Blogoir: July

Talking of Ghastly Diplomatic Moments, the dismal fate of British diplomat James Hudson prompted this magnificent sentence:

his starring role opposite and under two local hookers brought an end to his tour of booty . . . er, duty: one portly bespectacled chap from Whitehall with his dressing gown hanging open quaffing champagne with a pair of Urals slappers going through the motions with all the flair of the mechanical hare at an East End greyhound track.

And then on to a lively account of the whole series of ghastly moments involving a rather too inscrutable (and indeed often inscrotable) Chinese stage personality which came the way of French diplomat Bernard Boursicot, making him really famous for all the wrong reasons.

Who else but ..?

By the way, I am unimpressed with the response to my request for examples of such moments.

Please try harder, diplomatic readers (or even better those of you who have been helpless better victims of DGMs, as they henceforth will be called here).

My young issue of the non-distaff side had a turbulent upbringing. Between 1996 and 2003 they lived in Russia, Croatia, Bosnia, USA, England, Serbia and Poland. Seven countries in some seven years.

This took its toll in educational terms. In Sarajevo they were among the first intake in the newly opened international school, comprising exactly 40% of it (ie there were five children at first - it has moved on since then) and we eventually surrendered, sending them off from Poland to boarding school.

In Belgrade after Milosevic fell, the only English-speaking international school was in a gloomy state, so we decided to ask to take with us a tutor. This once had been a normal part of FCO life, but had not been done for years. Yet there it was, provided for deep in a dusty part of the rules. So we were duly authorised to find and take with us said tutor.

For a year they were home-schooled. No great harm occurred. In fact they may even have learned something.

Hard to say whether all the long-term disruption to their education was good or bad. They missed out 100% on continuity during those formative years, but in Belgrade at least having top-end football coaching and access to the Serbian Special Forces sniper range appeared to compensate.

Now teenagers, they get up occasionally and sprawl voluminously round the house, demanding money with menaces and waiting for their GCSE/A-Level results respectively. 

In those days it was not so easy to find tutors willing to live overseas at short notice. Now the Internet does the business via Tutor Hunt.

So snap one up quick.   

Is belatedly linked to by me here, hosted by Cabalamat.

Look out for Prodicus and a massive array of adjectives on the EU as a Stalinist plot, a point of view unappealing to one of his commenters who says it is instead a fascist plot.

And Raedwald looks at liberating road traffic from the horror of excessive signs in central London, utterly ignoring the A420.

In case feminist analysis of glamour calendars does not turn you on enough, try some furtive nocturnal stegophilia gnar gnar gnar.

My own next BBRU hosting is in the first week of September. Be warned.

Voting in the Total Politics Blog Poll ends at midnight today.

So, you know what to do.

I have been struggling with my paper on military/civilian cooperation in 'fragile states'.

It is easy to think that the whole business is hopeless. It is just not possible in the short time-scales we all can cope with these days to work out how best to achieve Stability while maintaining Legitimacy. Not to mention Development.

It is not all bad. The Sierra Leone intervention a few years ago is said to have been a rather good one. There the state had fallen into gruesome collapse, with horrible atrocities being carried out by armed factions. The UN Sec Gen called for the British to help Do Something, and so we did, sending in a sizeable armed contingent in 2000 to 'restore order'.

This was done, and UK forces left in 2002 soon after successful new elections. Sierra Leone totters along again, a miserably poor country but no longer a total failure.

And what about the UNTAC deployment in Cambodia in the early 1990s? In went a major UN civ/mil deployment, some 20,000 people costing $1.5bn. They left two years later with Cambodia restored to something resembling normality after the catastrophic Khmer Rouge period.

Perfect? No.

Pretty darn good by the standards of such things? Yes.

In Cambodia there was a deep tradition of success to work with. The problem there had been the Cold War and Vietnam War and then the Khmer Rouge communist insanity. With those problems ended, Cambodia could start to move back towards success again. Now growing briskly, albeit still from a very low base.

Bosnia? The conflict was stopped but it did not end. Fourteen years on Bosnia is still far from able or willing to act as a single purposeful state. Instead:

Both Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo are dominated by a greedy, irresponsible elite that only too often crosses the line into organized crime, as anyone who asks around in the region is likely to hear.

Deep deep down in all this are our Assumptions, often so deeply buried that we do not even pause to think about them.

One such is the idea that culture somehow does not matter in all this. That all people respond to materialist incentives as we usually do, and so it is best if Western/international ideas of 'development' and progress prevail. On this Marxists and liberals tend to agree: modern is good.

But are some cultures (eg in Africa) just not suited to what we want them to have? Is it wicked to ask?

