I was in Newcastle on 9/11, giving a speech about the future of manufacturing in the northeast. I was chuffed to get my first interview at the BBC regional TV studio. Then I heard about the attack on the first tower in a taxi on the way to South Shields.
The decade since has been the most traumatic for the west since the 1930s. Now, as the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, we must ask ourselves how to draw a line under it, and salvage a position of stability and confidence. It will demand a radical shift in the way we think.
Over the past few centuries, there have been three systems of international order: economic and military domination; a balance of power; and shared sovereignty. They can coexist, as they more or less did in the years after 1945 in different parts of the world. But today America is
RICHARD_MORGAN
Fascinating that the (thankfully superannuated) David Miliband still has the arrogance to lecture us on justice and responsibility. This from the man who strenuously resisted any inquiry into the legitimacy of the Iraq war, the man who point blank refused to appear in his capacity as Foreign Secretary before a parliamentary committee on the use of torture by British and US intelligence, and the man who in that same capacity spent five million pounds of taxpayers’ money on affirming the ethnic cleansing of Diego Garcia by the British government and reversing a high court ruling that the Diego Garcian islanders had the right of return to the home that was stolen from them.
Quite a track record, that. Who’s next, Prospect? Bashar Al-Assad, perhaps, with a lecture on democratic accountability and the proportionate use of force?