When the United States and Britain invaded Iraq in 2003, a number of people pointed out what a terrible message this sent to the world about nuclear weapons. Iraq had dismantled its WMD programmes and it was invaded. North Korea had developed a rudimentary nuclear device and got negotiations. So, if you don’t want to […]
Thursday’s Security Council resolution on Libya is both sweeping and limited.
Sweeping: It authorizes all necessary means to enforce a no-fly zone and to protect civilians.
Limited: It does not authorize warfare to overthrow Gaddafi’s government and it upholds the ban on supplying arms to anyone in Libya, including the rebels.
That ban on arms is reportedly […]
Every once in a while the clouds of propaganda part and, for a brief moment, clarity shines through. One of these moments (political activist and comedian Robert Newman is rather fond of this one) came in July 2002 when The Times forgot the official line and excitedly blurted out the naked truth about the impending […]
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
“Whether it’s true or not … no longer matters” - Glen Beck
Glenn hasn’t been studying his diagram:
If you want to criticize anyone for woolly thinking about anything, Glenn Beck is very, very low-hanging fruit. We should all just ignore him and hope he goes away. But, like everyone else, I have finally succumbed to temptation.
Shanghaiist […]
Saturday, December 11, 2010
On Friday, the BBC’s website published the very surpising claim that in 1973 Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho rejected his Nobel Peace Prize “without explanation”.
It’s surprising because Le Duc Tho wrote to the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee at the time giving clear and precise reasons for rejecting the prize and these reasons were widely reported. I […]
Thursday, September 2, 2010
It occurred to me that I’ve been wasting my time grumbling on this blog (here and here) about journalists and politicians who describe the current age in Britain as “peacetime” when we are at war in Afghanistan. Not because I think it’s a non-issue, but because my mutterings here won’t make any difference.
So I sent […]
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Some very confused writing by Larry Elliott and Tom Clark in The Guardian today, implying that the British haven’t fought a war since 1945. Someone also has a strange understanding of the word “strong”.
First paragraph:
David Cameron’s first 100 days in Downing Street have seen the coalition win the key argument over the economy, with a […]
Doublethink: “to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them…”
Britain is simultaneously at war in Afghanistan (we’ve now been there longer than the Soviet Union) and in a state of peace. The previous government said so. The new government says so. The media? Yes, they […]
It really shouldn’t surprise me by now, and yet it does every time: just how little respect British newspapers have for their readers.
Today’s front page “exclusive” in the Observer:
How serious are the revelations in this memo? Serious enough to potentially derail the Tories’ efforts to form a government. Or so the Observer would have us […]
As the crow flies, Tegucigalpa is just over 50 miles from the sea. So Brazil’s ambassador may have wondered why Honduran troops had pointed sonic weapons at his building and (very loudly) informed him in English that he was approaching a US warship in international waters:
This is a test of the Long Range Acoustic Device, […]