Archive for category Foreign Affairs
La Mala educación
Posted by Nick Cowen in Education, Foreign Affairs on 20/09/2007
Hugo Chavez certainly knows how to shore up his socialist consensus in Venezuela for the long term: ban all schools from teaching anything else. He has already ensured that college level students won’t be able to study medicine without first pouring through Marx’s Das Kapital and some of Fidel Castro’s speeches. But his tactics for co-opting private schools into his preferred ideology could really do with some refining. After all, his aggressive stance is attracting a lot of bad press. If he had only studied New Labour tactics, he could have learnt how to bring many private schools to their knees without anyone noticing!
Why Brown Should Ignore the Recommendations of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee
Posted by Nick Cowen in Foreign Affairs on 14/08/2007
Yesterday saw the publication of a report on the Middle East by a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee.
Media accounts of it have largely focussed on one of its principal recommendations. This is that the Government ‘should urgently consider ways of engaging politically with moderate elements within Hamas as a way of encouraging it to meet the three Quartet principles’.
continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.
The ‘Wisdom’ of Our Lords and Masters
Posted by Nick Cowen in Foreign Affairs on 24/07/2007
‘The noble Lord Hannay … will understand better than most the importance of a united position around the UN principles. Our policy has not changed. We expect Hamas to adhere to the principles set by the Quartet in January 2006. These are to renounce violence, recognise Israel and accept all previous agreements and obligations, as set out in the road map. I hope that it does that and that it takes the opportunity for dialogue and progress, but a political dialogue is impossible as long as Hamas dedicates itself to violence and destruction.’
Thus remarked Baroness Royall of Blaisdon earlier this month in the House of Lords, winding up for the government there a debate on Palestine and the Occupied Territories.
continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.
Time to get tough
Posted by James Gubb in European Union, Foreign Affairs on 20/03/2007
Today – in fact at this very moment – the EU-ACP (African-Caribbean-Pacific) Joint Parliamentary Assembly convenes in Brussels for their biannual plenary meeting. Talking shop or not, the Assembly has acquired an increasingly prominent role, particularly given the tensions surrounding the EU’s intention to end its preferential trade arrangements with ACP countries in favour of bilateral Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs). The blurb on its website states: ‘A substantial part of the work of the Joint Parliamentary Assembly is directed towards promoting human rights and democracy and the common values of humanity….in order to guarantee the right of each people to choose its own development objectives and how to attain them.’ If so, then now, given the situation in Zimbabwe, is the time to prove it.
What Did You Believe About the War in Iraq, Daddy?
Posted by David Conway in Foreign Affairs on 03/11/2006
However well or ill things in Iraq might currently be going for the US and UK, the question remains as to whether or not Bush and Blair were justified in going to war against Saddam in 2003.
They claimed Saddam posed a threat to the west and its allies because of his WMD programmes. It had to be neutralised pre-emptively. To wait until Saddam acquired them would be a disaster because of the risks of retaliation. And to allow him to acquire them would be a disaster because of his links with organised terror groups would roisk nuclear blackmail or worse.
The rest we know as history. Troops went in, but little by way of any WMD showed up. Sceptics have since never ceased to claim the invasion to have been a disaster. All it has done is destabilise Iraq, strengthen Iran as a regional power, and radicalise Muslims at home and abroad. All in all, they claim, it was a right mess that GWB had gotten the west into.
Well, it increasingly looks like Bush and Blair were absolutely right to have gone in.
All Our Yesterdays … and Their Todays
Posted by David Conway in Foreign Affairs on 26/07/2006
One picture is said to be worth a thousand words. So, the images shown by clicking on the first link below, first shown by a German television station last Sunday, do much to augment the information provided by clicking on the second link, to explain why Israel is so determined to do all in its power to defeat Hezbollah, and why, despite the tragic scale of the consequent collateral damage from its current assault against Hezbollah, analogies currently being drawn between Israel and the Nazis for having made it are so badly and obscenely misplaced.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=d51poygEXYU&search=mufti%20hitler
http://www.nationalreview.com/nr_comment/nr_comment071802a.asp