It traces features of Islam (and indeed Christianity) back to the very deepest roots, namely core assumptions about God's nature laid down centuries ago:

While Christianity recognizes the possibility of miracles, when God intervenes to supersede natural law, in Islam every nanosecond is the functional equivalent of a miracle, the result of God’s divine act.

Thus there is no law of gravity, only God’s will, determining moment by moment that the apple will fall from the tree. Neither is there any morality, no objective good and evil as we in the West would see it, only the arbitrary decrees of an all-powerful God...

As hard as it is for the secular Left to accept, Western culture is founded on and steeped in the Judeo-Christian assumption that our innate understanding of what is right is a direct reflection of God’s goodness and justice as reflected in His universal law, to which even He adheres.

We make a mistake when we assume other cultures are necessarily speaking the same moral language.

Assumptions. Tricky things.

That reminds me of this:

Another former colleague recently said to me, "the trouble with you is that you reduce everything to first principles!"

He's right. I do. 

The risk for someone who does that lies in sounding like the wily but annoying Irishman who tells a lost traveller trying to get to Dublin that it is "no good starting from here".

The key advantage in looking hard and regularly at First Principles is that one is less likely to build a tall edifice on wobbly foundations. And perhaps more likely to be a better source of advice as to when something tall and imposing is in fact risking collapse.

This could be interesting.

I opened it to find an article written by me which I could not remember writing(!). So I read it with much enjoyment and appreciation.

Check it out. It describes my attempts as an argumentative young diplomat to persuade the Embassy in Belgrade in 1983/84 that the then Yugoslavia was possibly heading for a breakdown, with unfathomable consequences. To no avail.

Which prompted me at the time to write my legendary MTS, Non-MTS paper - as per one of my very first blog postings here.

My DIPLOMAT article describes what happened next:

I left the post in 1984. Back at HQ I went along to Personnel to discuss my future. ‘You are getting a reputation for being argumentative,’ said the frumpy HR lady. ‘Wouldn’t you argue if you saw disaster looming but everyone else ignored it?’ I replied in some exasperation.

‘See, you’re arguing again,’ came the smug response.

I still remember this conversation so vividly, not least the supercilious but unimaginative female on the other side of the table. I pointed out to her that it had been annoying dealing with senior Embassy colleagues who instructed me to go out and talk to Yugoslav dissidents and get their devasting observations on the fecklessness of the Yugo-communists, but then could not spell when they wrote afterwards that these people were 'obviously dissaffected'.

"I find that hard to believe", she sniffed.

Pshaw.

And so I moved onto the Air Services Desk and then FCO Speechwriting. The Cold War ended. A mere 300 weeks or so after I left Belgrade, Yugoslavia indeed collapsed into appalling violence and ghastly war crimes. Huge British and international resources were poured in to help stop the fighting and pay for post-conflict reconstruction.

Yes, I had been argumentative. I had even been right. What I see now, with the benefit of much more experience, was that I had not been convincing.

Not that it would have made much difference had I been convincing. Finance Ministries don’t want to adjust their plans to warnings of disaster. They prefer to ignore the problem and instead pay out reluctantly as and when disaster creates real problems, which the taxpayer is prepared to fund to clean up.

In Yugoslavia’s case, this was far more expensive than the cost of investing in diplomatic initiatives to bribe the reckless Yugoslavs into calming down.

What are feisty young Chinese or Indian diplomats now drafting in their European Embassies? Maybe a paper entitled ‘The eurozone: MTS, or non-MTS?’

Will they be allowed to send it back to HQ?

Read the whole thing.

Here on the Right is Simon Heffer, quiet Ayn Rand fan and very conservative in all respects, liking Mr Blair (whom he knows) but being baffled by the poor writing:

It appears to be a book written in tune with all the most unpleasant and cynical marketing techniques of modern publishing. Its tenor is often pure Sylvie Krin. The gossip in it will amuse those who like such things – whether about Mr Blair's liking a drink, his lusts for the late Diana, Princess of Wales, or the Queen's being "haughty" (a somewhat off-colour observation for her former first minister to make, we should reflect) – but is hardly becoming of an elder statesman.

How much this is the result of an instruction from his publishers to provide something that will make money, and how much it is the product of Mr Blair's own personality, one cannot be sure.

And on the Left, Mehdi Hasan at the New Statesman who looks with some scorn at the Blair record on Iraq:

Six of the country's top academic experts on Iraq and international security warned TB, in a face-to-face meeting in November 2002, that the consequences of an invasion could be catastrophic.

Cambridge University's George Joffe, one of the six invited to Downing Street, got the impression of "someone with a very shallow mind, who's not interested in issues other than the personalities of the top people, no interest in social forces, political trends, etc".

... No, I just think you're being dishonest, Tony. Seven years on from Iraq, nothing has changed.

One of the odd arguments against the Blair policy on Iraq is that it blames the West in general and Bush/Blair in particular for all the suffering caused by UN sanctions against Saddam's Iraq before the invasion. The Hasan piece drones on in this sense:

No mention here of the sanctions on Iraq, imposed by the United Nations, and enforced by the United States and the United Kingdom. Those sanctions caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, and were described by the former UN humanitarian co-ordinator in Iraq, Dennis Halliday, as a form of "genocide".

