Blogoir: May

Rupert Cornwell in the Independent gives a glowing tribute to Senator Edward Kennedy's life and achievements.

Maybe he should have included his thoughts on the evidence from the KGB archives that Kennedy tried to work with the Soviet Communists to stop President Reagan being re-elected in 1984?

A stunning story, so damning to Kennedy and his vast reputation that the 'mainstream media' have studiously ignored it?

Buy The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism to read what appears to be the fullest account of the matter currently available. Ed Driscoll's podcast interview with the author Paul Kengor is also fascinating.

A 'buzz' is being generated a new documentary film about Roman Polanski's flight from the US legal system.

This is what the original case was all about, way back in 1977. Not a nice story.

Since then Polanski has not set foot in the USA and has kept well clear of the UK, even when pursuing successfully a libel case. He of course is feted elsewhere in Europe and especially in Poland.

He came into my life in Warsaw 2005, when I as HM Ambassador was invited by the promoters to join a press conference to launch his new version of Oliver Twist.

What did Diplomatic Etiquette (and Common Sense) say I should do?

On the one hand this was a major new film of a classic British story with a British boy in the starring role. A British export of sorts. Right to support it!

On the other hand, Polanski remains some sort of outlaw for his revolting and arguably cowardly behaviour albeit many years ago. Stay away!

When in doubt, research the precedents...

It turned out that Polanski has been invited 'privately' to lunch at HM Ambassador's Residence in Warsaw under a previous management. So UK taxpayer's money had gone to feed and water this fellow in some style.

Ultimately Ambassadors are paid not to go along with what intrigues them but to serve their employer, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and thereby represent HM The Queen. Did they want to see noisy headlines in the papers of 'British Ambassador Endorses Paedophile Runaway Pole Polanski!"? Probably not.

So I declined the press conference. But I did attend the premiere, and indeed briefly met Mr P there.

We nonetheless did a little for the British angle in the film by inviting the star of Oliver Twist, young Barney Clark, round to the Residence, where he played X-Box and kicked a ball about with my boys to general satisfaction.

Here is Pat Buchanan rambling on about the utility of talking to dictators.

He somehow contrives to say that Poland brought Hitlerian disaster on itself by being a bit too "proud, defiant and heroic", albeit egged on by "insane" British guarantees.

All this and more is meant to cast in a bad light President Bush's powerful speech in Israel warning against extremist ideologies:

There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in these men and try to explain away their words. It’s natural, but it is deadly wrong. As witnesses to evil in the past, we carry a solemn responsibility to take these words seriously. Jews and Americans have seen the consequences of disregarding the words of leaders who espouse hatred. And that is a mistake the world must not repeat in the 21st century.

Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.

We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.”

We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history. (Applause.)

Buchanan snipes at this from various viewpoints. But the very example he builds his case on - Poland - refutes it.

Is he saying that if only Poland had given Hitler what he wanted everything would have been a lot better? If so, would there ever have come a point when Poland had to tell Hitler 'No', and deal with the ensuing carnage?

In any case, Stalin went along with Hitler in a Buchananish way. And look what happened then.

From the point of view of Negotiating Technique, the real problem in 'talking to extremists' is not that it is morally wrong to do so - you have to deal with what you have to deal with.

Rather it lies in betraying and marginalising more moderate voices. Why should anyone in the Middle East stand up against terrorists for 'moderate Islam' if vicious Hamas-style Islam carries the day and gets to the Top Table?

In case you were wondering what vicious Hamas-style Islam sounds like, here is the Hamas Culture Minister in full flow. Someone likely to bring to any senior negotiating table a measured sense of give-and-take?

As the joke I heard in Poland has it:

All the word's problems are caused by Jews! And bicycles!

Huh? Why bicycles?

Why Jews?

... are, it turns out, easily indentifiable.

And Guido identifies them.

I went to a 'direct grant' school myself (St Albans School). Does that qualify me to write for a Left-inclined national newspaper?

How the EU is wrecking one African farming sector after another?

It can not be said often enough: the CAP is “the most stupid, immoral state-subsidised policy in human history, give or take communism”.

But as usual the countless snoughts in the trough of public money across Europe combine to thwart serious reform.

