Paul Leslie Moorcraft (born 1948 in Cardiff, Wales) is the Director of the Centre for Foreign Policy Analysis in London and visiting professor at Cardiff University's School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies. He is widely acknowledged to be one of the United Kingdom's leading commentators on security and defence issues and a specialist in crisis communications.
Moorcraft was born in 1948 in Cardiff, Wales. He attended Canton High School, Cardiff, and then Swansea, Lancaster and Cardiff Universities. Later, he studied at universities in the Middle East, and in southern Africa (University of Pretoria and University of Harare). He married Susan van den Brink in 1987 on an island in Zimbabwe's Lake Kariba. In his memoirs, he said it happened "almost by accident". The marriage was dissolved in 1993. Paul Moorcraft now lives in the Surrey Hills, near Guildford in the United Kingdom.
Career
Moorcraft has been the Director of the Centre for Foreign Policy Analysis since its establishment in 2004. The centre is an independent non-political organization dedicated to conflict resolution.
In the course of his academic career he taught full-time at the universities of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, Natal, Cape Town, and the Witwatersrand, Cardiff, Baylor (Texas), Deakin (Australia), Waikato (New Zealand) and Bournemouth, as well as lecturing part-time at the Open University and Westminster University. His subjects ranged from international politics to journalism. In his second book of memoirs, Guns and Poses (2001), he says he regards his academic career as "a sideline" to his interest in writing.
Moorcraft has also worked for the British defence establishment. He is a former senior instructor at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, and has also taught at the UK Joint Services Command and Staff College. He also worked in corporate communications in the British Ministry of Defence in Whitehall. The Ministry of Defence recalled him for six months during the Iraq war in 2003.
Moorcraft has also pursued a successful career as a journalist. He was the editor of a range of security and foreign policy magazines, including Defence Review and Defence International. He worked for Time magazine, the BBC and most of the Western TV networks as a freelance producer and war correspondent. He was a Distinguished Radford Visiting Professor in Journalism at Baylor University, Texas. Over the past three decades, he has worked in 30 war zones in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and the Balkans, often with irregular forces. For example he travelled with Afghan mujahidin and reported on their war against Soviet occupiers in the 1980s. While filming the mujahidin in action he was hit by mortar bomb debris which exacerbated an earlier eye injury. Blinded in one eye for a time, he subsequently made a full recovery. Most recently he has been working in Iraq, Palestine/Israel, Nepal, Sudan and again in Afghanistan.
Moorcraft is also a crisis management consultant to such international blue-chip companies as Shell, British Gas, 3M, Standard Bank etc., as well as for various government organizations.
He is the author of a wide range of books on military history, politics and crime. Moorcraft is a regular media commentator and appears regularly on BBC TV and radio, as well as Sky, Al Jazeera, CBC, the Islam channel and Press TV. He is also an op-ed/columnist for major international newspapers including The Guardian, Washington Times, Canberra Times, Business Day, New Statesman and Western Mail. In 2005 he co-authored Axis of Evil: The War on Terror (Pen and Sword, May 2005). An updated version, The New Wars of the West, was published by Casemate in the US in 2006. His Shooting the Messenger: The Political Impact of War Reporting (Potomac, Washington, 2008), is co-authored with Professor Philip M. Taylor. The Rhodesian War: A Military History, the authoritative study of the Rhodesian civil war (with Dr Peter McLaughlin) was also published in 2008 by Pen and Sword books.
Moorcraft is an award-winning novelist, best known for his Anchoress of Shere (Poisoned Pen Press, 2003). Although the bible of US publishing, Publishers Weekly, gave it a rare starred review and chose it as a "notable mystery" for 2002, other reviewers found the book "too disturbing" to read. Some of the more graphic sections presumably prompted a more positive response in Japan, where a translated edition was published in 2004.
Charity work: He takes an active interest in raising awareness of dyscalculia in children.
Critics have pointed out apparent contradictions in Moorcraft's busy, even picaresque, lifestyle. He was elected as a Plaid Cymru (Welsh Nationalist) councillor, while also having been an instructor at Sandhurst and serving in numerous roles in the UK Ministry of Defence, often in war zones a long way from Wales. Moorcraft also conducted one of the first major interviews with Robert Mugabe at the end of the Rhodesian war. He praised Mugabe for his conciliatory attitude towards the white Rhodesians, then later became one of the toughest critics of the Zimbabwean regime. Moorcraft also supported the war against Saddam Hussein in 2003, but later recanted his views in the light of the WMD fiasco. He now apparently supports a total withdrawal of Western forces from Muslim countries, according to a recent feature in Britain's Sunday Express.
His war reporting, however, has been well received by fellow journalists. Loyal Gould, a professor of journalism at Baylor University, where Moorcraft taught, described his former colleague as "One of our era's foremost scholars of international communications as well as one of our leading professional journalists. He is truly a scholar-journalist of which there are few." Sir John Keegan, the defence editor of The Daily Telegraph, said of Moorcraft that "I am amazed he is still alive." He is also alleged to have said: "I am equally amazed he is still working for the Ministry of Defence." The BBC's John Humphrys was concise: "Paul's been around and doesn't it show."
In April 2008, Moorcraft's views on church law and marriage, more specifically criticizing the phenomenon of "wedding tourism", which involves couples seeking to be married in pretty rural parish churches with which they have no real connection, were heavily publicized in print, radio and TV in the UK. Journalists and bloggers might have forgiven his over-extending himself by talking on television about scientific issues (for charity reasons about dyscalculia), but they were less polite about his pontificating on ecclesiastical matters. Moorcraft did explain that he was talking about his own community (Shere, where he has based his fiction), and not the Anglican Church in general.