As even the Humanitarian Panel of the Security Council noted in March 1999: "Even if not all suffering in Iraq can be imputed to external factors, especially sanctions, the Iraqi people would not be undergoing such deprivations in the absence of prolonged measures imposed by the Security Council and the effects of the war".

What is it with Leftists? They say they want multilateralism and non-violent pressure against unjust regimes which brutalise international law and attack their neighbours. In this case they got exactly that.

Saddam invaded Kuwait and the planet more or less united around the proposition that he should be thrown off the premises. With bizarre restraint the first President Bush did not used the US presence in Iraq after Saddam's defeat to topple him.

Which meant that other measures were then needed to keep this madman under control. Including sanctions.

The whole point of sanctions is that they have bad effects. Admittedly the broader the sanctions, the worse the effects on ordinary people and the erosion of middle-class social stability. That, presumably, is again an intended market signal to the masses concerned to rise up and overthrow the regime provoking negative international reaction which is damaging their interests.

In practice odious regimes do well from sanctions and often even manage to blame the sanctioneers for the negative results, as happened in the Iraq case.

The core point is that if ordinary Iraqis suffered pain and deprivation from the sanctions regime, there was a simple answer.

Saddam could have agreed to step down to end the suffering of Iraq and its people, maybe negotiating some sort of immunity guarantees and/or safe passage to a state ready to host him. The international community thereupon could and would have helped Iraq supervise free and fair elections and so bring about a generously supported transition to reasonable modern pluralism.

That approach would have avoided all the misery and violence which happened.

That such misery and violence did in fact happen was squarely attributable not to Bush and Blair but to Saddam's and his national socialist regime's greedy desire to cling to power, no matter what.

Thus Leftish/progressive moaning about Blair's policy on this point at least is trivially dishonest, if not wicked propaganda.

That said, I don't think I'll be buying this book. Mawkishly written, plus the fact that Blair left Brown and so many other misfits in key positions for so long showed that, basically, he put his wretched party's interests (and his own) ahead of those of the UK. I have paid enough for his selfishness already.

Willaim Hague's statement on the issue has dignity and barely concealed anger - one of the most remarkable (and frank) things ever said by any Foreign Minister anywhere?

Iain Dale is upset, somehow assuming that this a bleak day for blogging and that 'political blogging' as such is diminished by this episode:

For those who doubt it, they forget (probably conveniently) that I spoke out against the bloggers who accused Gordon Brown of having mental problems. I freely admit that I don't get it right all the time, but when I get it wrong big time I try to hold my hands up and apologise.

I hope that happens in this case. The fact that Guido Fawkes has printed the Hague statement with no added comment indicates a growing realisation (I hope) that he called this one wrong.

I am afraid that all of us who blog have been sullied by this experience, even though only one blog was making the insinuations. I said on Radio 4's PM that there was part of me tonight that is ashamed to call myself a political blogger this evening, and I meant it. That may sound a bit holier than thou, but it is how I feel.

A somewhat self-absorbed and self-indulgent view? Why should he think that 'all of us who blog' have been sullied by this experience?

I don't.

Do journalists for serious newspapers feel 'sullied' by the ravings of tabloids? No.

None of this would have happened had Mr Myers not been given a unique and influentual role at the heart of UK foreign policy work. William Hague in his statement defended the appointment of Mr Myers thus:

Christopher Myers has demonstrated commitment and political talent over the last eighteen months. He is easily qualified for the job he holds.

The fact remains that there is not a whisker of evident benefit coming to taxpayers from this appointment. Even if (as some have wondered) Mr Myers is qualified for the job of an FCO Special Adviser, the job (in my view) should not exist in the first place at a time of such a squeeze on public finances.

Guido looks to have blown it on this one, but he is merely the latest and noisiest exponent of a fine tradition of political muckrakers.

See eg this from Zoe Archer, another story of people supposedly sharing a room:

... 18th century scandal rags gave readers plenty of outrageous behavior. Consider, for example Mrs. Crackenthorpe reporting on:

...Madam Slender-sense, who is lately fallen ill of a swelling she receiv'd by a slip the last ball night. Some are so rude as to say that Beau Garsoon, the French dancing master, was the occasion of it; and Mrs. Manlove, who generally searches into the bottom of such an affair, solemnly protests she saw them go up one pair of stairs together. What they did there, she can't tell, but the lady has been ailing ever since.

There was even a European angle:

... the French exile libellistes who flocked to London to publish scandalous or sexually salacious pamphlets in the hope of extorting lavish suppression fees. These ‘smut-mongering’ pamphleteers have become prominent figures in the recent historiography of the French revolution, with many historians contending that their ‘desacralizing’ and frequently pornographic publications sapped the foundations of the monarchy.

Not a bleak day for anything.

Just the unruly and sometimes downright unpleasant din of our hard-won freedom to lambast our leaders, hard at work.

Update: Guido apparently has replied himself on Iain's blog. Scroll down through the comments:

If ever there was a time for our leaders not only to behave with propriety, but to be seem to behave with propriety, this is it. It is disappointing to watch you climb on a moral high horse and go in the wrong direction...