Then and Now

Katherine Whitehorn's ramblings against competition as somehow juxtaposed against 'action for the common good' miss one other vital effect of competition, namely its tendency to incentivise frugal use of resources.

We hear all the time sundry collectivists urging the idea that capitalism and competition are uniquely wasteful of resources and environmentally destructive.

They tend not to mention the most ambitious attempt in human history to run a society via state-imposed socialistic 'cooperation' for the common good, and the remarkable environmental impact that had.

Because it is not easy regularly to bring about major cost-reduction strategies, businesses (and governments, and consumers) focus on making 'marginal' efficiency and other cost savings wherever they can be identified.

And the brilliance of competition is that it endlessly encourages this process through innovation.

Take shops.

You want to buy a new lawn-mower. In your town there are four shops selling them.

Once upon a time you would have had to telephone round to check the rival costs and availability of the model you wanted.

Now you can do much of that via the Internet.

But what if you could just type the make/model into your car computer which then guided you directly to the shop offering the best deal?

What if your car was transactive?

Come on, Katherine, tell us.

Would not smart kit like that created by competition itself give rise to wonderful new forms of cooperation - for the common good? 

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

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

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

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

But ice melts.

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

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

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

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

This FT editorial gets it mainly right:

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

But not quite:

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

Really?

How long is long?

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

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

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

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

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

And he did not even have to buy it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rien.

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

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

Not perhaps quite the whole story?

For those of you with weak memories, here is Arthur Scargill, defiant miners' leader who crashed to defeat against Margaret Thatcher.

He is still whirring away with the Socialist Labour Party, a lumpen Marxist phenomenon of no consequence.

But as if for old times' sake, here he is in the Guardian getting free publicity arguing the case for coal power as opposed to nuclear power.

Does he make any sense? Hard to tell - depends on how you measure the 'true' costs of coal as opposed to gas as opposed to nuclear calculated over decades.

But he is as defiant as ever:

I challenge George Monbiot to test out which is the most dangerous fuel - coal or nuclear power. I am prepared to go into a room full of CO2 for two minutes, if he is prepared to go into a room full of radiation for two minutes.

The Scargill case rests on the assumption that clean coal is Good and radioactivity is Bad. That said, it's not quite clear to me what a room full of radioactivity is, since all rooms are 'full' of natural radioactivity anyway. Go for it George!

Oh - and coal-burning itself is a handy source of radioactivity.

Whatever. Back to Kraftwerk.

Craig Murray responds to my previous post:

Charles,

You brush very lightly over the fact that you praised in the warmest terms at the time the telegrams you now rubbish - as did numerous other Ambassadors including Jeremy Greenstock who commended the to his New York morning meeting.  I think that your new-found Damascean conversion to rubbihing me on behalf of the Establishment needs a little fuller explanation for your readers.

I think the most important single point here is one of honesty.  Our policy was based on accepting as true an official narrative of both economic and political reform which was simply impossible to square with the objective facts on the ground.  That theme recurred again and again throughout the book.  I don't think intellectual dishonesty is ever the basis for good policy.

I can respect though not agree with an argument from realpolitik that says "Karimov is very bad but we need him" as you posit.  But that wasn't the argument, as you well know.  The line being peddled by the US and supported in Whitehall was "Karimov's really not that bad a guy - look at all these reforms".  It was the intellectual dishonesty and cowardice of it that I found so frustrating.

I did not mean to brush over my email of congratulations to Craig on one of his early E-grams, nor do I think I did so. Plus see also this from an earlier post in April:

But I do recall dropping Craig an email of congratulations when he first started firing off some heavy reports to London pointing up the scale human rights abuses in Uzbekistan.

He made good sense in pointing to examples (eg the Taleban) where 'the West' had backed local extremists for short-term reasons, those extremists thereby flourishing and eventually taking on virulent anti-Western positions; it was (he argued) unwise to invest in the Uzbekistan regime for Iraq reasons, only to stoke up trouble for the future.

However, in subsequent FCO reports he banged on in a similar vein to and beyond the point of being persuasive or even credible. I dropped him another private email saying that while I did not follow the Uzbek/Iraq question in any detail, he came over as getting too shrill: maybe he should think about other more subtle ways of trying to win (or at least make a small policy gain or two in) this argument.

Nor am I 'rubbishing' him or his telegrams now.

Craig has made a lively new life after leaving the FCO trading heavily on his former Ambassadorial status and access to sensitive information and insights he acquired while on the public payroll.  Hence, and with the benefit of some hindsight now, fair questions.

What sort of example did/does Craig Murray set? What lessons does his complex case teach young diplomats starting their careers?

As an informed FCO insider, now ex-FCO outsider I have been analysing his own published account of his work as HMA Uzbekistan, looking methodically at the important policy and procedural issues it raised. This is as far as I know the first time this has been done in such detail.

I think - and I think I have been showing - that Craig's work in a senior civil service position overseas gives us a fertile if not unique combination of poor technique and judgement attached to high-octane personal commitment. With British public and political life in its current demoralised state, such an example is well worth a close look.

Craig's claim that I am have had a 'new-found Damascean conversion' to rubbishing him 'on behalf of the Establishment' is a good example of the Murray Law of the Excluded Middle:

• Crawford rubbishes me
• The Establishment rubbishes me
• Therefore Crawford is rubbishing me on behalf of the Establishment

Puny illogic, which as shall be demonstrated infects important parts of Craig's professional work and helps cause his downfall (or meteoric rise to glory/notoriety, depending on what one wants to call it).

