Blogoir

A good Guardian newsfeed on the developments in Moscow as demonstrators are arrested gives us this:

Andrei Buzin, an election expert at Golos, said that the falsifications were not widespread enough to have left Putin with less than 50% of the vote and require a run-off, but the vote was still skewed. "I wouldn't call these elections free or fair," Buzin said.

This is an important point. It is scarcely surprising that there have been crass abuses in an election on this scale, and plenty of them. But they did not happen (apparently) on a scale big enough to matter, ie to the point of seriously calling into question the strong Putin first-round victory.

In other words, Putin won because many millions of Russians really did vote for him and not for any of other candidates who in their different ways did offer alternative policies for Russia (some of them insane). That gives the result a substantive legitimacy which can not be wished away.

That's the reality.

Another reality is that unless something utterly extraordinary happens, protests against this result in Moscow and elsewhere will not build up into a significant Putin-threatening nationwide movement. Too many Russians either don't care, or if they do care prefer Putin to carry on.

The threat to Putin's position (if there is a threat) comes rather from a growing sense among the intellectual elite in Moscow and elsewhere that Russia is underperforming and letting itself down, above all through corruption. But even then a goodly proportion of those intellectuals will favour radical 'nationalist' solutions to these problems rather than more 'Western-style' pluralism and transparency.

If there is ever to be a showdown which leads to Putin's untimely fall from power it's much more likely to be in the long, dark Kremlin corridors within the ruling establishment, rather than a doomed attempt by Russian protesters to be Western Occupiers or Ukrainian-style Orange revolutionaries.

Here is our old friend Robert Fisk showing what a great war reporter he is:


This is the same Robert Fisk who penned these now infamous lines about Saddam's mighty unbatterable defences on the eve of the fall of Baghdad (may these lines never be forgotten):

How, I kept asking myself, could the Americans batter their way through these defenses? For mile after mile they go on, slit trenches, ditches, earthen underground bunkers, palm groves of heavy artillery and truck loads of combat troops in battle fatigues and steel helmets. Not since the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War have I seen the Iraqi Army deployed like this; the Americans may say they are “degrading” the country’s defenses but there was little sign of that here Wednesday...

I had perhaps two hours to take it all in, to wonder how the Americans could batter their way up this long, hot highway — you can feel the temperature rising as you drive south — with its dug-in tanks and APCs and its endless waterlogged fields and palm plantations. The black-uniformed men of the Saddam Fedayeen with red and black “kuffiah” scarves rounds their heads, whom I saw a hundred miles south of Baghdad, were kitted out with ammunition pouches and rocket-propelled grenades. And they did not look to me like a “degraded” army on the verge of surrender.

Yes, there's a lot to be said for war reporters knowing something about, you know, war. Rather like we expect football commentators to know a little about football?

My favourite war reporting story comes from Moscow and the attempted Communist coup against President Yeltsin in autumn 1993 which culminated in the attack on the White House (Russian Parliament building) whither the coup supporters had retreated.

A famous ITN reporter - even now I spare his blushes - wanted to show how dramatic the fighting was. So he arranged to film his breathless heroic story crouching down behind a low wall with the crackle of gunfire in the background. Dramatic indeed were the images filmed. Yet we never saw them! Why? Because the camera crew knew that he was a blustering phony and allowed the cameras to roll even though standing behind the wall were a young Russian couple happily chatting and watching the battle with no concern at all. He was furious when he saw the footage. Haha.

The point? That Robert Fisk has a point.

War reporting like all other sorts of media reporting is all too often packaged and frothed up to make the reporters themselves seem all-important. Sometimes the reporters indeed are important - and brave - enough to get stories which catch the attention of world opinion. Then they become part of the story and these days are likely to be targeted, as tragically happened to Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik in Syria.

I fear that the Prime Minister was ill-advised to allow his name to be attached to an astonishly bad and strange letter sent to 'Presidents' Van Rompuy and Barroso by twelve national EU member state leaders.

Parts of it was written by the EU's version of our old friend the Postmodernism Bureaucratic Generator, a computer program which assembles plausible sounding jargon words in a more or less random way to produce sentences which have a creepy plausibility but absolutely no meaning:

In this context, we ask the Commission to convene without delay a new forum for the mutual evaluation of national practices to help identify and bring down unjustified regulatory barriers, examine alternatives to regulation which ensure high professional standards and assess the scope for further alignment of standards to facilitate mutual recognition of professional qualifications.

We look forward to the Commission report on the outcome of sectoral performance checks and call on the Commission to fulfil its obligation under the services directive to report comprehensively on efforts to open up services markets and to make recommendations for additional measures, if necessary in legislation, to fulfil the internal market in services

Anyway, I have analysed this ghastly thing over at Telegraph Blogs

First, it is absurdly long. 1656 words. It has succumbed to an acute case of EDDS (European Dustbin Drafting Syndrome), where successive versions of the text get ever more obscure additions as bureaucrats throughout twelve governments press their pet concerns, and no one dares say "Stop!"

Concluding thusly:

Had I been in No 10 I would have advised the Prime Minister not to sign such a text. It wastes time, and (worse) it’s undignified.

Much better that he drop a short private line to Messrs Barroso and Van Rompuy to say that he knows that eleven other leaders are writing this letter, and that he supports the thrust of it: without significant speedy EU-wide steps to promote growth and cut bureaucracy, the crisis will intensify. Who knows, they might even have read it.

When we look at the savage 'cuts' in public spending (not), why not start at the top? Namely the FCO's busy anti-bullying industry?

This is what you taxpayer suckers are spending your money on! Powerpoint slides for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office describing what to do to avoid bullying or 'discrimination'?

Choosing a man for a job if he is the best candidate is not discrimination

Phew. I was worried there for a moment at the fact that all current FCO Minsters are challenged when it comes to displaying female body parts.

And then there's ... this beyond astounding educational infograph-like thing, a supreme example of why modern Social Europe is doomed:

It's not just that the diagram itself is terrifying. Even worse are the accumulated collectivist assumptions and structures - and insanely wasteful demoralising procedures - which it so accurely represents.

I voted Conservative - and this was the T-shirt I got.

I am trying to find out More, thanks to the wonders of FOI.

Always fascinating to see self-styled progressives retreating in confusion, trying to cover their errors by (of course) blaming someone or something else. Preferably the Tea Party tendency in the USA.

Take John Weeks (economist and Professor Emeritus at SOAS, University of London). Here he is over at Social Europe Journal lamenting the state of the Eurozone:

Few outside of Europe (and not all within) understand the profoundly undemocratic nature of the European Union that created the current disaster.  In retrospect it is clear that the long-term effect of the Maastricht Treaty and its infamous “criteria” were to remove economic policy from democratic oversight.  The design of the European Central Bank completed the task. 

The anti-democratic removal is not an accident of the law of unintended consequences.  It is the conscious fulfilment of the central political principle of neo-liberalism, that economic policy is the preserve of experts, and should not be subject to the “populism” of democratic politics. 

