Democracy = Hard Choices

Foreign Secretary David Miliband spells out the UK position on Georgia:

The Georgian crisis is about more than vital issues of humanitarian need and rule of law over rule of force. It raises a fundamental issue of whether, and if so how, Russia can play a full and legitimate part in a rules-based international political system, exercising its rights but respecting those of others...

... Russian mind games on withdrawal do them no credit...

... International law must be obeyed. This goes to the heart of the question of how Russia comes to terms with its past, and how it sees its future; above all, whether it recognises that the old frontiers of the Soviet Union are now history, and whether Russia sees its future as part of a rules-based international system.

That sort of analysis rests on certain ... psychological assumptions.

One of them is that the reply will not be something like this:

The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules.

Do we really look like a country with a plan? We don't have a plan.

The EU has plans, the World Bank has plans. You know what we are, West? We're a dog chasing cars. We wouldn't know what to do if we caught one. 

We just do things. We're a wrench in the gears. We hate plans. Yours, theirs, everyone's.

Schemers trying to control their worlds. We are not a schemer. We show schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.

So when I say that what happened to Georgia, your girlfriend, wasn't personal, you know I'm telling the truth.

You guys in the West were schemers. You had plans. Look where it got you.

I just did what I do best. I took your Kosovo plan and turned it on itself. Look what I have done to this small country with a few tanks and a couple of bullets.

Nobody panics when the expected people get killed. Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plans are horrifying. If I tell the Western media that tomorrow a gangbanger in Nagorno-Karabakh will get shot or a truckload of soldiers in Chechnya will get blown up, nobody panics.

But when I say one little country will get a small invasion, everyone loses their minds!

Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. We are an agent of chaos.

And you know the thing about chaos, West? It's fair.

Hmm. Doesn't this sound ... familiar?

More on Russia, always a rich seam for foreign policy First Principles.

Thus Max Hastings gives us a striking Russia metaphor:

The Russians yearn for respect, in the same fashion as any inner-city street kid with a knife. They will become willing to play with the west by western rules only if or when they no longer perceive those rules as disadvantaging themselves. Today they cannot compete on the EU's terms, still less those of the US, so they make up their own.

It is unnecessary for the west silently to acquiesce in the Russians' excesses, but it must tread cautiously in the face of their sensitivities.

Maybe the fact that we in the UK tread cautiously in the face of the sensitivities of street kids with knives accounts for this?

More from Max:

America must stop pretending that democracy is, of itself, the answer to all the world's ills ... US policy towards Moscow for almost two decades has been based upon the assumption that since the Russians were losers, their wishes could be ignored or defied on every front. No useful business could result from such a posture.

Blimey.

Democracy may not deal with the world's ills but it makes a good step in that direction. Indeed, the problem in Georgia is that the Russian leadership want to send a profound anti-democratic signal that Might is Right - that what Russia wants or needs is the uber-value in that part of the world. See this latest outburst from the reportedly mild-mannered President Medvedev.

Plus the USA in fact has spent large sums of money in and with Russia on all sorts of common projects, aimed at building a new sense of partnership. The problem is not that the Americans treat the Russians as losers. It is that the Russians behave like losers, unable to make do with their sprawling eleven time zones of territory and hankering after regaining former imperial lands elsewhere.

One recurring theme in Russian and some Western analysis is the deterministic but weird idea that Russia has to behave differently (ie badly) because it is 'surrounded by enemies'.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin once said that the fall of the Soviet Union was a geopolitical disaster. This didn't mean that he wanted to retain the Soviet state; rather, it meant that the disintegration of the Soviet Union had created a situation in which Russian national security was threatened by Western interests.

As an example, consider that during the Cold War, St. Petersburg was about 1,200 miles away from a NATO country. Today it is about 60 miles away from Estonia, a NATO member. The disintegration of the Soviet Union had left Russia surrounded by a group of countries hostile to Russian interests in various degrees and heavily influenced by the United States, Europe and, in some cases, China.

If a country occupies such a vast land mass as Russia does, it necessarily has plenty of neighbours and all sorts of complex questions to deal with. The Russian problem is that it tends to see anything it does not like as 'hostile'. And that attitude extends even to the Bambi-ish spread of EU values and processes into eg Ukraine.

Because, of course, the point is not that 'Russia' has a problem with that. Rather the Russian post-KGB elite have the problem, since the spread of Western democratic values brings with it new transparency and reliance on open rules rather than shadowy power-plays. And that threatens both their biznes interests and their world-view.

Above all, the Western democracy which is sneered at so much in the West brings with it a sense that political behaviour has (and depends on) Limits - limits of law, of convention, of personal self-restraint..

Here is the profound cultural/philosophical difference between Russia and the West.

'The West' sees Limits as a source of strength. 'Russia' sees Limits as a form of weakness.

Max does not seem to get this:

... the west (sic) will find it easier to coexist with this tormented, intransigent, melancholy and oil-rich neighbour when Russia feels comfortable with itself, not when its nose is rubbed in its long history of failure.

This has to be mainly wrong. No serious community policy can be based round the idea that we all wait for the inner city street kid with knife to 'feel comfortable with himself', if his idea of being comfortable is to slash away at smaller kids who disagree with him.

If we are not brave enough to take away his knife and haul him off to therapy, we at least need to limit his room for slashing, and do a lot more to help those he threatens to defend themselves? 

A lively piece of US-style political analysis:

Sure, Hillary’s fat and waddly and screechy and gives pantsuits a bad name. Sure, she’s the kind of gal my dad’s generation knew back in college in the Sixties, the one who wore granny dresses and never shaved her legs and slept with the poetry professor and had a “War is Harmful to Children and Other Living Things” poster on her dorm room wall and gave the Black Power salute to the other white kids and worshipped Saul Alinsky and Herbert Marcuse and always argued in class that communism had never really been given a proper try, so why not here and why not now?

But that generation was pretty tough. O.K., they lost Vietnam to a bunch of guys in pajamas but they took to the streets in Hillary’s hometown of Chicago and bloodied the pigs pretty good. They blew up buildings — Bambi’s mentor, Bill Ayers, comes to mind — and even killed some people. Charlie Manson gave the whole movement a bad name and the Rolling Stones didn’t help when that black guy got murdered at Altamont, but you see what I’m driving at: Hillary’s minions know how to party.