Another assumption is that the right thing to do with a fragile or failing state is to get it restored to a less fragile/failing condition.

That might work for somewhere like Cambodia, where Cambodians have shown themselves to be able to pull themselves together in their own national interest.

But can it work eg in Bosnia or Afghanistan or even Iraq, where the ethno-religious-regional rivalries mean that it is not clear what the expression 'national interest' means at all?

Maybe some states as currently constituted are just too weak/divided to be revived, or are never going to flourish within their existing borders, however much money is poured in? Should the option of putting that thought on the table be ruled out a priori?

Putting it another way, when is it honest to say that a certain approach has failed or at least is so unlikely to succeed that other approaches deserve a try?

For a state of the art look at clever progressive socialist British opinion on such matters, read the new DFID White Paper.

Buried deep on page 135, just after the cutesy passages on DFID's new UKaid logo (Note: is not the word 'aid' a tad patronising towards its recipients?), is this at 7.54:

Well, there it is. Another assumption. That the core task of 'development' is to use state structures to prop up other state structures, with a nod to private enterprise as and when it might be a handy 'partner' on the donor state's terms.

Finally, the absolutely basic assumption shared across the planet is that there must be No More Colonialism.

Fine by me. I do not want the British state to run anywhere in eg the poorer parts of Africa.

But would it be so wrong in principle or substance if a self-evidently failing state was told by the international community that as a condition for getting any further assistance it would lose the right to run its own affairs for (say) 30 years while a major international team stepped in to run the territory according to decent standards, and trained up large numbers of local people to work to those standards?

That sort of outcome would be long enough to reassure investors and get private capital pouring in. It would give the average ten-year-old living now the prospect of getting training and a decent local job in his/her lifetime. Human rights would be respected enough. Courts would function honestly. Infrastructure could get built. Women could get a better deal. And so on.

That sort of approach would almost certainly guarantee that the country concerned moved from being a failure to being a Success within a couple of thousand weeks.

Is anything else likely to work better?

No.

And that option is the one option no-one will contemplate.

Who's failing whom here?

Over in the USA a lot of noise is being generated by people speculating that President Obama is not for various technical reasons an American citizen and so should not have been allowed to run for President.

Yawn.

But there may be other reasons for wanting to see all the documentation describing his birth. Not just the birth certification - the actual birth certificate too.

Just, you know, to help find out some details about his earlier life which the official versions seem not to cover quite as accurately as they might?

Interesting, in a zany way.

My next commission for DIPLOMAT magazine is a piece on Diplomatic Ghastly Moments.

All you diplomatic readers out there will have had them. You know what I mean.

That moment when your heart disappears in the general direction of your toes at high speed. When your mouth goes dry as all of a sudden things are ... Different.

Some ghastly moments really are ghastly. In my case, for example, the news of a death of a colleague in a helicopter crash in Sarajevo, or getting a phone call to say that Serbia's Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic had been shot.

But I am after examples of those occasions affecting oneself personally and professionally. Those split seconds when one realises that one has not done something essential, or done something unwise, or otherwise blown it big time.

Such as the moment when I broke the hinge on the briefcase of a member of the Royal Family when tasked with highly responsible and complex job of opening and closing said briefcase. 

Or when I blithely knocked a glass of champagne across the Prime Minister's table at Number Ten.

Or when I was driving back from a funeral in Warsaw and received a call on my mobile from the Sunday Times. 

Stuff like that. As must have happened to James Hudson when he watched a local Russian TV website. 

All true-life examples asap to mail@charlescrawford.biz, please. Anonymity of course will be preserved in the final article as people request.  

Have you voted in the Total Politics Blog 2009 exercise yet?

If you care to do so you can include a vote for this one, now with an added Wikio 'badge' (see on the right hand column) which I have earned by soaring unexpectedly for me at least into the UK Top 1000 blogs (as measured by the mighty Wikio).

Some way to go to reach number 1, but with patience and all that famed Blogoir reader loyalty...

The Americans have a way with words: a good loser is a Loser.

In other words, by contemplating the possibility of defeat yet remaining cheerful about it you psych yourself down - and help bring defeat about.

Which brings us to President Obama's recent remarkable off-hand thought:

I'm always worried about using the word 'victory,' because, you know, it invokes this notion of Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur.

Read this bracing analysis of why that is both inaccurate and open to misinterpretation.

A fuller version suggests that the President's chain of thought is that in the nature of the terrorist/Taleban problem a formal full surrender of our opponents in the way that ended the fighting with Japan and Germany in WW2 on Allied terms might not be even theoretically possible; all we can hope is to force them deep on to the defensive to stop them attacking us significantly in the future. 

