Riyadh Despairs, So It Talks to Iran

There’s no need to be surprised by reports that envoys from Saudi Arabia and Iran have been negotiating in secret in Baghdad. Nor by the fact that the negotiations have been vigorously denied. Nor that the Saudi crown prince now has uncommonly constructive things to say (and on the record) about his country’s possible future relationship with Iran.

Afghanistan Outsourced

If outsourcing has become inevitable in commerce, we cannot be surprised that it has found its place in government. In matters of national security especially, it can be of use to rely less on soldiers than on mercenaries. Russia makes extensive use of the Wagner Group, mercenaries who operate with the state’s approval in Middle Eastern and African battlefields, doing dirty work in a deniable fashion.

Front Line Dictator

Surprise was the natural reaction upon hearing the news on April 20, that the long-standing president of Chad, Idriss Deby Itno, had been killed on the front lines of his country’s war with the rebel Front for Change and Concord in Chad (FACT) militia group.

Unit 29155

Connoisseurs of a certain kind of bare-faced espionage have certainly enjoyed the last couple of days. They like it when faces or institutions, associated with other stories, reappear. In this case, the Czech Republic has expelled 18 Russian diplomats in retaliation for bombings in 2014 which targeted munitions factories in the country and killed two civilians. You may have seen the faces of the alleged culprits before.

Ramsey Clark, Friend of Dictators

Last week saw the death of Ramsey Clark. He was 93 and a former attorney general of the United States. By the end of his life, Clark was a reasonably obscure figure, which is possibly the reason why those who wrote his obituary felt both willing and able to gloss over so much of what gave his life its shape and animation.

The Rise and Fall of Bernie Madoff

The audacity of Bernie Madoff’s fraud could perhaps have been glimpsed in how Madoff held himself in the years before his Ponzi scheme collapsed in 2008.

Is America Really Back?

When, on Tuesday, the American secretary of defence Lloyd Austin announced that 500 more American troops would be sent to Germany, a tacit intention of his speech was to convince observers that a terrible thing had been averted in the nick of time.

Iran’s Nuclear Conspiracy Theories

Attempts to interrupt Iran’s nuclear proliferation are not uncommon, but they can often be made to sound more exciting than they really are. There seems to have been another effort over the weekend with an attack on the Iranian nuclear facility at Nantaz.

War Records

Prince Philip, who has died aged 99, was a navy man. It is something his obituarists all mention. They note his passage into the Royal Navy after a rackety childhood and Gordonstoun. How he was an able cadet at Dartmouth, the top cadet of his course, and that by the time he married the then-Princess Elizabeth in 1947 he was a confident and handsome first lieutenant, whose wishes to continue his naval career were later ended by her ascent to the throne. He kept a model of HMS Magpie, his first command, in his office in Buckingham Palace in the decades that followed.

Oxfam’s Heart of Darkness

Every year since 2018, or thereabouts, we have seen variations on a grim theme. Women in third world countries, the recipients of aid and charity, have accused aid workers of sexual abuse and exploitation, of rape and molestation.