Oliver Miles

According to the UN watchdog, Paulo Pinheiro, speaking in the General Assembly on 29 July, Syria is in free fall: 100,000 dead; refugees and displaced persons in the millions; atrocities of every kind; no end to the fighting in sight. Both Barack Obama and David Cameron have been under pressure to ‘do something’, and most media attention has focused on arming the rebels – as if they were short of arms. Both leaders were initially tempted but seem to have come off the boil.

Britain has been at war in Afghanistan for more than 12 years, which must be some kind of record. The media have largely forgotten about it, except when British soldiers are killed. Barack Obama said last month that the foremost US foreign policy concern was managing the withdrawal of its 62,000 troops. A Taliban political office in Doha was formally opened following long negotiations but promptly closed, apparently because of a row over its use of the name and flag of the 'Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan'. Coming back from a visit to Afghanistan, David Cameron welcomed the prospect of dialogue between Hamid Karzai's government in Kabul and the Taliban, but Karzai has called off the negotiations because of the row.

The Libyan government has appealed against the International Criminal Court’s order to hand over Gaddafi’s longtime intelligence and security chief (and brother-in-law) Abdullah al-Sanusi for trial in The Hague. His lawyer, Ben Emmerson QC, said last week: ‘Libya's rebel authorities need to understand that the days of show trials and summary executions are over.’ Sanusi is regarded in Libya as bearing the prime responsibility after Gaddafi for such crimes as the 1996 Abu Salim prison massacre, in which 1200 people died, as well as Lockerbie, the bombing of a French airliner, the murder of Yvonne Fletcher, the disappearance of the Lebanese Shia leader Imam Musa Sadr and the supply of arms to the IRA. Were Sanusi handed over to the ICC, he could never be tried for these crimes.

The European Coal and Steel Community and the other elements from which the EU springs were explicitly intended to make war between France and Germany ‘not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible’. That aim has been achieved, though America and Nato also played their part. But what contribution has the EU made to peacemaking elsewhere? I restrict my thoughts here to three conflicts in which I have been personally involved as a diplomat: Palestine, Cyprus and Northern Ireland.

Edwin Wilson, the CIA veteran jailed for carrying out the biggest illegal arms deal in US history, died in Seattle on 10 September aged 84. Born in Idaho, he joined the CIA in the 1950s after serving in the Korean War. He retired from the Company in 1971 but continued to work for them freelance and built up a fortune of over $20 million as an arms dealer, claiming to have arranged clandestine CIA arms shipments to Angola, Laos, Indonesia and Congo.