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Title: Independent Diplomat
Author: Carne Ross
Date: 2007
Language: en
Topics: diplomacy, accountability, elite, internationalism, international relations
Source: Retrieved on 19th December 2020 from http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=99D9037E127212B43827E0448E330E2D

Carne Ross

Independent Diplomat

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are a great many people I would like to thank for helping me

prepare this book. Some helped in practical ways with research, reviews

and advice. Others helped by talking with me, influencing my thinking or

by simply listening. I am indebted to all of them. Any mistakes are, of

course, my own responsibility.

I would like to thank in particular Michael Dwyer at Hurst for his

encouragement and thoughtful criticism, which were invaluable, Roger

Haydon at Cornell University Press, Maria Petalidou at Hurst, the

editors of the Crises in World Politics series, Brendan Simms and Tarak

Barkawi, and Rosemary Brook and Maja Zupan at Kaizo.

I am very grateful to Mike Cohen and Jonathan Bach at the New School

University in New York, who first gave me space and time to think by

inviting me to become a fellow at their Graduate Program on

International Affairs. Others who have helped along the way, by reading

drafts, undertaking research, discussing specific ideas or episodes, or

in other ways, include Jonathan Agar, Ardian Arifaj, Asmaa Donahue,

Vanessa Howe-Jones, Chris Kyriacou, Angela Lewis, Andrew Lloyd, William

Maley, Edward Mason, Rebecca Mead, Tania Mechlenborg, Mark Roberts,

Imran Shafi, Sarah Ross, Neal Sandin, Stephanie Thomas and Anthony

Wilson. Inigo Thomas has been an unfailing friend in his encouragement

and advice. I want to give special thanks to my friends Laila Parsons

and Rob Wisnovsky, both now academics in Canada, who introduced me to

the ideas of the discourse, the narrative and indeed — essentially —

essentialism. I have not enjoyed discussing the world, or ideas, with

anyone more.

I wish to thank too the many people who have helped make the

organisation Independent Diplomat a reality, including Patrick Shine and

John Rafferty at Unltd; Di Stubbs, Stephen Pittam and the trustees of

the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust; Aryeh Neier and George Soros of

the Open Society Institute; Adrian Arena at the Oak Foundation; and

?Whatif! Innovation (particularly James Baderman, Paul Wilson and Kris

Murrin in London, and Meldrum Duncan, Nina Powell and the crew who made

me so welcome in NYC), all of whom have done so much to support and

inspire Independent Diplomat. Unsung (until now) is the pro bono help we

have very gratefully received from the international law firms Lovells

and Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, New York University School of

Law (in particular Simon Chesterman) and the International Senior

Lawyers’ Project (in particular Jean Berman and Eldon Greenberg). Paul

Keetch MP, Jeremy Oppenheim at McKinsey, Olivier Kayser and Ben Metz at

Ashoka and Baroness Frances d’Souza have given me very welcome moral

support and practical advice. My father helped Independent Diplomat in

the early tough days — I thank him. My cousin Stefanie Grant has been an

unceasing and much-valued source of support and wisdom. Gratitude does

not suffice for the board and staff of Independent Diplomat. They are

the organisation; without them it could not exist.

I would also like to thank my former colleagues at the Foreign &

Commonwealth Office, who taught me much about diplomacy, and some of

whom taught me about much more. In particular I would like to thank Sir

Jeremy Greenstock, Robert Cooper (now at the European Union), Alyson

Bailes (now at SIPRI) and David Richmond, all of whom were, in different

ways, kind, inspirational as well as instructive bosses. My criticisms

of that institution, and the discourse of diplomacy (if I can call it

that), are not of them, but of the system. I thank too my many friends

in the FCO: I still miss their companionship.

Finally, I dedicate this book to my wife, Karmen, who has supported me

and guided me in more ways than I can ever say. Without her, the journey

this book represents simply would not have happened.

London, January 2007 C.R.

“War will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, frontiers will be dead,

royalty will be dead, dogmas will be dead, man will begin to live.”

Victor Hugo

1. INTRODUCTION

Back at the UN Security Council in New York. A cockpit of world affairs,

this is also my workplace. The Council chamber and its maze of adjoining

rooms and corridors are familiar to me. I know all its nooks and corners

— where to make discreet phone calls reporting discussions back to

London (or to my girlfriend), where to twist the arms of colleagues in

private (this place was made for corridor diplomacy), the spot to grab a

moment’s peace without being bothered by other delegations or

journalists (a former French ambassador once wrote a book on the best

places to sleep at the UN: there were many). It feels like home ground.

The formal Council Chamber is located deep in the UN complex. To reach

it you must make your own way through long corridors. There are no

signposts; but I know the route well.

As I enter, I greet the Secretariat staff with whom I have worked for so

long, “How are you? Fine.” I recognise a couple of other diplomats; we

chat briefly. I smile and wander into the chamber, smell its closed air

(there are no windows). Dimly lit and soberly decorated, the Chamber

exudes gravitas and high politics. The Council table dominates the room

— a large, wooden U-shape surrounded by soft blue seats fixed to the

floor in discrete groups (for the fifteen Council members) around it. On

the wall behind the table, a huge mural looms. Donated by Norway, it

depicts machines and people in an unintelligible panorama, whose

meaning, during long meetings, I have often fruitlessly questioned.

Inside the U is a long table, lowered below the rest of the room, where

the Secretariat officials sit, barely observed as they annotate and

record the meetings. To the side, five yards from the table, is an

inclined bank of seats for UN states which are not Council members.

Above them, and still further away, is a “public” gallery, though the

public is only allowed in when no one is meeting here. A mini-geography

of power and influence.

Without thinking I move towards a group of seats at the Council table,

where the UK delegation has its place. But I must stop myself. I am no

longer a British diplomat. There is no place for me at the table. Today

I am a member of the Kosovo delegation. There is not even a nameplate

for us here, since Kosovo is not a country recognised by the UN.

I swallow and look for seats at the side of the Council table, where

other member states must sit to observe the “formal” Council meetings.

On this occasion, and only this one, the Kosovars have been specially

permitted to sit here, though no seats have been reserved for them. Even

the Prime Minister, Bajram Kosumi, whose first official visit to the

Council this is, must hunt for a place among the scattered junior

diplomats who take notes at the Council’s sessions. His interpreter, a

volunteer from a nearby university, manages to sit behind him and

whisper Albanian into his ear. No interpretation is provided for him,

though it is the future of his country that is being discussed.

The Prime Minister, though head of a democratically-elected government,

participates only as a member of an UNMIK (the UN Interim Administration

Mission in Kosovo) delegation, led by an unelected UN official. He is

not allowed near the Council table, unlike Boris Tadic, the President of

Serbia, a country which was driven from any substantive authority over

Kosovo in 1999. Humiliatingly, Tadic welcomes the presence of the

“leader of Kosovo’s Albanians” in the UN delegation; Kosumi is not

permitted to respond.

Next to the Prime Minister, I sit and fidget in the non-Council seats,

far from my former perch. I recall my days as a British diplomat on the

Council, when I enjoyed a certain swagger. The P5 (the five permanent

Council members) run the Council, and during the Council’s formal

meetings (of which this is one), I would march around the formal

chamber, gossiping with my friends and colleagues, collecting

intelligence on the moves of other Council members, passing notes to my

ambassador and chatting with the Secretariat staff. I would go into

their side-offices to borrow their computers to write speaking notes for

my ambassador or copy draft statements to circulate. I would lounge

expansively in the soft chairs provided for the delegations of the

Council, fiddling with my notebook or mobile phone, always busy. It was

our domain.

As an honorary Kosovar, I immediately feel intimidated by our humble

rank in the Council’s hierarchy. Walking by the burly security guards

who stand at the doors to the chamber, I worry that my temporary UN

protocol badge will not pass muster and that I will be denied entrance.

Although I have much to ask the diplomats of the important Council

delegations, I suddenly feel too nervous to bother them as they sweep

around, as I once did, looking busy. Seated away from and to the side of

the Council table, I do not dare approach the delegations seated around

it, as one would not interrupt a bishop during a service in his

cathedral.

I try to recapture my former élan and confidence, but it is hard to

re-muster. Instead, along with my timidity, I find frustration with

those who sit at the Council table. Although their faces are anonymous

and their expressions bored, the diplomats of the Council annoy me: in

them, of course, I recognise my former self. Their indifference was once

mine. I feel irritation on behalf of the Kosovars at their treatment.

While the delegations of Argentina and Tanzania drone on with their

stock phrases applicable to any conflict (“there must be greater efforts

for reconciliation between the parties”), the Prime Minister, who had

travelled five thousand miles to attend this discussion of his country’s

affairs, is not even permitted to speak.

His visit, which I have organised, has been an education. The UN

assigned its most junior officials to make the arrangements. Our

requests consequently take an age to process, as they must be referred

upwards in that towering hierarchy. We ask to use the UN press room to

brief journalists on this historic occasion: the first time that a Prime

Minister of Kosovo has attended Security Council discussions of his

country. We are told this is impossible, only to discover by chance that

the UN’s Special Representative is at this moment using the room for his

own briefing.

When we request meetings, senior officials melt away (“he has an urgent

engagement”) to be replaced by more junior substitutes. The US

ambassador refuses to see us: his underling says he has “no interest”.

The Austrian mission brusquely refuses to organise a meeting with the

European Union’s collected ambassadors (Austria is the EU’s rotating

President): “This has no precedent”. We have no recourse but to curse

and sigh when we put down the phone. We are provided with no delegation

room in which to organise ourselves and instead spend all our time in

the delegates’ coffee lounge (where to their relief the Kosovars can at

least smoke).

When the British ambassador wants a meeting with the UN

Secretary-General, it is always granted without delay. When Kosovo’s

Prime Minister wants one, it is not confirmed until the night before

(the request was made weeks earlier); the audience itself lasts a brisk

ten minutes. The Secretary-General’s staff make clear to us that we are

not to linger. Nevertheless, the Prime Minister, his picture taken for

the Kosovo history books, is deeply grateful.

There are more subtle distinctions too. When I was with the British

mission, officials of the UN or other countries paid attention when we

spoke. Doubtless this was often faked, but it was perhaps felt to be

required, given Britain’s place in the UN pecking order. With the

Kosovars, no such deference is necessary. Junior officials become

impatient with our demands and even on occasion allow themselves a

perceptible sneer when they talk to us. For them, it is acceptable

behaviour to interrupt the Kosovo Prime Minister when he is talking, but

how would these same people have behaved if the British Prime Minister

had been within view? I find it thoroughly depressing. I ask the

Kosovars how they feel. They say it is normal and that they are used to

it.

On the last night of the visit, the vicissitudes and irritations at last

behind us, we celebrate. A ridiculous stretch limo is rented for a

couple of hours, and we cruise Manhattan, drinking vodka and dancing in

our seats. Later, at an Albanian-American “Italian” restaurant, we drink

and eat copiously. Amid the hubbub of Albanian voices, it is as if we

are in Pristina. I am the only non-Kosovar there. The Prime Minister

sings anthems from his days as a political prisoner in Milosevic’s

Yugoslavia.

This is one privilege I had not expected. For the Prime Minister and his

delegation, the visit is a proud moment in their country’s progress, an

achievement regardless of the frustrations. It is another step on the

road to the ultimate liberation of independence.

–––––––––––––––––

Before the French revolution, according to Simon Schama in Citizens,

Louis XVI’s palace at Versailles “had been built around the ceremonial

control of spectacle through which the mystique of absolutism was

preserved and managed. At its centre, both symbolically and

architecturally, was the closeted monarch. Access to his person was

minutely described by court etiquette, and proximity or distance,

audience or dismissal, defined the pecking order of the nobility

permitted to attend him. The palace exterior facing the town expressed

this calculated measurement of space and time by confronting the

approaching visitor with a succession of progressively narrowing

enclosures. From the stables and the Grand Commun housing the kitchens,

where space was at a premium, to the ‘marble court’ at the centre of

which the King’s bedroom was housed, the visiting ambassador would

negotiate a small series of pierced barriers or grilles, each one

admitting a further measure of access.”[1]

The United Nations headquarters on Manhattan’s East Side is sadly no

Versailles but the tall, slab-like block has a certain emphatic

presence: its singular design (by Le Corbusier and others) is the reason

why the tour buses pause on First Avenue and the sightseeing cruises

dawdle on the East River. As at Versailles, one only enters as a tourist

or an invited guest. The latter-day equivalent of Versailles’ barriers

and grilles is the glass wall, through which the visitor can glimpse the

vast General Assembly hall or the empty Security Council chamber (the

public is not admitted when the Security Council is in session, even

during its so-called “open” or “public” meetings). Meeting a national

diplomat at the UN or a UN official is, like an audience with the King,

a more difficult matter, its ease or difficulty a signifier of one’s

status in the obscure hierarchies of international diplomacy. Admittance

to the UN’s missions (the offices of the member states represented at

the UN) or the Secretariat is by pre-arranged appointment only. To see

even the most junior official, you must first know who they are (no easy

matter in itself) and give them a compelling reason why they should meet

you. As an ordinary member of the public, it is unlikely that you will

be received by even the lowliest official. To meet an ambassador or an

Under-Secretary of the UN, you must yourself enjoy an equivalent rank in

diplomacy or politics (a minister or a senior parliamentarian perhaps)

or business (in diplomacy, as elsewhere, money has its own special

heft). Like Versailles’ inner sanctum, the Secretary-General’s suite

lies in the most remote and inaccessible part of the Secretariat

building, its summit, or the “thirty-eighth floor” as it is known to UN

insiders. A special reserved lift will help you ascend to this peak,

where, if your appointment is confirmed and credentials have sufficient

weight, you will be ushered into a small waiting room, there to await

the gift of the limited time of the Secretary-General.

The revolutionaries of 1789 (like those of 1917) tried to change the

nature of their politics and indeed their diplomacy. They succeeded in

the first task but not the second. The practice of diplomacy was

impervious to revolutionary passion; it remains a closed world,

accessible only to an appointed élite, and intelligible only through

their codes and terminologies.

This practice is now massive and complex, globally ubiquitous and

present in almost every issue that concerns us in the modern world. It

covers both the more traditional business of bilateral diplomacy — of

one country’s relations with another — and multilateral diplomacy: the

world of the United Nations, the European or African Union, the WTO, G8,

ASEAN and so on. It is a discourse whose practices have been acquired

over decades and centuries, and with these practices have accumulated

assumptions and ways of thought which dominate today the way that

diplomats think and talk about their work, and indeed the way that

others (journalists, academics) think and consider diplomats’ work too.

This book’s examination of those practices and assumptions covers both

worlds, the multilateral and the bilateral, for in both the manner of

thinking is similar, if not the same. The analysis is drawn from my

personal experience.

I have eschewed the contemporary controversies over the future of the

United Nations, or US unilateralism. These have been well covered

elsewhere. My suspicion is that even this debate is problematic in that

it makes over-simplistic assumptions of what is going on in the world.

In a way, all such theories are deficient, in that they are theories. As

the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz put it, all theories are nets

through which we strain life (ergo something — perhaps something

important — falls through the holes). Contemporary diplomacy is premised

on such theories — of how states behave, of realism, or neo-realism, or

neo-conservatism — and narrow ones at that, and that is their

fundamental problem. If this book offers the reader an alternative

theory, it is that there should be no theories, at least not ones that

offer universalist explanations of international relations (even if,

paradoxically, universalist approaches are just what the world needs,

but we shall come to this). My critique maintains neither an

internationalist nor a unilateralist view of the world (or it does

both). It is aimed not so much at the UN Secretary-General (or the US

President) but at the assumptions that inform their thinking and,

perhaps above all, the succouring and affirming officials who surround

them. These officials, and the way that they think, should be laid open

to greater scrutiny and interrogation.

The lattice of multinational bodies and institutions that spans the

globe is in some ways diplomacy’s greatest achievement. A multinational,

intergovernmental body now exists to arbitrate and sometimes legislate

almost every conceivable aspect of our public lives, even the very air

we breathe. The lattice is a reassuring presence. Its omnipresent

embrace helps us to believe that the world’s problems are being taken

care of. The semiotics of these institutions reinforce this impression.

A neat globe sits at the centre of the UN’s symbol, the world’s disorder

ordered into a clear geometric circle and all inscribed upon a safe,

neutral azure, suggestive perhaps of the sky, a clean ocean,

indeterminate but certainly not ugly, bloody or discordant. In other

institutions (the European Union, the World Trade Organisation) circled

stars, mingled flags or entwined hands symbolise a vague and warm

aspiration for cooperation and togetherness, even where none may exist.

I am colour-blind but even I am calmed by these soft whites, deep blues

and uniform tones and patterns.

The lattice has achieved great works: treaties to ban landmines, end

global warming or protect children in wartime. Even if these paper

promises remain unfulfilled, the international lattice has indeed

contributed to ending conflict and to mobilising help for the poor or

the disaster-struck. War is now much less prevalent than in the recent

past, as a recent UN study has shown; and many people are richer and

live longer and healthier lives than their forebears (although the

precise determinants of these successes are of course moot).

However, the lattice incubates one terrible flaw, a harbinger of its own

demise. This flaw is a deficit, even identified as such in the European

Union as the “democratic deficit”. The institutions which make up the

lattice are like vast windowless bastions studding the landscape.

Although their purposes may be good, their inhabitants are nameless and

invisible, their workings too often unintelligible and hidden. While

some may be well-intentioned and others idle or malign, the countless

officials who inhabit these bastions share one indivisible

characteristic — they are not accountable for their actions; indeed you

will not know — with one or two rare exceptions — who they are. This

criticism applies not only to the multilateral institutions of

international diplomacy but equally to the foreign ministries of the

world’s most democratic countries.

Karl Popper spent his life considering the flaws and merits of democracy

versus other less participative forms of government such as fascism and

communism. He proved beyond argument that democracy was the best, if

still imperfect, form of government. But his work concerned only

individual states: how a particular country in isolation should be

governed.

Today, our problems are global as well as local. We do not have world

government but nor do we have world democracy. Instead we have an

agglomeration of states cooperating sometimes well and sometimes badly

to address their shared problems. Whatever the denizens of these organs

of cooperation (the UN, the EU) may pretend, this is no democracy. And

the failings that Popper identified in non-democratic governments

afflict this system just as surely as they did the communist governments

of eastern Europe which he so trenchantly criticised.

In a sentence, these afflictions are a lack of accountability and

responsiveness to the problems the system is supposed to address. The

governed have very little, if any, access to the governors of this

system; still less do they have means to sway or influence them. If

international policies go wrong, the mechanisms to feed back information

on those failings are imperfect. For Popper this was the crucial

component of a democracy: since society is complex and there is no

perfect knowledge, government would always make mistakes: no government

would always institute the right policies to solve society’s problems.

The only way to correct such mistakes was for the governed, through

elections and other elements of the open society (a free press, the

legal system, civil organisations), to inform the governors that their

policies were not working and to propose how they might be changed. Such

feedback mechanisms only exist in scant form in the field of

international policy.

Those affected in country A by the policies of country B have no means

of informing the policymakers of country B what is going wrong (or

right). This problem is compounded in multilateral organs, where

policymaking countries must perforce pay much more attention to the

views of those with whom they must negotiate to make policy, than to

those affected by their shared policies on the ground (as I learned

negotiating collective policy on Iraq at the UN).

This book is not only a theoretical (and anti-theoretical) analysis of

the problems of contemporary diplomacy. It is also a personal account of

my slow descent from illusion to disillusionment, followed by a return

to belief or perhaps a new illusion — time will tell.

I became a diplomat, after one failed attempt, in 1989, when I joined

what was then known as the “fast stream” of the British Foreign Office

or Diplomatic Corps. It was the fulfilment of a long-held ambition,

fuelled in part by a fascination with the world and a desire to escape

suburban banality, and in part by pure ambition: for status, esteem and

recognition. Diplomacy offered an elegant combination of the two.

I duly loved my work and “the office”, as the Foreign Office was known.

Its rituals and habits — the thick green memo paper, the elaborate

protocols for visiting statesmen or ministers — delighted me, and I was

quick to immerse myself in them. What I failed to notice was my parallel

immersion in the ways of thought that permeate such institutions. As my

posture became more proudly upright, so too did I begin to talk of how

“we” saw the world, “we” being Britain, which I now was encouraged to

embody. My self, and its individual conscience, was slowly suborned into

the collective, and the collective’s way of thinking, which was of a

world of states and interests: something very different from the

personal morality and conscience which had hitherto formed my mental

architecture.

I undertook the usual round of postings — Norway, Germany, the UK

Mission in New York — and jobs: in London I was variously desk officer

working on Benelux,[2] the Iraq/Kuwait or “Gulf” war of 1990, the global

environment, the Arab/Israel dispute; I was also for a while, and

unhappily, speechwriter for the Foreign Secretary. My career prospered,

but as it did so a shadow began to form across my experience. I tried to

ignore it, and became in response all the more vigorous in the

aggressive pursuit of my country’s goals and thus of my career. This

conflict came to a head during what was to be my last full posting for

the British foreign service when I was First Secretary at the UK Mission

to the United Nations in New York (1997 — 2002).

My work in New York was hard; the long hours helped me to conceal, or

rather allowed me to deny, some deeper contradictions in my work. Imbued

with the self-serving belief of many western diplomats (and, I suspect,

particularly British and American ones), I truly believed that “our”

policy in the Middle East, for which I was responsible in New York, was

good and right. This assumption was helped by the fact that I had only

rarely visited the region (and spoke none of its languages), and had

never visited (and never did visit) the place for which I was primarily

responsible, Iraq itself.

I was directly responsible for Britain’s policy towards Iraq at the UN —

mainly in the Security Council, both weapons inspections and sanctions

(“responsible” here is a problematic word, because although I was in a

direct and personal way responsible, in the way governments and civil

servants think about policy, my ministers were responsible and not I

myself). This policy, like most policies, was a complicated story, where

good and bad were sometimes hard to distinguish. And it is only after

years of reflection that I have reached some clarity about my

experiences at this time — and even this may be merely a sieving, a

reduction, and thus a deception of its own kind.

My job was to prepare and negotiate resolutions — international law — on

Iraq, the bits of paper that obliged all countries to stop exports and

imports to and from Iraq (sanctions) and for Iraq to prove the

disarmament of its Weapons of Mass Destruction.[3] Slowly, I became

horribly aware that what “we” were doing in Iraq, namely enforcing

sanctions, was achieving the wrong objective, namely harming ordinary

people. Saddam’s manipulations contributed to this, but our own policy

reinforced this effect. Meanwhile, I became steeped in the complex lore

and technologies of unconventional weapons and their delivery systems,

all the better to argue that Saddam had not disarmed. I could name the

different variants and capabilities of Scud missiles; I could describe

the degradation process of VX nerve agent; I knew the units and numbers

of Saddam’s special weapons regiments. This knowledge helped me perform

my job with vigour — I became proud (to my present shame) of my

Rottweiler-like reputation at the Security Council, as the most

effective and aggressive defender of British-American Iraq policy,

sanctions and all. I could demolish anyone’s contrary arguments with a

devastating barrage of carefully-chosen facts. But this knowledge was

also to prove my nemesis as a diplomat.

Exhausted and troubled by my work at the UN, I took a sabbatical from

mid-2002 at the New School University in New York, to which I am forever

grateful. From this close vantage point, and still in close touch with

many former colleagues (including diplomats on the Security Council and

other experts like David Kelly, with whom I had organised many briefings

on Iraq’s weapons), I watched the British and American governments, and

my former colleagues in both (diplomats from the two countries worked in

very close concert on this issue), deploy arguments for war. Here my

knowledge was my undoing, since I was immediately aware that the case

for war presented by Washington and London was a gross exaggeration of

what we knew (I had said so, in the mild terms employed in officialdom,

when asked to comment on the early drafts of what later became known as

the infamous Number Ten dossier). Moreover, Britain’s behaviour in the

Security Council was at best manipulative and at worst dishonest, as one

resolution (1441) was sold to the Council as the “last chance for peace”

to get the inspectors back in. Then, prematurely and before our own

deadlines (which I had helped design and negotiate in the establishment

of the weapons inspection agency UNMOVIC[4]), we declared that Iraq was

“not cooperating” (another exaggeration, this time of what the

inspectors had said). Failing to win the authority from the Security

Council with a further resolution (the famously failed “second

resolution”), my former colleagues declared that the first resolution

(the “last chance for peace”) had given them the necessary authority to

go to war in any case.

In all my career, I had been taught and believed that Britain stood not

only for a world of rules but also for that more ineffable quality of

integrity. Many will think me disingenuous, but this was the rock on

which I based myself as a diplomat, even when contradictions presented

themselves, as they often had. But this was too much.

However, my attachment to my identity as a diplomat was so great that I

could not tear myself away, despite my anguish at the behaviour of my

government and colleagues. I drafted many resignation letters but did

not send them. That summer David Kelly killed himself after telling

journalists what I too had been telling them, although his experience as

a scientist gave him much more authority than me, a mere diplomat. His

suicide appalled and enraged me. My anguish deepened but not my

decisiveness. I vacillated between resignation and the self-interest of

my career. To postpone the choice, I went to Kosovo on secondment to the

UN mission there. In the summer of 2004, I testified to the official

inquiry into the use of intelligence on Iraq’s WMD, conducted by Lord

Butler. Indicative of my ambivalence, my testimony was delivered in

secret (I am listed as a witness with no name) so as not to undermine my

career. But the act of testifying was a kind of epiphany. Setting down

my views (that the case for war was exaggerated, that there was a viable

alternative to war) at last hardened my resolve. Shortly after giving my

testimony to Butler, I sent it to the Foreign Secretary as my

resignation from the British diplomatic service (he did not reply).

Tempting though it is, it would be dishonest to claim that Iraq was the

only reason for my departure. The narrative of the brave official

resigning in protest at the dishonesty of his government is a familiar,

and seductive, one. But in my case it was only part of the truth (and a

part which I have played on). There were other forces at work.

In my sabbatical year, I had investigated the philosophy of knowledge:

how it is that we come to claim that certain things are true. This was

an exercise designed to help answer my doubts about the whole discourse

of diplomacy. Both in its practice and its terms, diplomacy for me had

stopped seeming “real”. I was weary, disillusioned and often bored, even

though the subjects I was dealing with — Iraq, Afghanistan, terrorism —

were among the most important and exciting in the world. Diplomacy can

seem intensely glamorous. Television crews would chase me down corridors

to get the latest on the P5 talks on Iraq; people I met at cocktail

parties would nod approvingly when I told them my job. But there was

considerable drudgery too. Negotiation in the UN Security Council, but

also my day-to-day work as a diplomat in the ministry at home and

embassies overseas, seemed both literally and figuratively disconnected

from the issues it was supposed to be arbitrating. My life was feeling

desiccated and more and more meaningless.

My investigation began into the utility of terms, and thus of language,

and indeed of all symbols and theories, to explain reality. This quickly

led me to an understanding of their limits and a realisation about

diplomatic terms: that the words permitted in diplomacy are but a subset

of a broader language, itself a subset — a reduction — of reality. A

sub-set of a sub-set can feel narrow indeed. And I began to suspect that

this narrowness was part of the problem with diplomacy itself,

especially when diplomacy was attempting to deal with more and more of

the world’s problems: our reality.

My work in New York had revealed other problems too, both personal and

political, with the profession of diplomacy. I enjoyed questioning and

arguing with senior colleagues and ministers but for my career to reach

the peak, I would have to set limits on such behaviour. I noticed that

the senior members of Britain’s foreign service never questioned the

instructions of their ministers (and certainly never the Prime

Minister), or if they did, it was in such timid and allusive terms that

one could fail to notice that any concern was being raised at all. One

ambassador discouraged me from raising questions (internally) about the

direction of an item of policy in a telegram (the main form of

communication in the Foreign Office) but instead suggested I put my

questions in the form of a personal letter which would not of course be

seen by ministers or, unlike a telegram, be signed off by him — even

though he fully agreed with all that I wanted to say.

The smart suits and ties I wore as a diplomat began to feel more

restrictive and more uncomfortable. I realised that the separate

identities I had maintained, as me and my professional diplomatic self,

would have to merge, and with that union something very important would

be lost.

There was also, not only in the British service, but among all of those

with whom I interacted as a formal diplomat, a profound commitment to a

particular way of talking and thus thinking about things: the discourse.

In my first few years as a diplomat, I loved talking about the world in

this way — of German interests, of Russia’s next move, of how “we” might

outwit the French (a perennial British favourite), of alliances and

mutual interests — much as in earlier years, I had loved the boardgame

“Diplomacy”: a world of coloured pieces, them and us, with discrete

interests and options, which could be engineered and moved around to

create discord or harmony. When French diplomats told me what France

wanted, I took them at their word, as I hoped they would take me at mine

when I talked of what “we” — Britain — wanted. But as time went on, this

seemed to me more and more ridiculous — a fabrication. And as I

reflected on the process that allowed us as diplomats to say “Britain

wants this” or “the US wants that”, the more I realised that this was an

arbitrary and manufactured process, with little grounding in reality,

and certainly only very rarely discussed with those in whose name the

whole discourse was being practised. In other words, something of a

sham.

There was a deeper moral concern at play too. The performance of

diplomacy is founded on a particular view of the world — one of

competition, of nation states, of limited resources, of agreement or

contest. And like all political philosophies, this is premised on a

singular view of mankind: the “Hobbesian” notion that people just want

more, and are ultimately self-seeking and power-hungry (Hobbes is

explicit on this point), and that the only source of stability and order

and harmony is the state (although paradoxically the state is allowed to

do things — like kill and imprison — which are forbidden for

individuals).

