Blogoir: July

My recent piece about the feebleness of Peter Mandelson's speechwriters looked ahead to the coming international tour of David Cameron to see if his people would do a better job.

NB folks, what follows is not about policy as such. It's about speechwriting and diplomatic technique, and the way messages are sent/received both explicitly and implicitly.

First, the headlines were caught by the Prime Minister's strong support for Turkey's EU membership:

When I think about what Turkey has done to defend Europe as a NATO ally and what Turkey is doing today in Afghanistan alongside our European allies, it makes me angry that your progress towards EU membership can be frustrated in the way that it has been.

My view is clear: I believe it is just wrong to say that Turkey can guard the camp but not be allowed to sit in the tent.

I will remain your strongest possible advocate for EU membership and for greater influence at the top table of European diplomacy.

Strong meat. But is it quite wise to strike such a forward position within hours of landing in Turkey?

Not according to this scathing review by Barry Rubin:

It is a textbook example of how not to conduct international affairs ... everything should be conditional. The message to be delivered is that it is in your interest to respect my interests.

Cameron did the precise and exact opposite. His message was: The UK needs Turkey. Turkey is wonderful. Its behavior has been perfect. We are desperate for your help.

What is the effect? A man goes into a bazaar, points to a carpet, and says, “That is the most beautiful carpet I have ever seen. I must have it no matter what the price! How much is it?”

In addition, Cameron committed some other howling mistakes, several of which will amaze you...

Which he proceeds mercilessly to describe.

It has to be said. There is a serious point here. To open a speech like this...

Turkey is vital for our economy, vital for our security and vital for our politics and our diplomacy...

... is dubious technique. It gives a gauche hint of subservience, almost desperation. You are vital to us! You are! The effect of which is to suggest deep insecurity  on our part - that we might not be vital to them.

Hmm.

On to the Prime Minister's speech in India:

I come here with a very clear purpose: to show what this new start means for our two countries. I want to take the relationship between India and Britain to the next level. I want to make it stronger, wider, and deeper.

To show how serious I am I have brought with me the biggest visiting delegation of any British Prime Minister in recent years. Members of my Cabinet, our most dynamic business leaders, leaders of industry, social entrepreneurs, civic leaders, figures from our most forward-looking arts institutions and museums, sports men and women, and pioneers of community activism.

Phew! Did anyone ask India if it wanted or needed this sprawling entourage of Busy Brits?

... this country matters to Britain for many reasons beyond your economy too (sic). With over 700 million voters and three million elected representatives at council level, your democracy is a beacon to our world. You have wonderful tradition of democratic secularism; home to dozens of faiths and hundreds of languages, people are free to be Muslim, Hindu or Sikh and to speak Marathi, Punjabi or Tamil. But, at the same time, and without any contradiction, they are all Indian too.

India matters to the world because it is not only a rising power but a responsible power as well...

Lawks - the Mandelson Mistake! Pronouncing on where India fits into the world these days - as if its our natural job to make such pronouncements, and theirs to sit politely and bask in our warm praise. Why should India care if it 'matters' to the UK? Patronising, anyone?

At the height of the industrial revolution in the United States, they said, ‘Go west, young man, in order to find opportunity and fortune.’ For today’s investors and entrepreneurs they should go east.

Another poorly cast paragraph. It seems to say that today's investors and entrepreneurs are where we are, whereas in fact they increasingly are in 'the East' themselves, and doing just fine.

... why should Britain matter to India? I believe our two countries are natural partners; Britain is one of the oldest democracies and India is the world’s largest.

Stop all this 'mattering'! Never say 'I believe'. Let the words themselves bring out your beliefs. And what has comparing the size of our democracies got to do with anything at all?

We have a shared commitment to pluralism and to tolerance; we have deep and close connections amongst our people, with nearly two million people of Indian origin living in the UK. They make an enormous contribution to our country – way out of proportion to their size – in business, in the arts, in sport.

I never like this glorification of ethnic communities as such - it sounds phoney, almost as if it nervously has to be said lest someone accuse you of being racist in expecting them not to make such a wonderful contribution. And what about the bad eggs in their midst?

India and Britain also share so much culturally; whether it’s watching Shari Kahn, eating the same food, speaking the same language, and of course watching the same sport. Many of you in this room will have grown up revering and watching Kapil Dev; I did the same in Britain watching Ian Botham. And Sachin Tendulkar, the Little Master, is so talented that wherever you are from, you cannot help but admire as he hits another century.

Aaargh. How bad a passage is that? The hapless speechwriter ran out of intelligent things to say so slumped into curry and cricket. Raaaacist!

We come at this from different angles. The Indian story is well-known. There is still a huge challenge but on any measure India is on its way, a rising economic power. On any measure, India is on an upward trajectory.

Help - the Mandelson Mistake comes back. Don't tell other people how well they're doing. Especially in a former colony, it sounds like proud teacher patting a diligent pupil on the head.

We in Britain are determined to work even harder to earn our living: attracting more foreign investment to our shores, making more things for the world again, selling ourselves to the world with more vigour than ever. I’m not ashamed to say that’s one of the reasons why I’m here today.

