International politics

No, Iran does not posses nuclear weapons

In the course of a long career as a polemical journalist I have got thoroughly used to being insulted, libelled and attacked in a multitude of different ways. It comes with the territory, and is probably good for the soul. As a general rule the best policy is to allow these assaults to pass by outside the off-stump without playing a stroke. Disputes between journalists tend to be fruitless, self-important and (worst of all) tedious. However, two weeks ago I published a book, co-authored with David Morrison, A Dangerous Delusion: Why the West is Wrong about Nuclear Iran. Since then my co-author and I have been subject to a series

The Miracle of Globalisation: Most of the World has Never Had It So Good

Could life in Bangladesh be better? Of course it could. Is life in Bangladesh getting better? Of course it is. The horrific death toll after a factory building collapsed in Dhaka last week encourages us to forget this second point. But we should still try and remember it. Sensible advocates for reform and improvement know that globalisation has made an enormous difference to Bangladesh just as it has in many other poor countries. That more could be done to provide safer working conditions is scarcely in doubt. Similarly, you can be in favour of globalisation and still think Bangladeshi textile workers should be able to organise themselves in Trade Unions.

In Praise of Sweatshops

In today’s Telegraph David Blair has a strong and angry piece arguing that we – that is, western consumers – are complicit in or partially responsible for the deaths of nearly 300 Bangladeshis killed when the building in which they worked collapsed. Many will agree with him. This, they will say, is the true price of our addiction to (or, rather, preference for) cheap clothes manufactured in often appalling conditions. If you shop at Primark today you have blood on your hands. In the aftermath of an appalling accident such as this it is no surprise that people are calling for more to be done. Some even suggest that factories

The Rehabilitation of George W Bush: A Sisyphean Task

Freddy Gray is quite correct: the drive to rehabilitate George W Bush is suspicious. It is also a dog that won’t hunt. It is true that recent opinion polls have reported that Dubya is more popular than when he left office but this is surely chiefly a consequence of the public forgetfulness. Returning to the spotlight can only be bad news for Bush’s reputation. It will remind people why they were so pleased to be rid of him in the first place. Because, in the end, an administration bookended by the worst terrorist attack in American history and the gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression can’t be spun as

Why oh why oh why can’t Barack Obama be more like Lyndon Johnson?

So, is Barack Obama a wimp or just another lame-duck second-term President? Maureen Dowd, in her typically sophomoric fashion, appears to believe that the failure to pass gun control legislation shows that the President has not been paying enough attention to Aaron Sorkin movies. Tim Stanley, who at least knows something of how Washington works, suggests this failure reveals Obama as a lame-duck. Today’s New York Times piles on with an article asking, essentially, why oh why BHO can’t be more like LBJ. As is so often the case, a presidential setback must be attributed to an absence of Presidential willpower. The Cult of the Presidency is an eternal flame that can

Has the taxpayer received bang for buck from Baroness Ashton?

A great deal of fuss is being made about Baroness Ashton’s retirement salary. She leaves her ludicrous post as High Representative for Foreign Affairs at the European Union next year — and is being given only £400,000 to tide her over the next few years. I think that is quite modest: sometimes, you see, the taxpayer has to take a deep breath and cut his losses. Better this woman be paid £400,000 for doing absolutely nothing, rather than receive her full salary for carrying on doing useless, pointless things in Brussels. It would be interesting, though, to add up how much the state and the taxpayer has forked out for

Paolo Di Canio is right — Italian Fascism was not racist

The truth is that the new Sunderland manager Paolo Di Canio is right: Italian Fascism was not racist — at least not until its fatal alliance with German National Socialism. In truth, there is nothing necessarily racist about Fascism. That many football hooligans and the entire Liberal Left disagree is irrelevant — irrelevant, that is, to the truth. Racism in the context of Fascism essentially means hatred of Jews rather than, say, of blacks. But here’s the funny thing: Fascism, unlike National Socialism, was not anti-Semitic. True, the words ‘Fascist’ and ‘Nazi’ are interchangeable these days, and often synonymous with the word ‘racist’. But Benito Mussolini, who founded Fascism, was not anti-Semitic. Indeed,

Would you prefer to do business with the eurozone or China?