In my work on Iraq, and later in Kosovo, I began to doubt this view and

wondered why I should spend my life working for one group of people —

British — when there were others who were suffering much more than we

were. Our self-assigned identity as bringers of democracy, rights and

other goods was sufficient only up to a certain point (and especially

when, as with sanctions against Iraq, it was not clear that we were

bringing good at all). This separation of us, my country, from the rest

of humanity began to seem false and invidious, elevating “our” needs

above “theirs”. Moreover, working in these places I realised something

very obvious — that there are a great many people who are ignored and

marginalised in the closed world of diplomacy, and often — indeed

usually — these are the ones suffering most. When I sat in negotiation

with the Kosovars or Palestinians, I began to yearn to be on their side

of the table rather than my own. Romantic perhaps, but to me that began

to have a greater source of meaning than the predictable ascent up the

career ladder (and partly that predictability was a disincentive too).

In my reading on my sabbatical, there was one passage, in one book,

which stuck in my mind. In Ray Monk’s outstanding biography of Ludwig

Wittgenstein, he describes an incident in the early days of the Second

World War when Wittgenstein and a colleague noticed a news story that

Britain had instigated a recent assassination attempt on Hitler.

Wittgenstein’s colleague commented that “the British were too civilised

and decent to attempt anything so underhand, and such an act was

incompatible with the British ‘national character’”. Wittgenstein was

furious: even five years later, he complained to the colleague at the

“primitiveness” of the remark. It occured to me that such beliefs

continued to underpin the national self-image chosen and perpetuated by

diplomats like me. It followed that it made little sense to choose to

serve one group over another: “us” rather than “them”.

–––––––––––––––––

There is something wrong in the state of diplomacy. This book elaborates

eight related problems, which are connected and compound one another.

Together they have created a discourse which is profoundly flawed and

inapposite for the problems of the world.

1. Diplomacy is not democratic, even in democracies. Somehow, and

through the accretions of practice and habits of history, it is accepted

that diplomats are a separate élite, who are free to arbitrate policy

with little outside scrutiny, influence or accountability. We the

governed and those affected by their decisions have little idea what the

diplomats are doing in our name, or even who they are. This is true of

the US State Department; it is even more true of the Chinese foreign

ministry. The juxtaposition is deliberate. Even in supposed democracies,

it is very difficult to know what our representatives are doing in our

name. It is all but impossible to have access to them or influence their

decisions; if they make mistakes, which will inevitably happen, it is

only very rarely possible to hold these practitioners to account.

2. The identification between the diplomats and their state is a false

and arbitrary one. When you become a diplomat, you are encouraged to

submit yourself to the collective state: your individual “I” becomes

“we”. Members of the diplomatic elite are encouraged and taught to see

themselves as the embodiment of their state (not merely their

government), as in “We [Britain] believe that Iran should immediately

allow access to its nuclear sites.” The justification for such

identification — that the diplomats represent the government which

represents the state whose population has elected the government — is

tenuous. In reality, the identification is a disguise for arbitrary,

manufactured and unaccountable decision-making. When a diplomat speaks

as “we” that statement only very rarely has anything to do with the real

collective wishes of the state concerned. The “we” is also problematic

in that it encourages individual diplomats to subsume their own personal

morality into that of the state. This therefore permits amoral behaviour

since by conventional thinking the state has no morality and is free to

do things that the individual is not free to do.

3. This problem is closely allied to another. Despite the falsity of the

élite’s adoption of the interests of the state as their own, and the

appropriation to themselves of the right to decide what is best for that

state, the population concerned often seems to accept this role. Their

passivity is the necessary corollary. Perhaps this too is an historical

inheritance — that many people seem to accept that they should be

excluded from the arbitration of their own affairs internationally. But

perhaps it also serves their own interest. There is an unspoken,

unacknowledged pact at work: the diplomats get on with dealing with the

world, whatever the consequences, and we get to live and enjoy our

lives. It is a kind of exchange of irresponsibility or, more accurately,

a pact between the unaccountable and the irresponsible. This may have

made sense when the world was less integrated than now and when affairs

of state touched only matters generally far removed from the affairs of

ordinary people (and when democracy did not exist in any case). But

today, when our lives are inextricably connected to the lives of the

other inhabitants of the planet, it makes no sense. Instead this

exchange of irresponsibility fortifies and underpins the damaging

competitive model of international relations, to the ultimate detriment

of all.

4. The way that the diplomatic élites and most commentators and writers

still think about foreign affairs is one again inherited from earlier

history. States are seen as discrete actors with interests which must be

arbitrated and negotiated with other states, sometimes bilaterally,

sometimes collectively or multilaterally. Although, particularly in

Europe, it is unfashionable to say that states have “interests”

(instead, they have “values” which they pursue), even in Europe the

behaviour of states and the diplomats who represent them reflects the

more old-fashioned way of thinking. Germany wants x, France wants y.

Negotiation between them, and with others concerned, may produce

agreement z. Statesmen, diplomats and the journalists who report on

their doings all adopt this model of description and behaviour. “US

secures good agreement at UN Security Council”; “UK humiliated at EU

Brussels summit”. It is as if the states are football teams playing in a

tournament. Indeed, sometimes international meetings are reported in

this way (particularly relevant for soccer-loving countries) — “ UK 0;

France 1” (not a result to gladden the heart of any British Prime

Minister). Intrinsic to this way of thinking is the idea that

competition lies at the heart of states’ behaviour. Each state looks out

for its own interests; harmony lies in a balance of interests, secured

through negotiation and diplomatic communication. Where interests are in

opposition, sometimes armed conflict must result. Self-interest is seen

as the driving motor of international relations. It is of course an echo

of contemporary economic ideology that the maximisation of welfare lies

in the individual pursuit of self-interest. But just like that ideology,

such a way of thinking about international relations produces flawed

results which may have nothing to do with the collective (or even

individual) interests of mankind.

5. This model may have been relevant for a time when the collective

interests of mankind were rather less obvious than they are now. But at

a time when global warming, resource shortage (whether of oil or water),

disease (AIDS, bird flu), migration and non-state violence are the most

urgent problems facing us as individuals and collectively, it is

dangerously inappropriate. Our problems are collective; ergo, the

solutions must be collective too. Unfortunately, however, the

supranational institutions established to deal with these problems are

not producing effective solutions to any of these problems. The reason

is that they are not truly supranational institutions at all, and they

reflect the same calculus of traditional international relations: that

consensus is produced by the bargaining of states’ interests to produce

an acceptable agreement. Moreover, the mere existence of these

institutions, with their institutional self-interest in claiming that

they are effective, predisposes us to complacency about our collective

problems: the pact of irresponsibility at work again.

6. Beneath these more institutional and structural problems lie more

fundamental problems concerning the way that practitioners think about

international relations and diplomacy, in other words what these

practitioners regard as acceptable information and what they do not.

There is a deep commitment to certain forms of information and a

rejection of others. Dispassionately-presented factual information is

taken as a superior form of information, and as “objective”, when

presentation of all information, including in such form, represents a

choice about what is important to us and what is not, and thus brings

into play our emotions, personal prejudices and intuitions. This is not

to say that all information is equally valid, and that all truth is

relative. But it is an odd and problematic deficit in the discourse of

diplomacy that certain types of information should be so rigorously

excluded. One specific deficit in discussion of international relations

is the difference between description and reality. Decisions in foreign

policy are invariably taken at several removes from the reality they are

trying to affect or arbitrate. Thus such decisions must be based on

descriptions. Such descriptions are thus inevitably deficient, and may

exclude the essence of what is going on in any particular situation. We

need to find ways to account for the irrational, the ineffable and other

vital elements of what makes us human and comprises our reality.

Diplomacy should take a more eclectic approach to information, and allow

discussion and examination of emotion and non-measurable elements of

reality, and at the least acknowledge this deficit in its calculations.

7. Related to this is a kind of conceit: that the world is

comprehensible at all. The world is now overwhelmingly complex (perhaps

it always was so). It is incomprehensible if you rely on any singular

theory of how states, or individuals, or indeed anything, behaves.

Governments, states and diplomacy are premised on simplification: that

the world’s complexity can be described and put into an order about

which we can then take decisions. Governments and politicians, and the

diplomats who serve them, have a profound interest in claiming that they

can understand and order the world in this way. They cannot be anything

other than wrong. Simplification, though tempting, must inevitably be

inaccurate and wrong and is therefore dangerous. Academics are as guilty

of this thought-crime as the politicians, providing glib generalisations

with which we can organise our thoughts and dinner-party arguments. The

absurdity of theses such as “the clash of civilizations” or the “end of

history” (though the latter book admits to a more nuanced analysis) is

only revealed at the point that any situation, anywhere, is examined

using such templates.

8. At a more prosaic level, contemporary diplomacy is deeply unbalanced

and unfair. Its practice and machinery are dominated by rich and

powerful states, whose political and economic power is reinforced and

supplemented by their less-recognised diplomatic power. Big, rich and

established countries have large cadres of experienced, well-trained and

well-resourced diplomats who are able to dominate negotiations. They are

better informed and more able to turn negotiations to their advantage

(for instance, at the UK Mission to the UN in New York, our lawyers

frequently prepared the first draft of texts for negotiation whether as

resolutions or statements; as any negotiator knows, this is a huge

advantage). On the other side of the table, poorer and less experienced

countries (and particularly non-state groups) often struggle to get

their point of view heard, let alone accommodated. This is obviously

disadvantageous to them but nor does it serve the powerful, although

they may wrongly think so. For agreements that do not address the

interests of all concerned, above all those affected, are not good

agreements and they are unlikely to have the desired effects or to

endure. Ways need to be found to enable all those affected to be heard

and their interests somehow addressed. This is the “diplomatic deficit”

that Independent Diplomat, the non-profit advisory group I founded in

2004, was designed to address.

All of these problems are mixed up in the confused and secretive

discourse known as diplomacy and statecraft. The practitioners and

analysts of this discourse love to pretend that it is complex and

arcane,[5] the better to preserve its privileges and power for

themselves. But the business of contemporary international affairs is

every-body’s business, because it affects us all.

Moreover, by erecting elaborate barriers to entry and sticking to

irrelevant and outdated philosophies of international relations (which

we examine later), the diplomats and statesmen have become very confused

about the nature of diplomacy and international relations. Academics

provide complicated theses about realism, liberalism, neo-realism and

neo-conservatism, but overlook the fact that international relations is

ultimately about simple effects on simple people: it is merely politics.

In their endless struggle to define what their state wants, the

diplomats have forgotten that their state, and our common world, is just

people and the environment in which they live.

We need a much more critical and intrusive approach to the world of

diplomacy and international affairs. The stuff at stake here is nothing

less than our future and it is time we paid it some attention. And it is

time too to consider abolishing the discourse of diplomacy altogether.

The idea that statecraft and international relations form some separated

practice that can be removed from other forms of politics and

government, with its own separate rules and philosophies, is unjustified

in an age where everything is connected.

There is a paradox here. In a world of ever more connected events and

phenomena, there is a greater need to discuss than ever before our

affairs with our fellow humans. We need more diplomacy! But this book

questions whether diplomacy — at least in its current forms — is the

best way to undertake this task. Abolishing the restrictions,

simplifications, abstractions, inventions and arbitrariness of diplomacy

may require abolishing the idea of diplomacy itself.

2. THE EMBASSY

Bonn 1992–95

My first full posting as a diplomat was to Germany and its then capital,

Bonn. The British embassy in Bonn was an ugly concrete block on the main

road connecting the city and its suburb, Bad Godesberg. Everything about

it was grey — the carpets, the walls, the faces of the people working

there. My office overlooked the often-rainswept car park. If I craned my

neck, I could see the road beside the embassy where cars sped between

Bonn and Bad Godesberg.

My title was Second Secretary (Political), a junior diplomat, an embassy

workhorse. The embassy had a large staff of diplomats, whose work was

divided into many sections. My job was to report on German foreign

policy. To do this, I would get into my car or ride the tram to the

Auswärtiges Amt, the German foreign ministry, or, occasionally, the

Federal Chancellery (where the Chancellor and his staff had offices).

Once there, I would walk the long corridors until I found the desk

officer I was looking for and I would ask him what German policy was on

country x. After taking a few notes I would return to the embassy and

compose a telegram or letter summarising what I had been told. That was

it.

Once I had realised the essential simplicity of this task, I tried to

make it more interesting. I would seek out Bundestag members to talk to;

I would cultivate journalists. I even participated in training courses

with young German diplomats. All the better to understand what was going

on in German foreign policy, in theory; but in practice my motive was to

escape the incredible boredom of my job. For the Foreign Office in

London, known in the service simply as “London”, was not in the least

interested in the thoughts of the minor parliamentarians who were

willing to talk to junior diplomats, and even less the insights of

German journalists. They didn’t want to understand Germany, they just

wanted to know what it was doing. And indeed it is much more the job of

embassies to do the understanding in order that their home countries

will have a better sense of what the target country is doing. That’s

part of the point of embassies.

My beat was the world outside Europe. My friend J. covered “Europe”,

which in those days included the former Soviet Union but not Turkey

(that was mine). German foreign policy in the rest of the world was, and

still is, mostly routine: the pursuit of its “interests” in Asia, Africa

and the Americas. Almost invariably, this meant trade. From Turkey to

China, this was the abiding German interest. There was only one interest

that came close in importance to trade: namely immigrants and how to

stop them coming to Germany.

“London” was moderately interested in German Chinese policy (at least

the department in London once replied to my letters). Trade with the

Chinese rested largely on the degree of favour granted by the Chinese

government, particularly in the case of large engineering contracts. So

official visits to China, for example by Chancellor Kohl, involved lots

of sycophancy to the government, the signature of large contracts (for

new rail systems for instance), and a bit of lip-service to human

rights. I was disproportionately curious about this last aspect, since

this was what I thought most important about China, so I would always

give it particular attention in my reports (usually to emphasise how

little attention the Germans had given it in their exchanges with the

Chinese). London was of course much more interested in the contracts and

how little lip-service it too could get away with: indeed, I was told

that the value of my reports was in helping London calibrate the British

approach with that of the Germans.

I don’t think that anyone I spoke to either in Bonn or in London was

especially pleased that this was the manner and focus of our

relationship with the Chinese. The German officials talked about it with

a resigned air, that this was just the way things were. The desk officer

for China in London and I, meanwhile, enjoyed an ironic to and fro,

glossing over the “realpolitik” with humour. His true love was art. None

of us really thought of questioning the direction of our policy. We just

accepted that trade, not rights, should take priority. This was what

foreign policy was about.

But the thing that most gripped the German government, which their

officials would confess to me in quiet moments, was the risk that China

would disintegrate (with a smack of pretence, they called it

centrifugalism), launching a massive wave of immigrants towards Europe

and above all, they feared, towards Germany. When I first heard it, this

revelation astonished me since it had not occurred to me, nor did there

seem much risk of it. But it made sense in the Germany of 1992, which

that year had received nearly a million asylum-seekers (Asylanten, as

they were known derogatorily), most of them from Eastern Europe and,

above all, from the disintegrating states of the Balkans.

My introduction to Germany was over a month of what is accurately called

“immersion” with a family near Münster. For five suffocating weeks, I

stayed with a German family in order to cement my language skills. My

German certainly improved, and so did my understanding of Germans, at

least some of them. Night after night on the television news, we would

watch pictures of traumatised Bosnian refugees escaping the war(s). On

one occasion a train filled with refugees had been stuck on one of

Germany’s eastern borders. The people on board had been trapped on the

train for days and were very clearly in desperation and agony, their

faces an unpleasant echo of earlier genocidal wars. One of my hosts

turned to the other, “More bloody (verdammte) Asylanten coming to take

our money.” My days would be filled with what were supposed to be German

lessons, which in a way they were: didactic lectures from the father on

how unfairly Germany had been treated (there were war crimes on both

sides during the war etc.). Every evening, the mother would return from

her medical practice to regale us with incessant complaints about the

appalling and untrustworthy behaviour of the Bosnian girl whom she had

foolishly employed. To escape, I smoked in the garden (to enormous

disapproval) and taught myself to juggle.

But in some ways that family was more connected to the reality of what

was going on in the Balkans than we were in Bonn. At least they had some

contact with real Bosnians. In Bonn, like all the other diplomats in the

embassy, I had quickly to learn to defend British policy over the

break-up of Yugoslavia from the criticisms of many German officials and

journalists. At that time (in the early 1990s), and indeed throughout

the war, the “British” view, which was in fact the view of a few

ministers and key officials, but which we were all required to uphold,

was that the Yugoslav wars were a civil war, driven by ethnic hatreds.

Unwilling to intervene to stop it, we presented the murderous killing as

inevitable and unpreventable. All we could do in such circumstances, we

argued, was provide humanitarian aid (which British troops, as part of

UNPROFOR, bravely and professionally did) and prevent any inflow of arms

through an embargo.

I did not understand the Balkans. But this did not prevent me or anyone

else in the embassy from repeating the analysis set out above. Indeed,

that is what we were told to do. On the war in former Yugoslavia, as on

any controversial issue, “London” would send out regular

“lines-to-take”, setting out in succinct and well-crafted bullet points

what “we” thought. I would read these, learn them and deploy them

authoritatively whenever a German interlocutor would argue that we were

standing by while genocide was perpetrated, or that we were preventing

the Bosniaks from defending themselves by denying them arms. I believed

those lines-to-take, which helped when I had to use them. I did not stop

believing them until I actually went to Bosnia many years later.

If the lines-to-take failed to do the trick, as they usually did, we

would resort to criticising the Germans or the Americans. For of course

the Germans, claiming that their constitution did not allow it (which it

then did not), were unable to intervene to stop the Serbs. And the

Americans, well, that’s a story better told by others.[6] It is human

nature that when you are on weak ground you seek to undermine your

attacker, rather than examine the ground on which you are standing. Once

a position has been taken on an issue — for example that the wars in

Yugoslavia were a “civil war” — all analysis becomes suborned to that

meta-analysis. Groupthink, in this case as in others, not only ruled but

was encouraged. If we believed in a nice, tidy, ordered world of states,

as British officials most emphatically did, then the break-up of a state

was a Bad Thing and must be “contained”. British policy seemed logical,

and the facts could, if we chose, be made to fit our views (telegrams

from our posts in the region, particularly Belgrade,[7] did just that).

If you see one group fighting another inside the borders of a state and

you believe in the primacy of the state as the organising unit of

“international affairs”, you will tend to see that conflict as a “civil

war”. You can disregard the now undeniable fact that this war was

deliberately initiated by one group against another, where the first

group used the extant machinery of government, in particular the army,

to remove and often annihilate the other. That we may have been entirely

wrong never seemed to occur to us. To this day you may still meet senior

British officials who will repeat the “civil war, ancient ethnic

hatreds” analysis, Srebrenica notwithstanding. Charge them with our

inaction and they will, with knee-jerk certainty, immediately blame the

Americans (for not bombing sooner) or the Germans (for recognising

Croatia too soon) and usually both. In extreme cases they will even

blame the Bosniaks, presumably for somehow instigating their own

annihilation. Not for a moment will they concede that “we” might have

been wrong.

My area of responsibility covered other, even bloodier events. One day

(and only once) I was asked by London to find out what “Germany” thought

about the killings in Rwanda. Following a routine explanation from the

Auswärtiges Amt desk officer on why the killings were inevitable and

impossible to prevent — and of course I understood, he added, that

Germany itself could not possibly do anything thanks to its

constitutional position — I was treated to the desk officer’s own more

personal analysis of why the killing was so widespread. You see, he

said, there’s just not enough room for all of them in that little

country (he asked condescendingly if I had been to Rwanda) and they must

kill each other like rats in a cage.

Despite the fact that the worst killing in Europe since the Second World

War was going on just a couple of hours’ flight from where we sat, the

war in ex-Yugoslavia impinged little on our consciousnesses (Rwanda was

barely spoken of). Both the British and German governments were much

more preoccupied with “Europe” or rather the European Union, and the

tedious battles over things like Qualified Majority Voting on milk

packaging directives. The embassy had an entire team to cover such

crucial questions.

Despite its sometimes vivid but abstract content of genocide and human

rights, the day-to-day reality of my life in Bonn was dull beyond words.

Not for nothing did John le Carré, who once served in the embassy,

describe the town as “half the size of Chicago cemetery and twice as

dead”. I acted in a couple of local amateur dramatic productions (don’t

ask). Occasionally I would drive very fast along the autobahn to

Cologne, there to seek excitement (I didn’t find any). I kept a diary,

detailing the agonised, spasmodic but seemingly inevitable collapse of

my relationship with my girlfriend who had stayed in London. I had a few

friends in Bonn who, in the manner of those who become friends in dismal

circumstances, were good ones. But my days were grey and lonely, all in

all.

Recognising the limits of my official duties and perhaps, though he did

not mention it, my melancholic aspect, my boss, an enlightened soul,

encouraged me to pursue what I thought interesting. This was an unusual

attitude for a Foreign Office manager but he was and is a singular man.

I decided to investigate the minorities in Germany, the outsiders.

Working on and off as my regular duties allowed, I spent months on the

task and eventually produced a weighty paper which I proudly despatched

to London. Perhaps it was the Münster family who had inspired me, but I

was fascinated by the many millions of people who lived in Germany but

were not Germans, and in particular by those who lived there for many

generations but were still not considered Germans, culturally if not

legally. German residence law has since changed, but at that time, over

six million “foreigners” were living in Germany without citizenship.

I will not repeat the contents of the paper, much as I enjoyed preparing

and writing it. Its significance to my story is this. My researches led

me to some of the most oppressed people in Germany, and perhaps in

Europe (with the exception of the Balkans), at that time. The Roma and

Sinti peoples (almost universally known in Germany as Zigeuner, or

gypsies, the English word does not have the same derogatory overtones as

the German) were, and I suspect still are, routinely discriminated

against. I visited a community in what could only be described as a

ghetto, for it was a dilapidated housing estate, set in an industrial

zone on the outskirts of Hamburg. The chemical pollution from

surrounding factories was so bad that the local council would not allow

“ordinary” housing, but this was where the Roma had been housed. The

estate was surrounded by barbed wire, with a kind of sentry box,

occupied by a policeman, at the entrance. The conditions inside the

estate — the dirt and overcrowding — were disgusting. The local Roma

leader told me that ambulances would not attend emergency calls at the

estate. The inhabitants were barred from all the local shops.

But the relevance of this depressing story is that this was the most

potent and moving experience of my time in Germany. I was shocked. I

tried to convey the experience in my paper back to London, but could

not. Neither by employing a sub-Orwellian journalese nor the drier

vocabulary of a diplomatic dispatch could I capture the full power of

what I had seen. I developed, with my boss’s help, a theory of

minorities in Germany,[8] partly because I sought an order, an

explanatory system, to understand the messy human reality I had

witnessed and also in order to find terms (words like citizenship,

identity and rights) more palatable to the discourse of diplomacy, where

of course abstractions are much more comfortably consumed than cruder,

more coloured representations of reality. It is simply not done to write

to London that people are being screwed in Hamburg, Bosnia or anywhere

else.

Moreover, since the condition of the Roma and indeed other minorities in

Germany did not fall under the rubric of Britain’s “interests” there,

the report was not placed on the normal channels of the embassy’s

communication with “London”, namely the classified and encrypted

telegrams that would be circulated on receipt to officials across

Whitehall in many different government offices. It was instead sent back

in the “bag”. This was our weekly diplomatic bag to London, which

contained everything deemed least urgent, a means of transportation

almost guaranteed to deter the recipient from reading the contents.

Unlike the telegrams copied in their hundreds to numerous departments in

the government, it was sent in a single envelope to the Germany Desk

Officer in what was then known as the Western European Department. I

never received a reply, or even an acknowledgement of receipt. Nor did I

really expect one, because such matters are not really what foreign

policy, and the Bonn embassy, was “about”, namely the hard stuff like EU

governance, the future of NATO, trade negotiations and what “we”

couldn’t do about Bosnia. It was certainly not our business to comment

on the internal affairs of an ally (we only do that to poor countries).

The desperate condition of an oppressed minority was regarded, even by

me, almost as a hobby, a thing apart from the core.

Afghanistan, Spring 2002

A thundering C-130 Hercules is swooping through the mountains. Just

behind the pilots, I clamber on to a small platform and poke my head up

into a small, perspex dome just large enough to accommodate my

shoulders.

Pure exhilaration. I look out from the top of the fuselage with a

panoramic view of the aircraft, to the rear its fin cutting through the

wispy cloud, to either side its huge, stolid wings and bellowing

engines. I turn forwards, and we break through the clouds, skipping

sharp mountain peaks and diving steeply over an immense plain. It is

like the dangerous pleasure of a child sticking his head through the

sun-roof of a speeding car, but this is a huge aircraft and we are five

thousand feet above the ground, roaring over the Hindu Kush, diving down

towards Bagram.

Afghanistan. It was perhaps appropriate that this should be my last

diplomatic posting, a brief sojourn from my permanent post in New York.

As a teenager I had stuck a collection of postcards to the wall by my

bed. One, a well-known photograph, showed a mujahideen fighter kneeling

on a prayer mat in the Afghan mountains, his hands raised in

supplication to Allah, a Kalashnikov by his side. Eric Newby’s A Short

Walk in the Hindu Kush had been one of my favourite books; Ahmed Shah

Masood’s romantic struggle against the helicopter gunships and bombers

of the Soviet Union my favourite war.

I had lobbied hard to be posted to Kabul when Britain reopened its

embassy after the Taliban fell. My qualifications were scant: that I had

“done” Afghanistan on the UN Security Council, for instance by

negotiating the Security Council mandate for the International Security

Assistance Force which now helped police Kabul. But only a very few

British diplomats had even set foot in Afghanistan in the long years

since the Soviet invasion. Fewer still knew anything of the local

languages. And so it was that in March 2002 I found myself in the

embassy, being served tea in the garden by the ancient retainer, who had

loyally tended the gardens and buildings throughout Britain’s long

absence.

The former British embassy was now a ruin, a once grand but now decaying

neo-classical ambassadorial residence set in a large estate littered

with the burnt-out houses of the lower-ranking diplomats, their style

that of suburban Surrey — mock Tudor in the Afghan hills, a home from

home for the archetypal Bromley man of the British civil service. But

the embassy site now belonged to Pakistan, and Britain was obliged to

occupy a small corner of its former estate, a gathering of cramped,

low-rise buildings which had once housed the embassy hospital.

The embassy team –– the ambassador, the diplomats, the support staff and

the many soldiers who protected us –– shared a few small rooms. Our main

office was a tiny drawing room and the corridor outside. We ate together

in a long dining room, using the be-crested crockery and cutlery that

the embassy’s retainer had managed to save through the long years of

Britain’s absence (he had hidden the silver candlesticks too but these

had been stolen, to his great distress, by an early visitor from

Britain’s Special Air Service). Bacon, eggs and cornflakes in the

morning; beef and roast potatoes for supper. Tea whenever you wanted it.

The staff, cooped up in the embassy for most of the time, talked of what

they knew: the latest soccer games in the Premiership, television soaps.

In the evenings we sometimes played games (Trivial Pursuit, charades)

and drank beer and whisky flown in at enormous expense by the Royal Air

Force. After four cosmopolitan years in New York, it felt like being

trapped in a rather stuffy hotel in Weymouth.

Afghanistan lurked behind the high walls that protected us from

“outside”. The walls were topped with coils of razor wire and sack-cloth

netting, the latter to trap the rocket-propelled grenades that were

feared as the greatest threat to our safety. My job as the political

officer in the embassy was to report to London on political developments

in the country. Before the posting, I had visions of sitting in crowded

tea-shops in Kabul chatting about politics with the locals. Instead, on

arriving, I learned that we were only allowed beyond the walls of the

embassy inside an armoured Land Rover with an escort of at least two

members of our close protection (CP) team. Appointments had to be made

days in advance in order to allow the CP team to reconnoitre the site

before our visit. This was a frustrating and time-consuming process,

involving endless failed telephone calls to the few Kabulis who owned

satellite phones or sending out our local “fixer” to set up the meeting.

Once the meeting was arranged and the reconnaissance complete, we would

roll up in our lumbering white Land Rover, the bodyguards would hop out,

machine guns at the ready, and I would emerge in my grey suit, notebook

in hand, interpreter at my side, bright-eyed and ready to learn what was

“really” going on in Afghanistan.

Naturally, this was not the best way to detect the complex and powerful

forces sweeping that country. The Afghans I met were guardedly friendly,

and with armed men at my side it was no surprise that they generally

told me what we wanted to hear. They were pleased the Taliban had gone

and grateful for our help (they were polite enough not to point out that

the Talibs’ defeat was largely the Americans’ doing). They wanted peace,

stability and –– mentioned less often –– democracy.

I spent a lot of my time talking to the impressive Afghans and UN staff

who were working to prepare the Loya Jirga, the gathering of

representative groups of Afghans from around the country that was to

choose a new government (“democracy Afghan style” as some of my

colleagues chose to call it). The UN, unencumbered by the stringent

security precautions that so limited our work, was much better informed

than we were, and moreover employed some of the more skilled and

experienced Afghan “hands” in the international community (several were

fluent in Pashtun and Dari). Desperate to get some kind of orientation

in this unfamiliar country, I sought out all the factions I could

identify on the political landscape and tried to talk to them all.