Fair enough. But wiser to call that outcome victory anyway?

And make clear that that's what is going to happen?

Remember that far-reaching German Constitutional Court ruling qualifying the interpretation of the Lisbon Treaty?

Spiegel Online International has a lot more:

In essence, the court ruled that by passing the so-called "accompanying law" to the Lisbon Treaty, which determines the rights of German parliament to participate in European legislation, the representatives had relinquished significant monitoring rights to Brussels.

According to the judges, this unconstitutionally subjects the people that they represent to the whims of a bureaucracy that lacks sufficient democratic legitimacy.

A point everyone is now busy trying to hide from the Irish as they are pummelled into voting Yes in a second Treaty referendum. That said, the ruling is encouraging those parties in German concerned that the Lisbon Treaty creates 'too much Europe' to pursue other manoeuvres aimed at qualifying the Treaty and its legal impact in and on Germany at least. Scope for some impressive mess in due course.

Meanwhile the Czech President appears to have in mind some new legal ploys to effect further delay, much to the chagrin of the Swedish EU Presidency who wants everything sorted out tidily under its benign leadership..

Is 'Europe' amidst all this wrangling on the wane? Dominique Moïsi fears that in looming realignments of international groupings brought about by global economic uncertainty, Europe risks losing out if it does not speak with a united voice eg at the United Nations:

... Europe's last chance to be a credible actor in a multi-polar world rests precisely on its ability to present a single, united, responsible voice. Europe currently exists as an economic actor, not as an international political actor.

If Europeans were to set for themselves the goal of speaking with one voice, of having one representative in the spectrum of multilateral institutions – starting with the UN Security Council – they would be taken more seriously. In this case, one can really say that “less is more”.

Well ... no.

The chances of the UK and France ceding their UN Security Council seats are ... [pause as he gets out his calculator and does some feverish number-crunching] ... nil. So let's proceed on that basis, shall we?

Looking on what might be said by some Europhiles to be the bright side:

The European Union in the year 2009 represents a world-historical optimum. Never before have 500 million people united under a single political order been better off. Never before have they been as free, as healthy, or as well educated; and never before have they been as peaceful.

To be sure, it is the systemic improbability of this state of affairs that lends a certain credence to the current pessimism about the future...

Peering ahead a mere two thousand or so weeks to 2030:

I was over at the UK's international development department (DFID) today, talking about the current British attempts to 'join up' military and civilian efforts in world trouble-spots.

As I was looking at these questions with both the benefit of years of insider experience and now the irresponsibility of non-office, it occurred to me that any given policy is based upon geological layers of assumptions. Some of these go unquestioned, partly because even to question them opens unfathomable new complications (see Kurds/Iraq/Turkey passim), but also partly because we have forgotten they are there at all.

So lots of attention is being given now to 'failed states' - eek, how to stop them failing? See William Hague's significant recent speech on Conservative foreign policy themes. 

But what is the right question here? Is there a case for accelerating their failure, to set up something totally different? Should states which can not manage internal ethno-religious rivalries without massive violence simply be divided into whatever new smaller units might have some prospect of being run coherently, or taken over in whole or part by their more stable neighbours?

Another basic philosophical issue is the role of local 'strong men' (and they almost always are men, not women).

Do you try to cut deals with them as the only realistic chance of getting some local stability, a pre-condition for any sort of development emerging? And perhaps too as the only way to 'contain' a problem, if one has concluded that resolving it is simply too difficult? That tends to be the view of other Asian countries towards the Burma regime.

The problem then is that the Strong Men end up oppressing whatever passes for the local moderate forces, with their legitimacy undeservedly boosted through our engagement with them. The territory tends to stay nasty and brutish indefinitely, and perhaps not in fact much more stable anyway? See Zimbabwe.

But if you decide to tackle the worst Strong Men, what if it turns out that they are stronger than you thought and can fight better to defend themselves and their interests in and around their territory than you can? And/or they expect that you will want to give up and go home eventually, leaving things still in their favour? See the Milosevic example. Or Belarus/Cuba. And Iraq. 

Hence the latest ideas being floated that in Afghanistan 'we need to talk to moderate elements of the Taleban', and the parallel idea of talking to moderate extremists within Hamas ranks.

I wrote about the Afghanistan angle back in March as Holbrooke reappeared on the scene.

You have to make the best of a bad job in coping with the problems caused by these dismal countries. If that leads you towards a broad lowest common denominator policy of 'containment', so be it.

