91Èȱ¬

Someone, somewhere, wants you to believe that Israel is actively preparing plans to attack Iran's nuclear research plants.

So should you believe it? More importantly, should the Iranians believe it?

Israel, it's said, has just carried out a major military exercise which could easily have been a for such an attack.

quotes the former US ambassador at the UN, John Bolton, as suggesting that Israel may be planning an attack for after the US presidential election in November but before the inauguration of the next president in January - "too late to be accused of influencing the election and before needing a new president's green light."

But I think I would still advise caution. Take a look at a : to get to Iran from Israel you have to fly through the airspace of one or more of these countries: Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Iraq. The quickest way is to head due east, across Jordan and Iraq.

True, Jordan is probably in no position to object if the Israelis decide to do it that way. But who controls Iraqi air space? The US. So would Washington give Israel the green light?

Consider this scenario: Israel bombs Iran. Iran retaliates. Its proxies in Lebanon and Gaza (Hizbollah and Hamas respectively) launch multiple rocket attacks into Israel.

But they do more. They order their allies in Iraq into action against US forces there. As a well-informed American friend said the other day: "Israel attacks Iran with US approval and Americans die? I don't think so."

And there's one more thing you need to bear in mind as well. Israel is in the throes of yet another political crisis: the Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, is beset by corruption allegations and may well be gone by the end of the year. His challengers for the party leadership are already jockeying for position, some hoping to win support by making blood-curdling threats against Iran.

None of this means there won't be an attack. It just means that, as always in the Middle East, you shouldn't necessarily believe everything you hear.

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You can call me an old softie if you like, but I do have just a smidgen of sympathy for Gordon Brown this weekend.

It's a year since he finally made to it to Number 10, and all he hears is the sound of critics lamenting what a terrible job he's doing. From the "best Chancellor in British history" to the "worst Prime Minister since John Major" ... all in 12 short months.

So here, just for argument's sake, is the case for the defence. First, look at the calendar. By the time he took over as PM, Labour had already been in power for a decade. That's a long time in politics, and it's at least arguable that no PM taking over after 10 years is going to have an easy ride.

Alec Douglas-91Èȱ¬ took over from Harold Macmillan in 1963 (by which time the Tories had already been in power for 12 years) and was out a year later. James Callaghan took over from Harold Wilson in 1976 and lost an election three years later. John Major inherited from Margaret Thatcher in 1990, unexpectedly won the next election in 1992, but then limped on after the debacle of Black Wednesday until he was defeated by Tony Blair in 1997.

So the omens for Gordon Brown were never favourable. Second, look at the economic cycle. Yes, he liked to claim that he had abolished "boom and bust", but even he must have known that the good times weren't going to last for ever, although he probably couldn't have forecast the sub-prime mortgage fiasco and the consequent credit crisis. It was never going to be easy to retain a reputation as a miracle-worker once the downturn set in.

I wrote a year ago, when he took over as Prime Minister with the cheers for the departing Tony Blair ringing in his ears: "I fear the warm glow of satisfaction will be short-lived ... Political honeymoons don't last long these days."

We knew then that he was detail-obsessed: no one who had been listening to his Budget speeches over the years could have been in any doubt about that. But we didn't know he would find it so hard to make decisions and stick to them. An autumn general election? Signing the Lisbon Treaty? Tax changes for non-doms? The abolition of the 10p income tax band? There's been, shall we say, quite a bit of recalibrating on the hoof.

We knew he lacked Tony Blair's easy charm and communication skills. But we didn't know that he would find it so difficult to respond to voters' needs as food and fuel price increases began to hurt.

So yes, it's been a dreadful year for Mr Brown and the Labour party. Party strategists now seem to be divided into two camps: one lot are asking: "What do we have to do to win a fourth term in office?"; the other lot are asking: "What do we have to do after we've lost the next election?"

