• Operation Epic Fury… one month on.

    There has to be an argument that encapsulates the ‘2026 Gulf War,’  whether it is an ideological approach or a continuation of the conflict in the Middle East that started in 1991, is a question that has vexed most analysts, historians and international lawyers trying to define the intellectual, political and legal parameters of Operation…

  • State capture

    The commentator asked Jeremy Bowen – “What the war was about….?” I answered to myself – “I don’t know” – then laughed. There were no wry smiles, but there was a pause and then Bowen answered, “I think….” But what did I know, or what did I predict, like everybody apart from Ayatollah Khamenei, I predicted…

  • reform The lower case argument.

    I am not sure whether I should be writing this, but listening to Nigel Farage this afternoon made my blood boil. The more you say “the economy is broken” and the more you say that the British state needs reform is an ideology based on scant argument, few plans and disposing Britain to the variances…

  • Its called “Sundowners”

    Its called “sundowners” in America, I first learnt about sundowners from a personal account by Paul Krugman, he explained that sadly his father went through it and thinks Trump is in his final stages of sanity. In Britain we call it vascular dementia, (the symptoms fit) in the last few weeks of my fathers life…

  • The revolution within a revolution….

    In 2022 – it was five hundred – that was the number dead declared after the Mahsa Amini demonstrations. That number was significant, it was a number the Ayatollahs and Revolutionary Guard elite could settle on as a statement of power – a number that was not high enough for the outside world to be…

  • Christmas Newsletter

    Christmas newsletter House-keeping.  I am sorry for not writing in the last month and half, but I have been re-appraising whether to continue writing articles. In the past month I have introduced an AI bot and I am experimenting with a new type of output, which will come out later in the year when the finance comes through for…