Does it really matter now whether the eurozone breaks up or not? The damage may already have been done, in terms of business confidence. A £10 billion bailout for Cyprus has been agreed, but nobody will forget that its people woke up one morning to find their bank accounts raided — something you don’t hear of happening even in developing countries. At the height of the confusion, Britain had to send out cash on a plane to its troops in Cyprus so they wouldn’t be deprived, a bit like a UN mission plopping food packets over stricken areas. The buzz is that Russian billionaires may now stage some sort of

James Forsyth

The Cyprus drama has only just begun

Analysts today are talking about the GDP of Cyprus falling by 20 per cent over the next four years, and stressing that this is a conservative estimate. This, and the attitude of the Church there, does make me wonder if the Cypriots might not reject the bailout again, revert back to the Cypriot pound and try and devalue their way to recovery. This could hardly be more painful than a bailout that will make credit nigh-on-impossible to obtain in Cyprus. The second thing is surely any company or institution with large cash reserves is moving them out of any bank in the Eurozone periphery. If, as the head of the

Europe should shut the door on immigration

The Prime Minister is giving a speech about immigration on Monday.  I am sure we can all guess the content.  If anybody is interested in a break from this — or indeed if the PM’s speech-writers are curious — perhaps I could humbly recommend this debate I took part in a couple of weeks ago in Athens. The motion was ‘Europe should shut the door on immigration’.  I used my speech and time in Q&A to explain why although we should not slam the door, let alone lock it, Europe urgently needs to wean ourselves off the habit of mass immigration and, at the very least, to give the door

Death of the Two-State Solution

At the (rejuvenated) New Republic, Ben Birnbaum has a comprehensive and comprehensively-depressing survey of the last-gasp prospects for a two-state solution to the Middle East ‘peace process’. If the two-state solution (TSS) is not yet on life-support it is hardly a picture of health. The prognosis is not good and time is running out. According to Birnbaum, Mahmoud Abbas and Bibi Netanyahu are, in their different ways, the last remaining men who could make it work. Yet neither man, as he also demonstrates, has much room for manoeuver. The sketched outlines of a deal remain in place (a divided Jerusalem, land-swaps, a symbolic ‘right of return’ for a few thousand

Hugo Chavez: A Clown Masquerading As A Threat

As would-be dictators go, Hugo Chavez was on the clownish end of the repressive spectrum. By the end, however, the joke was wearing thin. He was, as Rory Carroll aptly describes him, an “elected autocrat”. But if you judge a man by the company he keeps, Chavez’s legacy takes a darker turn. In the name of sticking-it-to-the-man (that is, the United States) Chavez chummed himself to most of the world’s ghastliest leaders. And, of course, his hero and father-figure was Fidel Castro, governor of the world’s sunniest island gulag. Meanwhile, in Britain and Ireland, his death has been mourned by George Galloway (who deems Chavez a “modern day Spartacus”), Ken

The febrile atmosphere within Saudi Arabia

A Saudi court has sentenced Khaled al-Johani to 18 months in prison for protesting against the regime. His troubles started two years ago when Saudi activists inspired by the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt had planned a ‘Day of Rage’. Fearing a popular revolt, the government instructed mosques across the country to warn their congregations against protesting. They also exploited Saudi’s still powerful tribal structure to ensure the incipient rebel movement was undermined. On the day, as police, Special Forces, and intelligence officers swarmed the area no one turned up – except Johani. Johani then launched a one man protest and denounced the government to an assembled scrum of journalists.