And whereas I can be blamed for many things in my FCO career, being part of the Establishment is (as Craig knows) just not one of them.

Anyway, I'll be moving on to the substance of Craig's other points above as my analysis of the book unfolds.

If anyone is impatient for More in the meantime, have a look at another what Brian Barder - yet another former British Ambassador - had to say on all this back in 2006. Plenty of thoughtful points here and in the links.

These celebrity revivals are sooooo exhausting.

First we have the long-awaited return to the stage of Joker Karadzic, although without his funny costume and disguise he was really not that scary.

And with him returns Batman Holbrooke, the distinguished former American diplomat whose considerable ego and ruthlessness helped bring peace to the Balkans.

Holbrooke grumbles that Karadzic was not arrested once the Bosnian war was over:

In an interview on CNN aired after the court hearing, Mr Holbrooke said: "I negotiated a very tough deal. He had to step down immediately from both his posts as president of the Serb part of Bosnia and as head of his party. And he did so.

"But when he disappeared, he put out a piece of disinformation that I had cut a deal with him - if he disappeared we wouldn't pursue him. That was a completely false statement."

Mr Holbrooke also said it was a grave mistake that Karadzic was not arrested after Nato forces deployed to Bosnia following the peace agreement.

"He should have been arrested. His green Mercedes was parked in its parking spot outside his office for six months after (the peace deal) each day. The Nato commander at the time refused to arrest him even though he had the authority to do so. It was a terrible mistake."

Agreed. A terrible and expensive mistake.

But by whom exactly?

The commander of the NATO Rapid Reaction Force in Bosnia in early 1996 was General Mike Walker (British).

Further up the NATO chain were two Americans, Admiral Leighton Smith as commander of IFOR and at the top of the NATO command chain General George Joulwan, Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR).

Holbrooke in another interview blames Admiral Smith by name:

... Karadzic should have been captured in the first few months after [the signing of the] Dayton [Peace Accords], in early 1996. Even though everybody knew where he was, he was not brought to justice because the NATO commander, Adm. Leighton Smith, failed to exercise his authority. Smith said it was not a mission of his command, which was a terrible thing to do. Had Karadzic been arrested back then, the history of the Balkans would have been much easier during the last 13 years ...

Weedy NATO fails again!

Really?

The point of course is that the arrest of Karadzic required a top-level political decision, since the risks of the Dayton deal breaking up if it all went wrong had to be factored in.

Thus:

... the military warned of casualties and Serb retaliation if an operation to arrest him took place. They said they would carry it out only if ordered to do so directly by the President; thus if anything went wrong the blame would fall on the civilians who had insisted on the operation, especially on the President himself.

This was a heavy burden to lay on any President, particularly during an election year, and it was hardly surprising that no action was taken to mount, or even plan, an operation against Karadzic in 1996 or 1997 (sic).

A 'heavy burden'?

Or is taking a tough strategic decision exactly what a President is paid to do?

Who wrote that politically disobliging passage anyway? No fan of the then US President Clinton, obviously!

The Riddler? 

A familar argument heard against the the 1996 Dayton Peace Accords in Sarajevo is that in setting up a two Entity structure for post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina they 'legitimized genocide', namely by accepting Republika Srpska as one of the two Entities (the other being called, somewhat confusingly, the 'Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina').

Hence the arrest and expected conviction of Karadzic are being presented by some Bosniak leaders as a handy step towards ending the results of his actions, namely terminating Republika Srpska itself:

"Justice is not complete until we erase the genocide project that is still alive today. Radovan Karadzic has been arrested, Slobodan Milosevic is dead, but their project Republika Srpska still exists,” said Haris Silajdzic, the Bosniac member of the state’s rotating presidency.

The basic problem with this argument is that the Bosniac leadership themselves played a large part in setting up RS.

In 1994 the Americans were fed up with the spectacle of Muslims/Bosniacs fighting Croats rather than uniting to fight Serbs, so they leant hard on the Muslim/Bosniac and Croat leaderships to join forces. This took the form of the strangely named 'Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina', covering territory the two sides' forces controlled.

This formation was given constitutional status at the Dayton Peace talks, but it took almost a year to set it up formally thereafter.

The very basic point is that this was a sort of unique diplomatic Category Mistake.

Why?

Simple. Because by setting up the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a part of Bosnia and Herzegovina on what was effectively an ethnic basis (ie a space controlled by and for Muslims/Bosniacs and Croats), the Americans (egged on by the Germans) basically gave the Serbs the core of what they wanted, ie something not that.

In other words, if the whole point of Bosnian Serb nationalism and Karadzicism was for the Serbs to be 'separate', the clumsy creation of the 'Muslim/Croat Federation' to solve a short-term military problem achieved precisely that political goal for them!

This 'ethnic' nomenclature lives on years later, despite heroic attempts in Bosnia to proclaim each Entity substantively multi-ethnic and to hack away at 'divisive' symbols and institutions.

Is it surprising that the Bosnian Serbs in fact quite like this deal imposed on them by the International Community and cling tenaciously to it?

Update: Here is Haris Silajdzic pressing these arguments . He feebly tries to get round the point made above by saying that the Bosniacs were forced to sign Dayton "at gunpoint". This is just not good enough.

Haris has a point when he advocates a 'Bosnia of the economic regions', each region defined non-ethnically. The trouble with that is that it of course suits the largest ethnic community, viz the Bosniacs, as they will tend to do best from it. And the Serbs/Croats do not trust them.