For the first time in my life I have a garden to look after - myself.

It is a Big One. In it and around it swirl buzzards, kites, owls, badgers, deer, foxes, rabbits, hares, frogs, hedgehogs, bats, moles, more moles, even more moles and all sorts of other phenomena. The barn owl is interesting: it emits an eerie wheezy noise.

The deciduous English countryside is about as benign a climate as one can imagine. Not too hot for too long, ditto not too cold.

But Nature even here is unrelenting. Our house, my civilisation, are under constant selfish harrying from rain, creatures, insects and plants!

Were it not for all the tools and chemicals invented down the ages it would revert to a ruin and sink into brambles and creepers, teeming with Nature. Keeping all that at bay is exhausting and expensive work.

Prolific Marxian Terry Eagleton opines on the subject of Civilisation and Barbarism in the Guardian today.

Some of it is over-written in a lumpen-Leftist way:  For every cathedral, a pit of bones; for every work of art, the mass labour that granted the artist the resources to create it. Civilisation needs to be wrested from nature by violence, but the violence lives on in the coercion used to protect civilisation - a coercion known among other things as the political state.

If my garden is anything to go by, Nature is trying to wrest civilisation away from me by 'violence'.

But this is a good point on which Leftists and Conservatives ought to agree:

... civilisation needs culture even if it feels superior to it. Its own political authority will not operate unless it can bed itself down in a specific way of life. Men and women do not easily submit to a power that does not weave itself into the texture of their daily existence - one reason why culture remains so politically vital.

Maybe this is one reason for anxiety about immigration or UK Euro-scepticism.

And why the EU now spends so much taxpayers' money on state-funded Culture? NB the profoundly Liberal Fascist idea here that spending on Culture appears not to count unless it is via EU mechanisms.

Ho hum. Back to my unending struggle with Nature. 

If you're so smart, creepers and nettles, invent one of these.

Back on languages again.

Slav languages make a distinction in their verbs between Perfective and Imperfective 'aspects'. Thus in Russian/Serbian/Polish there are different verb forms denoting (a) when an action has been done and is now complete, and (b) when an action is continuing or repeated.

Here is a fairly straightforward explanation of the basic point.

We too express these distinctions in English, in a different form:

• Perfective:     Yesterday I ate my sandwiches
• Imperfective:  Yesterday when I was eating my sandwiches, it happened...

And we also use prepositions (often 'up') to denote the idea of finishing an action: "Please eat up your lunch"; "chop up those onions"; "carry out a task"...

The use of these prepositions in English has a colloquial ring. Is there some element of linguistic class distinction here too?

Would an Upper Class person say "I'll ring you up", rather than "I'll telephone you"? Do Upper Class people where possible use a single word correctly to express an idea rather than these prepositional verb-phrases?

Thus "Finish your lunch", "chop the onions" and "complete a task". 

Or is it all just a matter of ultra-correct and/or old-fashioned usage which (probably) is dying out?  

Could excessive/unwise EU regulation of the power sector cause the UK power generation sector ruinous problems?

The problem in this complex policy area is that the lead times for taking decisions are necessarily long (power stations cost a lot of money), and decisions once made have to be lived with (because no-one wants to live without power for a few years while governments and power companies weigh options).

As we have seen in South Africa, blunders made years ago over power-generating capacity are having grim results now.

In Europe we have the extra dimension of EU Directives, owing their loyalty to a collective one-size-fits-all vision of what 'Europe' needs. Many of these are of course driven by special interest groups. No doubt there are British special interest groups hard at work too, but the unwieldy untransparent processes involved create a context in which capricious outcomes are more likely. See EU confusion over biofuels.

Add to the mix not consensus-based decision-making but EU-style voting, and the chances for any one member-state of a serious foul-up notably increase.

The new Lisbon Treaty significantly extends the areas in which Voting must take place. Hence the need for the UK to be able to lobby hard and well in member state capitals across the EU, as well as in Brussels. Our vital operational national interests are at stake now in a way which was not the case before.

So what does this government and the FCO do? Start hacking back the size and seniority and therefore punching weight of the UK's EU Embassy network, for the sake of other Policy Goals.

Seriously damaging.

