Last time, I noted with great sympathy that most people have become totally confused about the events taking place in the Middle East. Since then, that confusion has risen to unprecedented levels…not least because US jets bombed the Iraqi city of Tikrit in order to aid the Iranian-supported Shiite militias doing battle there while, at […]
There is an ancient Chinese curse that goes: “May you live in interesting times.” Based on the flood of news that we have been witnessing in recent months, it would appear as though those who have cursed us have been working overtime. We have been inundated by so much news and so much spin […]
I have long preached that major economic, social, political and military events do not just happen. They are invariably the product of processes that have been underway for a very long time. That presumption is certainly true for all the events we have been witnessing in the Middle East during the past few years. […]
The political and diplomatic negotiations leading up to the announcement of each Israeli-Hamas cease-fire were among the most fascinating and revealing political exercises in recent memory. However, to paraphrase a man much wiser than me, never in the course of human endeavour has so much nonsense, with so few insights, been said […]
I can’t recall a single set of diplomatic negotiations that has been accompanied by as much spin as the recent Geneva talks on the future of Iran’s nuclear programme. What is even worse is that the spin continued throughout the post-mortems. And so, rather than being used to clarify issues, the period after the interim […]