Updated below.

In case you haven't noticed, the world is on the brink. We are caught in a gigantic mudslide slowly gathering speed downhill, tearing out even the strongest trees by the root. It is impossible to figure out what crisis is more important than another. But I...

LONDON -- There he goes again. George Bush. Talking the talk to create bloodshed where he never has to walk the walk. And scoring cheap political points while doing so.

President Bush calls people who talk to terrorist groups appeasers and implies Barack Obama should wear a Scarlet A where...

In this season of Iraq assessments, much of the comment in the mainstream media has been from above. Senior Iraqi and American politicians have weighed in with their opinions on the op-ed pages. Think-tank bodies from inside the Beltway who have never been to the country or who, if...

As a journalist I have always practiced a form of history from below. My career coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the continuing break-up of the old World Order (the New World Order is still not in place). I preferred to report from the street rather...

London - Even on this side of the ocean Barack Obama's speech on his personal Jeremiah has made waves but I see that the usual suspects in the right-wing commentariat are not satisfied: Krauthammer in the Washington Post opinion pages today and Michael Gerson in the same place earlier in...

Erbil, Kurdistan, Iraq - Five years ago tonight I was desperately running around Erbil, de facto capital of the Kurdish autonomous region, looking for a translator. The war was due to start any minute and I had yet to find someone competent enough to do the job for me. My...

London - they still don't get it.

From this side of the Atlantic it is abundantly clear. Six years into the most disastrous presidency in modern American history, the political class in Washington - first through fourth estates - still don't get it. They can no longer operate imperiously in...

London -- At High Noon on Good Friday 1998 the prospects for a deal to end the conflict in Northern Ireland were receding. Talks chairman, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, had set midnight as the deadline for reaching agreement, that moment had come and gone and after an...