No, the Syrian civil war is not “Obama’s Rwanda”

Today’s Question To Which the Answer Is No is asked by Will Inboden over at Foreign Policy. To wit: Has Syria Become Obama’s Rwanda? There are many reasons why it has not, not the least of them being that the question rests upon an utterly false premise. According to Inboden, however: In the crucible of policymaking, officials should ask themselves more often how they will look back on the decisions they made while in power. Former President Bill Clinton has repeatedly said that one of his biggest regrets was not intervening in Rwanda. As Obama and the senior members of his national security team consider the memoirs they will inevitably write and

Why I love Beppe Grillo

‘Crazy Italians!’ you might think.  Offered the choice between Bunga Bunga Berlusconi, an ex-Communist and a Brussels stooge, one in four of them went and voted for a stand up comedian. Ever since Beppe Grillo’s shock success in the Italian elections, serious pundits in the mainstream media have been inviting us to disapprove. We are supposed to roll our eyes at the idea that Italians seem unwilling to accept austerity.  We are meant to tut tut at the failure of their democracy to produce a stable administration willing to take instruction from the Eurosystem. This only goes to show, imply the poobahs and the pundits, that Italian democracy is in crisis.

Weary Italian voters can teach UK politicians lessons

Italian voters are clearly cheesed off: with the Establishment, and with the country’s austerity programme. The explosion onto the scene of Beppe Grillo – which Freddy examined in his post from Rome on Sunday – shows quite how cheesed off they are, and it also has wider lessons for the eurozone and for UK politics, too. The first is that voters clearly do not share eurozone leaders’ unswerving commitment to the euro project: Grillo made much of his party’s eurosceptic credentials and won 54 seats in the upper house, with Berlusconi’s centre-right on 116, while Mario Monti, the conduit for the EU’s austerity measures, won only 18. No alliance gained

Italian elections: anti-politics on amphetamines

Rome Italians go to the polls today, and Beppe Grillo still seems to be the name on everybody’s lips. Grillo is expected to get up to 22 per cent of the vote — staggering for a comedian-turned-politician with no discernable policies whose campaign slogan is ‘vaffanculo’ (‘F— off!’). Il Fenomeno Grillo is anti-politics on amphetamines. Is Italian democracy self-immolating? Maybe. Faced with nothing but corruption, recession, imposed EU austerity, and the same old politicians, the downtrodden public are fed up and turning on the system. You can’t really blame them. Some of the Italians I spoken to here today think it is scandalous that Grillo has so much support —

No, Barack Obama has not declared an end to the War on Terror – Spectator Blogs

I see that Con Coughlin is at it again. Apparently, you see, Barack Obama has “taken leave of reality”. How so? By declaring that al-Qaeda is but “a shadow of its former self”. That seems a reasonable statement to me. Moreover, the sensible response to that declaration is surely I should bloody well hope so. Otherwise what have we – that is, chiefly, the US Armed Forces – been doing these past dozen years? According to Con, however, the President is, at best, hopelessly naive and, more probably, abdicating from his responsibilities. You see: Is he forgetting that it is only five months since Chris Stevens, the US ambassador to Libya, died following an

David Ward and the Ruthless Suppression of Anti-Israel Criticism – Spectator Blogs

David Ward, Liberal Democrat MP for Bradford East, is unhappy that his recent comments about The Jews attracted such widespread criticism. You see: “There is a huge operation out there, a machine almost, which is designed to protect the state of Israel from criticism. And that comes into play very, very quickly and focuses intensely on anyone who’s seen to criticise the state of Israel. And so I end up looking at what happened to me, whether I should use this word, whether I should use that word – and that is winning, for them. Because what I want to talk about is the fundamental question of how can they do

Lockerbie Novel: It Was Iran, Not Libya – Spectator Blogs

From a very entertaining New York Times profile of Gerard de Villiers, the French novelist who, though little known in this country, is seemingly better connected in the spy world than any mere hack novelist has any right to be: Why do all these people divulge so much to a pulp novelist? I put the question to de Villiers the last time we met, in the cavernous living room of his Paris apartment on a cold winter evening. He was leaving on a reporting trip to Tunisia the next day, and on the coffee table in front of me, next to a cluster of expensive scotches and liqueurs, was a