Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons user Muhammad Mahdi Karim.
When it comes to Israel and Gaza, I find it very hard to judge. Maybe this is because my judgment isn’t very good, or maybe it’s because judging well really is hard, and not enough people realize this.

Filed under: barackobama, hillaryclinton, jonathanbirch, middle east, middleeast, taliban, terrorism on January 26th, 2009 | No Comments »

Hamas militants fired 200 rockets at Israeli communities, Israel reacted in the usual way, and at least 56 civilians have been killed. The cliché is that the response is “disproportionate” (examples here, here, here and here). You can call Israel’s response ineffectual, heavy-handed, counterproductive, short-sighted, demagogic, brutal, tragic, heartbreaking — but disproportionate? This ubiquity of [...]

Filed under: 9/11, jonathanbirch, middle east, middleeast, terrorism on December 29th, 2008 | 3 Comments »

Photograph courtesy of Flickr user *Hiro
Does the West cause Islamic extremism? Is it the war in Iraq what done it, or decades of support for Israel, or centuries of imperialism? In a trivial sense, yes. If we’d done things differently, the consequences would have played out differently. It’s easy to construct stories of how this [...]

Filed under: foreignpolicy, iraq, jonathanbirch, middleeast, ukpolitics on January 24th, 2008 | 3 Comments »

Photograph courtesy of the Soldier’s Media Center
Clare Politics is proud to announce that the second speaker for Lent Term 2008 will be Dr. Rosemary Hollis.
Dr. Hollis is Director of Research at Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs) in London. She is a leading expert on foreign policy and security issues in the Middle [...]

Filed under: afghanistan, clarepoliticsnews, iran, iraq, middleeast on January 11th, 2008 | No Comments »