George w bush

Saturday

Jacob Heilbrunn

The Iran strikes might be Trump’s Sarajevo moment

Here we go again. Switch out Saddam Hussein for the Ayatollah Khamenei and Ahmed Chalabi for Reza Pahlavi and you have a fresh war for regime change in the Middle East, this time with Israel as America’s sidekick. With Operation Epic Fury, the American and Israeli bombing of Iran and push for regime change, the self-proclaimed “President of Peace” runs the risk not only of triggering wider upheaval in the Middle East, but also globally. Is this a new Sarajevo moment? With Trump’s own generals having warned him that attacking Iran could be a debacle, he may have torched his own presidency Unlike George W. Bush in 2003, who worked

Tuesday

Daniel Rey

What was the point of the war in Afghanistan?

On 7 October 2001 President George W. Bush launched Operation Enduring Freedom – the invasion of Afghanistan. The operation sought to bring the architects of 9/11 to justice and reduce the threat of terrorism. Twenty years later, President Joe Biden has pledged to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by 31 August, bringing to a close the United States’s longest-ever conflict – known colloquially as ‘the forever war’. But Biden, who supported the invasion, is pulling out at a time when the Taliban – the highly-conservative Islamic organisation that was harbouring al-Qaeda in 2001 – is sweeping through half the country, killing civilians and human-rights defenders and besieging three cities. The US