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/ 5 November 2003
It would be a macabre exercise, but if anyone were ever to compile a league table of political assassins, ranked solely by success in achieving their goals, there is no doubt who would come out on top. It would surely be Yigal Amir, the Jewish extremist who murdered Israel’s prime minister Yitzhak Rabin eight years ago on Tuesday.
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/ 31 October 2003
Now we know that the grounds on which the Iraq war was fought were false, we cannot be blamed for wanting to wallow in self-righteousness. As director Michael Moore might bellow: ”We were right and they were wrong.” That is true, but we cannot leave it there. We have to do better than that. We have to move on.
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/ 10 September 2003
At his eve-of-war press conference back in March, President George W Bush cast Iraq as providing ”training and safe haven to terrorists who would willingly use weapons of mass destruction against America and other peace-loving countries”. The irony is that, at the time, this was not true. But it is now.
The Cold War and the seven decades of the Soviet Union live now only in the history books. Or at least that’s how it looks. In fact, the reverberations of that place and time rumble on even now. Fifty years after his death, Joseph Stalin is still a presence in our world.
We’re all so fixated with the Middle East war that’s about to begin, we’ve stopped looking at the one that never seems to end. But the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis has not disappeared just because we’ve stopped paying attention. It’s still pressing on, stealing lives and breaking hearts every day.
Many Europeans are not just on the opposite side from the United States in the debate over war on Iraq, but are not even having the same conversation. While they still agonise over whether to go to war, the American conversation has moved on long ago
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/ 1 February 2003
Now we may get to see the true face of Ariel Sharon. His crushing victory in the early hours of Wednesday morning has given the Israeli people, and the wider world, a chance at last to see what this man really wants.
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/ 20 January 2003
It was a forlorn image. Two Palestinian delegates facing not the British foreign secretary but a humble TV set. On top of the box, one of those neat Internet camera gizmos, the kind kids use to talk – in slow, juddering, delayed time – to their granny in Australia.
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/ 5 December 2002
So far the war on terror has divided the world into hawks and doves. Hawks want to crush the enemy with physical might. Doves seek to understand the root causes of terrorism, to address the grievances that motivate the killers.
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/ 15 November 2002
The word of the hour is empire. As the United States marches to war, no other label quite seems to capture the scope of American power or the scale of its ambition. ”Sole superpower” is accurate enough, but seems oddly modest. But empire is the big one.