In a Guardian column last Monday, Max Hastings observed: "Those of us who opposed military involvement in early-1990s Yugoslavia were probably wrong. The fact that it was difficult to do something should not have become an excuse for doing nothing. It we want to stop the Milosevices of the future, what will be needed are credible, muscular military actions, not gestures . . ."

It was a journalistic mea culpa [...]

To review these two books for the New Statesman is to have a small irony in attendance. Two and a half years ago, John Kampfner, then the New Statesman's political editor, now its editor, published a cover story on "Britain's neoconservatives". Kampfner linked four journalists of the right with two of the left and called them all neoconservatives, a term that the left has largely seen as one of abuse. [...]

A farewell article for the New Statesman - to which I have been at least a fortnightly contributor for the past seven years as well as being a former editor - is not the place for subtleties, which presuppose a continuing engagement with the readership. It is best for me to say, as clearly as I can, what I think are the central issues for the left to have emerged [...]

Terrorism seldom achieves its goal in modern democratic societies. As Michael Ignatieff reminded us in his fine series of Gifford Lectures, given in Edinburgh last year, none of the modern movements in Europe - the neo-Marxist murder and kidnap squads in Germany and Italy in the 1970s and 1980s, the Basque terrorists and the IRA - has accomplished what it wants, whether disintegration of the capitalist state or the creation [...]

As the time nears for a decision on the invasion of Iraq, support for that invasion within the European left has dwindled to a very small constituency. Of the ruling social democratic parties, only the British is fully in support: the German, Greek and Swedish leftist governments are all against. For those parties out of power, opposition to the war is fairly uniform - though capable of causing rifts and [...]

In the polemics between Europeans and Americans on the need for a war on Iraq, one large component of the US view is largely missed by Europeans. It is a new version of US idealism, or can-do-ism: the determination not just to remove the threat inherent in Iraq's ruthless leadership and its possession of weapons of mass destruction, but in doing so reshape its politics and society, and the politics [...]

Three things can be said about Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, as he enters the fourth year of his presidency. First, he is ruthless. He came to power as the second Chechen war was ramped up, and he has refused to consider any let up to this, one of the world's most murderous conflicts, in which a small country has been largely destroyed. He has given no sign whatsoever that [...]

Mass immigration will be among the most urgent issues facing rich countries this year. They will deal with it by becoming more restrictive, and much more choosy about whom they allow in to their countries. This is inevitable, given the political trends in the past year; it may also be desirable, on certain conditions.

It became obvious in 2002 that a significant proportion of European electorates could be roused to [...]

This is what we, the media, are doing. We are making of public life a goldfish bowl from which, at intervals, we pluck a fish and put it under a white hot lamp. If it survives, it may be tossed back. If not . . . not.

We treat men and women in public life as characters against whom we can rail, when they are judged (by us!) to have [...]

On 22 August, Le Monde led its front page with a story about the publication of a book of fewer than 100 pages. The book, The Call to Order: an inquiry into the new reactionaries, by the left-wing political philosopher Daniel Lindenberg, was a denunciation of the author's contemporaries on the left who were covertly endorsing a range of right-wing, indeed dangerously reactionary, positions.

It was not a particularly quiet [...]