Blogoir

Here is former UK Ambassador Craig Murray being rightly pleased with himself that his blog is right up there among the most influential blogs in the UK at least according to ebuzzing:

According to the ebuzzing (formerly wikio) rankings, this is the third most influential political blog in the UK – and the fifth most influential blog of any kind. It beats, hands down, the heavily funded ConservativeHome and Labourlist propaganda operations.

Of the two political blogs ahead of it, Guido Fawkes has permanent paid staff, whereas Liberal Conspiracy is a collective of 32 high profile ultra politically correct guardianistas; many of whom are paid by mainstream media.

Yet this blog has total funding of precisely nil and is only me, an ageing and disillusioned man sickened by the growing gap between rich and poor, the domination of mainstream political parties by corporate interests, and the continual promotion of aggressive war.

This blog does everything wrong. There are frequent gaps between posts, sometimes of weeks on end, because I get too depressed at instances of the callous disregard of the powerful for ordinary people.

I do not tweet, except that the start of each blog entry automatically gets tweeted, which someone set up for me.

This is an SNP supporting blog based in Ramsgate, Kent, written by a manic depressive sacked diplomat of eclectic views, whose guiding lights are the deeply unfashionable John Stuart Mill and William Hazlitt, whose favourite book was written by Michael Foot, and who is still metaphorically on his knees begging forgiveness for advising people to put Nick Clegg into government.

Craig has a point. He above all is authentic and passionate. Find an anti-establishment cause and Craig is right there.He was on the spot, watching from the Embassy sofa as J Assange addressed the world from the Ecuador Embassy balcony. That takes diligence. He puts in quality time poring over obscure details to come up with powerfully expressed conclusions: see this one on the Assange rape allegations.

His views - ranging from the self-pitying to the outlandish or bonkers via the sharp and sensible - gush out in all directions. And he has a very strong following among the world's most ambitious conspiracy theorists, who gather at his site for mutual warmth: as someone wittily once put it to me, "if those people were not busy commenting on this site, they'd be walking round supermarkets muttering to themselves".

On the other hand, he froths up bizarre ideas by playing unrelentingly on a rhetorical syllogistic abuse of the Law of the Excluded Middle: if not X, therefore (plausibly and/or not improbably) Y.

See this superb example which trails a sly smear against Israel in connection with the shootings in France where Craig has NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER to do so:

My own security services sources insist that al-Hilli was not a person of current interest to the UK intelligence agencies and was not involved in anything clandestine. I have no reason to disbelieve them. On the other hand, the limited and confusing information in the media is almost entirely from official sources. I find it very strange indeed how little attention has been paid to the murdered French cyclist, and how easily it is presumed he was just a passerby. Surely it is as likely (sic) he was the intended victim and the al-Hillis the accidental witnesses?

I have only one thought of my own I want to add at the minute. Al-Hilli was a Shia muslim and had been on pilgrimage to Qoms in Iran. What if it is indeed true that he was in possession of no especial nuclear or defence secrets to pass on to the Iranians, but the Israelis thought that he was? The Israeli programme of assassination of scientists involved in Iran’s nuclear programme is a definite fact. It makes as much sense as anything else at the moment, as a possibility.

I am not saying that is what happened. But the directions in which the mainstream media is being so strenuously pointed by official sources, like the massacre of an entire family over an inheritance, are certainly no more inherently probable

See his naughty trick? He takes a completely made-up and arguably anti-semitic idea (ignorant Israeli death squad shoots the Al-Hilli family) and says that 'inherently' the theories published by the media are 'no more probable'. Sure, but why not suggest an Iranian death squad? Or a Chinese one?

Challenged on such dirty drafting ploys Craig can be expected to hoot that X/Y/Z well-known examples of official fabrications show that the powerful have been found to lie, so why are they not lying once again here? This is another banal Excluded Middle: since some people in power sometimes lie, nothing anyone in power is believable. And in any case at least our society puts strong pressure on leaders not to cover things up - perhaps that makes us a bit better than most other societies, not worse?

My own more, ahem, measured, efforts here at this site are far less impactful. But I nonetheless was pleasantly surprised to find myself as high as 120th on the ebuzzing Top Political Blogs and seemingly trending upwards. Our other ex-Ambassadorial blogger Brian Barder is down in 361st place.

So, credit where credit is due. If you make a loud noise, more people hear you.

My various postings and pronouncements on the rights and wrongs of the UK government's 'threat' to remove the diplomatic immunity of the Ecuador Embassy in London to enable J Assange to be nabbed have prompted Brian Barder to weigh in.

And when Brian weighs in, he does so thoroughly. His long analysis was too much for the Comment function of this site, so he has sent me his views by email and I am pleased to post them in full below. I have taken the liberty of breaking down his paragraphs into manageable smaller pieces, to make the flow of the argument readable (BB is one for long sentences and longer paragraphs. I am not).

The key issue is simple. BB says (in effect, I think) that the 1987 UK Act purportedly giving the Foreign Secretary the power to remove an Embassy building's diplomatic status under certain conditions is so constrained by the Vienna Convention (apart from an extreme case of obvious 'self-defence') that it can't be used.

I by contrast argue that the Act gives legal force to the underlying time-honoured sense of reciprocity in the Vienna Convention by enabling modulated and proportionate action by a receiving state against grave breaches of the Convention by or through the Embassy concerned.

So we disagree on the margins (important margins) about what abuses of the Convention by/through an Embassy might trigger a legally justified move against the Embassy's immunity. We nonetheless agree that in the Assange case the abuse (if any) by the Ecuadoreans of the Convention by sheltering Assange is NOT such as to make even the temporary removal of the Embassy's diplomatic immunity by HMG a legally appropriate or politically wise response.

Note that some of this is all about deep diplomatic theory and high principle. What happens in practice - and how any case on the matter might come to the courts and who would decide the outcome - is a very different matter. Note too that in his excitement BB ascribes to me a number of positions that I do not hold, and/or strays into some weak non-sequiturs. But I forgive him.

Enough. Judge for yourselves. Here is Brian's analysis, taking up my earlier piece here. CC in black, BB in blue

Brian Barder: I'm afraid there are so many elementary confusions in all this that it's difficult to disentangle them.  But here goes.  Quotations from your post labelled "CC" are followed by my explanation of why they are wrong, labelled "BB".

 

CC: "Brian is right that the Vienna Convention at Article 22 lays it all down pretty bluntly:

 

The premises of the mission shall be inviolable. The agents of the receiving State may not enter them, except with the consent of the head of mission.

 

To which one can say, so what? The Convention also has a catch-all Article 41 which requires diplomats to respect local laws and not use their diplomatic premises in ways incompatible with the Convention or wider international law rules."

 

BB:  You imply that if the British government believes, rightly or wrongly, that the embassy of Ecuador is behaving improperly, Article 41 of the Vienna Convention (VCDR) permits us to strip it of its diplomatic status and immunities, send in the cops, and arrest Assange, without the ambassador's consent.  But that's simply wrong. 

We have several options for responding to the embassy's perceived misbehaviour, from a simple protest right up to expelling the ambassador or in the last resort breaking off diplomatic relations with Ecuador and closing down its embassy (which incidentally would be bad news for Assange).

What we can't legally do is renounce our obligation to respect the embassy's diplomatic status, claim to have abolished its immunities (which would be flat contrary to the VCDR), invade it, and arrest anyone we find there -- even the sainted Mr Assange.  

I did explain all this in my earlier comment on your blog, from which you quote selectively.  Apparently it was not understood, although it seems simple enough to me.

CC: "Thus the 1987 Act, that gives HMG the right to strip a mission of its diplomatic status by withdrawing consent for that status in specified circumstances and "if the Secretary of State is satisfied that to do so is permissible under international law" (Note: a somewhat subjective test, ie Brian is not correct above on this point)."

BB:  By calling the test "somewhat subjective", you seem to imply that if the Secretary of State declares himself satisfied that what he wants to do is permissible under international law, he can do as he likes.  But that's wrong.  His declaration of satisfaction that his proposed action is legal would be subject to judicial review. 

The courts would look into the basis for the Secretary of State's claim of satisfaction, and would not take very long to find that he had no basis whatever for that claim, since any proposal to muscle into the Ecuador embassy would clearly be contrary to Art. 22 of the VCDR, which you yourself re-quote. 

Mr Assange's supporters and the Ecuadoreans or their sympathisers would be sure to seek that judicial review before you could say "William Hague".  So it's not purely subjective, and I was not wrong to point it out.

 

CC: "In other words, it is not open to a diplomatic mission to insist that any given building is its Embassy and remains so indefinitely - that has to be accepted by the receiving State."

BB:  Wrong again.  Art. 22 of the VCDR, part of which you recklessly re-quote, obliges us to respect the inviolability of what we have already recognised as an embassy and diplomatic mission.  Art. 22(2) says:  "The receiving State is under a special duty to take all appropriate steps to protect the premises of the mission against any intrusion or damage and to prevent any disturbance of the peace of the mission or impairment of its dignity." 

There's no way that can be squared with the receiving State (Britain) itself mounting an intrusion.  The receiving State has no option but to discharge its obligations under the whole of Art. 22.  There's no basis for your assertion that this has to be accepted by the receiving State, even if you underline 'accepted'. The receiving State has already 'accepted' it by signing and ratifying the Vienna Convention.

Moreover Britain can't wriggle out of those obligations by passing a domestic law purporting to permit it to do so.  If it could, any country -- North Korea, Zimbabwe, Iran, Ecuador -- could pass a similar law, and send its heavies armed with baseball bats into the local British embassy or high commission an hour or two later.  No international agreement (including the Vienna Conventions, plural) would be worth twopence.

 

CC: "And that acceptance can reasonably be withdrawn eg if the receiving State has good reason to think that that building is being used in ways grossly incompatible with international law. That is an expression of the rights available to a receiving State under the Convention, not a breach of the rights of the hapless cheating mission." 

BB:  Perhaps you would point to the Article or Articles of the VCDR which grants to the receiving State the right to denounce its Article 22 obligations and break into the premises of a diplomatic mission as a mark of its displeasure at allegedly -- or manifestly -- illegal or objectionable activity going on in those premises. 

As I have now explained twice here already, there are many ways in which the receiving State can respond to illegal or improper activity in a diplomatic mission, but entering it without its consent simply isn't one of them -- with one clearly defined exception which we'll come to immediately but which is totally irrelevant to anything currently being done by the Ecuadoreans or indeed by Mr Assange.

 

CC: "Probably no row at all would ensue if eg the Ecuadorean Embassy or even J Assange starting shooting out of the window without provocation at passers-by and/or the police, gravely abusing the Convention. It would be absurd to say that in such a dramatic situation HMG could enter the Embassy only with the Ambassador's permission to stop the mayhem: action to strip the Embassy's diplomatic status would be right in principle, and overwhelmingly popular in this country and probably applauded by any country that takes diplomatic privilege seriously."

BB:  The one exception to the principles and rules that I have now explained three times above is where the receiving State acts under its "inherent right of self-defence" under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. 

To be able to assert this right, the receiving state has to be able to point to behaviour by or from the embassy which poses an immediate threat to the lives and safety of people in its vicinity, such as the kind of situation you imagine -- someone shooting randomly, or at all, from within the embassy. 

When young PC Yvonne Fletcher was shot from a window of the Libyan embassy in 1984, the British government would have been entitled to exercise its right of self-defence to enter the embassy and take whatever action was necessary to prevent further murders.  (It decided against doing so, primarily because of the risk to the British embassy in Libya if it did -- a point worth considering in the context of the Ecuadorean embassy in London, incidentally.) 

This sole exception to the special status of Article 22 is not AFAIK set out in any formal legally binding document, but it is generally recognised by students of international law, and confirmed in Professor Eileen Denza's authoritative book 'Diplomatic Law', as well as in the chapters in the current edition of Satow on diplomatic privileges and immunities (of which Professor Denza was the author).

One further point:  you talk about the functions of a diplomatic mission specified by the VCDR as proper and permissible, as if anything not mentioned in the Convention must be incompatible with the mission's obligations under it.  But the functions described in the Convention are purely illustrative, as shown by the all-important phrase 'inter alia' in Article 3. 

It's therefore wrong to argue that because the Convention is silent on the question of using diplomatic premises to shelter a refugee (something that many British embassies have done for years BTW), therefore sheltering Assange must be incompatible with the embassy's international law obligations. 

Whether this action by Ecuador is permissible in international law probably depends on whether the extradition proceedings against Assange can properly be regarded as politically motivated  or whether they are purely associated with accusations of non-political criminal offences, a matter on which you and I will take one position and Mr Assange and the Ecuadoreans will no doubt take another. 

But the presence of this gentleman in the Ecuadorean embassy can't possibly justify action by the British government contrary to Art 22 of the VCDR in pursuance of its inherent right of self-defence.  End of story. 

And my last word on this issue on your ever entertaining blog.  If I need to write yet more, I shall do it on my own, at http://www.barder.com/ephems/, where you and any other reader of this will find a pretty exhaustive account of my view of the issues, both in two recent posts and in my responses to numerous comments on them.

Here at The Corner (National Review Online's popular stream of consciousness in the USA) is a piece by John O'Sullivan that picks up some of my ideas but comes down in favour of gracefully letting Mr Assange stew in his Ecuadorean juice:

With those two points in mind, why not try the following approach: First, make it clear to all of Latin America but especially to Ecuador that Britain fully accepts its diplomatic ability to shelter Assange in its embassy even as London disapproves of its exercising that ability on behalf of someone accused of rape. Second, publicly withdraw, disavow, and if necessary apologize for the earlier suggestion of forcible entry. Third, surround the embassy with police. Fourth, carry on regardless indefinitely...

Assange permanently around the place would be not merely a nuisance but a damned nuisance. He might try to stay in the headlines, but he would gradually sink to page eleven below the fold and the final item on the nightly news (if that). The crowds gathering for his speeches would gradually shrink ( though we should make publicly clear to Ecuador that the U.K. fully accepts its right to give a balcony-platform to the Australian asylee). He would become the Great Bore of Knightsbridge...

For Assange Addicts as we all are these days, here is a businesslike Guardian editorial that calls a spade a spade:

This champion of radical transparency hasn't helped Swedish prosecutors with their inquiries. There was his remark about people being jailed for exercising freedom of speech, "There is unity in the oppression. There must be absolute unity and determination in the response", and yet taking shelter in a country that, according to Reporters Without Borders, shut down six radio stations and two TV stations in just one fortnight this June.

No doomed cause can exist without our old favourite ex-Ambassador Craig Murray weighing in wildly. Here is again, watching the Assange balcony scene safely from within the Ecuadorean Embassy.

And another former diplomatic colleague turned pundit Brian Barder helpfully reminds us how not to write a sane FCO policy submission.

Tomorrow I have an interview with the Voice of Russia radio on this fascinating subject.

Truly, Julian Assange is the gift that keeps on giving for weary ex-diplomats.

 

The story that emails sent from Education Secretary Michael Gove's wife's email account might count as official emails for Freedom of Information purposes rumbles on. This is an interesting point:

Department for Education spokesman said: “Emails are not automatically considered an official record. Special advisers are not required to maintain records of deleted emails. All civil servants routinely delete or archive emails, taking account of their nature and content.

“Government systems could not operate if every civil servant kept every email they send or received (sic). The act of deleting emails is not evidence of wrong doing.”

Fair enough? Or not?

When the FCO brought in email communication first on a clunky internal system then on a more familiar Windows-based system, the use of emails of course exploded. And the FCO had to think about what to do with them all.

Various categories of email were devised, reflecting security classifications for documents set up under utterly different conditions. So for a while until a network-wide Confidential system was rolled out to the huge majority of posts (over several years) the 'Unclassified' parts of the network could send and receive only Unclassified emails, leaving them largely excluded from the day to day email chatter at HQ in London. This was part of Craig Murray's problem in Uzbekistan - he did not have a CONF system and so substantively was isolated from much of the policy debate in the FCO. This frustrating situation led to him to start using the 'telegram' level for communicating his thoughts to a vast bemused Whitehall audience, and it all went downhill from there.

The really staggeringly stupid thing the FCO did was not insist from the start on a sound system for email retention. If I wanted to send an email to someone on the network, I just sent it. The message would be stored in my Sent box on Outlook until I moved it to an Outlook file or saved it elsewhere on my computer. Thus over time my Outlook space became clogged with all the folders of emails I'd created as a sort of private registry system. It could be searched by me but not by anyone else other than remote system controllers who were essentially technicians and network security minders.

In other words, if a member of the public or even a fellow colleague wanted information on (say) UK policy towards Montenegro, there was no meaningful way that the fast proliferating mass of emails on that subject across the FCO network could be searched. Partly this was for classic internal 'Need to Know' reasons. Better not to have a centrally searchable database open to all FCO staff lest anyone who got into the system illicitly might scoop the whole lot.

There was in fact an easy solution. Namely that before sending an email the sender would have to choose from a drop-down menu which might give one of the following options, following which the message would be automatically stored centrally and be searchable by those who needed to do so:

• Ephemeral/Unimportant - Delete after three Months
• Ephemeral but Operationally Significant - Delete after One Year
• Policy Relevant but Operationally Insignificant - Delete after One Year
• Policy Relevant - Keep

These classifications or something like them would have covered the nuts and bolts exchanges on eg organising visits, which by definition are mainly irrelevant and unneeded once the visit is over. They also would have allowed FCO officials to set timelines for keeping messages which had some current policy relevance that was set to dwindle over time (eg analysis of the prospects for Montenegro as elections approached - interesting at the time, but not mattering much a year after the election). Above all, they would have given officials a chance quickly to designate an email message as worthy of prolonged retention/searchability and eventual sending on to the Public Records Office for the national archives.

All this could have been complemented by a requirement that each email message have in its title three or four key words (Montenegro Economy Bilateral Steel) which would be a fast way of helping find emails on a certain subject in months and years to come.

What instead happened was that cumbersome arrangements were set up for 'saving' emails (or not) separately from sending them. With the result that few officers saved more than a handful. Even though I must have produced thousands of emails in my final seven years in the FCO I don't recall saving permanently any at all(!), although as Ambassador my main senior policy effort was via 'telegrams' sent electronically (E-grams) which were in a category of their own and saved automatically by HQ. Plus I assumed that if anything really important came up arising from what I had sent, I would be able to find the trail in my Outlook private filing cabinet.

That said, when I left post the whole mass of work I had sent by email was summarily deleted. Gone.

In all this it was never clear how far anything was really finally deleted once and for all. Presumably the messages were also captured on central FCO servers. Yet without some sensible way of searching through the gazillions of messages which even a small government department like the FCO generated each year, they might as well have been deleted.

In short, it is likely to be relatively easy to track down recent official working papers where the people who created them are still at their desks (see eg my request re that astounding FCO Bullying training event, where I have sent a follow-up request to get more accurate costings after the FCO said that they did not know what the event had cost).

But for anything much older the chances of getting anything like a full set of papers (if such a thing is even imaginable in our chattering e-age) are much reduced. Oddly enough if you go further back to the days of predominantly paper records things might get easier again, as physical files telling a story were kept. See eg the impressive reply to my FOI request for papers on the FCO's policy on homosexuality in the 1980s.

Basically:

• there has never been a policy that all official papers are kept for the main Public Record
• 'weeding' of papers and emails goes on all the time - it indeed is not evidence of wrong-doing (although some deleting may be wrong-doing)
  
• FOI is never going to be much better than the ambient information management systems in any government department
• in most modern democracies including our own the level of transparency is remarkable and historically unprecedented
• the more the public demands that almost everything 'official' be open to scrutiny, the more likely it is that informal arrangements will emerge to keep some sensitive exchanges off the record, as has happened in the Michael Gove case
• that's human nature

Craig Murray and I have a fleeting moment of agreement, rather like ships sailing in opposite directions who pass and exchange friendly waves.

He commented on my earlier piece about Libya and MI6, responding to another reader:

Your second point rests on the premiss that if government ministers approved something, then it was legal. That is simply not true. A previous government may have done something, and may even have briefed their successors about it. if it were illegal, nothing in that means it should not subsequently be the subject of criminal investigation. Theoretically, the current government has no role in either encouraging or stopping the criminal investigation - it is quite rightly a matter for the police and CPS.

However, a new development arises. Two Libyans are launching civil actions in the English courts against my old colleague and good friend Sir Mark Allen, over the circumstances under which they were subject to 'rendition' to Tripoli and subsequent abuse by the Gaddafi regime. The Guardian:

Saadi was detained in Hong Kong in 2004 and then forced on to a plane to Tripoli with his wife and four children in an operation that MI6 allegedly mounted in co-operation with Koussa, who was Gaddafi's intelligence chief at the time. Saadi says he suffered years of torture.

Belhaj was detained in Bangkok along with his pregnant wife after an MI6 tipoff and was allegedly tortured by American agents for several days before being flown to Tripoli, where he says he was tortured and detained for several years. His wife was detained for several months.

The issue here is not any claim that MI6/HMG engaged in torture. Rather it is that MI6/HMG are said to have been 'complicit' in torture in Libya of certain Libyans by certain other Libyans. Which raises the question: what does complicity mean?

Back in March 2010 in an earlier exchange with Craig I looked at precisely this question. Craig and other maximalists insist that even to possess information which is suspected as having come from torture amounts to 'complicity'. That position, as the House of Lords found in 2005, is incorrect as a matter of law (and common sense):

Very (very) broadly speaking, I conclude from this judgment that the the top legal body in the UK drew at least three important conclusions:

• That it may be acceptable for the state's executive authorities to receive/acquire and use information which they know or think may have been derived from torture, if they believe that there is a clear public interest in doing so (eg saving lives)
• But it is not acceptable for the judicial authorities (courts and tribunals) to hear and use such evidence in reaching conclusions directly affecting the rights of individuals
• If seemingly well-founded allegations are made that evidence has been or may have been produced by torture, the court/tribunal has to consider most carefully how to deal with that evidence, but is not bound to conduct an exhaustive investigation of the origin of the evidence to reach a final view as that would just not be possible

These conclusions do not apply directly to the current emerging case, namely where HMG allegedly took action leading to Libyans being returned to Libya where they say they ended up being mistreated.

The problem here is that any secret 'rendition' by us or even a contribution to secret rendition by others is likely to have been endorsed by Ministers, either specifically or as a general rule. So to single out one civil servant for litigation is mischievous if not malevolent.

Second, the whole case turns on the idea that 'complicity' can be stretched far beyond any immediate link to maltreatment. Any abuse or torture was not committed by HMG or its officials. Is it really fair to make us legally responsible for horrors committed by others far away?

Even if you think that it is reasonable to do so on the moral level, you need to draw a line somewhere and say that the actions alleged were too 'remote' to amount to complicity. Under what principle should the line be drawn in specific cases? What balancing factors should be taken into account?

What if our attempts to bring under control Gaddafi's WMD have hit the rocks and it looks like we need to make some 'minor' concessions to Gaddafi's entourage to get things restarted? How do we even begin to weigh up the possibility of abuse of two individuals with the possible dangers to millions if the WMD are not secured asap? 

This leads us back to the core policy dilemma, namely how to deal with wicked regimes? Thus:

Above all, if you engage with dirty people, how to avoid some of their dirt ending up on you? The promise of Engagement is that it offers the hope of slowly but surely changing things for the better; the danger is that while you are doing that, the key leaders of the regime in fact get far richer and learn how to be oppressive in new, cleverer ways.

So in the Libya case. The stupid/wicked/naive Brits trained the Libyan security forces! Of course we did: if you want to set in motion a process of reform and enlightenment in such regressive institutions, what else to do?

Think about what this means in practice. If the Libyan secret police are known torturers, you will be training them while their torturing ways continue. Even if the total amount of Libyan torture declines sharply as a direct result of Libyans cleaning up their act during the wider normalisation process, your trainers in one way or the other will be helping a torturing regime be more efficient.

Yet without outside democratic engagement (and the high-level civilisational rewards which rightly flow to the regime for behaving in a less extreme way) the chances of reducing Libyan torture at all (and thereby opening some small new space for opposition trends) are hugely reduced...

This nasty, bleak, lonely policy and moral frontier was where Mark Allen and his colleagues were operating. If the way is opened to sue them for outcomes which were far from ideal if not awful, who is going to be ready to do this sort of fundamentally important work?

The issue here is simple. Not what the 'right' choice is when you are dealing with a regime like Gaddafi's. There isn't one.

Rather it is 'who decides?'.

We seem to be ending up in the absurd position that sanctimonious lawyers and unelected judges far from the operational and policy realities of such questions are seen as more 'responsible' than elected politicians and civil servants who are elected to do our dirty work while operating to arguably the highest standards of public probity in human history.

Yes, judges have the benefit of detachment. And yes, Ministers and officials can get so wrapped up in what they are doing that serious errors get made. But this is one where the best people to judge are voters, not lawyers.

Over at Commentator is my latest piece on UK engagement with Libya, in which I argue that what happened in recent years was principled, smart and mainly effective. Take that, you chattering classes:

there are only two basic choices available to democracies when it comes to dealing with odious regimes: Isolation, or Engagement. And that both can have perverse consequences, because it is impossible to deal with perverse regimes without some perverse outcomes

Isolation (plus or minus sanctions) invariably drags on unhappily, mainly because the regimes are never in fact that isolated: see the wild success of those policies for eg Cuba, Myanmar, Zimbabwe and Belarus. In some cases the regime may isolate itself, all the better to oppress its own citizens: see decades of North Korea.

Engagement creates different problems. Above all, if you engage with dirty people, how to avoid some of their dirt ending up on you? The promise of Engagement is that it offers the hope of slowly but surely changing things for the better; the danger is that while you are doing that, the key leaders of the regime in fact get far richer and learn how to be oppressive in new, cleverer ways.

So in the Libya case. The stupid/wicked/naive Brits trained the Libyan security forces! Of course we did: if you want to set in motion a process of reform and enlightenment in such regressive institutions, what else to do?

Think about what this means in practice. If the Libyan secret police are known torturers, you will be training them while their torturing ways continue. Even if the total amount of Libyan torture declines sharply as a direct result of Libyans cleaning up their act during the wider normalisation process, your trainers in one way or the other will be helping a torturing regime be more efficient.

Yet without outside democratic engagement (and the high-level civilisational rewards which rightly flow to the regime for behaving in a less extreme way) the chances of reducing Libyan torture at all (and thereby opening some small new space for opposition trends) are hugely reduced...

This is also where I part company with my former UK Ambassador colleague Craig Murray. Forget his idiosyncratic leftism. My problem is that Craig's books and website lambast almost any 'Western' foreign policy as corrupt, mendacious, duplicitous or whatever. Yet he is almost 100% silent on how in real life to achieve any positive changes for the better, not least in Uzbekistan which is run by a hard-core regime which he knows only too well.

A loyal reader of my latest Commentator piece says this:

My initial instincts would be to disagree mostly with the kind of line you take on this particular issue. I'm a no compromise man on dictatorships. But, as you say, what are we supposed to do with them? If I may say, you make a very convincing case that really makes me think hard.

Let's think about this a bit more, taking for granted that a 'Western' democratic system with a strong legal system is just 'better' than a cruel torturing dictatorship. What should the democracy do about the dictatorship?

One option is to do nothing. Faraway wicked foreigners oppress each other - what's new?

That option is in fact quite often used, even if there is a busy pretence of 'doing something'. Saudi Arabia is the classic example of a system which in most respects imposes odious unfair apartheid-like restrictions on its citizens, and which we studiously treat as a 'factor of stability'. Communist China used to be far worse, murdering millions. As did the USSR.

In all these cases the hard fact that these systems are powerful, ruthless and/or rich compels a certain caution. But does the fact that we 'tolerate' (say) the Saudi system demolish any claim by us to moral superiority? Double standards, they shriek.

No. Any good policy has to be realistic as well as consistent. If you can't stop all killers, it's right to stop those you can stop. To that extent there is solid intellectual and moral territory between 'double standards' and 'no standards'.    

If we nonetheless decide to do something about a dictatorship, what in fact is likely to work, where 'work' means bringing about change for the more pluralistic, preferably without massive violence?

Hold it right there. Why is massive violence bad? Sweden's Foreign Minister Carl Bildt tweeted recently thus:

What if we think that there are possibilities for more or less peaceful change? Egypt in some ways is a good current example. NB South Africa is always presented as a triumph for peaceful change but of course wasn't.

Libya might have been too, had the Gaddafi elite not reverted to stupidity instead of using its new improved relations with Western democracies to negotiate .

Cuba? Belarus? Myanmar/Burma? Zimbabwe? China itself?

Simply making a short list like that shows just how varied and problematic the challenge is. In each individual case the options range far and wide, as does the prospect of getting allies and building successful coalitions for change. 

Let's not forget too that Western political leaders' main focus is what their voters want. And voters (with rare exceptions) do not put changing the ways of revolting foreign regimes far up their priorities list. Or much taxpayers' money to be spent on the problem. In 1999 Robin Cook realised that it was a good investment to fund anti-Milosevic activities led by myself, and got superb results. 

So in the real world of foreign policy it makes no sense to take a stark 'no compromise' position of substance with dictatorships. They exist, they have UN and other votes, they can export trouble, they probably have Ambassadors in London. Your aircraft may need to fly over their territory, or they may agree with you on various international technical issues. It's complicated. 

You almost always end up with some form of 'engagement'. But the fact of matter-of-fact exchanges and opportunistically looking for areas to build some common ground is not the same thing as having a policy of Engagement aimed at deliberately using a range of options (openly or otherwise) to bring out reforms. 

When in Poland I quietly and privately explored with the then Ambassador of Belarus (smart, energetic diplomat) some ideas for engaging with the Lukashenko elite. But it all fell into the Not Important Enough category in London. Getting anything done there would take a lot of effort and senior time: Tony Blair saw no real upside in this long slog, and plenty of reasons for letting this one quietly fester under 'EU pressure'.

Was that the wrong decision by No 10? Or the right one? It's still festering, but EU governments are still wobbling unconvincingly between Engagement and Isolation.

A huge subject.

My point today is simple. British foreign policy and leadership can make positive changes in unpropitious foreign situations. But simply wanting to make a difference does not get results. Making that happen requires a powerful combination of strong policy determination, operational nimbleness and fine professional technique, an area where the FCO obviously declined under Labour. Plus some money.

What just doesn't help is facile sneering from the likes of the BBC's 'foreign editor' Jon Williams:

WilliamsJon Jon Williams

Any suggestion of MI6 relationship with #Libya into 2011 v damaging to FCO & No10. Til (sic) now claimed UK-Gaddafi ties part of Blair/Brown past

The fact that MI6 had a relationship with #Libya under Brown/Blair and continued under Cameron showed the policy was working, you silly fellow.

The Commentator has published a piece of mine - Torture versus terror - a tale of two resignations - which is intended to bring out in 100% unambiguous terms what practical and ethical/policy dilemmas a blanket extension of the idea of 'complicity in torture' might produce.

It takes a dramatic imaginary scene some years in the future to explain why and precisely how some anguished operational choices might need to be made, and how different honourable people might come to completely different conclusions: 

I believe that in the extreme circumstances I faced, I acted – as I was elected to do - in the national interest, by accepting that information and acting on it. Torture is despicable. We work tirelessly at the United Nations and elsewhere to stamp it out.

But I believe that it cannot be right to avoid any action to thwart murderers and so save innocent lives. The relatives and friends of all the victims of the bombings today in London and Edinburgh will be tortured by their grief from this disaster every day for the rest of their lives.

This situation creates appalling policy and ethical dilemmas for us all. Indeed, I myself might be open to prosecution for what I did. If this happens I will plead not guilty but enter no defence and leave it to the jury to decide.

I do not wish to continue to serve as Prime Minister without a clear mandate from voters as to how I should respond in such circumstances.

I hereby resign my seat in Parliament with immediate effect. A by-election will be called in the shortest possible time. I will stand for re-election but not campaign for it. My statement here tonight represents my only policy position and my only public statement in that campaign...

In fact the dilemmas are there already for practical purposes. British police officers have been busy grilling MI6 officers on what if anything they knew or suspected about the treatment in other countries of AQ and other terror suspects.

These issues take us right to the very outskirts of Policy and how it's made. And if you want one of the most remarkable and profound set of answers ever articulated on some of these problems as they come up in a democracy out there on the Limits of Diplomacy, swing by the transcripts of the UK's Iraq Inquiry and have a read of this testimony by an MI6 officer.

Plenty of heavy black redactions for reasons of the highest secrecy, but what's left is gripping and subtle enough. And, in parts, downright magnificent:

Did you have much contact with Alastair Campbell through this period or generally?

SIS4:

I never met him. I saw him across the Cabinet room table on the morning after 9/11 and I didn't know who he was. I had to ask.

Here is Craig Murray rumbling on about the fact that News International recently held a reception in the FCO:

Last week the Murdoch phone hacking empire hired the palatial rooms of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for their summer party. There Rebekah Brooks and Murdoch junior sumptuously entertained their bought politicians from all the major parties, who turned up in droves, tongues dragging on the bespoke axminster, from Cameron down.

But what's this?

A couple of years ago when Charles Crawford and I were considering holding a public debate on foreign policy and the practice of diplomacy, I asked whether it would be possible to rent a state room in the FCO. I was told I was not an appropriate person to rent a room there.

Let's see what they say now under Conservative/LibDem management...

The agonies continue at the LSE over the fact that it took Libyan money.

Here is the sensible memo which an unhappy Fred Halliday wrote on the subject in October 2009. It reads quite well now.

Here briskly defending what New Labour did by way of opening up to Libya is Lord Mandelson:

Our policy goal should be to do all we can, with others, to put such a country on to the path of transition. Opening up its economy, helping it to tap its natural resource wealth, deepening its integration to the rest of the world and stimulating domestic enterprise and business will spur the growth of aspiration, demands for freedom and the spread of pluralistic values in that society.

Contact with the outside world makes a population want more of what that world – its material goods and liberal values – has to offer. The next step is for them to organise in order to resist and weaken the tyrant’s power and, eventually, overthrow him and his regime as, hopefully, will happen in Libya and, in due course, Iran.

The sort of points made on either side of this argument (and the usual clamorous accusations of 'hypocrisy' which get flung in all directions in these situations) are all about a peculiarly difficult policy question: if there is a bad regime out there, how best to promote change?

First, you have to get over the argument that if foreigners want to brutalise each other, that's none of our business. And the related argument that even if we want to do anything, we'll be likely to mess up and make things worse.

All sorts of the usual policy points can be made to and fro on those ones. But let's stipulate for the purpose of this blog posting that it just doesn't feel quite right to do nothing when we see decent people attempting to stand up for the sort of rights we enjoy and being massacred by a tyrant.

So we decide that we do want to do something. But what is in practice likely to work against Bad Leaders?

I have written about the Bad Leaders phenomenon at some length here already. See this.

And this one, which looks carefully at the core weakness in Craig Murray's utterances on Uzbekistan, where the only thing more deafening than his hoots of supposed moral outrage at anything involving 'engagement' with the Karimov regime is his studied silence on any clearly different policy way forward instead.

In this context the Gaddafi case is really interesting.

For years Gaddafi was a loathsome form of post-colonialist national socialist low-life, supporting terrorism in many different forms and showing off about it. Then came the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and a furtive telephone-call to MI6 - Gaddafi would like to offer a deal.

And quite a deal it turned out to be. Not only did Libya work with Western governments to renounce various WMD programmes. It accepted responsibility for the Lockerbie state-sponsored terrorism bombing atrocity!

One of the most impressive Bad Leader policy shifts in modern times - had Milosevic offered such a grand bargain he might still be Serbia's leader.

Bad Leaders may have a keen regard for their undeserving necks. But they also have their professional pride. And if they offer a deal they want to get something real in return. Not only the fact that they are not toppled. Recognition - acceptance - respectability - too.

And that was what we had to offer Gaddafi to clinch the deal. Sanctions were lifted and very quickly Libya started to be treated once again as a 'normal' country.

Not normal in the sense that we believed it behaved in a civilised way at home; it didn't. But normal in the sense that we tried to deal with it as we would any other unhappy dictatorship, namely showing formal respect for its leaders while trying to look for ways quietly to promote better outcomes for ordinary Libyans.

Part of this process involves business deals. Sure we know that the local dictators will find countless ways to cheat their own people. Check out my first-ever LSE book review which has just appeared - cool timing. It looks at a book called Economic Gangsters which aming other things ingeniously tries to calibrate the extent and cost of top-level corruption in Indonesia.

Yes, big business deals enrich the regime. But yes too, they bring in to the regime's structures unfamiliar new processes of accounting, lawyers, rules, standards, transparency and reputation which have to be taken seriously.

These ideas permeate out into the elite and beyond. People start to think about how life might be better if much more of their country's processes were opened up and internationally legitimised. The top leaders start to modify their behaviour - no point in being too openly odious in the run-up to Davos.

Likewise scholarships and academic programmes. Yes, there's a risk that if we bring plenty Libyan students to the UK to learn chemistry they'll help develop WMD technologies when they go home. But yes too, they'll see a completely different pluralistic academic and social atmosphere, their horizons will be far wider, they'll ask questions, they'll end up thinking differently about the world.

And then there are military and intelligence contacts. Yes, talking to the regime's senior hoods somehow reinforces their prestige and power (bad). But engaging with them through visits and other programmes (including training) helps in a drip-drip way to spread better ideas and instincts among the next generation of leaders (hopefully good).

So there is a case for being stern and unyielding towards Bad Leaders: sanctions, threats, UN resolutions and the rest.

But experience shows (apartheid South Africa, Saddam Hussein, Cuba, N Korea, Milosevic, Lukashenko) that these policies drag on for many years with not much to show for them other than making the mass of people poorer for far longer. Not years but decades of fast compounding misery.  

So if isolation does not work, you end up with different sorts of engagement. All largely inglorious and risky, none offering any quick solution to the basic problem - the sheer Badness and tenacity of the Bad Leader concerned.

Stick v Carrot? Or a clever attempt to use both which is hard to sustain cleverly, and risks looking ridiculous when the bad donkey eats the carrot but stays put? A timless and unanswered question.

So I have no problem in principle with the LSE taking Gaddafi's money to run various programmes which it otherwise might not have run. The more so if that was part of an accepted wider international schmoozing of the Gaddafi regime which followed the end of those WMD programmes, and a significant opening-up of Libyan society which went along with all that.  

But there are firm lines to be drawn.

And if LSE cut corners in approving sub-standard academic work from top Libyans as part of the implicuit deal to get that money, we were not spreading good practice to Libya - Libya was spreading very bad practice to us. 

Craig's made a big effort to change his website. Here's the result.

Definitely a cleaner, sharper 'look', although some might wonder about his self-description:

Former Ambassador, Human Rights Activist

 

The experts in such matters always say that it's best to brand yourself in terms of what you do now and what you now plan to do, not what you once did. Anyway, the substance is much the same as before, viz Craig as the world's most all-wise anti-hypocrisy megaphone but now without added Spellcheck. 

 

Here he is on the Middle East:

 

Yet Karimov in the fast (sic) three months had a visit from Hillary Clinton, a new military supply agreement with the United States and new partnership agreement with NATO, an official visit to the EU in Brussels, and new tarriff (sic) preferences for slave picked Uzbek cotton entering the EU. Most people in Uzbekistan have not a clue the arab revolutions are happening, such is state control of meida (sic)

 

And here's a novel thought:

 

The Arab people have shown they are more than capable of seizing their own destiny.

 

Hmm. When was that, precisely? Isn't the real problem that they have shown exactly the opposite: awesome passivity and fatalism in the face of oppression and indignity dished out by their own leaders for far too many decades?

 

For years, Western commentators spoke of “the Arab street” as a coherent public opinion, but as though (sic) it were natural that such opinion was at complete odds with the views of autocratic leaders, and the arab voice had no potential for translation to action

 

Well, for years banking on the absence of potential for action was a good way to bet.

 

Still, Craig's basic point has a modest merit: that 'intervention' may well not have the desired results and/or make a difficult situation much worse. That said, for a grown-up hard look at the general principle of 'liberal intervention' swing by Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian:

 

... there is then a whole range of forms of intervention – from economic carrots and sticks, through diplomatic pressure, all the way to often controversial forms of overt or covert assistance to independent media and opposition groups, training in forms of non-violent action, and so on.

Many of the most genuinely liberal forms of intervention – those which help people help themselves to be free – are to be found somewhere along this spectrum, but well short of armed force. We used them far too little in the Middle East over the last 30 years.

Precisely.

 

Craig Murray as ever tries to steer a course which no-one else has ever steered. And crashes. Here he is talking about the impact of the weather:

A combination of crazed right wing thinking and crazed left wind thinking, so typical of the UK, is why our airports are rubbish...

BAA invests in only enough cold weather equipment to cope with a mild to normal winter. It has not tied up capital in equipment that may be fully needed only once in every five years. It crosses its fingers and hopes - it has, in effect, no insurance.

It is not of course unique. The philosophy of just in time ordering that transformed cash flows two decades ago, means total collapse if transport is disrupted. You hold no stock, carry no excess of anything.

It is this ideological commitment to short term profit maximisation that makes capitalism an unsafe model for British public infrastructure.

But then there adds to the chaos the left wing rubbish of health and safety culture. A man may not unload bags if there is any ice under his boots. He may slip. All risk must be eliminated and we must live hermetically sealed from our environment.

He's right about the left-wing rubbish, of course. But is 'just in time' thinking all about right-wing 'ideology' and 'short-term profit maximisation'?

I think not.

Forty years ago back in the communist USSR a huge proportion of all food grown rotted in the fields or was lost in useless storage/transport. But over in the capitalist USA a huge proportion of all food grown rotted on the shelves and was eventually thrown away, as the supply chains for filling shops did not have the information management tools to avoid this waste - better to have too much in the stores than too little. (Note: I did a fascinating Harvard case-study on this one.)

You today are an ideological hard-core right-wing capitalist selling widgets. You want to make as much money as possible. Part of doing that - and, of course, of being as 'green' as possible - lies in reducing waste.

You have hard choices. You can decide to make no provision for bad weather or other disruptions and stock only the widgets likely to be sold in normal times.

But you know that if you do this you may lose out at some points to your ideologically hard-core capitalist rival up the road, who is known to be investing in snow-clearing kit and making other precautions so that his shop can stay open and sell widgets come what may.

On the other hand, because you are not spending that money by way of weather insurance you can spend it on enhanced widget design and so have better products to sell most of the time.

In other words, it's a gamble. Different people who believe exactly the same thing reasonably may take different choices about how to maximise their sales.

But choices do have to be made. Imagine my joy to hear a UK Minister on the radio yesterday saying that if as a society we invest in more bad weather kit (snow-ploughs etc) we'll lose other things we might have bought instead. A grown-up!

This applies on the micro-level too. Almost no-one in the UK invests in snow-tyres, hugely increasing the likelihood that difficult slippery roads will be blocked by inane accidents caused by people unused to the conditions.

Snow-tyres cost money. Would the public if given a free vote prefer to keep the £250 or so it costs to fit snow tyres every year and take their chances? I suspect yes, if only because many people would bank on some people being responsible enough to do so, in effect reducing the risk at no cost to themselves - a typical free-rider problem solved in snowy countries by the law compelling everyone to make the change as winter looms. 

The argument perhaps loses some force when it comes to quasi-public quasi-monopolies such as roads or airports which have privileged positions. But even they have to choose and take some chances - investing in more winterisation insurance means less to spend on other facilities the public might like.

I nonetheless name the guilty:

• Oxford City Council: the road from the Botley roundabout into Oxford yesterday was an idiotic disgrace. Stop wasting money on phoney propaganda adverts on buses telling everyone how 'green' Oxford is, and invest instead on stopping the city seizing up when it snows
• Eurostar: yes, I mean you, Eurostar. Even though many trains were going you yesterday came up with the astonishing idea of cancelling the reservations of all your passengers, compelling everyone to queue in inhuman conditions without a ticket system. Vous êtes trop stupides. 
• the M4 motorway authority: what the hell are you doing? How can you be so incompetent that you can't keep all lanes and exits clear soon after a snowfall? The exit to Oxford coming up from London on Sunday evening was a deathtrap of uncleared snow   

In other words, Craig is wrong again. Capitalism is not an 'unsafe model for British public infrastructure'. It has nothing to do with 'capitalism'. It has nothing to do with ideology of left or right, or even about public and private.

Even if it were all about 'capitalism', there is little to be said for the proposition that ranks of risk-free civil servants in drab offices are going to make any better decisions than people in business whose very existence depends upon studying risk closely. Look at the farcical performance of Oxford City Council, presumably one of the more intelligent local authorities in the country..

Everyone has to live with risk and uncertainty. Go for a strong return 90% of the time and then take the hit when things eventually go awry? Or opt for a less strong return 99% of the time?

Look to maximise revenues or 'utility' over 2 years? Or over 20 years? Boldness? Or caution?

The point is that the market alone gives space for both. Indeed, it's the interplay between them that makes things happen at all.

This is odd.

Andrew Heyn as HM Ambassador to Burma has been writing in implausibly frank terms in the Guardian about Burma's forthcoming elections. Or, should I say 'elections', as the form appears to exceed the substance in democratic terms?

Thus:

People here believe that the vote will somehow be fixed, just as the result of the constituitional referendum was widely alleged to have been in 2008. The only thing they are not sure about is how this will be done...

And this from an earlier piece:

Those democratic opposition parties that have chosen to participate must operate under the most difficult conditions. The Union Electoral Commission which is responsible for nearly all aspects of the election process is nominally independent. But its actions have demonstrated that it is anything but.

At a recent briefing for diplomats in the capital, Naypyitaw, for example, an election commission official facing a difficult question told his astounded audience that he would need to get instructions from the home ministry. It seems that even the pretence of independence has been abandoned.

This sort of language and the way it is being delivered goes well beyond anything I have seen ever before from any senior diplomat, with the lively exception of Sir E Clay in Kenya who in 2004 had something to say publicly on the issue of Kenyan government corruption:

... evidently the practitioners now in government have the arrogance, greed and perhaps a sense of panic to lead them to eat like gluttons. They may expect we shall not see, or will forgive them, a bit of gluttony because they profess to like Oxfam lunches.

But they can hardly expect us not to care when their gluttony causes them to vomit all over our shoes...

And let's not forget Craig Murray's human rights speech in Uzbekistan.

This Burma case is rather different, an open attack on a ruling elite as an important election looms. It's hard to imagine a more open - even illegitimate - example of 'interference in the internal affairs of the host state', or a way of doing so less likely to make a serious impact on the problem.

Remember Tony Brenton, HMA Moscow? He ended up speaking in comparatively decorous if still critical terms about Russia's human rights record, and what real good did that do:

The problem is that one can get away with quite a lot of criticism of a host government as long as it is done quietly. But if an Ambassador is deemed to have stepped over the line and taken sides - however obliquely and politely - in domestic politics, his host government find it easy to justify their poor behaviour by piously adopting the highest tones of synthetic indignation, sniping away until the posting ends.

The Ambassador in other words becomes a 'player', not an informed spectator - and can be ruthlessly fouled.

That said, Western Ambassadors in Moscow face an unenviable problem - how to avoid giving the impression to democracy's friends and foes alike that crass repression of Russia's best democrats by the current authorities is acceptable, or at least tamely accepted?

So what is happening in this Burma case? Options include:

• HMA's posting is coming to an end, so the FCO has let him speak out in this unconventional way to get a message across before a 'new start' Ambassador arrives
• HMA has burnt his personal bridges with the regime, has no local impact anyway and so the FCO has decided that UK policy has nothing to lose by letting him write these pieces
• HMA/FCO believe that in fact the opposition will do well and so he is positioning himself to be the most popular Ambassador in town if they win
• The whole thing is a crass stunt, not properly thought through

My feeling? As I have been writing on Craig Murray's website (quite a good debate has unfolded there, as it happens - scroll down through the comments), diplomacy is all about making an impact, which means being credible locally and at HQ, and building up a nice bloc of allies.

I know next to nothing about Asia, but by openly challenging the regime in this way Andrew Heyn (whom I know and like) seems to me to be doing the diplomatic equivalent of slapping the Burmese leadership across the face with a dainty silk glove. They are unlikely to be appreciative.

It's a very effective insult. But is it ... dignified? Or wise?

Talking of post-colonial Burmese pith-helmets and high protocol etiquette, maybe the Burmese will reply to Andrew rather like this:

Craig hits back with usual energy and rudeness at myself and Brian Barder. Worth a read if you can face yet more on Torture, Policy and all that.

I have posted a long comment there:

One of the (few) points of writing this website is to provide a forum for intelligent thoughts for people interested in how government works or not in practice, especially in the foreign policy area.

This is why I refer quite often to the pronouncements of former UK Ambassador Craig Murray. He purports to tell the world how diplomacy works in practice by drawing on his former seniority in public service, but is often simply wrong or howlingly tendentious. So I feel that I owe it to FCO colleagues and anyone else who might be interested to put on the record an alternative point of view.

Anyway, the ever-meaty Spiegel Online has had a good idea, namely to compare the way Craig worked in Uzbekistan with the way the current German Ambasador Wolfgang Neuen operates there.

Neuen was assigned to Tashkent when he is 62, two decades older than Murray was when he assumed office there; Uzbekistan will be Neuen's last post:

The career diplomat makes one thing clear from the very beginning: He will not spare Karimov from having to address critical questions behind the scenes, and he too will meet with civil rights activists -- to an extent he finds reasonable -- who are attempting to strengthen civil society. But all of this is to take place on the quiet. Ambassador Neuen has no intention of openly challenging the regime, or possibly contradicting Berlin's established policy.

That policy consists of cozying up to the Uzbek dictator. The Germans joined, but repeatedly circumvented, the EU sanctions against Tashkent after the Andijan massacre. The entry ban against leading Uzbek politicians was already lifted in 2005 when Uzbek Interior Minister Zakir Almatov was given a special visa for medical treatment in Hanover. And in October 2009, Germany was the leading force behind the decision to lift the EU weapons embargo against Uzbekistan.

Unfortunately the article does not really deliver on its promise, choosing instead to treat its readers to a long account of lurid episodes from Craig's book. It offers no substantive thoughts on what the two EU countries were/are trying to achieve in Uzbekistan, or whether either of them have actually succeeded in making a real difference for the better through the efforts of their respective Ambassadors.

It concludes:

The provocateur and the appeaser, the man who refuses to apologize for anything and the man with an explanation for everything, the man who constantly rubs people the wrong way and the man who fits in everywhere -- they have never met. But it's safe to say that the "Maharaja of Whiskeypur" and "Fürst Bismarck Quelle" have nothing but supreme contempt for each other.

Neuen, in his office at the embassy in Tashkent, whispers almost inaudibly when he talks about Murray: "When you work as a diplomat, you have to understand and accept your job description. The current British ambassador is still cleaning up the mess his predecessor left him."

Murray, in his house in London, almost shouts his opinion about Neuen: "Oh, the Germans! In Uzbekistan, they were always the ones who, of all Western countries, were the most interested in appeasing the dictator. Is that what they've learned from their history?"

Nice idea. Opportunity missed.

Brian Barder and I are deadly ideological rivals. He hews to a number of Old Labour-style positions which (for me) are like the sort of exhibits you find in the gloomier rooms of the Natural History Museum which no-one visits.

More foreign aid! No to swingeing cuts in public services! Russia must not be encircled! More foreign aid! Put Western leaders on trial for war crimes in Kosovo! Did I mention even more foreign aid?!

You get the picture.

But these diehard socialists often do have one great virtue, namely their ability to sniff out drivel and cant wherever they are found (usually of course in the ranks of New Labour). Hence Brian's latest businesslike demolition of Craig Murray and his noisy army of echo-chamber elves:

I respect his moral passion and his furious energy and often admire his quixotic courage.  But on the subject of the use of information that may have (and sometimes probably has) been obtained by torture, the main theme of his post yesterday, he is simply and straightforwardly wrong.  The dozens of admiring and mostly uncritical comments appended to Craig’s post are in many cases even more misguided.

... those who (presumably deliberately) misrepresent Sawers’s speech by juxtaposing what are in fact separate and unrelated extracts from it have some pretty awkward questions to answer.

Constant repetition of half-truths, misrepresentations and downright untruths doesn’t make them valid or reputable.

Who are we mere libertarian conservatives to disagree?

Lib Dem Ministers Complicit in Torture

Scary, huh? I always thought they were prim, well-meaning political vegetarians, not raging carnivore fascistoid extremists.

But Craig Murray knows different. (Warning: he displays a large picture of an Uzbek torture victim.)

Behold Craig's attempt at analysis of Sir John Sawers' speech yesterday:

These are Sawers' key words:

"Suppose we received credible intelligence that might save lives, here or abroad. We have a professional and moral duty to act on it. We will normally want to share it with those who can save those lives."

Sir John said the UK's security service had a duty to ensure any partner service would respect human rights but admitted this was "not always straightforward".

He said: "Yet if we hold back and don't pass that intelligence, out of concern that a suspect terrorist may be badly treated, innocent lives may be lost that we could have saved.

"These are not abstract questions just for philosophy courses or searching editorials, they are real, constant operational dilemmas. Sometimes there is no clear way forward. The more finely-balanced judgments have to be made by ministers themselves."

Now parse that very carefully. It says we do receive intelligence from torture, and we know we do. It says this happens all the time - "real constant
operational dilemmas" - and that the decisions to receive intelligence from torture have specifically been approved by ministers. That means Lib Dem ministers are complicit in this policy.

Let's analyse (not 'parse' - he does not know what that word means) Craig's analysis.

John Sawers did not say that we 'receive evidence from torture ... all the time". He instead suggested that the very nature of operational secret intelligence work throws up all sorts of moral dilemmas. 

The suggestion in his speech was the exact opposite of what Craig said. John is highlighting one possible dilemma, where we get information from a reliable non-torture source which, if passed on to another government where an attack is planned, might lead to suspects there being abused. 

Plus, of course, Craig does not quote this passage from the speech:

If we know or believe action by us will lead to torture taking place, we’re required by UK and international law to avoid that action. And we do, even though that allows the terrorist activity to go ahead.

Some may question this, but we are clear that it’s the right thing to do. It makes us strive all the harder to find different ways, consistent with human rights, to get the outcome we want.

Unlike Craig the Independent tackles this head-on:

This is a somewhat startling statement by the head of MI6 declaring that information about a plot involving violence and loss of lives may not be passed on if the country where it is taking place abuses detainees and political opponents. The moral dilemma in those circumstances would be acute and grim.

In reality such intelligence is sometimes passed on through a third party or assurances are sought that the regime receiving it will not behave brutally towards suspects. But Sir John's statement indicates this may not always happen and innocent people have been injured and killed to protect the civil rights of terrorist suspects.

Conclusion?

Craig should be ashamed of himself, expoiting the memory of Mr Avazov to make his trivially inaccurate criticisms of people doing the grown-up foreign policy work he was quite unable to do himself.

Here is the comment I have posted on Craig's site:

Craig,

Hmm, torture and vile regimes again. Let's recall one vast example.

I have just returned from a Mass of Reparation in Buckinghamshire recalling the fates of thousands of Slovenes who were sent back to Slovenia by British forces as WW2 ended, to be murdered en masse by Tito's communists. A young officer Harold Macmillan featured prominently in that horrifying episode.

It still is not clear what motivated the British officers involved. Although it is impossible to believe on the facts of what happened, maybe they genuinely thought that they were doing the right thing - Tito had been fighting the Nazis, as had Stalin. Churchill indeed famously sat down with Stalin, one of the greatest killers and villains in history, to negotiate post-war political issues. Was he wrong to do so?

In all your voluminous writings on the subject of torture as you rail against the status quo, you rarely if ever tell us what you think Western governments actually ought to do.

Your own record as HM Ambassador in Uzbekistan was at best ambiguous. You boast in your book about how many Ministers from this regime you entertained at taxpayers' expense. You seemed to think that by patient (and as necessary firm) diplomatic means you could get them to change their ways or at least pursue UK commercial interests.

But above all you engaged with them as they were. What would you have advocated in the way we dealt with Uzbekistan had the Iraq invasion NOT happened?

This is exactly what Sir J Sawers said yesterday. When it comes to protecting the public HMG needs to engage with people and regimes we all dislike, perhaps especially with people and regimes we dislike. What's your precise alternative?

What would you DO if you were a LibDem Minister who is given a GCHQ intelligence intercept from a foreign regime reporting a likely terrorist attack in London based on interrogating a suspect? You fear that that suspect has been tortured by the regime. Do you nonetheless decide to do nothing, in effect ordering the UK police and MI5 not to act on that report (or even try to verify it)?

If that terrorist attack which we might have prevented happens, and 50 people are killed, what is your political and personal responsibility then?

Just for the record, the way you 'parsed' the Sawers speech is trivially dishonest. You say: "It says we do receive intelligence from torture, and we know we do. It says this happens all the time - "real constant operational dilemmas" - and that the decisions to receive intelligence from torture have specifically been approved by ministers. That means Lib Dem ministers are complicit in this policy."

Literally none of that follows from what Sir John said. Feeble.

Update:  see in the Comments a terrific contribution from Michael S who gives excellent background

* * * * *

Craig is back with us, this time sniping at the British Ambassador in Tashkent, Rupert Joy.

What has Rupert Joy done wrong this time? Shock! He's attended a fashion event led by Gulnara Karimova, the glamorous daughter of the Uzbek President:

“Rupert Joy should be deeply ashamed of himself,” the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, said when he learnt about Joy’s participation in the style.uz fashion week, organised by Uzbek President Islam Karimov’s eldest daughter Gulnara...

Having enslaved their country to ensure stratospheric profits for themselves, the Uzbek elite and Gulnara Karimova, in particular, cannot but be concerned with their image in the world which they are trying to improve by splashing huge money earned by others on this.

Craig Murray is convinced that Karimova wants to improve her image to strengthen her political ambitions. One of their means of doing this is to involve ambassadors of countries that enjoy a good reputation in the world in her events.

Gulnara did not invite Rupert Joy because she fancies him, but because it helps boost Uzbekistan’s image of respectability even though it is one of the world’s worst dictatorships,” he said.

“Joy’s attendance is in effect an endorsement of both Gulnara and of the whole regime,” the former ambassador added.

To show how cool and tough he is on this subject, Craig boasts on his own site that he has been writing to Rupert to ask him to explain himself and gives his readers Rupert's email address so that they can pile on the pressure.

