Christopher Montgomery

[nb: As Christopher Montgomery is away this week – paragliding in Tashkent – Antiwar.com is replacing him with stuff we found earlier in the week in a wastepaper bin, in a conference room in London’s Canary Wharf. Although the document is incomplete, it is clearly a transcription, and we believe the initials stand for the … Continue reading “Notes From the Wastebin of History”

Everyone, rightly, jumps up and down with enjoyable rage when anyone suggests that America had September 11th ‘coming’. And of course, no one would defend crashing airliners into skyscrapers, nor the cause for which this act was carried out. What is madness, plain and simple, is a refusal to consider why 20 men (and twenty … Continue reading “Does September 11th Matter?”

Last week found me standing on a Sussex beach, lost in my own thoughts, staring out towards the channel and (presumably) France beyond. I had come, on a whim, onto the small village of Rottingdean, sometime home to Max Boot’s hero, so as to be beside the sea after a trip to Lewes. Like all … Continue reading “My Day at the Seaside”

A few years ago Niall Ferguson made the unexceptionable observation in The Pity of War that Great War soldiers as much as anything fought on, and fought to win, because they enjoyed fighting. This caused some of the more po-faced reviewers of his book to tut-tut – and murmur about, ‘what can a civilian academic … Continue reading “Fighting Is Fun”

Before I fell ill, I had last week meant to write about how what Britain leaving the EU would entail. I would like to be able to tell you that whilst lying on a bed of pain, a series of hallucinatory visions about the nature of foreign policy occurred to me, and hence why, again, … Continue reading “Getting Bogged Down”

If Tories were rats being drowned in a bucket, it would be neither water nor bucket that would bother them, but whether a Clarkeite’s blanched belly bobbed to the surface first. The most recent example of this came after l’affaire Cummings, when the party’s newly appointed director of strategy choose to reveal the innermost thinking … Continue reading “What Are We Fighting For?”

Just before the US presidential election, a much trailed collection of essays on foreign policy, Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy, was published in October 2000 – edited by Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol. To save you time (and money) I’ll sum this book up in a sentence: American power … Continue reading “Absent Dangers:”

There’s one very good reason why conspiracies are so genuinely rare in international relations, and that’s because, although you can hide what you’re doing, you can’t very often hide why you might do it. In other words, ‘secret diplomacy’ and everything more Bondian beneath that is all well and good, but the interests of a … Continue reading “Conspiracy Corner”

It is sometimes all too easy to see why the British left are so adamantine in their assumption of moral superiority. Take for example the absence of right wing opposition to ‘Gypsy’ Jack Straw’s Immigration and Asylum Bill in the last parliament. This truly terrible bill had as one of its many odious ingredients the … Continue reading “Let Them In”

If justice were a more common habit, then Jack Straw would have been lynched on his recent visit to Gibraltar. The Foreign Secretary would have been left dangling from the end of one of the colony’s ornate lampposts, Barbary Apes gleefully swinging from his lifeless limbs, with some one iconic image winging its way round … Continue reading “Gibraltar: It’s Ours, and We’re Keeping It”