But don't be surprised if the moderate Talebans turn out to be pretty irrelevant, unable by virtue of their very 'moderation' to bring along with them into peaceful nation-building the numbers of hard-core fighters needed to make a difference.

Or the moderates quickly end up dead.  

One of the best things about the Internet is the way it lets ideas be hammered out, if only for the benefit of the people who follow the hammering. (Note: the fact that insane Internet conspiracy theories seem to do rather better than hard facts is of course a problem.)

Take this really good analysis by Tim Worstall, swiping at Richard Murphy's claim that it is not possible to deal with Climate Change while growing global economic output significantly in the coming century.

Tim takes the trouble to break down a number of complicated issues into bite-size chunks which we lesser mortals might understand. Well worth a look.

He surely is on to something important in peeling away at rival scenarios for the impact of climate change. Since the likely damage (and benefit) caused by global warming depends in part on how and where people are living in decades to come, which in turn requires us to make intelligent assumptions including about economic growth.

At the very heart of the policy on all this is the famous Social Discount Rate. In essence, if the planet is likely to grow quite a lot wealthier in the decades to come, should people now subsidise people a century hence?

Would it have made sense for people in 1907 to make significant economic sacrifices for the benefit of people alive now? Not obviously - they were far poorer then than we are, and the uncertainty of the future would have led to serious mistakes in the form of sacrifice taken.

Which is why some experts say that even if we all agree that climate change is a Problem, the wisest thing to do is probably not very much - rather than scramble around spending huge sums of money now trying to fix long-term trends, much more effective to spend money in the future to deal with specific problems as they arise.

See eg Bjorn Lomborg:

Likewise, reasonable people can differ on their interpretation of the Waxman-Markey bill. Even if we set aside its masses of pork-barrel spending, and analyses that show it may allow more emissions in the US for the first decades, there are more fundamental problems with this legislation.

At a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars annually, it will have virtually no impact on climate change. If all of the bill’s many provisions were entirely fulfilled, economic models show that it would reduce the temperature by the end of the century by 0.11°C (0.2°F) – reducing warming by less than 4%.

Even if every Kyoto-obligated country passed its own, duplicate Waxman-Markey bills – which is implausible and would incur significantly higher costs – the global reduction would amount to just 0.22°C (0.35°F) by the end of this century. The reduction in global temperature would not be measurable in a hundred years, yet the cost would be significant and payable now.

Is it really treason against the planet to express some skepticism about whether this is the right way forward?

And while Tim is at it, he demolishes a scary Oxfam claim that climate change is going to flood the world with 75,000,000 economic migrants by 2050. He simply runs some elementary maths over the arguments and cuts them down to their puny size.

Inconvenient truths.

Brian Barder tries to explain why he is of The Left:

There is a broad left-to-right spectrum of values and priorities and most people can quickly see where on the spectrum they belong. The two ends of the spectrum may be summarised (in simplified form) like this:

• Liberty, human rights >>> <<< Discipline, restraint, order, social responsibility
• Compassion >>> <<< Competition
• Concern for the underdog and the vulnerable >>> <<< Respect and admiration for the rich and successful
• Belief in maximum equality, including equality of outcomes >>> <<< Belief in equality of opportunity and the need for inequality of outcomes for reward and incentive
• The public service and government as principal agents for essential services, change and reform >>> <<< Minimum government, small public sector, maximum role for private sector and individuals
• Taxation as means of financing public services and reducing inequality >>> <<< taxation a burden on private initiative, to be minimised
• Responsibility of rich people to help the less well-off >>> <<< If most poor people worked harder they too could be rich and successful
• Trade unions as a necessary protection for employees’ interests >>> <<< Unions often hamper managers in their responsibility for managing
• Politicians as necessary and valued agents for change and reform >>> <<< Politicians meddle in business and the economy for ideological rather than practical reasons
• Private sector and the profit motive generally equate to exploitation of the consumer and the employee >>> <<< Private sector the only creator of wealth, and the profit motive a necessary incentive
• Society should promote the interests of those least able to help themselves >>> <<< Advancement purely on merit in a relentless meritocracy, and the devil take the hindermost

I have omitted a few. But you get the picture.

He of course crafts the spectrum in a tendentious way to explain why he is for all the first snuggly choices and virtually none of the second brutish ones.

Why is Compassion juxtaposed with Competition?

The main failure in his analysis is the truly Leftist absence of any idea as to how wealth is created in the first place, or any respect for human creativity and energy. Just why is it so bad that clever people create myriad new products and ideas from which millions of less able people benefit? What is the alternative?

Brian! Read this sliced bread piece and reconsider, before it's too late.