I made a few trips around the country to meet local leaders. When the

Prime Minister’s Special Representative visited Afghanistan, I

accompanied him to call on the bear-like General Dostum in Mazari-Sharif

and the delphic Ismail Khan in Herat. But my efforts to get out of Kabul

on my own were thwarted by the fact that we could only travel by air

(the roads were too dangerous) and then only in Royal Air Force planes

(which were usually employed in more military duties) and once an escort

of Royal Marines (to guard the aircraft and us on the ground on arrival)

had been arranged. This I managed only once, by goading a reluctant

member of the British military to allow me to piggy-back on his own

visit to the beautiful and remote town of Bamiyan (site of the famously

destroyed Buddhas).

High in the mountains, we rode four-wheel drives bouncing down dirt

tracks and steep valleys, then sat for hours, cross-legged, at a feast

of lamb and rice discussing the future of Afghanistan with Karim

Khalili, the leader of the Hazara sect:

Me (through interpreter): “Tell me, Mr Khalili, what do you think are

the prospects for the Loya Jirga?”

To get home, our squad unfurled a small parabolic antenna on the roof of

their Landcruiser and called down our C-130 to Bamiyan’s dirt airstrip,

where it barrelled in, roaring and spitting gravel from its wheels.

The mountains were very beautiful; the people picturesque. The light had

a wonderful, limpid quality. But whether these images had much, or

anything, to do with the real Afghanistan, remains a mystery to me. I

spoke no local languages (there was only one person in the embassy — the

interpreter — who did). All my conversations were thus limited to

stilted, somewhat impersonal exchanges. The most resonant image of my

time there is looking out at the people of Kabul, bustling and alive,

through the cold, thick armoured glass of the CP Land Rover.

However, this separation did not prevent me from writing nice, clear

telegrams (divided, as the Foreign Office practice dictated, into

Summary, Detail and Comment) informing “London” what was going on in

Afghanistan. My missives covered such diverse topics as the prospects

for the Loya Jirga, the future of the Hazaras, and the celebrations in

Kabul for the New Year (Nawruz) festival. I tried to say that I didn’t

really know what was going on (I repeatedly mentioned the restrictions

on our work, linguistic and otherwise), but I was being paid to produce

a product, and produce it I did. And I did feel that there was one

message that was worth getting across. This was the one thing that every

Afghan I met, with the exception of the so-called warlords themselves

(Dostum, Ishmail Khan et al.), told me and this was that they wanted to

be free of the warlords. They wanted “security”.

The UN said it too, the US Ambassador said it, as did mine, so did the

military men I met from our own forces, and so did all the journalists.

My own confinement to Kabul and protection by the CP team carried the

same message. The country was not safe. ISAF provided a modicum of

security in Kabul but outside it there was considerable anarchy, only

moderated in limited areas by the autocratic and occasionally tyrannical

rule of the regional big men, such as Dostum and Ismail Khan. Most

striking of all were the messages carried to the organisers of the Loya

Jirga by innumerable delegations from the regions: they wanted security;

and they wanted ISAF deployed across the whole country to provide it.

And although this of course was the one thing that everyone decent and

sensible there said very clearly, it was the one thing that “we” — the

UK and US governments — were not prepared to give them.

What the campaign to overthrow the Taliban was about, of course, was not

the Afghans’ security but our own, as defined by us. The reason why the

smiles of welcome on the Afghans’ faces were not as warm as they might

have been was that they knew perfectly well that, but for 9/11, Osama

bin Laden and all the rest, they would still be languishing, forgotten,

under the rule of the Taliban. Our protestations, from the Prime

Minister downwards, that we would not again forsake Afghanistan, were

met with scepticism.

While I was at the embassy, I slowly became aware that there was a

different narrative being played out by the various powers in

Afghanistan, one that hardly featured in the telegrams I or my

Ambassador wrote, one that had nothing to do with building democracy,

the Loya Jirga or anything so noble. [9]

After a while, I realised that while I was running around encouraging

and cajoling politicians to engage in the Loya Jirga process, the

purpose of which was in part to take power back from the warlords,

others were running around doling out bribes to buy loyalty amongst

those very same warlords. Their purpose, so they claimed, was to track

down the terrorists, Al-Qaeda and the remnant Taliban or “AQT” as they

were known. Although it took me a while to cotton on, this was and had

been for some time an open secret among the international community in

Kabul (in fact, I think it was someone from the UN who first told me

about it). Indeed, it was something of a joke among the more cynical

observers that the Afghans, within the government as well as the

regional war-lords, were encouraging a bidding war between the foreign

powers involved in Afghanistan — the US, UK, Russia, Pakistan and Iran,

to start with — to extract the most cash. It was widely believed that

some in the government were taking money from all of them (and who could

blame them?).

It is not hard to see the contradictions. In the embassy, our version of

reality went like this: we favoured a process (the Loya Jirga) leading

to a democracy based around a centralised system of government, with the

centre supreme over the regions and people like that nice Mr Karzai (who

happens fortunately to speak a language we can understand) in charge of

the whole thing. Our activities and our reports were thus directed

towards this end. The UN too, which helped run the interim

administration and the Loya Jirga process, was working towards this

aim.[10]

But meanwhile a different strategy was being played out, often entirely

unknown to us. In theory it was a complementary strategy, but what has

happened since suggests otherwise. This was to buy off the support of

the regional powerbrokers in order to win their cooperation in the war

against the “AQT”. A further goal was added, which reinforced the

contradictions. Shortly after the Taliban fell, someone in the British

government remembered that Afghanistan was the source of much of the

heroin that ended up in Britain. So the plan was hatched to remove this

supply at a stroke by paying the farmers in the poppy-growing areas

(otherwise known as most of Afghanistan) to plough in that year’s crops.

This occupied many of the staff of the embassy, and several officers

were drafted in especially for the task. Vast amounts of cash were

dished out to the various regional leaders to pay off “their” farmers to

destroy their crops.

The result of these strategies soon became clear. In 2002, according to

the UN Drug Control Programme, the heroin crop in Afghanistan was ten

times bigger than it had been in 2001, when the country was for most of

the time under Taliban control (the Taliban were, with some exceptions,

largely hostile to drug production in areas under their control).

Meanwhile, the process of political stabilisation has faltered, it seems

because of two main factors: the persistent insecurity and instability

outside Kabul and the continuing intransigence of the regional warlords

in ceding real control to the central administration. Indeed, by 2006

some analysts were arguing that the warlords, and the drug runners, were

now running the central government: a narco-state was in the process of

creation.

How the war against terrorism — “AQT” — is going I do not know, but over

the four years since the allied invasion there have continued to be

bloody skirmishes in the south and areas bordering Pakistan, where the

remnant Taliban (if that is who they really are) are strongest. The

signs, even in early 2002, soon after the Taliban had so precipitately

collapsed, were inauspicious. Twice I visited Bagram airbase, where much

of the British military were then stationed. A senior British officer

there voiced his fear that the strategy that the allies (his polite way

of indicating the Americans) were adopting would perpetuate the very

problem it was designed to solve. He gave an example.

Aerial reconnaissance had photographed an encampment close to the

Pakistan border which bore suspicious signs that it might be an AQT

base. There appeared to be circular pits, perhaps for mortars or small

artillery, camouflaged trucks and trenches. A British patrol was sent to

investigate. First, it observed the camp from the hilltops above, but

could not tell what was going on. So they boldly decided to descend to

find out more. On entering the village, which it turned out to be, they

realised that the settlement was not AQT but a camp of nomads, the

Kuchi, as they are known in Afghanistan. The “gun pits” were circles

made in the grass by goats tied to stakes. The “trenches” were drainage

ditches and the “camouflaged trucks” were ragged old tents. The patrol

was greeted with a friendly welcome, and they went on their way after

arranging for an airdrop of “HR” (humanitarian relief).

Had “our allies” first received the information of this encampment,

argued the officer, they would have bombed it flat. As he spoke, A-10

Warthog ground attack aircraft taxied along the runway behind him and

blasted into the air for another mission. (The incidents of accidental

bombings of civilians in Afghanistan have been frequent since then. For

example, in May 2006 over a dozen civilians were reportedly killed when

their village was struck by allied bombs.) The officer argued that the

“allied” goal was to kill as many AQT as possible, not to win over the

local population. At the same time, there were plenty of people, he

argued, not only in Afghanistan but also from the surrounding countries,

who were delighted to come to fight the Americans. Thus a cycle would be

established and perpetuated.

In June 2006, over 22,000 US and British combat troops remain deployed

in Afghanistan to fight the “AQT”.

–––––––––––––––––

The thick screen of “armour plating” and bodyguards that separated us

from the reality of Afghanistan was unusual, but in its way symptomatic

of the separation of the embassy from its surroundings. It successfully

allowed us to project our own narrative on to what was “really” going

on, even if the consistent message from the Afghans who broke through

our screen was a clear one.

What I experienced in Kabul and Bonn has echoes of other episodes of

diplomatic history. The then British ambassador candidly admitted the

failure of his embassy in Tehran to detect the rumblings of frustration

and revolt which led to the overthrow of the Shah in 1979. We were

distracted, he confessed. What the work of his embassy had been “about”

was maximising sales to the friendly and pro-western Shah, whether of

tanks or chemical plants.

Even in countries very similar to our own, like Germany, there is an

inevitable tendency for the diplomat to gravitate towards those like us;

those who speak our language, or share our values. For they are

inevitably easier to find — indeed they may seek us out. They may become

our friends (as the Shah and many of his ministers became of the British

ambassador), and come to comprise our understanding and memory of what

Germany, or Iran, or Afghanistan is.

(In Afghanistan, the diplomats, UN staffers, NGOs and journalists formed

a large group of expatriates who socialised and gossiped together. It

was too unsafe and, frankly, alien to socialise with the Afghans. The

journalists looked to the diplomats for information, and we did the same

to them. Thus a circle was formed, where we were able to confirm our

chosen narratives of what was “really” going on. There were some great

journalists and international workers who rejected the temptations of

this circle of affirmation, and sought out the facts on their own, but

they, regrettably, seemed to be the exception.)

The good diplomat will resist this tendency, but it is difficult, even

for the most diligent. As the screen of security around US, British and

other western embassies grows ever thicker, it will become even harder

for the diplomat to locate and meet “real people”: my dream of sitting

in tea-houses in Kabul with “ordinary” Afghans remained a fantasy. It

was easier for me to meet them in New York.

But this restriction will not prevent the embassy from producing

detailed reports on what is going on in its host country, just as I

dutifully reported from inside the fence in the embassy in Kabul. The

local government will still speak to us from inside its fence and thus

the utility of embassies, government speaking to government, is in this

narrow sense preserved.

Ambassadors and diplomats moreover tend to emphasise their intimate

relations with the local authorities, as a mark of how well they are

doing their job. When I was a diplomat, ambassadors took great care to

relay to London detailed accounts of every mutter and hint of their

late-night conversation or round of golf with the President or Prime

Minister. Usually, these accounts would be given a high classification

and restricted circulation, in order to underline the unusual access the

diplomat has secured (even if the information contained is banal). They

are often spiced with little personal details (the President’s favourite

whisky; his fondness for the British royal family etc.) in order to

demonstrate the intimacy and uniqueness of the exchange. The product of

such behaviour is to reinforce the sense that diplomacy offers a

rarefied and unique level of communication, where one élite talks to

another, elevated from the cacophonous hordes beneath.

This remains one service that embassies can perform for their

governments.

3. THE NEGOTIATION (1)

UN Security Council, New York, 2001

What is a fact?

This was not a post-modern philosophical debate; it was a negotiation of

what was to become international law. But this essential question

bedevilled our discussion. We could not agree on the facts.

We were meeting day after day, for several hours at a time. Our

discussions took place in a narrow, cramped room called the NAM caucus

room. NAM is the acronym for the Non-Aligned Movement, the grouping of

those states that during the Cold War saw themselves as associated with

neither NATO nor the Warsaw Pact. Although the Cold War is over, the NAM

lives on, as does its room, which is next to the room next to the UN

Security Council (perhaps a situational reflection of the NAM’s distant

relationship to real power). The room is too small for the NAM, which

has 116 members; indeed it is too small for the fifteen delegates of the

members of the Security Council. The table only accommodated ten people,

tightly squeezed together, so whoever entered the room last had no seat

at the table, and was forced to sit on the uncomfortable chairs behind,

lining the wall. When the negotiations began, there would be an

ungentlemanly rush for the table seats, and whoever was last in the room

would have to spend the next several hours awkwardly balancing their

negotiating papers on their knees. However, this problem did not last

long. After the first few days, some of the smaller non-permanent[11]

Council delegates stopped bothering to attend the negotiations at all,

even though their countries would have to vote on the outcome.

It might seem cynical or even idle not to bother to attend negotiations

on such an important subject as the future of sanctions on Iraq. But

these were small delegations, heavily overloaded with the many agenda

items on the Security Council, and the truth was that they were

irrelevant. Some of the more competent non-permanent delegations were

often able to make a meaningful contribution to Council negotiations,

despite the limitations of their tiny size (they might have three or

four overworked diplomats covering the entire agenda of the Council,

where Britain, by contrast, had at least a dozen). But their role was

really more that of spectators at the main fight. We all knew that they

would vote for whatever outcome the permanent members could agree to,

and they knew it too. So not bothering to attend was, in a sense,

entirely rational on their part. It also meant that there was more room

at the table.

Our negotiation was to agree the terms of what we called the “rollover”

of the Oil-for-Food programme in Iraq. Every six months the terms of the

programme had to be negotiated afresh in order for the Council to agree,

by adopting a new resolution, to implement the programme. But although

technically this was what the negotiation was about, the actual

discussion was concerned with how much or how little we were going to

ease sanctions on Iraq, for the resolution on the Oil-for-Food programme

also stipulated, in arcane yet often imprecise detail, what Iraq could

and could not import or export, and how these flows were to be

regulated.[12]

And this was why we couldn’t agree the facts. By 2001, when this

negotiation took place, the debate over sanctions on Iraq had calcified

into two opposing and entirely incompatible views.

On the one side were us (the British) and the Americans, with perhaps

one or two sympathetic non-permanent members, like the Dutch, and on the

other everyone else, led by the French and, less articulately, by the

Russians. The US/UK view was that sanctions were essential in the face

of Iraq’s non-compliance with its obligations to disarm of its Weapons

of Mass Destruction.[13] If there was humanitarian suffering in Iraq, it

was the fault of the Iraqi government for its failure to comply with its

disarmament obligations and for failing to implement properly the

Oil-for-Food programme, which since 1996 had existed to allow Iraq to

purchase, through the UN, necessary humanitarian supplies, including all

types of food and medicine.

To justify our argument we could deploy a whole array of “facts”, for

example that in northern Iraq, where the UN rather than the Iraqi

government was in charge of running the programme, hospitals and schools

were being set up and operated smoothly, and supplies were being

successfully delivered to those who needed them (indeed, so successful

was the Oil-for-Food programme in the north that the Kurdish parties

would lobby us to make sure that it wouldn’t be stopped if sanctions

ever had to be lifted). Another fact consisted of the reports of the UN

administrators of the programme, the Office of the Iraq Program, which

suggested that it was delivering humanitarian improvements. In addition,

a routine argument used by our politicians was the fact that Saddam was

building and furnishing lavish palaces while his people were suffering

(we tended not to use this argument in negotiation; somehow it seemed

too crude and propagandist, something we diplomats were supposed to be

above). We could cite import orders, placed through the UN (as all

import orders, legal ones at least, had to be) for ludicrously

unnecessary goods, like 10,000 tons (yes, tons) of neckties or 25,000

musical doorbells. Cigarettes and whisky were being imported by the

regime in vast quantities. All of this meant that it was all the fault

of the government of Iraq, not of sanctions, if people were suffering.

On the other side, the opponents of sanctions had assembled an equally

devastating array of “facts”. They cited evidence of hospitals without

medicines, undernourished children, schools with neither books nor

desks, sewage systems without spare parts, power stations that didn’t

work, ambulances without tyres. They could trot out one report after

another, some from NGOs, some from the Iraqi government (which surpassed

itself in the hysterical language it used to describe the suffering of

the Iraqi people) and some from the UN. Most famously, there was a

UNICEF report which, projecting from mortality data from before the

first Gulf War, estimated that some 500,000 children had died in the

period since sanctions were first imposed, deaths that would not have

occurred if pre-sanctions mortality rates had remained stable. This

rather complicated and measured judgement had been spun by opponents of

sanctions into the statement that sanctions had killed half a million

Iraqi children, which, UNICEF would say, was an oversimplification of

their conclusion (even if it might nevertheless be true). And

simplification begets exaggeration, as Osama bin Laden was later to say

that sanctions had killed two million Iraqi children.

To each and every fact on either side of the argument, we developed

counter-facts. When others raised the UNICEF report, we would politely

nod and say something like: yes, that’s a serious figure but (cue frown)

it is based on Iraqi government figures — which it was — and (suck

teeth) I’m afraid we cannot treat those as reliable. And to every one of

our arguments, the French and Russians deployed their own battery of

rebuttals. They would argue, for instance, that the northern provinces

of Iraq received a disproportionately large share of the proceeds from

the Oil-for-Food programme (which was true, although the disproportion

was not enough to explain the difference in welfare in the north). The

egregious examples of Iraqi government wastage and inefficiency did not

show that sanctions should continue in their current form, etc. On both

sides there were skilled diplomats who spent their time scouring UN

reports and writing briefs, dedicating their intelligence and energy to

rubbishing one another. If the negotiations became stuck, as they always

did, at the level of the delegates or “experts”,[14] as they are known

in the insider language of the Security Council, we would organise a

round of negotiation at ambassador level. There exactly the same

arguments would be repeated, except by different people and with more or

less fluency, depending on the individual — the Russian ambassador, for

instance, was not only a brilliant and lucid advocate in English, but

also had a thorough familiarity with the arguments. The only other

significant difference was that the ambassadorial discussion would take

place in another room, this time the “informal” Security Council

chamber.

The result, needless to say, was total deadlock. Negotiation became a

tedious recitation of their “facts” and our “facts”, thrown to and fro

across the table. We only persisted in this trench warfare because each

of us was trying to convince the non-permanent members that we were

right, in the hope that this would convince them later to vote for this

or that proposal in the resolution. This too was largely a waste of time

since they knew that any of the permanent members could block any

proposal they didn’t like, and in any case the crossfire of arguments

soon made the debate unintelligible. It got so bad that we would reject

anything the French and Russians proposed simply because it was their

proposal, and vice versa. Indeed, on several occasions we would

introduce a new proposal (say, to modify some aspect of the process to

screen exports to Iraq) only to have it opposed without concession by

the other side. Then, six months later, come the next “rollover” debate,

they would propose exactly the same idea, only this time we would oppose

it, because we couldn’t believe that there wasn’t some hidden catch

which would allow the Iraqi regime and their allies a loophole.

You will notice one major absentee in this discussion: the Iraqi people

themselves. As we irritably traded arguments in the NAM caucus room,

ordinary Iraqis were struggling with a defunct economy, eking out their

dwindling incomes and coping. It is all too easy to see now how their

fates could become a debating point in a fetid negotiation chamber. What

we all lacked in that nasty overheated little room was any sense of what

was really going on. Almost every source of information was in some way

compromised and thus could be dismissed by one side or the other. For

the British and Americans we could always deploy one argument if all

others failed, and this was that any report coming out of Iraq was

inevitably questionable since organisations could only operate there

under the supervision of the Iraqi government. Even the UN itself could

not be impartial: we suspected some agencies of becoming “politicised”

(as if everything was not already politicised in this debate), led by

people with an “agenda”. Other agencies were less suspect, and it was

their reports that we tended to quote. Thus observers of the debate were

treated to the absurd spectacle of each side quoting supposedly

impartial UN reports at one another — and, as Germaine Greer once said,

“all quotations are taken out of context: that’s what they are.”[15] All

our information was out of context.

However, I should not play this “he says, she says” point too far. The

absence of good, hard, reliable data and our own skill at demolishing

our opponents’ arguments helped us avoid a very important truth, perhaps

even The Truth. There may not have been good facts, but that should not

have prevented us from seeing the obvious. After several rounds of this

type of discussion, I began to find it deeply disturbing. There is

something very wrong about sitting around a table in New York arguing

about how many children are dying in Iraq and whose fault it was. By

2001 I had been doing the job for over three years. I had met a large

number of UN staffers and NGO workers, as well as many diplomats from

other countries who were present in Iraq (neither we nor the Americans

had had diplomatic relations and thus embassies in Baghdad since the

invasion of Kuwait), and even the occasional “real” (i.e.

non-government) Iraqi. These were not people with an “agenda”. And they

all agreed on one point. Things were bad and had been bad for a long

time. I slowly realised, as I should have done long before, that it was

much more important to do what we could to ameliorate the situation than

to expend our energies attributing blame for it.

This realisation had begun slowly to filter into the British government

more generally. The lobby against sanctions in Britain was considerably

more vociferous and well-organised than in the US (perhaps simply

because of proximity). Our ministers were finding it increasingly hard

to justify sanctions in the face of pictures of children dying for lack

of necessary drugs or overflowing sewage systems (they were not as

practised as the diplomats were in firing off the barrage of counter

arguments, tending instead to rely on the weaker forms of generalised

propaganda — palaces and whisky again). A polemical film against

sanctions by John Pilger had made a particular impact (it was never

shown on general release in the US). And so the government decided to

review its policy.

A policy review sounds grand, but it is not. The term conjures up images

of learned mandarins bent over reams of documents, scrutinising,

examining, weighing up the options. When we at the Mission were told

there would be a review, I imagined thoughtful missives bouncing around

between embassies and the Foreign Office, ministers, experts, civil

servants all joined together in a common endeavour, the select, the

policymakers. We were clever, we were concerned, we would get it right.

I was wrong.

The review began in early 1999 and it was not complete until the next

year. It consisted largely of a desultory exchange of ill-informed

letters from senior officials. Most of them were so ignorant of the

existing measures that they would propose changes that had long ago been

introduced. All of our views, including mine, were uninhibited by any

connection with empirical reality on the ground. One official, from the

Ministry of Defence, opined in strong terms that since sanctions would

“never work”, the only recourse was military action (my colleagues and I

at the mission thought this laughable at the time, little realising what

was later to follow). Contributions from our embassies in the region

were facile, “The [insert name of Arab population] will welcome some

easing of sanctions, as there is considerable concern on the street[16]

at their humanitarian impact.” And, this being government, the review

was secret. We might mutter to a few other diplomats that we were

“having a think” about sanctions, but the large number of NGOs and

concerned individuals — humanitarian experts, academics — who had taken

an interest in this controversial issue were ignored, unless we the

officials happened to bother to read their reports, which most of us

didn’t. We were too busy.

Part of the problem was that sanctions policy was so complex that only a

very few people understood it. At the Mission, most of our contributions

to the review consisted of correcting the misunderstandings of other

senior officials. Only when a particular individual was put in charge of

the whole review did any coherence start to emerge. He took the trouble

to spend some time on the subject, and learn some of its intricacies.

Whenever ministers became involved, the debate would have to be reduced

to such a level of simplicity that all meaning was removed. One

particular minister would occasionally touch on the subject with his

American opposite number. The records would show that a few generalities

would be exchanged, “yes, I agree we need a rethink, better focus, that

kind of thing”. Then the conversation would move on to more exciting

topics, with the details, as ever, “left for the officials”. The trouble

was that the details were the policy. Only once, much later, in this

long process did one minister — to his great credit — bother to get to

grips with the detail. We were in the thick of trying to persuade the

Russian foreign minister to accept what had become our new revised

sanctions proposal. At his request, I wrote the minister a 20-page brief

on the topic. He read it that night and the next day deployed it to

devastating effect. Ivanov appeared completely stunned.

After several tortuous months of the review, we managed to agree inside

the Foreign Office on what we should do. The summary of the idea was

simple: the present situation was that Iraq was not allowed to import

anything except those goods which were explicitly approved by the UN

Sanctions Committee. Now, we would allow Iraq to import anything except

those items which were explicitly prohibited. A sort of reversal. The

concept was neat — good for soundbites — but the details were

complicated and difficult. Moreover, before we could even begin to

persuade the Security Council to adopt the new system, we had to

persuade the Americans. This was to prove much harder than we

anticipated, because the State Department, unlike the British

government, was under no political pressure to alter sanctions at all.

On the contrary, they were worried that any new system would be

condemned by the Republican right as “going soft” on Saddam (this was

during the last days of the Clinton administration). The complexity of

the policy also meant that our ministers were rarely able to exert any

leverage in their contacts with the Americans (leaving it to the

officials, invariably). However, long sessions at “State” (as we

insiders call it) and endless cajoling telegrams to get “London” to

pressure “Washington” eventually had their effect.

And so, with the Americans somewhat reluctantly on board, we went to the

Security Council and proposed our new measure, soon to be characterised

by the press, though never by us, as “smart sanctions” (inviting the

obvious retort, from Iraq’s Deputy Prime minister Tariq Aziz, that

previous sanctions had been “stupid”). And thus it was that I found

myself chairing a meeting of the Security Council “experts” to try to

get them to agree to it. (Since it was our proposal, we had taken it

upon ourselves to convene and chair the meetings.)

It was at first a thrill to negotiate international law for one’s

country. When I first did it, at the beginning of my tour in New York, I

would bound out of bed every morning at the excitement of the prospect.

I remember being so thrilled that I whooped to myself in the shower:

wow, this was the business, the hard core. But by the time we came to

negotiate “smart sanctions” (we soon wearily accepted the name; everyone

else was using it), I was a little more jaded. This was my seventh

“rollover” of the Oil-for-Food programme. Most of the “experts” had

changed, but the arguments had remained the same. Indeed, it felt as if

I was stuck in an unfunny diplomatic version of “Groundhog Day” with the

same episode being replayed over and over again. You say “civilian

deprivation”; I say “Iraqi non-cooperation”. Fresh ideas were hard to

come by, and even when they appeared, they were invariably rejected.

This new initiative — smart sanctions — was fresher and better than

most, but our clever new weapon failed to alter the nature of the war —

we were back in the trenches, hurling the same old canards, and I was

still stuck in that same horrid airless NAM caucus room.

This time round the atmosphere was particularly bad. Years of argument

had entrenched deep animosities among the “experts”. National

differences had become personal feuds. When the American delegate spoke,

the French would stare at the ceiling and smirk. When the French had

their turn, the Americans would shuffle their papers and whisper to one

another. It was unpleasant to be in that room. And it became clear, soon

after we began, that we would be stuck there for a very long time.

The Americans felt that since they were offering such a massive new

concession, everyone should gratefully accept it without question. The

French and Russians, unaccustomed to such flexibility, were

exaggeratedly suspicious, querying every tiny detail for fear that we

were deceitfully introducing some new and unwarranted means of control.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi government hated the new scheme, realising that if

it worked as we hoped, it would remove once and for all the humanitarian

argument to lift sanctions. To what extent their opposition to the

initiative played a part in French and Russian hostility, I do not know

and only those governments could answer (and they will not do so), but

the fact that the Iraqi government was so implacably against the scheme

did nothing to help our cause, whatever the cynicism lying behind their

reasons. All this produced the ingredients for yet another nasty, slow

and unproductive negotiation.

After the talks began late one week, I returned to London to attend the

wedding of an old friend. The event was a respite from my dessicating

work in New York and the singing of the choir uplifted me. On the flight

back to New York, an idea occurred to me. The following Monday, my

colleague and I took a portable music player into the NAM caucus room. I

made a suggestion. Why didn’t we take it in turns to play a song at the

beginning of each session?

I turned to my colleague, and he turned on a CD from the British singer,

formerly of The Jam, Paul Weller:

Day by day

Going, just where I’m going

Getting to where

We should be going

The delegates would usually fidget and chatter at the beginning of each

session. It would take several minutes for people to settle down and

work, and longer still for them to listen to each other. This time it

was different. Silence fell as the song began; a sense of tranquillity

spread among us. I caught the eye of the Bangladeshi delegate and he

smiled. After the song, I asked G. to explain why he had chosen it and

why he liked it. The other delegates listened quietly. And, when we

began our discussions, going line-by-line through the draft resolution

we had proposed, the rancour and acidulous tone of earlier sessions had

disappeared. The differences of substance were still as acute, but the

acrimony had passed. The next day the Chinese delegate brought in a

beautiful, haunting tune from medieval China relating, he told us, the

last moments of a doomed general as he faced his enemy. The day after

that, the Bangladeshi brought in a love song, sung by a shepherd in the

vast delta at the heart of that country, a song of unrequited love.

And so the negotiations proceeded. One afternoon, the Reuters

correspondent at the UN telephoned me at the mission. She had seen us

carrying the music player into the NAM caucus room. The French delegate

had told her what it was for. She asked me to confirm the story and,

since there was no point in denying it, I did. She ran the story, and

from there, things began to get out of hand. Just as our own discussions

bore precious little relation to the realities of life in Iraq, the

representations of our music initiative had even scantier connection to

what was going on in that little room. The BBC got hold of the story and

managed to interview Paul Weller about the use of his song. Generously,

he said he was pleased and that it was somehow appropriate that we had

used his song to calm hostilities because it was about love. They also

interviewed a professor of music, who was intrigued that we had chosen

non-linguistic negotiating techniques. The British press began to run

the story, as did some of the US press. Then the Iraqi ambassador was

interviewed about it and expressed his outrage that we were trivialising

the fate of his people. Inspired perhaps by this, the Tunisian

ambassador raised a complaint in a formal session of the Security

Council (his delegate in the room had told me he had enjoyed the music

and was busy planning his own song). We had to stop. But the story did

not need our music to keep running. It now circled the world with

articles in Europe, Asia and, above all, the Middle East. An

anti-sanctions campaigner wrote to a mass-market British newspaper

saying that I was a disgrace to the British foreign service.