Iain Dale urges his vast army of fans to read Total Politics Issue 2 - and one article in particular.

Indeed.

One of the things we all need to do is spend our inherited capital wisely, not blow it on trivial consumption.

Alas we humans have been squandering like billy-oh the inherited richness of global oil and gas reserves created millions of years ago by decaying forests.

It turns out that once upon a time the Arctic was covered in lush jungle in quantities sufficient to lay down a mere 90 billion barrels of oil.

So surely we need to start planning to replace it as we begin to use it?

Alas the Arctic is covered in all that useless ice, which usually stops jungle from growing properly.

Maybe the answer lies in the planet getter rather warmer so that vegetation can grow there profusely once again, as it should?

Or am I missing something?

Update:  I discover that there is a lively controversy going on out there about the claim that oil derives from long-squished vegetation. Some scientists (not least a good bloc of Russian opinion) say that that is tosh, and that oil occurs from natural geological processes.

Time to tip-toe away from this one. 

Chandler Rosenberger at National Review Online takes a big picture look at US Balkan policy over the past decade and more.

I might disagree with him at various points. He offers a rather US-centric view.

But he does bring out well that while thematic, sustained and firm approaches to dealing with Bad Leaders have their ups and downs, they can eventually bring positive results.

The problem for diplomats is that they often see the realities of what can be achieved pretty well. It is politicians who do not like hitting the nasty bumps along the road, even when the road is bumpy and one has to go down it to get anywhere.

Hitting bumps on that sort of road is a sign of success, not a sign of failure.

Bottom Line for the former Yugoslavia: no-one else out here really cares what your problems are, but we do expect you to solve them nicely, which means you rooting out the worst disruptive idiots and gangsters who claim to be your leaders.

Got that yet? 

Chapter two of Craig Murray's book describes his pre-posting briefing rounds.

He heads for Eastern Department, effectively his 'line management' people. He finds it hard work:

The atmosphere in the department seemed to be unpleasant - heavy, pompous and serious. A pall of misery appeared to have settled.

I have a soft spot for Eastern Department, as I was there when it received the name.

Back in the mists of time (to be precise 1640) our Foreign Policy organised itself to deal with different parts of the world in endearingly simple ways. One Department of of State was Northern Department, covering great swathes of the globe north of the equator. The other was Southern Department, covering points south.

Northern Department eventually became the Foreign Office but an FO department with that historic name continued to operate until well after the Second World War, when a reorganisation created 'Soviet Department'. Good riddance. Northern Department had dealt ingeniously with UK/Soviet policy in part by having various Marxists working in its ranks.

I was posted to Soviet Department as Deputy Head of Department in mid-1991 on returning from South Africa. I inherited a vast old 'partners desk' which had an electric switch by one's knee - once upon a time the occupant of the desk could switch on a red light to alert others in the room that he was on the telephone to the Soviet Embassy, hence they should stop talking lest Secrets be Revealed. Cool.

Anyway, after the Soviet Union collapsed in late 1991 we had to rename the department. It could not be 'Russia Department' as too many other countries were to be covered by it. Restoring the name Northern Department might provoke, hem, adverse media comment.

So Eastern Department it was, and is. I hope that that desk is still there.

Craig describes his various conversations there with two FCO colleagues whom I happen to know, mainly on Tashkent Embassy resources/management issues. Craig notes that he inherits a small and mainly junior UK-based team: only four FCO officers plus a Defence Attache.

There is a hint of a Problem with one of the FCO team. Craig (reasonably) expresses concern at the absence of a more senior political officer, but is more than confident that he will cope:

I was professionally very capable myself of a high volume of wide-ranging output.

Thereafter Craig meets some senior business people from British firms investing in Uzbekistan, feasts on yummy Uzbek plov with the Uzbek Ambassador in London, and has a pre-posting audience with Princess Anne and Prince Andrew (Note: trite moan about having to wear 'fancy dress' for the occasion).

Craig's final pre-posting calls are on FCO Minister Mike O'Brien ("all haircut and presentation") and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw who says:

"Whenever you get to ... wherever it is you're going ... tell them I'm thinking about them."

That was the extent of my instructions.

Putting to one side Craig's attempt (not it must be said totally unsuccessful) to portray his London interlocutors as largely uninterested in Uzbekistan, I find his account of these calls a bit strange.

Pre-posting Ambassadors are expected to work up their own pre-posting briefing round lists. Craig also had plenty of time in the margins of his months of Russian language training to see people.

So where are the calls on eg the FCO Human Rights and EU teams, HM Treasury, DTI, SIS, MOD, Cabinet Office, No 10 and so on? What about British human rights groups concerned about Uzbekistan? Uzbek dissident groups in London? Leading journalists and academics who cover the region? Did he pursue with FCO personnel people the question of the apparent poor performance of one of his future team?

Maybe he met some or all of these people and decided not to mention it in the book.

One way or the other, a key part of a new Ambassador's role is to ascertain 'what is out there' in the UK in respect of the country and issues with which s/he will be dealing, and to spot potential allies and friends.

No evidence is presented by Craig that he did this. The impression he gives us is of meeting only a few cynical busy people who treat Uzbekistan as a far away country of which they know little, and care even less. Their problem, not his!

So to say dismissively that Jack Straw's off-hand remark was "the extent of his instructions" is disobliging, if not untrue.

His detailed 'instructions' would have come from his many meetings round Whitehall.

If he had them.