It is an irony that the European Union is frequently assailed by right wing politicians in the United States as a haven of socialism.  The reality is that the European Union represents exactly the end of democratic oversight that the Tea Party Republicans crave.

HAHAHA *pauseswhilescrapesselfofffloor*

Yes, folks. The problem is that the EU is too RIGHT-WING!

Wait. There's more?

Similarly, today in Europe a pact among the governments of Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain to coordinate a simultaneous withdrawal from the euro zone would offer a viable alternative to the imposed austerity programs.  Together the output of these five countries is almost forty percent larger than Germany’s.  The probability of this radical but feasible alternative may be as high as one in a million...

How far we have fallen!  The vision of a cooperative Europe, that began in 1950 with the Iron and Steel Community, is now realized as a collection of weak and strong countries caught in a spiral of beggar-thy-neighbor trade and austerity policies, in which the 99% are the losers (even in Germany).  

The authoritarian governance of the EU has reached its fullest expression in the debt disasters of the 21^st Century, bringing on a continental depression.  The ideology that justified this consciously-created and unnecessary depression was and is pure neo-liberal economics.

Of all the bitter ironies of European unity gone viral, one stands out from all the others:  a political project designed consciously to ensure that no country would again dominate the continent changed into the mechanism to achieve that domination.

And, yes, it's all GERMANY'S FAULT that the EU is 'authoritarian'. Arbeit macht frei!

Read the whole thing, but first take out life insurance against dying of extreme mirth.

Yet let's be fair. His idea that a group of countries leave the EU to set up some sort of more manageable formation is not a bad one.

Maybe this is getting to the nub of the whole business. The EU is just too big.

Given that there is no willingness across Europe to set up a single big country and have all the wealth transfers between richer and poorer areas run centrally and supposedly democratically as might happen (or not) in a normal country, the alternative is to have all sorts of ad hoc rules which are in substance capable of being untransparent or oppressive. Why not have a number of national groupings in Europe which share some common light-touch overall trading and strategic framework, rather than the one-size-doesn't-fit-all rigidity as we have now?

It can't be said enough. It's all about Trust. 

As of this morning, the German elite have concluded that the Greek elite and Greek masses alike can not be trusted to keep their promises, and so insist on highly intrusive measures and controls to keep them up to the mark (so to speak). There is even talk of leaning on Greece to postpone elections.

The Greeks think that all this is arrogant and intrusive and object strenuously. Distrust in Germany (the main source of European money to help Greece!) soars. Loony Greeks (Left and Right) start railing against foreign oppression. And down we do spiral.

The latest news is that all is in place to give Greece yet another bail-out. But we all know that it won't work. Greece can not pay back the debts it now owes even under the most optimistic scenarios of the next bail-out working. Plus the capacity of the Greek system to deliver the measures promised even with cruel Germans manning the towering heights of Greek bureaucracy is inadequate. It won't happen.

If you want a more nuanced look at Greece/EU from a demoralised progessive point of view, try Nick Cohen in the Guardian, who points to a strange fanaticism within the Eurocracy which can not accept that its most cherished beliefs were attached to utterly wrong-headed policies:

Raised in a Eurosceptic country, we do not understand how an absolute commitment to the European project was a mark of respectability on the continent. Like going to church and saying your prayers for previous generations, a public demonstration of commitment to the EU ensured that the world saw you as a worthy citizen. If you wanted to advance in Europe's governing parties, judiciaries, bureaucracies and culture industries, you had to subscribe to the belief that ever-greater union was self-evidently worthwhile...

When historians write about the end of its postmodern utopia, they will note that it was not destroyed by invading armies anxious to plunder Europe's wealth or totalitarian ideologues determined to install a dictatorship, but by politicians and bureaucrats, who appeared to be pillars of respectability, but turned out to be fanatics after all.

The point, dear Professor, is that the EU crisis has nothing much to do with 'neo-liberalism'. The EU is a convoluted sui generis ideological potage (because nothing else could be cooked up in the kitchen) which messily combines bits of almost anything you can think of. Tedious 'social' policies, endless formalism, and  'single market' rules which do indeed rely upon some simple ideas, namely that debts should be repaid and that generous 'solidarity' transfers from one country to another require respect for honest process in return. 

As a gesture of goodwill towards Scotland, let's go to Macbeth to sum up where the Eurocrats now stand:

I am in blood stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,

Returning were as tedious as go o'er

Over at Commentator I gallop through some of the issues arising from the splitting-up of countries, drawing on the examples of the collapse of the USSR and SFRY, and seeing how far they apply to Scotland.

The division of Czechoslovakia into two units might well be more relevant, as a commenter fairly points out. But I haven't followed that one personally, so do not feel qualified to say much about it.

One point I did not mention is the radical impact Scottish independence might have on all sorts of other separatist causes . The United Kingdom is seen round the world as a country which for all its annoying post-imperial pretensions has achieved incredible results through its long, stable democratic traditions. The eventual example of Scotland breaking away (albeit under closely negotiated terms) might well embolden others to say that if it's OK for areas to break away even from the best-run democracies, it's surely OK to demand separation from less than well-run democracies.

Plenty for the next leadership in Moscow to think about in that sense - across Russia's vast time-zones are plenty of territories itching to have a lot more say in their own affairs. Republika Srpska? Any number of places in Africa? Certain other EU countries? 

In other words, Scotland v UK is just another example of the wider phenomenon of institutions created in very different times no longer seeming fit for purpose and yielding to a highly focused democratic impulse for complete change. That the new institutions might not be much better in any particular respect (and that the opportunity cost of setting them up could be incredibly high) is not necessarily going to stop people insisting on them.

 

Here's my latest LSE book review, on a new book by Charlie Beckett with James Ball describing the rise and fall of Wikileaks:

One of the key advantages of WikiLeaks as seen by its avowedly radical ‘hacktivist’ creators led (loosely speaking) by Julian Assange is that it subverts all existing categories of pretty much anything: geography, law, morality, self-restraint. The book notes that by aiming for impunity from the law WikiLeaks hopes for immunity from the consequences of the ‘wider settlement between journalism and society’ (sic) and “a less-reported but similarly liberating degree of ethical and moral flexibility”. Hmm. Which tyrant down the ages has not hoped for such ethical and moral ‘flexibility’?

Take the vital issue of ‘protecting sources’, something journalists claim to be a core part of their professional responsibility. Assange is quoted as saying that any US informants in Afghanistan who were murdered by the Taliban as a result of WikiLeaks revelations deserved their fate, a loathsome and – as he found – unsustainable position.

