target cultural editor Flemming Rose and cartoonist Kurt Westergaard.  The mild-mannered Flemming Rose is back in the spotlight. Asked if he regretted publishing the cartoons, Rose insisted that bowing to such pressure would not yield less extremism, but more. He went further – the cartoons have not been re-issued, which amounts to the sort of self-censorship that moved him to commission the cartoons originally. Rose’s target was neither Islam nor Muslims. He wanted to

Thursday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Is the army funded to its target level?

During the TA debate yesterday, Bob Ainsworth tried to explain why the government had ended up making the cut in the first place. One of the reasons Ainsworth advanced was that recruitment for the regular army had been stronger than expected. But the army remains below its target strength. The exchange between Fox and Ainsworth suggests that the army isn’t actually funded to what is meant to be its full strength: “Dr. Fox: For the sake of clarity, we know that more recruits have come forward than expected, but the Army is still below the target level set by the Government. Is the Secretary of State telling us that the

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Playing Poker with Iran

Robert Kagan worries that Barack Obama isn’t a strong enough poker player to beat Iran. This is probably not much of a surprise. But here’s how Kagan puts it: Many of us worry that, for Obama, engagement is an end in itself, not a means to an end. We worry that every time Iran rejects one proposal, the president will simply resume negotiations on another proposal and that this will continue right up until the day Iran finally tests its first nuclear weapon, at which point the president will simply begin negotiations again to try to persuade Iran to put its nuclear genie back in the bottle… The worst of

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Vietnam Watch: Ben Macintyre

An occasional series deploring pundits’ determination to treat the curret Afghan campaign as though it were a replay of the Vietnam War. Today’s episode disappoints me since I have a considerable regard for Ben Macintyre. Nevertheless, his column in the Times today is, right from the get-go, a classic of the genre: An unquiet ghost stalks the White House Situation Room as Barack Obama, increasingly Hamlet-like, ponders what to do in Afghanistan: it is the spectre of the Vietnam War, America’s enduring historical hang-up. Oh dear. The most important parallels with Vietnam are neither tactical nor practical, but cultural and emotional. Americans are not backward-looking by nature, but the trauma

Tuesday

John Stokes

The West’s intelligence deficit on Iran

At the headquarters of the Defense Intelligence Agency outside of Washington DC, there are no cardboard mockups of Iran’s nuclear sites that can be used for briefing the military on plans of attack. Instead, there is a very cool 3D map table that allows the viewer to fly into and through the many layers of the nuclear facilities. A movement of the hands can expand or contract the view from an image of an individual room to the perspective from an overhead satellite. On the basis of that briefing, an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites looks easy, right down to the dialing in of the depth at which a new

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Afghanistan: A Modest Case for Dithering

My old chum, and former boss, Iain Martin writes that time is, in fact, of the essence in Afghanistan and that Barack Obama needs to make a decision: We cannot go on like this indefinitely – making some progress but never winning, especially when money is so tight. We need to either commit more troops and firepower, get a move on, surge troop numbers, take the fight anew to the Taliban and aim for victory. Or if we don’t fancy that we can slim down our presence dramatically, fund the anti-Talban forces and back them up with special forces support and airpower. The worst option appears to be staying in

Alex Massie Alex Massie

A Question of Numbers or of Kind?

David Aaronovitch’s column in the Times today is excellent. Worthy of three cheers. I should say here that the ONS begins every such report with the explicit warning that its projections are not forecasts, as Mr [Frank] Field claims, but projections forward of recent trends.[Empasis added] When I spoke to him yesterday Mr Field essentially dismissed this as nit-picking. I think he’s wrong. …What Mr Field didn’t point out — because his intention is propagandist, not informative — was that the 2008 projection was a reduction (albeit small) from the 2006 one. Nor did he mention that the last actual figures, for 2008, showed net inward migration of only 118,000,

Monday

Peter Hoskin

What does this mean for the Lisbon Treaty?

To sign or not to sign?  For the past week or so, we’ve been hearing reports about how the Czech President, Václav Klaus, has decided, reluctantly, to accept the Lisbon Treaty.  But a story in today’s Times suggests that he’s still holding out against ratification.  Here’s the key passage: “Václav Klaus, the Czech President, who is the last hurdle to full ratification of the Lisbon treaty, has made a final attempt to derail the agreement. In a submission to the Czech constitutional court, which will decide tomorrow whether the treaty is compatible with the country’s constitution, Mr Klaus has suggested that it should be subject to a referendum. … The