As if the EU's ambiguous response to the Georgia crisis was not depressing enough, life is getting tougher on the economic side too in Europe:

The eurozone as a whole shrank by 0.2pc, the first contraction since the launch of the single currency a decade ago. Germany led the slide with a fall of 0.5pc. France and Italy fell 0.3pc. The delayed effects of the strong euro, tight credit, and slowing exports have now kicked in with a vengeance.

Problems for my own British-based budget as we sit in muggy Orlando:

The pound could soon dive to barely more than a dollar and a half while gold prices plunge to $650, experts predicted yesterday amid fresh evidence that the commodity boom is ending and the dollar's resurgence is under way.

But whereas the UK can hope to use its currency as a set of buffers, the Eurozone faces much more searching internal strains:

... the euro is nothing like the dollar. It has no European government, tax, or social security system to back it up. Each member country is sovereign, each fiercely proud, answering to its own ancient rythms.

It lacks the mechanism of "fiscal transfers" to switch money to depressed regions. The Babel of languages keeps workers pinned down in their own country. The escape valve of labour mobility is half-blocked. We are about to find out whether EMU really has the levels of political solidarity of a nation, the kind that holds America's currency union together through storms.

My guess is that political protest will mark the next phase of this drama. Almost half a million people have lost their jobs in Spain alone over the last year. At some point, the feeling of national impotence in the face of monetary rule from Frankfurt will erupt into popular fury. The ECB will swallow its pride and opt for a weak euro policy, or face its own destruction.

Gulp. 

The commentaries on Georgia pour out.

This one by John Bolton is sharp and good. Try this:

The European Union took the lead in diplomacy, with results approaching Neville Chamberlain’s moment in the spotlight at Munich: a ceasefire that failed to mention Georgia’s territorial integrity, and that all but gave Russia permission to continue its military operations as a “peacekeeping” force anywhere in Georgia. More troubling, over the long term, was that the EU saw its task as being mediator – its favourite role in the world – between Georgia and Russia, rather than an advocate for the victim of aggression.

And this:

The West, collectively, failed in this crisis. Georgia wasted its dime making that famous 3am telephone call to the White House, the one Hillary Clinton referred to in a campaign ad questioning Barack Obama’s fitness for the Presidency.

The point being:

 ... we are facing the much larger issue of how Russia plans to behave in international affairs for decades to come. Whether Mikhail Saakashvili “provoked” the Russians on August 8, or September 8, or whenever, this rape was well-planned and clearly coming, given Georgia’s manifest unwillingness to be “Finlandized” – the Cold War term for effectively losing your foreign-policy independence.

Hence:

 ... we should have a foreign-minister-level meeting of Nato to reverse the spring capitulation at Bucharest, and to decide that Georgia and Ukraine will be Nato’s next members. By drawing the line clearly, we are not provoking Russia, but doing just the opposite: letting them know that aggressive behaviour will result in costs that they will not want to bear, thus stabilising a critical seam between Russia and the West.

 ... Russia did not invade Georgia with diplomats or roubles, but with tanks. This is a security threat, and the proper forum for discussing security threats on the border of a Nato member – yes, Europe, this means Turkey – is Nato.

Saying this may cause angst in Europe’s capitals, but now is the time to find out if Nato can withstand a potential renewed confrontation with Moscow, or whether Europe will cause Nato to wilt. Far better to discover this sooner rather than later, when the stakes may be considerably higher.

What is interesting about Issues is that they do not go away even when we do not want to look at them.

'Europe' (in this case the EU) finds some things Just Too Difficult.

One example. Which countries are in Europe? This simple question is highly unsimple and (worse) uncomfortable, since to answer it clearly opens the prospect of EU membership to those countries who qualify.

Those EU members who (a) do not want much further enlargement and (b) see the EU above all as some sort of balance to the USA do not want to think about bringing any more of the former Soviet republics into the European fold. To do so opens questions about Russia's role which (they think) are best left unopened.

Alas for them the Russian intervention in Georgia does open that question.

So, EU. Are we going to stand nervously inside our fence listening to the cries for help of people looking remarkably like Europeans hammering at the gate as they get savaged by bears?

Welcome Instapundit readers.

While we Crawfs have been travelling the Georgia story has moved on, to the point where French President Sarkozy has been helping broker some sort of truce and possible peace plan.

No end of commentaries too, of course, many dwelling on what this episode tells us all about Russia's apparently resurgent power and equivalent 'Western weakness.

Here is the mordant Spengler saying that Putin should be the President of the USA, not Russia.

Or try the hopeless divisions in the EU, as described by the Guardian.

This rapier-like analysis by Victor Davis Hanson nails most of the right wider points:

We talk endlessly about “soft” and “hard” power as if humanitarian jawboning, energized by economic incentives or sanctions, is the antithesis to mindless military power. In truth, there is soft power, hard power, and power-power — the latter being the enormous advantages held by energy rich, oil-exporting states. Take away oil and Saudi Arabia would be the world’s rogue state, with its medieval practice of gender apartheid. Take away oil and Ahmadinejad is analogous to a run-of-the-mill central African thug. Take away oil, and Chavez is one of Ronald Reagan’s proverbial tinhorn dictators.

... When one factors in Russian oil and gas reserves, a pipeline through Georgia, the oil dependency of potential critics of Putin, and the cash garnered by oil exports, then we understand once again that power-power is beginning to trump both its hard and soft alternatives.

When the Soviet Union collapsed a new implicit Deal emerged. It had various elements, some more obvious and robust than others:

• the 'West' would not reorganise its economic and security arrangements developed during the Cold War (primarily EU and NATO) to accommodate a totally new situation.
• Russia was invited to cooperate with the 'West' but effectively from an objectively weak position, and therefore on Western terms albeit with significant Russian involvement (see the pretty good Contact Group period in former Yugoslavia)
• but Russia insisted on and somehow retained the idea that its 'near abroad' (ie the former Soviet Union republics) were more Russia's then the West's.
• The three tiny Baltic republics dashed from the Russian camp and formally joined the Western camp, but while the new 'Commonwealth of Independent States' led by Russia was an institutional flop it achieved its main purpose in Moscow's eyes, ie keeping the other new states involved in a Russian psychological space.
• For some years this seemed like a good enough outcome for the West. Involvement in these deeply Sovietised territories was hard work. Russia was arguably the most democratic state in the CIS and looked to be exporting modest pluralism or at least modernisation to them.
• Latterly we have seen two rival tendencies. The CIS states moving to some sort of open market relationships beyond former Soviet borders and therefore opening up to Western processes (and wealth); in short, having different and rather attractive new options. And Russia gaining a windfall of wealth from soaring energy prices while itself adapting to a strategic transformation.
• This gives Moscow impressive new ways to exert influence across the CIS - buying key assets, 'persuading' CIS leaders that cooperation is in their best interests and so on. Why strap these countries down in close and boring neo-imperial ties with Moscow when it is so much easier to buy or control indirectly the best bits?
• That goes only so far. Moscow has to be especially tough with the (few) parts of the CIS which are still making the greatest formal efforts to join the Western camp. Hence intense Russian efforts in Ukraine while keeping CIS frozen conflicts well chilled, to create local imbalance/uncertainty which Moscow can nudge as and when necessary.
• And, now, Moscow pouncing on Georgian miscalculation to up the ante by overt military intervention.
• This Georgia crisis therefore represents the formal end of the original West/Russia Deal, which was already dead in the water as evidenced in part over Balkan policy in general and Kosovo in particular.
• Russia instead is proclaiming a New Arrangement: that if there are to be Westernising processes in the CIS area they will take place on Russia's terms, and that Russia is ready to use force to defend its self-proclaimed interests.
• Russia could press on and topple the Georgian leadership, and maybe still will.
• But the Russian Mind also will relish the idea of leaving Saakashvili twisting forlornly in the wind, humilated both by having failed to recapture South Ossetia and by having been left standing alone as the USA and all Georgia's European friends watched aghast but did significant nothing to help.
• And the likely Russian tighter grip on South Ossetia also creates a handy pseudo-precedent for Serbia gripping the Serb-controlled territories in northern Kosovo.

Will the West sign up to Russia's New Arrangement for the CIS space? If so, what? And if not, what?

More generally, are we moving to a new, darker and unpredictable international situation?

In which Rules will matter less, Willingness to Prevail a lot more?

Does the objective correlation of forces favour those leaders who in a pre-modern way have a clear sense of what they want - and are ready to take risks to achieve it? Leaders who will think they have the upper hand against other leaders who rely on little more than post-modern flannel and uneasy hopes?

So much for the new online service for speeding admission to the USA.

We reached Newark Airport immigration control desks and none of the officers there had heard of it. Having filled in all the forms on the aircraft 'just in case' we somehow survived this indignity and made our way to Orlando.

Just when one thinks that the level and volume of plastic in this part of the world can not possibly go higher, one visits the local supermarket to see 'artificial honey' on the shelves.

What a place. Great to be back.

After my exciting red pen adventures at New York airport immigration desk in May, I am taking no chances with my forthcoming family holiday in Orlando.

I have registered all of us with the new ESTA website run by the US Government to make easier (in theory - let's see the practice) getting into the USA. In 2009 it will be obligatory to use the site, so get registered now and avoid the rush.

The site asks for the basic information previously required on that immigration form previously filled in on the plane. But once e-authorisation is given - for the three Crawf children it was instantaneous, for two Crawf adults it took 72 hours - in principle it lasts for two years.

Yay.

Quirky US foreign policy point.

In the various dropdown menus on the site as you fill in your nationality and telephone contact details etc, Serbia is listed. So is Yugoslavia. But not Kosovo.

Endearingly retro.

When we get all worked up (pr not) about British blunders and hypocrisy, we tend to lose sight of where they fit in to the greater scheme of things.

Pointing to others' even viler behaviour does not legitimise or make right one's own.

But it just is the case that some horrors are bigger and worse than others. And that different systems and political cultures are ... different.

Some find it easier to contemplate and launch outlandish behaviour. And safety mechanisms for stopping Bad Policies once they start kick in at different points.

So, is there anything in modern UK practice to compare to the French performance in Rwanda:

Drawing on documents recently released from the Paris archive of Mitterrand, the commission clearly describes the motive for French policy in Rwanda ... The RPF was a part of an “Anglophone plot”, involving the President of Uganda, to create an English-speaking “Tutsi-land”. Once Rwanda was “lost” to Anglophone influence, French credibility in Africa would never recover...

... The French created a secret command of the Rwandan Army through what he called a “légion présidentielle”. This was a group of elite operatives that was answerable only to Mitterrand and which drew up battle plans and military strategy, and built a psychological warfare capability with operatives trained in the manipulation of public opinion.

My own work has shown that not all French military operatives left Rwanda when the UN peacekeepers arrived in 1993. When the genocide began six months later there were senior French officers attached to key units in the Rwandan Army - the para-commando and reconnaissance battalions, and the Presidential Guard. It was French-trained soldiers from these units who, early in the morning of April 7, had orders to eliminate members of Rwanda's political opposition - and to kill anyone with a Tutsi identity card ...

The French Senate discovered how policy towards Rwanda had been made by a secretive network of military officers, politicians, diplomats, businessmen, and senior intelligence operatives. At its centre was Mitterrand ... It may be that a true reckoning of France's responsibility will never be possible.

What do other EU governments including ours do now to get to the bottom of this calamity?

Rien.

A creepy Euro-etiquette forbids us even to talk about the issue publicly in any way that counts. Especially when the French hold the EU Presidency.

The French of course insist that to open all this up is intolerable - their motives and actions were 'pure'.

Not perhaps quite the whole story?

More on the feisty Report by the HoC Public Affairs Select Committee report which came down heavily on FCO rules purporting to limit what diplomats might say after they leave the Service.

Craig Murray calls these regulations 'near-fascistic':

The idea, of course, is that only the ministers' version of truth will enter history. You can be confident that Jack Straw's memoirs will not tell you that he instructed Richard Dearlove that we would use intelligence from torture, or that we colluded with torture and extraordinary rendition in Uzbekistan and elsewhere. You needed my memoirs for that. If Jack Straw had his way, I would not have been able to publish my book telling you the truth; in fact the new regulations were born directly out of Straw's fury at Murder in Samarkand.

We now have a government so despised that it strives to protect itself further and further from scrutiny...

Let's be a tad more dispassionate.

Back to first principles.

The public want - and expect - to know in some detail what Government is up to with their money. 

The public also want Government to Just Get On With It, weighing complex interests and principles and taking hard decisions intelligently. 

As we are a free country, people should be able to comment on and/or write searching analyses of policy issues once they are out of public service, subject to some sort of reasonable cooling off period.  

That said, the public simultaneously like tittle-tattle and 'revelations', but also do not like seeing former officials trading in the public’s information to make a personal profit. 

These fickle public expectations are not invariably compatible with each other, or with real life. 

Foreign policy in particular requires a different quality of common sense confidentiality.

Domestic issues are in a way all 'ours' - disagreements and negotiations are within the British political family, all of whom claim that they want the best for the country.

