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.