It was uncomfortable for once to be the object rather than the subject.

Diplomats, particularly British ones who speak with a comfortable

anonymity (“British diplomats said”, “Western officials commented”), are

used to privacy. Only rarely do we find ourselves in the ungenerous

light of publicity. At first, I enjoyed the attention and felt rather

clever and pleased with myself (a German diplomat approached me in the

corridors of the UN and said it was the coolest thing he’d ever heard

of). As the commentary turned more critical, I naturally liked it less

and I began to realise how our actions would be seen. We were used to

carrying on in private — now for once, our machinations were public and

it became clear that the world, when it saw what we were up to, would

not be wholly approving. The music in the Security Council became a

Rorschach test for the Iraqi sanctions debate. In the US press, and

mostly in the British press too, in such comment as there was, this was

an amusing, somewhat curious little incident.[17] In the Arab press, our

music was seen as yet another example of the crass inhumanity of western

diplomats, dancing on the graves of Iraqi children.

The negotiations moved on to the deadline of the end of that six-month

span of the Oil-for-Food programme. Music notwithstanding, we failed to

overcome the objections of the Russians (the French came around sooner):

there were more questions over the contents of the lists of prohibited

items than there was time to resolve, and for months to come the US was

mired in highly complex negotiations over the specifications of

prohibited goods.[18] Iraqi resistance remained intractable. Our smart

sanctions would have to wait for the next rollover six months later,

when they were at last agreed. G. was in charge of the negotiations this

time: I had volunteered to serve a brief spell in our embassy in Kabul.

There was no music, just G’s quiet professionalism to guide the

negotiations. And they managed to agree. But by then Washington was well

on its way to deciding an altogether different course, and smart

sanctions was no longer seen as the necessary redeemer of a bad policy.

Sanctions on Iraq were inhumane and I was intimately involved in both

their maintenance and their design. Many people suffered as a result of

our misconceived policy. Somehow, in our creation of two irreconcilable

narratives of what was “really” going on, reality — at least that of the

Iraqi people — got lost. How did this happen?

A traditional analysis would portray this episode as a tale of an

inevitable collision of the irreconcilable interests of nation states

sitting on the Council. US interests were to maintain sanctions (despite

the later claims of the US and UK governments, our internal assessments

were that sanctions were highly effective in preventing significant

rearmament by Iraq). British interests were to ameliorate the effects of

sanctions in order to improve their international acceptability, and

thus to maintain them. The Russians and French would say that their

interest was to make sure that our new sanctions initiative did not in

fact make matters worse for the Iraqi population (there were indeed some

grounds for supposing that the elaborate new system we had designed

would, at least initially, make it more complicated to export goods to

Iraq). But both of course had substantial economic interests at stake

too: the Iraqi regime had signed contracts with a number of Russian,

French and Chinese oil companies for the exploitation of Iraq’s enormous

reserves when sanctions were lifted.

Put more critically, all of us were failing in our responsibility under

the UN charter to maximise security and minimise suffering. Russian and

French intransigence no doubt gave great comfort to the Iraqi government

in its campaign to resist cooperation with the Security Council. I have

little hesitation in saying this: Iraqi diplomats would tell me so, as

they crowed that sanctions were crumbling and it was we, the UK and the

US, who were isolated in the world, not them. Meanwhile, I have equally

little doubt that, for our part, although we may not have had legal

responsibility for the welfare of the Iraqi people, we had a moral

responsibility. We should have done a lot more a lot sooner to reduce

the unquestionably harmful effects of sanctions. It would be too easy to

blame this on the Americans, and indeed they were even less inclined to

ease sanctions than the British were, but we could have done more, a lot

more. There were good alternatives, which were never properly

pursued.[19]

Another form of analysis would see this as a story of bad group

dynamics, with young to middle-aged people, mostly men, arguing and not

listening, refusing to accord to one another even the possibility that

they might be right. And indeed there was something ugly going on in

that group. Petty rivalries and animosities were allowed to influence

debate on a much larger issue. To my shame I remember the pleasure I

felt at my little triumphs, such as when the UK draft resolution became

the only draft under discussion and the rival French draft fell away,

irrelevant and defeated like a vanquished knight (not for nothing is the

entrance to the British ambassador’s residence in New York lined with

prints of Waterloo). We would whine to our ambassador when the French

had been particularly rude, and, like a good Dad, he would ring up the

French ambassador to admonish him. It was more than a little childish.

But there was something else going on too, something that my account may

have made clear to the reader but did not become clear to me until long

after I left the mission. We believed that we were dealing with real

facts and real people. We had a positive belief in information. Our

information was good; our opponents’ was biased. And of course they

believed the opposite. One of us must have been wrong.

If, instead of playing music, we could have transported ourselves to the

ward of a children’s hospital in Saddam city, a slum of Baghdad, or to a

school; if we could have spent six months in Iraq instead of six months

in negotiation, then things might have been different. I suspect — I do

not know, and never will — that our arguments would have subsided and we

would have sought instead to find practical ways to do something. My

colleagues and I spent many hours dreaming up schemes to try to improve

conditions in Iraq (history will not long remember the “cash component”,

a scheme to allow the UN to fund projects with direct cash locally,

rather than having to import all goods through the Oil-for-Food

programme). None of them came to anything. When we proposed them, they

were blocked. When our opponents advocated similar ideas, we were

truculent. We once proposed a visit by a team of “objective”

UN-appointed experts (real experts this time, not the diplomats):

although we managed to get the Council to agree the initiative, the

Iraqi government refused to allow them in. I even applied to visit

myself in order to see with my own eyes (one’s own eyes of course being

entirely reliable witnesses of the “truth”): the Iraqi government denied

my visa application. Absent any encounter with reality, we worked in a

futile abstraction.

Of course all information, whoever mediates it, is something less than

what it is describing. No amount of statistics can convey the bottomless

agony of the loss of a child. No words, especially the dry vocabulary of

official reports, can capture what suffering is. It is a long way

between New York and Baghdad. Whenever information made the journey,

something was lost en route. It would have taken a huge leap of

imagination sitting in a stuffy room on the banks of the East River to

think about the real needs of Iraqi people: not in dollars and tons, but

in human, emotional terms. Occasionally I tried, but it was too

uncomfortable and unpleasant. I could not, for example, bring myself to

watch John Pilger’s film until long after I left the job. I didn’t want

to know what was happening there: it was easier to dismiss Pilger as a

polemicist and carry on with our own version of reality.

One thing about this debate is now clear to me. We chose the “facts” to

suit the policy, and not the other way around. Had we been confronted

with the unarguable truth of actual experience, we would not have found

it so easy to do this. It was not only the junior diplomats in New York

who were busy creating our own versions of what was “really” happening,

it was the entire government. While we were arguing in New York, London

would encourage us on. Together we would read the same reports from the

UN in order to find in them even more egregious examples of Iraqi

malfeasance, the more easily to argue our case that it was “all the

Iraqi government’s fault”. Indeed there was plenty of such evidence. I

clearly remember, dismal though the memory is, skim-reading dense and

poorly-written UN reports, looking for the key sentences (“There has yet

to be sufficient cooperation from the Iraqi government in implementing

this aspect of the programme”) to highlight in our telegrams back to

London and then deploy like hand grenades in the negotiations. These

sentences would stand out to me as if in bold type while the more

nuanced information would fade almost literally into nothingness; and

they became mini-factoids that would assume a life of their own,

replayed first in our telegrams, then picked out by a desk officer in

London for a ministerial press conference. If the minister remembered

this factoid, he might use it in other interviews, and round and round

it went.

This is not a problem that was unique to the arguments over Iraqi

sanctions. It is common to all foreign policy and, despite the explosion

of “information” in today’s e-world, it seems to be getting worse. For

the greater the amount of information, the greater the need for

simplifying narratives to “explain” what is going on.

All information, however comprehensive it attempts to be, inevitably

embodies a selection and reduction from reality. No one sees with the

eyes of god. In the mass of available information, inevitable selections

have to be made about what to use in order to decide policy. In the

British foreign service, there is an all-too-human tendency to seek out

and relay the information that confirms our view of the world. And the

further away one is from reality, the worse the tendency is. We were

6,000 miles from the Iraqi reality we were arbitrating; there were times

when we might as well have been talking about the surface of the moon.

There is a belief in government that we, the policymakers, sit at the

apex of a pyramid of information. No one in government is silly enough

to believe that they know everything, but they have great faith that as

the information about reality at the base of the pyramid is passed

upward, only its unnecessary elements are filtered away, leaving only

the essential “facts” for those at the summit on which to base their

decisions. Civil service culture in Britain reifies the skill of taking

large quantities of information and reducing it to the key essentials

(the testing of this skill is a central part of the entrance

examinations). From what I have seen of Germany and the US (two foreign

services which I know better than others), other government services

value this skill too. And it is easy to see why. The world is a

complicated place. There is far too much information about everything.

Decision-makers cannot possibly absorb all the information available, so

they rely on reductions performed by those lower down the pyramid. But,

as this episode illustrates, sometimes at least, what is essential may

not be what is presented to the decision-maker; and indeed it may be the

very thing that is left out. What was essential about decisions about

sanctions on Iraq? I would argue that at least part of what was

essential was the condition of the Iraqi people: their reality. And that

reality played very little part in our deliberations. We talked about

it; we even claimed to care about it (remember the phrase which must

have tripped across ministerial tongues a thousand times, “We have no

quarrel with the Iraqi people”?). We thought we were talking about

facts, or at least representations of facts, but they were the wrong

ones.

Although we were wrong, we were confident in our wrongness. There were

many others telling us we were wrong, but we ignored them. UN staff

members, NGOs, ordinary Iraqis (including those who opposed Saddam)

would tell us that sanctions were causing considerable suffering. But

our assigned roles as diplomats gave us the confidence, some would say

arrogance, to dismiss their concerns. They were suspect, politicised,

motivated by sentiment or politics, whereas our motives rested on the

elevated plane of diplomacy; if these motives were not pure, they were

nonetheless the right ones for this discourse: we had “our” security,

the region’s security, even the world’s security at heart.

Our physical location made such insouciance easier. It was very

difficult for lobbyists or activists to know who we were. If they

managed to identify us, it was harder still for them to meet us. We

could simply refuse, leaving demonstrators to yell on the streets

outside, far below our offices many storeys in the air. Our negotiations

took place in small rooms deep inside the UN complex, inaccessible to

all except those delegations allowed to attend. The press and outsiders

could not get near. Since 9/11 the fencing and the security checks

around these bastions of diplomacy have only become thicker.

If dissenters ever did manage to meet us, we could easily dismiss their

arguments. Even if misguided, we were highly versed in the facts and

nuances of the sanctions debate. Steeped in the reports, arguments and

counter-arguments, we could easily outmanoeuvre the earnest campaigners

who came to present an alternative view, one perhaps more closely

aligned to “reality”.

The lesson is clear. Like the world, policy is complicated. At all

times, the suffering of others should be given due heed, even priority

above all other requirements. Policy-making does not benefit from

secrecy or privacy. Karl Popper told us this many decades ago, but we

have not yet learned his lesson. Information is not reliable, unless it

is constantly re-examined, checked and tested against reality. Others,

particularly those most affected by policy, must be allowed to

participate, or at least to be heard.

4. WAR STORIES

WMD and Noble Half-Truths

Years after the United States and Britain invaded Iraq, the world

remains polarised over the war. Supporters thought it necessary, while

many opponents believe a false case was deliberately manufactured for

it.[20]

This allegation has been reinforced by the discovery of a putative

intellectual justification for such deceit, the idea of the “noble lie”

propagated by the late University of Chicago philosopher Leo Strauss,

one of the strongest intellectual influences on the neo-conservatives.

According to Strauss, élites in liberal societies must sometimes create

“myths” to hold those societies together, for fear that they would

otherwise collapse through selfishness and individualism.

One such myth is the enemy, the threat, the identification and combating

of which forces society to cohere and unite. Once that enemy was the

Soviet Union and communism; today it is Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s

weapons of mass destruction.

This is a big allegation and it is a toxic dispute, poisonous to both

domestic and international reputations, the cause of both angry

accusation and equally bitter rebuttal. But perhaps the story of

sanctions policymaking in the Security Council can help throw light on

the argument.

While the two “sides” in the Security Council composed incompatible

narratives of what was going on with sanctions against Iraq, both

comprised and reinforced by partial selections of facts, something

similar was going on in the story of Iraq and its weapons of mass

destruction. This neither confirms nor fully refutes the “noble lie”

thesis of deliberate deceit. It suggests, rather, a more complex and

subtle, and if anything more disturbing, story.

Here the basis of evidence was not the UN, NGO or other reports on

sanctions or sanctions-busting, many of which suffered their own

peculiar biases and flaws, but a resource that is unavoidably

unreliable, namely secret intelligence. Particularly after inspectors

were withdrawn in late 1998, the available intelligence on Iraq was

severely limited. Whatever Saddam had or did, he concealed under roofs

or underground, and there is no aircraft or satellite camera yet

invented that can penetrate there.

Both the United States and Britain were thus forced to rely on that most

unreliable reporter of facts — human beings (or “humint” as it is

known). In addition, there was the expert knowledge of the many

inspectors who had visited Iraq’s WMD sites and spoken with Iraqi

officials and scientists. Despite these difficulties, the picture that

emerged in the late 1990s and into 2002 was reasonably consistent.

This was that Iraq was not rearming to any great extent, that there were

still questions about its disposal of past stocks of weapons, but in

summary that the policy of containment was working. Inevitably, there

were unanswered questions — unconfirmed reports of attempted imports of

dual-use materials that might be used to produce WMD and possibilities

that the unaccounted-for dozen or so Scud missiles might still exist and

be reassembled (not one was found postwar). But there was nothing that

would suggest significant rearmament or intent to attack Iraq’s

neighbours, let alone Britain. The Butler Report[21] gives a similar

account.

Yet, by September 2002, both the US and UK governments were claiming

that Iraq was a significant threat, citing clear and authoritative

intelligence evidence of rearmament and attempts to acquire nuclear,

biological and chemical weapons. The US government went further,

suggesting that Saddam Hussein, Al-Qaeda and 9/11 were somehow

connected. Bush began to juxtapose Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein in

adjacent sentences, never quite claiming a proven connection, but

deliberately implying some kind of link. The implication, still repeated

to this day by members of the Bush administration, was refuted by the

9/11 Commission. Even at the time of the war, Britain’s Secret

Intelligence Service (SIS) let it be known publicly that this suggestion

had no foundation.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn cites a number

of studies where scientists with different paradigmatic views observe

different patterns in the same data — what he calls a switch in the

visual Gestalt. For example, looking at a contour map, a student sees

lines on a paper, a cartographer a picture of terrain. Only once trained

will the student see the same as the cartographer, even though the data

he is observing have not changed.

Both the British Prime Minister, to the Butler Review, and the former US

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have admitted publicly (long after the

war) that what changed before the war was not the evidence of Iraqi

weapons but, in the new post-9/11 light, the appraisal of that evidence.

The Prime Minister told the Butler Review: “after September 11^(th) it

took on a completely different aspect...what changed for me with

September 11^(th) was that I thought then you have to change your

mindset...you have to go out and get after the different aspects of this

threat...you have to deal with this because otherwise the threat will

grow...”.

This rings true and is understandable. An event of the horror and

magnitude of 9/11 should have changed our appreciation of the dangers of

WMD and non-compliance with international law. It represented, for good

or ill, a paradigm shift in the way our leaders saw the world. But it

appears that not only did the appraisal change but so, crucially, did

the presentation of that appraisal, and the evidence justifying it to

the public.

No doubt other factors were at play. There is a tendency in government

to see intelligence material as being at the pinnacle of the hierarchy

of information. Unlike the voluminous flow of diplomatic telegrams,

memos and open-source information that hits computers on desks across

government every day, intelligence arrives in slim folders, adorned with

colourful stickers announcing not only the secrecy of the information

therein but the restricted circulation it enjoys. The impression thus

given, a product of these aesthetics, is of access to the real thing,

the secret core denied to all but the elite few.

History gives an interesting example of this phenomenon, namely the case

of the Zinoviev letter. In 1924 Britain’s Foreign Office was sent a copy

of a letter, purporting to come from Grigori Zinoviev, the president of

the Soviet Comintern, addressed to the central committee of the

Communist Party of Great Britain. The letter urged the party to stir up

the British proletariat in preparation for class war. The letter then

appeared in the press, causing immense political and diplomatic

repercussions. It was a major embarrassment for the Prime Minister,

Ramsay MacDonald, and the governing Labour Party. The opposition

Conservatives won the general election four days later. Relations

between Britain and the Soviet Union soured, and Anglo-Soviet treaties

were abandoned.

Only in 1999, when the then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook ordered an

investigation of Britain’s official archives, was it confirmed that the

Zinoviev letter was a fake. The fake was believed as genuine by the

Foreign Office, the archives revealed, because it came from the Secret

Intelligence Service (this an observation from the Foreign Office’s own

archival investigation).

An additional factor in Iraq was also that many of the human sources of

intelligence had an understandable interest in exaggerating what they

were reporting, not least because they wanted to encourage the overthrow

of a regime they hated. The role of the Iraqi National Congress, the key

Iraqi opposition group before the war, in providing “humint” is now

well-known. But, interestingly, the Butler Review discounts this factor,

pointing instead to the SIS’s failure to validate its sources properly,

the long reporting chains and the sources’ lack of expertise on what

they were reporting.

Back in the capitals, there is meanwhile an invisible undertow at work

on the civil servants who collate and analyse this information. If

ministers want a particular story to emerge, it has a way of emerging:

the facts are made to fit the policy. It takes a brave if not foolhardy

civil servant to resist this tide. This is not to claim that there was

some secret cubicle in Whitehall (or Washington) where evidence of

Iraq’s weapons was deliberately fabricated, but something more subtle:

evidence is selected from the available mass, contradictions are

excised, and the selected data are repeated, rephrased, polished (and

spun, if you prefer), until it seems neat, coherent and convincing, to

the extent that those presenting it may believe it fully themselves.

All of these reasons will have contributed to a considerable bias in the

information that the government received and the analyses then produced

on Iraq’s WMD. All of these reasons should have inspired caution; any

assessment based on such information should have been heavily caveated.

But, as the Butler Report relates, instead of transmitting these caveats

in its public presentations, such as the infamous Number 10 dossier, the

government left them out. What was broadcast to the public was in effect

not the summit of a hierarchy of information but a selection from a

spectrum of information, a spectrum that ranged from the

well-established to the highly speculative, and the selection came from

the wrong end. Just as I once produced one-sided arguments to justify

sanctions by ignoring all contrary evidence, the government produced a

highly one-sided account of inherently unreliable information.

Of course governments in all democracies put forward one-sided accounts

of policy. Economic statistics are always presented with the positive

numbers in the forefront, the negative sidelined to footnotes or

ignored. Civil servants are highly skilled in slanting information in

this way. But there should be limits. When seeking to justify military

action, the government has a duty to tell the whole truth, not just a

partial account of it.

Something else was going on too. As the drums of war beat louder in

Washington, both the US and UK governments became more strident in

dismissing containment or other alternatives to all-out invasion. Bush

declared sanctions to be as full of holes as a Swiss cheese; the Prime

Minister, Tony Blair, even once, bizarrely, argued that military action

was preferable to the distress caused by sanctions. Sanctions were

crumbling, the public was told (as it still is today). These governments

gave the impression that all alternatives had been exhausted; war was

the only option.

This was not in fact the case. There was a viable alternative. Effective

action to seize Saddam Hussein’s illegal financial assets and block oil

smuggling would have denied him the resources which sustained his power:

sanctions on the regime, and not its long-suffering people. For many

years before the war this alternative was unfortunately never pursued

with the necessary energy or commitment. The reasons for this are not

immediately obvious.

Such a policy would have required consistent pressure across the region,

applied to all of Iraq’s neighbours. And, for different reasons in each

case, it wasn’t pursued with sufficient vigour. Senior envoys and

ministers only rarely or half-heartedly mentioned smuggling in bilateral

contacts, thereby implying toleration. Gradually it came to be

understood that certain of Iraq’s neighbours were “allowed” to import

illegal oil, undermining attempts to deal with even the most egregious

sanctions-busters.

Meanwhile, back in the Security Council, any attempt we made to propose

collective action against smuggling was invariably blocked by France or

Russia, on the alleged grounds that there was insufficient proof of the

smuggling, or that such action might further harm Iraq’s people. I lost

count of the number of times we inserted provisions for

sanctions-monitoring units, or other exhortations for action, into draft

Council resolutions, only to have diplomats from these countries strike

them out in negotiation (as veto-wielding permanent members, their

acquiescence was essential for every dot and comma). The US and UK

governments now like to claim that this was the reason sanctions failed

(when in doubt, blame the French); some even claim that the UN itself

connived at corruption to benefit Saddam Hussein (an allegation for

which there is scant evidence).[22] But, in truth, we too exerted

precious little energy to enforce controls. While in New York we argued

ourselves hoarse in negotiation, Washington and London rarely lifted a

finger to pressure Iraq’s neighbours to stem the illegal flows.

An effective anti-smuggling policy would have required an over-arching

and long-term strategy, addressing problems in a variety of different

areas ranging from illegal bank accounts to cross-border oil smuggling.

Such a strategy was never implemented. Instead there were piecemeal and

ineffective efforts.

I suspect that the reason for this perhaps lies in the universal human

truth that what can be left until later usually is, until it is too

late. The policy was difficult, complex and unfashionable, demanding

extensive study to master and discuss, a luxury that busy ministers and

senior officials do not enjoy. It was never the first or most glamorous

priority, so it was allowed to slide.

In the end, when contrasted with the complexity and uncertainty of the

alternatives, war may have seemed simpler. In the strange way that

governments are swept along by events without properly stopping to

think, war came to be seen as the only viable course, a current no doubt

strengthened in Britain by the clear determination in Washington, now

amply chronicled (in Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack, among others), to

pursue conflict.

It would undoubtedly have taken considerable political and diplomatic

effort to corral Iraq’s neighbours and other states into this alternate

course. It would not have had the binary clarity of winning or losing a

war. But this effort would certainly have been less than that of going

to war, and it had the real potential to remove the regime by cutting

away the funds that sustained it. Above all, this approach would not

have incurred the sacrifice of Iraqi, British, American and other lives.

If Iraq was not a threat and not collaborating with terrorists, why did

the Bush and Blair governments go to war with it? Several plausible

explanations have been offered by others: the US administration’s need

after 9/11 to demonstrate its power — anywhere, anyhow; a mission

civilisatrice to democratise the world by force, an impulse given

strength by the vigorous and forceful lobby of the Iraqi opposition. But

less credible, given the record on sanctions, is the claim that the

welfare of the Iraqi people was the primary concern.

Another possible explanation lies in the more sinister motives of oil

and its control. The prospect of Iraq’s huge reserves (the second

largest in the world) hung in the air throughout the policy

deliberations in the years before the war. It was well-known that Saddam

Hussein had allocated all the massively lucrative post-sanctions

exploration contracts to French, Chinese, Russian and other non-US and

non-British companies (and it bothered the companies a lot, as they

would tell us). It is hard to believe that the immense potential for

money-making and energy security did not exert some pull in the decision

to invade, but the evidence for some sort of conspiracy led by Big Oil

is hard to come by. But again, we do not know, because we have not been

told. Instead we were given not the “noble lie”, but the somewhat

less-than-noble half-truth. The full answer will perhaps be revealed by

the chief protagonists in years to come. For now, all we can know for

sure is that the empirical reasons these governments have given so far

simply do not add up.

Perhaps, therefore, a non-empirical reason is at the heart of this. They

did it because they thought it was right. Saddam Hussein was a bad man,

a potential danger in the future, not today. And this, if true, is a

legitimate reason, or at least arguable. Unfortunately, it is neither

the primary reason both governments gave the UN or their peoples for

going to war (though both President Bush and Prime Minister Blair allude

to it with ever greater frequency), nor is it justifiable in any canon

of international law (although perhaps it should be).

And here we return to Leo Strauss: not to the “noble lie”, but to his

belief in “natural law”, a fundamental, sometimes religious (though

Strauss, I read, was an atheist) sense of right and wrong, a right and

wrong superior to all other laws — including, it seems in this case,

international law. Both leaders have said in the past that they believe

in such rules, as I suspect most of us do in some way. And it is perhaps

the readiness of voters, especially in the US, to accept this reasoning

that lies behind the curious phenomenon that, although the evidence that

these governments misled their peoples was soon clear, neither Bush nor

Blair paid any immediate political price for it.

In the 2004 presidential elections the allegation of lying, noble or

otherwise, and the decidedly ambiguous course of the resulting war did

not turn the people against their chosen president. His “natural law”

argument — that it was right to remove the Iraqi dictator — sufficed,

even when the empirical evidence did not. Tony Blair likewise was

comfortably re-elected in Britain in 2005.

Political theorists of the twenty-first century have much to feed on in

this analysis: it is a story rich in paradox and contradiction, from

which it is hard to divine rational inferences or laws. The governments

did not manufacture lies, but neither did they tell the truth, even when

they thought they did. These half-truths, moreover, bore no relation

whatever to the real truth of what was actually going on in Iraq (no

terrorists, no WMD). And in the end, the electors, in the name of whose

security and safety the whole exercise was undertaken, do not seem to

care much either way. In this picture it seems that neither Strauss nor

Plato (who in fact originated the “noble lie”) nor anyone else is much

of a guide. Things seem altogether less ordered and coherent than any

logical analysis would have it. The key actors claim to have agency, to

make rational decisions, but in fact are swept along by forces they

cannot grasp. Laws of democracy and morality give way: the law of chaos

instead must hold sway.

Here may be the biggest misperception of all, though not a lie, since it

is hardly conscious. This is a misperception — a fiction, if you like —

in which governments and governed collaborate, for to believe otherwise

is too uncomfortable. And this is that governments, politicians and

civil servants are able to observe the world without bias and

disinterestedly interpret its myriad signs into facts and judgments

(indeed, in the Foreign Office, telegrams are divided into these two

very categories: “Detail” and “Comment”) with an objective, almost

scientific rigour. The story of what these two governments observed,

believed and then told their populations about Iraq suggests an

altogether more imperfect reality.

5. THEM AND US

Essentialism and the Cult of “We”

“Nations! What are nations? Tartars, and Huns, and Chinamen! Like

insects, they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them

memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so many men. It is

individuals that populate the world.”

Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle

Diplomacy is often compared to games like chess. Indeed, chess pieces

frequently adorn the covers of books or websites about diplomacy.

Diplomacy is depicted as an intricate sport where victory is the object,

and the movements, motives and capabilities of the teams are finite and

knowable, even if they can be complex.[23]

In order to play chess, you need two sides, clearly delineated: one

white, one black. So it is to play diplomacy. In order for diplomacy to

function as a discourse, to make any sense, and to perpetuate itself in

its current form, the sides involved are required to delineate

themselves into discrete sets: Us and Them.

Essentialising Us

When a diplomat speaks to the microphone outside the UN Security Council

or is interviewed on CNN, invariably he or she will talk about “we”.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice does it, the State Department press

spokesman does it. Individual diplomats do it.

“We seek the disarmament of Iran and are dissatisfied with their

assurances to date.”

“We welcome the recent elections in Ukraine.”

“Our interests in China versus those in Taiwan dictate the continuation

of the One-China policy.”

This was how I spoke with journalists. It was how I talked in

negotiations with other diplomats: “We do not agree with your proposed

text for paragraph 12 of the resolution and instead offer the following

words…”. Even in our internal meetings, we spoke in this way: “This

morning our objective in the Security Council discussion should be to…”.

Our internal telegrams discussing policy discussed what “we” should do

about country x or y.

This manner of speaking is a reflection of the way the world is.

International relations is seen, and practised, very much as a business

of states interacting with one another, with diplomats the formal

exponents of that process, authorised to speak in the name of their

state. Chinese diplomats will speak of China’s wishes as those of a

single entity, despite the massive size and diversity of that country.

It is an expression of the reality that the state remains, for good or

ill, the organising unit of contemporary international affairs.

It may therefore seem naïve — even quixotic — to question whether such a

system is the right one. But delving into the process by which a group

of people are assigned the right to determine (or even invent) the

wishes of the state reveals some troubling insights. In order for the

diplomat to articulate his country’s wishes, those wishes must be boiled

down into a discrete set of desiderata. This process inevitably involves

simplification but, as we see in the next chapter, it is an arbitrary

process and one resting on some questionable assumptions of what foreign

policy is “about”. The creation of a separate political and moral

identity for a group of people — the policymakers of foreign policy —

must inevitably risk artifice, arbitrariness and, as I have argued

elsewhere, a lack of accountability.

If the diplomatic “we” is arbitrating what the state wants (and thus how

the world is run), how is this identity developed and maintained, and

what values does it embody? In short, who is “we”?

Before I joined the British diplomatic service, I gave little thought to

what it was to be British. I was just me. But by some subterranean and

unexplained process when you join the Foreign Office, you begin to

identify yourself with the state. In both speech, writing, and — more

insidiously — thought, I became “we”. A singular became a plural. How

did this transformation take place?