Likewise the book records that WikiLeaks’ publication of confidential documents about corruption in Kenya led to riots in 2007 which 1300 people were killed and 350,000 displaced. The authors’ assessment is at best baffling: “It also indicated that Wikileaks, and Assange in particular, were prepared to make a different risk calculation that accepted some incidental harm for the ‘greater good’ of transparency.” Had a Western politician described the deaths of 1300 Kenyans as ‘some incidental harm’ caused by a different risk calculation in official policies, imagine the banshee shriek.

In this moral tarpit some people see in WikiLeaks a source of hope. The book quotes ‘cyber-optimist’ Clay Shirky: “it represents, in its irresponsibility, a space for reform and progress”.

No thanks. WikiLeaks is by any normal standards a malign phenomenon based on a business model of stealing then selling other people’s information. It has surged sensationally across the media firmament but now looks bedraggled and discredited. As the authors note in the epilogue, former WikiLeaks enthusiasts are writing it off, as further damage has been done to its credibility.

The real value of this fascinating but uneven book is that it reminds us that especially in an age of ‘anything goes’ e-leaks, the heart of credible journalism remains a sense of unwavering professional responsibility – and a good old-fashioned sense of honour.

Check out the rest.

Frugaldad has sent me this interesting infographic. As the proud but broke owner of ever more Apple products, I share it with you: 

Source: http://frugaldad.com

 

Remember my piece almost a year ago describing smart diplomatic options for Doing Something about Libya?

Here it is, and none the worse for wear:

You draw a noisy stick across the bars of the FCO/State Department cage to rouse the bemused and sulky inmates, and demand ideas for action. What might they serve up?

"Basically", they'll primly reply, "You politicians have to accept that there are subtle/difficult trade-offs and hard choices to be made between Breadth v Depth, Fast v Slow, Big Impact v Less Impact, More Certain Impact v Less Certain Impact, Risky v Not-so-Risky, Legal v Not-so-Legal, and so on."

"Oh, and did we mention Cheap v Expensive?"

And having got that off their clever chests, if they are smart they'll produce something like the following Options Menu...

I grouped options under different headings:

-  Indirectly Limiting the Regime's Power

-  Directly Limiting the Regime's Power

-  Preparing for New Government

Does anything new spring to mind in connection with Syria, based upon our vivid experiences in toppling Gaddafi?

The key thing in diplomacy as in life is to pick the right tool for the job.

Yes, to a glib outsider Libya and Syria look much the same. Both full of Arabs, both led by wicked dictators who have lingered on for far too long, both held back by lunatic national policies. Where's the differences?

Well, scale for one thing. Syria has some 21.5 million people, just one down from Australia at 53rd place in the list of countries by population. Libya by contrast has just over six million - at 103rd place. So the physical and psychological impact of the Gaddafi regime has been very different. With only six million people everything happening in a country becomes a lot more 'personal'. Pluralism and politics mean very different things.

But also look at economics. Libya is close to the top 50 countries in the world going by GDP per cap - Syria is below 100th place, a dismal record of Baath Party incompetence. Syria has some oil, but other noting than cheap plastic washing-up basins sold in Serbia I have never seen any product made there.

Perhaps above all, Syria has some friends. And important near neighbours (Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon). For decades Gaddafi actively annoyed almost every capital on Earth in one way or the other. And apart from oil, who really cares about all that North African desert? Damascus by contrast has run a pretty tight national socialist ship, wooing/thwarting East and West alike as and when necessary due to its proximity to Israel and that knot of Middle East problems. During the Cold War Syria played an important role as a friendly or even close partner for Moscow, the USSR being muscled out of Egypt by the USA's spending power and moving away from its early positive relationship with Israel.

This is why the Russians are still busy in Syria, including by vetoing UNSC resolutions. It gives them diplomatic market share in that turbulent region. Some say very busy:

According to Le Figaro on Tuesday, Russian military “advisors” are “omnipresent” in Syria. Besides reportedly sending S-300 anti-air missile systems to Damascus and agreeing to deliver a new batch of military aircraft, the Russians this week celebrated the reopening of a Cold War-era intelligence listening post on Mount Qassioun, the summit that dominates Damascus from the northwest.  The Russians appear increasingly dug in.

Russian advisors are also laboring to reorganise the Baath Party and arrange talks with members of the Syrian resistance.  They are making their own contacts with Arab and Islamic organisations, seeking to dilute the solidarity of the West with Arab leaders on the Syrian problem. 

To any normal non-Russian person the Russian position is beyond cynical. Every senior Russian diplomat mouthing sentiments which in effect of not in substance give succour to the revolting Assad regime has his/her job (OK, almost 100% his) because the West actively supported democratic transformation in the USSR. Moscow's lack of elementary human solidarity with the Syrian resistance/opposition is chilling.

Yet Russia is in it for Russia, not for anyone or anything else. Moscow knows that one of the key lessons of the fall of Gaddafi is that however much the 'West' supports the Arab Spring opposition, the default popular Arab instinct these days is to want to be as un-Western as possible.

So even if Assad falls and a new government ostentatiously ejects the Russians from their naval base and fancy listening posts, the Russians will soon be comfortable again sidling up to the new management and whispering anti-Western blandishments in their willing ears.

Likewise because Russia is in with the current regime it can have some sort of real role talking to in-country opposition tendencies about a negotiated end to the crisis. This is exactly what the UK did in apartheid South Africa, to very good effect. The very fact that Mrs Thatcher stood firm at the UN against sanctions made us look tough - and therefore more credible - to all sides in the drama.

So where does that leave the West? In a weak but not hopeless position. What tools work here? Many of the ideas listed in the Libya piece linked above look OK (enough) for Syria.

The unhappy Syrian masses surely can go only so far without outside military support. The regime's firepower and ruthlessness are pronounced, and the Russia/China blocking of the UN Resolution served to leave the active anti-regime elements feeling let down by 'world opinion'. Yet plenty can be done secretly to help 'train and equip' anti-Assad forces. I'd also be rummaging around to find ways to get secret messages to those hovering on the edge of the Assad circle encouraging them to hold back - in their own interests: Nothing like finding a message from MI6 pushed under the front door during the night to give one cause to reflect.

Sensible governments also should start working on a powerful offshore programme of Preparing for a New Government - drafting new laws and new constitutional changes for a post-Assad government, working with smart Syrians in exile, helping train potential judges and senior policy experts in the areas needed to make Syria develop well under civilised management. Sensible Arab countries' experts and other international transition experts (eg from Poland which knows a few things about Syria from Cold War days) could join this effort to make it substantively balanced and not explicitly 'Western'.

That sort of programme has three big advantages. First, it's needed anyway. Second, it offers an intellectually attractive rival to self-serving and parsimonious Russian offerings in the general 'reform' area. And third, it serves to send an encouraging signal to Syrians (and to Assad) that we are preparing hard for a new era.

Finally, make it a key policy goal that a New Syria opens all police and secret police archives, so that the extent of Soviet/Russian (and other foreign) penetration can be exposed once and for all. That is important as a goal in itself: these archives otherwise can end up being a disruptive source of poisonous politics and blackmail. Plus it sends Moscow and signal that inevitable future transparency could well end up embarrassing the Russians too, so they might like to proceed now in a measured way.

