Paul McGeough

Republicans plot to steal White House

Paul McGeough There's a fiendish cleverness in perpetrating a fraud in broad daylight.

Paul McGeough

This is Romney's campaign to lose

Paul McGeough ELEMENTS of the commentariat are demanding a Sister Souljah moment from Mitt Romney. The call harks back to 1992 when candidate Bill Clinton gave the African-American rapper a jab in the ribs for her...

Paul McGeough

Brass hue to silver lining of a new Egypt

Paul McGeough An all's-well presumption in some quarters on the Egyptian presidential election is bizarre.

Paul McGeough

US exit creates army ripe for recruitment

Paul McGeough Numbers coming out of Afghanistan often are scary but try wrapping your head around this one - 123,500.

Paul McGeough

A great race is all about the timing

Paul McGeough Some will gloat about the skeleton that tumbled from Mitt Romney's closet this week. But I'm more taken with the timing.

One man's fate the flag for a billion

Paul McGeough Don't get me wrong. The treatment by Chinese authorities of the blind lawyer Chen and his family is appalling - even grotesque, if the latest accounts of his village home being converted into a...

Paul McGeough

Foiling attempts to follow the money

Paul McGeough With hundreds of millions of dollars sloshing around, American politics is a saleable commodity.

Paul McGeough

Terrorists thrive as US turns blind eye

Paul McGeough Who would have thought in a post-September 11 world that you could find an organisation that kills hundreds of Americans in dozens of terrorist strikes - but which Washington refuses to punitively...

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Paul McGeough

What it takes to put Tehran on the mat

Paul McGeough A quick fix is unlikely to emerge from talks in Istanbul, through which the West hopes to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Paul McGeough

Authoritarian habits prove hard to break

Paul McGeough If the rise of the Egyptian Islamists gives us a few laughs, the refusal by the Cairo generals to relinquish power is the stuff of tears.

Paul McGeough

Postage stamp nation as global ringmaster

Paul McGeough The word ''bluff'' gets an outing in analysis these days. Is Benjamin Netanyahu bluffing about an attack on Iran?

Paul McGeough

Take a bite out of Iran at your peril

Paul McGeough You'd have thought the reality of Afghanistan and Iraq might act as a break on the instinctive lunge by hawks to compare apples with oranges as they try to gull us into a belief that war is a doddle.

Libya's stalemate path bodes a long-term commitment from the West

Paul McGeough IT IS apparent on the battlefield but it's the background briefings that confirm the direction of the Libyan conflict: an open-ended stalemate that will suck in Western financial and military...

Paul McGeough

West will be losers if Gaddafi holds on

Paul McGeough Muammar Gaddafi looks like a flake, so we don't expect logic from him. But with all their fine suits and braided uniforms, we do expect it from those higher up in a Western military campaign that...

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Paul McGeough

No going back once the first shot's been fired

Paul McGeough If he was tuned in, George W. Bush would be forgiven a bout of nausea as news came through of the first missile strikes.

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Paul McGeough

After all the dithering, it may still be too late to turn the brutal tide

Paul McGeough Forgive the scepticism, but what if all the hairy-chested talk at the United Nations was too little? What if the world's statesmen could find it in themselves to act only when they knew it was too...

Paul McGeough

A fledgling democracy needs support, not suspicion

Paul McGeough AS IF they do not have enough on their plate, the biggest challenge for Egyptians after dislodging Hosni Mubarak is to prove that their uprising is not a repeat of the 1979 Iranian revolution, which...

Paul McGeough

Iran is still talking, if nothing else

Paul McGeough It could hardly be called an agreement. But when talks between Iran and a European Union-led delegation broke up in Geneva on Tuesday, a faint promise of more powwow hung in the chill Swiss air.

Paul McGeough

WikiLeaks reveals unreliable war cries and chequebook democracy

Paul McGeough THE danger in WikiLeaks' dump of reams of super-sensitive cables from Washington's worldwide listening posts is not merely that the game has been revealed but how it might play out in future.