If a private corporation did such damage to other British private and public interests, it could be sued. Why not sue the FCO for this stupidity as and when jobs and livelihoods are lost? I have the names of the senior people involved in driving these decisions, if anyone wants to make it personal - much more vivid that way.

Maybe the voters in Crewe will send a message tomorrow that one of their Policy Goals is to stop the EU turning off our lights?

But if they do, which Party will do anything about it?

Confused and worried by the turbulence in global financial markets?

This explains it in terms even Germans - and the rest of us - can understand.

Not comfortable reading:

The monster is not the financial system, crooked and stupid as it may have been. The monster is the burgeoning horde of pensioners in Germany and other industrial countries. It is easy to change the financial system. The central banks can assemble on any Tuesday morning and announce tougher lending standards. But it is impossible to fix the financial problems that arise from Europe's senescence ... 

... There is nothing complicated about finance. It is based on old people lending to young people. Young people invest in homes and businesses; aging people save to acquire assets on which to retire.

The new generation supports the old one, and retirement systems simply apportion rights to income between the generations. Never before in human history, though, has a new generation simply failed to appear...

South Africa's wave of violence against foreigners is vile and depressing.

Not so much because 'black' South Africans should love and respect foreigners from elsewhere in Africa. Why should they?

But the fact that South Africa's uniquely horrible live burnings are back.

Remember necklacing? The practice of placing a petrol-filled tyre over a fellow Africa's shoulders then setting it alight? Winnie Mandela (in)famously endorsed this technique of revolutionary terror.

The then ANC leader Oliver Tambo used curiously mild language:

"Of course we are not in favor of necklacing. We don't like necklacing, but we understand its origins. It originated from the extremes to which people were provoked by the unspeakable brutalities of the apartheid system."

So what is 'provoking' this latest round of mayhem? What are its 'origins'?

The ANC leadership's busy unspeakable attempts to steer into the long grass international condemnation of the Mugabe regime, whose unspeakable brutality has driven hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans to cross into South Africa?

Or is it demographic trends, accelerated by ANC policies?

For a long time Africans have been making their way to South Africa to try to make a living. Down in Cape Town in 1988 my Polish friends in the city council told me how they grappling with finding interpreters to speak languages from as far away as Kenya - people had walked or hitch-hiked thousands of miles from there to tin shacks on the beach near Cape Town.

But the suicidal Mugabe regime has caused a far larger exodus, across South Africa's own borders. Not too surprising that poor South Africans are fed up, even if the scale and intensity of the violence is appalling.

I recall a senior diplomat telling me that South Africa was not really different from other disasters in Africa. It eventually would crash into the ground, but thanks to its higher living standards it would descend from a far higher altitude and with a shallower trajectory.

Sure seems to be going that way.

The Cuban authorities are accusing US diplomat Mike Parmly of passing money from Cuban terrorists living in the USA to Cuban mercenaries living in Cuba. I knew Mike in Sarajevo. Tough operator.

As with diplomats in Zimbabwe trying to operate during that country's madness, Western diplomats in Cuba have to make the best of a bad job and establish informal links with pro-democracy groups. But they will be closely watched.

In Milosevic's Serbia it was rather different. A lot of rather obvious official EU/US support went to different organisations opposing Milosevic, whose representatives were able to operate freely and travel overseas - Milosevic helpfully believed he was invincible and did not crack down.

In Zim and Cuba it is harder. Hence these latest noisy accusations that the US Government are helping pass things to and fro.

The only questions that matters are these. Is there a policy actively to work to bring down the regime? And if so, how best to do it?

The EU alas has no policy to wobble Cuban communism. Maybe the Americans are made of sterner stuff.

Go it, Mike  

One of the Basic Points I tried to teach my Embassy teams as I ascended through the FCO ranks was, "Never mind all that policy stuff, which will tend to be OK enough. Your job is to get it 200% right on the day!"

The best-planned visit or event can become a wash-out for lack of attention to basic or even any detail.

An epic example was a joint visit by the then French and German Foreign Ministers to Sarajevo back in 1997 or thereabouts.

This visit was billed as a key EU moment in post-conflict Bosnia, a resounding call from Europe to the war-weary Bosnians to settle their differences and walk together purposefully down the European high road.