This one will get much worse before it gets better. As things stand now, the Russians for a change have some non-trivial diplomatic momentum and a chance to wield effective influence. Will they manage to use this to get some positive results, if only for themselves?

In the short term, perhaps. In the longer run the Assad regime will wobble then crash under the weight of opposition from massed Syrians fighting local tyranny with Western and wider Arab support. And this phase of crafty Russian diplomacy will crash with it.

Small 'unofficial' referendum in northern Kosovo - not many dead.

In case you haven't noticed, the Serb population of northern Kosovo have set up and run their own referendum on whether to accept rule by the institutions of Kosovo. The answer, to no-one's surprise: No!

As the EU knows to its cost, referenda are troublesome. The public are quite capable of being awkward and annoying. Which explains why everyone in authority including the Belgrade leadership is busy saying that the result just doesn't count. BalkanInsight:

But the OSCE and the UN mission in Kosovo, UNMIK, had earlier warned that the referendum had no validity and would have no legal consequences.

Serbian President Boris Tadic on Tuesday said holding the referendum was harmful to the interests of Serbia, which is currently pressing its case in Brussels for EU candidate status.

Borislav Stefanovic, Serbia's chief negotiator in Kosovo talks, has called the referendum "completely unnecessary and meaningless". He said: "The referendum will leave no trace in history, nor will have any result.
"It has sent the wrong message that Serbs in the north cannot agree with their own country," Stefanovic told Serbian news agency, Tanjug.

Kosovo authorities predictably condemned the vote as illegal.

The problem of course is that the result is not meaningless. A small but coherent group of people have proclaimed that they do not want to be part of a country not recognised by the majority of states (representing the majority of people) on the planet. Not in itself a trivial or even unworthy position, you might think.

The Kosovo authorities' official line that the referendum was 'without legal effect' and so 'void' is curious. Attentive readers will recall the ICJ decision on Kosovo's own independence declaration, where the Court looked at a question tabled by Serbia:

The ICJ decision was likely in view of the strange question which the UN General Assembly posed at Serbia's request:

Is the unilateral declaration of independence by the Provisional Institutions of Self-Government of Kosovo in accordance with international law?

Since international law loftily takes no view about declarations of independence, unilateral or otherwise. As I previously wrote:

Because in a trite sense a declaration of independence (or of anything else for that matter) has to be 'in accordance with international law', since it has no relevance in international law. International law does not deign to take any notice of declarations.

Thus, for example, if the town council down the road here in the UK makes a solemn unilateral declaration of the town's independence from the UK, the rest of us will make a wry smile and go back to blogging or working.

The declaration is 'in accordance' with UK law - free speech and all that. But it is just that, and no more. It's what happens afterwards that counts one way or the other in legal terms, in domestic as in international law. 

If citizens of our town en masse support the declaration of independence, put up road-blocks, stop paying taxes to Westminster and proclaim Vladimir Putin their new king with his consent, things begin to get more interesting.

Norms are being created and broken in all directions. Realities start to be created. Loyalties start to shift...   

In other words, Kosovo won its own significant ICJ victory precisely because its independence declaration in itself was deemed to have no legal effect. It was the subsequent acts of recognition (or not) which mattered.

Here there will be no need for 'recognition' of the results of the referendum by others. Those countries which don't accept Kosovo's independence see northern Kosovo as part of Serbia anyway. Those countries which do recognise Kosovo see the referendum as a futile silly noise - those pesky Serbs will have to accept that they are part of Kosovo sooner or later, or move out.

But on the whole this move (as was its originators' intention) reaffirms in clear political terms the position of those countries (with Russia to the fore) which say that it is simply unwise to move international borders, especially those in Europe, without the consent of all concerned. And it embarrasses the general thrust of the majority of EU states' policy in this area. Why in fact should a local population accept that it is being allocated to a new country by foreigners?

All of which drags us kicking and screaming back to the origins of the Yugo-crisis in the early 1990s, and back from there to the post-WW2 Titoist rearrangement of the internal demarcations of Yugoslav 'republics' and 'autonomous provinces', and then back to the inter-war arrangements for Yugoslav 'governorships' (banovine). And then back to the Treaty of Versailles after WW1, and finally then by a great jump back to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

Who lives within which borders? And, above all, who decides?

To be continued ... for ever.

Here is my piece over at Commentator on Drone Warfare, beginning with exploding the tragic George Monbiot and proceeding thusly:

Not that long ago Europe’s parents and grandparents were being blown to bits in their tens of thousands by bombs simply dropped from planes in the general direction of the target. The sheer precision of modern weapons has saved countless more innocent lives caught up in armed conflict than, alas, still get taken.

One perverse result of this development is to give new life to Stalin’s reputed infamous observation that “the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic”. Precisely because so few people are now killed in modern warfare, the numbers of those who die shrink to the point where individual deaths of unarmed civilians can be ‘personalised’, and attacks on specific military targets start to look more like ‘assassinations’ or common law murder than war. At what point can (or should) we start to think about war and the legal parameters of it completely differently?

...

The Guardianistas’ Monbiotish pronouncements on human solidarity and existential Gaian interconnectedness in, for example, the ‘climate change’ or development aid contexts seem to evaporate when it comes to defence questions. Yet the issues are exactly the same.

Just as the planet can be seen as a single organism worthy of collective respect, so too can the technical infrastructure which supports human life these days. No country in the world can survive in any meaningful sense without some reliance on the networks of real-life equipment (power-generators, communications cables, data storage computers) by which things get done and new inventions happen. Who protects those facilities?

Classic international law tells us that, in principle, it is for each state to protect those facilities sited on its own territory. But what if a state is too weak to do that, and/or allows terrorists and sophisticated criminals to use its territory as a base for plotting attacks on key installations in other countries?

If a country and its citizens want to enjoy the manifold benefits of belonging the modern global networked space, do they in turn have to accept an implicit obligation to take responsibility for defending those networks pro-actively and vigorously against those who, for whatever reason, want to wreck it? And if they can’t or won’t take the action needed to deal with such people, can they complain if other powers acting under a new version of the doctrine of collective self-defence step in to do that job instead?

Interventions need not be anything so crass as invading with huge numbers of soldiers. Rather the best available tools can be found to neutralise these threats from afar, including swarms of hi-tech drones that identify an enemy, watch the enemy’s movements to minimise the risks of collateral injuries – and pounce.

That sort of remote-controlled intervention in principle offers the most moral, controlled, restrained and proportionate expression of legitimate military self-defence the human race has ever seen. Which, of course, does not make it perfect or fool-proof. Or wise.

Several good comments - Commentator attracts a more, shall we say, thoughtful class of commenter than Daily Telegraph blogs.

