Author: |Posted: 6:31 pm on 05/10/09
Category: World News Blog
The International Atomic Energy Agency does not want to be held responsible for starting a war.
The IAEA and its director, Mohamed El Baradei, jointly won the Nobel peace prize in 2005 for their “efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and to ensure that nuclear energy, for peaceful purposes, is used in the safest possible way”.
Author: |Posted: 7:24 pm on 28/07/09
Category: World News Blog
This is the way the Brit mission ends.
No bang; just the whimper of a procedural delay in the Iraqi parliament. After six years, the number of British troops in Iraq has gone from 46,000 to zero. (Well zero-ish, as there are some still based in Baghdad.)
A photograph in The Times said it all. read more
Author: |Posted: 2:57 pm on 30/06/09
Category: Snowblog
Iraq is a country I have visited many times since I was first there to report from the front line of the harrowing Iran/iraq war in 1980. Foreign intervention and interference has dogged it for more than a century. No wonder Baghdad is seized with parties and celebration.
For the promised American pull-out from Iraq starts today. US forces start pulling out of urban areas in the country on what the Iraqi government has declared to be National Sovereignty Day.
Author: |Posted: 7:31 pm on 24/06/09
Category: Gary Gibbon on Politics
Gordon Brown has a habit of upsetting people he’s asked to conduct inquiries.
Adair Turner didn’t look like a man who’d like to take up another commission from Gordon Brown after his pensions inquiry. More recently, Sir Christopher Kelly’s team looking at MPs’ expenses was repeatedly publicly harried by No.10 and didn’t appreciate it.
Author: |Posted: 9:44 am on 15/06/09
Category: Snowblog
Gordon Brown will announce an inquiry into the Iraq war this week. My sources tell me that this will not be chaired by a judge, senior or retired. It will be chaired instead by a historian.
The hot tip in Whitehall is that it is likely to be the respected Churchill and Holocaust scholar Sir Martin Gilbert.
There are enormous risks to reputations – not least that of Tony Blair as he strives to become president of Europe (a real prospect). Securing that post for Mr Blair is said to be one of Lord Mandelson’s many responsibilities.
Author: |Posted: 4:12 pm on 23/02/09
Category: World News Blog
I remember the horror when we entered the plundered Baghdad Museum two days after the Americans took the Iraqi capital in April 2003. We picked our way through broken shards of pottery and destroyed statues – the looters had smashed as well as grabbed. A lone archaeologist was wandering around in shock. “We would have been better off keeping Saddam Hussein,” he said. “At least people were scared of him.”
We told the American forces at the Palestine Hotel that no one was guarding the museum. Nothing they could do, they said. They were Army. That part of town was Marines. Not their problem. read more