Foreign affairs are different. Day in, day out HMG are involved in tough negotiations round the planet with people who may be our enemies, or who rightly want to do the best for their countries by exploiting British weaknesses/mistakes. It is madness to show our detailed analysis and negotiating hand to our rivals for ‘UK freedom of information’ reasons, when they of course will not reciprocate. 

At the very hard end of the spectrum are highly sensitive intelligence reports, sometimes gleaned from foreigners risking their lives to share information and insights with us (which NB does not mean that those reports are accurate/reliable).

The public know that the world can be a dirty place. They broadly trust the government to defend British interests by using such material wisely. This means keeping secrets secret, the public respecting limits on the public's 'right to know'. Lost lap-tops containing secret official material convey a sense of fathomless incompetence.

In return for ceding extra government discretion in this murky area, the public react badly to politicians whipping up public sentiment on the basis of inconclusive intelligence analysis, as happened in the run-up to the Iraq intervention. 

You know when you are seeing something Really Secret when its heading is a Greek letter or acronym you haven't seen before: TOP SECRET UK EYES A EPSILON/LOCKTIGHT or somesuch.

During my career I have seen all sorts of highly confidential analyses of controversial issues and countless Top Secret reports. I have written such papers myself.

Now I have left the FCO. Should I be free to use my privileged access to this fruity material to make money or stir up public anger, even if I happen to think the moral case is just?

In my view, no. Certainly not immediately I leave the Service, and for some purposes never.

The 'system' (and here I part company with Craig Murray) does offer all sorts of democratic best practice ways for officials to register substantive concerns, compatible with maintaining the secret methods needed to track foreign spies working against us, or managing threats posed by ruthless terrorist killers themselves armed with high-tech kit.

Have we got everything Perfect? No.

Room for improvement/tweaking? Probably.

Risky business for politicians and the public alike, one way or the other? Yes.

All that noted, if we agree that I am not to be 'allowed' to use my knowledge of highly sensitive processes/facts as I like immediately on leaving the FCO, how to give effect to that?

And if there are Rules or Principles, how to apply them? What threat should hang over me to deter me, a former British diplomat pecking away at my lonely keyboard, from overstepping the rules, in letter or spirit?

Legal proceedings against potential publishers?  Prison?

Threats to my pension? Ah now you're talking!

Finally, who in the end decides if a line has been overstepped, and what should happen next?

The Public Affairs Committee made a strong point in noting that in Freedom of Information Act disputes a separate outside mechanism has been set up to stop a Ministry being judge and jury where its own information is concerned. Something like that could be used to settle in a gentlemanly way rows over contested memoirs of the Jeremy Greenstock sort?

Ministers! The smart way to lean is towards generosity, creativity and flexibility. Do not appear vindictive/obsessive/defensive.

Few if any 'revelations' by former civil servants do drastic irreparable damage. We are in fact quite loyal for most purposes, most of the time.

Much worse political damage can be done by appearing to cover up and duck the hard questions than by taking some hits, heavy and unfair as they may be at the time.

And, above all Ministers, behave in an honourable, trustworthy and fair-minded way towards your officials and the public alike.

This gives you your best chance of winning their respect and so surviving the inevitable squalls of democratic public life in good shape, maybe even with a reputation enhanced.

Light touch, old boy, light touch – always the safest policy.

The House of Commons Public Affairs Select Committee has now given its thoughts on the FCO/Cabinet Office rules - tightened after the Craig Murray and Sir Christopher Meyer books - on what diplomats can (or not) say after they leave the Service.

Their view:

 ... the results do indeed appear to be excessively wide-ranging and oppressive. Their only saving grace is that they seem to be unworkable.

A bit of a tonking?

I have dashed off some thoughts for the Independent's Open House pages. Here.

More to follow.

... just when Barack wants to make America cool again, people are being really mean to him.

How cowardly is that?!

Via American Digest.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at Harvard in 1978:

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations.

Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society.

Of course there are many courageous individuals but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity and perplexity in their actions and in their statements and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable as well as intellectually and even morally warranted it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice.

Was he writing the script for The Dark Knight?

Is B Obama losing momentum?

If so, is it because he did not take some earlier advice?

When you interfere with a natural process, there are consequences, not all of them good — and you should be mindful of them. It’s not just fish that end up getting hurt.

The role (if any) played by former diplomats in public life depends to quite a degree on how - and how far - they draw on their extensive and unique experiences in the Diplomatic Service.

So, questions.

What are the limits if any on what they can say publicly about information/insights and sheer gossip gained from working for the taxpayer?

And who decides?

Following the noise generated by the memoirs of Sir Christopher Meyer the Government looked again at the rules. And aimed to tighten them up.

My former colleague Sir Edward Clay has come out especially strongly against this move:

It remains to be seen whether future retirees will flout the FCO's legally dubious gag; the FCO clearly intends to hear progressively less from its retired and senior members, unless it approves of what is uttered. It suppresses valedictory despatches from retiring ambassadors, afraid of criticisms. There have been whispers of an attempt to get mandarins to sign over copyright on anything they write - novels and poetry, as well as despatches.

The FCO tells retirees that the rules applying to their serving colleagues also apply to them, for ever. Books, articles and lectures have got to be cleared months ahead. But the real rub comes with the requirement to give five days' notice of what they intend to say in any appearances on, or articles in, the media: any public comment based upon any of their professional experience is covered, far broader than previous strictures on official secrets or confidentiality. Unspecified civil or criminal proceedings are threatened for transgressors.

Sir Edward's and other vigorous interventions have prompted Parliament to take a look. The HoC Public Administration Select Committee is expected to pronounce today. A trailer.

In case you are wondering, before I left the FCO I told them that I was planning to write this Blog. I would use my judgement as to what I did or did not publish. I did not plan to seek publicity for myself via self-indulgent gossip or hot policy 'embarrassing revelations', mainly as I had none to reveal.

Rather I planned to talk about the diplomatic and political world in a quizzical, sometimes sharp way, to cast light on processes in public life and the professional dilemmas that arise.

Sounds good to us, they said.

Not a peep from them since.

Basically, the argument from some former Ambassadors is that they can not trust the Government to enforce these rules fairly.

Is not the problem that the Government these days can not trust senior civil servants to respect them?

Whence this decline in mutual trust?

A fish rots from the top.

Here's something new.

A husband-and-wife couple doing a job-share at Ambassador level, for the first time ever, anwhere.