Look how defensive that sounds. All those feeble comparatives:

• work even harder
• attract more foreign investment
• make more things for the world again
• more vigour than ever

Here, more = less. It sounds too striving, too keen to make a point, too anxious.

Tomorrow I’m going to be talking to Prime Minister Singh about how we can work together to develop and deploy new and renewable energy sources, in particular to reach some of India’s poorest communities. If we get this right, it will be a triple win: clean energy, electricity brought to poorest people, new jobs and growth. And it’s precisely the sort of cooperation we need as we move forward in this relationship...

We must be the ones to act and we must act together. Together Britain and India can do the work that is needed. Together our partnership can benefit the world. So together, let us build this new relationship that can meet the scale of our great ambitions together

This passage illustrates what I don't like about this breathless, hyperactive, self-absorbed style of speechwriting. The PM seems to pronounce all sorts of things about what the UK and India could and should be doing together before he's talked to the Indian opposite number to see what he suggests and wants.

Maybe the Indians don't want to work with us to 'do the work that is needed', to benefit the world' in 'partnership'. They certainly seemed happy enough to ignore us in the Climate Summit endgame:

Obama sitting down with the Brazilian, Chinese, Indian and South African leaders to hammer out something or other among themselves, far from the madding crowd of NGOs and all the other leaders.

Thus it came about in spasm of post-modern irony that a small self-proclaimed group of countries defined the main outcome on behalf of everyone else, with the European Unionists (collectively the third biggest CO2 emitter) left outside. Ditto Russia, left holding its cute little red reset button handed over by Hillary Clinton. And Indonesia, a huge emitter. 

The progressive-Left symbolism of this is magnificent: no Dead White Men (especially those sanctimonious Europeans) spoiling the photo-shot!

We decide - Dead White Men pay!

In short, well done the Prime Minister for showing British energy and purpose. But not so well done in how messages are being transmitted. The basic tone as served up by the new squeaky-clean speechwriters is over-keen and unconvincingly over-confident: Hullo, I am your new best friend!

Plus it's characteristic of the speechwriting work of people who know a lot about the UK and political spin here, but next to nothing about Foreigners. It's far too much on Transmit, not Receive. Where are the following thoughts:

• I'm relatively new to this top-level international game. But I do know about the UK's national strengths and comparative advantage
• I know that we have interests. So do you. We traditionally agree on some things. We also disagree on some things. Let's talk
• I see areas where the existing relationship might be enhanced. But before plunging in to all that, I'm here to listen.
• I want to hear for myself your leaders' views, to talk quietly with them about where we might take things forward

Keep a lot more back. Cultivate some mystery. Imply that in some areas we'll be totally inflexible and/or drive a very hard bargain.

That is the oblique and efficient way to compliment your hosts - to hint that you relish disagreeing with them in some areas, because they - like you - are tough too.

Above all, the new government's speechwriters need to stop talking in this febrile paternalistic Mandelsonian way about other countries' successes and achievements.

Because in these days of commercially-minded diplomacy, it's none of our business.

An ever-alert reader notes that on the B92 website in Serbia I am described as Carls Kroford.

Huh?

On Charles, the cyrillic alphabet has its own separate letters for our ch sound, one for a 'hard' ch and one for a 'soft' ch: very roughly the difference between choose-day and Tuesday. Similarly Polish: a hard ch is written cz.

When Serbs transcribe that into Latin script, the usual formula is to denote a hard ch with a little accent on top: Č (ч in lower case cyrillic). A soft ch appears like this: Ć (ћ in lower case cyrillic)

To make it all the more tricky for foreigners, whereas many Serb names end with a soft ch (Milošević), some end with a straight c which has the same sound as the ts in cats (Kragujevac).

B92 uses a simplified Latin script for its English language version which omits the accents and gets rid of letters not sounded in English anyway. So Čarls becomes Carls.

As for Kroford, Serbian does not really have the long sound of the English word 'awe', so it improvises with the next best thing, namely an o as in 'otter'.

Plus being a sensible phonetic language Serbian writes as it sounds where possible, so the hard C beginning Crawford is invariably written with a K (as in kapetan, a Serbian version of captain).

So Crawford becomes Kroford.

Simple.

My piece at the Independent on the outcome of the Ejup Ganic trial in London provokes the usual flurry of comments:

Mr Crawford is one of the morons that manipulated both US and UK foreign policy towards Bosnia in the 1990s. As an officer in the NATO force that arrived in Bosnia in 1995 I can say, unequivocally, the Bosnian muslims were just as much criminals as their Serbian and Croatian counterparts. It is time to start punishing their leadership as well. The Ganic story is not over.

What about those poor conscripts who have been burnt down by
thugs who call themselves ,,Bosnian Army,,? Do they deserve justice?No?And why? Because,they were Serbs.How unfortunate. How much did you get paid for your ,,opinion,,? Lunch? Shame on you!

Appalling! His excellency, the former ambassador Crawford (to Serbia) reminds Serbia that it should shut up because that is the script handed to it by the International Community. Serbia is guilty by definition, so the accusations of war crimes that Serbia may have against others are not to be considered (Ex turpi causa non oritur actio)! Talk about specious syllogisms! 

