Alex Spillius

France’s intervention in the Ivory Coast is further proof of Nicolas Sarkozy’s growing appetite for muscular intervention.

French and UN troops have helped arrest Laurent Gbagbo, whose refusal to let president-elect Alassane Ouattara was plunging the country into civil war.

It was Sarkozy who first recognised the Libyan rebels and France who fired first on Muammar Gaddafi’s forces. He took a tougher line on Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak than Britain or the United States. He has been aggressive against Iran’s nuclear weapons plans and personally intervened in the crisis in Georgia in 2008 as president of the European Union, helping ensure that Russia did not invade.

What is he up to? There are plenty of domestic critics who think he is trying to boost flagging poll numbers ahead of what promises to be a difficult re-election. Supporting the youth of the Arab spring will be useful with France’s North African minorities given Marine Le Pen’s challenge from… Read More

Here is my column for the American Way slot in tomorrow’s Sunday Telegraph. Both sides will claim credit for avoiding a shutdown, but in the short term the Tea Party-backed Republicans are the winners, as their cost-cutting agenda now dominates Washington.

So the government of the United States has not shut down after all. An agreement on the current year’s budget was reached, literally at the eleventh hour, on Friday night in Congress and the world’s sole superpower remains open for business.

Tourists were on Saturday happily strolling around the Washington Monument and the doors of the capital’s eminent Smithsonian museums were open for business. Soldiers fighting in Afghanistan will receive their next pay slip on time and 800,000 federal workers, 18 percent of the central government’s workforce, have avoided a temporary lay-off.

What matters now is the politics and who takes the credit, not so much for averting the shutdown, but… Read More

I just attended an eye-opening roundtable discussion with several members of Saudi Arabia’s Majlis al-Shura, the advisory council to King Abdullah, at the New America Foundation here in Washington.

It was a great chance to assess the Saudi government’s take on the change sweeping the Arab world, and where it is positioning itself. It was hard to conclude that its location is currently on the wrong side of history.

The level of denial about Bahrain, which is the kingdom’s key concern in the region, was startling. One delegate said there was “no major crackdown” in Bahrain, despite the fact that the security forces opened fire in Manama’s Pearl Roundabout, You-Tube footage can be seen of protestors being shot at point blank range, the main opposition newspaper has just been shut down amid the emergency rule imposed a month ago. Not forgetting that Gulf Co-operation Council forces agreed to a… Read More

President Barack Obama speaks about Libya (Photo: AP)

Plenty of commentators here in the United States are searching for an Obama doctrine in the president’s speech on Libya last night.

As always with this president, his exact beliefs were hard to pin down. He made it clear that he felt the US had no choice but to act to prevent a slaughter of in the rebel-held city of Benghazi. Yet he admitted the US could not always intervene every time brutal repression shows itself in the world.

It was clear that while Obama is president, unilateral US military action is highly unlikely, but at the same time he grandly touted America’s leadership in the world.

He called for Gaddafi to go, but declined to target him directly with air strikes or “boots on the ground”…. Read More

Obama delivers a statement about Libya in the East Room of the White House (Photo: Getty)

After eight years of George W Bush, a majority of Americans wanted a president who didn’t shoot from the hip, and that is certainly what they have got in Barack Obama.

When it came to taking action against Libya, the leader of the free world kept his pistol in its holster until the last possible minute.

We now learn that it was only last Tuesday night, at the end of an extremely tense meeting of his national security staff, that the president finally come down on the side of military intervention and decided to throw the crucial support of the United States behind UN resolution 1973, which passed just 48 hour… Read More

Now that Col Gaddafi is winning, the Obama administration now appears inclined not just to impose a no-fly zone against the Libyan leader, but a no-drive zone and a no-sail zone too.

That, at least, is the impression some analysts and journalists in Washington have taken from comments made late on Wednesday by Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the US.

“We are interested in a broad range of actions that will effectively protect civilians and increase the pressure on the Gadhafi regime to halt the killing and to allow the Libyan people to express themselves in their aspirations for the future freely and peacefully,” she said. “Those include discussion of a no-fly zone, but the US view is that … a no-fly zone has inherent limitations in terms of protection of civilians at immediate risk.”

Some in the administration have been keen to encourage the impression that it has adopted a more… Read More

AS with many Congressional hearings, it is hard to see what the point is of Peter King’s session tomorrow, beyond buttressing the opinions of the congressman in the committee chair.

The hearing at the House homeland security committee is entitled “The Extent of Radicalisation in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response”.

Muslim groups and civil rights activists have accused King of McCarthyism, of starting a witch hunt against Muslims. They argue it is prejudiced to single out Muslims rather than other extremists such as the Ku Klax Klan or Right-wing haters.

But for all of King’s distrust of the Muslim community – evident in the very title of the hearing – that is an over-reaction. There is a problem with domestic Islamist terrorism in the US. To deny that would be absurdly over-sensitive and patronizing to Muslims.

As Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security Secretary, said last month at another hearing before King’… Read More

Barack Obama has taken his biggest political blows from his healthcare bill, but make no mistake, his most thorough defeat has been his failure to close Guantanamo.

His announcement of new legal rules and regulations for the al-Qaeda prison on Monday was dressed up as a victory for American justice, but it was really just codification of the Bush-era regime. Having grandly declared on his second day in office that he would close the detention centre within a year, he never came close.

Now military trials will resume and indefinite detention without trial has the full blessing of the administration. When Guantanamo will close, nobody knows.

Events and Congress conspired against Obama. Funds were denied to transfer prisoners to even a super-super-max prison in Illinois. The authorities in New York rejected putting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other 9/11 alleged plotters on trial. Since early 2009, Yemen has imploded, preventing the State Department from… Read More

Here is my guest appearance in the American Way slot in today’s Sunday Telegraph, on Mike Huckabee’s outburst against Barack Obama:

Mike Huckabee may or may not win the Republican presidential nomination, but he is certainly giving Sarah Palin a run for her money as chief conservative controversialist.
The former Arkansas governor, who consistently polls among the top three potential Republican contenders for 2012, last week matched the former vice-presidential candidate’s knack for grabbing negative headlines when he erroneously claimed Barack Obama was raised in Kenya.
He surmised that Obama had, as a youth, been instructed in the evils of British conduct during the Mau Mau rebellion, becoming infused with an anti-colonial, anti-Western attitude.
Apart from the fact that Americans, of all people, should not have a problem with anti-colonialism, Obama did not visit Kenya, the land of the father he barely knew, until he was well into his twenties.
Under pressure the next day, Huckabee… Read More

Muammar Gaddafi: President Obama hascalled for him to step down

The natural headline from Barack Obama’s first taken question on Libya yesterday was his call for Col Muammar Gaddafi to step down. It was indeed the first time the US president had made such a statement publicly, and he did so with some force.

But on the most pressing question facing Washington and other Western capitals – the imposition of a no-fly zone against the Libyan leader’s air power – Obama prevaricated.

His message was that until things get a lot worse in Libya, until the humanitarian crisis is greater or civilians are dying in even larger numbers, we do nothing.

The key quote was: “So what I want to make sure of is that the United States has full capacity to act potentially rapidly if the situation… Read More