The major set-piece event during the visit was a gala reception in a Sarajevo hotel with several hundred prominent Bosnians.

There we all gathered chattering noisily, waiting for the guests of honour.

Eventually they arrived and the moment came for the various speeches to start.

Someone must have spent loving hours drafting them. But no-one from the French/German Embassies or BH protocol appeared to have given any thought at all to how the speeches actually would be delivered, with interpreting, in that particular big room, full of guests who did not mainly speak French/German, at that time, on that evening.

The sound system was bad. The Visitors were positioned in not the best part of the room. No podium for extra height and 'presence'. Interpreters slowed everything down. No trumpet or gong was sounded to attract the audience's attention and establish quiet when the speeches started.

Thus it was that as the speeches droned on, more and more Bosnians present simply tuned out and carried on chatting among themselves.

An unseemly competition started. Which was louder? The mass of Bosnian guests, or the VIP speakers?

When the German Foreign Minister got going, a mini-crisis was reached. He could not be heard at all other than by shouting.

Which he did. To little avail.

The louder he went, the more the massed Bosnians themselves talked loudly, almost as if (perish the thought) they spontaneously thought it would be a good Balkan joke to drown him out.

So we connoisseurs of the Diplomatic Grotesque witnessed a fascinating moment.

A leading European politician from a country which had given generously to the post-war reconstruction effort was left bawling at a large crowd of senior Bosnians that they should be grateful to Europe, and respond accordingly.

And they did respond. They just ignored him.

A text-book study in incompetence by the organisers.

And a metaphor for EU policy in the Balkans?

We pay. They don't listen...

Echoing as if by magic my thoughts earlier today on Junk Diplomacy, some trenchant observations from Mark Steyn:

Increasingly, the Western world has attitudes rather than policies. It’s one thing to talk as a means to an end. But these days, for most midlevel powers, talks are the end, talks without end. Because that’s what civilized nations like doing — chit-chatting, shooting the breeze, having tea and crumpets, talking talking talking. Uncivilized nations like torturing dissidents, killing civilians, bombing villages, doing doing doing. It’s easier to get the doers to pass themselves off as talkers then to get the talkers to rouse themselves to do anything...

... In his 2002 letter to the United States, bin Laden has a lot of grievances, from America’s refusal to implement sharia to Jew-controlled usury to the lack of punishment for “President Clinton’s immoral acts.” Like Barack Obama’s pastor, bin Laden shares the view that AIDS is a “Satanic American invention.” Obviously, there are items on the agenda that the free world can never concede on — “President Clinton’s immoral acts” — but who’s to say most of the rest isn’t worth chewing over?

This will be the fault line in the post-Bush war debate over the next few years. Are the political ambitions of the broader jihad totalitarian, genocidal, millenarian — in a word, nuts? Or are they negotiable?

Good question.

Poland claims to have the EU's longest 'external' border.

Hmm. 

Our coastline is an external EU border. It is over 12,000km long, far longer than Poland's EU 'external' eastern borders with Russia/Belarus/Ukraine and its maritime border combined.

But (with so many islands) Greece's coastline borders are over 13,000km, and on that basis presumably are the EU's largest. Poland has the longest land border with non-EU countries.

Any other bids?

The BBC website currently has the following headline:

Iraqi al-Qaeda commander 'seized'

Why the inverted commas around the word 'seized'?

There is nothing in the ensuing story to explain why, unless the idea is to imply that the Iraqi forces who say that they have done the seizing are lying or wrong.

Why not 'Iraq' al-Qaeda commander seized?

Or Iraq 'Al-Qaeda' commander seized?

Or Iraq Al-Qaeda 'commander' seized?

When I was a student it was all the rage to throw such punctuation around, somehow giving the impression that one was evincing an oh-so-clever and cynical relativism, questioning everything in sight.

Now the BBC has caught up. 

We started with junk food. Then we had junk sport.

Now we have Junk Diplomacy.

This takes numerous exotic forms. But in its mainstream version it consists of high-level expensive and expansive Dialogue, the more vacuous the better.

Thus European Voice reports poor prospects for this week's EU/Latin America Summit in Lima. Some 50 heads of state and government are gathering, leaving behind them a wide trampled path of carbon footprints.

Likely useful operational outcomes?