Mr Charles Crawford is a man of honor and integrity. SHame on you for attacking him.

Some background.

The Independent asked for 400 words. I sent them some 500. They condensed that down to 330 without sending me a final version. So key nuances which went some way at least to tackling points made in the critical comments were lost.

Such is Journalism.

In case anyone is still interested, here is what I think is the full judgement.

The judge said this:

There is nothing within the request which would bring the conduct alleging issuing a command to attack a military convoy within the meaning of a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions 1949. However there is a reference to an Ambulance within the convoy and the request alleges that Dr Ganic expressly ordered an attack upon the Ambulance within the convoy. To that limited extent I am satisfied that the conduct alleges an extradition offence.

I am not satisfied that the rest of the convoy had any right to protection or that the soldiers in the 30 vehicles were prisoners of war.

Without having heard the evidence presented it is hard to say why he reached this conclusion. But it is clear from the video footage of the Dobrovoljacka St shootings that the JNA convoy was leaving Sarajevo under some sort of UN-brokered ceasefire agreement.

Is there really no case to answer that it is a breach of the laws at war to attack a convoy in such circumstances? Apart from the wider policy issues, this finding directly contradicts the testimony of a British expert on the whole story whom the judge praised for his accuracy.

The Serbia side does not appear to have found any satisfactory answer to the Sarajevo/BH side's arguments that Serbia offered to let the Ganic extradition request lapse in exchange for political support for Serbia Srebrenica Declaration. The judge reasonably gives significant weight to this in support of his wider concern that Serbia's application was in one way or the other 'politically' motivated.

The judge took evidence from various notable people on that point including from Dr Schwarz-Shilling (sic and Lord Ashdown), former High Representatives in Sarajevo. Both asserted that the extradition request "is about politics rather than justice". Since neither of them have lived in Belgrade and both have seen the BH issue mainly from the vantage-point of Sarajevo, their evidence on this point should have been dismissed on the grounds of irrelevance.

Lord Ashdown even linked the extradition request to the date of the opening statement by Radovan Karadzic at ICTY, a linkage so footling that the judge explicitly dismissed it.

The judge was improperly dismissive of the role of the Belgrade war crimes courts and seemed to accept as true various tendentious generalisations about Serbia and Serb views put forward by Noel Malcolm and others.

These statements persuaded him that Serbia's application should be barred by Section 81(a) and (b) of the Extradition Act 2003 on the grounds that the request had been made "for the purpose of prosecuting or punishing him on account of his race, religion, nationality and political opinions". This in my view is a far-reaching and obnoxious finding, based upon noisy assertions rather than hard facts.

All in all, a powerful but not especially coherent and convincing judgement. That said, in the circumstances it probably was correct enough.

It looks as if the Serbia side had not prepared its case re launching the extradition request and then thought through how best to handle the extradition hearing. It did poorly in presenting witnesses to rebut the openly 'political' case put forward by the Bosnia side. And by attempting some behind-the-scenes deal with Sarajevo while the matter proceeded in the UK courts, Belgrade foolishly laid itself open to a charge that its 'real' intentions were 'political' rather than legal/justice focused.

To be 100% clear for the record.

I am NOT saying or suggesting that war crimes against Serbs should not be prosecuted. I pressed hard for that to happen when UK Ambassador both in Sarajevo and Belgrade.

Nor am I saying that because of Srebrenica/Mladic Serbia is disqualified from running war crimes trials in Belgrade, or from putting in extradition requests such as this one.

Nor do I believe that Belgrade is unable to run a fair trial of non-Serbs. I do think that keeping fair is a difficult problem for all the local war crimes processes in former Yugoslavia:

The ICTY is not the whole story. Special courts for “lesser” war crimes have been set up in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia. These important trials are little acknowledged elsewhere in Europe. As British ambassador in Belgrade, I hosted a Kosovo family in Belgrade to give evidence in one of the first trials, involving alleged war crimes by Serbs in Kosovo. They said they had been treated honorably by the Serbian authorities.

The core problem with these trials is that each ethnic community concerned likes to see a conviction of someone from another community who brutalized their fellow ethnic cousins. But they hate it when “their” court is expected to put on trial one of “their” people. They hate it even more when a court elsewhere in the region looks to go lightly on someone from “its” community. Why, cry Serbs, has the Bosnian legal system for nearly 20 years done next to nothing about the 1992 Dobrovoljacka Street killings?

The reality is that every community in the former Yugoslavia sees itself as a victim of something or other. And a central part of being a victim is that you never get justice. So local politicians who believe in pushing the war-crimes agenda face an uphill task -- where are the votes in doing so?

To make it even more difficult, the Serbian government is (as the Amnesty woman at the “Storm” screening rightly pointed out) undermined when other European countries won’t respect Belgrade’s warrants to arrest people indicted in Serbia on war-crimes charges. It makes no sense for the European Union to insist that the region run these trials to high international standards and then not respect local efforts to do that.

BUT...but...

The hard fact of it is that there is a nasty, neo-national socialist tendency in Serbia which flourished under Milosevic, and that those poisonous attitudes infect the way the Serbian elite presents itself. (Similar neo-national socialist tendencies of course are alive and well among Croats, Albanians/Kosovars and Bosniacs/Muslims, a key point lost on some of the supposedly expert senior witnesses presented by the defence at the Ganic trial.)

