I am 35,000ft above Afghanistan. Beneath me, in the snowy hills, an insurgency is raging. In front of me sits David Miliband, Britain’s foreign secretary, who is leaning forward in his cream-coloured leather seat on a flight from Kabul to Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.

“Amartya Sen is a brilliant man,” remarks Miliband. “I think his argument that there is a fusion tradition – a liberal tradition that is concerned with social justice – is right. And I admire his work on capabilities, and on freedom as capability.”

At 42, Miliband is one of Britain’s youngest-ever foreign secretaries. As his musings on Amartya Sen [the Harvard academic and Nobel prize winner] suggest, he is also one of the most intellectual. The son of Ralph Miliband, a famous Marxist academic, he worked in a think-tank before serving as head of Tony Blair’s policy unit at 10 Downing Street. With the predictable British reaction to anybody who might seem a bit clever, Miliband’s colleagues in Downing Street nicknamed him “Brains”. He entered parliament in 2001 and rose swiftly. When Tony Blair was forced to step down as Labour leader and prime minister in 2007, despairing Blairites appealed to Miliband to run for the leadership against Gordon Brown. But Miliband resisted the temptation, and was rewarded with the job of foreign secretary when Brown formed a government.

A rise from the backbenches to one of the great offices of state in just six years demands real political skill. And a couple of days in Miliband’s company have convinced me that he is much more than a jumped-up intellectual. He has a politician’s knack for rarely saying the wrong thing – which makes him a tricky man to interview when there is a tape recorder running. He is also formidably energetic. His day began with an early morning visit to British troops in Kabul. It will end with a late-evening meeting in Dhaka, with politicians and businessmen. His schedule includes no “down time”. He doesn’t seem to sleep much, and his staff claim that they have to remind him to eat.

(more…)

Thank you to Pacifist et al, for drawing my attention to the White House’s displeasure at Zalmay Khalilzad’s decision to appear alongside the Iranian foreign minister at Davos. I was at that session and - I must say - I don’t think the Bush administration has much to fear. There were no surprises. The Iranians ranted about their right to nuclear energy and about injustice in the world. Khalilzad said nothing that was out of line with American policy.

But his general demeanour was cool and unconfrontational - and maybe that was the problem. As it happens, Khalilzad has impeccable neocon credentials. He studied under Albert Wohlstetter, a fiercely conservative strategist, and was a founder member of the Project for a New American Century. But, in other ways, he does not fit the stereotype. He is not a headbanger and has gone down very well as American ambassador to the UN. Unlike his predecessor, John Bolton, he does not go out of his way to offend people. And he also has a deep knowledge of the countries he is dealing with. He was born in Afghanistan and - at Davos - he listened to the Iranians without using the headphones.

(more…)

There is something about the last throes of an American presidency that seems to persuade occupants of the White House that it would be a good idea to try and solve the Middle East problem. Jimmy Carter tried it, so did Bill Clinton. In Britain, Tony Blair fell prey to the same temptation and is now a part-time peace envoy (when not giving speeches for exorbitant sums in China.)

The latest lame-duck president to try his hand at the peacemaking game is George W. Bush. To be fair, his efforts are considerably more half-hearted than those of Clinton or Carter. In fact, until very recently there was some doubt about whether the Annapolis summit would even take place. Now we seem to have a confirmed date - November 26th. But expectations are justifiably low. The only senior person in the Bush administration who seems remotely fired up is Condi Rice. In a speech this week she declared that "Failure is not an option" - always a phrase to make the heart sink.

(more…)

The king of Saudi Arabia has just made his first royal visit to Britain for 20 years. Roula Khalaf reports that the Saudis were surprised by the anger and criticism that was directed towards them in the British media. They shouldn’t have been. The fact is that the British are extremely uncomfortable about the sleazy nature of British-Saudi relations. I recently met a senior Foreign Office official who was willing to talk unguardedly about all manner of issues, except one thing - relations with Saudi Arabia and, in particular, the decision to drop a corruption inquiry into arms sales. At that point, he just shut up and refused to answer questions. I would say he was squirming, except that senior mandarins don’t squirm - they just look blank.

But it remains the case that when the Brits think about the Saudis, the ideas that are generally brought to mind are: arms deals, corruption, Mark Thatcher, the suppression of police inquiries, human-rights abuses, the sponsorship of terrorism, and the impossibility of buying a drink. None of these are positive images. Under the circumstances it was peculiarly inept of the Saudis to claim that they had provided valuable intelligence on the London tube bombings, which had been ignored. It would be even more appreciated if they stopped funding lunatic Wahabi mosques.

(more…)

Thanks to everybody who contributed to the Wikipedia discussion. I was reassured by the general consensus that using Wikpiedia is not the journalistic equivalent of putting on the dunce’s hat. As for the general discussion of Web 2.0 - very useful.

For anyone wondering what happens next, let me explain how I hope to use all this stuff:

I tend to have a list of topics that I hope eventually to write newspaper articles about. The idea is that at some point something happens in the news which makes my idea seem relevant - at which point, I pounce. Alternatively, if nothing much is happening in the news, I have an excuse to delve into my bag of general themes. So I will wait for my moment with the Web 2.0 stuff. And - in the meantime - if people feel inclined to contribute further thoughts to that discussion thread, so much the better.