Tom Carter and Carolyn Davidson are off to represent HM The Queen as High Commissioner in Zambia, taking it in turns to run the High Commission for four months at a time.

Here are their careers so far.

Ignoring if we can in the Guardian piece the witty and unexpected reference to Ferrero Rocher chocolates (and the vacuous innacuracy over another senior diplomatic husband and wife team mentioned who are no longer Ambassadors at Post in Bratislava and Vienna respectively), we ask ourselves: is this a Good Idea?

The Guardian article does not tell us. It tweebles on about the grimness of the diplomatic spouse's role, the handiness of the arrangement for the married couple themselves and the 'positive feedback' they had as job-sharing Deputy Head of Mission in Slovakia.

Nothing serious about the main issue: how to advance hard-headed British interests in that tricky part of the world? 

The point of course is that it is, mainly, not a Good Idea. Or at least that it is an idea whose goodness applies only in marginal cases which (HMG hope) do not matter overmuch.

The point of an Ambassador or High Commissioner is to represent British interests in the country concerned. Judgement calls are constantly being required. More often than not, they do not make much of a difference. But sometimes they matter hugely. Even in Africa.

Remember Sandline?

Say that there had been a husband-and-wife jobshare in Sierra Leone during that crucial period. Or in Uzbekistan trying to work out how best to balance all the moral and policy factors Craig Murray was tackling. Or for that matter in Warsaw when the UK EU Presidency was trying to negotiate a complex EU Budget deal.

Is it really likely or even desirable that two professional people in tough situations like that are going to agree fully on the analysis and on the recommendations on tactics and strategy, and will have equally good relations with key local interlocutors and in Whitehall?

One of them will be more credible and effective. When his/her four-month stint ends, is Whitehall going to be pleased to see him/her standing down to do an Open University course rather than grip the crisis?

Obviously not. It is weird even to pose the question.

Thus a job-share at this Ambassadorial level looks to rely on one core and unspoken assumption.

That in the greater scheme of things the job they are sharing is relatively unimportant to permit an experiment of this nature; that the UK's relations with the country concerned - here Zambia - can take some knocks from the obvious inefficiency/inconsistency the arrangement involves.   

Would we try this with China, or Russia, or Pakistan, or India, or France, or the USA?

No. 

And if we did, the countries would ask us to come back in three years or so after the job-share posters left, when we had decided to behave seriously again.

That said, if (as must be the case) the Zambians approved the shared posting, they carry a share of the cost of any mishaps and missed opportunities which occur. 

And, last but not least, good luck to Tom and Carolyn themselves. I am sure they'll give the job their best shot.

Does not all this remind us of the famous Gay Flag problem? How - and where - can the modern Foreign Office safely 'tick the boxes' of political correctness and 'diversity' while expecting to be taken seriously?

Memo to next Government:

• Just Say No to artful diversity dodges of this sort.
• Treat all countries with equal and significant respect
• Take diplomacy seriously

Craig Murray responds to my previous post:

Charles,

You brush very lightly over the fact that you praised in the warmest terms at the time the telegrams you now rubbish - as did numerous other Ambassadors including Jeremy Greenstock who commended the to his New York morning meeting.  I think that your new-found Damascean conversion to rubbihing me on behalf of the Establishment needs a little fuller explanation for your readers.

I think the most important single point here is one of honesty.  Our policy was based on accepting as true an official narrative of both economic and political reform which was simply impossible to square with the objective facts on the ground.  That theme recurred again and again throughout the book.  I don't think intellectual dishonesty is ever the basis for good policy.

I can respect though not agree with an argument from realpolitik that says "Karimov is very bad but we need him" as you posit.  But that wasn't the argument, as you well know.  The line being peddled by the US and supported in Whitehall was "Karimov's really not that bad a guy - look at all these reforms".  It was the intellectual dishonesty and cowardice of it that I found so frustrating.

I did not mean to brush over my email of congratulations to Craig on one of his early E-grams, nor do I think I did so. Plus see also this from an earlier post in April:

But I do recall dropping Craig an email of congratulations when he first started firing off some heavy reports to London pointing up the scale human rights abuses in Uzbekistan.

He made good sense in pointing to examples (eg the Taleban) where 'the West' had backed local extremists for short-term reasons, those extremists thereby flourishing and eventually taking on virulent anti-Western positions; it was (he argued) unwise to invest in the Uzbekistan regime for Iraq reasons, only to stoke up trouble for the future.

However, in subsequent FCO reports he banged on in a similar vein to and beyond the point of being persuasive or even credible. I dropped him another private email saying that while I did not follow the Uzbek/Iraq question in any detail, he came over as getting too shrill: maybe he should think about other more subtle ways of trying to win (or at least make a small policy gain or two in) this argument.

Nor am I 'rubbishing' him or his telegrams now.

Craig has made a lively new life after leaving the FCO trading heavily on his former Ambassadorial status and access to sensitive information and insights he acquired while on the public payroll.  Hence, and with the benefit of some hindsight now, fair questions.

What sort of example did/does Craig Murray set? What lessons does his complex case teach young diplomats starting their careers?

As an informed FCO insider, now ex-FCO outsider I have been analysing his own published account of his work as HMA Uzbekistan, looking methodically at the important policy and procedural issues it raised. This is as far as I know the first time this has been done in such detail.

I think - and I think I have been showing - that Craig's work in a senior civil service position overseas gives us a fertile if not unique combination of poor technique and judgement attached to high-octane personal commitment. With British public and political life in its current demoralised state, such an example is well worth a close look.

Craig's claim that I am have had a 'new-found Damascean conversion' to rubbishing him 'on behalf of the Establishment' is a good example of the Murray Law of the Excluded Middle:

• Crawford rubbishes me
• The Establishment rubbishes me
• Therefore Crawford is rubbishing me on behalf of the Establishment

Puny illogic, which as shall be demonstrated infects important parts of Craig's professional work and helps cause his downfall (or meteoric rise to glory/notoriety, depending on what one wants to call it).

And whereas I can be blamed for many things in my FCO career, being part of the Establishment is (as Craig knows) just not one of them.

Anyway, I'll be moving on to the substance of Craig's other points above as my analysis of the book unfolds.

If anyone is impatient for More in the meantime, have a look at another what Brian Barder - yet another former British Ambassador - had to say on all this back in 2006. Plenty of thoughtful points here and in the links.

A bit more on Karadzic, alas.

Dick Holbrooke says that there was No Deal struck by him with Karadzic under which if Karadzic left political life he would not be sent to the Hague Tribunal.