Serbia's internal struggles continue over what Serbia and Serbs represent both to the world and to themselves.

And that was what ultimately undermined Serbia's case in London; in form and substance it just wasn't convincing.

You're seriously ill.

The doctor says something like this:

You may now need to think about your best options. It looks to us as if you have the following two basic options:

• Option A:  we use the most aggressive medical techniques we can find to try to cure you. But you are in bad shape. We give you only a 2% chance of living for another five years, as against an 80% chance of dying within five months. Those five months will be miserable and painful and undignified, and almost all spent in hospital.
• Option B:   we mainly stop treating you other than administering painkillers, and let nature take its course. You are almost certain to die within ten months, maybe less or maybe more. But you'll be able to live at home and feel far more relaxed and happy.

What to do?

Read this superb article by Atul Gawande about the way vast medical costs are being thrown at people to eke out a few more months of miserable life. It suggests that by reducing treatment more people in fact would live longer and die more easily. 

The point is not only that the way things now work is (arguably) wasteful and unwise. We also do not tend to get the options spelled out to us fairly and frankly, the emphasis instead being on 'battling' illness to the very end.

Not a bad strategy in many cases. We all know people who did so battle and made it through to years of good life thereafter.

We also know people who are kept more dead than alive by modern medical ingenuity - is that what they would have chosen had they been offered a choice?

No good answers. But the questions come up with growing intensity as we try to grapple with what 'society' can or can not 'afford'.

Read the whole piece if you read nothing else this week. 

One final reminder, folks.

That Total Politics blog popularity contest is coming round again.

If you want to vote for your favourite political blogs, check out the rules:

Entries are by email and have to include AT LEAST FIVE British blogs, listed in order of preference of up to ten blogs.

Full details at Iain Dale's site here. Fewer than five blogs means that your vote will not count.

So, if you like this blog and want to see it featured in the TP rankings, you know what you have to do.

And if you are a foreign reader but do not follow many other British blogs, the list at the sidebar here on the right has plenty of worthy suggestions (although not all of them are British, so be careful). 

For example, the ever-energetic Anna Raccoon.

My piece in the Independent:

Belgrade's application in London looked like a weird attempt to cover everything in political slime to make a specious Serbia-favouring syllogism:

All slimy people are guilty

All involved in the Yugoslav imbroglio were equally slimy

Therefore all were equally guilty – and, by the way, equally innocent.

This sits (putting it mildly) uneasily with the facts...

Update: my piece has been picked up by B92 in Belgrade - with added picture!

A London court has rejected Serbia's application to get former Bosnian/Bosniac leader Ejup Ganic extradited to Belgrade to face charges on the infamous Dobrovoljacka Street killings in Sarajevo in 1992.

The word 'rejected' perhaps does not do justice to District Judge Timothy Workman's demolition of Serbia's case. Perhaps 'blew to smithereens beyond all recognition' would be more accurate.

The judge probed behind the Serbian application, exploring not so much the substantive merits of the case itself but rather the implicit and explicit motivations of the plaintiffs. He examined the fact that other substantive and credible war crimes processes (ICTY and in Bosnia) had found no case for proceeding against Dr Ganic:

On the first day of this extended hearing I was satisfied that there was prima facie evidence of an abuse of process and as a result of that ruling evidence has now been adduced in relation to that issue.

No evidence having been adduced to show a striking or substantial change in the evidence available to the ICTY or to Mr Alcock, I have concluded that there is no valid justification for commencing proceedings against Dr Ganic.

But much worse, from Belgrade's point of view, was this: 

I am satisfied from the evidence of Mr Arnaut that during the course of these extradition proceedings attempts were made to use the proceedings as a lever to try to secure the Bosnian Government’s approval for the Srebrenica Declaration.

If indeed the Government [of Serbia] was prepared not to pursue these extradition proceedings in return for Bosnia co-operation, that in itself must be capable of amounting to an abuse of the process of this court. Some corroboration of Mr Arnaut’s evidence could be found in the unusual circumstances in which an application to vary conditions of bail was made to this court to enable Dr Ganic to return to Bosnia.

It would appear that that application was founded upon attempts at diplomatic agreements. I am also satisfied that the descriptions in the request [of the alleged grave breaches of Geneva Conventions] are as described significant misrepresentations.

The combination of the two leads me to believe that these proceedings are brought and are being used for political purposes and as such amount to an abuse of the process of this court.

The Serbia side says it will appeal against the ruling.

My assessment? See (if they use it) my piece for the Independent tomorrow.

But for now...

There is a maxim of Equity which says that equity must come to court with clean hands.

In this case Bosnian/Bosniac hands are far from spotless. The Bosniac leadership wail in rage at anything which suggests that they themselves and their predecessors may have made any unwise or immoral moves in the chain of events culminating in the violent collapse of Bosnia, or in their conduct of the ensuing conflict.

Instead they park on one big principle: that the Serbs (and indeed just Serbs) are Guilty.

