Barack obama

I’m hearing more reports about the rather peculiar behaviour of Nicholas Sarkozy, and how he is playing the Libya campaign thus far. Obama wants to hand over leadership of this mission quick. He was never really into it, but the US Navy was overwhelmingly the best placed to do the first phase of the mission (ie, fire Tomahawks into 20 Libyan targets). The Tomahawk team constituted 11 US ships and submarines, plus one British submarine. Anything other than American leadership would have been a joke. Phase Two is to take out Gaddafi’s surface-to-air missiles as soon as he dares to move them. Obama wants to hand over the baton to

Reports are coming in that French jets have fired the first shots in the UN-supported intervention in Libya. The coming conflict will determine, in the short term, whether the Gaddafi regime is toppled and, in the longer term, whether the international community rediscovers its appetite for intervention which had been so diminished by the controversies over Iraq and the difficulties of the Afghan mission. That there is intervention at all in Libya is down in no small part to David Cameron and William Hague. Hague played a key role in ensuring that Arab countries were prepared to commit to putting planes in the air in this operation, something that was

It now seems almost certain that Colonel Gaddafi will now not only survive in Libya but reassert control over the whole country. With the fall of Ajdabiya, there is no break between Gaddafi’s forces and the rebel capital of Benghazi. The window for international action is shutting rapidly, even if it has not yet closed. But, as so often, there seems to be no multilateral desire for action. Gaddafi’s triumph is a disaster for the Libyan people but also one of the biggest strategic set-backs the West has suffered in the post 9/11 world. Every dictator will now know that they can suppress a revolt with violence without fear of

There is a war on. Not in Libya but in Helmand, where nearly 9,000 British troops are fighting. Last year was in fact the deadliest of more than nine years of war for Afghan civilians, the United Nations has just reported. You would not know it, though. For the events in North Africa have almost removed the issue entirely from the newspapers. When Hamid Karzai came through London recently, his visit barely registered. What a change from only half a year ago when every one of his idiosyncratic utterances would be replayed and over-analysed.   This may not be an altogether bad thing. Too much 24-hour coverage can make it

The garbled horror stories just keep on rolling out of Libya. According to the latest reports, Gaddafi’s troops have attacked the rebels in Zawiyah with redoubled violence and force. Aircraft, tanks, bombs, mortars – all have been used against the city and its people, with what one assumes are bloody results. As one resident puts it to Reuters, “Zawiyah as you knew it no longer exists.” It is unclear whether the rebels have now lost control there, but that is a strong possibility. Unsurprising, then, that the West is positioning itself to act. David Cameron, we are told, has been speaking with Barack Obama about the full spread of options

Yesterday was momentous, but we should not lose sight of the head of the IMF saying that the Chinese renminbi could take steps to becoming a global reserve currency. To be specific: Dominique Strauss-Kahn has in mind adding renminbi to the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights system. In itself, no big deal – but a notable kiss being blown to Beijing. It fits a trend. The Chinese, notoriously, manipulate the value of their currency to keep their goods cheap, so they can’t have their currency treated with reserve status. But power is shifting – and America’s fiscal misbehaviour has unsettled international investors. John Peace, chairman of UK bank Standard Chartered, put