Professional Judgement Rating: 5/10. Useful and blunt (if a touch dismissive) account as far as it goes of various significant briefing meetings, but no evidence presented that he did a full and comprehensive networking job.

As a chess fan I decided to use my time in Moscow to get to know some of the world's top players.

This was at the time when the world of chess was in turmoil because of Garry Kasparov's ambitions to make the game more accessible - and more lucrative. In 1993 Kasparov had played England's Nigel Short in London for The Times World Chess Championship, winning comfortably after numerous hard battles where Short had winning chances if not winning positions.

My plan worked well. Very well.

To the point where at my suggestion the Embassy hosted a 'charity simultaneous' event, featuring a number of the best players ever who were gathered in town for a top chess competition.

Thus we had Kasparov, Short, Kramnik and Anand taking it in turns to move against some 40 opponents who had paid for the privilege of being whupped by these giants.

The receipts (several thousand dollars) went to a Russian good cause. The event, the first of its kind at this level in any Embassy, was featured on Russian national TV.

Before Kasparov as White made the first move against each participant, he vigorously seized his two knights and pointed them straight ahead. A gesture of psychological aggression which in my case worked a treat. Not knowing what I was doing, I tried to dig in as Black and was easily swamped.

Anyway, at the Moscow speed-chess championships concerned Kramnik beat Kasparov in a remarkable game full of dashing sacrifices and an ultimately desperate king chase to finish it all off.

Here it is. Press the button and watch the moves unfold.

Terrific, complex stuff.

What was even more remarkable was seeing Nigel Short again a couple of years later. We sat down with a chess board and Nigel played me through the moves of the Kramnik-Kasparov game - from memory.

Perhaps we should not be impressed. That's what chess Grandmasters do - play and remember chess games, even when they have not played the games themselves.

But I was impressed.

This is an elegant analysis from my former US Ambassadorial colleague in Belgrade Bill Montgomery about the current state of mind of Republika Srpska, the 'Serb' Entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Bill argues that RS led by Prime Minister Dodik is pursuing a Montenegrin-style war of attrition aimed at making an eventual divorce of RS away from the rest of Bosnia seem inevitable and maybe even desirable.

Here's something I wrote the other day:

There were in principle three ‘balanced’ ways to end the war in Bosnia:

• One Country, Three Peoples, One Political Space:  no subdivisions on an ethnic basis, one person one vote, strong institutionalised arrangements to protect equality and minority rights
• One Country, Three Peoples, Three Entities:  give each of the three rival ethnic communities (Bosniac/Muslim, Serb, Croat) some sort of territorial reassurance within an overall single confederal framework.
• One Country, Three Peoples, Many Entities:  a Swiss-style canton system comprising a single polity, aiming to diffuse ethnic conflict. 

The solution which made no philosophical sense was chosen at the Dayton Peace Conference in 1995: One Country, Three Peoples, Two Entities.  It emerged from a previous phase of the 1990s’ conflict when the Americans and Germans brought great pressure to bear on the Bosniacs/Muslims and Croats to stop fighting each other and join forces against the Serbs.

Under this settlement the Bosniacs and Croats dominating one Entity (the Federation) got too little and typically disagree, creating unaffordable bureaucracy at all levels. The Serbs dominating the other Entity (Republika Srpska) got too much...

As Bill says:

Ironically, the Dayton Agreement itself provides the "weapons" to passively resist the establishment of a strong Bosnian state. On the one hand, it clearly gives the RS definite powers and authorities and the ability to frustrate the plans of the other ethnic groups.

On the other, it is a totally unworkable document whose dysfunctional nature reinforces the failure of the Bosnian state.

The Dayton BH Constitution is a classic piece of work for those interested in short-term v long-term policy outcomes.

Dick Holbrooke railroaded this through partly because he felt that only brutal bulldozer tactics would bring about a BH deal after so much mayhem and international disagreement. Also no doubt to give his boss President Clinton a significant international policy success.

But it was achieved at a price.

The Constitution features obvious 'internal' political and philosphical incoherence (well, obvious to me as a Balkan expert of sorts).

It was a deal signed only by the people who had made the problems (Milosevic/Tudjman/Izetbegovic) with no 'social democratic' voices allowed anywhere near. The people who had run the conflict were just not the people to build a new peace.

And because it was done in such a rush, no proper thought was given to exactly how it would be implemented on the ground. Hence the awful exodus a few months later of thousands of Serbs from Sarajevo, pushed by vengeful Bosniacs/Muslims and 'pulled' by the odious RS leadership who wanted the Serbs to be as separate as possible.

Bosnian Serb leader Krajisnik (later sent down by ICTY for war crimes) cynically but not altogether inaccurately used to tell me that Sarajevo was the "button holding the two sides of the Bosnian jacket together". The absence of this integrating human element in the country's capital is a big reason for Bosnia's continuing underperformance now.

There it is. Over a decade later these contradictions are slowly compounding up.

And we see from the examples of the Kosovo Albanians and Djukanovic's Montenegrins alike just how a steely sustained focus can bring results when there is uncertain international resolve.

Alas the Bosniac leadership have tended to make this difficult situation worse:

"The [Serb] nation may not be guilty, but it is responsible," Silajdzic started his response to the statement that one cannot blame all Serbs. And then he set off into a truly shocking speech about "differences between Bosniaks and Serbs" that boil down to the fact that "we" have not while "they" (Serbs, of course) have been raised as fascists and criminals; consequently this is not a first genocide of Bosniaks and everything must be done that it is the last...