Which means - as they see it - that an attempt by Belgrade to open episodes such as the Dobrovoljacka Street killings and cast some blame on senior or any Bosniacs must be at best ill-intentioned, and at worst downright evil.

(For about as reliable a view of what actually happened as we are ever likely to get, see this interview with Jovan Divjak, a senior Serbian JNA officer who bravely decided to fight on the Bosnia side of the conflict.)

Meanwhile the Serbs in Belgrade and Banja Luka try forlornly to salvage something from the wreckage of Milosevic's policies.

They (mainly) accept that Milosevic, Karadzic and the rest of that cast of weird second-raters pursued ruinous immoral policies, but they then froth up arguments that, bad as Belgrade's leaders were, others leaders were not really much better and even, perhaps, worse.

And this argument does have some merit. One of the very best things Robin Cook achieved as Foreign Minister was to act upon the proposition that Croatia's leader Franjo Tudjman was in much the same category as Slobodan Milosevic, ie a zany and pernicious national socialist cum fascist menace to European values. Cook stubbornly held the line against all sorts of EU pressures to 'show flexibility' towards Tudjman. Tudjman then helpfully died, isolated and unmourned by moderate opinion round the planet.

The Bosnian case is a harder one for Belgrade to prove. OK, Izetbegovic was a convinced if (by many standards) moderate Islamist, but he was defending a weak position.

Belgrade had all sorts of options to deal with the BH conundrum, but Milosevic chose to let rip Arkan and all sorts of vicious gangsters as a political tool. Far from using its weight and intellectual resources to show modern leadership, Belgrade went on a massive binge of greedy violent cynicism, seemingly relying at each stage on erratic improvizacija and Western lack of resolve.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that any London court is likely to have in mind the fact that sixteen years on Belgrade has still not arrested General Mladic and thereby confronted the horror of Srebrenica. And that, accordingly, Belgrade's claims to be able to deal fairly with war crimes trials may well be true, but somehow held hostage to deeper political manipulations.

Belgrade here looks to have made a blunder in trying to trade behind the scenes with Sarajevo: 'Ajde bre, we'll end the Ganic extradition application in London if you guys cut us some slack on the Srebrenica declaration going through our Assembly...

Whereas in normal Balkan bazaar terms this sort of thing makes perfect sense, a steely London court not unreasonably could conclude that the whole extradition application had nothing (much) to do with Justice and was more about shady political machinations.

Result?

Serbia has taken a severe tonking in a London court today, following a pretty miserable result at the ICJ last week. The Bosniacs will be exultant, feeling that this represents a historic day of vindication for their core 'narrative'.

All of which said, anyone watching the evasive interviews with Ganic and other leaders on the gripping Fall of Yugoslavia video series will feel that something dark and dishonourable did occur at Dobrovoljacka Street. Not much chance now of justice being done for the victims of that war crime, alas.

Bottom Line?

Belgrade under democratic and fair-minded leadership can make all sorts of important points about the collapse of Yugoslavia. Not all Belgrade's arguments were bad just because Milosevic made them.

But until Belgrade bites the bullet and arrests Mladic, those arguments look contrived and morally hollow.

Washing those dirty hands is much better than pointing with them at the grime on others' dark fingers.

The European Stability Initiative do lots of good solid analytical/policy work.

Have a look at this ingenious proposal for resolving the absurd problem of Greek opposition to Macedonia's name:

How can this conundrum be resolved? It can be done through a constitutional amendment in Skopje that changes the name of the country today, allowing Athens to support the start of accession talks later this year, but that also foresees that the change will only enter into force on the day Macedonia actually joins the EU.

This effectively 'solves' the problem in principle in a way the Greeks should accept, but brings in the solution down the road on Macedonia's EU accession, giving Macedonia the necessary guarantees.

Clever. Mutually reinforcing but asynchronous (ass-'n'-chronic?) incentives towards good behaviour.

And read this one on the constitutional mysteries of Belgium, suggesting that the puny (in comparison) constitutional mysteries of Bosnia and Herzegovina should not be an obstacle to BH's EU membership. See eg Belgium's Constitution:

Article 1
Belgium is a federal State composed of Communities and Regions.

Article 2
Belgium is composed of three Communities: The French Community, the Flemish Community and the German-speaking Community.

Article 3
Belgium is composed of three regions: The Walloon Region, the Flemish Region and the Brussels Region.

Article 4
Belgium has four linguistic regions: The French-speaking region, the Dutch-speaking region, the bilingual region of Brussels-Capital and the German-speaking region. (…)

(Depending on whether the language in which the Constitution is written is French, Dutch or German, the respective Community and Regions are mentioned first.)

Phew.

Is hosted by Mr Eugenides. A double round-up this week.

Linking to Thatcher Derangement Syndrome.

A more than comprehensive analysis by Brian Barder of the al-Megrahi/Libya business.

And a lumbering waddle into the droll world of fat queer activists:

I'm a working stiff, a tired artist, and an aspiring public intellectual who is interested in the intersections between bodies, identities, and aesthetics. I'm interested in fatness in part because of my lifetime struggle to peacefully occupy my own body.

To each her own. Just don't overdo it.

Remember this piece about David Horowitz on Christopher Hitchens?

