Security and Defence

In the current round of nuclear talks with Iran, the international community must not be guided by dreams but by reality. Too often, the world has been deceived by the regime in Tehran. The sanctions have to be kept in place.

The attack on Nairobi demonstrated that al Shabaab has peaked and is attempting to reverse its seemingly unstoppable decline.

Yom Kippur, October 6th 1973, at five minutes past two precisely, 4,000 artillery pieces, 250 aircraft and dozens of FROG missiles struck Israeli positions along the Suez Canal and the Sinai, at the same time along the Golan Heights 1,400 tanks advanced towards Israel.

Whilst al-Qaeda has never been a particularly centralised organisation, in recent years it appears to have shifted from a model of a centralised franchise, which supports other groups to carry out attacks in their name, to a fractured structure of regional groups, each with its own internal politics and personal missions.

The EU somehow managed to cover up its failure in Libya and Mali, but the disaster of its Syria policy cannot be squashed as easily. The time has come for the member states to ask themselves how far they want to go in terms of a common foreign and security policy.

Whilst it is widely agreed that the Arab Spring will have an enormous impact on al-Qaeda and the worldwide jihadist movement, there is no consensus on what this impact will look like. On one hand, there are optimists like Fawaz Gerges and Peter Bergen who think the Arab-Spring is a death blow to the jihadist movement.

The RAF interception of Syrian Jets over Cyprus is a sign that Britain can still be sucked into Syrian intervention through regional spill over and unforeseen events.

On this, the twelfth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre, the wounds are still fresh and raw in much of the West. Images of men and women diving to their deaths, rather than be crushed and of emergency personnel dying to save those inside the towers still haunt almost aspect of Western politics.

Perhaps we should stake out the case for interventionism in very simple terms: an internationalist party does not stand by and permit the slaughter of children in gas attacks.

Many filed Pakistan under 'basket case' years ago and stopped trying to rationalise developments in that country. Sadly, for others, that isn't an option. What is taking place is tragic, absurd, and frightening.