When I entered the Foreign Office in 1989, all new entrants were

required to undergo what was called “induction training”. Our group of

about a dozen eager twenty-somethings was sent to an otherwise anonymous

building off Millbank, near to the Houses of Parliament. Almost as soon

as my fellow new entrants and I were sitting in a large grey room where

our training took place, our instructor began to talk to us, and he

talked about “we”.

“I’m here to tell you about the way we do things in the Foreign Office”,

he said. We then learned about the correct way to address ministers, the

correct way to compose a minute (not a memo, but a minute), a telegram

and a submission. We learned that minutes (not memos) to

under-secretaries and above, including ministers, were to be written on

“blue” paper, or simply just “blue”. The only twist to this otherwise

straightforward procedure was that “blue” paper was in fact green, a

lovely twilled paper, rich and textured. Very expensive, it looked, and

very green. We were not told why blue was green. My fellow new entrants

and I were charmed by these quaint traditions.

But nor were we told who “we” were. It was simply assumed that “we” in

the Foreign Office were Britain. This assumption suffused everything we

were taught and subsequently did in our Foreign Office careers. It began

at the beginning and quickly became a habit of speech and writing. It

became a habit of thought: I became “we”. Even after I had resigned from

the Foreign Office, I found myself saying “we think that the Zimbabwean

government needs to…”. “We” was wired deep.

A feisty young diplomat from the British mission in Pretoria gave us a

lecture about how “we” thought sanctions on apartheid South Africa were

a bad idea (these were the days of Margaret Thatcher’s policy of

“constructive engagement”). A diplomatic dispatch was presented to us as

an example of how to write such pieces. In it, the ambassador wrote

about how “we” had got this country “wrong” and “we” needed a new

approach. In a number of different ways, we were taught how “we” saw the

world. What we were never taught, however, was how it was that “we” saw

the world that way. That “we” saw it that way and that “we” were the

arbiters of what Britain wanted was taken for granted.

Part of our training was a game. The Foreign Office invented a policy

exercise about a crisis in a fictional country called Boremeya and what

“we” should do about it. It was a good game, and fun. It lasted about a

day and consisted of crisis meetings, submissions to ministers (“make

sure to use the blue paper!”) and difficult encounters with the

Boremeyan Foreign Minister, played by one of our instructors. Throughout

the game, the new entrants were told to consider what “we” wanted or

needed in the situation. At several points, what we wanted was put into

other terms: what are our “interests” in this situation? A British

company was negotiating a contract with the Boremeyan government when a

political crisis erupted, forcing us to reappraise the situation and

advise the minister on what “our” policy should be.

The foreign services of other countries give more extended training to

their neophyte diplomats before letting them loose on the world. The

German foreign ministry, at the more intensive end of the spectrum,

requires its new entrants to spend two taxing years at the Auswärtiges

Amt’s training school, where they are taught a great deal of history,

diplomatic practice, rules of protocol and, above all, law.

Fully-qualified lawyers who join the German diplomatic service, and

there are many of them, are excused the second year of training. In

other words, all German diplomats have a minimum of one year’s fulltime

training in international law. We had none. If we wanted to learn about

international law we could, if we wished (it was entirely voluntary)

attend a two-week course at Cambridge University.

This thin education in law however did not prevent us from being told,

with frequent repetition, that Britain stood for the “rule of law” or a

“world of rules”. This was one of the core characteristics which British

diplomacy claimed to represent. Never was this statement of belief

analysed; it was presented to us as a given and one furthermore that we

should ourselves propagate henceforward. Although we were not taught

“the rule of law”, we were taught that British diplomats stood for it.

It was a similar story with economics. German diplomats-in-training

spent months learning economics. In the Foreign Office, those without

economics training were not encouraged to get any but, if they were so

disposed, they could attend another two-week training course which, it

was alleged, took the trainee to “degree level”. Again, this did not

prevent the repeated assertion of the belief that “Britain” and

therefore “we” believed in market economics and the promotion of trade

as core values.

Beyond the thought-habit of thinking as “we”, there is another way that

new diplomats are inculcated into identifying themselves with the state.

In the case of the British Foreign Office, it begins before you even

join, when you must undergo a process known as “positive vetting”. There

is a similar process in the US and other major foreign services.

After I had passed the many entrance exams and interviews to get into

the diplomatic service, the Security Department of the Foreign Office

assigned an investigator (in my case, a former policeman) to examine my

background, and quiz my acquaintances and friends, in order to ensure

that I would not pose a security risk to the government. Without this

clearance I could not begin work since much that the Foreign Office does

involves access to “Top Secret” material, the compromise of which, in

theory at least, poses a grave risk to the security of the state. Others

who had gone before told me that the process was straightforward “as

long as you don’t tell them anything”. Unfortunately for me, my personal

referees had already told my investigator various things, including the

fact that I occasionally drank too much at university and that I was

sharing a flat with a gay man. I took the naïve view that since I had

nothing in my life to be ashamed of, I would tell them the truth. This

approach proved to be a mistake.

My vetting took place as the Cold War was ending, in 1989. But the

Foreign Office still feared the pernicious attentions of the KGB and

others, and it was felt that being homosexual risked exposing the

officer to blackmail. It did not seem to have occurred to the mandarins

in charge of the Security Department that a blanket prohibition on

homosexuality was more likely to force serving or potential Foreign

Office officers to lie about their true sexual natures and thus increase

their vulnerability to blackmail.[24] So my vetting officer subjected me

to a long series of absurd and insulting questions about my sexuality,

culminating in the conclusive, “So you’ve never been tempted off the

straight and narrow then?”. To which I could honestly answer, “No”.

Meanwhile, my vetting officer had found out from my application forms

that my grandmother was Polish. Poland was at that time undergoing its

transition to democracy. But the inquisitor felt, following policy, that

the mere fact that I had Polish relations posed a security risk, since

the KGB might “get at” them and use them to “get at” me (it had happened

in the past when Poland was a vassal of the Soviet Union). My family was

thus forced to dig up long-buried family records and inform the Foreign

Office exactly when, where and how all my Polish ancestors had died (in

order that the KGB couldn’t discover their names and impersonate them to

“target” me). In the process, they made the upsetting discovery that

some of them, as members of the Polish resistance, had died in

Auschwitz.

I was obliged to attend several interviews with the investigator in a

sparse office in another anonymous building near Parliament Square,

furnished with sinister-looking steel filing cabinets. His desk, like

that of a film noir interrogator, had no papers and just one

government-issue swivel lamp, the only light in the otherwise gloomy

room. The interviews would sometimes last for hours. I wouldn’t be told

how long. My family and friends were at first amused by his questions,

but soon became irritated and in some cases deeply upset (my flatmate

was — understandably — especially offended).

My first entry date into the Foreign Office came and went, and I had not

passed my “PV” as positive vetting is known. My personnel officer seemed

to take pleasure in telling me that it was extremely unlikely that I

would eventually be allowed in. I swallowed these humiliations — I

wanted too badly to become a member of that rarefied species, a

diplomat. Meanwhile, I was forced to find temporary work for a further

few months until the next entry date came up when, against expectations,

the now-completed investigations had convinced The Office, as my

investigator called it (and as I too would come to know it), that I was

not gay, communist, a drunk, a drug addict or a debtor, and I was at

last invited to attend my first day of work.

The inculcation does not stop there. When you join the Foreign Office,

and once you have been “positively vetted”, you are required to sign the

Official Secrets Act. This draconian document comprises your agreement

never in your lifetime to reveal to outsiders or to publicise in any way

the content of your work. With astonishing breadth, the act defines the

information that you must protect to your grave as any official

business, determined by the government itself. In other words, anything

that you do in the course of your work is to be kept secret, forever.

Any revelation about what that work entailed (such as this book for

instance) is in theory a criminal offence. When I was offered the

document to sign (it was mailed to me at home), I did not hesitate. The

glamour of secrecy lured me in, and I simply never believed that the day

might come when its strictures might seem more a threat than an

invitation.

The signature of the Official Secrets Act marks one initiation into the

culture of secrecy that pervades government, and particularly those

parts of it dealing with foreign policy. When you learn how to handle

documents, for instance, you are taught that the originator of the

document must classify it, using designations starting with “restricted”

up to “top secret”. You are taught that only those documents that would

not perturb you if they were handed out to passers-by on the street can

be designated “unclassified”. Unsurprisingly therefore, almost every

document produced inside the Foreign Office is classified “restricted”

or above.

This culture is constantly reinforced throughout one’s career. Telegrams

are transmitted only when highly encrypted. All computers are hardened

against electronic eavesdropping. Telephones carry stickers warning

against divulging state confidences. So many and so ubiquitous are these

limitations that it is soon clear that the only people one can discuss

candidly what “we” are doing are one’s colleagues — other members of the

club of “we”. For what “we” are doing is the affairs of state, and other

states might try to find out our secrets; therefore one should only talk

to people with a “need to know”. This excludes almost everyone,

including those in whose name “we” are acting.

The creation of the identity of a British diplomat, the exponent of the

state, can seem a process which is innocent, unloaded and necessary. It

could be argued that such a process is requisite for the international

system the world today enjoys. States interact in this system; therefore

the system requires exponents of the state’s wishes, steeped in the

richest sense of what their nation stands for. But my experience

suggests that intrinsic in this process of diplomatic identity-creation

is something dangerous.

In spite of the almost complete absence of outside scrutiny, the British

Foreign Office does not “do” self-criticism. Embedded within the

acculturation process is a deep sense that “we” are in the right. From

the day I stepped into the training department, to the day I left my

last full job at the UK Mission in New York, it was part of the air I

breathed that what “we” were offering the world was good. The world’s

oldest parliamentary democracy, a successful economy, an ancient

culture, we represented the acme of what the rest of the world should

aspire to. We were moreover pragmatic and “sensible” (never idealist,

that was too romantic and therefore silly). American diplomacy, though

marked with different emphases (the infinitely variable notion of

“freedom”),[25] is little different. Even when our motives were

transparently different, we were encouraged, subtly and through

imitation, to claim that we were offering others versions of ourselves:

our democracy, our laws, our “values”. In Afghanistan in 2002, our

policy was framed as the delivery of stability and democracy, even when

our motive was solely (and not illegitimately) our own security. I

believed this identity: it made me feel better (particularly when

defending the effects of sanctions in Iraq) and it gave me purpose. I

only stopped believing it when the contrary evidence became too

compelling to ignore. And even then the abandonment of this persona was

a painful and drawn-out business.

This self-regard breeds a pervasive complacency. If our motives are

always pure, it follows that “we” cannot be wrong. When Britain failed

to secure the infamous “second” resolution authorising an invasion of

Iraq, officials were very quick to blame France (for threatening a

veto), rather than acknowledging the reality of “our” failure to garner

sufficient support.[26] Examination of Britain’s failure (with others)

to stop the genocide in Bosnia was left to journalists and scholars:[27]

no comprehensive internal inquiry was instigated. These are but two of

the more blatant examples of a culture that brooks no self-examination

while resisting meanwhile the rigour of external scrutiny.

British diplomats are not alone in maintaining a comfortable and

flattering self-image. In my experience, diplomats of many other

countries rest on similar conceits. An Egyptian might claim that his

tradition is one of brokering the pan-Arab view (a Nasserist

inheritance) while offering a bridge between East and West (a role

claimed too by Turkish diplomats); the Dutch are the hard-headed

pragmatists of the European Union; the Singaporeans are the

politically-in-correct realists, and so on. No one is the bad guy.

Everyone believes they are serving the Good. There is a degree of

caricature here, but in that caricature lies an uncomfortable truth:

that to a greater or lesser degree, diplomats are required to define

themselves, to create an identity, in order to function.

Essentialising Them

Thus is one side of the chess board delineated: “Us”. But for the game

to be played, the other team needs to be defined, or essentialised, too:

“Them”. Without such delineation, the game cannot be played.[28]

Diplomacy requires a system of ordering to function; thought requires

such a system too (or so some philosophers would argue). In diplomacy it

is not seen as a mistake to boil the world down to some simple essence;

it is mandatory. The easiest way to pretend that you understand the

world is to essentialise it. The Arabs (all of them) are this; the

Israelis are that. The Thais are a little bit…the Malaysians far

too...and the French, well, the French are always incredibly… .

You will see this kind of essentialism practised every day. You need

only open your newspaper. There you will read how the US President

describes the aspirations of the Iranian people for freedom and

democracy (though curiously in 2006 he no longer does so when talking

about the Iraqi people, whose behaviour since their “liberation” has

suggested that more complicated ambitions may also be at play). Switch

on your television and analysts talk about the needs of the “people of

the Middle East” or the approach “the Europeans” take to building

democracy (often in the American discourse the appellation “the

Europeans” carries negative overtones). And it is not only the West

which indulges in such characterisations. In April 2006 Egypt’s

President Mubarak upset sensibilities across the Middle East by

suggesting in an interview that Iraq’s Shia, indeed all Shia in the

Middle East, were more loyal to Iran than they were to their own

countries.

Twenty years since Edward Said’s Orientalism, his excoriating critique

of western characterisations of the Middle East, diplomats still

orientalise almost the whole world, reducing its complexities and

uncertainties to simple cultural and racial stereotypes. Routinely, you

can still hear diplomats talking (and some journalists do it too) about

the Arab street, a place where presumably Arabs gather to talk and

express opinions (furtively, presumably). (In my Economist this week is

a review of three books about “the Arabs”, including one by an Arab,

which in different ways analyse why the Arabs have difficulty

assimilating democracy. The piece is titled “Not yet, say the Arabs”.)

Or you can hear China explained in terms of the way “they”, the Chinese,

think, all 1.2 billion of them.

I have been working for some time in Kosovo. When talking about this

place, many western diplomats and foreign policy analysts talk about the

need for Kosovo to “progress”; that its majority-Albanian culture is

“clan-based”, its values are those of “loyalty and revenge” rather than

“our” more enlightened ways. As for their political ambitions, they just

want a greater Albania. More than one senior UN official told me that

“these people” were “primitive”.

Having lived in Kosovo, it is hard to recognise these descriptions. No

one I met talked about their “clan”. Many Kosovars I know are among the

most hospitable, friendly but also urbane people I’ve met. Many speak

several languages (something many American and British diplomats do

not). No one has ever mentioned in my hearing a desire to unify with

Albania (a very different country from Kosovo). There are also Kosovars

who do not share these attractive characteristics, but that is the

point. Essentialism always leaves someone out.

The production of these depictions is sometimes trivial, but nonetheless

revealing of the mindset. On my first ever overseas posting, to Norway,

I wrote a letter — at the encouragement of my boss — to the Western

European Department in London analysing the “Norwegian national

character”. This letter was superficial in the extreme, mainly because

its observations had been gathered from watching the behaviour of

Norwegians at the luggage carousel at Oslo airport when I first arrived.

I spoke no Norwegian (and never did). This did not however prevent me

from sending the letter.

This kind of thing is, I hope, less common today than it was then (in

the early ‘nineties). But you will still find ambassadors and embassies

routinely generalising about the cultures and “national characters” of

the countries where they are hosted: they do it because, as I was, they

are encouraged to. If you are sitting in an office in Whitehall, or

Foggy Bottom, you want your embassies to explain the world to you, so

that you can feel you understand it. You are part of a pyramid of

reductionism and you cannot escape it. As an official, you are required

to tell your minister or Secretary of State that you understand the

world. If you are a minister or Secretary of State, you are obliged to

say to your legislature, or the press, that you understand what is going

on in, say, Iran or China. The Secretary of State cannot give a ten-week

seminar on China’s complexities; they have to be summed up in a few

sentences (or less). In these analyses, you cannot admit to uncertainty

or even complexity. Essentialism is, unfortunately, essential. The

question however is whether such reductionism helps or hinders our

struggle to understand the world.

As a diplomat, you are moreover abetted by your foreign colleagues in

the discourse. Just as the British diplomat essentialises his own

country into what “we” want, they will essentialise theirs. Without

hesitation the German diplomat, in describing his views about the

genocide in Rwanda, or democracy in Russia, will speak as Germany — “we

think intervention is impracticable”. The Egyptian will do the same, and

the Russian likewise. Thus one can report their views as “Germany’s”,

“Egypt’s” or “Russia’s”; and in my telegrams from New York I would

describe them in just this way, sometimes without even recording the

real names of the individual diplomats I had spoken to, just their

countries. Oddly, the only diplomats I have found who don’t indulge in

this manner of speaking are those new to the diplomatic scene: the

Somalilanders and the Kosovars. They have yet to learn the habit of

generalisation.

A recent scientific study analysed the characteristics of different

nationalities, asking whether there was any truth to well-worn national

stereotypes. Researchers for the National Institute on Aging (NIA) in

the US examined the accuracy of national character stereotypes in

forty-nine cultures worldwide. They asked nearly four thousand people to

describe the “typical” member of their own culture.[29]

When researchers compared the average trait levels, i.e. the cultural

group’s true attributes to the stereotypes, there was no agreement. For

example, Americans believe the typical American is very assertive, and

Canadians believe the typical Canadian is submissive, but in fact

Americans and Canadians have almost identical scores on measures of

assertiveness. Looking at each other’s personality traits, the

researchers found that Indian citizens see themselves as unconventional

and open to a wide range of new experiences, but measurements of

personality show that they are more conventional than the rest of the

people in the world. Czechs believe that they are antagonistic and

disagreeable, but when personality is actually observed, they score

higher than most people in the world on measures of altruism and

modesty.

One of the study’s leaders, Dr Robert McCrae, said “People should

understand that we are all prone to these kinds of preconceptions and

likely to believe that they are justified by our experience, when in

fact they are often unfounded stereotypes. We need to remind ourselves

to see people as individuals, whether they are Americans or Lebanese,

Gen Xers or senior citizens” (the NIA’s objective was in part to

disprove preconceptions about age groups, particularly older ones).

Diplomacy is still often ignorant of this lesson, preferring to talk of

national characteristics, countries as single, uniform entities and, if

they are not conveniently uniform (like the Japanese or the Dutch), of

their subgroups and ethnicities. It would not surprise Said to discover

that, in western diplomatic systems like Britain or the US, the tendency

to essentialise other countries increases the more unlike us these

countries are. In the annual ambassadorial dispatches and telegrams, the

ambassador in Germany is much less likely to generalise about “the

Germans” or the cultural identity of Germany than the ambassador

reporting from Riyadh. In the American discourse, it is routine to

generalise about “the Europeans”. Hardly anyone in Europe, notably, even

uses the term.

One curious manifestation of this way of thinking is what happens to

language when national generalisations fail. Before the invasion of Iraq

in 2003, British and American diplomats and politicians would routinely

talk about the Iraqi people as a homogeneous whole, as in “sanctions are

not intended to harm the Iraqi people”, “we have no quarrel with the

Iraqi people, just with the leadership”, or, as the invasion approached,

“the Iraqi people yearn for their liberation”.

After the invasion, and as sectarian and religious tensions emerged into

violent confrontation, the language changed. Commentators and leaders

alike began to talk about the “Shi-ites”, “the Baathists”, “the Sunnis”

and, just as they did formerly with the “Iraqi people”, they ascribed

collective characteristics to these groups, as in “the Sunnis feel

threatened by Shia dominance” or “the Kurds want their own state”.

I once attended a lecture by a former British diplomat who found

himself, post-invasion, governor of an entire province of Iraq. To

explain the complexities of his environment, he began to draw circles on

a board, inscribing within them the names of Iraq’s different ethnic

groups and then drawing lines and arrows to indicate the relationship

between them. He clearly needed such a delineated system to help him

understand what was going on. But to realise the deficiencies of any

such system, one need only apply it to one’s own reality: Britain’s

“middle classes want economic growth and social stability”, “America’s

blacks support the Democrats”. We feel insulted when others do it to us.

Anti-Americanism is built on simplistic caricatures which grossly

misdescribe America’s massive diversity. As a Briton living in America,

my hackles rise whenever I hear a sentence beginning, “the Brits

are...”. It is crass to describe our own societies in such terms, but

this is what diplomats and analysts routinely to do other societies, and

it is always inaccurate.

Diplomats don’t think and talk like this because they are racist. Most

are not, and love the wider world; they do so because it reduces the

world’s complexity to something that can be ordered and put into a

system: made sense of.

Moreover this habit of essentialising is a practice that reflects the

way the diplomatic world actually is. Diplomats speak of what China

wants in a draft Security Council text because the Chinese ambassador

says “China wants paragraph 12 deleted…”. It is not only essentialising,

it is also a reflection of diplomatic and political reality. But it is a

self-reinforcing reality, and for that reinforcement to function there

must be a process of essentialising performed both upon ourselves (as I

describe above) and upon them. In negotiations at the UN Security

Council, I realised that part of the way in which we worked out what we

— Britain — wanted was by distinguishing our wishes from those with whom

we saw ourselves in natural competition (France or Russia). So subtle

and insidious was this process that it is hard to offer convincing

proof, except to say that more often than I would want to admit we saw

issues such as sanctions on Iraq not primarily in terms of the issue

itself but as a means of getting what “we” wanted (this “competitive”

model of diplomacy is discussed further in chapter 6). And what “we”

wanted was sometimes defined in terms of what they — our opponents —

didn’t want.

A paradoxical example of the boiling down of what we and they want is to

be found in trade negotiations. International trade talks at the WTO —

the most recent being the so-called “Doha Round” — often revolve around

the trading of concessions between national delegations (or groups of

delegations). One of the most common “concessions” is the granting of

trade access to the domestic market of the state offering the

concession. Such concessions are offered in exchange for access to

others’ markets in the same or different products, in a highly-complex

bargaining process. The offering of such “concessions” is however

bunkum, because the benefits of free trade flow more to the importer

than the exporter: imports of cheaper or better goods give consumers

more for their money and, through competition, raise domestic

productivity.[30] In other words, what is being offered is not a

concession at all — the party offering the concession is proposing

something that will benefit it more. But so familiar have the discourse

of trade talks and the calculus of concession-based bargaining become

that everyone pretends that what is not a concession is one, and vice

versa.

It is no coincidence that it is governments that perform this

essentialising. They must. It is profoundly in the interest of

government, and the politicians who lead it, to claim that only they can

speak for the whole country. Equally, therefore, they must affirm the

nature of the international system by accepting that other governments

speak for their whole countries. A modern diplomat would deny that they

are so crass as to essentialise other cultures and countries in the way

I have described. Of course, they aver, that when they talk about Iran’s

policy, they mean the policy of the Iranian government, and indeed that

is often how they will describe it.

But the habit of referring to whole countries in the singular and to

their government as the embodiment of that state is one as deep-rooted

as the state-based international system itself. To change the

nomenclature of the actors would be to remove the assumption that

governments represent the totality or indeed the diversity of their

countries. This would alter the nature of the international system from

one based around states as the unit of agency to one based on some other

unit or units. But as long as governments wish to hold sway in

international policy and decision-making, they must continually reaffirm

not only their own but each other’s legitimacy to speak for their

countries, even when the government is as undemocratic as, say, Muammar

Gadhafi’s in Libya.

Perhaps one reason why this habit persists is because of the way that

diplomacy evolved. From its origins in Classical times, through the

Middle Ages and the development of the state-based system of the Peace

of Westphalia, diplomats represented — and negotiated between — discrete

entities: cities, provinces and later states. In contrast to today, the

business between them was limited to relatively narrow areas like war

and peace, and trade. These were important but they did not have the

character of the massive and diverse contacts and interactions (words

which do not by themselves adequately convey the complex and dynamic

nature of these flows) of today’s world.

One of the seminal texts that helped define the nature of diplomacy is

De la manière de négocier avec les souverains, de l’utilité des

negotiations, du choix des ambassadeurs et des envoyez, et des qualitez

necessaries pour réussir dans ces employs, published by François de

Callières in Paris in 1716. De Callières saw the principal function of

diplomacy as moderating and managing the clash of conflicting interests

as efficiently as possible. Thus it was important for diplomats to be

honest in their dealings. Diplomatic immunity was also to be upheld, not

merely because of legal provisions but because the interests of princes

compelled it. The diplomatist would be the agent rather than the

architect of policy, but would be crucial both in the framing of policy

and even more in the business of seeking to persuade representatives of

other governments to see matters in this rather than that light. He

would be required to assess how the interests of his state and the other

state could be met on terms acceptable to both.

From this summary one can see how remarkably similar this conception of

diplomacy is to the way it is usually conceived today. Yet the world we

live in today is remarkably different. The post-war establishment of new

multilateral diplomatic machineries such as the United Nations, NATO and

the European Union — while creating new forums for state-to-state

interactions — has not altered the fundamental idea that diplomacy is

about states identifying their interests and arbitrating them with one

another. Indeed, these institutions are premised on the very notion that

states can meet there and decide upon their common problems. It is

therefore no surprise that diplomats tend to make the world and its

myriad problems fall into these shapes. That this process is becoming

more and more artificial and disconnected from the reality of the forces

at work in the world is not yet evident enough to compel change.

Essentialising the World

It is far too disconcerting a prospect for governments or the diplomats

who represent them to analyse or talk about the world as it really is,

one shaped and affected by multitudinous and complex forces, among which

governments are but one group of many involved. To preserve their own

role, and the belief — comforting to us as well to them — that

governments are “in charge” of events, they must continually assert that

governments are on top of the pile of agents and must determine what is

important and what is to be done, and make and enforce the rules.

This may have been appropriate in 1648 or 1945. But today the trouble is

that the world is growing more and more complicated. Its problems are

ever less susceptible to the essentialising analysis traditional in

diplomacy. Everyone, including the diplomats, accepts that many of our

most troubling problems are transnational in nature — pollution, bird

flu, terrorism — complex in their causes and thus solutions, and require

mass action to tackle. The division of the world into the coloured

pieces of the board game makes less and less sense. It always was a

simplification, but it is becoming an ever more absurd one.

Globalisation in some respects implies a greater simplicity, for

instance the narrowing of the world into one market. But even those who

believe this must also acknowledge the world’s continuing if not

burgeoning complexity. Was it conceivable thirty years ago that the fury

of one young Egyptian over the war in Chechnya would lead him to fly an

aircraft into the World Trade Centre in New York, an act facilitated by

an organisation born of Osama bin Laden’s anger against the US

occupation of Saudi Arabia, and itself given a base by a fundamentalist

regime in Afghanistan, whose assumption of control was a direct

consequence of Soviet occupation and slow decline (and this itself is a

simplified account of a complex series of causes and events)? This

singular act, itself the progenitor of massive, complex and

unforeseeable change, was brilliantly anatomised in the 9/11 Commission

Report, which took nearly 400 pages to describe the antecedents and

chronology of this single event.

The reductionist tendency in diplomacy is reinforced by, and itself

reinforces, the commentary we read in the press. Oddly, the more

complicated our globalising world becomes, the more those commenting on

it tend to such simplification. Confounded by the world’s complexity, we

grope for simplifying metaphors — the big idea — to explain what is

going on. Academics and commentators duly oblige, offering up “the world

is flat”, “the clash of civilisations” or “the moment” (when America

could save the world).

Those consuming these nostrums have perhaps only themselves to blame.

The outlets of the mass media are in sharp competition. The measured

commentary attracts less attention than the sensational. A recent study

by Philip E. Tetlock[31] confirms the suspicion: those offering the most

dramatic political predictions attract the most press attention, but are

unsurprisingly the most inaccurate. His study examined predictions from

thousands of experts about the fates of dozens of countries, and then

scored the predictions for accuracy. His team found that the media not

only failed to weed out bad ideas, but often favoured them, especially

when the truth was too messy to be packaged neatly.

Tetlock’s evidence falls into two categories: optimists and pessimists

(or “boomsters” and “doomsters”, as he calls them). Between 1985 and

2005, boomsters made ten year forecasts that exaggerated the chances of

big positive changes in both financial markets (e.g. a Dow Jones

Industrial Average of 36,000) and world politics (e.g. tranquillity in

the Middle East and dynamic growth in sub-Saharan Africa). They assigned

probabilities of 65% to rosy scenarios that materialised only 15% of the

time.

In the same period doomsters performed even more poorly, exaggerating

the chances of negative changes in all the same places where boomsters

accentuated the positive, plus several more (including the prediction of

the disintegration of Canada, Nigeria, India, Indonesia, South Africa,

Belgium, and Sudan). They assigned probabilities of 70% to bleak

scenarios that materialized only 12% of the time. But despite these

gross inaccuracies, these “over-claimers” rarely paid any penalties for

being wrong. On the contrary, the media showered lavish attention on

them while neglecting their more careful (and accurate) colleagues.

There is perhaps something unstated at play here. Our attachment to

simple models of the world and grand overstatement may be related to the

diplomat’s need — which I could once identify as my own — to attribute

to themselves a beneficent rather than a malign persona. We need

narratives of ourselves and of the world to explain it. And we are

unlikely to choose negative ones (if not for others, at least for

ourselves). Just as we need to view ourselves in a positive light, we

desperately want the world to make sense, to respond to order and

systematisation. It is paradoxical that within this innocent-seeming

desire lies acute danger.

As we shall see in the next chapters, these biases in the way the world

is described to us, and is arbitrated by policymakers, contribute to

error. Indeed, they may compound one another and thus compound the

failure. A complex system (is it even a system?) is described and

governed by those who prefer to see it in simpler terms than it actually

is. Unfortunately for its would-be players (and for those who would

comment on them), the world is not a chessboard.

6. THE TELEGRAM OR HOW TO BE IGNORED

UN Security Council and Tindouf, Algeria

One of the principal artefacts of diplomatic business is the encrypted

telegram between the embassy and the capital. In the British Foreign

Office, telegram writing is a highly fetishised business. The drafting

process is stylised and hierarchical, in a way an unconscious metaphor

for the whole business of diplomacy.