Are you busy, with lots to do?

Forget all that, and read this long transcript of American conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt in conversation with Hitchens, now on heavy cancer treatment.

Hitchens is a ferociously well read and knowledgeable person. He is a massively opinionated writer who has taken it upon himself to go and see things for himself, a Leftist in the best Orwell tradition of staring fearlessly at tyranny, hypocrisy and stupidity wherever they loom large.

In a way I was hoping that Hewitt would drill down deeper than he does into Hitchens' beliefs (and maybe his own). Yet the discussion perhaps is all the more engaging because it is so wide-ranging and unexpected.

Hitchens on an evil Argentinian general:  I describe him as looking like a human toothbrush. He was a sort of starch, lean officer with a silly mustache, and a very stupid look to him, but a very fanatical glint as well... He’s in prison in Argentina for selling the children of the rape victims among the private prisoners, who he kept in a personal jail. And I don’t know if I’ve ever met anyone who’s done anything as sort of condensedly horrible as that, if you know what I mean. 

Hitchens on possible death:  when Mark Twain was pronounced dead in the newspapers, he said rumors of his death had been greatly exaggerated. I read so many nice things about myself now I begin to think that rumors of my life have been a bit exaggerated.

Hitchens on social class:  you also learn that at the absolute height of bad manners is to be rude to someone who is, I don’t mean these words, but you know what one would call social inferiors. You mustn’t be rude to waiters or servants or anything like that, because it’s taking advantage of something that’s unfairly conferred on you.

Hitchens on reading widely and learning things:  I’d rather do anything than patronize people. I’d rather say look, I know this. There’s no reason you shouldn’t. And if you didn’t, don’t complain. I’ve just given you the opportunity to check it out. And I backed myself, saying I think there is a gold standard in writing, and in the world of ideas. And I know something about it, and I’d like to introduce you to it, too.

Hitchens on Israel:  for Israel to become part of the alliance against whatever we want to call it, religious barbarism, theocratic, possibly thermonuclear theocratic or nuclear theocratic aggression, it can’t, it’ll have to dispense with the occupation. It’s as simple as that. It can be, you can think of it as a kind of European style, Western style country if you want, but it can’t govern other people against their will...

And I’m afraid I know too much about the history of the conflict to think of Israel as just a tiny, little island surrounded by a sea of ravening wolves and so on. I mean, I know quite a lot about how that state was founded, and the amount of violence and dispossession that involved. And I’m a prisoner of that knowledge. I can’t un-know it.

Hitchens on John Sparrow:  his role in the life of the university of Oxford was to act the part of the most comic, antediluvian reactionary that it was possible to pick, a man who lived in a college that was full of vast riches of endowment that was famous mainly for its dining and its port, almost a parody of Oxford as the home of lost causes, and of extreme monarchical and Anglican conservatism. I mean, we could hardly believe there was someone as amusing as that still around in the 60s.

Hitchens on Castro:  “if the most salient figure in this state was immune from critical comment, then all the rest was detail. Ah, never forget how useful the obvious can be.”

Hitchens on Iraq:  The fall of Saddam Hussein was generally very positively experienced. And I think it will be remembered as a great thing to have done. But unfortunately, the overlay of incompetence and mismanagement and bungling that followed the liberation is never going to be forgiven or forgotten. And by the way, I don’t think it should be.

Hitchens on Obama:  He just seems to believe, it was same watching him with Netanyahu this week, as if all this can be resolved, you know, man to man, these are just misunderstandings that can be ironed out by people of goodwill. He doesn’t seem to have the concept of radical conflicts of interest at all.

Just wonderful verve, confidence and insight.

Take time out and read it all. You'll learn something.

Then swing by Amazon and buy this, as I have just done:

I was chatting to a senior oil executive the other day (as one does), and I asked how that vast multinational corporation ran its top speech-writing function.

"Oh,we have the usual - a team of young speechwriters, which is what you need these days."

Really? Why do you need young speech-writers?

What books have they read? What hard decisions have they ever had to take? What pain have they suffered? Where have they been? What encounters with senior foreign people have they had - do they know just how to pitch things right?

What experience do they bring to the job, other than the doubtful one of being 'young'?

Today I heard about Peter Mandelson in India from someone who had watched him in action. His visit came soon after the dreadful performance of David Miliband who insulted his much older Indian counterpart by being over-matey with him during their private meeting.

Peter Mandelson by contrast (I was told) insulted on a much bigger and public scale.

He addressed a large gathering of business people at an event also attended by several senior Indian politicians. In his random Nu Labour way, he made a flaccid speech about globalisation, including passages saying just how well India was doing as an 'emerging economy'. He then left the event to move on to 'another engagement'.

I think that this must be the speech concerned:

For a couple of years up until about the middle of last year there was a debate going on in the financial services sector and in the financial media over the extent to which the emerging economies - including India, of course - had ‘decoupled’ from the developed world.

Have India, China and the other emerging economies achieved enough momentum economically to fundamentally break the link between their economic destiny and ours in the EU and the US?

... I welcome the fact that the Indian government remains so committed to liberalization of its financial, legal and accountancy sectors, which will be an important contributor to attracting the foreign investment it wants for its large infrastructure projects.