It was immediately obvious (on everyone's faces, even Hadzifejzovic's in Sarajevo studio) that with those words and repeated emphasis on "criminal upbringing" [of Serbs] Silajdzic crossed some sort of invisible, but alarming line between what is permissible and what is not, regardless of political, national or other differences...

Tadic in Belgrade only had to make sure not to miss the opportunity. He asked, softly and without raising his voice: "Who will you make peace with if you reject all Serbs as criminals?"

Indeed.

The point being that having opened the Balkan Pandora's Box of Precedents, we can not be surprised when they fly all over the place, sometimes in directions we do not expect - or want.

Craig cheerfully writes:

But at some stage you have to face the real question.  Nobody now doubts the CIA's use of torture, by proxy as in Uzbekistan or even direct.  And as you know very well, the UK government gets the CIA reports which are a result of torture.  There is an argument - advanced by many around Bush - that torture is justifiable in the War on Terror.  I did not invent what I was complaining about in Uzbekistan, and there are issues here other than the beauty of my secretary ... 

By the time you finish making fun of the more amusing bits of the book, I hope you'll have faced some of the deeper questions. 

I have replied that indeed I will do that. Debate is joined.

I proceed for now by taking the book as Craig wrote it. So, having dealt with the cover I move to the Preface.

Craig begins the book by saying that to the best of his knowledge and memory it is a true story, albeit told largely from memory:

But most importantly it is the truth as I perceived it ... Different people can thus experience the same events and have a different take on what happened. I am not saying that mine is uniquely correct. This is what seemed (sic) to me to be happening, and how it felt to be me, experiencing it.

As a fellow ex-FCO professional I do not like that passage. It comes across as somehow equivocal, maybe even a bit shifty.

Is there a sense here that Craig knows that his own actions and attitudes are open to severe criticism, and that the best way to head that off is to steer the book away from Facts and Judgements towards a much more slippery territory of Experience and Feelings?

Let me digress.

Promotion in the FCO as in much of the real world turns these days on 'competences' - those qualities the organisation in question looks for in its people at each level and especially the higher levels.

In the FCO as elsewhere Competences change according to fashion and latest management theory. Thus in my own very final appraisal of 2007/08 I was assessed on:

• Leadership
• Getting the best from staff
• Delivering results
• Strategic thinking
• Personal impact
• Learning and development 

There used (as recently as 2002) to be a longer and better list covering such issues as Adaptability and Creativity, Communication (Written and Oral), Relating to Others and above all Analysis and Judgement.

And the greatest of these is Analysis and Judgement. (Memo to next government: bring that back on Day One.)

Why?

Because in foreign policy things are complicated. Long-term v short-term. Big v Small. Certainty v uncertainty. Principle v Politics v Practical v Possible.

Thus in a democracy what Ministers need is a team of skilled people able to help them steer through these operational and philosophical complexities for a few years.

People who simplify complexity but in a subtle, nuanced way. Who are good at bringing people of rival opinions together and explaining convincingly what might best be done. People who can juggle numerous balls but keep their eye on the Big Picture. People of unerring accuracy.

And 'Judgement' is the word for all that. Without Judgement a civil servant (like a Minister) is fairly useless.

So what? The point - a serious one - is this.

Judgement is not about looking at the world from the point of view of one's feelings and 'experiences'. It is the exact opposite of that.

It is about keeping one's feelings/experiences in the picture but not letting them detract unduly from a hard-headed or even ruthless objective focus on the wider issues.

See eg this well-known example of Structural Judgement Failure in this sense.

So in presenting his whole book as essentially 'the truth as he perceives it' Craig turns his back on the World of Judgement and wanders off somewhere else. As we shall see, that question of Judgement (and Lack Of) is at the heart of the whole story.

Moving on.

Craig says that he never expected to have to confront extreme moral dilemmas of the sort he had debated at school.

But my brilliant career, resulting in my appointment as Ambassador at the age of 43, ended with me writing in an official telegram to Jack Straw, British Foreign Secretary: 'I will not attempt to hide ... my shame that I work in an organisation where colleagues would resort to [casuistry] to justify torture.'

Reading that for the first time I thought that Craig was being ironic in describing his career as 'brilliant'. But on second thoughts I think he meant it!

What is a brilliant FCO career?

Not Craig's. Nor indeed mine.

A brilliant FCO career is one involving not merely serious jobs but also jobs at the heart of the policy machine as a whole. Thus it is almost impossible to get to the Very Top without one or more Private Secretary positions in the FCO or No 10. It is those jobs which give you both a vast range of operational insight plus knowledge of how Ministers and Parliament work - the very heart of our democracy.

Craig (like me) had none of those jobs. Nor did he work in eg the FCO Planners, another 'core' job. Nor did he work in a single Big Embassy.

It took him thirteen years to move from Second Secretary to Deputy Head of Department. It took me rather less, eleven years, and I did it younger. The brilliant ones would have done it notably faster

Every now and again one sees a Balkan story of truly excellently bewildering folly.

Take this one:

The latest portion of benefits for war veterans paid on May 12 has left the two Bosnian entities with a budget crisis, FBiH Finance Minister Vjekoslav Bevanda said at a press conference on May 13. Out of the required 50 million Euro currently there is only 7.5 million Euro left in the budget of the Federation of BiH.

Bevanda advised a restructuring of the budget. A few weeks back, he warned that BiH is facing bankruptcy by this September, due to the excessive spending on social benefits for mainly Bosnian war veterans and invalids.