Nil.

Gordon Brown and President Sarkozy sensibly have decided not to go. The UK apparently will be represented instead by Baroness Ashton. She will not be popular. Her presence will send all the other heads of state/government a (for them) patronising message that HMG think they are wasting their time. A message all the more vexing because it is true.

The European Voice article also contains explicitly anti-American propaganda:

Latin America now has the biggest gap between rich and poor in the world, a gap whose widening can be traced back to the neo-liberal business policies pursued in the 1970s and 1980s by US-backed military dictators. 

Really? The corruption and maladministration by all those home-grown etatist-populists have had nothing to do with it?

One problem with EU junk diplomacy is that it dumbs down the prospects of action in areas where the EU actually could make a useful difference.

Thus those EU member states which romanticise the Cuban communist system block action by those (such as Poland) which thinks that Europe should be doing far more to promote democracy there.

This is stupid in principle, but also operationally unwise in the EU's own terms. When Cuban communism collapses the EU will not be as well positioned as it might have been to influence the turbulent transition, and nasty American values will pour in instead.

Another problem is the fact that because such gatherings need to be regular and frequent to show how just much we value Dialogue, any strategic content is leeched out of them.

Thus the best quote European Voice can find to justify the Summit in Lima is summit as “an excellent opportunity for both regions to get to know each other's priorities and discover on what there could be bilateral agreement and on what agreement might be more difficult”.

Utter twaddle.

One able civil servant in Europe could knock out the key points here on a few sides of paper, run it past an oppo somewhere in Latin America, and everyone could read it at home. Huge savings to the EU and Latin America taxpayer. Leaders get on with leading.

The answer to junk diplomacy is the same as the answer to junk food.

Go on a diet.

The Guardian's Madeleine Bunting visits a new bore-hole in Africa, funded not by official development assistance but by voluntary efforts.

She asks in some despair:

"But the question that keeps coming back is: where is the state investment in Katine? Why isn't Kampala finding the money to drill a borehole for this community?"

Anyone who has seen the results of Western development assistance in Africa over decades will not take long to answer that question for her. Later in the piece she mentions Chinese contractors hard at work building a new road. Who is paying them? And why are African contractors themselves not hard at work in that area?

This too is a bit odd:

These are people whom history has served badly, and Britain has played no small role in that. We cobbled Uganda together ... Furthermore, the damaging western legacy is no longer seen as just political: it is increasingly also environmental. Last year, Katine was one of many sub-counties in the Soroti district devastated by nine months of flooding, which destroyed roads, homes and crops on which thousands depended. No one can remember comparable floods, and the fear is that climate change is to blame.

On a point of sneaky drafting technique, note how Ms Bunting effortlessly slips from the Subjective (" ...is seen as just political") to the Objective ("it is increasingly environmental".

Is she suggesting that if the colonial-legacy borders were different there would have been less flooding?

In Europe we have adjusted many earlier borders peacefully (and not so peacefully) in the past 20 years as communism ended.

Time for Africa do the same, if the different communities find it so hard to live together?

Hot on the heels of my thoughts on how many NGOs are not really NG, here is another pertinent observation, pointing up the sneaky but widespread practice of sending taxpayers' money to 'NGOs' then citing their views as support for the official line!

But how to stop this sort of thing?

Update: as has been pointed out, I have linked to a subscription-only European Voice article (which was available to all yesterday). It basically pointed out how EU monies had gone to Friends of the Earth whose pronouncements often supported EU positions, and called for so-called NGOs to show a lot more transparency in how such public money was spent.

Plodding round the garden trying to cut the grass, I kept thinking about the momentous words of John Bosnitch!

He dismissed me summarily on B92's site as an "ex-ambassador trying to complete England's never-ending mission of subduing Serbia as part of its global policy against Russia".

Huh?

What does JB think happens each day in English (or even British) diplomacy?

Does he really think that our diplomats and Ministers spring from their beds, cast off their flannel jim-jams and gobble their cornflakes in their fevered haste to get through the London rush-hour to the Foreign Office and start a new day scheming Serbia's downfall?

Does he think that we have a Top Secret folder full of instructions originating in the C19 for subduing Serbia and crushing all fair-minded Serbian aspirations?