The Indian knowledge economy has ambitions to cater for a global market. The expansion of Indian manufacturing, which the government rightly sees as central to defining India’s future place in global value chains, will be built on the further opening up of the Indian market to industrial imports.

This sort of thing is in fact very hard to draft well. See especially the absurd and unwise phrase "I welcome ..."

How does one say anything much about someone else's country at such an event without somehow seeming to be assuming to oneself the role of loftily pronouncing on the good marks and not so good marks, like a cargo cult schoolteacher?

Here the ignorant and jejune speechwriter obviously failed to get it right, a high-profile blunder all the more embarrassing for the UK as it came immediately after D Miliband's fiasco.

After P Mandelson had departed, a senior Indian speaker addressed the throng and had them in stitches laughing at Mandelson's patronising style and hollow substance:

"We look at the UK and see it as a sub-merging economy!"

Maybe there should be a new rule.

No politician should have a speech-writer younger than s/he is.

Just think of all those mountains of money and time wasted on so-called diversity training, when simple reminders about Good Manners would have been far more effective.

Let's see if David Cameron can get things back on track.

I am looking at buying some fitted bookcases for our next house.

This website looks OK: Built-in Solutions.

But as I read on, my heart sinks:

We are always prompt and curtius...All Furniture is made in our workshop, that means all the mess generally associated with construction is not carried out at you're property.

Meanwhile my lawyer sends me Special Conditions as part of the draft contract of house sale:

...but this Special Condition shall not apply of the proceeds of the Seller's policy are applied towards the reinstatement of the Property.

Help.

We are sinking under a tsunami of illiteracy and carelessness.

Toy Story 3 is just superb. Go and see it.

One highlight is Barbie abruptly hollering out one of the greatest ideas of Thomas Jefferson:

Authority should derive from the consent of the governed; not from the threat of force

Hurrah!

Yet ... what if those governing start off that way, but then slowly but surely change the rules towards rewarding themselves first and looking after the governed second?

How are the governed to withdraw their consent from this situation, when the governors of all main political parties seem to have more in common with each other than with those who pay taxes and vote?

This problem featured in a very different context in the famous 1957 book by Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System.

Djilas had been one of the very top Titoist communists after WW2. Some older Serbian staff working in the Embassy in the early 1980s hated his memory, as (they said) he had dominated Belgrade after the war wearing jackboots and carrying a whip brutally to impose comunist rule.

With the publication of this book Djilas was sent to prison by the Yugo-communists and achieved international glory as the first senior communist leader to renounce communism in its Stalinist-bureaucratic form.

Djilas' core ideologically devastating argument was that far from replacing a class-free society, the new communist elite themselves had become an effective class, hoarding power and privileges for themselves at the expense of the masses.

Which leads us now, via Barbie, straight to this:

The current state of American politics can be summed up in this poll data, published today by Rasmussen Reports:

75% of Likely Voters prefer free markets over a government managed economy. Just 14% think a government managed economy is better while 11% are not sure.

Well, one would hope so. But here is the kicker:

America's Political Class is far less enamored with the virtues of a free market. In fact, Political Class voters narrowly prefer a government managed economy over free markets by a 44% to 37% margin.

... It strikes me that these data largely explain the political turmoil of the last year. The political class, now firmly in the saddle in Washington, wants to substitute government control for free choice wherever possible.

Since members of the political class communicate mostly with each other, they evidently underestimated the extent to which such policies would be unpopular with mainstream Americans.

A point also made eloquently by Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit).

All of which applies to the European Union too. Whatever its merits in allowing all sorts of processes to be 'harmonised' for general public benefit, the fact remains that the 'consent of the governed' is not exactly something which preys upon EU elite minds as they pile on new 'Directives'.

Where is all this heading?

Somewhere dangerous, I fear.

The International Bar Association's Annual Conference is this year in Vancouver in early October.

And I am honoured to be included on their speaker's list.

Here.

Be shocked, as the Truth is revealed.

Welcome Browser and other new readers. After reading my thoughts below, check out this piece I wrote back in 2008 about inat. If you don't understand inat, you can't understand Kosovo or Serbia or anything about former Yugoslavia. Sorry, but there it is.

* * * * *

The International Court of Justice has ruled that the declaration of independence "is not in conflict with international law".

The ICJ site is overwhelmed so I can not yet share with you my wise thoughts on the full text of the decision.

Quickies anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why did Serbia pose the Kosovo question in this odd form? Maybe because it did not want to force the ICJ to answer head-on the Kosovo independence question (eg Is Kosovo now a state recognised by international law?) in case the Serbs lost, thereby incurring an epochal defeat?

This 'advisory' ruling on this curiously open-ended question allows Belgrade to say that nothing significant has been decided one way or the other, so its struggle against Kosovo's independence blithely continues.

The ICJ ruling itself confirms that view in a sense, saying that the Court has not taken a view on whether the consequences of Kosovo's independence declaration have included Kosovo acquiring statehood.

According to B92 in Belgrade (in Serbian) Russia has been quick to confirm that it will not recognise Kosovo for (in effect) this very reason.