And indeed, a few weeks later:

24 June 2008 Sarajevo: Just 434 Konvertible Marks (€221) remains in the budget of Bosnia’s bigger Federation entity as a result of excessive public spending, a Sarajevo daily reports.

This difficult financial situation may result in major social unrest and have significant political consequences ahead of October’s local elections, reports Dnevni Avaz .

Despite repeated warnings by local and international financial experts, the Federation government has kept increasing public spending, including the recent purchase of a motor boat for its exclusive vacation resort in the town of Trpanj on the Croatian peninsula of Peljesac, the paper claimed.

So now in July:

Croatia's legendary publication Feral Tribune has closed for financial reasons.

Feral was an outstanding and courageous source of scurrilous but hard-hitting attacks in the 1990s on Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and his close associates, who strove mightily to close down the paper.

In 1997 Robin Cook flew from Banja Luka to meet Tudjman. Tudjman knew that the issue of official Croatian assaults on free media would come up.

It did. As I heard the story later, when Robin Cook raised the subject Tudjman clicked his fingers and in solemnly walked a flunky with a silver tray laden with articles from the Croatian media critical of Tudjman, complete with lampooning pictures of Tudjman with spectacles and a silly beard crudely added.

Tudjman insisted that the media in Croatia were free, as this weighty material scandalously attacking him showed.

R Cook opined that in democracies such phenomena in fact were quite normal.

"Look at this!" said Tudjman. "No other government in the world would accept such attacks on the head of state."

"Sometimes the truth hurts," mused the Foreign Secretary.

Easy enough to find on the Internet examples of Feral in its most aggressive form, including brave investigative reporting of atrocities committed in Croatia against Serbs.

For something more subtle, try this. A reporting piece by Ivan Lovrenovic evincing insight, wisdom and generosity of spirit. Great journalism. 

Hvala, Feral. 

We think that we are pretty darn smart these days, what with all our clever new inventions.

But in seventy years' time, won't we look a bit ... quaint?

A powerful TV programme in Poland has aroused a lot of interest there. 

Trzech Kumpli ("Three Mates") describes the fates of three men who were students in communist-era Krakow in the 1970s.

One became a poet murdered seemingly by the communist police.

One under the Kaczynski twins' leadership became the head of TVP (Polish BBC-equivalent), a fervent anti-communist.

And one became a prominent journalist for Gazeta Wyborcza (sort of Guardian equivalent in Poland).

The point is that the film describes how the third of the three also was a serious collaborator with the communist regime, spying and informing on his friends.

And how the crimes and abuses by the regime which he may have helped provoke have gone largely unpunished, while this collaborator like so many others who helped run the apparatus of repression has lived well on generous pensions and privileges, far beyond what the average Pole receives.

This collaborator not only has lived well. After communist rule ended he established himself in a senior role on the leading Polish newspaper which came out strongly against 'lustration' (the full revealing of who did what to whom in the communist period).

Nice work if you can get it.

Like a murderer from a gang of killers who manage to destroy the evidence which might convict them, who subsequently becomes famous for arguing strenuously in the media that murderers in general should not be punished harshly because 'society is to blame'?

Beyond sickening.

This issue - should we 'move on' from communist-era crimes - is a profound one for modern Europe.

I tackled it in my very final telegram for the FCO, sent from Warsaw:

... during the Communist period the authorities pressed a person to sign a simple document indicating a readiness to cooperate even when the security police did not care whether the person actually would cooperate or not.

What they wanted was the recognition by the person signing of his/her own psychological submission, expressed via just that mean little secret signature, whose very meanness and smallness and furtiveness made the act of submission even more total...

... the striking thing is how the psychological force of Submission lives on today. Clamour from the Poles and indeed foreigners against opening the secret police archives here comes from different angles.

From the former communist elite intending to keep ill-gotten gains by keeping the scale of their plunder and deceit well away from the wider public eye. 

From the rantings of Lenin's useful idiots in Western media and academic circles (and indeed! How useful they have been to the Communist cause down the generations - the Bolshevik poisoned gift that keeps on giving).

Some from well-intentioned decent people who unhappily conclude that even if the cause is just, the pain and disruption (including to the Catholic Church) provoked by tackling these problems will not be worth it.

The arguments and motives differ. The end result is the same.

The days trickle into months and years. It all gets ... difficult. Complicated. Memories fade.

Thus people who slyly presided over or benefited from the communist system are feted as modern European social democrats. Jewish, Polish and other victims of communism who had their property stolen or heroically refused to cooperate appeal to European institutions for justice, and often leave empty-handed. We prosecute elderly Nazis for their crimes. Elderly Communists go free...

... Do Al Qaeda and Hamas look at how Stalin got away with mass murder at Katyn, and think that by being viciously determined enough they can do the same? Do they expect the sheer intensity of their hatred of our pluralism to overwhelm our readiness to defend it? That they too can bring us to Submit?

How might we measure if they are succeeding? 

Well done Poland, for keeping the subject alive.

If you have been beaten up by someone for nearly fifty years, does that 'cloud your judgment' about the beater?

But however clear-eyed Lithuania's decison-makers claim to be about today's Russia, many seem myopic about their own country's past. Anger over 48 years of Soviet occupation clouds their judgment about the Communists' recent role.

Still, the scale of the monstrosities which went on under the Nazis in Lithuania and elsewhere in Europe - and the complicity of local people in complying with Nazi plans - is indeed a question.

The 70th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact next year should give these Twin Vampire issues a much-needed airing.

This is indeed a bad security breach by a senior official.