Karadzic in his first appearance at ICTY tried to get this claim established, but failed. It will return.

Meanwhile Mo Sacirbey (Sacirbegovic), the fomer Bosnia/Izetbegovic Foreign Minister, says that there was a Deal! He cites US diplomat Robert Frowick as the 'unimpeachable' source!

Sacirbey. That name rings a bell..?

Oh yes.

As far as I can tell, his legal campaign in the USA against extradition to Bosnia to face some grave corruption charges is still dragging on.

Surely the point is that even if Holbrooke gave any undertakings to Karadzic to 'go easy' on the ICTY process, they had to be worth little if anything in legal terms.

Once ICTY had issued its indictment on war crimes charges of this importance, it would have to be pursued to the end.

Even if politically and presentationally inconvenient for some people.

These celebrity revivals are sooooo exhausting.

First we have the long-awaited return to the stage of Joker Karadzic, although without his funny costume and disguise he was really not that scary.

And with him returns Batman Holbrooke, the distinguished former American diplomat whose considerable ego and ruthlessness helped bring peace to the Balkans.

Holbrooke grumbles that Karadzic was not arrested once the Bosnian war was over:

In an interview on CNN aired after the court hearing, Mr Holbrooke said: "I negotiated a very tough deal. He had to step down immediately from both his posts as president of the Serb part of Bosnia and as head of his party. And he did so.

"But when he disappeared, he put out a piece of disinformation that I had cut a deal with him - if he disappeared we wouldn't pursue him. That was a completely false statement."

Mr Holbrooke also said it was a grave mistake that Karadzic was not arrested after Nato forces deployed to Bosnia following the peace agreement.

"He should have been arrested. His green Mercedes was parked in its parking spot outside his office for six months after (the peace deal) each day. The Nato commander at the time refused to arrest him even though he had the authority to do so. It was a terrible mistake."

Agreed. A terrible and expensive mistake.

But by whom exactly?

The commander of the NATO Rapid Reaction Force in Bosnia in early 1996 was General Mike Walker (British).

Further up the NATO chain were two Americans, Admiral Leighton Smith as commander of IFOR and at the top of the NATO command chain General George Joulwan, Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR).

Holbrooke in another interview blames Admiral Smith by name:

... Karadzic should have been captured in the first few months after [the signing of the] Dayton [Peace Accords], in early 1996. Even though everybody knew where he was, he was not brought to justice because the NATO commander, Adm. Leighton Smith, failed to exercise his authority. Smith said it was not a mission of his command, which was a terrible thing to do. Had Karadzic been arrested back then, the history of the Balkans would have been much easier during the last 13 years ...

Weedy NATO fails again!

Really?

The point of course is that the arrest of Karadzic required a top-level political decision, since the risks of the Dayton deal breaking up if it all went wrong had to be factored in.

Thus:

... the military warned of casualties and Serb retaliation if an operation to arrest him took place. They said they would carry it out only if ordered to do so directly by the President; thus if anything went wrong the blame would fall on the civilians who had insisted on the operation, especially on the President himself.

This was a heavy burden to lay on any President, particularly during an election year, and it was hardly surprising that no action was taken to mount, or even plan, an operation against Karadzic in 1996 or 1997 (sic).

A 'heavy burden'?

Or is taking a tough strategic decision exactly what a President is paid to do?

Who wrote that politically disobliging passage anyway? No fan of the then US President Clinton, obviously!

The Riddler? 

It is not obvious to me what is wrong with the argument that says, “The criminals already have guns; gun control disarms the rest of us.” I don’t know how many times I have heard that view sneered at, or laughed at, or pointed to as an infallible marker of stupidity. But I haven’t ever heard it seriously confronted, let alone refuted.

An open-minded Brit visits a US gun show and comes away ... changed?

But of course there is a political dimension. Aside from other motivations–sport, self-defence – the gun-show universe is about pride, self-reliance, and resentment at being bossed around. Distinctively American traits, wouldn’t you say? Best in moderation, no doubt – but still, where would the country be without those attitudes? I may get thrown out of Georgetown for this, but I say, good for them.

"Here in the UK we need more pride, more self-reliance and much more resistance to being bossed around."

Discuss.

John Redwood aims to correct in brisk fashion some 'Continental Misunderstandings' about a future Conservative Government's policy on further EU integration (and indeed the EU integration we already have).

Eg on the Lisbon Treaty:

“We assume the Conservatives will go along with the European project and with the Lisbon settlement – the UK has always in the past joined in, albeit reluctantly and late.”

It would be unwise to make such an assumption this time. When Margaret Thatcher came to power she did want to complete the Single market, and when Tony Blair came to power he did want to give the EU more powers over social and employment policy. The modern Conservatives have no wish to grant any more power to the EU. Moreover, we have voted against Nice, Amsterdam and Lisbon because we disagree fundamentally with them, and expect powers back. As William Hague has said, we cannot leave matters as they are if Lisbon has been ratified by all countries.

“What can the UK do if Lisbon has not been ratified by all countries?”

An incoming government can keep its pledge to give the people a referendum. If they vote No to Lisbon the government will repeal the legislation and the Treaty is dead.

A UK referendum of this sort would be a cracker of an event. Some Continentals must be wondering nervously what happens if the Irish problem remains 'open' and the Labour Party's agonies here prompt an early UK election.

Otherwise the key point is the proposition that if Lisbon has been ratified (somehow) by the time the Conservatives take over (if they do), "matters cannot be left as they are".

Fine. But what exactly to do?

There is always the famous Lisbon Treaty Article 50 which for the first time makes explicit the option of a member state actually leaving the EU, even if the last word zanily looks to be left with the European Council once the European Parliament has given its 'consent':

1. Any Member State may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.

2. A Member State which decides to withdraw shall notify the European Council of its intention. In the light of the guidelines provided by the European Council, the Union shall negotiate and conclude an agreement with that State, setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal, taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union. That agreement shall be negotiated in accordance with Article 218(3) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. It shall be concluded by the Council, acting by a qualified majority, after obtaining the consent of the European Parliament.

Heading into that maelstrom is maybe too dramatic a UK move, for the time being.

But as there is no prospect of our EU partners agreeing to 're-open' the Treaty to row back some of it for the UK's benefit, what else is available?

The next best lever for Change We Brits Can Believe In is ... British Money. Not agreeing to pay it into the central pot without radical reforms.

That means the next Financial Perspective negotiations which come round again in 2012 or thereabouts.

180 weeks or so.

Not too long.

The words "modern management techniques" and "whelk stall" come to mind:

Labour was plunged into open warfare as Gordon Brown's allies launched a series of highly personal attacks on leadership rival David Miliband.

Did 'sources at Number 10' and 'Brown's allies' and 'an MP close to Brown' really say stuff like this:

• "If he has not got enough work to do then maybe he needs to be given another job," ... "He [Miliband] needs to calm down and shut up. He also needs to grow up,"  
• Mr Miliband has "one more chance" to "clarify" his position when he appears on radio today. after refusing to rule out challenging Mr Brown four times
• "He [Miliband] has behaved disgracefully and disloyally. People will be surprised that he has chosen to write an article like that at a time when the Prime Minister is under attack after last week's loss.
• "There have never been any real warmth towards David in the Labour party, but people did respect his ability. However, I think he has overreached himself here in a major way."
• "David had the opportunity to close this story down and he didn't take it. I am afraid his ego has clouded his judgement.

Seems they did!

Should they be sacked? Yes!

The dysfunctional operation in Number 10 only adds to the distracting din ... That is not exactly the way of calming a story down. The former minister, Denis MacShane, told me that the briefings were far more damaging than Miliband's article and that whoever made them should be sacked. He is not alone in his concern at the Downing Street operation.

Have I got this straight?

Number 10 are putting it about that the British Foreign Secretary whom the Prime Minister appointed is an immature egoist, lacking in judgement?

That will help the British arguments dominate the room next time Mr Miliband has to meet eg his US or Russian or Chinese opposite numbers to tackle something serious.

This report as picked up by Iain Dale and others asserts that:

Internet users will be protected from abusive bloggers and malicious Facebook postings under proposals to set up an independent internet watchdog, The Daily Telegraph has learnt. The body, made up of industry representatives, would be responsible for drawing up guidelines that social networking sites, the blogosphere, website owners and search engines would be expected to follow.

The recommendation is one of several that the House of Commons culture, media and sport select committee is expected to make in its long-awaited report on harmful content on the internet and in video games.

The Report itself is here. Its overwhelming focus is "the use of social networking sites and chatrooms for grooming and sexual predation."

I have gone through the document. There is only one single reference to blogs/blogging:

The FT attempts to describe how this morass of trade rules complexity has hit the rocks (Note: deliberate mixed metaphor). See also this.

When one has worked in Diplomacy for as long as I have, one realises just how little one knows.

So on this subject I have primitive instincts/prejudices in favour of 'free trade' as opposed to eg 'fair trade'. But if asked to write a succinct and sensible two-page essay on how world trade talks work, I could not do so.

Obviously some of it is about what actually happens, and some of it is about what might happen, and how different 'safety nets' can be used in case of things going 'wrong' (NB not easily defined what that means) on a local level.

Plus a lot depends on the individual power of specific national and international lobbies, with US elections and no doubt many others round the world looming.

And predicting what any deal will mean in practice with oil and food prices in such a state of flux round the world is next to impossible

Thus from the FT:

The US created some momentum last Tuesday by proposing to reduce its allowable ceiling for farm subsidies to $15bn (€9.6bn, £7.5bn). The figure was a couple of billion dollars below Washington’s previous offer and much less than existing limits of $48bn, though – as Brazil and India promptly pointed out – about twice its current actual spending.

It appears from this that the US slashed its farm subsidy safety net in this area from a potential $48bn to a measly $15bn. Pretty generous, huh? But Brazil/India pointed out that in fact the US was spending only some $7bn, so keeping the safety net at double that was suspicious.

See also this:

The US, with covering fire from some developing world agricultural exporters such as Uruguay, insisted that India and China open their rice and cotton markets; India and China, backed by other heavy hitters such as Indonesia, said that the US was asking them to sacrifice too much.

It does not sound from this as if the USA is going to be noisily blamed for this trade round failing. China and India as fast developing economies want to have their rice cakes and eat them - they want maximum freedom to export and maximum options to protect their domestic base. Nothing surprising there, but other developing countries might think that with the success they currently are enjoying they might take a few more 'risks'.

It is all horribly complicated. Business Standard:

The battle to conclude negotiations for Doha in agriculture and market-opening for industrial products broke down due to unbridgeable differences between India and the United States over the trigger and remedy for using the Special Safeguards Mechanism (SSM) by developing countries to check sudden surges in imports of vulnerable farm products.

After 12 days of intense negotiations, Commerce Minister Kamal Nath and his US counterpart US Trade Representative Susan Schwab failed to agree on a figure for using the SSM.

India proposed that if imports cross 115 per cent over a base period, it should be allowed to impose safeguard duties that are 25 to 30 per cent over its bound duties on products taking zero cut.

Uuurgh. How far in all that are they talking about things likely to happen in real life, as opposed to mere potentially destabilising possibilities? How many special interests stand to benefit corruptly round the world from the jungle of local rules needed to make such detailed provisions work?

Finally, the human factor. These articles bring out that the personalities of individual negotiators count for a lot, as does the guile or otherwise of the person leading the process, here WTO DG Pascal Lamy. He gambled that he could close some well known large gaps, and (says the FT) lost.

What next?

All being well that the main players will go off and lick their wounds for a few months without rocking the global trade boat too much in the meantime.

Then try again.

And hope that in the meantime those who lose out from rather less globalisation (ie the very poor) don't perish on a scale and in a way which allows anyone involved in these talks to be blamed.

Craig Murray has commented on my earlier post about EU policy towards Uzbekistan:

You make the somewhat childish debating error of asserting that because I have said that US republicans do something, I am claiming that only US republicans do that thing.  I have in fact published numerous pieces, both on my blog and elsewhere, attacking Germany's policy in Uzbekistan. Not sure if this link will show, but this one entitled "Uzbekistan and German Disgrace" is just one example: http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2007/05/uzbekistan_and.html

Well, childishly or unwisely or otherwise I was basing myself on p.37 of his book, which singles out 'conservative politicians in the USA' and 'short-sighted US Republicans' for confusing Uzbekistan leader Karimov with true democrats elsewhere in the former communist world.

Later on p.60 is a fullish description of the mighty 'K2' US airbase in Uzbekistan which is mentioned elsewhere in the book at different points. But it takes us until p.330 to discover that our benign EU partner Germans too have a significant military airbase in Uzbekistan.

And it takes us until p.378 tucked away in Note 73(!) to find out the name of "the most frequent and obsequious" Western Minister to visit Uzbekistan, namely "Joschka Fischer, the trendy Green German Foreign Minister". 

Craig likes to express his views in a blunt, provocative way. See eg his recent remarkable two-for-the-price-of-one sexist swipe on his website aimed at the Labour candidate who lost in the Glasgow East byelection:

... the graceless vituperation of the defeated New Labour candidate, the shrew-faced bitch Margaret Curran ...

It is fair to take his book about Western policy in Uzbekistan as his considered view on that subject. And that book hits far harder at US/UK perfidy than at eg German perfidy. Hence my childish simplification.

Maybe a book dwelling in greater length and in a balanced way on contradictions in EU as well as US policy towards Uzbekistan would have been more accurate, subtle - and persuasive? And for all those reasons less likely to sell?

Next. On to analyse Chapter Four of Craig's book, where he meets President Karimov and the German and US Ambassadors...

Oliver Miles picks up on my reference to the possible indictment by the ICC of the President of Sudan and commends to me to an article by Palestinian author and editor Rami Khouri: Whose Crimes? Against Whose Humanity?

This is a good article of a certain Arab liberal genre - well worth a read for Big Picture thoughts on international justice from a 'non-Western' point of view.

Khouri notes that the ICC charges have to be taken seriously:

The critics of the ICC should not be dismissed as hopeless despots, nor should the court’s potential indictment of President Bashir be dismissed as neo-colonialism administered through the UN Security Council that asked for the investigation in the first place.

And the facts are tough:

The chilling details in the prosecutor’s summary of the case revolve around charges that include acts of murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture, rape, attacks on civilians, and pillaging towns and villages. They state that Bashir “masterminded and implemented” a plan to destroy three of the largest ethnic groups in Darfur (the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa) by using the armed forces, the Janjaweed militias, and the entire government apparatus, to specifically and purposefully target civilians.

The charges state that over 35,000 were killed and 2.7 million displaced, and refugee and displaced persons camps were also attacked and harassed, in a policy aimed at destroying these people as distinct groups or tribes.

However:

[T]hese criminal charges against Arabs in Sudan have to be weighed against three other realities: massive crimes committed against Arabs by their own leaders in other Arab countries; crimes committed by Israel; and, the mass suffering, death, destitution, refugee flows, and other consequences of invading foreign forces -- especially the American-led troops in Iraq.

Will any of the crimes by Arab, Israeli or American leaders be equally investigated in due course? ... Criminal acts must be investigated and punished wherever they occur; and, the same standard of culpability and morality should be applied to all situations around the world.

The moral force and political validity of the rule of law emanate from its universality above all other attributes. Investigating and indicting Sudanese leaders while ignoring the crimes of Arab, Israeli, American and other officials are seen as a sickening example of double standards that reek of colonialism and tinged with racism. Yet we cannot ignore crimes by Sudanese in Sudan by arguing that other criminals and killers in the region are not prosecuted.

Sickening double standards? Racism?!

This issue deserves more than a blog posting, as it is at the heart of a lot of diplomatic work.

It goes to the deep legitimacy of what we all do - the legitimacy each government thinks it has, and the legitimacy others ascribe to those actions and their own. And Legitimacy is one important aspect of Effectiveness.

Still, a quick thought or two.

I happen to think that the world is becoming more democratic, albeit in an unruly and maybe ultimately danerously anarchic way. It is just harder to push people around at the local, national or international level. Authority is challenged head-on. People armed with hi-tech devices can quote back the law and organise to thwart attempts by ostensibly more powerful forces to control them.

Thus charges of 'double standards' resonate and circulate fast. They point up operational inconsistency and/or some sort of hypocrisy - why are you being tougher on X than on Y?

Yet in my experience the claim of 'double standards' almost always comes from leaders or commentators defending policies/practices based on no standards at all.

In Western democracies such as our own, leaders have to defend themselves in great detail. Papers leak. The media are free in any normal sense of the word. Elections come round - voters can throw out those they dislike.

So if those leaders are pursuing some sort of inconsistent/hypocritical or unwise/unjust policy, they are not going to do so quietly. There is real-time pressure at home and overseas - accountability - to correct mistakes or change course.

Contrast this with the 'Arab world'. Almost no leader is freely elected. The media are not free - they tend to be crude propaganda outlets. There is no comparable way to apply criticism and force change. Human rights abuses are far greater across that region than in 'the West'. No meaningful accountability.

These deficiencies are home-grown. The overwhelming mass of the millions of Muslims who have died in recent decades have been killed not by Western military action but by other Muslims, killing under one or other banner of political/religious fanaticism.

US-led intervention in Iraq has led to deaths. It also has saved many deaths which the Saddam regime would have inflicted, as it had inflicted in the past. Do saved lives not count too?

Is Israel to blame for this?

How are we to have 'universality' in international justice? What is the point of including on international tribunals or UN human rights fora representatives from countries/regions rotten with injustice and oppression?

Here's my solution.

Tha Arab world calls a Summit. It admits that it is in a historical and moral cul-de-sac, and underperforming accordingly. It calls for a transformation in human rights (above all for women). It opens the way to UN-supervised free and fair elections in every state within a year. It calls for full religious tolerance. It calls for top-end open dealings in public money, and an end to corruption. Those states which fail to sustain democratic pluralism are to be excluded from taking part in any international fora pronouncing on justice or human rights.

A couple of decades pass to allow the new governments to bring in these momentous changes and be replaced democratically and peacefully. Then the Arab world proclaims itself ready to take on the responsibilities of applying universal reasonable standards in a reasonable way. Indeed it is ready.

As its standards are now close to if not surpassing those of Israel, that dynamic changes for the better too.

Until all that happens, the Arab world accepts that even if others exhibit 'double standards', those standards are higher than the standards the Arab world itself is now able to deliver. So in a spirit of purposeful humility but also hard-headed ambition, work is needed to catch up.

Bosnia's President Izetbegovic made many political mistakes. But he was a brave and insightful man.

I understand that he got up at a meeting of the Islamic world in Saudi Arabia and told the assembled Islamic leaders that they had to learn from the West, where democratic principles and practices were simply better. Indeed.

The true pernicious racism in all this lies not in the likes of Bush and Blair bullying brown-skinned people.

It lies rather in the zeal of Western chattering classes to explain away brown-skinned people's dismal treatment of each other. In the idea that 'democracy can never work in the Middle East'.

Can't we all do better than this?

One of the things British diplomats do in foreign parts is study the local media, to keep up with the obvious news but also to follow in a deeper way what makes those societies tick.

Armed with good basic background understandin