Libya

The pressure is being turned up on Colonel Gaddafi, but it may still take a while to have an effect. The Libyan dictator retains some form of power and has told the only person who has been granted access to see him, South Africa’s Jacob Zuma, that he intends to stay on in Libya. He wants a ceasefire before anything else is discussed. The rebels in Benghazi, meanwhile, want him to go before anything else is discussed. And so the bombing goes on. At the UN, people talk of negotiated settlement, fearing that chaos would follow Gaddafi’s killing. That may be true, but there has been little evidence so far

As Noman Benotman predicted, Colonel Gaddafi’s relations with his military are disintegrating. Reuters is reporting that 120 loyalist officers have defected and arrived in Rome. Details are scant, but this is a major success for Britain and France’s attempt to effect regime change without intensifying their military deployment. There will be doubts as to how long the resilient dictator can survive without loyal military leadership. Gaddafi now has to choose how to respond to this treachery – rough justice may be tempting, but that might deepen the rebelliousness of his officers, increasing the likelihood of a coup. NATO will be trying to exploit this stroke of luck, encouraging further defections.

Sometimes you wait and wait for an event, and nothing ever happens. Pakistan is always said to be teetering on the brink of collapse but never quite edges over the precipice. The same used to be the case with Yemen. In fact, Coffee House predicted that Yemen would implode last year, but Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh managed to hold the country together in the face of terrorism, irredentist movements, insurgency and, recently, pro-democracy protesters demanding his resignation.   Now, however, the wily leader may finally have run out of road. Heavy clashes have erupted in the capital Sanaa, a day after Saleh again refused to sign a Gulf-brokered power-transition.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo of the International Criminal Court has said that Colonel Gaddafi, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi and spy chief Abdullah al-Sanussi have the greatest responsibility for the “widespread and systematic attacks” on civilians in Libya. The prosecutor has therefore asked the ICC to issue warrants for their arrest. The move comes as rebels claim they now have full control of Misrata and scored victories in Zintan, south-east of Tripoli. A senior officer told me he thought Colonel Gaddafi would be toppled in less than six months. But if he does not fall, the ICC move may become problematic. For if  warrants are issued, the Libyan dictator has little way out but

The National Security Council was a sound idea. But it has disappointed, both inside and outside Whitehall. The Ministry of Defence has complained that it “failed to give strategic direction”. Among previous supporters in the media, Con Coughlin has commented sourly that “all it has achieved so far is the replacement of Blair’s much-derided ‘sofa government’ with a new, back-of-the-envelope approach”. James Kirkup was even driven to ask “What exactly is the point of it?” Where did things go wrong? First, it seems that more effort went into spinning it to the media — it was a ‘War Cabinet’ to Sun readers, an end to ‘sofa government’ to those disaffected

Here are letters T to Z in our A-Z guide the coalition’s first year. A-F are here. G-M are here. And N-S are here. T is for Tuition fees “Broken promises, there have been too many in the last few years.” So said Nick Clegg in a Liberal Democrat video during the last election campaign. It was favourite theme of his — and one that he deployed both during the TV debates and in signing a pledge to scrap tuition fees. This was to be a New Politics. Clegg was to be its champion. Shame it didn’t quite work like that. The coalition agreement was damaging enough to Clegg’s aura: