Civilisation and its Enemies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus Max Hastings gives us a striking Russia metaphor:

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

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

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

More from Max:

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

Blimey.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Max does not seem to get this:

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

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

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

A lively piece of US-style political analysis:

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

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

Michael Binyon deploys chess metaphors to describe Russia' s military push into Georgia:

Vladimir Putin lost several pawns on the chessboard - Kosovo, Iraq, Nato membership for the Baltic states, US renunciation of the ABM treaty, US missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic. But he waited.

The trap was set in Georgia. When President Saakashvili blundered into South Ossetia, sending in an army to shell, kill and maim on a vicious scale (against US advice and his promised word), Russia was waiting ...

... Moscow can also counter Georgian PR, the last weapon left to Tbilisi. Human rights? Look at what Georgia has done in South Ossetia (and also in Abkhazia). National sovereignty? Look at the detachment of Kosovo from Serbia. False pretexts? Look at Ronald Reagan's invasion of Grenada to “rescue” US medical students. Western outrage? Look at the confused cacophony.

There are lessons everywhere. To the former Soviet republics - remember your geography. To Nato - do you still want to incorporate Caucasian vendettas into your alliance? To Tbilisi - do you want to keep a President who brought this on you? To Washington - does Russia's voice still count for nothing? Like it or not, it counts for a lot.

Let's dwell on that chess metaphor a while.

Aron Nimzowitsch was a great chess Grandmaster. One of his famous reputed chess aphorisms is "the threat is stronger than the execution".

The sense is that one can wait for some time to play a strong chess move, letting the threat that it might happen create new advantages. However, once the move is played the threat is gone and the move stands on its own merits. And, of course, the move is 'committal' - once played it can not be taken back.

In this case the Russians have been watching the Kosovo precedent and waiting to move.

One possible move was to stand firm on rejecting Kosovo independence. Another was to say that if Kosovo gets what it wants, why should not some others do the same?

The Georgian episode opens the way for Moscow to play the second move, as looks to be happening: "Georgia's territorial integrity is a dead issue".

However, Russia is a UN Security Council Permanent Member so such moves have to be wrapped in some sort of credible international law ribbon.

By parking on unbending opposition to the Kosovo precedent, Russia claimed to rule out ad hoc exceptions to a key precept of international practice in Europe in recent decades, namely that borders can not be changed without general consent.

What exactly is Russia now saying?

That if a country behaves badly enough towards minority territories, those territories can break away?

That any territory can break away if it has a strong supportive neighbour?

Or is there a new realpolitik doctrine emerging, that a new twilight zone category of small pseudo-states might emerge whose 'independence' is recognised by a core of supporters but not the international community as a whole? See also Transdnistria.

These questions have mind-boggling political and diplomatic ramifications rippling on down the decades to come. What looks like a strong move now may (or may not) come to look like a mistake.

For now Russia has all sorts of operational options in Georgia, using the presence of Russian official and unofficial forces on the ground to play for time and create (as we chess-players say) unfathomable complications.

For a famous example of such complications, see Game 14 of the World Championship match between Garry Kasparov and Vishy Anand. At the height of the battle (and the Championship struggle as a whole) with both players short of time, Kasparov on move 27 made a dramatic speculative knight sacrifice throwing the position wide open. He outplayed his opponent in the ensuing dog-fight.

Putin maybe has in mind a famous American example:

I don’t believe in psychology. I believe in good moves.

The commentaries on Georgia pour out.

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

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

And this:

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

The point being:

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

Hence:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back in the West, there is a health and safety policy I have not seen before here at Aquatica, the new water-park next to SeaWorld in Orlando.

As one waits in line for a good splashy ride, a tape-recording in a prissy male Australian voice tells us all that:

Your security is our number one concern. Therefore, lifeguards may not make eye-contact when speaking to you. Nothing personal, mates. No worries!

Huh?

Does eye-contact with lifeguards make some people feel insecure? Or is it that the lifeguards' beady eyes must be roving ceaselessly to spot potential trouble and so they may not have time to alight on you, so please do not feel offended? Something else?

I have sent a message to Customer Relations to ask. Always nice to know what is going on.

Update: almost instantaneous and friendly replies from Aquatica saying that indeed the point is that the lifeguards need to be looking everywhere so may not have eyes for you when talking. I have pointed out that that is not clear from the way the warning is phrased. Over to senior management.

Here is Nobel Peace Prize Winner Mikhail Gorbachev piously enjoining people in the Caucasus to live together nicely:

The roots of this tragedy lie in the decision of Georgia's separatist leaders in 1991 to abolish South Ossetian autonomy. Each time successive Georgian leaders tried to impose their will by force - both in South Ossetia and in Abkhazia, where the issues of autonomy are similar - it only made the situation worse...

What happened on the night of August 7 is beyond comprehension. The Georgian military attacked the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali with multiple rocket launchers designed to devastate large areas. Russia had to respond. To accuse it of aggression against "small, defenceless Georgia" is not just hypocritical but shows a lack of humanity...

... Georgian armed forces were trained by hundreds of US instructors, and its sophisticated military equipment was bought in a number of countries. This, coupled with the promise of Nato membership, emboldened Georgian leaders.

... Small nations of the Caucasus do have a history of living together. It has been demonstrated that a lasting peace is possible, that tolerance and cooperation can create conditions for normal life and development...

The international community's long-term aim could be to create a sub-regional system of security and cooperation that would make any provocation, and the very possibility of crises such as this one, impossible...

What a superb performance. These Russian communists sure have staying-power.

A couple of the more obvious points:

1)     The roots of this problem are not to be found in 1991, but rather in the preceding decades of Soviet brutalisation of Georgia which continued while said Gorbachev was still in power. Eg this example of the Gorbachev communists tackling the National Question in Georgia in 1989:

At the dawn, the Soviet special task forces attacked the demonstration with sharpened spades and poisonous gases, killing twenty-two demonstrators, mostly women and teens. Some two thousands were left sick for weeks and months, in hospitals and at home, from the toxic gases. The brutality of the Soviet forces against the peaceful demonstrators was recorded on the tape and shocked entire Soviet Union. A number of cases of ethnic hatred by the Soviet soldiers was attested. As witnesses recalled, some soldiers, while battering victims with trenching spades, were yelling "This is what you get for Stalin."

2)     Gorbachev insinuates that Georgia is to blame for the current violence, egged on by the USA. No mention of the dismal Russian record in South Ossetia over the past decade or so.

3)     Most impressively, Gorbachev calls for a "sub-regional system of security and cooperation". That is Communist for "just give us back the Soviet empire and leave us Russians alone and all will be well". The whole problem is that parts of the former Soviet Union and indeed parts of Russia itself do not want to be in Russia's 'sub-regional security system'. Why should they be, when Russia is giving them only insecurity and lumpen corruption?

Gorbachev deservedly crashed from power because he believed in replacing discredited Soviet Imperialism with a fizzy and brightly packaged new product, Soviet Imperialism Lite.

Seems he is still selling it. And that the Guardian is still buying it.

Welcome Instapundit readers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Georgia burns we look to the FT to guide us through all the complexities.

And sure enough:

Paris Hilton is no average airhead, as her self-parody shows

They're right. She is way above average airheadnesses.

She is top of the airhead range.

Richard Beeston and Edward Lucas both know what they're talking about on Georgia.

Both wonder if Georgian impulsiveness is not going to backfire. Lucas:

It seems Russia is ready to hit back hard, in the hope of squashing the West's pestilential protégé. In short, it looks more and more as though Georgia has fallen in to its enemies' trap. The script went like this: first mount unbearable provocations, then wait for a response, and finally reply with overwhelming military force and diplomatic humiliation.

What do the Russians want? Free Thinker drills down into the comment section of a Russian website to try to find out:

It's strange: this discussion thread is in some ways a model of democratic debate, with a wide range of views expressed.  There's a right-left spectrum of sorts, only its center of gravity of the discussion is in a disturbing place.

Mind you, look at the Comments on my own Indy Open House piece about the rules on memoirs for former diplomats if you want to see some 'disturbing' thoughts:

When is Britain going to cast-off the cord to Washington, and tell the yankee-doodles to go to hell? Sucking-up to tyranical despots because they're Uncle Sam's buddies is not in Britain's interests, and is a gut-wrenching travesty of what British diplomacy is supposed to achieve.

Sigh.

The one thing the disparate CIS frozen conflicts have in common is this. Russia could have worked with its European partners to use its weight and ingenuity to solve these problems on modern creative democratic terms. Instead it has done little other than create morbid little pockets of corruption and instability, essentially for psychological reasons: to show the world and itself than it can not be 'pushed around in its own backyard'.

Hence another failure of 'European diplomacy' in wanting to look away from the hard choice here which Poland and some other former Communist countries correctly insisted was the only real one. Either these European countries are given a fair chance to be free to join the Western democratic mainstream, or they stay in a new sort of virtual Soviet empire.  

Except that once the Russian tanks start moving in, it is not that virtual.

Edward Lucas again:

The fighting should be a deafening wake-up call to the West. Our fatal mistake was made at the Nato summit in Bucharest in April, when Georgia's attempt to get a clear path to membership of the alliance was rebuffed. Mr Saakashvili warned us then that Russia would take advantage of any display of Western weakness or indecision. And it has.

I swung by the FCO the other day to have a chat about Bosnia.

The snappy desk officer dealing with this problem now is 24 or thereabouts.

Let's say she is 24. She was born in the year I was British Olympic Attache at the Sarajevo Winter Olympic Games. She was 7 when the Soviet Union broke up, 11 when the Dayton Peace Accords were signed, 14 when NATO bombed Serbia.

Hence her formative years have seen the 'frozen conflicts' here and there in the former Soviet Union as part of normal life. Abkhazia, S Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Transdnistria - all mysterious places in a geopolitical limbo where nothing much happens, or can or even should happen.

But ice melts.

Suddenly out of thin air (or so it seems) Georgia - a country hitherto pushing for NATO membership - is battling with Russian forces on its own territory in a struggle to control a few tens of thousands of Ossetians who do not want to be part of Georgia.

Various people warned that if 'the West' pushed ahead with Kosovo independence, Russia would move to change the rules in one or more of these frozen conflicts.

Kosovo course is (for Moscow) a sort of reverse S Ossetia. In Kosovo the Western parts of the international community are leaning hard on Serbia to drop its claims, and would react sharply against any attempt by Serbia to recapture Kosovo by force.

In Georgia the Western sympathies lie with the existing state, and it is Russia helping the tiny South Ossetian community stay separate. Russia plans to get round this conundrum by blaming the violence on Georgian fascism or somesuch, while NB opening a new form of external self-defence doctrine said to aimed at protecting Russian citizens alleged to be at risk beyond Russia's borders in other former Soviet republics. A doctrine with all sorts of ingenious political and other deployment options... 

This FT editorial gets it mainly right:

Mr Putin (and Dmitry Medvedev, his anointed successor) seem to want to prove two things: that Georgia is far too unstable to join Nato, and that they alone can determine the future of the former Soviet space.

But not quite:

They are right that neither the US alone, nor the Nato allies, would dream of intervening in a military confrontation. But Georgia is only unstable because of Russian policies. Encouraging secessionists sends a terrible signal to others inside Russia, especially in the rebellious north Caucasus. Moscow’s policy may be macho, but in the long run it will be utterly self-defeating.

Really?

How long is long?

And is Moscow sending a signal that 'encourages Caucasus secessionists'?

Or is it sending a signal that it means to keep a tight political and/or psychological grip on as much of the former Soviet Union as it can grasp - and that US/NATO had better back off?

Imagine a nice piece of land where under the law anyone can walk freely. Someone brings on to it a few big snapping dogs and lets them roam there.

The law has not changed - but if nothing happens to get the dogs removed or contained, the inclination of many people in fact to go for a stroll may well diminish.

If that situation becomes the norm, the owner of the dogs may feel that that land is now his for all effective purposes.

And he did not even have to buy it.

Memo to the Bosnia Desk: The North Caucasus area is like the Balkans but without the sense of ethnic harmony and self-restraint which has always prevailed in much of former Yugoslavia. Read Robert Kagan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rien.

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

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

Not perhaps quite the whole story?

Remember the heroic fight for freedom by Ezra Levant in Canada over his publication of the dreaded Danish cartoons of Mohamed?

He has won!

Sort of.

He didn’t say I was free. He said I merely met his censorship standards, so I may go. Those are two completely different things.

Indeed.

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

Craig Murray calls these regulations 'near-fascistic':

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

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

Let's be a tad more dispassionate.

Back to first principles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have we got everything Perfect? No.

Room for improvement/tweaking? Probably.

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

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

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

Legal proceedings against potential publishers?  Prison?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is Future One. Martin Jacques gloating over 'western impotence' as evidenced by our inability to get what we wanted in Burma or Zimbabwe.

In the parallel moral universe of MJ, South Africa's President Mbeki has "scored a major diplomatic triumph" by getting the two main parties in Zimbabwe to the negotiating table.

If allowing one of the most dismally incompetent and vicious leaders in world history to ignore his defeat in an election and cling on to power is a triumph for Guardian readers, yes, well done Thabo!

Meanwhile In Burma the West could not intervene and ended up quietly channelling its assistance to cyclone-ravaged Burma via ASEAN, "the obvious and desirable course of action".

Yes, Martin, how obvious and desirable it is that thousands of people die for lack of the assistance we generously offered, helpfully to demonstrate Western impotence to Guardian readers.

Here is Future Two. Kevin Kelly talks about the next 5000 days of the World Wide Web and the profound transformations coming our way.

Set aside 20 minutes of your life to listen. And to think.

Future Two will defeat the banal emptiness of Future One.

It rolls out to the planet, including Zim and Burma in due course, the true new power of 'the West': connectivity, transparency and individual freedom.

And sure, as Asia and Africa and the Middle East take up these values 'the West' will have a lot to think about. New syntheses of power and responsibility will emerge. All very complicated.

But the problems we and our leaders face are all about managing Western success and indeed grasping  the scale of it, not managing failure.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at Harvard in 1978:

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

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

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

Was he writing the script for The Dark Knight?

Buying things is a redistribution of wealth.

Wood?

Meet Axe.

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

War criminals are war criminals only when they are convicted of war crimes.

Until then they are 'war crimes indictees', 'people suspected/charged with war crimes' or some such neutral phrase.

Why?

Because it is true.

And because it is unwise to give such people any excuse to claim that they have been 'condemned in advance' and so can not get a fair trial even at an International Tribunal.

So here we quickly see Radovan Karadzic insisting that he can not expect a fair trial because the sustained Balkan and international media witch-hunts against him.

He would say that, wouldn't he?

Yes. But let's not pass him high calibre ammo to make it sound more credible.

Even then, it is one thing media pundits or his political enemies claiming that Karadzic is a war criminal. The court can loftily tune out from such background noise.

Much worse when a Minister from a European government which has actively supported ICTY says in so many words on a Government website that Karadzic "has blood on his hands ...  He organised the murder of thousands of innocent people in a vile campaign of ethnic cleansing."

Luckily his Boss got it right.

Via Brian Barder, this really good - and meaty - assessment of the current plight of Kosovo by Jeremy Harding.

It in fact headlines the Kosovo situation, but really it is about the Limits of Diplomacy - how far can countries on their own or in teams act deliberately (a) to change things and (b) for the better?

A couple of my own speeches have attempted to tackle this Limit from different Balkan angles. But the arguments apply just as well to 'assistance' for Africa, or intervention in Iraq, or the Korean War or whichever example you choose.

The awesome fact about Kosovo is that many billions of UN dollars and EU Euros have been poured into this tiny territory not much bigger than North Yorkshire.

And the results? According to Jeremy Harding, not good:

If intervention was supposed to bring about development, which optimists see as a prelude to civility, it has not been a success. The most startling features of Kosovo, now that the cleansing of the Serbian minority is on hold, are the poverty of the province – for Albanians and Serbs alike – and the pitiful economy that keeps it locked in.

Despite the creation of a small millionaire class, 45 per cent of its inhabitants are below the poverty level (unable to meet basic needs). Around 15 per cent live in extreme poverty, earning less than a euro a day ... Earlier this year, the British government put infant mortality in Kosovo at ‘35 to 49 deaths per thousand live births’ – at least twice as high as the rest of Serbia and greater than that in Mexico or the Occupied Territories.

How much have we paid to get this outcome?

Much of the disappointment centres on the fact that UN expenditure, now in the order of £25 billion, was ill judged: too much spent on traineeships and seminars – ‘institution-building’, ‘capacity-building’, ‘technical assistance’ – not nearly enough on infrastructure.

Let's recall the wit and wisdom of Major General Gen Raul Cunha:

The situation here is not brilliant and we are a lot to blame. We, I mean the western international community. We have maybe invested here in the worst way and we were not very careful with the money. Each time I take a look at the numbers, I notice that 80% of the investment was made on consultancy and capacity building and, practically speaking, we didn’t build any capacities.

Commenting on Brian Barder's gloomy Kosovo analysis, another former British Ambassador Jeremy Varcoe argues for ... Even More:

I consider the EU now has a duty to orchestrate assistance on a sufficiently large scale to kick-start development and to try to rekindle a sense of hope for all the communities, not forgetting all the minority groups, in this limpingly independent state.

No.

No!

Let's try Much Less.

If we start reducing EU assistance to the level we have given eg to Serbia, we begin finally to compel the Kosovo population and its leaders to think long and hard about how they might use the modest resources of their bleak Balkan plateau to make something like an honest living in today's Europe.  

This will mean some painful political and other sacrifices. Not least a stand by the mass of the population against the violence and corruption presided over by a few powerful Albanian clans. And adopting a much more realistic attitude to how they need to cooperate with their neighbours.

There is only one thing worse than being abandoned by the International Community.

Being rescued by the International Comunity.

Welcome, Britblog Roundup readers.

The latest Roundup is here. It links to one of my Craig Murray Saga posts: "long-term mud-wrestle ... one to watch."

Lots of other interesting blogs there too.

Such as the Stroppybird - someone about as far from my own views as I can imagine. It does one good to step outside one's own little world now and then.

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

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

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

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

Discuss.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the facts are tough:

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

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

However:

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

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

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

Sickening double standards? Racism?!

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

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

Still, a quick thought or two.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Israel to blame for this?

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

Here's my solution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can't we all do better than this?

Anglican Bishops have been marching against world poverty - then tucking in to a worthy feast.

Hypocrites!

When Pope Benedict XVI visited Krakow in 2006 the Polish authorities were determined to prevent any unseemly scenes of drunkenness among the vast crowds thronging to see him.

So alcohol sales were banned in Krakow and for miles around.

In Krakow for the Pope's Mass I went for dinner at the Hotel Stary, where as it happened the main restaurant had been booked for a mass of Catholic Archbishops and others from the Church hierarchy. There they were, finely berobed.

Imagine my suprise to see the long bar groaning with bottles of champagne and wine, laid out in long rows beautifully for their benefit. They did not hold back.

Research needed? 

I suspect that few readers of this Blog have ever heard of Jovan Divjak.

Here he is.

The point being that while we think about Karadzic and Mladic and all the horrors they helped create, let's remember one true Bosnian, born as a Serb in Belgrade, who fought against them in favour of a truly democratic Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Divjak's case is all the more striking as he was a senior officer in the Yugoslav Army - for him to abandon the 'Belgrade' cause and join the Bosnia cause as a soldier was all the more remarkable.

In fact he was so remarkable in being an honest man that the Izetbegovic Bosniak-Muslim elite of course did not trust him, and sidelined him after the conflict ended.

Had they been truly interested in creating a modern pluralist Bosnia he would have been a central iconic figure. Instead they opted for a policy of No Ethnic Disarmament for 50 Years.

Once everything is defined primarily in such strategic immutable 'ethnic' terms, someone honest and independent who does not fit (or choose to fit) tidly into one or other Category has few chances to make a difference.

And these people tend to be just what is needed to build a reasonable shared future in a bitterly divided society.

Zdravo, Jovane

Are international tribunals for war crimes suspects a Good Idea?

And if so, are they being Done Well?

If not, does that mean that the Idea is in fact not so Good?

Two excellent pieces on these themes: one by John Lloyd, the other by Bill Montgomery.

It goes without saying that there are going to be shortcomings in any process of this sort, especially if the accused is bent on turning the whole affair into a circus as the best way of confusing the issues and trying to 'relativise' his/her guilt.

To this end Vojislav Seselj is putting in a powerful performance (NB a rare example of courtroom transcripts being Not Suitable for Work?).

Likewise any such Tribunal needs to rely on certain cooperative countries' police/military forces to arrest and hand over suspects, and to provide hard evidence perhaps from Top Secret sources.

This means that those countries inevitably start to have some influence over the timing of arrests and even the issue of indictments. Political and other calculations creep in. "You help us - we help you."

So if Milosevic had to be indicted, surely Croatia's President Tudjman who also played his part in some ghastly events should be too? Indeed. 

Yet somehow the indictment with his name on it was never quite issued. 

Did some governments not want that to happen and suggest that ICTY delay matters as Tudjman was ill? Tudjman generously solved the problem by dying. Unindicted - his reputation undeservedly intact to that extent at least.

Similarly Bosnia President Izetbegovic was under ICTY investigation when he died in 2003, when investigations were dropped. Was it really not clear by 2003 (ie almost a decade after the Bosnia conflict) that Izetbegovic too should face some war crimes indictments? Why was it all dragging on in this way?

Lloyd's article includes the following quote from a senior disillusioned British observer of ICTY:

And I saw that the UN, which is supposed to supervise, has no moral compass. It enjoins even-handedness, on ethnic grounds, not on grounds of justice.

Maybe in the circumstances of what happened in former Yugoslavia, which most people would see as some sort of ethnic civil war, this sort of thing is not only inevitable but desirable? If justice is to be seen to be done - most importantly among the communities involved in the fighting - all the issues need a fair objective airing?

NB All of which is not - of course - to say that each leader was "equally guilty".

One thing is for sure. If ICTY and other such Tribunals can not find a way to deal with intimidation of witnesses as happened in the case of indicted Kosovo leader Haradinaj, the process might as well not continue.

To carry on and reach unsatisfactory verdicts when this is going on simply shows weakness, and tells ICTY indictees and their supporters that the worse they behave, the better the outcome - for them.

Exactly the opposite of the message ICTY was set up to send?    

In Sudan too the authority of UN-led international processes is now being directly challenged.

Will ICC keep its nerve and follow through by indicting President al-Bashir?