My own hunch at the moment is that it would take nothing short of a miracle for Labour to win. (And no, I don't think a change of leader would help.) But let me give you a tip: keep a very close eye on that new mayor of London, Boris Johnson. He's now by far the most powerful Tory in Britain, and I'm told there's no love lost between him and David Cameron.

Maybe it's because Boris thinks he'd make a better PM than Mr Cameron, or maybe it's something to do with old Eton rivalries. But if the mayor gets into trouble - something for which, on past experience he seems to have a special talent - David Cameron and his plans could be badly hit.

Wouldn't it be odd if Gordon Brown's fate now rested in the hands of Boris Johnson?

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It's simple really: if you're paid to be an adviser, keep your mouth shut.

As Margaret Thatcher famously said on the occasion of the resignation of her chancellor Nigel Lawson in 1989: "Advisers advise, and ministers decide."

The same goes, I would suggest, for US presidential candidates and London mayors.

So s adviser Charlie Black was, er, ill-advised to tell magazine: "Certainly [a terrorist attack] would be a big advantage" to the McCain campaign. Yes, it may be true, and yes, lots of other people have said the same thing. But what's an adviser doing talking to Fortune magazine anyway?

Likewise, James McGrath, senior adviser to the mayor of London, . When a journalist asked him for his reaction to a suggestion that Mr Johnson's election could cause an exodus of Caribbean immigrants, he replied: "Well, let them go if they don't like it here."

Which didn't go down well, and Mr McGrath is now looking for a new job.

So unusual though it may be for a reporter, I find myself suggesting that maybe some people really shouldn't talk - at least not for attribution - to reporters.

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A week from today, the people of Zimbabwe will face an unusually stern test of their mettle. In the face of widespread and intimidation, will they have the courage to turn out to vote in the run-off presidential election?

Thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands, have already been forced to flee from their homes by supporters of President Mugabe's ZANU-PF party. They will not be allowed to vote because they are no longer in the electoral district where they are registered. Others have had their identity documents confiscated by armed men at road-blocks because they did not know the words of ZANU-PF chants. They, too, will be disenfranchised, because without documents, they can't vote.

So what about those who, despite everything, insist on turning out next Friday? Some of them, when they get to the polling station, will be "invited" to accept assistance from government agents. If they decline, they will be labelled as opposition supporters, and their homes, their families, even their lives, will be at risk.

You think I may be exaggerating? I wish I were. Just yesterday, reported the finding of 12 more bodies of murder victims. Most of them bore signs that they had been tortured to death. This is no longer a campaign of violence, said one senior Western diplomat in the region, this is terror, plain and simple.

But something is stirring among Zimbabwe's neighbours. After having watched for years in silence as the country slid into poverty and anarchy, Mr Mugabe's neighbours are at last speaking out. Over the past couple of days, as if with one voice, they have criticised the terror unleashed in Zimbabwe - and have warned that unless something changes pretty dramatically over the next few days, there is no way that the outcome of the election can be regarded as legitimate.

So here's an imaginary scenario for you: the elections go ahead, and substantial numbers of people turn out to vote. The opposition MDC promptly announce that their leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, has won. ZANU-PF say rubbish and, after another lengthy delay, just like after the first round of elections, pronounce Robert Mugabe the winner.

What then? Will angry opposition supporters take to the streets, as they did in Kenya? Will government troops and security forces go on the offensive and crush any sign of dissent? Will President Mbeki of South Africa, who's meant to be mediating in the crisis on behalf of Zimbabwe's neighbours, urge that the elections be annulled and some form of unity government cobbled together instead? (Reports in the South African press suggest that he is already, in fact, proposing something along those lines.)

It is difficult to see any prospect of President Mugabe, after 28 years in power, agreeing to step down. Yet the same was said at various times of the Shah of Iran and Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania. Yet they did, eventually, bow to the inevitable - one died in exile in 1980, and the other was executed in 1989.