If a junior diplomat writes the first draft, it must be checked by a

senior diplomat before being “signed off”. Particularly important

dispatches must be checked by ambassadors themselves, since it is their

name that goes at the end of the message (itself an unconscious

reinforcement of the hierarchicalism of the system).

When you join the diplomatic service, you are instructed in the “house

style” which strives for clarity, conciseness, detachment and, above

all, objectivity. Drafting skill is highly rated. Some ambassadors

become known for writing particularly well-crafted and witty missives

and the best telegrams are circulated widely on an informal network as a

kind of salute to the author.

But the telegram is also the embodiment of what diplomacy is about. In

the British service, it is divided into Summary: a few lines; Detail:

the main body of reportage; and finally the all-important Comment: what

the embassy thinks of what is being reported and what policy they

recommend to London. Thus a telegram may read something like this:

Immediate

To: FCO London

From: British Embassy Ruritaniaville

Classification: Confidential

Summary

1. Coup in Ruritania. An opportunity for the UK: new President a good

friend. No change recommended for travel advice.

Detail

2. At 0200Z[32] today, a small band of army officers led by General

Potato seized the national radio station, main army barracks and all

principal government buildings. There was a brief stand-off at the

presidential palace, but otherwise little fighting and few casualties.

Former president Tomato has been imprisoned by Potato’s men, who have

announced that he will be tried for corruption and other “anti-state”

crimes.

3. In a radio address at 0700Z, Potato declared that the coup is for the

“people of Ruritania” to deliver them from the corruption and economic

chaos of the Tomato regime. While declaring himself “transitional”

President, Potato has announced that there will be general elections

within six months or “as long as it takes for stability to be restored”.

4. The situation in Ruritania is generally calm. Some demonstrators have

come on to the streets to celebrate the coup but otherwise there is

little disturbance.

Comment

5. This coup has been brewing for some time (as other information has

suggested).

6. While we [i.e. the UK] may disapprove of Potato’s method of removing

the government, Tomato’s regime was a disaster for Ruritania, causing

economic collapse and massive social unrest. Potato (whom I know well)

has a level head and seems committed to the restoration of democratic

government as soon as the security situation allows. We must insist that

he keeps his word.

7. Potato’s arrival offers an opportunity for us. I have dined privately

with him frequently. Unlike Tomato, he is well-disposed towards the UK

(he attended Oxford for one term). We should immediately re-examine our

commercial and military export strategy.

8. We will keep the security situation under close review, but I see no

need at present to alter our current travel advice.

BACON [the surname of the ambassador]

Almost all such messages are classified from Restricted, the lowest

level, up to Top Secret. The Foreign Office has succeeded in encouraging

officials to downgrade the classification of many documents, for the

more highly-classified a document, the greater the cost and awkwardness

of circulating and storing it. However the vast bulk of such internal

communications remain classified in some form. Thus a vast, effectively

secret discourse is created.

Hundreds of such communications (though few of such drama) emanate from

embassies all over the world every day. There is an unspoken, almost

instinctive, understanding that the most important parts of the world

demand the most attention, so the British embassy in Washington, a huge

office with many hundreds of officials, will send thousands of messages

a year, while the two-person embassy in Ulan Bataar will only bother

London a couple of times a month – or when there’s a coup.

Historians may regard such written records as crucial manifestations of

what is “really” going on inside a government — the core of its private

deliberations. This is true, but only up to a point. In the crafting of

these documents, to which diplomats devote considerable care, there are

often distorting factors at play.

First, the documents are circulated widely in the foreign ministry and

beyond, including to senior officials and ministers. They are thus, in

the closed world of government, the most public demonstration of the

skill and achievement of the author. This encourages all but the most

unassuming ambassadors to play up the depth and intimacy of their

political contacts: note (above) the fictional Bacon’s emphasis on his

close personal relationship with the new president. It is also worth

remarking that this kind of analysis reinforces and perpetuates the view

that governments — and the individuals comprising them — are the

determining factors in international relations: that they are what

really matters. The quality of relations with key local actors is the

kind of thing which wins a big tick in the performance appraisal box

when the ambassador is considered for promotion. Likewise, such

telegrams will invariably stress the embassy’s deep comprehension of the

local scene. Never will they confess that they have little idea about

what is going on.

I will here admit one shameful episode from my own career: when I was

posted to Kabul, I was telephoned by the department in London and asked

for a report on “the car bomb in Jalalabad”. I acknowledged the request

and put down the phone. I had no idea what they were talking about. I

duly went to the BBC website on the internet (whence presumably London

had heard about it too), and took down a few details of the attack. Thus

informed, I composed a short telegram back to London, classified it

“restricted” and sent it.

Second, the division between “detail”, i.e. fact, and “comment”, i.e.

judgement, in any such telegram implies such a separation in the mind

and reporting of the ambassador. The separation makes sense in a system

where readers need to know what is fact and what is opinion, but such a

division belies the reality that the choice of what is reported at all

implies a judgement in itself. Recall how in Bonn (chapter 2) my

examination of the condition of the Roma did not justify a telegram.

What embassies choose to report — what they see as a credible part of

the discourse — is of course a judgement and a highly value-laden one at

that.

Third, such telegrams are written to give the impression that they are

offering considered and objective policy choices to the capital. When I

was negotiating at the UN in New York, we would often in the “detail”

(i.e. allegedly the “facts”) section of the telegram describe the

negotiations in such a way to persuade the reader (a senior official or

a minister) of a particular course of action. For instance, if we in the

mission disliked a proposal that London had asked us to put forward in a

particular negotiation, we would often exaggerate in our reports the

degree of opposition in order to encourage London to drop it. This was a

subtle skill, but one in which we became very artful. I am sure we were

not alone in this practice, though I doubt whether any serving diplomat

will admit it. It would therefore be wrong to take such reports as fully

accurate accounts of what they purport to be recording.

Finally, and perhaps most subtly, such communications do not necessarily

communicate what the author really thinks. In my diplomatic career there

are many telegrams I wrote that stand out in my memory. One commemorated

the culmination of a year’s gruelling negotiation to re-establish the UN

Security Council’s approach on Iraq (resolution 1284 (1999), which is I

think the longest Security Council resolution of all time — see chapter

8); another, on 12 September 2001, reported the Council’s condemnation

of the attacks the day before. A third — in late 1998 — reported Iraq’s

promise of cooperation with the weapons inspectors, thus stopping the

bombers which were already in the air from striking Iraq, although

Iraq’s promise was not fulfilled and the bombers nonetheless attacked

later that year. I remember that when I composed this telegram, my hands

were shaking so hard I could hardly type.

But one sticks out above all, not least because it was about an issue I

have come to know very well, now from both sides of the table. The

telegram was about the Western Sahara, one of the issues I was

responsible for as head of the Middle East section at the UK Mission to

the UN.

Few people have heard of this issue. Those who campaign about it argue

that this is because the benighted people of Western Sahara (or

Saharawis, as they are known) have never, unlike the Palestinians,

resorted to terrorism. The Polisario, the organisation that represents

the Saharawis, has never used violence as a political tool, except in

direct resistance to the forces which occupy the Western Sahara in a

guerrilla war which ended in 1991.[33]

The history is straightforward. When Spain, the colonial power, left the

region known as Western Sahara in 1975, Morocco immediately invaded and

occupied the territory. The inhabitants of the region were offered no

choice in this invasion, and their representatives, the Polisario, have

ceaselessly campaigned for the Saharawis to be given the right to

self-determination. In the early years, between 1975 and 1991, this

campaign took the form of a sporadic guerrilla campaign. The Polisario

decided to end the fighting in 1991 when the UN Security Council agreed

a process, known as the Settlement Plan, whereby there would be a

referendum in the territory on self-determination. Morocco threw up

incessant obstacles to the plan’s implementation. One of its techniques

was to encourage Moroccan settlers in the territory to file thousands of

objections to the voter registration lists prepared by the UN, thereby

interminably delaying the preparations for the referendum. The Moroccans

had also managed to convince their allies the French and US that if they

lost the referendum, they would refuse to accept it.

In 2000, the UN Secretary-General appointed James Baker, the former US

Secretary of State, as his Personal Representative on Western Sahara.

His mandate, undeclared officially but unofficially understood by the

permanent members of the Security Council, was to break this “deadlock”

(a way of characterising the problem so that the main cause of it is

absolved). In 2002 Baker offered three options to the Security Council:

one to continue with the Settlement Plan, the second to offer the

Saharawis a more limited autonomy (with the promise of a referendum on

the territory’s final status within five years) but under Moroccan

sovereignty, and the third was to give up. The thrust of the

recommendations — to abandon the Settlement Plan — was obvious: in other

words, that the Security Council should abandon its own agreed approach

to resolve the dispute simply because one of the parties was obstructing

it.

In early 2000 the Foreign Office asked various of its embassies and

missions, including New York, for their views on what “we” should do

about Western Sahara. It fell to me to write the telegram from New York.

My telegram duly reported what the UN Secretariat thought, what the

French and US missions thought (notably, I did not seek the views of the

Polisario representative, a charming and somewhat woebegone figure who

ceaselessly tramped the corridors of the UN), and then what “we”

thought. As was and is the practice, I divided the telegram into

Summary, Detail and Comment. The Detail comprised my reports on what the

UN, French and Americans had told me. These three actors had concluded

that the Settlement Plan was running into trouble and that neither the

US nor France was prepared to overcome Moroccan obstruction of the

referendum. These were supposedly the “facts” on which I based my

judgements, though, as I have noted, these facts did not include some

details, such as the views of the Sahrawi representative, which to some

might have seemed pertinent.

And just like our review of policy on Iraq sanctions, these “facts” did

not include one word about the reality of life in Western Sahara for the

Saharawis, Moroccans or indeed anybody else. I had never visited the

Western Sahara. When eventually I did, in the autumn of 2005, I was

appalled by the futility and suffering of some 150,000 Saharawi refugees

who to this day remain in tented refugee camps in the western reaches of

the Sahara, waiting for the “international community” to restore to them

the justice they have been denied.[34] Having told “London” of the facts

— which were merely the positions of the other “key” players — I then

produced my judgement on what should be done about the Western Sahara

problem. And here another deeply entrenched habit was put into play,

namely that of identifying, in an entirely arbitrary and subjective way,

what were Britain’s, or rather “our” interests in this affair. This is

what the summary section of my telegram said:

“We should take a back seat: we have no dog in this fight.”

Elsewhere, in the “Comment” section of the telegram, I wrote, “We have

no national interest at stake”, before recommending that we acquiesce,

through quiet support, in the UN’s impending decision to seek some

alternative to the Settlement Plan and its referendum, an approach which

we had many times endorsed and was supported in international law.

Why did I write this? I was, as a British diplomat of some ten years’

experience, firmly gripped by a way of seeing the world which orders it

in terms of states and their interests. From this perspective it was and

is indeed the case that “Britain” had no national interest at stake in

doing anything about the dispute. On the contrary, it had, by the

traditional analysis, some measurable interest in not doing anything.

Britain’s exports to Morocco amounted in 2000 to some £402 million. Most

of these exports were purchased directly by the Moroccan government and

comprised armaments. For Britain to take a stand on the Western Sahara

issue would have jeopardised that trade, particularly that with the

government. So by this measure it was clearly in “our” interests to do

nothing about Western Sahara.

What are our interests anyway, and how are they calculated? As elsewhere

in the rarefied business of foreign policy, there is no “how to” guide

or textbook to guide one. In the British Foreign Office, it is

subliminally instilled into you that “our” interests generally consist

of three things: trade, security and what are mysteriously called

“values”. I have talked to many diplomats from other countries who tell

me that their policies are based on similarly-termed analyses. In the

British Foreign Office, we were not taught this calculus during our

induction course, but it is something one infers from the endless

disquisitions one subsequently reads where what “we” want is put into

these terms. This is an arbitrary process. Very rarely are meetings held

where ministers ask or even state what British “interests” are in any

particular case. It is all pretty much assumed. Even to divide this

amorphous set of interests into three subsets — trade, security and

values — is to give a definition and rigour that this type of thinking

rarely employs. Indeed, such is the subjectivity and arbitrariness of

the components of foreign policy, that even to define them in this way

is likely to be disputed. But for the sake of our own clarity of

analysis, I must.

Economic “Interests”

Trade is the first obvious one. British trade with foreign countries is

an easily measured variable. Such statistics appear in every annual

review from embassies and in every analysis of bilateral relations with

country x or y. These statistics give the trade factor a weight and

psychological impact in any debate about policy. In the case of Western

Sahara, my telegram put trade very much as primus inter pares in terms

of our “interests”, and I suspect that its statistical quality played a

role. There is indeed some psychological research evidence which

strongly suggests that people give more weight to clearly quantified

data — numbers, percentages, etc.

It is assumed in places like the Foreign Office and in governments

world-wide that trade is what their countries “want”. But this of course

is a very big assumption. The foundation of this assumption is of course

what underpins neo-classical economics, namely that individuals seek to

maximise utility through consumption, i.e. people want more things. Writ

on the national scale, this assumption is expressed as more trade and

more growth. But there is growing evidence — and good, hard empirical

data too — that this is not in fact the case.

At the most basic level — that of the individual — there is plenty of

evidence to suggest that individuals are not primarily motivated by the

desire to maximise their own wealth. For example, Professor (now Lord)

Richard Layard has given a remarkable series of lectures (now a

book[35]) showing that the pursuit of wealth has not made us any

happier. Once people rise above a level of abject poverty, their level

of happiness stagnates, despite increases in wealth. In the western

world, the last fifty years have seen massive increases in wealth, but

there has been no corresponding increase in happiness. The evidence he

cites is not the nice, hard statistics of economics which have no

measure of happiness, but psychology, where neuroscience has produced

some compelling evidence in support of Layard’s claims. Layard’s

assertions seem to be borne out by more global evidence. Global opinion

surveys, such as those conducted by the Pew Center and Gallup

International, suggest that while the escape from poverty is a primary

global concern, other concerns, particularly once wealth levels rise,

become more pressing.[36] These concerns, including things like crime,

corruption and disease, do not fit easily, or even at all, into the

assumptions of conventional economics on what motivates us.

This evidence fits in with well-established psychological theory about

human needs and wants, such as Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs”.

This claimed that the highest level of human motivation was the need to

achieve self-fulfillment. Below that were other levels of need, each of

which had to be satisfied before people could progress to the next. At

the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid of needs were the basics of life such as

food, water and material comforts. Next were safety and security needs.

Then came love and belongingness, including the desire to feel accepted

by the family, the community and colleagues at work. After that came the

need for esteem — both self-esteem and other people’s respect and

admiration. Then finally, at the top, came what Maslow called

self-actualisation — the point at which people achieved the happiness

that came from becoming all they were capable of becoming. At this level

people might seek knowledge and aesthetic experiences for themselves and

help others to achieve self-fulfillment.

The measurement of happiness is inevitably a messier business than that

of, say, GDP. But the evidence clearly suggests that Maslow’s hierarchy

is in operation. The poorest are least happy; the better off generally

more happy. But once a certain basic level of income is reached, which

may only be as little as $10,000 per head per year, then levels of

happiness stabilise. Increases in income and wealth do not subsequently

trigger increases in happiness. In fact, levels of happiness can even

decline.

This insight, which is occurring to more and more economists, suggests

many consequences. One is that the well-being of the world would be

increased by greater redistribution from rich to poor, as the poor

benefit from increases in income much more than the rich do. But it also

suggests that the central objective of governments in the richer

countries — the endless campaign to maximise national wealth — may be

the wrong one.

Taken to its fullest extent, this would mean a fundamental

reorganisation of conventional political and economic thought. But at a

minimum, it would suggest that the conventional assumption of foreign

policy does not stand up: that a core “interest” of any particular

country is exports and the maximasation of national growth.

Security “Interests”

Let us now look at the second great set of “interests” which states are

commonly assumed to represent. This set is usually presented as a

responsibility: to provide for the security of a state’s citizens. This

is such a widely-accepted norm of what states are meant to do that it

has become an axiom, if not to say a tautology, of how we think about

states and the world system: states exist to provide security for their

citizens, ergo states must provide security for their citizens.

However, there is room to suppose that within this tautology there lies

a self-perpetuating cycle. States exist to provide security. Therefore,

in order for states to exist, they must ceaselessly prove that there are

threats to their existence, thereby reaffirming their indispensability.

The original reason why states exist, one is taught at most universities

in the west, is to provide security for their citizens. Without the

state, there is chaos. You will find this assumption everywhere in the

core academic texts on foreign policy. In his essay “Perpetual Peace”,

Immanuel Kant repeats the assumption, routinely believed even in his

day, that the state of nature — i.e. what the world would be like

without states — is a perpetual one of war and lawlessness. Therefore

the state is indispensable, and those who arbitrate what it wants are

indispensable too.

One does not have to think too hard to realise that state élites have an

interest (to use their terms) in making themselves indispensable, and to

do so they must endlessly prove that the state is under threat. More

dangerously still, they may actually behave in a way that encourages

threats against the state. One way they do so is by emphasising the

competitive or realist model of international affairs, a world of

interacting and inevitably competing “interests”. It’s a dog-eat-dog

world, they say. Eat or be eaten.

There are many examples of how government élites have exaggerated the

threats against the state. During the Cold War the CIA overestimated the

size of the Soviet economy and thus the resources that could be devoted

to military production by at least a factor of two. More recently both

the US and British governments exaggerated the extent of the threat

posed by Iraq to the peoples of Britain and the US in order to fight a

war that can only have been motivated by other reasons.[37] In this

latter case, unable to prove an existential threat to their states

themselves (even Saddam didn’t have weapons capable of harming the US or

British territories), both governments claimed that Iraq was a threat to

their “interests”. These were never clearly defined.

The exaggeration of threats is very much a function of the competitive,

“realist” model of foreign policy thinking that is so pervasive today.

To think in any other way — to claim, for instance, that economic and

security “interests” may not be primary among a country’s policy

concerns — is instantly to exile oneself to the wildernesses outside

policymaking circles.

If instead you are a member of a foreign policy élite – say in the

British Foreign Office or the US National Security Council, or, in the

US, one of the think-tanks staffed by the sort of people who might end

up in the NSC – you will already tend to think in the realist way (if

you do not, your career in such places is likely to be short). The

simplifications that you use to summarise what your state wants (usually

unmodified by any relationship with the opinions of real people),

prettifying these things by terming them as “interests”, you will also

tend to employ when thinking about other states: we want this; they want

that. A model that inevitably emphasises competition, for only in a

world of unlimited plenty can all wants be satisfied. The need for a

clarity which any order requires inevitably encourages a tendency to

polarise Us from Them. As Sartre once put it, we are defined by what we

oppose.

The competition model is a deeply-rooted habit of thought and behaviour

among nation states, clear even to those who are fresh to the scene. A

relative newcomer to the world of international diplomacy is Luiz Inacio

da Silva, the President of Brazil. Preparing to attend his meeting with

the Group of Eight (G8) industrialised nations in June 2003, he

commented on the leaders he would meet, “Politicians are like football

coaches, they may like each other but they want their team to win.

Chirac, Bush, Blair may like me but they’re passionate about their own

people”.[38] In British newspapers, summits and international meetings

are treated as diplomatic football matches, where success or failure is

judged on the basis of whether We have got Our Way.

Values

This is an altogether more contested area of what should drive foreign

policy. There are plenty of people who today contend that “values” is

what British foreign policy is primarily “about” (you will find such

claims in the Foreign Office annual report or its website; such claims

are repeatedly made in ministerial speeches). American leaders are even

more forthright in claiming their mission to be the propagation of

freedom, democracy and other American values. Some commentators go so

far as to suggest that in this era of “post-modern” international order,

values are a more important motor of foreign policy than more

traditional indices of states’ interests. This process parallels the

evolution of supranational forms of organisation (the European Union is

often given as the primary example), replacing the state as the

principal unit of the international order.[39] Indeed, it is instilled

in you from the very beginning of your career in the British foreign

service that “British values” are what you are meant to represent. At

first sight, these are simple things like democracy, accountability, the

rule of law and open markets. More recently, the promotion of human

rights has joined the list of “values” that “we” promote (at least in

some places).

Before I joined the British Foreign Office, I had never given much

thought to what British values were. Indeed, I would have thought it

rather ridiculous to attempt to summarise them. This reservation had

disappeared when, after about six years as a diplomat, I attended a

conference of young British and European “opinion-formers” —

journalists, trade unionists, civil servants and the like. It was not a

very diverse group: there were no writers, painters or musicians and

only a few people of colour. The predominant social designator was

white, urban and middle class. Quite intentionally the conference was

designed to reach “opinion-formers” — it was an élite.

The question arose: what were British values? Already steeped in the

uncritical complacency of the government view of the world, I ventured

an answer: decency, tolerance (I do not recall, thank God, that I said

“fair play” but I could easily have done). I naïvely thought that this

description would kick off a friendly consensual discussion but instead

my description was vehemently denounced by another participant. He used

words like élitist, arrogant and short-sighted. My critic was a white,

thirty-something policeman with cropped hair whose beat was where I had

been born, Lewisham in South London. This example simply illustrates

that there is little consensus on what British values are. More

problematic still is how you prioritise and weight them: above all, how

you pursue them.

In his essay “The Pursuit of the Ideal”, Isaiah Berlin gives a measured

yet devastating critique of all those who pursue absolutist, ideal

solutions to the problems of mankind. He concludes that in deciding what

to do, the only option, in private life as in public policy, is to

engage in trade-offs: rules, values, principles must yield to each other

in varying degrees in specific situations, adding that “a certain

humility in these matters is very necessary” since we have no guarantee

that any particular course we choose will be right.

One will rarely find such care among international policymakers. Rare

now are the diplomats or political leaders who will claim their motives

as purely selfish. Everyone now claims that “values” — whether they are

imposition of democracy or the preservation of peace (the ubiquitous

motive of “security”) — are the motive. The Foreign Office is no

different. In policy submissions and telegrams offering views on what to

do about a particular situation, one will almost invariably find

references to democracy, human rights or another “value”.

It is, I suppose, a good thing that values are now reified to a higher

place in the hierarchy of “interests”, though I question whether

“values” have not simply become a more palatable and politically-correct

excuse for realist “business as usual”. The trouble is that the absence

of consensus on what values are important or even what those values

signify has given rise to enormous confusion. Relatively simple concepts

like “democracy” are open to discussion about whether certain types of

representation are more or less democratic than others. When it comes to

concepts like “freedom”, meanings are even more contested. Throw into

the mix other vague objectives like “stability” and “security” and you

can get very confused about which is more important than the other and

even what these terms actually mean.

The result is, as Humpty Dumpty said to Alice: “when I use a word, it

means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less”. This

translates to a total reliance, in places like the Foreign Office, on

highly subjective judgements of what values are and which priorities to

adopt. Although, like most people, I prefer to believe that I am a moral

person, I have nevertheless many times lied and cheated in the name of

British diplomacy, which is in theory supposed to represent “British

values”. Now that I have left the Foreign Office I do not make any claim

to know what the values of the British people are. I doubt whether

anybody else can have such an idea. We may talk about things like

democracy, fairness and decency, and I would agree that these are things

that many people in Britain think are important. But I would not know.

Ask others outside Britain about what they think British values are and

they are likely to offer a more discomfiting view. Bosnian Muslims will

present a rather different answer from the one I gave at the conference.

For that matter, why not ask British Muslims? But of course no one in

British diplomacy ever does ask anyone else, least of all the people

they are supposed to represent, what British values are.[40] From the

first day they enter the office, they are encouraged to believe that

they know.

Economic interests, security interests and values are the three

ingredients that generally make up the subjective mix of assumptions

that underpin foreign policy calculations, even in relatively open and

democratic countries like Britain.

And it was this type of analysis that British policy on Western Sahara

adopted both before and since my involvement in the subject. The

diplomatic situation has changed not one iota since then: there is still

scant prospect of a referendum, and zero pressure, from the UN or its

members, on Morocco to have one. The Saharawi refugees remain in their

camps. In this case “values” do not make much of an appearance in the

calculus, although I suspect that a close reading of the files (when

they are opened in thirty years’ time) will reveal that values such as

“realism” and “pragmatism” are given prominence in the internal policy

analyses. In the case of Western Sahara, the more traditional interests

of trade and security point heavily in the direction of not standing up

to the Moroccan government. British trade may be jeopardised by doing

so. Meanwhile, the Moroccan government has become one of Britain’s

supposed “allies” in the “war against terrorism”, i.e. by helpfully

locking up Islamist terrorist “suspects” usually without trial or access

to lawyers, according to Amnesty International.[41] Thus our security

“interest” is reinforced; this is also true of the US, which has

reportedly sent terrorist suspects to Morocco for interrogation in the

programme known as “extraordinary rendition”. Clearly in this case our

“values” are not held sufficiently strongly to trump the other two sets

of interests.

I thought I was being rather clever in putting this blunt example of

realpolitik in the form “we have no dog in this fight.” These were,

infamously, the words used by James Baker in 1992 to declare that the US

had no interest in intervening in the war in the collapsing state of

Yugoslavia. My phrase was meant as an ironic echo of his, but if there

was irony in my choice of words, the joke was on me because the telegram

betrayed a deep and unconscious cynicism not only about British foreign

policy, but about myself.

Looking back, this moment represents the triumph of the “we” over the

“I” of me, the instant when my own personal values were subsumed and

annihilated by the groupthink of “British national interests”. If you

had asked me then and now what I think about the Western Sahara issue, I

would say that a great injustice was being done to the Saharawi people

and that their rights was being ignored because no country was prepared

to sacrifice its “interests” by putting real pressure on Morocco to

grant the Saharawis their right to self-determination. But this is not

what my telegram said; instead I wrote “we have no dog in this fight”.

My bosses approved the telegram and off it went to London, so they

clearly agreed with me. And telegrams from other embassies and missions

said more or less the same thing. If I had written that the Saharawis

were being screwed sideways and something should be done, I have little

doubt that my draft would have been returned to me with the comment that

I should be more “realistic” or “less emotional”.

What is bizarre and troubling about the episode is that most of my

colleagues, and certainly those who dealt with Western Sahara at the

Mission, all felt that a horrible injustice was being done. Our personal

sympathies were very much with the Saharawis. We would say so to each

other whenever we discussed the issue. Indeed, in later years, the UN

envoy dealing with the matter told me that most diplomats he talked to

felt the same way. But none of us said so in our official telegrams,

minutes and letters. Somehow we felt that to do so would be “naïve” or

“not done”. Our selves had been subsumed into a broader identity, one

that had very little to do with what we each thought but with what we

all thought we ought to think.[42]

I have often wondered since then who “we” were to make such judgements

about what “Britain” wanted. If even the diplomats involved felt that an

injustice was being ignored, what about “ordinary” British people? Would

their reaction be that exports were more important than large-scale

human misery? The truth is that I do not know. I certainly didn’t know

when I wrote the telegram saying what I thought “our” interests were.

The British people were never consulted and they never will be.

In theory popular wishes are mediated through parliament where MPs are

supposed to hold ministers to account. But the conflictual nature of the

House of Commons, like Congress, encourages all parties to focus on

those most contentious issues — Iraq, the Euro — rather than on other

less fashionable cases like Western Sahara. Rare is the MP who knows

about Western Sahara, rarer still the one who raises it in the House or

writes letters to ministers. If an MP does raise Western Sahara, he or

she will be given a sensible-sounding but very much a stock answer by

the minister,[43] prepared by a desk officer like me. If they’re lucky

there might be an opportunity for a brief follow-up question, but that

is all. Yet the UK’s role as a permanent member of the Security Council

is important and has the potential to be crucial, if only it would use

it (I now speak as the frustrated campaigner, rather than the cynical

insider). In the US the Western Sahara is barely discussed at all,

despite America’s enormous potential to influence Morocco.

Take away this democratic input, and it is left to officials more or

less to make up what they think “our” policy should be. Ministers of

course take the decisions, and theirs is the ultimate responsibility,

but the choices they are presented with are invariably premised on

exactly the kind of thinking that I have described, i.e. a calculus of

what “we”, the state, want, based on an assessment — invariably

subjective — of what those “interests” are. The suffering of the

Saharawis is not ignored, and I assume that it concerns both the

officials and ministers involved, but it is not given the weight of

other factors.

The lesson here is obvious and depressing. For the Saharawis it is not

enough to have right on their side and enjoy the personal sympathies of

those who deal diplomatically with their situation. Somehow they must

realpolitik. It would be little wonder therefore if groups like theirs

(but notably not them, yet), marginalised in the conventional discourse

of what foreign policy should be about, were to resort to more violent

methods to get noticed.

7. THE AMBASSADOR

The moral limits of the diplomat and “going too far”

“You cannot think without abstractions; accordingly, it is of the utmost

importance to be vigilant in critically revising your modes of

abstraction. It is here that philosophy finds its niche as essential to

the healthy progress of society. It is the critique of abstractions. A

civilisation which cannot burst through its current abstractions is

doomed to sterility after a very limited period of progress.”

Alfred Whitehead, Science and the Modern World

“You must realise this: that a prince and especially a new prince cannot

observe all those things which give men a reputation for virtue, because

in order to maintain his state he is often forced to act in defiance of

good faith, of charity, of kindness, of religion. And so he should have

a flexible disposition, varying as fortune and circumstances dictate.”

Machiavelli, The Prince

(After Machiavelli…)

The ambassador is at the summit of his career.[44] These are the days

for which he has been preparing all his life. He has been honoured by

his country, with medals and titles, and doubtless will receive more

before he retires. People call him Sir, unbidden.

His clothing is elegant, understated but projecting a style of his type.

Dark, well-cut, his suits hang well on him, as they are tailored to. His

shirts are pressed and without wrinkle. His collars are clean and crisp.

His tie is colourful, but never idiosyncratic. His socks have no holes,

though they may, in a flash of self-expression, occasionally be red.

His demeanour is friendly but grave. His expression says that he is a

man to be taken seriously: he has much on his mind. He may frown but he

will never grimace. He may raise his voice, but he will never shout.

Measure is his mien. In all things, measure.

The ambassador is the apotheosis of the diplomat. The young diplomat may

be exuberant, may laugh and shout (occasionally); the ambassador, never.

In the years leading to this point, the ambassador has learned to hold

any emotion in check and to articulate what he has to say precisely and

efficiently. Few words are wasted, except when many words are needed.

He is above all professional. I watch him as he chairs meetings of other

diplomats. He is careful to show that he listens, nodding when others

speak, acknowledging what they say when they have finished. When it is

his turn to speak, he does so with a soft voice; it helps that his voice

is deep. People listen.

If he disagrees, he says “I disagree,” not “You are wrong.” He never

gives anyone a reason to dislike him, or to complain that he has wronged

them. Personal difference cannot be allowed to intrude into business. He

is charming and polite, though you can never really tell whether he

likes you, or anyone else.

He is a successful diplomat. He is the vessel for his nation’s wishes.

He has travelled the world, lived in many of its countries. He can say

hello and how are you in about six different languages. Maybe more, no

one is ever sure.

I have been with him for many days and nights of hard diplomacy, of

discussion of war and peace. I have watched and tried to know him, but

have never succeeded. One night we went to war and for the first time I

saw in him a kind of excitement. His eyes glittered as we watched the

television with its images of explosions and the bombers that caused

them. But that was the only time. Otherwise, a wry smile might be all

you see of the man beneath. And what signifies the smile, no one can

tell, perhaps not even him.

The stuff that we work on together is of infinite moment and importance.

On our work rests the lives of many, sometimes conflict and sometimes

peace. Great issues are at stake, of freedom, of democracy, of rights

and human suffering. But while I am in turmoil and a frenzy of doubt and

questions, he is serene.

I envy his serenity and for a time thought it a sign of great wisdom.

His government gives him a large and expensive car, and a driver, to

whom he is always polite. The car carries a flag on some special

occasions. He lives in a huge house, where servants prepare his meals

and make his bed. Though magnificent, the house is not his. Its style is

generic, designed “not to offend”. A panoply of historic prints and

tasteful wallpaper, it conveys no personality, for there is none behind

it. No single mind has designed it. No one loves this house, since for

no one is it a home.

The house sees an endless procession of guests. Official guests come

from the home country to visit “abroad”. A ceaseless round of

receptions, lunches and dinners is held there. The waiters are discreet

and courteous, and know how to serve a good wine, though it is never the

best (government spending being what it is). The food is good, but never

great. The furniture is attractive, but not splendid. It must serve a

thousand guests, after all. And after a few years of use, it will be

replaced, like the ambassador.

The ambassador’s office is the embassy. Some embassies are exquisite,

some are ugly. But wherever they are in the world, they carry the air of

the home country within them. Pictures of the Queen adorn their walls.

The corridors ring with accents of home; discussions of the latest

soap-opera or football game caught on satellite television. The

ambassador’s office is a little different from his staff’s. It is

larger, and has comfortable sofas on which to seat his many guests.

There is the silence of an important place: the chatter and tickering

keyboards of his secretaries are banished to an ante-room outside. If

you visit, you will quickly be offered tea.

–––––––––––––––––

There is nothing like a war to help map the moral limits of those who

work on it.

Iraq invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990. One afternoon, as the

coalition prepared to retake Kuwait, I was telephoned at my sleepy West

European desk and summoned to join the war effort. The office needed

staff to run the political-military liaison unit in what was called the

Emergency Unit. The Emergency Unit was located in a special suite of

offices underneath Whitehall. Quite why it needed to be situated down

there was never clear to me, since there was no threat of Iraqi Scud

missiles destroying the offices above ground. The absence of natural

light and the necessary descent through combination-locked doors to the

rooms certainly contributed to the sense of “emergency” and drama. The

head of the unit did his bit to heighten the feeling of disorientation

and crisis by immediately instituting a shift system of twelve hours on

duty and twenty-four off (the unit had to be manned twenty-four hours a

day). Thus within about two days of starting work, our sleep patterns

were totally disrupted, we were exhausted and, on leaving the unit to

emerge on to the streets above, we would never know whether it should be

night or day.

My job consisted of sitting in a small office and reading reams of

intelligence reports and summarising them for senior officials and

ministers. Naturally, this was fascinating, though I soon learned that

there is little information with a scantier connection to reality than

“intelligence” information. I would often read blood-curdling reports of

the imminent use of nuclear weapons — I remember one which gave a

specific time for the launch of the nuclear-tipped missile — or the

torture of British POWs (one supposed eye-witness report stated that

captured British pilots had been dragged in chains by a pick-up truck

through the streets of Basra, something which thankfully never

happened). I would relay this to my seniors and they would say things

like, “thank you, very useful” although I was never told what this

information was useful for, and, looking back, I suspect it was not

useful at all since the Foreign Office was not at all involved in the

military prosecution of the war.

I had other tasks. Before the war, each bleary-eyed shift in the Pol-Mil

Unit, as we were known, had been given instructions on what to do once

the operation to retake Kuwait began. We were to be telephoned by a

senior official who would give us a password —“Mikado”— and a time at

which operations were due to begin (if Iraqi intelligence had been

bugging our phones perhaps they were supposed to think that we were

opera buffs). On receipt of the password, we were to telephone each

member of the British Cabinet to inform them.

So it came about that one January night I was on duty with another

officer. It was a regular evening without much to do. We had eaten the

revolting food provided for our supper and were settling in for another

night of watching television. Suddenly, CNN began to report explosions

and gunfire in Baghdad. How exciting, we thought, perhaps it’s a coup,

since no one had called us with the password. This went on for about

half an hour until eventually the phone rang. “Mikado”, said the

disembodied voice, adding a time which was some thirty minutes later.

And we then rushed about to call the Cabinet. I remember watching my

fingers shake so much that I could not press the buttons on the

telephone. I put on my most serious Foreign Office voice to say,

“Minister, this is the Foreign Office Emergency Unit. Operations to

retake Kuwait have begun.” Most of them politely thanked us. One said,

“Thank you, I know, I am already watching it on television.”

There was a large room of the Emergency Unit filled with banks of

telephones for consular calls, i.e. for ordinary people, whether in

trouble or merely worried. In order to maintain surprise, none of its

staff had been told that hostilities were to begin that night (indeed

none of us had been told except Mikado). So no one was on duty. We

rushed into the room. Every telephone was ringing furiously. On the wall

was a counter showing the number of unanswered calls. Its digits were

racing like a stopwatch. At random, I picked up a telephone. An

hysterical woman screamed “Get my husband out of there!”, meaning Saudi

Arabia or somewhere else in the Gulf. Another phone, the same thing. I

asked the head of the unit what the advice should be to these callers.

He replied, “The official advice is ‘Keep Your Heads Down’”. I offered

this to various of the panicked callers. It did little to calm them.

The war added a glamour to my private existence. I had to carry a beeper

which I would ostentatiously parade at social occasions (“just in case

I’m needed at the Foreign Office” I would say self-importantly if

someone, as I hoped, noticed it). I would emerge from a night shift into

a grey Whitehall dawn feeling somehow part of the great scenery of

“history”. And indeed in a minuscule way I was. There had been reports

that Allied bombers had damaged Shi’ism’s most holy sites at Najaf and

Kerbala. I wrote a press line about how every care was taken by our

aircraft to avoid damaging sites of “cultural sensitivity”. It was a

convincing, well-crafted piece of text. The only thing to note about it

was that I had no idea whether “our” aircraft were taking such care. I

certainly didn’t ask the Royal Air Force people in London, let alone in

the region. I assumed they were, but for all I actually knew they could

have been directing their bombs on to the very tomb of Imam Hussein

himself. Yet I wrote the press line, and it was used with considerable

conviction by both our ministers and indeed by Colin Powell.

Buried in our bunker, I learned and practised the arts of propaganda.

Before the war began, the Allied governments talked up the awfulness of

the Iraqi threat. I calculated that Iraq had more main battle tanks than

all the armies of Western Europe combined (as long as you counted them

in a particular way). One of our Ministers (it might even have been the

Prime Minister) said that the Iraqi army was the third largest in the

world. Some journalists had queried this claim. I was therefore tasked

to “prove” this statement. I duly consulted Jane’s Armies of the World

and performed the necessary calculations. I could only “prove” the Prime

Minister’s assertion by including Iraq’s enormous reserve forces (which

amounted to over a million) and ignoring the reserves of the other

contenders for the third-largest spot. But I need not have worried. The

“fact” that Iraq had the third largest forces in the world had become

one of those factoids, believed by almost everyone (except those who

bothered to read the books), validated merely by multiple repetition.

Operation Desert Storm proceeded. Some members of my unit pasted large

maps on the walls of our subterranean offices, showing the dispositions

of our and the Iraqi forces. As the intelligence came in — or as CNN

reported movements — they would move little flags and symbols up and

down the maps. You could tell that they loved doing it because we had no

need for the maps as we were not involved in any way with actual

military operations. It reminded me of the fun I had playing wargames at

school, massing Russian divisions, symbolised with little cardboard

hexagons, against the Germans on the Eastern Front on a large boardmap

of Europe. I had my own duties. Behind my desk was a row of

old-fashioned bakelite telephones. Occasionally one would ring and it

was my job to answer it. A voice would say “A scud [missile] has been

launched towards Dhahran [or Tel Aviv or wherever]”. I would say “thank

you very much” and replace the receiver. I would then announce to the

unit that a Scud had been launched towards Tel Aviv and we would all

turn on CNN to see shots of people frantically putting on gas masks in

Tel Aviv. There was no other purpose for the telephone calls.

Although there was an undoubted excitement to these moments, there was

also something terrible about them. We had seen plenty of information,

from a variety of sources, suggesting that Iraq would use chemical,

biological or even nuclear weapons. We never knew if this Scud launch

might be the one that would bring hideous destruction with it. One night

I read a report indicating a specific time when Iraq would launch a

nuclear-tipped missile towards Israel. It was a tense night. But, I

don’t care to admit, there was also something “real” about it, even

though we were experiencing the war only remotely. There was a verve and

punch to those days. The eyes of the officials in the unit, despite the

strange hours we worked, were alive and sparkling. People loved to work

on the war. Staff would come in to the unit even when they weren’t on

duty. There was no work for them to do (truth be told, there was often

very little for any of us to do), but they clearly wanted to be part of

the “action”. One senior official made a fetish of coming to work and

announcing to all about how his marriage was collapsing or he was

missing his daughter’s birthday because of his work, yet he didn’t need

to be there. There was a ghastly machismo about it. I remember us all

having a good manly guffaw at the news that only one of the five bombers

the pathetic Italians sent had managed to reach its target.

All of the officials in that rabbit warren of offices, including me,

would say then, and perhaps now, that it was all terribly serious, but I

suspect that many would know in their deepest senses that they enjoyed

it. There is nothing like the excitement of war, particularly one where

you yourself are at no risk whatsoever.

At the same time as I began, in a somewhat scattered and incoherent way,

to realise why people, especially men, are driven towards the excitement

of conflict (as I was too), I also became aware of a strange

disconnection. One night, a British Tornado pilot was interviewed on the

television. Asked what he thought of the rightness or wrongness of what

he was doing, he replied that he simply did what the “politicians”

wanted. He added that he did not have time to think about the “whys and

wherefores”, as he put them – he just did his job. I pondered this

statement and realised that we officials too, though in a less pointed

fashion than the man who actually dropped the bombs, were in the same

position. Although we were involved in the enterprise of war, none of us

seemed to feel any real sense of responsibility for it.

I thought about this during the 2003 war with Iraq, when British

officials (by that time my former colleagues) would tell me that they

thoroughly disagreed with the war, even though — they did not add — they

were thoroughly involved in executing it too. The ultimate conclusion of

this logic is that only the ministers who decide to engage in a war are

morally responsible for it.

There are reasons to question this comfortable assumption. Such a logic

runs counter to the evolution of international law which, since the

Nuremberg Trials, has emphasised that “obeying orders” is not a

legitimate defence. This is not to suggest that our various wars with

Iraq involved war crimes, but instead to point out the inconsistency of

the logic which many government and military people seem to adhere to.

For, whether bomber pilot or backroom official, we were all of us

actively involved in the enterprise: the material facts of our actions

could not be denied.

The argument of the pilot, which I think would have been shared by many

if not all of the officials I worked with, is as follows. War is decided

by “the politicians”; they are accountable through parliament; we — the

functionaries — do what the politicians tell us. Our accountability is

to them. We have no wider moral accountability. This reasoning fails

some fundamental moral tests, such as Kant’s belief that you are morally

responsible only for that which you can control. (For the more

religious, God sees everything we do.) For the pilot and the official

both have control in that they can choose not to participate. They are

not forced to collaborate in policy. They can resign. There may be

penalties for doing so, but they do nonetheless have that choice. This

objection notwithstanding, the belief, whether rationally articulated or

believed in some less coherent, emotional way, is widespread in

government service. We just do what we are told.

The powerful and dangerous consequence of this mental habit is that it

contributes to an undoubted moral numbness, although it felt not like

numbness in the Gulf War Emergency Unit, but like complete indifference.

It simply wasn’t our job to worry about the moral implications of what

we were doing. To believe so would have been seen as hopelessly naïve. I

have noticed the phenomenon particularly among some senior officials,

whose sensibilities have been blunted by years of experience. The moral

limits of the “system”, of “politics”, have become their own moral

limits, so that they exhibit no separation between their own personal

moral sphere and that of the political system in which they are working.

Moral ugliness is breezily dismissed, “that’s just politics/the way the

world is/the system, get over it.” Worse, this moral indifference is

presented as a virtue: that those like them who see things as they

“really are” are the more “practical” and “realistic”. Those who dare to

exhibit their own moral judgement or criticism are condemned as

“romantic”, “sentimental” or just plain “immature”.

There is a particular sobriquet that attaches itself to those who

exhibit their moral sensibility too often or too openly, one which

speaks also of the unspoken, class-derived norms of Foreign Office

manners, that of “going too far”. In the 1990s there was one particular

senior ambassador to a large Middle Eastern country who, it was felt,

was “going too far”. He would send telegrams to London suggesting that

Western policy in the Middle East was iniquitous: the Palestinians were

being treated terribly and the Israelis should be more harshly censured.

And he would say this quite often. For this expression of views, it was

said in the Foreign Office (phone calls among colleagues, office gossip,

muttered asides at meetings) that Sir X had “gone too far”, that he had

abandoned that fabled quality: “balance”. Occasionally, I too was called

to order in my performance reports for “going too far”. Debating at a

staff dinner in Bonn, I had attacked a colleague for his defence of

Britain’s inaction to prevent the Holocaust in World War Two. This, my

report said, showed a tendency to “go too far”. My performance rating

was duly downgraded.

One important point to notice about both these examples is that the

tendency to “go too far” was in both cases exhibited in private, within

the confines of the Foreign Office’s walls. I have little doubt that the

senior ambassador did his job and was duly loyal to government policy

when he was in foreign company, just as I was in pursuing what “we”

wanted in my official work. But “going too far” was nonetheless

condemned as a dangerous character flaw.

It only slowly became clear to me where the boundary lay between

“balance” and “going too far”. “Balance” lay in never questioning the

broad thrust of what “we” wanted or were doing. One was entitled to

question and debate small details, but suggesting, for example, that

sanctions were morally wrong was very much “not done”. Indeed, to

mention that there should be a moral component to policy was regarded,

in the unstated and inexplicit way that a culture operates, as naïve and

unprofessional.

This was very much the culture of the officials in the Foreign Office. I

always found that ministers (i.e. the politicians), by comparison, were

much more willing to debate and hear criticism of the fundamentals of

policy. I would have to seek them out in private, in order to avoid

another “going too far” remark in my next personnel report, but whenever

I did so, I invariably found them receptive. This was paradoxical

because I was told by my seniors on a tedious number of occasions that

officials were not supposed to question what ministers wanted. In fact,

I often found that ministers wanted us to do just that, provided it was

in private.

Ministers seemed to show an instinctive understanding that policy was

about something more than just the allegedly-empirical world of “facts”

(however dubiously derived) like states, security and interests. For

“going too far” in some ways represents crossing over into the

non-empirical realm of morality. To remain “balanced” was to choose to

remain in the world of the state system, the world as it is: a world of

statistics, even invented ones like Iraq’s third-largest army in the

world, and cold-eyed “realism”. To accept such a reductionist version of

the world is to succumb to the worst kind of cynicism, where that

cynicism is not even declared or admitted as such. Sometimes when I

looked in the eyes of those senior officials I thought I saw a kind of

death, that some part of their soul had shrivelled and died with disuse.

But at the time of the “Gulf War” such meditations were far in the

future.[45] My interior moral debate did not prevent me from enjoying

the exterior experience. Indeed it gave it a certain ambiguous drama.

–––––––––––––––––

To think that the state and its servants must embody a different

morality from that of ordinary people is widespread in the world of

diplomacy. It is an acceptance often expressed with weary cynicism or an

indifferent shrug, “it is the way of the world”: realpolitik. It is an

idea whose antecedents stretch back into antiquity. Its most famous

philosophical proponents are the Greek historian Thucydides, Machiavelli

(most notably in The Prince) and Thomas Hobbes (in Leviathan). The more

recent exponents of realism include Henry Kissinger and the former

British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, who infamously dismissed those

who sought Western intervention in the Yugoslav meltdown as the

“something-must-be-done brigade”.[46]

In academic circles they are known as proponents of the “realist” view

of international relations. For realists the laws governing politics

have changed little if at all through the years. Although there are some

differences between so-called neo-realists and classical realists, all

theories of realism are sceptical of universal moral principles. The

state, they argue, is by far the most important institution in

international relations. They claim that collective action (for instance

in the UN) is unlikely to work beyond short-term agreements, that a

balance of power will emerge between rival alliances, and that war

cannot be eradicated from international relations. Raison d’état governs

the world.

I suppose my views represent more of what is known as the “liberal” view

of international relations. Alongside realism, liberalism remains one of

the predominant strands of Western political thought and practice. Like

realism, liberalism has a rich heritage, encompassing such figures as

John Locke, J.S. Mill, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. Though

difficult to generalise into one paradigm, it offers a more universalist

approach — law, human rights — to international affairs. As liberalism

evolved in the twentieth century (and some called it neo-liberalism), it

argued that cooperation and collective security in a multipolar system

of democratic states and strong international institutions would best

serve the interests of stability (echoing Kant’s “perpetual peace”).

Many contemporary liberals viewed the end of the Cold War (the realist

paradigm of a bipolar system) as the ultimate confirmation of liberalism

as the only viable mode of political life.

Champion among such thinkers was Francis Fukuyama who, in his seminal

book The End of History and the Last Man, argued that political history

had come to a close with the death of the Cold War and, by default, the

triumph of liberalism. Not only will liberal democracy and capitalism

spread through an ever-globalising world, but also such a system would

be ideal. A world wherein all states adhere to liberal democratic norms,

institutions and universal political values would be one that

neutralises war and conflict. From Kant onwards, liberals embraced the

idea that representative democratic governments would never resort to

violence because rational, free-thinking individuals would never

consider war in their best interest. Additionally, growing economic

interdependence means that states have increasingly higher stakes in

ensuring mutual peace and prosperity.

Meanwhile, in the US, a new school of thought, neo-conservatism,

emerged, which reflects elements of both realism and liberalism. Unlike

the proponents of these other schools, the neo-cons are more

policymakers and politicians than theorists. The most definitive

exposition of neo-conservatism as a movement has been put forward by the

Project for the New American Century, a think-tank whose statement of

principles carries the names of Vice President Dick Cheney, former Vice

President Dan Quayle, former Assistant Secretary of Defence and current

World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, former Secretary of Defence Donald

Rumsfeld and another twenty-odd prominent American policymakers and

academics.

In brief, contemporary neo-conservatives promote four key foreign

policies: maintaining and expanding US military forces, openly

challenging hostile regimes, promoting economic and political freedom

and shaping the international order to one best fit for American

“security, prosperity and principles”. In short, neo-conservatives hold

that the advancement of American goals and interests is important and

beneficial not only for the US but for the rest of the world.

With some echoes of Woodrow Wilson’s liberal idealism in promoting

American ideals of government and economics abroad, neo-conservatives

differ from other conservatives with their aggressive and moralist

foreign policy stance. (Many neo-cons for instance, although not in

government at the time, supported the decidedly anti-realist position

that the US should intervene to stop Serb ethnic cleansing and seizure

of territory during the Yugoslav wars.) That neo-conservatism draws on

the ideas of Wilson indicates the ideological diversity within the

movement. Indeed, many neo-conservatives once affiliated themselves with

liberal or even far-left political ideologies; many considered

themselves neo-conservative in the past but are no longer. Apart from

their common interests in foreign policy, neo-conservatives are almost

universally united in their opposition to communism. The “War on Terror”

and the “Bush doctrine” show the significant influence of the “neo-cons”

on American policy today.

In any debate on foreign policy, you will observe these strands emerge:

morality vs raison d’état; intervention vs persuasion and non-military

coercion; confrontation vs negotiation or cooperation. Added to the mix

is the dichotomy of soft vs hard power, an idea (originated by Harvard

professor Joseph Nye) that power has many expressions other than

military force, including cultural and institutional persuasion. As Nye

himself says,

“The basic concept of power is the ability to influence others to get

them to do what you want. There are three major ways to do that: one is

to threaten them with sticks; the second is to pay them with carrots;

the third is to attract them or co-opt them, so that they want what you

want. If you can get others to be attracted, to want what you want, it

costs you much less in carrots and sticks.”

The contrast is often made between the “soft power” of the European

Union, which encourages states to behave better through the carrot of EU

membership or other EU-granted advantages, and the “hard” militaristic

approach of the Bush administration.

These theories were developed to help explain international relations,

and in some cases — the neo-cons being the most recent example — to help

shape policy. Looking back at my experience of policymaking and

implementing foreign policy, I find however that their relevance is

limited. I have argued in earlier chapters that realist concepts still

play a large role in shaping how diplomats think about the world —

states identifying their interests and interacting, and sometimes

fighting, on the basis of these interests. Liberal ideas of projecting

universal values — rights and law — also have an influence, to a greater

or lesser degree depending on the circumstance. But the very coherence

and neatness of these theoretical explanations of diplomatic behaviour

betrays the reality, and the complexity, of what actually took place.

In government, officials tend to think in a “realist” manner, defining

their interests and choices according to realpolitik. While I have

argued that such thinking is still far too dominant in policy-making,

there is also a substantial “liberal” sentiment at play too (and this

was true of Conservative as well as Labour governments in Britain,

Republicans and Democrats in the US): that we should be driven by more

universal concerns for human rights and the diminishing of suffering.

There can be no doubt that neo-conservative ideas played a substantial

part in driving the US decision to invade Iraq in 2003, but as I have

discussed in chapter 4, they cannot have been the only factor. There

were doubtless many others at play. Only in newspaper columns is the

argument put into simple dichotomies.

What one finds in the world of diplomacy today is rarely distinguishable

into these theoretical boxes. Policymakers are influenced by a mass of

different factors, some historical, some cultural, some emotional and

some indefinable. To pretend that decision-makers or policy-framers look

at the world in terms of theory (whether liberal or realist) is

dangerously reductionist. The more subtle and complex reality I

experienced suggests a certain scepticism about the explanatory utility

of these theories. In short, policymaking is more random, more

arbitrary, just simply messier and more human than theory would have us

believe.

(One consequence of this reality is, again, to underline the requirement

for greater scrutiny of those within the system. For if decision-making

is as arbitrary and unsystematic as I claim, then all the greater is the

power of those within the system — since they are not following a

consistent theory — and thus greater the need to query and check their

actions.)

This is understandable. Foreign ministers and diplomats are human after

all. But the desire to fit real events into these conceptual structures

often diminishes, not increases, our understanding. NATO’s intervention

in Kosovo is often presented as a pivotal moment in the evolution of the

doctrine of “humanitarian intervention”, namely the idea that states can

intervene in other states, against their governments’ will, in order to

protect civilians against genocide or widespread oppression. This right

is not yet incorporated into international law.

But NATO’s intervention was driven by many factors, including guilt over

its failure to prevent genocide in Bosnia and in particular the

Srebrenica massacre. Other factors included the fact that the majority

in Kosovo (the Kosovo-Albanians) were being so clearly repressed by

Milosevic’s Belgrade, the power of the almost real-time imagery of

Kosovo refugees being driven from their country, the diplomatic

isolation of Milosevic and the sense that he was near the end of his

power, the overwhelming military superiority of NATO which allowed

intervention without risking Western troops on the ground, the power of

the pro-Albanian lobby in the US, the role of the UN Security Council

and international law (the Council neither endorsed nor condemned the

intervention), the idea that the West could not admit more chaos and

genocide in Europe (though it was ready to allow it in Africa), and of

course the personal inclinations of the leaders concerned which must

perforce have comprised their own private narratives of the meaning of

morality, history, the nation state and their own emotional motors. This

combination of factors came to a head at a particular moment in 1999 and

pushed the decision-makers towards intervention. Had the crisis arisen

in 1996 or 2002, it is hard to believe that they would have made the

same decision. And even this account is inevitably simplistic.

It seems to be something intrinsic to discussion of foreign relations

that we tend to conceptualise in such generalised terms. When

Machiavelli was writing about international relations, his world was

divided into states which traded and occasionally went to war with one

another, but that was about all, and their trade and other interactions

were but a tiny proportion of their total economic and other activity.

It is a very different story today where the interactions of states

(with the exception of a few isolated hermits like North Korea) are

massive and heterogeneous. The world is not divisible. Hobbes’s ideas

were very much driven by the need to avoid civil war (which gripped

England during his lifetime) not international war, yet his ideas of the

state and the alternatives to it still influence basic, and often

unspoken, assumptions about international relations.

One of the oddities of the discourse of international relations is that

it treats the world of states and their doings as on a separate plane.

It is as if states float above the realm of ordinary people and that

therefore they require different forms of analysis and moral scrutiny.

Perhaps this is because we are taught, by the inevitable simplifications

of history, to regard states as separate entities, discrete and with

agency. Perhaps our natural desire for order and patterns encourages us

to do this too. History we prefer to see as a linear progression, indeed

as “progress”, until the present moment.[47] Like us, the world betrays

little order, and as we advance into the twenty-first century, the

neatness of past centuries (though were they ever really neat?) falls

away, and we encounter something that looks more and more like entropy,

disorder.

There is danger here too. The more complex the world becomes, the less

it will respond to our simplistic models of how it should behave. The

temptation will arise to make it respond. This is one way (and only one

of many ways) of viewing the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq

(whose putative motivations are discussed at further length in chapter

4): it was an attempt, post the devastating ruction of 9/11, to reassert

an American order on the world, an order more reflective of the realist

analysis of the 2001 National Security Council strategy document: a

world of states and threats which must be countered. The post-invasion

history of Iraq has shown how inappropriate that form of analysis is. As

I write in 2006, the removal of a dictator has spawned not stability but

chaos in a country that barely warrants such a designation, where many

post-national (or pre-national) forces — religious, ethnic,

anti-American, fundamentalist — are at play in a confusing and violent

mêlée.

Thus to understand the world internationally today, we need more than

the theory of how states behave. We need to understand that a state is a

mere agglomeration of individuals, not a singularity. To understand

these groups and their leaders, we must acknowledge their great

complexity, and develop a debate about their moral behaviour in the

international context (not deny its relevance). We must apply the tools

with which we understand other forms of human behaviour, whether

collective or individual: psychology, anthropology, and perhaps the more

arcane means of interpreting hidden motives such as semiotics and even

art. We must employ too our understanding of our physical space — the

environment, natural resources — in order to accommodate its effects

upon our behaviour and our lives. None of these factors is separable

without artifice; even together, they lend themselves poorly to generic

theorising. We must be humble before these many signals, and aware of

the limits of our capacity to interpret them.

And while theory has its limits, even words and terms themselves

sometimes cannot convey all that is important.

8. STAR TREK, WITTGENSTEIN AND THE PROBLEM WITH FOREIGN POLICY

“Ever since men began in time, time and

Time again they met in parliaments,

Where, in due turn, letting the next man speak,

With mouthfuls of soft air they tried to stop

Themselves from ravening their talking throats;

Hoping enunciated airs would fall

With verisimilitude in different minds,

And bring some concord to those minds; soft air

Between the hatred dying animals

Monotonously bear toward themselves;

Only soft air to underwrite the in-

Built violence of being, to meld it to

Something more civil, rarer than true forgiveness.