Among the other topics that I’ve been planning to write about for ages are American "imperialism"; democracy promotion (was it a bad idea, etc…) and my personal hatred of Bono. Over the next few weeks, I’ll start discussions on all of these themes.

But first, empire:

Generally people who talk about "American imperialism" do not mean it in a nice way. But I was struck, during the run-up to the Iraq war, by the overt flirtation with the idea of empire among certain American policymakers and intellectuals. There is Ron Suskind’s now famous quotation of an unnamed senior Bush administration official, who allegedly said: "We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." Charles Krauthammer in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute in 2004 salivated that "this American Republic has acquired the largest seeming empire in the history of the world - acquired it in a fit of absent-mindedness greater even than Britain’s".

(more…)

Before the Iraq war, optimistic neo-conservatives came up with a new slogan about the Israel-Palestine conflict: “The road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad.” American victory in Iraq would create the political conditions for peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Now that the US is well on the way to failure in Iraq a new theory is doing the rounds. This time, “the road to Jerusalem runs through Tehran.” It is the rising power of Iran – fostered by the war in Iraq – that may create the conditions for peace between Israel and Palestine.

While the Baghdad road theory was based on an optimistic vision of the democratic transformation of the Middle East, the Tehran road theory is based on fear. It argues – essentially – that the rise of Iran is scary enough to give all sides in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute a new interest in finding a settlement. This has become especially urgent since the militant Islamists of Hamas – who are supported by Iran – have seized power in the Gaza Strip and split the putative Palestinian state in half.

Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, is trying to take advantage of the moment. She has promised that a peace meeting will be convened this autumn. The usual suspects will be there: the Israelis, the Palestinians, the US, the Egyptians, the Jordanians. The Saudis might also come, which would be regarded as an important development.

The remainder of this column can be read here (FT.com subscription required).

Life for the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank is getting steadily worse. On Wednesday, an Israeli official told me that the Gaza economy is in a “state of total collapse”. Travel for Palestinians on the West Bank is incredibly arduous because of the huge number of Israeli road-blocks.

But – right now – many Palestinians seem more pre-occupied by the internal dispute between Hamas and Fatah than by the Israelis. I got a sense of the bitterness of the dispute when I visited Issa Qaraqe, a Fatah legislator, in his offices in Bethlehem.

Qaraqe runs the Palestinian Prisoners Association, which tries to look after the interests of the 11,000 Palestinians in Israeli jails. He himself was imprisoned for 10 years and then released in 1993. On his office wall is a large poster of Bobby Sands, the first IRA hunger-striker to starve himself to death in a British prison.

But Qaraqe’s take on Hamas is almost as dark as the version you will get from the Israeli foreign ministry. He is not uncritical of his own organisation – and will admit that Fatah has committed human-rights violations and made huge political errors. But Hamas, he says, are Islamist fanatics and the tools of Iran. He says that while Fatah have a secular, democratic and nationalist view of the Palestinian problem, Hamas “approach the Palestinian issue as a religious question, not a national question.” He claims that Gaza is in the early stages of “Talibanisation” – and points to the destruction of the statue of the unknown soldier in Gaza, likening it to the Taliban’s destruction of Buddhist statues.

(more…)

Is Tony Blair the right man to bring peace to the Middle East? Plenty of people will have their say on that if - as predicted in today’s FT - Blair is appointed as a new envoy to the area. But, to my mind, the more interesting question is whether the Middle East is the right place to bring peace to Tony Blair.

Consider the problem. Here is a man who is leaving office reluctantly after 10 years in Downing Street. He is uncomfortably aware that his reputation for competence and morality has been badly damaged by the Iraq war. He is seeking redemption - and now wants to do something unarguably good. He wants to save something. He could try to save the planet from climate change - but Al Gore seems to have cornered that market. He is itching to save Africa - but there is no formal job to apply for. Oh well, it will have to be the Middle East.

(more…)

What is the answer to the rise of fundamentalism across the Muslim world? For years Europeans and Americans thought they knew the antidote: secular democracy.

In the Islamic world, Turkey has been the shining example. Not only is the country a member of Nato; it has also been held up as proof that a country can be simultaneously Muslim, prosperous, secular and democratic. So what are we to make of events in Turkey now? Secularists have demonstrated in huge numbers because they are terrified by the prospect of the indirect election of a mildly Islamist president, and the army has hinted that it may stage a coup to protect the secular character of the state. Secularism and democracy seem to be at war.

The paradoxes do not stop there. American neo-conservatives hoped that the invasion of Iraq would create a new bulwark of pro-western democracy in the Islamic world. But while the US has failed in this aim, it has managed to inflict grave damage on its strategic relationship with its most important partner in the Muslim world: Turkey.

The remainder of Gideon’s weekly column can be read here (FT.com subscription required).

One of the many ironies of the Bush presidency is that George W came to power determined to spend less time on the Middle East. Well the US is now heavily engaged on all fronts – Iraq, Iran and the Middle East peace process. I spent last week in Washington talking to administration officials - and others – and this is where things seem to stand:

(more…)