Chilcot on Civilian Casualties: Part III

Hello everybody. Today I just link to my piece in The Conversation.

Chilcot Cometh

At long last the Chilcot report is out and I'm proud to announce that I've already read 0.000019783% of it. So far I have fixated mainly on the issue for which I threw down a marker earlier on the blog - Tony Blair's use of bogus child mortality figures before the Inquiry to justify the …

The Iraq Sanctions Myth Rears its Ugly Head at Scripps College

This unusually interesting article just appeared in the the Los Angeles Times (coming to me via Michael Shermer). The obvious angle is the spectacle of protesters at one women's college (Scripps) attempting to follow the  path of another (Smith) in disinviting a female commencement speaker (Madeleine Albright) who had shattered gender barriers in a male-dominated …

Who Remembers the Chilcot Inquiry?

OK, that was an unfair question. Few readers are old enough to have well-formed memories of the days when disco was King and the Chilcot Inquiry, also known as the Iraq Inquiry, opened its doors. But at long last we are hurtling toward a conclusion to this epic adventure so I'd like to throw down a …

Clarity on Economic Sanctions

This article made something click for me. If you impose economic sanctions on a country to encourage it to change its behaviour then you need to remove the sanctions if the target country meets your conditions. Moreover, leaders in the target country must believe  you will remove the sanctions if they comply with your conditions. …