Military

In a clear move to distract attention from his own problems, Syrian president Bashir Assad has allowed people to march from the Syrian border toward the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, in the hope it will lead to a violent reaction from the Israelis. It did. Israeli forces opened fire on the people, wounding several. There are reports of at least four people killed and 13 wounded but these have not been verified. There can be no doubt that the incursion is part of a Syrian plan. The protests coincide with the 44th anniversary of the Six-Day War, when Israel captured the Golan from Syria, as well as the West Bank and

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 Ratko Mladic faces his accusers at the Hague, it’s instructive to revisit the fallout from one of the atrocities he is alleged to have committed. The Srebrenica massacre was both a horrendous tragedy and a horrendous failure of internationalism – a point the Spectator made cautiously as news of the war crime emerged. No End of a Lesson, The Spectator, 22 July 1995 The tragedy in Bosnia is so harrowing, the United Nations’ failure so all-embracing, the West’s humiliation so total that it is difficult as yet to see beyond them. But for the Bosnians themselves, the worst may now be passed. Whether the defeated international powers stage some

I wrote back in November that as we approached the July deadline when President Obama promised to start drawing down troops from Afghanistan, the tensions between politicians and military would re-emerge, as “the military ask for more time to get it right, and Obama tries to hold them to the deal he thought he made in late 2009”. This is now coming to pass, in London as well as Washington. I also argued that having some sort of public timetable for the troop drawdown was a reasonable solution, perhaps the only solution, to the politicians’ problem of balancing conflicting messages to different audiences in Afghanistan and at home. But the

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.

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

Bosnia has been getting more attention recently, as analysts predict gridlock (or worse) in the coming weeks. The reason is a move by the country’s Bosnian Serb leader, Milorad Dodik, to challenge parts of the Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the hard-fought war in 1995. Few people outside Bosnia know who Dodik is. Those who knew him during the Bosnian War or immediately afterwards saw him as a moderate businessman-turned-politician. But since then, Dodik has either changed or shed his cover. Now he wants to hold a vote next month on whether to reject Bosnia’s federal institutions, especially the war crimes court. He has accused the court of bias. A