The MDC are insisting that they will offer Mr Mugabe a guarantee of his personal safety. He is, even now, a hero of his country's independence struggle, so he may avoid the fate of either the Shah or Ceausescu.

But he must know that with his neighbours now running out of patience (the Tanzanian foreign minister used those exact words in a 91Èȱ¬ interview yesterday), his options are few. His neighbours fear a total breakdown of order across their borders - and it's beginning to look as if they've decided that the only way to avoid it is by easing President Mugabe into retirement.

It's going to be a tense few days, but we'll do everything we can to report and analyse the developments for you as they unfold.

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Read moving account of what it means trying to live a normal life in Baghdad. It's written by an Iraqi journalist who works for the American McClatchy newspaper group.

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I'm beginning to wonder if Europe's political leaders perhaps aren't very good at their jobs.

After all, they insist that the changes they want to make to the way the EU is run are vital. Trouble is, they don't seem able to persuade their voters. Not in France or the Netherlands three years ago, and not in Ireland last week.

Let's start by giving them the benefit of the doubt. Let's assume that they haven't spent the best part of five years agonising over mind-numbingly complex voting formulae and textual amendments just because it's their idea of fun. Maybe they have a point when they say that the rules drawn up for a club of half a dozen don't work too well in a club of 27.

So why can't they convince the voters? First, I would suggest they haven't tried very hard. It all seems so obvious to them that it didn't occur to them that it might not seem so obvious to the rest of us. And anyway, it is all horribly complicated, so we probably wouldn't understand.

Second, they have been strangely reluctant to admit that if you're in a club with just a few other members, you're bound to have more influence than if there are more than two dozen. Voters in Ireland weren't slow to appreciate that if there's no longer a permanent Irish member of the European Commission, which is what the Lisbon treaty proposed, it's just possible that their interests may not be as well looked after as they used to be.

But there may also be a sub-text here as well. I remember in the early 1990s, when I used to cover EU summits as a matter of routine, that the UK government was always pushing for enlargement. "Wider, not deeper" was the mantra - for the simple reason that the Major government thought that if you could open up the EU to enough new members, then all this stuff about "ever-closer political union" would inevitably have to be cast aside.

As so often, the writers of "Yes, Minister" spelt it out with admirable clarity:

Jim Hacker: Why is the foreign office pushing for higher membership?

Sir Humphrey: I'd have thought that was obvious. The more members an organisation has, the more arguments it can stir up. The more futile and impotent it becomes.

Jim Hacker: What appalling cynicism.

Sir Humphrey: We call it diplomacy, Minister.

(The full clip is .)

Those who have been arguing with such conspicuous lack of success in favour of the Lisbon reforms say that without them, the EU will not be able to take effective action on climate change, energy security, or organised crime. If Europe wants to be able to stand up to the US, Russia, China and India, they say, it has to be able to speak with a single voice.

But my impression from having reported on the French, Dutch and Irish referendums is that a major factor in the Non/Nee/Nil votes was a simple, visceral suspicion of Brussels. True, Ireland has done very nicely in the past out of EU development grants - but more recently, there have also been large numbers of migrant workers arriving to take advantage of a booming economy.

To many EU voters - not only in France, the Netherlands and Ireland, but also in Germany, Italy and Spain -- EU enlargement has meant more foreign workers. And they just don't like it. Nor do they like being told to vote for something that they don't understand a word of, and which political leaders seem unable to explain.

So what about Croatia and Turkey, and Ukraine and Serbia, all of which are hoping to join the EU over the coming decade? My hunch is it ain't going to happen. Which causes much scratching of heads in some EU capitals, where diplomats are convinced that holding out EU membership as an incentive to democratise is a highly effective tool of diplomacy.

Perhaps John Major was right: you can have a wider EU, or a deeper, more integrated, EU. But you can't have both, or at least not until you've found a way to persuade voters that their interests are being looked after too.

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Question 1: Are you in favour of referendums? Please answer either Yes or No.

