Alas poor Michael Jackson, I didn’t know him particularly well. In fact, I didn’t know him at all. I did, however, play a walk-on part in the media frenzy that surrounded him as his life became increasingly bizarre.

Jackson was in Bangkok in 1993 when the first allegations that he had an unhealthy interest in children were made. I was living there and together with my wife, who was working as a freelancer for the BBC, made my way down to the Oriental Hotel to see if we could put the allegations to Jacko directly. The whole place was, of course, a circus - the Oriental was surrounded by singing fans and the lobby was stuffed with security men. Jackson was on the top floor - but the lifts weren’t stopping there. But somehow we found out the room number of a member of his management team, who was on the tenth floor.

We went up there and rapped smartly on his door. The man from the Jackson team opened the door - behind him in the room, we could see some young Thai men who he seemed to be entertaining. As soon as we identified ourselves as journalists, he lost his temper - and tried to knock away the microphone that my heavily-preganant wife was waving. There was an unseemly bout of pushing and shoving. Eventually we beat a retreat. Our next move was to try the fire escape to see if we get upto the 12th floor - but that was also blocked by security men. So eventually we went outside the hotel and vox-popped fans on whether they believed the allegations. As far as I recall, all the British fans thought they were definitely true and all the Thais thought they were scurrilous lies.

Anyway, I’m sorry to lower the tone on the day of the poor man’s death. I don’t think he was up there with John Lennon or Elvis - but maybe he makes the Buddy Holly, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix league, when it comes to the untimely deaths of pop icons.

I have always found the idea that new media would somehow kill off old dictatorships unconvincing. The Chinese government seems to have coped perfectly well with the rise of the internet. Still, events in Iran have given a new lease of life to this theory. The use that the Iranian opposition has made of social networking sites and, in particular of Twitter, has excited lots of interest. Yesterday the State Department even asked Twitter to delay an update of its service, so as not to disrupt the role the micro-blogging service is playing in allowing the Iranian opposition to communicate with each other. (Note for my mother, you can post tiny little updates onto a twitter site, instantly, using a computer or your mobile phone - provided the “tweet” is no more than 140 characters long.) Some people have now predictably dubbed this the “Twitter revolution”.

Certainly, some of the tweets coming out of Iran make exciting reading. Andrew Sullivan has pulled together some of the best twitter feeds. And here are a few other popular ones that give you an idea of what information is coming out. Tehran Bureau, an interesting site that pulls together reporting from Iran, also has its own twitter feed.

Still, while I think Twitter gives a good sense of the atmosphere in Iran I cannot say that I felt espescially enlightened after reading all these tweets. The first and most obvious problem is that I don’t know who any of these people are - so it’s very difficult to gauge the accuracy of what they are reporting. Second, there is a limit to how much information you can convey in the requisite 140 characters - and, as for context or analysis, forget about it. I have found good reporting and opinion pieces and even the comments on my blog, rather more illuminating. Hearteningly, I do not seem to be alone in my scepticism about the Iran Twitter phenomenon, as this post from Dan Drezner illustrates.

Still, if readers want to direct me towards good blogs or sites or even tweets - or any other useful reading matter on events in Iran, please do.

Stephen Walt, the Harvard academic, has blogged about his ten favourite political films. It is a great idea, and I thoroughly approve of his top two choices: Dr. Strangelove and Casablanca. But overall, I think his list is a bit disappointing. And - as a couple of the commenters on his site point out - all the films he lists are American, which is a bit odd for a professor of international relations.

That said, it leaves a gap in the market for the rest of us. So here is my list of the top ten, non-American political films. This is very much a first effort. I scribbled them down in about half-an-hour. They are listed in a very rough order of preference:

1. The Marriage of Maria Braun - Fantastic Fassbinder movie about the rise of post-war Germany, made in 1979.

2. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie - This is not strictly speaking a political film, it is too surrealist for that. But Bunuel’s 1972 masterpiece contains the funniest diplomatic reception scene I’ve ever seen - as well as an excellent scene in which the ambassador of Miranda takes pot-shots at anarchists scoping out his embassy.

3. Burnt by the Sun (1994) - Gut-wrenching movie, set against the background of Stalin’s purges.

4. The Sorrow and the Pity - Famous masterpiece; a documentary about France under the Nazis that was so sensitive that it was not released for many years.

5. Monsieur Klein (1979) - On a similar theme, a Joseph Losey film about a Parisian art-dealer who tries to avoid being caught up in the deportation of the Jews, but it all goes horribly wrong.

6. The Yacoubian Building - A recent and very successful Egyptian film that paints a very depressing and compelling picture of modern Egyptian society.

7. The Lives of Others - Recent Oscar-winner, set in East Germany.

8. Apartment Zero - Homo-erotic thriller, made in the late 1980s, and set against the background of the dirty war in Argentina.

It strikes me that all the films I’ve listed so far are a little on the depressing side, so here are two more cheeeful ones to round things off.

9. L’Auberge Espagnol - Who would have thought that you could make a genuinely funny and touching film, centred around the EU’s Erasmus programme for exchange students? This was hugely popular among Eurocrats in Brussels. It came out about five years ago.

10. Carry on Cleo (1964) - Contains the best line in British cinema, when Caesar is attacked and shouts -”Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me.” Much better than “Et Tu Brute”.

Which reminds me, that - of course - Shakespeare was quite good on politics, so Carrying on Regardless:

11. MacBeth - the Polanski version.

12. And if you are allowed television series, Michael Dobbs’s “House of Cards” - with a particularly evil and murderous chief whip. Striking isn’t it, that only the British political movies are comedies.