Here is what I have posted on Craig's site by way of comment (fair's fair - Craig has a very open and impressively spam-free comments policy):

I am baffled by your continuing sniping at those who associate closely with Gulnara Karimova, including HMA Tashkent.

How can you brazenly say this:

“Rupert Joy should be deeply ashamed of himself,” the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, said when he learnt about Joy’s participation in the style.uz fashion week, organised by Uzbek President Islam Karimov’s eldest daughter Gulnara...Joy’s attendance is in effect an endorsement of both Gulnara and of the whole regime.”

What driveling hypocrisy.

You yourself did something even more outlandish. You invited the lovely Gulnara to the Queen's Birthday Party you hosted in Tashkent, letting her guzzle sausages on sticks paid for by UK taxpayers.

Hard to do more to 'endorse' the regime than that? You write in your very own book how proud you were that she had attended the event - a sign of your own mighty influence:

http://charlescrawford.biz/blog/NRWLCI691651

Maybe Rupert Joy is simply following your own wily example of getting close to the Uzbekistan regime with a view to influencing it by stealth?

This is too much.

Craig, there is just no point in railing against a former colleague who is doing exactly what you did!

Do stop it. You're making all us former Ambassadors look ridiculous.  

Former Ambassador turned 'activist' Craig Murray is a commendable phenomenon for self-publicity. His website now attracts a considerable following, far higher than this modest effort.

But he achieves this in part by rehashing old FCO material, and noisily claiming to gullible readers that it shows all sorts of things (eg 'complicity with torture') when it just doesn't.

For a classic example, see this posting where Craig presents as new material various redacted documents which he has previously published. Craig Spart-style Trot adjectives and adverbs gush forth:

An FCO source warns me this morning that a vicious rearguard action is being fought within the FCO, to ensure that any government inquiry excludes my evidence and does not consider whether there was a policy of complicity with torture...

I have now obtained under the Freedom of Information Act the final documents in the Tashkent series. These show beyond doubt that there was an official policy of obtaining intelligence through torture...

The picture built up by these documents is overwhelming and undeniable evidence of a policy of complicity in torture, even despite the censorship by government.

No, it's not. As previously pointed out here.

Now, as well as being rude about his former boss Linda Duffield and swiping at the blandly inoffensive Westminster Foundation for Democracy - is nothing sacred? - he wants the taxpayer to spend precious money on a new enquiry into the way his own turbulent case was dealt with by the FCO.

Maybe that would be a good idea, if Craig were to agree to pay back to the taxpayer the very large sum (£350,000+?) he was given by the taxpayer on leaving the FCO were any such enquiry to find that he had been treated fairly and honourably?

Sorry not to have been more active recently, folks. But I have had to travel to Stuttgart, Geneva, Warsaw/Cracow and now Brussels all in the past ten days, while keeping an eye on our attempts to sell Crawford Towers.

My latest manoeuvres involved leading a course on Ethical Dilemmas in Diplomacy. I tried with some success to distinguish between home-based dilemmas, which typically should be managed within the HQ organisation's rules and house culture, and dilemmas at an overseas posting where relationships between colleagues are completely different and things look and feel different.

Plus overseas postings are where policies collide furiously with real life, throwing up all sorts of moral and operational conundrums (or, lawks, should that be conundra?)

What, exactly, is an ethical dilemma for a diplomat representing a democratic country? After all, a dilemma is a dilemma only if you treat it as such - otherwise it's a fact of life.

Should a diplomat brush private moral concerns aside, saying that if the policy has been approved by a fairly elected government in a lawful way, that sets a sufficiently robust moral framework of checks and balances within which to operate?

NB this is not the same as a bland "I was only obeying orders" defence as used by Nazi concentration camp guards, since it presupposes a substantively fair and democratic process leading to the policy concerned - in such cases it arguably is reasonable for an official to outsource part of his/her own conscience to that wider process of consultation and debate.

In any case, what is a fair way to allow diplomats to express private reservations and have them taken into account? And, then, if such a procedure is available but fails to give the unahppy civil servant enough moral certitude, then what?

Should a diplomat who feels that a given policy in aim or outcome is inherently immoral simply resign? Why not? 

One of the few examples of a senior diplomat resigning on an issue of principle was Elizabeth Wilmshurst, an FCO Legal Adviser who in 2003 chose to leave public service when she could not accept that it was lawful to use force against Iraq without a new UN Security Council resolution.

She made a prominent case that the invasion of Iraq was unlawful and so in one or other sense Just Wrong. But let's remember that a significant number of her Legal Adviser colleagues either disagreed with her on the core arguments or, if they saw decisive force in her argument, nonetheless decided to stay within the system and pursue their moral choices in a different way.

Watching this the general public might be tempted to think that the likes of E Wilmshurst and C Murray are in some ways heroic figures, whereas their colleagues who did not leave the system were less principled or even cowardly.

However, would the public really want all the heroic principled people to quit the FCO or the civil service, leaving the shop run by only snivelling jellyfish who remain behind?

One of my very first postings here touched on all this:

Maybe I had lacked imagination previously, but this episode brought home to me for the first time that in my own rather limited and indirect way I was a non-trivial part of (and as it turned out some sort of spokesman for) an elaborate process which had led to some people far away dying violently.

That a diplomatic service career sometimes involved grim moral dilemmas. And that if that was not what I was ready to face in a job, I should get another one.

I still think about that night. For a few hours I was one of the few voices available to the public defending an unpopular UK government decision which had led to military action and numerous deaths in Libya.

I was not myself in any way involved in the policy chain which had brought that decision about. Yet surely as a promising middle-ranking FCO policy officer I somehow had to be seen as more 'involved' in some of the moral responsibility coming with that policy than eg a cleaner or messenger, even if cleaners and messengers themselves played an important functional role in helping that policy be delivered.

Anyway, it was an interesting course which helped shape my own thinking in new ways. 

Is the nice point about training that the trainers often learn more than the course participants?

Craig Murray offers some thoughts on where significant cuts might be found in the UK diplomatic effort.

It includes this:

... our Embassies in EU countries remain among the biggest and grandest we possess, reflecting the days when our shifting bilateral relationships with European nations were literally matters of life and death, war and peace.

They are magnificent and madly over-staffed by crazily over senior people. They are a great relic of a bygone age, institutions so grand that their overwhelming presence masks their lack of purpose.

Something in this, although of course many of the UK-based members of our Embassies in Europe are not FCO people anyway, so once again Craig makes a populist noise but gets the core of the argument wrong.

Do we really want to cut to nothing the numbers of people working in sensitive Embassy liaison jobs dealing with drug and cigarette smuggling, or preventing illegal immigration, or promoting UK business? When we instead could cut wasteful foreign development assistance and pay for all these services and eg beef up global anti-corruption initiatives?

In any case, the issue is much wider.

Successive governments have given the EU the right to take decisions binding on us (and on everyone else) by voting. This means that in the case of utterly stupid EU Directives such as the one attempting to control our working hours, the UK economy may be dramatically worse off (extra and unnecessary NHS costs running into billions of pounds) if this Directive gets agreed in the face of our strident opposition.

Which is why it makes sense to have serious UK diplomatic lobbying firepower deployed not only in our own capital and in Brussels, but also in EU member states capitals.

It is (FACT) not realistic to lobby effectively on many highly technical EU issues by telephone or by flying visits of London-based officials. Apart from anything else, some of the people who may be most difficult or need persuading may not speak English, or may be in parts of the local bureaucracy unknown to our London/Brussels teams.

Only an Embassy can see the local scene as a whole and work out where precisely in the system (bureaucracy/Parliament/media or all of them simultaneously) it makes sense to apply special arguments or offer policy deals. It is too risky to leave it to the Brussels people to haggle on the spot - by the time they arrive there, our rival delegations' positions will tend to be set in stone and our chances of blocking a ruinous vote against our interests could be gone...

In short, it is a damn good national investment to maintain significant senior lobbying in a good number of EU capitals - the sums of money at stake far outstrip the puny savings Craig identifies.

For a more detailed explanation of all this, see here.

I have no problem with Craig's idea of scaling back our consular effort (ie the work diplomats do to help Brits who get into trouble overseas), as much of that either can be done by commercial insurance schemes for travellers or not done at all.

But to make that sort of saving requires Ministers frequently to go on TV and tell the great British public that if they hit robbery or illness or earthquakes or volcano dust on their travels overseas, they'll mainly have to sort out their problems for themselves.

And when weeping angry relatives then appear on TV raving against government insensitivity and mean-mindedness after some disaster has hit their family somewhere beyond our shores, Ministers will have to say "Life's tough - don't say you weren't warned...".

Not quite what I expect to happen.