What on earth was he doing taking Top Secret STRAP material of this sort out of the building?

One of my first Blogoir posts described a grisly experience I had with FCO Security twenty years ago after a I passed a journalist a rather banal but Confidential document I had written.

This episode is far more serious. Really secret stuff left lying around.

In one way we should expect more breaches, simply because there are far more documents sloshing around now; the likelihood of some fathead losing one now and then is therefore all the higher.

The incompatibility and technical ring-fencing of the various top-level security computer systems round Whitehall (at least this was the case in my last time in London a few years ago) likewise mean that actual papers need to be carried from one building to another. And they can be mislaid.

Some top officials also have specialist laptops available for carrying Top Secret material, which melt into malodorous jelly if an unauthorised attempt is made to open and read them.  

It all boils down - as ever - to the human factor. Once upon a time the FCO Resident Clerk was sunning himself on the FCO roof when a Secret message came in to Churchill from Stalin on the FCO system, and was brought to him to action on to No 10.

Imagine his consternation when a gust of wind blew said message away over the parapet and into St James's Park.

Life - somehow - went on.

Note: sign of the times that the plucky citizen finding these Top Secret papers on the train yesterday handed them to the BBC, not the police. Dipstick.

The Belmont Club look at Michael Totten's impressions from Sarajevo. This captures my attention:

Sarajevo has largely recovered from the physical scars of the 1990s battles. The one thing that has changed -- ripped apart by ethnic powerplays -- is the easy sort of intercommunal tolerance of 30 years ago. In its place is a simplified map consisting of more or less homogenous ethnic groups. It's as if the ingredients in a stew suddenly agglomerated themselves together until you had lumps instead of a mix.

In a telegram from Sarajevo to London back in 1997, I used a similar culinary metaphor: Bosnia had been an ethnic omelette, now after the conflict it was three hard-boiled eggs.

I was a British Olympic Attache at the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics, living in the Olympic Village with, among others, Torvill and Dean, who then stormed to a rare British gold medal with Bolero.

What was Sarajevo like then? It had a new Yugo-cool atmosphere, a place where young people from across the country would go to hang out. The fave Yugo-rock group Bijelo Dugme (White Button) came from there, to deserved acclaim.

Yet there was a much darker side. Because of political tensions between the different ethnic factions unresolved since WW2 within the League of Communists, both within Bosnia and more widely, local tolerance for 'anarcho-liberalism' and 'clero-nationalism' was nil.

A group of alleged Muslim nationalists including future BH President Alija Izetbegovic was imprisoned in 1983 on charges of wanting to create inter alia an ethnically pure Bosnia.

Also into prison around then went future ICTY indictee Serb Vojislav Seselj, a talented law scholar, jailed for 'counter-revolutionary activities'. Biljana Plavsic, another Serb who ended up being sentenced for war crimes by the ICTY, told me with tears in her eyes how she had listened to the prison doctor describing the appalling torture injuries inflicted on Seselj by Muslim prison authorities - "his extremism came from that". 

Another more lowly Serb was jailed for singing an allegedly nationalist song in a bar.

In 1983 I joined a group of other (mainly Eastern bloc) Olympic Attache diplomats on a tour of the Olympic facilities then busily being finished. We were given a long and ridiculous lecture by a senior Bosnian Communist on the glory of Bosnia-style democratic 'Brotherhood and Unity'. I eventually lost my patience and asked about the trial of Izetbegovic and others - where did that fit in?

The Commie looked at me intently. "When you are shown a rose, do you see only the thorns?" he sneered, not exactly answering the question.

So, yes, there was a fairly normal and even positive human ethnic 'getting along' in Bosnia in the 1970s and 1980s. But at the price of not challenging in any way the explicitly repressive and vicious local communist regime.

Belmont Club again:

What is truly scary about the experience of the former Yugoslavia is how quickly a multicultural society could turn in an historical instant from harmony to savage intercommunal violence.

Maybe it turned because that apparent multi-culturalism was at root not 'organically' harmonious but rather ideological, phoney and synthetic, indeed imposed by violence, with too few ways available for people to express different and more pluralist views?

I completely agree with Belmont Club on this:

Maybe the real threat to multiculturalism are the demagogues who see identity politics as the road to power, even if that process involves the destruction of the larger polity. Under the color of multiculturalism, the ship of separatism steams majestically on.

Exactly.

Busy times in the ever-complicated relationship between Poland and Germany.

Robert Kubica becomes the first Pole to win a Formula 1 Grand Prix race - driving a BMW in Montreal.

Then Germany beat Poland 2-0 in Euro 2008, with Polish-born Lukasz Podolski scoring twice - for Germany!

Before the match there was the usual noisy tabloid war, rising to excellent heights of "Give us their heads!" tastelessness, even though one of the noisiest Polish tabloids is owned by the German Springer group.

All this reminded me of the wonderful Malbork Castle in northern Poland, founded in 1274 by the Teutonic Knights:

The castle was expanded several time to host the growing number of Knights, and became the largest fortified Gothic building in Europe, featuring several sections and walls. It comprises three separate sections - the High, Middle and Low Castles, separated by multiple dry moats and towers. The castle once housed approximately 3,000 "brothers in arms", and the outermost castle walls enclose 52 acres (210,000 m²), four times larger than the enclosed space of Windsor Castle.

The Knights were Tough Eggs, rampaging to and fro against the then Poland and into the rest of Europe down the succeeding centuries. But they did have a keen sense of humour.