Question 2: Are you in favour of referendums if you have good reason to expect the majority vote will not be the one you would wish? Again, please answer Yes or No.

Question 3: Do you think there are some questions that are just too complex to answer with a simple Yes or No? Please answer ... but you get the idea.

I've just been in Dublin, where yesterday they were being asked to vote in a referendum on the EU's Lisbon reform treaty. This is pretty much the same document as the one we used to call the Constitutional Treaty, but French and Dutch voters put that one out of its misery, so now it's been reborn without its constitutional fripperies.

I was in France and the Netherlands, too, for their referendums three years ago, so I may be in danger of becoming an EU referendum expert. And the one thing I have learned is that when people vote in these exercises, they tend not to answer the precise question on the paper.

Whatever the actual wording, the question people prefer to answer is: Do you approve of what the government is up to? Or perhaps: Do you approve of what the EU is up to? Or even: Are you happy with things in general, all things considered, by and large?

And because most people have little difficulty in finding things to complain about, the Noes seem to have a built-in advantage. (I'm writing, of course, before the announcement of the Irish referendum result. Maybe the Irish will prove to be rather happier than their French and Dutch counterparts were in 2005.)

The best question I saw asked in Ireland was in the Irish Independent: "Why should I say Yes to a legal document I don't understand?"

So perhaps it would be useful for me to give you a taste of what the Lisbon Treaty actually says. It starts like this:

"1) The preamble shall be amended as follows:

(a) the following text shall be inserted as the second recital:

"DRAWING INSPIRATION from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of
Europe, from which have developed the universal values of the inviolable and
inalienable rights of the human person, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law,";

(b) In the seventh, which shall become the eighth, recital, the words "of this Treaty" shall be replaced by "of this Treaty and of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union,";

(c) In the eleventh, which shall become the twelfth, recital, the words "of this Treaty" shall be replaced by "of this Treaty and of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union,".

I could go on, but I strongly suspect you'd rather I didn't. (There are 260 pages of it, and you can read every word .) To be fair, the Irish foreign minister, Micheal Martin, did point out when I interviewed him that people don't necessarily read every word of the Finance Bill when it's presented every year - but that doesn't mean they're not in favour of their taxes going down.

But then they're not asked to approve it in a referendum either. It really isn't easy to persuade people to say Yes to something which reads like the very worst that lawyers could come up with.

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Two 91Èȱ¬ journalists were murdered over the weekend, in Somalia and Afghanistan. Both were local men, risking their lives to help report on events in their own countries.

Today, with hundreds of colleagues, I stood in silence outside Bush House in London to honour their memories.

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Why did no one send troops into Burma to bring help to the hundreds of thousands of victims of Cyclone Nargis? Why is no one talking of military intervention in Zimbabwe to relieve the suffering of the people of that country? What on earth happened to all that talk we used to hear about "humanitarian intervention"?

It was to try to find some answers to these questions that The World Tonight co-sponsored a conference in London yesterday at the foreign policy think-tank . It threw up some sharp differences of opinion and some fascinating insights into the debate now under way among policy advisers and academics.

Think back for a moment to 1999. NATO was in action in Serbia and Kosovo to support ethnic Albanians against Serb troops and militias. Tony Blair made a much-discussed in Chicago in which he said: "The most pressing foreign policy problem we face is to identify the circumstances in which we should get actively involved in other people's conflicts."

Fast forward to September 2005, when the United Nations World Summit issued a , later endorsed by the UN Security Council in , which said inter alia: "Each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity ... The international community, through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means ... to help to protect populations ... In this context, we are prepared to take collective action ... should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity."

That encapsulates what has become known as the "responsibility to protect", or R2P, doctrine. But something happened between 1999 and 2005. The attacks of September 2001 led to US-led invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq - nothing to do with "humanitarian intervention" or R2P. The idea of waging war for human rights was quickly overtaken by what President Bush called the war against terror.