My piece about the latest Summit over at Daily Telegraph blogs is up, prompting the usual vivid comments from Daily Telegraph readers:

This piece by Crawford simply comes across as Civil Service gobbeldy-gook and demonstrates that he's no understanding of any of this. Is that why the Civil Service seem to be so utterly useless when negotiating with their counterparts in other EU countries ?

After all these years, after all these betrayals, after all the secret signings of treaties in darkened closets, after all the lies, the deceit, the obsequious kow towing and u-turns you and others STILL think it's down to ignorance, incompetence and cock up theory?

We often wonder why countries wish to join the Euro (beyond Dan Hannan’s point that the “club” is highly attractive to any country’s senior politicians). However, why are existing EZ countries so keen that other dissimilar and unconverged economies must share their currency. It’s like the Augean stable cleaner, up to his knees in the smelly stuff, inviting a fresh herd of elephant into a couple of vacant stalls.

Here's me:

The basic problem for the UK is that the tortuous manoeuvres required to keep the eurozone afloat can impact on us in different ways. In general it suits us if most of the rest of the European Union countries share a viable single currency. Plus if it crashed we would export less to the rest of Europe and end up worse off.

However, the point of the Prime Minister’s insistence (the "veto") that the rescue arrangements take place outside the existing EU Treaty structure was not about that. He wanted to try to establish some sort of legal firebreak, so that measures and norms aimed at propping up the eurozone could not automatically be applied to us if the Commission and/or European Parliament and/or European Court of Justice so decided.

Where are we now after the attempt by EU leaders to calm things down? In a murky but more or less tolerable position. The eurozoners must try to sort out their business via a new Treaty which is not part of the formal EU Treaty structure, albeit an expression of the "enhanced cooperation" provisions which those Treaties allow.

David Cameron has agreed to allow the European Court of Justice to support enforcement of the new Treaty’s rules (no doubt because he wants to help the eurozone reform itself, and any weak discipline is better than none). But quite how far – if at all – any ECJ decisions under that arrangement might (a) read across directly to EU Treaty interpretations, (b) to the UK’s disadvantage remains to be seen...

Plus I added a bit on Poland:

We peer at such EU Summits from our foggy offshore position. But spare a thought for the Poles, whose Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski delivered the mother of all pro-EU federalism speeches in Berlin back in November. The Poles are not yet in the eurozone but (under current management) insist they want to join it. Hence, question: how far should countries not yet in the eurozone but in the queue to join it have a say in eurozone reforms which will impact on them?

The problem here is that the more countries have such a say, the harder it becomes to get things agreed and implemented. Poland has the fastest growing EU economy but its total GDP represents only some 5% of the combined GDPs of the five largest eurozone members. So while the Germans and French will have welcomed the pro-EU noises coming from Warsaw, what they really need is Poland to be "realistic" about its weight in the greater scheme of tough decisions needed.

This explains why time-wasting new configurations for eurozone meetings have had to be agreed, to allow the 17 current eurozone countries to get on with it while trying to allow eurozone wannabes (led by Poland) some sort of input now and again. The Poles gloomily must accept that the key issues will be decided at 17, ie when they’re not there.

Conclusion?

The current core EU leaders are like those BUgs Bunny cartoon characters who reach the edge of the cliffs and keep striding determinedly out into thin air, only to realise in total panic that not much is supporting them. Their current efforts to flail their way back to solid ground are certainly impressive. But will they succeed?

Craig Murray and I have a fleeting moment of agreement, rather like ships sailing in opposite directions who pass and exchange friendly waves.

He commented on my earlier piece about Libya and MI6, responding to another reader:

Your second point rests on the premiss that if government ministers approved something, then it was legal. That is simply not true. A previous government may have done something, and may even have briefed their successors about it. if it were illegal, nothing in that means it should not subsequently be the subject of criminal investigation. Theoretically, the current government has no role in either encouraging or stopping the criminal investigation - it is quite rightly a matter for the police and CPS.

However, a new development arises. Two Libyans are launching civil actions in the English courts against my old colleague and good friend Sir Mark Allen, over the circumstances under which they were subject to 'rendition' to Tripoli and subsequent abuse by the Gaddafi regime. The Guardian:

Saadi was detained in Hong Kong in 2004 and then forced on to a plane to Tripoli with his wife and four children in an operation that MI6 allegedly mounted in co-operation with Koussa, who was Gaddafi's intelligence chief at the time. Saadi says he suffered years of torture.

Belhaj was detained in Bangkok along with his pregnant wife after an MI6 tipoff and was allegedly tortured by American agents for several days before being flown to Tripoli, where he says he was tortured and detained for several years. His wife was detained for several months.

The issue here is not any claim that MI6/HMG engaged in torture. Rather it is that MI6/HMG are said to have been 'complicit' in torture in Libya of certain Libyans by certain other Libyans. Which raises the question: what does complicity mean?

Back in March 2010 in an earlier exchange with Craig I looked at precisely this question. Craig and other maximalists insist that even to possess information which is suspected as having come from torture amounts to 'complicity'. That position, as the House of Lords found in 2005, is incorrect as a matter of law (and common sense):

Very (very) broadly speaking, I conclude from this judgment that the the top legal body in the UK drew at least three important conclusions:

• That it may be acceptable for the state's executive authorities to receive/acquire and use information which they know or think may have been derived from torture, if they believe that there is a clear public interest in doing so (eg saving lives)
• But it is not acceptable for the judicial authorities (courts and tribunals) to hear and use such evidence in reaching conclusions directly affecting the rights of individuals
• If seemingly well-founded allegations are made that evidence has been or may have been produced by torture, the court/tribunal has to consider most carefully how to deal with that evidence, but is not bound to conduct an exhaustive investigation of the origin of the evidence to reach a final view as that would just not be possible

These conclusions do not apply directly to the current emerging case, namely where HMG allegedly took action leading to Libyans being returned to Libya where they say they ended up being mistreated.

The problem here is that any secret 'rendition' by us or even a contribution to secret rendition by others is likely to have been endorsed by Ministers, either specifically or as a general rule. So to single out one civil servant for litigation is mischievous if not malevolent.

Second, the whole case turns on the idea that 'complicity' can be stretched far beyond any immediate link to maltreatment. Any abuse or torture was not committed by HMG or its officials. Is it really fair to make us legally responsible for horrors committed by others far away?

Even if you think that it is reasonable to do so on the moral level, you need to draw a line somewhere and say that the actions alleged were too 'remote' to amount to complicity. Under what principle should the line be drawn in specific cases? What balancing factors should be taken into account?

What if our attempts to bring under control Gaddafi's WMD have hit the rocks and it looks like we need to make some 'minor' concessions to Gaddafi's entourage to get things restarted? How do we even begin to weigh up the possibility of abuse of two individuals with the possible dangers to millions if the WMD are not secured asap? 