If other global big-hitters such India and China and Brazil and South Africa likewise decide to stay put and not shift their view, Kosovo's awkward half-in, half-out international status will drag on indefinitely - the map at the link shows how poorly Kosovo has done with the East/South of the planet.

On the other hand, the headlines round the world will tend to present this as a Win for Kosovo's cause, which in due course might well lead a larger number of countries to recognise Kosovo as a full independent state.

Basically, Kosovo falls into the All Too Difficult box for international law and policy.

Why? Because it is astride two huge tectonic plates underpinning global order and so is bang in the middle of a jurisprudential, political and moral earthquake zone. 

One plate is all about the right of identified peoples to be independent - the principle of self-determination).

The other is all about the circumstances under which existing states can split up into smaller or different formations (or not) - the principle of territorial integrity.

So it all wends its way back to the cynical deals done within the EU and between key European capitals and Washington back in the early 1990s. Basically, it was agreed to recognise Slovenia as an independent state since it (sort of) ticked both boxes simultaneously.

Slovenia was dominated overwhelmingly by Slovenes (self-determination).

And it had an undisputed geographical/political identity as a republic within the former Yugoslavia (territorial integrity), so its independence flowed neatly in parallel with the recognition of Russia and the other former Soviet republics as independent states.

Kosovo certainly makes its mark in the self-determination box, but as it was 'only' a province within Serbia (albeit with many attributes of a full republic, including membership of the eight-person SFRY Presidency itself) the territorial integrity issue is far less clear.

The more so since our cherished Helsinki Process norms basically lay down that there shall be no change in borders within Europe without the consent of all concerned. Which in this case there manifestly isn't.

Here is a tidy Russian look at the wider issues of principle at stake for Europe as these two tectonic plates grind away against each other. 

Implications for Bosnia? Not many.

The Republika Srpska leadership (more or less in coordination with Belgrade) will continue to press the self-determination argument: if Kosovo's declaration of independence is not against international law, why should Republika Srpska too not make a similar declaration at some point?

Down the road in Sarajevo the Bosniacs will noisily insist that the territorial integrity principle is supreme, and that RS itself is in different ways 'illegitimate'.

The Balkans. Where nothing is ever settled.

How to run a railway system with startling incompetence and/or amazing system destabilizing losses?

Learn from Greece:

Losses at Hellenic Railways, however, continue to mount — at the rate of 3 million euros ($3.8 million) a day. Its total debt has increased to $13 billion, or about 5 percent of Greece’s gross domestic product...

Some have argued that Hellenic Railways should shut down the majority of its routes, especially in the mountainous Peloponnese region where trains manned by drivers being paid as much as $130,000 a year frequently run empty.

Or just up the tracks in Albania where at least things are on a more modest scale:

Last year the railways had an income of €9m, of which €5m came straight from the government.

I blame it on all those olives.

The FCO has a new Permanent Under Secretary (ie top HQ civil servant cheese), namely Simon Fraser.

The Guardian of course gets it wrong:

Although the highly regarded Fraser has worked in the Foreign Office before, it is unusual for the permanent secretary to be recruited from outside the ranks of the diplomatic service.

In fact most of his career has been with the FCO. I know because he was in the group of graduate new entrants which included me, back in 1979. Latterly ( and is often the way these days) he has been on various secondments including to senior positions in Brussels and in Whitehall.

A few years back Simon played a leading role as FCO Director for Strategy and Innovation in the ghastly wholesale reorganisation of the FCO to focus on so-called Strategic Objectives, which devalued classic bilateral diplomacy and so led directly to the fiasco over the Pope's visit earlier this year.

Simon is unfailingly genial and (now) impressively well qualified in all sorts of complex top-level policy areas including world trade. His breadth of professional experience is a good match for leading a diplomatic service which needs rebooting after years of Labour decay (although some might wonder if he is not just a bit too steeped in undiluted Mandelsonism?). He has a very different, livelier personal style which should go down well with Ministers and even the fed up FCO masses.

Plus he has Middle East experience (Baghdad and Damascus) although he is not really a typical FCO 'camel'. Do we dimly recall a long-lost episode when he was moved from a Private Secretary job over his rather too friendly relationship with a Palestinian lady?

Maybe it was someone else.

In any case, that was another country, and we were very young.

Or if the BBC website front page as of 0947 this morning is anything to go by, is he bowing to us?

Plus how many other bowlers have managed to take 800 wickets on any given day in their fine Test careers, let alone their final day?

Sigh:

Christian faith centres on giving up the claim to be yourself at everyone else’s expense...

What a tendentious and generally problematic pronouncement.

“Love your neighbour as yourself"

Yes. But what does it mean to love yourself?

As Ayn Rand famously put it, "To say 'I love you,' one must know first how to say the 'I.'"

Hence this about love:

It is the view that you ought to be given love unconditionally -- the view that you do not deserve it any more than some random bum, the view that it is not a response to anything particular in you, the view that it is causeless -- which exemplifies the most ignoble conception of this sublime experience.

Such fascinating thoughts about the most basic spiritual and existential human principles arise because our old friend the Archbishop of Canterbury is back in the media:

He is a wily if not profound thinker, so his errors are no less profound and instructive...