THEY have only themselves to blame. Protests were always likely at any official sendoff for the most socially destructive prime minister in modern British history. But by turning Margaret Thatcher’s funeral into a state-funded Tory jamboree, puffed up wit
IF anyone doubted what kind of Iraq has been bequeathed by a decade of US-sponsored occupation and war, Tuesday’s deadly sectarian bomb attacks around Baghdad against bus queues and markets should have set
THE signs are unmistakable. Once again, the west is preparing to escalate military intervention in the Arab and Muslim world. This time the target is Syria. Since the US presidential election, the warnings have
LONDON: Eleven years after it began, Nato's occupation of Afghanistan is crumbling. The US decision to suspend joint Afghan-Nato operations in response to a wave of attacks by Afghan soldiers and police on Nato troops cuts the ground from beneath the cent
LONDON: The destruction of Syria is now in full flow. What began as a popular uprising 17 months ago is now an all-out civil war fuelled by regional and global powers that threatens to engulf the entire Middle East. As the battle for the ancient
AS Syria descends deeper into civil war and human misery, pressure for yet another western military intervention in the Arab world is growing. Last week, General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the US joint
MORE than a decade after George W. Bush launched it, the “war on terror” was supposed to be winding down. US military occupation of Iraq has ended and Nato is looking for a way out of Afghanistan, even as
DEMOCRACY has never been the European Union’s strongest suit. It’s an institution where the unelected and the barely accountable have always called the shots — and electorates are routinely made
LIBYA was supposed to be different. The lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan had been learned, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy insisted last year. This would be a real humanitarian intervention.
LONDON: If next month's presidential election turns out as expected, France is heading for confrontation over the disastrous austerity drive now choking the economic life out of the eurozone. As in Britain, the economy is struggling to recover from the cr
IT was an “isolated incident”, US officials insisted. The murder of 16 Afghan civilians as they slept, Hillary Clinton declared, was the “inexplicable act” of one soldier.
LONDON: After a decade of calamitous western wars in the wider Middle East, the signs are becoming ever more ominous that we’re heading for yet another. And, hard as it is to credit, the same discredited arguments used to justify the disasters of Iraq and
LONDON: There is no limit, it seems, to the blood price Arabs have to pay for their “spring”. After the carnage in Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Libya, Syria’s 11-month-old uprising grows ever more gruesome.