This leads us back to the core policy dilemma, namely how to deal with wicked regimes? Thus:

Above all, if you engage with dirty people, how to avoid some of their dirt ending up on you? The promise of Engagement is that it offers the hope of slowly but surely changing things for the better; the danger is that while you are doing that, the key leaders of the regime in fact get far richer and learn how to be oppressive in new, cleverer ways.

So in the Libya case. The stupid/wicked/naive Brits trained the Libyan security forces! Of course we did: if you want to set in motion a process of reform and enlightenment in such regressive institutions, what else to do?

Think about what this means in practice. If the Libyan secret police are known torturers, you will be training them while their torturing ways continue. Even if the total amount of Libyan torture declines sharply as a direct result of Libyans cleaning up their act during the wider normalisation process, your trainers in one way or the other will be helping a torturing regime be more efficient.

Yet without outside democratic engagement (and the high-level civilisational rewards which rightly flow to the regime for behaving in a less extreme way) the chances of reducing Libyan torture at all (and thereby opening some small new space for opposition trends) are hugely reduced...

This nasty, bleak, lonely policy and moral frontier was where Mark Allen and his colleagues were operating. If the way is opened to sue them for outcomes which were far from ideal if not awful, who is going to be ready to do this sort of fundamentally important work?

The issue here is simple. Not what the 'right' choice is when you are dealing with a regime like Gaddafi's. There isn't one.

Rather it is 'who decides?'.

We seem to be ending up in the absurd position that sanctimonious lawyers and unelected judges far from the operational and policy realities of such questions are seen as more 'responsible' than elected politicians and civil servants who are elected to do our dirty work while operating to arguably the highest standards of public probity in human history.

Yes, judges have the benefit of detachment. And yes, Ministers and officials can get so wrapped up in what they are doing that serious errors get made. But this is one where the best people to judge are voters, not lawyers.

The other day we had the pleasure of meeting senior colleagues at Edelman London, part of the global team who prepare the annual Edelman Trust Barometer. The online survey aims explicitly at educated people round the world who follow current affairs.

This year's survey concluded that trust in governments had suffered a sharp erosion in the past year, a finding that is both unsurprising and (as far as it goes) welcome. Yet it also suggested (perversely) that people wanted more government action in the regulatory field. Here's a snapshot of the results as recorded by the BBC.

Trust in government stayed high in several countries including China (perhaps because people there 'trust' the authorities to watch the replies in online surveys like this one?) yet in China trust in NGOs had leaped - NGOs there seen as an emerging force for alternative views?

Trust in business had also declined. Not surprisingly perhaps, given what is going on.

Such surveys are more interesting and indicative than strictly scientific. Yet this one coincides with what we might expect. Basically, as people round the world get access to new cheap IT, the emerging energy of networks is disrupting the established power and effectiveness (and legitimacy) of hierarchies. The rate at which government is unable to cope is accelerating: new laws and policies can be out of date or rendered irrelevant before they are promulgated.

Plus the Tower of Babelisation represented by 'social media' makes it all worse - facts, rumours and complaints all appear and circulate at startling speed, creating strange echo chambers in which truth, sense or nonsense alike are amplified to a meaningless crescendo. Governments are unnerved by this clamour and start to look for instant results. See the latest shameful row over RBS bonuses in the UK, where the government seem to have bowed to 'public opinion' and pressed a private citizen not to enjoy the bonus he is entitled to under his contract.

People in all countries sense this confusion and look to other ways to get things done, while hankering after greater certainty or order which (they still think) only government can provide. Examples in all directions: mainly incoherent, such as the creepy collectivist demands of assorted 'Occupy' tendencies.

One of the ideas which the survey throws up is the proposition that we need to move away from (rigid) Rules towards (more flexible) Principles or Standards. But how?

Look at the Eurozone drama unfolding once again today, as I type. The EU leaders are scrambling to come up with even more rules, in the shape of a brand new treaty which is intended to impose strict requirements on errant member states. Yet we all know that the new rules are unlikely to be enforceable, and new standards are unlikely to be respected when things get difficult. No-one in power dares suggest that the EU structure as currently configured is itself the main problem. Instead they press their leaking euro-canoe on towards the deeper faster rapids, proclaiming that that is the only sensible thing to do.

Trust in fact is what is wrong with the Eurozone. The Germans conclude that (say) the Greek government can not be trusted to do what is right and so must give way to EU-imposed technocrats. The Greeks (not unreasonably) think that they'll get stiffed by such a procedure which is designed to prop up German, French and other over-stretched banks.

Meanwhile the world peruses this unseemly flailing around and concludes that a bickering and demographically declining Europe can not wholly be trusted to repay money it has borrowed, hence imposes higher interest rates to help cover the risk.

Trust, in short, is simply another way of looking at Confidence. And as the Edelman 2012 survey suggests, it is unsurprising that global popular confidence in 'government' is declining - but not easy to work out what sensibly might be done about it.

Do any long-standing readers remember this?

Here is my own Grand Unifying Theory of Politics.

The core question of politics and economics is Trust. More specifically, under what circumstances can and should one trust strangers?

The greater the ambient level of trust in any given social space, the easier it is to do things quickly and well. People who scarcely know each other or who have never even met can strike sophisticated deals, knowing (a) that other partners are likely to be reliable, and (b) that if things go wrong the local state institutions will honestly help sort out the problem.

Without Trust of this sort, personal and organizational horizons shrink. Extended family networks and associated corruption thrive as the best way of dealing with the trust problem.

Or one trusts primarily members of one's own group/clan/religion/community. And assumes that members of other groups/clans/religions/communities are doing the same, so they are not to be trusted too far since their primary loyalty (like one's own) is not to a fair, neutral process.

All this is massively obvious across the former Yugoslavia space. Political leaders must represent 'their' national communities first and foremost if they are to get elected; voters distrust other communities and make a mainly ethnic/national choice as a form of political fire insurance.

Even in the UK where there is no serious complaint about the intrinsic fairness of the legal system and Trust is at civilizationally high levels, many Scots want a different political structure, viz some sort of independence from England. Likewise Quebec, Kurds, Chechens and countless other examples. The Israeli/Palestinian problem seems capable of being settled only on an ethno-national basis.

Thus the so-called 'nation-state' turns out to be a sophisticated device for enabling trust to operate, often at much higher levels of population. This has created conditions for the surge of economic growth and creativity seen around much of the globe over the past couple of centuries. Greater attention to this fundamental trust issue would pay huge dividends in the international development industry. 

Our success here in Europe (and the ruinous experience of the two World Wars where certain national ambitions ran amok ) has brought us to think that there is a new 'higher' stage of development.

The European Union is a unique example of an attempt to create a wider context of trust at a supra-national level. But it too risks making a fundamental blunder by trying to insist on, or sneakily nudge people towards, a new 'European' uber-identity which supersedes supposedly drearily parochial 'national' identities... 

True then. Even truer today.

 

 

 

Here is my new Daily Telegraph blog piece comparing the problems of the Eurozone with the fates of the USSR and former Yugoslavia.

