Operation Iraqi Freedom is the name given to the invasion of Iraq on March 19 2003. Its objective was ‘regime change’ – a euphemism for the removal of Saddam Hussein from his post as leader of Iraq, and his replacement by a ‘democratically elected’ Iraqi government with whom the USA could ‘do business’. The casus …
Some time over the weekend of August 12-13 2000, while on a naval exercise inside the Arctic Circle, the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk sank to the bottom of the Barents Sea with all hands on board. The entire 118-strong crew perished on the Oscar II class submarine, built in 1994. According to the Russian navy, …
In the late 1980s, after the failure of his long and costly war against Iran, which had lasted for most of that decade, Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein started to cast around for a new target for his warmongering aspirations. His sights alighted on another neighbor, the small but oil-rich Gulf state of Kuwait. On August …
Although some progress towards detente had been made with the signing in 1963 of the Test Ban Treaty between the USA and the Soviet Union, there were still plenty of itchy fingers around nuclear buttons when, on January 17 1966, during a routine mid-air refueling operation off the Mediterranean coast of southern Spain, a US …
Now it seems either breathtakingly arrogant or plain mad, but in 1979 global diplomacy had no public voice for, nor knowledge of, Muslim fundamentalism. When President Jimmy Carter, as Commander-in-Chief, sent in his newly formed Delta Force to rescue 53 American hostages seized with the US Embassy in Tehran, he was behaving as the heads …
Since time immemorial Afghanistan has been riven by tribal, ethnic and religious conflict. In its harsh geography, authority expands and contracts beneath a patina of centuries of shifting loyalties. The process of forming reliable alliances has been too subtle for foreign invaders – including Alexander the Great, the Moghuls, the British (repeatedly), and in 1979, …