In one smart tower of the castle is a hole in the floor by way of de luxe mediaeval lavatory. If a guest had failed to meet the Knights' exacting standards he would be offered the use of this facility, and in using it would be surprised whan a hidden lever was pulled, plunging him down on to the rocks far below.

The football tabloid war prompted the usual dreary calls from some windbags in Germany for the Polish government to 'take action' against such abusive media material.

Pathetic. The whole point of football is that it gives us all a marvellous and (usually)harmless outlet for atavistic, raw nationalism. Not to mention post-modern irony.

Which is definitely better than what we had previously.

Zimbabwe as expected falls ever more steeply to total disaster.

The gang of military/security leaders previously dependent on Mugabe now look to be running the shop, desperate as they are to cling on to power and privileges at the cost of ruining their own country. A text-book case.

Yet the UN still gives Mugabe a forum to rave away. And we taxpayers end up paying for it.

I have been looking at the True Cost of Stupidity.

Take Serbia and Slovenia.

After the initial flurry of violence when Slovenia broke from the then Yugoslavia, Slovenia has patiently got on with developing its economy.

Serbia by contrast got on with more violence against Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. This led to reduced investment, sanctions and even in the end a NATO bombing.

Result? In GDP per capita terms, Serbia is still struggling to match its economic position of 1991.

Thus the Cost of Milosevic(ism) can be accurately measured. It is the space between the two lines of a simple graph of total GDP measured over time:

• one line shows Serbia's actual awful performance
• the other line shows what Serbia would have achieved by growing at an average of 3% a year over the past seventeen years. (Note: a conservative estimate - of course it could have done a lot better than that with common sense leadership and policies.)

To calculate that gap, a mathematician uses the Trapezium rule. In Serbia's case the 'opportunity cost' of Milosevic and Milosevicism now runs towards hundreds of billions of dollars.

It is no exaggeration to say that Milosevicism in all its forms delivered a set-back to Serbia from which it will never recover. There is no conceivable chance of Serbia growing faster than Slovenia for the decades required for Serbia to 'catch up' the ground lost in the past seventeen years.

The political costs of this madness also have compounded up. Montenegro and Kosovo have broken away - had Serbia developed to its natural potential they could be clamouring to stay with Serbia and share its success.

Ditto for Mugabe.

Running the Trapezium formula on Zimbabwe's performance over the past twenty years and comparing it with eg Estonia is a profoundly depressing experience.

Mugabe like Milosevic for reasons of selfish paranoia has created national losses running to scores of billions of dollars, losses on a scale far exceeding anything development assistance might now do to put right. 

Zimbabweans will pay for this folly for many decades to come through low living standards, higher disease and death rates, worse roads, poorer education, weaker institutions.

Castro Communism is another horror story. Back in 1959 Cuba was richer than Singapore. Singapore got on with developing and building itself up, maintaining solid policies over forty years. It is now one of the most successful countries in the world. Castro's Cuba scarcely changed at all.

Conclusions? 

Guido and Iain Dale are riding high in visitors to their respective websites.

Big numbers, comparing favourably if not better with similar sites run by 'mainstream' media outlets. Increasingly they all feed off each other, of course.

Why not? For far too long a tiny number of media pundits have held extraordinary influence over public life round the world. Not because they were smarter or wiser than many others, but because they were taken on by major newspapers and ran a cosy and lucrative oligopoly.

Bloggers and other web analysts give these plump pundits healthy competition.  Plus they point out errors at supersonic speed: 'fact-check your ass', as it's known in the trade.

My own readership is more ... modest. Still, 3000 Unique Visitors a month is OK by me, given that the site has been going only a few months. Thanks, readers

Plus the site has helped me get a droll piece in a brand new UK political magazine launching this month: Total Politics. Be there, or be square.

"I say, cricket does appear to be changing, old boy!"

Prompted by my previous post on (not) talking to Al Qaida, a reader comments:

[T]ell me again why you thought invading Iraq was such a great idea?

Fair enough.

My very basic view on Iraq is to be found in the Blogoir FAQs.

More generally, what constitutes a Great Idea in this context?

Which of these policy decisions would now qualify as a Great Idea? Thus:

• The Russian Revolution
• Stalin agreeing with Hitler the Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact
• UK/French Suez intervention
• Resisting communist aggression in the Korean War
• Resisting communist aggression in the Vietnam War
• Not intervening by force to resolve the Cyprus partition
• (Not) boycotting the 1980 Moscow Olympics
• (Not) boycotting the 1884 Los Angeles Olympics
• (Not) boycotting the 2008 Beijing Olympics
• Welcoming Mugabe's rise to power in Zimbabwe
• French sabotage attack on Rainbow Warrior
• Reagan/Thatcher standing firm against Soviet protests about 'neutron bomb' deployments in the 1980s
• President Clinton's 1998 bombing of targets in Sudan/Afghanistan
• Blocking Alaskan oil exploration
• Not intervening by force earlier in the Bosnia conflict
• Not intervening by force earlier in the Rwanda conflict
• Kosovo intervention
• 9/11 attack by Al Qaida
• Iraq intervention

As time passes these episodes start to look and feel ... different. Aspects of their value (or harm) which were not apparent or not seen as significant at the time become clearer, or at least assume greater prominence in history's eye.

Sometimes the long-term implications are very long-term. The Russian Revolution and WW2 as started by Stalin's deal with Hitler transformed Russia, but have scary demographic legacies now.

Mugabe began well. Then went Very Bad.

Olympic boyc