In those two cases (but for very different reasons) the Centre had became the problem and duly crashed, whereas in the case of the Eurozone the majority of EU states are struggling to hold the Centre (ie Eurozone) together, even at stunning cost.

This one even has added Literature:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

You know the sinking feeling when you hear some precious moments of music from Mozart or Shostakovich used to support a TV ad or, horror of horrors, served up in a lift as "background music". Beauty has been melted down, turned into a trinket of cliché.

This has happened to the famous poem The Second Coming by W B Yeats. So vivid is the imagery and somehow so suited to our dismal times, his great lines pop up all over the place and start to sound trite.

But you have to applaud Mr Yeats’s prescience in sharing with us his poetic yet trenchant thoughts on the eurozone, and in particular the idea that “the centre cannot hold". Indeed, some people are now wondering whether the eurozone will go the same way as the Soviet Union or even the former Yugoslavia, and abruptly disintegrate...

... The problem is that keeping the Centre going also incurs unfathomable costs. EU capitals squabble furiously as they try to distribute these costs away from themselves and on to all the others. The world's markets observe this unseemly spectacle and conclude that they might be wise to call for higher interest rates to park their money in such a neurotic economic space.

No one can tell how this drama will play itself out. It's all very well the eurozone's leaders demanding that the EU Centre be held at almost any cost. Those costs are being dumped on European taxpayers who, sooner or later, are likely to insist that enough is enough. Then what?

While you’re mulling over that question, read this scarifying account of Greece’s looming deadlines. Then run out to buy tinned food.

What rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Brussels to be born?

Note the post-modern irony (mis)use of the word scarifying.

In due course I'll need to share thoughts on the lessons of the break-up of the USSR for Scottish independence (or not).

In the meantime, I need to recover form two hours of blather from a suave, persistent but ultimately unsuccessful solar panels salesman.

 

Part of the problem facing the Eurozoners as they struggle to convince global markets that all is under control so DON'T PANIC is identifying what exactly is the issue which needs solving. After all, they might make a bad situation worse by misdiagnosing what needs to be done.

Views on this differ. In the interests of fair play, here is a studious article (pdf) by C Fred Bergsten and Jacob Funk Kirkegaard which argues that the Eurozone is heading for the right outcome (ie 'comprehensive economic and monetary union') by the crafty ploy of (in effect) eliminating all the wrong ones:

It is imperative to understand that it is not the primary purpose of the ECB, as a political actor, to end market anxieties and thus the euro area crisis as soon as possible. It is instead focused on achieving its priority goals of getting government leaders to fundamentally reform the euro area institutions and structurally overhaul many euro area economies.

Frankfurt cannot directly compel democratically elected European leaders to comply with its wishes but it can refuse to implement a “crisis bazooka” and thereby permit the euro area crisis to continue to put pressure on them to act. A famous American politician has said that “no crisis should be wasted” and the ECB is implementing such a strategy resolutely.

The authors point out that because there is no willingness to allow centralised EU-wide taxation, other arrangements are needed and are edging towards being created, albeit by different EU leaders playing dangerous games of bluff to help get the best deal for their corner:

The reality in the euro area is that, for the foreseeable future and unlike in the United States, the overwhelming majority of government taxation and spending will continue to reside at the member state level for reasons of political legitimacy. Only a minor part will be pooled at the supra-national level. Restricting this spending via a new fiscal compact is consequently the only pragmatic route for now, leaving other aspects of euro area fiscal integration to the future...

The Eurozoners are having to look to the IMF for huge support. But that's OK:

Euro area governments will have successfully shifted part of the costs of any future financial rescues onto the rest of the world. The rest of the world will of course extract a suitable price from the euro area for this service in the form of European political concessions in other policy areas. This could, for instance, be a good time to demand that the euro area consolidate its representation on the IMF board to a single seat and accelerate the transfer of its quota shares to the financially contributing emerging markets...

Basically, their argument goes, they'll have to do what it takes to keep the Eurozone afloat as all the alternatives are far worse. And the record so far shows that despite all the uncertainty and some poor decisions along the way, the trend is in that direction. 

Read the piece as a whole. If you are a non-expert, it makes an impressive case.

So far so optimistic.

Then there's John Mauldin of Thoughts from the Frontline, whose wonderful economics newsletters are free. Here are some of his latest observations:

For most of the past two years, European leaders have tried to deal with the problems as though they were short-term liquidity problems: "If we just find the money to buy some more Greek bonds, then Greece can figure out how to solve its problems and then pay us back. Given enough time, the problem can get solved."

They have now arrived at the understanding that it this not a short-term problem. Rather, it's a solvency problem of the various governments, which of course creates a solvency problem for their banks. They are now addressing the problem of solvency and providing capital until such time as certain countries can get their budgets under control and the bond market sees fit to provide the capital they need.

But they are completely ignoring the third and largest problem, and that is massive trade imbalances. Germany exports products to the peripheral European countries, which run trade deficits. As I have shown in several letters, a country cannot reduce private-sector leverage, reduce public-sector leverage and deficits (balance its budget), and run a trade deficit all at the same time. That is simple, unavoidable math, based on 400 years of accounting understanding. Ultimately, there must be a trade surplus if leverage and debt are to be reduced...

Greece cannot print its own money, so unless it leaves the Eurozone, it's stuck. They can default on their debt, but that means they are shut out of the bond market for some period of time. That would force them to make the spending cuts they are now resisting, as they would simply not have enough money to pay their bills.

Even with a 100% haircut they're looking at a shorter but very real depression. And because no one will sell them products they need, like energy and food and medicine, unless they can sell or trade something in return (that trade-deficit problem), they will be forced to change their lifestyles. Wages must drop or productivity rise to be competitive with northern Europe. And that differential is about 30%. I am not certain, as I have not been to Greece in a long time, but my bet is, you won't find many Greeks who think they are overpaid by 30%.

But that is what the market is going to say. And that is the third problem, which Europe is not addressing. Germany and the northern tier are simply more productive than the Southern periphery. (With the possible exception of Northern Italy, but Italy all gets lumped together, which is why many Northern Italians want to be their own country and not have to pay taxes that go to Southern Italy. I am not taking sides, just observing what we read in the papers.) Until Germany consumes more from the peripheral countries or the peripheral countries become more productive, the imbalance will not allow a positive solution...

Sign up to his work to get regular bracing top-ups.

So there it is. Two contrasting styles of beautiful writing, and two very different and clever/informed views on what is happening.

The two views of course may be compatible. A stronger and even coherent Eurozone may emerge from this fiasco - if some countries whose debts are simply unmanageable are paid off to leave it?

A reader kindly points me in the direction of a blog written by Denis MacEoin which aims to portray Israel in a fair (and therefore favourable) light.