So was R2P as a UN doctrine still-born? Does it hold out to people in need of protection a promise that the world's most powerful nations no longer have any intention of fulfilling? It's a fact that since Kosovo, which is now nearly 10 years ago, there has been no further "humanitarian intervention". (The Australian-led intervention in East Timor later in 1999, and the British military intervention in Sierra Leone the following year, were both somewhat different, given that they took place either with what is known as the "coerced consent" of the authorities, in the case of East Timor, or with the government's full consent, in the case of Sierra Leone.)

The former defence secretary and foreign secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind argued at our conference that more often than not, "humanitarian interventions" do more harm than good. They change internal political dynamics, he said, strengthening some groups at the expense of others; they risk generating armed opposition from within; and they can change regional power balances. His message in a nut-shell was: "Except in cases of genocide, intervene at your peril."

So here's the question we're left with: If one day we see more pictures on our TV screens of mass murder, as in Rwanda, or of callous indifference to profound human suffering, as in Burma or Darfur, will we press our governments to send in the troops? Or will we look at Kosovo - and at Afghanistan and Iraq, even though the armed interventions there were undertaken for very different reasons - and say we're not prepared to get involved?

None of us likes standing by and doing nothing when we see our fellow humans in need. But is there a better way of helping them - a better way of fulfilling our "responsibility to protect" - than by going in with guns blazing? We'll be discussing some of these issues on the programme tonight, so I hope you'll be able to tune in and then let us have your thoughts via the website.

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Five months ago yesterday, a young, relatively unknown junior senator from Illinois called Barack Obama won the Iowa Democratic party caucus. The former First Lady Hillary Clinton came third.

Five months from today, US voters will choose their next President. In other words, we are now exactly half way through what's turning out to be an extraordinarily gripping 2008 US election cycle.

Four years ago, I was in Boston, when that same Barack Obama spoke at the Democratic Party convention and referred to himself as "a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too." I doubt that he believed then that the place for him might be in the White House.

But now even the , not normally enamoured of Democratic party presidential candidates, refers to him in the same breath as what it calls America's two foremost cultural icons, Tiger Woods and Oprah Winfrey.

So here's what you need to keep an eye on over the coming weeks and months.

1. Hillary Clinton: will she throw her full support behind Obama? (My guess is Yes.) Will he appoint her as his vice-presidential running mate? (My guess is No.) Will some of her campaign strategists and fund-raisers now join his team, and if they do, will that cause tensions? (Yes, and Yes.)

2. John McCain: will the spotlight now shine on him, having left him pretty much in the shadows during the Obama-Clinton slugfest? (Yes.) Will he start attacking Obama as an inexperienced liberal elitist, out of touch with mainstream America? (Is the Pope Catholic?)

3. The rumour mill: Watch the bloggers. Some will peddle rumours, which may or may not be true, but which will be designed to derail campaigns and damage candidates' reputations. It'll work both ways, and it'll be nasty. Both sides are already whispering that there's "stuff" waiting to come out. Ignore them until they either put up or shut up.

4. The debates: no US Presidential campaign is complete without televised debates. Obama has already done countless ones with Hillary Clinton, in some of which he didn't do terribly well. McCain has done fewer, and is a far less impressive public speaker. Does it matter? (Yes.)

5. The wives: The media seem to think that both Michelle Obama and Cindy McCain will provide good stories. Mrs Obama had a tough childhood on the South side of Chicago; Mrs McCain was born into a wealthy family in Arizona. There's plenty of scope for pot-stirring.

But maybe you're not as enthralled by all this as I am. (After all, it's only the leadership of the most economically and militarily dominant power on earth that's at stake.) In which case, take a break ... and I'll bring you up to date at the end of August, when Senator Obama, the first black candidate to be nominated for the US Presidency by a major political party, will address the Democratic party convention. Given his past record as a speech-maker, you won't want to miss it.

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