Just say the UK back in 1990 had been given one Balkan wish by the Good Fairy's magic wand. It would have been that Yugoslavia dump its ridiculous communist system and move fast to join the EU, or failing that become a successful non-EU but active country like Norway.

Once Yugoslavia started to collapse, we would have been more than happy to wish that that happen peacefully, with Serbia engaging in constructive competition with Slovenia to be the first former Yugoslav republic running an EU Presidency.

Had our wishes been granted, Serbia now would be far richer, visa-free for all EU countries, and maybe even enjoying a lot of options for managing its 'never-ending' Kosovo problem from a position of strength, not weakness.

All this was made clear time after time after time to Serbian leaders in Belgrade, publicly and privately.

Some listened. Some did not. Too many preferred to mess around.

Result? A weakened, unhappy, underperforming Serbia.

I suppose that the great advantage of selling conspiracy theories is that they ascribe to one's enemies supernatural powers of effective craftiness, to the point of giving the seller the ideal excuse for stupidity and idleness - "Our situation is hopeless. Whatever we do will be neutralised - by Them!"

Earth to Planet Serbia: Those who cooperate with others and work hard and sensibly tend to do well. Those who isolate themselves and are stupid and idle tend to fall behind.

Fair enough?

Imagine a very hypothetical situation.

You are in New York, the UN Ambassador of a country which has just been hit by a vast natural disaster which has killed thousands of your fellow-citizens. But the regime running the country is refusing to let international assistance into the country, probably causing thousands of new deaths.

What goes through your mind?

You want - need - to stay in your job. You wangled it through your close private business contacts with the top members of the regime, who carefully noted down and much appreciated your verbose professions of undying loyalty.

Yet now that you are in New York mingling at the highest levels with the 'international community', life looks rather different.

Those Western people and values the regime detests so much are, well, not so bad. Even the youthful British Ambassador from the hated former colonial power has been friendly enough when you have bumped into him on the diplomatic circuit.

Normally you stay close to your regional Ambassadorial colleagues. But since the disaster struck your country they too have been acting a bit differently. Their polite enquiries about how things are going back home seem to ring false.

Are they too wondering how you can stand there swilling the UN community's expensive wine and canapes while your people die from fast-spreading diseases brought about by lack of the massive emergency assistance they needed, and which the leadership you represent are too incompetent - or wicked - to provide?

And so many other colleagues representing countries which have offered assistance are now glancing at you in some embarrassment, turning their backs a tiny fraction to keep you out of their groups at the receptions.

Of course, it was not that easy before. All those hypocritical human rights lobbies had made life tough. But then there was plenty of personal cynical solidarity to be found among that large group of Ambassadors who represented repressive corrupt regimes and did not care tuppence for pluralism.

This is different. Even many of those colleagues seem a bit more distant now.

You have no good options. The sparse reports sent from HQ are obvious propaganda rubbish. There is too much bad news from home out there on the Internet to be made up, even by the CIA. HQ do not want to hear your private advice that your country's reputation is taking a heavy blow.

You had thought that even if they ran a tough ship they were inching in the right direction. National independence is precious and worth many sacrifices.

But this latest calamity has shown an aspect of the regime's character which even you had not expected - a readiness to let die thousands of your fellow-citizens for no good reason at all 

Plus some of your own relatives are in the worst-affected areas. You have not heard news of them, even though they were well-off and well-connected by local standards.

What to do?

The dark thought of defecting, of resigning and seeking political asylum in America, has crossed your mind. But how?

The Americans would expect you to spill the beans on the regime's inner dealings and weaknesses. You have beans aplenty to spill. But your family honour would take an eternal hit. Your best friends and closest relatives back home might simply disappear. You could never go home safely.

Too Awful.

Time to get ready for the Bohemian National Day reception. But you do not look foward it.

Just getting there will be disagreeable. Your wife has lost a cousin, maybe several others. She is grief-stricken and refuses to go out. She is screaming at the regime, despite your whispered warnings that the Embassy's Security Section may have microphoned your large flat.

And even your driver is now sullen - he too has relatives in the disaster area.

Yes, despite all the glamour and prestige Ambassadors can have a lonely, painful job.

If only people appreciated that rather more...