Paul McGeough

The military adviser left out in the cold

Paul McGeough The lost pages of Catch-22 have turned up: they are the real-life career notes of Gwenyth Todd.

Throwing good money after bad

Paul McGeough The pussyfoot President is off to the Middle East and you won't believe the nonsense going on over where he can and can't go in Israel and, for a matter of minutes, the Palestinian Occupied...

US war for oil lacks a punchline

Paul McGeough 'What's the difference between a duck,'' my father would ask us as kids.

Alexander leaves us on a downer

Paul McGeough A great week for huffin'-'n'-puffin', what? First, Alexander Downer takes an airbrush to history. And then, more gobsmackery by our top soldier, on what he ''always knew'' was a raw deal for the...

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So many secrets, not enough intelligence

Paul McGeough Does this jolt to the massive combine that is the US intelligence system, by the unseemly departure of the head of the CIA in what we know as the Petraeus affair, require a pause to look at the house...

Paul McGeough

Rash Israel lights Arab Spring powder keg

Paul McGeough The Middle East this week? Think Colorado in July and the movie megaplex massacre.

Paul McGeough

Bibi the fall guy as Barack wins the lot

Paul McGeough Moscow's thinking on the new Obama line-up comes discreetly, deniably.

Paul McGeough

US talks reform from comfort of fence

Paul McGeough Amid historic hoopla, something often happens that comes back to bite someone on the bum.

Paul McGeough

Coalition of the unwilling to understand

Paul McGeough With apologies to film director Ken Kwapis, they're just not that into us. We're talking about Afghans.

Paul McGeough

Assad's Alawites run out of options

Paul McGeough The dilemma for Syria's Alawites is acute. Do they go off a cliff with Bashar al-Assad, or can they retreat to safe ground?

Paul McGeough

War of words is Israel's best defence

Paul McGeough Is Israel actually going to war - or merely threatening to go to war?

Paul McGeough

Rebels bank on Aleppo as new Benghazi

Paul McGeough Let's get real. The Syrian conflict is a war, not a French-knitting circle.

Paul McGeough

In the US, the gun lobby calls the shots

Paul McGeough It didn't take long for a would-be copycat of last week's Colorado mass killer to emerge.

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

Why Obama faces a hopeless war in Syria

Paul McGeough ''Sensible'' doesn't cut it when women and children are being murdered on YouTube.

Paul McGeough

Egyptian generals let Arab Spring wilt

Paul McGeough The jig was up in Cairo when Barack Obama coughed up to the generals a cool $1.5 billion.

Paul McGeough

When charity bites the hand that feeds it

Paul McGeough In Afghanistan it's mop-up time. As foreign armies eye the exits, a meeting in San Francisco last week was a different kind of mopping-up for a non-combat force that is likely to remain on the ground...

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.

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

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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