That said, Brian's thoughts on Wayda's film Katyn are worth reading. Although it is worth adding that the 'fiction' of Nazi responsibility for the Katyn massacres was maintained in the West for decades from nervousness at confronting the Soviet Union with this biggest of Big Communist Lies.

Maybe one other spectrum item needs adding:

Belief that Stalinism was the right idea but badly implemented ..... belief that the violence and failure of Stalinism are inherent in the Marxist/Hard Leftist project

I have joined the Bloggers Circle group, an initiative set up by Labour supporter Matthew Cain and aimed at getting somewhat more structured debate going between bloggers.

Imagine my dismay when one of the first pieces of work put round for possible comment was this one from Raincoat Optimism linking the musings of our old friend Slavoj Žižek to Conservative policy:

I am struck by the solid number of people coming to this site via my Diplomatic Oral History transcript here. Welcome.

There is a lot of good vivid stuff there if anyone really does want a Lot More about some of the most memorable moments in my diplomatic career:

The Presidential drama (or not) in Honduras drags on despite my own best attempts to end it by going on holiday.

I see that Hillary Clinton is more nuanced about a possible return by ex-President Zelaya, now a 'reckless' move.

What happens if a demonstration in favour of the new situation is organised in Honduras but the media seem to be bad at counting?

The ever-fertile mind of Max Atkinson points out an easy way to avoid wasting fuel and make life better, namely allowing UK cars to turn left at red traffic lights if the road is clear.

Traffic norms in different countries take on a life quite independent of common sense. In Moscow in the early 1990s every possible traffic law was being flouted all the time as tend of thousands of private cars poured into the city for the first time ever on this scale.

Not quite every traffic law. Two exceptions.

Flicking on car headlights when going through a tunnel or even an underpass: dutifully done by everyone.

And waiting patiently by the side of the road for the traffic police to come if cars were involved in a collision, the drivers concerned deliberately not moving their damaged vehicles an inch to help clear the road so that in due course the cause of the collision might better be assessed. The effect of this of course was to jam the roads for no significant policy of practical reason at all.

And what about the USA's nervous aversion to roundabouts?

Yes did a song about that: 

Iain Dale is running his 2009 popularity survey of political blogging.

But to register a vote for your favourite blogs, including eg this one, you must nominate a full ten blogs. No need to give a category.

Last year this Blog made it into the Total Politics Top Twenty Libertarian blogs (hence the link on the site). If any of you out there are minded to take part and include a vote for this one, it's a free country and nothing whatsoever is stopping you.

Here is the link describing how to vote.

Go for it. All votes must be received by midnight on 31 July 2009. Any votes received after that date will not count.

Numerous Crawfs have made it safely back home after two weeks in sizzling Greek sunshine, freed from the temptation to look at the Meejer via the Internet during this period by the fact that the clueless hotel had no wireless capability and a solitary Internet computer charged out at €5 for 45 minutes.

I did look at BBC World fleetingly, for a clip about Swine Flu in the UK. Various experts intoned earnestly about the risk of mass panic and why that would be bad.

These observations might have been supported by some context figures showing how many people die from different sorts of flu or other common ailments in a normal year. Instead we were shown a large blue science-fictionish pulsating scary blue computer-animated germ-like blob, tentacles a-quivering, without any explanation of what it was.

How can apparently intelligent people put out such irresponsible - and pitifully poor - material?

The highlight of the hol, other than seeing two insolent turtles swimming near our boat without the basic good manners to take their heads out of the water for a nice photo, was the local ice-cream emporium. Our ice-cream - Warm and Fresh

Back here just in time for the Norwich North by-election result. Independent candidate Craig Murray has scored a resounding success, reversing the embarrassment of being beaten by the BNP in Blackburn in 2005.

Then he lost by 181 votes and romped home in fifth place.

This time he crushed them by 12 votes, a significant swing in his favour, but he only finished 6th. His share of the vote dropped from 5% to 2.8%.

The Libertarian candidate got 36 votes. Hmm.

Oh, and Labour got tonked too.

Conclusion?

Nothing, other than the fact that people have been coming to the Blogoir in non-trivial numbers despite (or maybe even because of??) the total absence of recent postings.

Thanks.

Normal service to be resumed gradually.

The Crawfs have ended up on a sweltering Greek island where the allegedly sophisticated but certainly expensive hotel has no wireless access and only one scrawny terminal in the basement where I now sit gloomily at 5 Euros per 45 minutes.

So this blog formally moves into aestivation mode until 26 July or so.

The break will do us all good.

In the meantime do read Sam the Sudden. The paragraph describing how he gently leaves a poached egg on the pillow of his sleeping friend is one of the finest passages in world literature.