Obama’s new Afghanistan strategy, announced today, is much as expected: more troops, more training for the Afghan army and police, more reconstruction and more of a focus on terrorism and Pakistan, with less emphasis on democracy-building.

The whole exercise suggests that the distinctions between the Bush and the Obama approaches to foreign policy may be less hard-and-fast than we thought. In the caricature version, it was Bush who was obsessed with the “global war on terror”, while Obama pushed idealistic ideas about democracy and human-rights. But here we have Obama ramping up the emphasis on terrorism and downplaying the liberal nation-building.

So will it work? Obama emphasised the necessary diversion of troops and resources from Iraq to Afghanistan. And indeed the US troops I met in Logar province a couple of weeks ago had been re-directed at short notice from Iraq to Afghanistan. The US will end up sending roughly 21,000 more troops - which is pretty much the same number that were sent for the surge in Iraq. Even so, there will still be only 60,000 US troops in Afghanistan - compared to 140,000 at the height of the Iraq war. And, as Nato briefers were at pains to point out, Afghanistan is a larger and more populous country with much more inhospitable terrain - and with a safe haven for Taliban forces right next door in Pakistan. Continue reading "The new Afghanistan strategy"

I stood about five feet from John McCain last night, as he gave an after-dinner speech at the German Marshall Fund’s Brussels forum.  It was odd to see him wandering around the hotel lobby alone and sitting quietly in seminars, and to think that if things had turned out differently … As for the speech, it was about Afghanistan - and a pretty standard, if well-delivered, version of the case for sticking it out. According to McCain, Nato’s credibility is on the line, we can’t afford to lose, if we do then the Taliban will come back to power, terrorists will roam wild and free. But we need to level with the public or there will be a backlash. This is going to take years, there will be an upsurge in fighting initially, it’s going to be really difficult. Or as Winston Churchill once put it, “I have nothing to offer you, but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” Except at the Brussels forum, there is also a rather nice pastry desert.

Standing in the front row while McCain spoke was none other than his pal, Misha Saakashvili, the president of Georgia. In fact, it was something of a coup for the organisers to have both Saakashvili and Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, at the same event. Lavrov was brusque, aggressive, confident and even funny - in a sinister sort of way. As for Saakashvili, he was more relaxed than I would have imagined given the external and internal assualt he has recently been under. And he certainly still has firm supporters. McCain is a long-time backer. But I was struck that Richard Holbrooke, now very senior in the State Department, also spoke very warmly of him.

The forum itself was a bit of a two-headed beast. There were lots of political sessions on the usual subjects: Nato, Afghanistan, Russia, climate change, Asia rising etc. And there were quite a few sessions on the economic crisis. I chaired one with Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank. But while the news out of the economic sesssions was pretty dire, this didn’t seem to impinge much on the deliberations of the political types. As far as they were concerned, it seemed to be geo-politics as normal. But not for much longer, I think.

In cowboy movies, there often comes a moment when somebody says “I don’t like it, it’s too quiet.” Then all hell breaks loose. If I was a member of the Obama campaign, I think I would be worrying that it’s too quiet. Of course, describing the frenzy of the last week of the campaign as “quiet” might seem a bit odd. But things still look unnaturally good for the Obama campaign. Poll after poll puts him ahead, some of them by double-digit margins. It’s been weeks since McCain led in any opinion survey. I don’t like it. It’s too good to be true.

I think my sense of foreboding on behalf of Obama feeds off two memories. First - the election four years ago. I went to bed in Britain around midnight with the BBC calling the election for Kerry. I woke up just before 6 am and turned on the radio. It was the middle of a discussion, but I could tell from the funereal tones of the BBC pundits that something had happened - Bush had won.

Then last January I was in New Hampshire for the primaries. Obama had a clear poll lead on the day before the election. We had all written our stories, predicting victory for him. Hell, Hillary had even cried on the eve of the vote. But - guess what - Obama lost.

Everything I read suggests that Obama has it all wrapped up - he leads in the polls, his campaign is more focussed, better financed and better organised, the McCain team are squabbling with each other, even diehard Republicans are endorsing Obama.

He can’t lose. Can he?

It looks like Plan B for the Lisbon Treaty might be in trouble, already. It was pretty obvious at the last EU summit that the idea is to proceed with ratification and then to try and force the Irish to re-consider. Given the irritating inflexibility of the Irish constitution, that would mean a second referendum.

But a new poll commissioned by Open Europe suggests that a second referendum would result in an even bigger Irish No vote. Some EU leaders reckon that the Irish are bound to re-consider, if all the other 26 countries can be persuaded to ratify. But “isolate Ireland” looks like a dubious strategy. First, I’m not sure it’s going to be that easy to secure ratification everywhere. Second, the new poll asks Irish voters how they would react if all the other countries have ratified. Answer - they become even more stubborn.

All this is a horrid dilemma for poor old Brian Cowen, the Irish prime minister. He is meant to “report back” to the European Council in October and “to suggest a way forward”. But what if there is no way forward?

Rupert Murdoch’s arrival at The Wall Street Journal is being greeted by American journalists with roughly the level of enthusiasm with which the Romans greeted Alaric the Visigoth. The Atlantic Monthly proclaims that the day the elderly tycoon took over the Journal was “a date that will live in infamy for a certain generation of American newsmen”.

The Atlantic frets that the Murdoch model will sacrifice “responsible, serious journalism” and damage public life in the process. Mr Murdoch’s defenders regard this as self-important tosh.

Of course, the reactions of anybody watching events at The Wall Street Journal from the Financial Times are bound to be a little complicated. But my first instincts were sympathetic to Mr Murdoch. A lot of American newspaper journalism strikes me as self-reverential, long-winded, over-edited and stuffy.

 The remainder of this column can be read here. Please post comments below.