Not least in this powerful letter he has sent to the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, which offers the worthy prelate some food for thought after the Archbishop offered some prayers for 50 families facing 'expropriation'of their land by the Israeli authorities:

Of all the people in the world, you single out 50 Christian families in Beit Jala and expect those who hear you to recoil, cut to the heart by the horrors of that situation. You speak as if the world had no greater shadow to offer.

Thousands have died and are dying in neighbouring Syria, but that gets no mention from you. An entire population is repressed and religious minorities are persecuted in Iran and you say nothing. Muslims who convert to Christianity in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere are put to death, yet you are silent.

In Egypt, Coptic Christians are killed and persecuted and their churches are destroyed, yet you cannot find a sentence in which to condemn it. Christians are not allowed to possess Bibles or to worship or seek converts in Saudi Arabia, yet your voice is not raised.

Christians are murdered and their churches burned to the ground in Nigeria, but I do not hear your voice. Yet Muslims are free to worship, open schools, have their own courts, and missionize in every Western country, yet you do not point out the anomaly...

... In 1949, one year after Israel was founded, the country’s Christian population numbered 34,000 souls. That figure has grown by 345 percent. It is still growing. Between 1995 and 2007, Israeli Christians grew from 120,600 to 151,600, representing a growth rate of 25 percent. In fact, the Christian growth rate outpaced the Jewish growth in Israel in the same period.

It is not a coincidence that Christians thrive in the only non-Muslim state in the Middle East and diminish in all the Muslim states...

I liked this concluding passage which gets towards roughly what I think about the whole Arab/Israeli business, knowing so little professionally about it:

Your fifty families – if, indeed, there are fifty families – will, at worst, face a legal battle, knowing they will be vindicated if their claims are valid. Israel will not set their homes alight, nor gun them down, nor desecrate their churches nor violate their priests nor execute their converts. It will not do to them what the Muslims of Egypt have done in a long and systematic persecution. It will not do to them what the Taliban have done to Christians in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It will not intimidate or hector or torture or kill them. It’s time this was recognized, especially by a leading churchman like yourself.

There is indeed something baffling or creepy if not bizarre about the way seemingly normal people at Western dinner parties abruptly start to rave against Israel and ignore far worse and far bigger abuses up the road in Syria and other Arab/Muslim countries.

Read the whole thing, and then have a look round Denis' fine blog. He is not prolific, but his work hits heavy targets with unerring accuracy.

As you all know, I happen to be a fan of what the Blair government and MI6 did to help bring Gaddafi back towards what passes for the mainstream of civilisation in that part of the world, by helping negotiate the end of his elaborate MWD programmes in return for 'normalisation'.

But did MI6 go beyond some sort of unspoken and perhaps not obvious line by getting a bit too close to the Gaddafi regime thereafter? To the point of helping hand over to Libya some regime opponents, either suspecting that they might be mistreated back in Tripoli, or not bothering to think about that too much?

I have no idea. But a new wearying police investigation begins.

Something about all this is not quite right. Above all, I find it hard to imagine a pretty far-reaching step like that being taken without some sort of explicit political clearance. So when are the police going to start rummaging through the papers submitted to T Blair, J Straw and other Labour politicians leading or close to the policy at the time? 

As readers know, assorted Crawfs went to a Turkish resort for a short holiday last year. The signs of feverish economic activity were there to be seen on the way from the airport - all sorts of buildings and other structures popping up in a madcap way.

Turkey is booming! Or is it?

I have not linked to the ever-gloomy Spengler for a while, but here he is with some unnerving graphs and accompanying analysis indicating that Turkey too has borrowed too much, too unwisely:

Erdogan has the weirdest economic views of any serving head of government. He justified the credit bubble on religious grounds, pledging repeatedly to cut the "real" interest rate (the cost of interest minus the inflation rate) to zero.

"We aim to cut the real interest rate in the long run, so people will increase their incomes through working, not through interest," he said last April. "Eventually we aim to equalize the interest rate and inflation rate."

Erdoğan believes that this would fulfill the Islamic injunction against lending for interest; if the real interest rate is zero, he seems to think, the sharia ban on interest is fulfilled de facto. In order words, Turkey provided nearly free money to bank customers. Erdogan's program set in motion a series of perverse effects. One is a sharp fall in the exchange rate...

... The result is a vicious cycle: excess credit creation weakens the currency, forcing the central bank to put up interest rates; higher interest rates push up the cost of debt service for Turkish borrowers; Turkish banks lend more money to their customers to finance the higher interest costs, so that credit keeps expanding and the currency keeps weakening.

Turkish banks continue to increase lending at a 40% annual rate, but most of the new lending will finance interest payments on the old loans.
Fine. Then what?

.

So, the same old story. Political leaders believing they can defy reality and gravity, combining with banks keen to cash in. Result? A fast emerging mess.

The notable feature of the apparently looming Turkish mess - as Spengler points out - is that the booming 'Turkish model' (ie a dynamic, modernising economy with strong Muslim features) was hailed for a while as the best outcome of the Arab Spring tendency. What if that model flops too? 

Spengler's view of what this means:

Now I predict that Turkey's economic crisis will undermine the stability of the Turkish state as well, leaving the Muslim world without a single enclave of stability from the Libyan-Algerian border to China's Xinjiang province...

 

 

One of the themes of this website is how our institutions and beliefs of all shapes and sizes are struggling to cope with the way new technology creates complexity at ever-soaring rates.

In other words, the faster our machines the faster they can do things and generate information, which in turn allows us to see new patterns and connections and (therefore) try to have 'smarter' policies. Which doesn't work because our policies are too slow anyway,  often out of date before they begin.

All of which, as we know, gives some advantages to small, fast, determined things who Keep things Simple (such as single-issue busybodies, terrorists, pirates, assorted Occupiers) over clunky big unwieldy things (such as the Eurozone, or even Democracy as currently constituted).

Here is a fabulous article by David Weinberger about what this means for science itself. Take a few minutes out from your busy day to read it and learn something:

The result of having access to all this data is a new science that is able to study not just "the characteristics of isolated parts of a cell or organism" (to quote Kitano) but properties that don't show up at the parts level. For example, one of the most remarkable characteristics of living organisms is that we're robust -- our bodies bounce back time and time again, until, of course, they don't.

Robustness is a property of a system, not of its individual elements, some of which may be nonrobust and, like ants protecting their queen, may "sacrifice themselves" so that the system overall can survive. In fact, life itself is a property of a system.

However, just as we realise that we can't work out what is happening at the most basic level of our own bodies, governments strain to micro-manage almost anything that moves. This way of running things is philosophically doomed to fail, and failing it is around the world.

Hayek was right. Capitalism and free markets are essentially information networks, and need to be treated respectfully as such. This in turn shows why the Eurozone is wobbling. Hundreds of millions of people are now able to examine its deepest practical and moral foundations and are finding them badly designed.

In short, the Eurozone system as a metaphor for the 'Western Social Model' is over-complex. But under-robust. It's science, see?.