No work was lovelier in history;

And nothing failed so often: knowing this

The army came to hear Achilles say:

‘Pax Agamemnon.’ And Agamemnon’s: ‘Pax’”[48]

It’s a regular Wednesday morning and here we are in one of the central

chambers of world diplomacy: The United Nations Security Council, where

nation shall speak unto nation. Here the discussion is of death and

starvation, of sanctions and nuclear weapons, of genocide and

ceasefires. Here we arbitrate war and peace; we ponder the fate of

millions. We wield the power of life and death in this place, the

crucible of our modern secular world order. Our business here could not

be of greater import. And yet there is something missing, something

vital yet indefinable.

It has been a long morning. It’s hot and stuffy. The chamber is too

small for the sixty or so people crammed inside it, arrayed in fifteen

tight delegations around a flattened U-shaped table. Chairs fixed to the

floor, like some prison canteen, deepen the sense of confinement. The

light is dismal. A few stray beams of sunlight filter through the blinds

drawn on the day outside.

Through uncomfortable plastic earpieces, the delegates listen

distractedly to the monotonous translations of the interpreters who sit

behind them, separated in elevated booths, “…My delegation wishes to

reiterate the need for all parties to participate in the dialogue and to

bring this dispute to a peaceful conclusion…”. One by one the heads of

the delegations intone the same platitudes, the same words — states,

security, peace, war, civilian casualties — rolling off their tongues in

a well-practised and repetitive litany. I’m thinking about my date in

the evening. I force myself to concentrate. It’s twelve-fifteen. We’re

halfway through the morning’s agenda. That means we must be

discussing…genocide.

I hadn’t thought the UN Security Council would be boring, but it is. I

sit, I take notes, I take more notes. I crave a cigarette. We and the

other diplomats in other delegations occasionally grin at one another or

pass witless jokes on scraps of paper. The day’s agenda is the usual

roster of unsolved conflict and human misery: Burundi, Iraq, East Timor,

Congo. The list is a long one.

With each new agenda item, another intractable dispute. A map is

projected on to a white screen at one end of the room. The UN Special

Envoy or Secretariat official is wheeled in to give the Council the

state of play: “We regret to inform Council members that fighting has

continued over the reporting period, with civilian casualties on both

sides…”. The ambassadors sitting at the front flick an eye of greeting

and attempt to stay awake for the discussion to come. The diplomats at

the rear of their delegations click their ballpoints and open their

notebooks.

The junior diplomats in each delegation take the note, as it’s known.

It’s a straightforward if demanding job. Most of the wars around the

world have similar dimensions, as long as you describe them in a

particular way. The attributes of conflict can be simplified in my

notes. Lots of people dying becomes, “v.dead”, mass starvation “v.

starv”, continuing conflict “cont. conf.”, and so on.

The reports come and go; the maps flicker on and off. Now it’s the

densely-packed land of Rwanda, now it’s Sierra Leone. I’m colour-blind

so most of the maps look pretty monotone to me and I have to look

closely to tell the difference. Maps were introduced at the proposal of

one well-intentioned ambassador. The idea was to give delegations a

better sense of the countries they were discussing. He didn’t mean it as

a joke.

The discussions come to an end and, with a sigh and a yawn, the

delegations make their way out, the ambassadors to an expensive lunch at

one of the many eateries of New York’s midtown, the junior diplomats to

a sandwich and back to the office to write up their reports. I wander

out, smoke a cigarette, chat to other diplomats, maybe some journalists

hanging about outside the chamber. I think about the report I have to

write; I think about what I’m going to do that evening.

Somehow the cigarette smoke in my lungs, as I suck it deep down, is more

real than anything we’ve been doing all morning. Here we are at a

confluence of world affairs, and it doesn’t seem real at all. The issues

that we’ve been discussing — war, deprivation, genocide — are momentous

and awful: people are dying as we speak. But somewhere along the way

they have been made lifeless and denuded of all human content.

If you make an enormous effort of imagination, you can just about

conjure up a picture of the human beings whose existence is at stake —

the victims of genocide in Rwanda, the civilians massacred during a

rebel advance in the Congo — but it is a stretch, and sooner or later

you stop doing it because it’s upsetting, tiring and, frankly,

unnecessary. It’s easier just to do what’s necessary, write the report,

negotiate the resolution, get home (our hours are long, even by the

Stakhanovite standards of New York City). And slowly but surely you

become deadened to it all. Wars, brutalities, peace plans, blah, blah,

blah.

Though we were at the heart of things, we seemed to be missing the

point. Terms — diplomatic words, statistics, resolutions — were our

tools to arbitrate a world of blood and agony. We were dealing with

reality but working in abstraction. Something was missing.

–––––––––––––––––

This something was not just absent in that airless room; it is an

absence in the entire discourse of foreign policy. For the terms and

manners of the diplomats in that chamber reflect those of the way in

which foreign policy is practised — by statesmen and diplomats — and

talked about — by journalists and academics — across the world. That

little room was a microcosm.

The turmoil of recent years has brought attention to international

affairs in a way unprecedented since perhaps the Cuban missile crisis or

the darkest days of the Vietnam war. Living in New York City before

September 11, few of my New York non-diplomat friends talked about

foreign affairs; if they did, it was often in an academic, disinterested

way. Since that dreadful day, one can hardly avoid it. The terms —

multipolarity, containment — the names and acronyms — WMD and GWOT —

once only known to the insiders of foreign and security policy, have now

become ubiquitous. But like thieves in the night, they have entered our

world and discussion un-noticed and unquestioned. Time perhaps to

examine the epistemology of diplomacy.

–––––––––––––––––

I was once briefly posted to Oslo. Despite the friendliness of the

locals and my colleagues in the Embassy, I often had long hours to kill

in the isolated bungalow in the outskirts of Oslo where I lived. I had

no car and my bicycle, though equipped with fearsomely-spiked ice tyres,

was inadequate to transport me in the snowy, dark Norwegian winter. To

assuage my loneliness, my boss kindly lent me her large collection of

episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (or simply “TNG” as it is

known to the cognoscenti). She would give me a commentary on each

episode, opening my eyes to the diplomatic morality tales hitherto

undetected therein.

“This one’s about Northern Ireland”, she would say and indeed the

episode concerned a planet where two communities had warred for

millennia. It concluded when Commander Riker, the most American of the

crew, declared: “Perhaps peace will come when the first child decides to

put down his gun.” There was one about Vietnam veterans, where a

planet’s inhabitants had banished a group of genetically-programmed

warriors to an orbiting moon because they were unfit for peaceful

society now that their fighting was done. That one ended with a little

homily too.

The “TNG” character I liked least was Deanna Troi, the “em-path” on the

ship who, on approaching an alien planet, would close her eyes, put her

fingers to her forehead and say things like, “I am feeling much pain and

unhappiness” — such feelings could not of course be detected by the

Enterprise’s other sensors. She seemed to me to represent a kind of

wishy-washy, psychobabbly approach to tackling aliens and resolving

conflict. I preferred the harder, more analytical methods of Captain

Picard, played, need it be said, by a narrow-eyed Englishman with a

Shakespearean accent (though why does he have a French name?). Guns and

treaties were the methods of intergalactic relations I liked, not

feelings. If an episode was centred around Troi, I would stop the tape

and find a more masculine episode (“Final battle with the Borg”). Such

were my days in Oslo.

Unattractive though I found her, Counsellor Troi embodied an important

insight into the nature of diplomacy (or space exploration, whichever

you prefer). This was her ability to enter and interpret the realm

beyond normal data-collecting tools. The Californian scriptwriters who

dreamt her up may have been thinking merely of the emotional realm

beyond conventional measure. But of course it is not merely the emotions

that lie beyond the capacity of tools of description or measurement.

All tools of description, all terms and all language, are limited. No

measurement, no depiction can ever quite capture the fullness of a

phenomenon. It is impossible to describe what an experience, any

experience, is actually like. Well, to be more accurate, one can say

what it was like, but never what it was. My experience of drinking a cup

of coffee is going to be quite like your experience of drinking a cup of

coffee, but it is impossible for me to convey to you, however vivid and

inventive the terms that I use, the actual experience. I could put the

experience into scientific terms and describe the encounter of the

heated water and coffee molecules with the nerve endings on my tongue,

then the stimulus of the caffeine chemicals upon my brain synapses and

blood pressure. I could film the act of coffee drinking, or try to

convey it in poetry or music. But whatever the medium, whichever terms I

choose, there would always be an absence: the difference between

description and the experience.

This much is obvious and familiar. Philosophers have long grappled with

the relationship between description and reality. Ludwig Wittgenstein

spent most of his philosophical energies exploring the connections

between language and experience. In the only work published in his

lifetime, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he concluded with his famous

near-tautology on the limits of language, “Whereof one cannot speak;

thereof one must remain silent.” From the preceding arguments of this

strange and sometimes impenetrable book, one can conclude that he meant

that while language has a logical structure, that logical structure

cannot be described in language; it can only be shown. In other words,

the relationship between words and reality cannot itself be put into

words; it can only be demonstrated through the use of those words.

Wittgenstein in Tractatus takes the argument further to claim that

almost everything that is most important cannot be stated at all, but

only, at the very most, indicated by our use of language.

In his later work Wittgenstein took a different tack — and a broader

view of language — and emphasised the role of philosophy in scrutinising

and clarifying the meaning of words through their usage. But, as Ray

Monk describes in his excellent biography,[49] he never abandoned his

identification of the limits of ordinary language. As he approached his

death, he grew increasingly despairing of the reliance of contemporary

society upon the seductive tools and terms of science to describe and

arbitrate the world. He remained throughout passionately committed to

the importance of music, poetry and other non-scientific, indeed

non-linguistic, forms of expression as revelatory of the human soul, of

the human reality. Neither scientific terms nor words could ever be

enough. As he says in Tractatus, “We feel that even when all scientific

questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely

untouched. Of course then there are no questions left, and this itself

is the answer.”

The distinction between what is describable through words and other

conventional descriptive tools and what is not brings us close to other

ancient borders, that between the world of physical reality and the

metaphysical, and between the rational and the irrational. Some might

spot the same boundary between the testable certainties of science and

the unprovable inexactnesses of the arts, though Heisenberg’s

uncertainty principle has perhaps undermined science’s claim — which I

suspect that few scientists believe in any case — to certain knowledge.

Mathematics has already, since Euclid, come to grips with the

immeasurable. Indeed, the term irrational in mathematics means that

which is not commensurate with ordinary numbers, something that cannot

be put into finite numerical terms: literally, the unquantifiable.

That the unquantifiable exists therefore is unarguable, and speaks to

our own intuition about our existence: there are simply some things that

cannot be put into terms and perhaps, as Wittgenstein argued, these are

the most important. The trouble with foreign policy, however, is that

there is no acknowledgement, least of all reckoning (if such a thing is

possible), of this truth. This deficit is one that is shared in all

policymaking, indeed in all discussion about policy — the discussion, no

less, of how we should together arbitrate our lives. We face a barrage

of words and terms that claim to represent “reality” in the

international world. The terms of foreign affairs are a specialised

language within a language, and thus, a subset of a subset of actual

experience. Exacerbating the problem, “statesmen”, academics and

commentators almost daily invent new terms to attempt to describe what

is going on. For example, asymmetric warfare is a term used, usually

though not always, to describe a fight between unequally-equipped

combatants, though confusingly it was also recently used by US officials

to describe the suicides of a group of Guantanamo detainees, implying

perhaps that these were an act of war.

Globalisation is a word bandied around with such abandon (including by

me) that all but the vaguest sense of its true meaning has been lost.

Coined by the Harvard professor Theodore Leavitt in 1983, the term as

invented meant that new technologies had “proletarianised” (Leavitt’s

own jargon, common at the time but now barely used) communication,

transportation and travel, creating worldwide markets for standardised

consumer products at lower prices. This careful description has not

prevented the word being applied to phenomena as varied as the

homogenisation of culture, the loss of native languages or the

liberalisation of capital markets. To add to our distress, we must

contend with the deconstructionist critique that words carry an

unacknowledged political freight and themselves perform a political

purpose.

Metaphors (“ping-pong diplomacy”, “the axis of evil”) are conjured up to

give an organising pattern to matters. In theory, they are supposed to

help explain what is going on, but in practice are often meant to shape

responses to policy: the war on terror is the most notorious example of

this phenomenon.[50]

The decision-making of international affairs is often presented as a

calculus, that economic interest X plus security need Y equals policy Z

(though as I discuss elsewhere such a representation implies a clarity

and deliberative rigour that rarely exists in the rush of modern

diplomacy). This presents policymaking as essentially rational, based on

quantifiable and verifiable facts. Of course, as many honest politicians

and diplomats would confess, it is no such thing. For the business of

foreign affairs is above all about ordering the collective life of that

most complex and immeasurable of beings: the human. Good politicians and

good diplomats all employ a hefty dose of personal psychology and human

intuition in their otherwise rational analyses (President George Bush

for instance has admitted that he watches body language closely).[51]

Perhaps we need to confess this more openly.

Some innovations would help the way foreign policy is conventionally

discussed and arbitrated now. First, we need constantly to interrogate

the terms we use to check their correspondence with reality. It might be

better if we tried using simpler terms that everyone can understand; to

try, as Wittgenstein urged, to see things as they are. The arms race of

neologisms to describe our situation must stop. So perhaps instead of

talking about asymmetric warfare, we should talk about conflict between

grossly unequal parties; instead of globalisation, we should talk about

the growth in international trade, or the liberalisation of national

capital markets, or global income inequality or the homogenisation of

national cultures, whichever it is that we mean; and instead of the

post-modern world order, we should talk about the way the world is

organised in the early twenty-first century. Simple language is needed

to get to grips with a complicated world.

There are methods to help us understand and arbitrate the non-empirical.

The Oxford Research Group, through its Oxford Process, has developed

techniques to try to get at the underlying assumptions and emotions at

play in political, and in particular conflict, situations. They have

realised that there are often deeply embedded philosophical assumptions

at work in a political position — about how the world should be

organised and how people should behave. Such unquantifiable elements

often underpin deep-seated conflict and are yet not addressed — or given

weight — in conventional analyses employing the accepted terminology of

diplomacy. In organising dialogue sessions between antagonists, the

Oxford Group have found that even simple things like providing good food

and musical entertainment can contribute substantially to beneficial

outcomes. Though seemingly obvious, such aspects are given very little

attention in the formal, anti-emotional, masculine-dominated world of

traditional diplomacy.

To get to grips with the immeasurable, let alone the indescribable, is

more difficult. The language of international affairs is limited; all

language, all terms are limited. What lies beyond contains phenomena and

components of human existence that are measureless in their importance.

This observation sounds, for an atheist like me, uncomfortably close to

a declaration of the significance of religion. But at a minimum we

should acknowledge the importance of the metaphysical. This is the realm

of the artist, the writer, the musician, the moral philosopher, and even

the imam, the rabbi or the priest. If art informs us about the nature of

ourselves as individuals, why should it not also help us understand our

world internationally?[52] The semiotician can help interpret the signs

which are not articulated by conventional language. In all of this, we

should cultivate an eclecticism of source and information.

We need help to navigate this territory beyond the scientific and the

rational. For in this province lie questions that no amount of economic

theory, models of “statecraft” or quantitative analysis can answer.

These include the moral questions about what is the right thing to do

and, most fundamentally, how we should live. In a science-obsessed age,

we have become used to turning to science, or pseudo-science, for

answers, but it is perhaps time to acknowledge the limits of those

answers and realise that we need to develop new ways of engaging with

and arbitrating the irrational in ourselves.

–––––––––––––––––

This, I suspect, was the missing something in the Security Council: the

difference between description and reality, the indefinable component of

human experience. I cannot be sure, and I cannot prove it. But that

there is a gap between talking about, say, genocide in Eastern Congo,

and experiencing that horror, is unarguable. That disparity may account

for the choice of indifference over action. In my work on Iraq (chapter

3), it without doubt contributed to the crudeness (and cruelty) of

sanctions policy. The real experience — and suffering — of the Iraqi

people were the absent truths at our negotiating table.

The ambassadors of the Security Council have in recent years made some

attempt to bridge the gap by travelling to the trouble spots they are

dealing with. But even this commendable effort is limited by the

inevitable brevity of the visits and the diplomatic version of

Heisenberg’s problem whereby the object of observation is altered by the

act of observation. I have no first-hand experience of this but often, I

gather, when the ambassadors travel to a region, local interlocutors put

down their guns and agree to talk, only to resume fighting as soon as

the diplomats have left.

We have no Counsellor Troi to sense the immeasurable. But we do have

means to interpret the ineffable of human experience. Every political

leader who has effected fundamental change, from Gandhi to Mandela, has

given heed to this moral force. Even if we cannot quantify, we can

account for — or at a minimum acknowledge — this undeniable constituent

of our existence. Failure to do so, Wittgenstein believed, could lead

humanity to disaster.

9. THE NEGOTIATION (2)

UN Security Council, New York 1999

In December 1998, the US and UK bombed Iraq in Operation Desert Fox, in

retaliation for Iraq’s failure to cooperate with the weapons inspectors

during a test period earlier that year. It was not until 17 December the

following year that the Security Council was able to decide a renewed —

but not united — approach to Iraq, on both central issues of sanctions

and weapons inspections. That year encompassed some of the hardest work

of my life. The product — resolution 1284 — adopted by 11 positive

votes, with none against and four abstentions, was one of the longest

and most complex UN resolutions ever.

In January the following year, while still at the UK mission, I wrote an

article to commit the negotiation to the record. I did so with

publication in mind so I utilised the sort of language that I thought

was required: the conventional discourse of states and their interests.

And this is what I wrote:[53]

As 1999 began, we knew that we had a tough job ahead to rebuild a

Council position on Iraq. At that point, we set ourselves three

overlapping objectives. The first was to avoid a position where we would

have to veto a sanctions-lifting resolution (a step which was in no way

justified given Iraq’s record of non-compliance). The second was to

build up a cushion of support for our position in the Council, thus

preventing others from building up support for sanctions-lift. The third

was to pass a new resolution, which would clearly re-establish a Council

position and reaffirm its commitment to its past resolutions and the

necessity of Iraqi compliance. We always judged the third objective to

be the most difficult, if not impossible, given the vituperative

opposition from Russia and China in particular, but in the end we

achieved all three.

As the Council discussed Iraq through January, it became clear that most

Council members wanted a fresh approach. Common ground among us was that

much more should be done to address the suffering of the Iraqi people,

but also that Iraq should comply with its obligations under the

resolutions, particularly those relating to disarmament. It was also

clear that many members wanted a thorough consideration of the many and

complex issues involved, particularly the arcane questions of Iraqi WMD

programmes and the intricate and sometimes opaque operation of the

oil-for-food programme, a UN-administered scheme whereby Iraq could sell

oil in return for humanitarian supplies.

The upshot was the creation of three panels, all chaired by the then

Brazilian Ambassador Celso Amorim, addressing disarmament, humanitarian

issues and the continuing question of Kuwaiti missing persons and

property (for whom Iraq had consistently failed to account). The panels

provided a breathing space for the Council to reexamine the issues at

stake, and, frankly, to cool down after the bitter arguments of 1998.

The reports the panels produced provided the building blocks for a new

Council approach.

As soon as the panels reported in March 1999, it was clear that the mood

in the Council was to take forward the work of the panels and put the

bulk of their recommendations into action. The Council needed to design

a comprehensive way forward, one that set out a route map to deal with

Iraq’s obligations to dispose of and account for its WMD, but also one

that addressed the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people.

To do this, the UK drafted a new comprehensive draft resolution, which

took forward the panel recommendations in the three main areas

(disarmament, humanitarian and Kuwaiti issues). Our draft provided for

the creation of a new disarmament body to take over the work of UNSCOM.

It also took forward a series of measures to improve the resources

available to, and the operation of, the oil-for-food programme,

principally by removing the ceiling limiting Iraqi oil sales but also by

simplifying the procedures for the import of goods into Iraq and

allowing the UN to spend money locally to revive the economy. On the

third set of issues, the draft resolution took up the panel

recommendation for the appointment of a new UN Special Coordinator to

press for Iraqi compliance with its obligations to account for the

missing Kuwaiti persons and property.

But in addition to these provisions, the resolution provided a new

stepping stone on the path to the lifting of sanctions. The draft’s most

important provision was to allow for the suspension (rather than the

full lifting) of sanctions if Iraq fulfilled a list of key disarmament

tasks, which would be identified by the disarmament commission. This

offered a new, interim step to Iraq, short of the full lift-for-full

compliance equation of the earlier resolutions. Instead of “light at the

end of the tunnel”, there was also “light in the middle of the tunnel”.

This was a crucial innovation in gathering support for the resolution.

The Struggle for the “Middle Ground”

Thus began the first phase of our campaign. Led by Ambassador Sir Jeremy

Greenstock, we embarked on a long and detailed lobbying exercise,

focused primarily on the non-permanent members whom we called the

“middle ground” of the Council: those Council members who supported

neither the immediate lifting of sanctions, nor the perpetuation of the

“ancien regime”. The Netherlands was the first to cosponsor our

resolution, and the draft resolution thus became known as the

“Anglo-Dutch” draft. The Dutch were to provide robust and energetic

support throughout our campaign.

Others took longer to convince, and a gruelling and lengthy process of

addressing each member’s concerns one by one took place. Countries like

Canada and Brazil had, like us, thought long and hard about the Iraq

problem. They had strong views about particular issues: for example the

Canadians believed that there should be provision, if Iraq was

cooperating with the UN, for foreign oil companies to be allowed back

into Iraq to invest in the country’s decaying oil infrastructure, thus

to allow more revenues to be produced for the humanitarian programme.

Brazil, having chaired the panels, had a number of concerns, in

particular on the operation of the humanitarian programme. They, and

others, were insistent that if suspension of sanctions took place, it

should cover imports into Iraq as well as exports from Iraq. Among the

non-permanents, there was also widespread resistance to the Anglo-Dutch

draft resolution’s provision (taken from the panel recommendations) that

the UN’s compensation fund, set up after the Gulf War to compensate

those who had suffered losses caused by the invasion, should be raided

for funds to supplement the humanitarian programme in Iraq. Another

factor was perhaps the desire of some non-permanents, particularly those

with a well-developed sense of the injustice of the

permanent/non-permanent division in the Council, not to be too easily

bidden in this, the most tendentious of Council issues. But after

detailed discussion, backed up by the usual political lobbying by

embassies in capitals, particularly by the US, and by phone-calls

between foreign ministers, we slowly built up the list of co-sponsors.

By August we had a list of nine co-sponsors, thus achieving the first

and second of our objectives.

Close coordination with the US during this phase was crucial, as it was

throughout. The presentation of our draft resolution was discussed in

detail with the administration in Washington. Both our officials in

London and New York, on frequent visits and phonecalls to Washington,

and our embassy in Washington, kept in constant contact with all the key

actors in the administration, not all of whom were easily convinced of

the merits of our approach. Some were undoubtedly more ready to discard

the Council approach, frustrated by those in the Council who seemed far

too keen to appease the Iraqis, and preferred instead a more unilateral

approach to military containment.

We argued that the British and American common interest in limiting the

Iraqi threat was best achieved by restoring international support in the

Council. A new Council resolution was the best way to get a robust

inspection mechanism back into Iraq and to consolidate support for the

international effort to secure Iraqi compliance with its obligations.

An additional argument was the fear that the absence of a new resolution

would encourage others to come forward with proposals to lift sanctions,

which we would have to resist as utterly unjustified. In the end these

arguments, which were shared by the bulk of administration officials,

particularly in the State Department, won through. The US ultimately

decided, like us, that a multilateral approach to dealing with Iraq was

better than going it alone. Their support was essential. A simple

reality of today’s Security Council is that no resolution will prosper

without it.

While we were engaged in our campaign for support, others were waging

their own campaigns. The French, Russians and Chinese presented

alternative draft resolutions in a number of different permutations (a

tripartite working paper, a French working paper and a Russian/Chinese

working paper were the main proposals). The difference between their and

our proposals is encapsulated in the distinction, seemingly arcane but

nonetheless important, between compliance and cooperation. The Russian,

Chinese and French proposals offered Iraq the suspension and lifting of

sanctions in return merely for cooperation with the new disarmament

mechanism (the original Russian draft offered suspension in return for

Iraq simply allowing the inspectors back into Iraq). We insisted on

actual compliance with Iraq’s obligations, i.e. the material revelation

of information about WMD programmes or matériel of those programmes. It

was never clear what cooperation would mean if there was no compliance.

[US diplomat] Thomas Pickering at one point later in the negotiations

compared it to offering the new UNSCOM tea and biscuits.

These countries were as vigorous as we were in arguing the merits of

their approach, claiming above all that theirs was the only “realistic”

way forward in the light of Iraq’s antipathy to any further arms

inspections and its statements that it would only cooperate if offered

the immediate lifting of sanctions. But only Malaysia declared full

sympathy with the alternative approach. Other Council members were more

ready to agree with us that the Council’s credibility would be

undermined if we discarded our own conditions for sanctions relief,

simply because Iraq had failed to meet theirs.

The P5 Process

By the summer therefore, we had a majority of Council members supporting

our resolution, but it was clear that divisions in the P5 were

entrenched. We realised that we would need a new approach to attempt to

win consensus in the Council, or failing that, adoption of the

resolution with the largest possible majority (and, by implication, no

vetoes). No one wanted the impasse to last any longer, or wanted Council

divisions to become set in stone. But equally the positions in the P5,

between the US and UK on the one hand, and Russia, China and France on

the other, were still far apart.

Diplomatic activity traditionally is a little quieter in the summer

months. That August, we sat down in London and worked out a strategy to

try to get the P5 together. We decided to adopt a French suggestion of

working on “floating elements” of a resolution, rather than continuing

to flog our national text, in order to get round national sensitivities

over ownership of the text. (One should never underestimate the

attachment a country forms to its own text, much as individuals do.) We

would divide the resolution into its main components, covering

disarmament, humanitarian and Kuwaiti issues. We would then initiate

discussion of each of these elements separately, on the basis that

nothing was agreed until everything was agreed. Each part of the

discussion would begin on a general basis: we would work on concepts,

before trying to work up detailed language for a resolution.

We initiated this phase of our campaign with a P5 meeting of Political

Directors in London in September. Discussion went well, though there

were still large differences. There was a clear willingness at least to

try to overcome our differences. After this meeting, contacts continued

by telephone and via bilateral meetings, in particular between France,

the UK and the US.

The first week of the General Assembly in New York (so-called

ministerial week) is always an intense few days of diplomatic activity.

We decided to take advantage of the week’s hothouse atmosphere and the

presence of everyone’s senior officials and foreign ministers, to try

for a breakthrough. Tactically, we chose to abandon temporarily our

“floating elements” approach, and attempted instead to win agreement to

a more general P5 statement of common principles in our approach to Iraq

(a technique copied from the Kosovo G8 statement negotiation, where it

had proved effective). The technique failed. A week’s intensive

discussion among senior officials produced no agreement on a common

statement.

Looking back, I am not sure the statement would have helped us agree a

resolution in any case. While it was difficult enough to agree common

principles on handling Iraq, the real nub of our argument lay in the

detailed language of the resolution regarding the conditions for the

suspension of sanctions, and other issues such as the composition of the

new disarmament body. This was to become more apparent later in the

process. Nonetheless, the ministerial week discussions allowed the

arguments to be fully aired, and some closer understanding of each

others’ positions to be achieved. Perhaps above all, the ministerial

week discussions helped to dispel some of the suspicion of US and UK

motives that had grown up, particularly after Operation Desert Fox, that

we were seeking to pass a resolution simply as a pretext for the further

use of force (since Iraq was likely, initially at least, to reject it).

But we had hoped that the week’s discussions would result in a helpful

boost to our efforts on the resolution, through a substantive common

statement from the P5 Foreign Ministers who met at the end of the week.

This did not happen.

Instead, we pressed on with P5 meetings in New York. Meanwhile, contacts

also continued in parallel, principally between London, Paris and

Washington. In the course of these trilateral discussions, conducted at

senior official level, we were able tentatively to agree a form of words

for the most tendentious element of the resolution, namely the

conditions for the suspension and lifting of sanctions, which had become

known as “the trigger”. In the P5 forum, the principal bones of

contention were the composition of the new disarmament body (where

Russia wanted all residue of UNSCOM excised) and the trigger. It became

clear that this latter issue was the only one that really mattered: if

we could get agreement to that, then we could get agreement to

everything else.

We were able, after extensive discussion, to find common ground on the

humanitarian provisions of the resolution (with one or two small points,

such as provision for Umra pilgrimage flights, still outstanding) and,

to a large extent, on the establishment and composition of the new

disarmament body, to be known as UNMOVIC (an acronym resulting from my

tortured attempt to incorporate the key initials of Monitoring,

Verification, Inspection and Commission.).[54]

On the disarmament body, Russia’s demands hardened as discussions went

on, including the demand that no UNSCOM staff should be allowed to serve

in the new body and that all references to “full” cooperation by Iraq

should be removed, as these were “provocative” and could be used as a

pretext for military action if Iraq failed to provide full cooperation.

But despite this, the final language that resulted was broadly

acceptable to all of us: UK and US concerns were satisfied that the new

body should enjoy the full rights of access to Iraqi installations

(immediate access, anywhere, anytime) and that it should be staffed by

serious disarmament experts, including those who had worked for UNSCOM.

But it was the trigger that took up most of our time, in meeting after

meeting, variously in our separate missions, in dingy rooms in the UN

building, and finally in the well-provisioned chambers of the US Mission

as the negotiations drew to their close. At the beginning of the P5

process, we had decided that we should not attempt to agree how

suspension would take place i.e. what controls would remain on Iraq to

prevent WMD rearmament after the suspension of sanctions. This would

unnecessarily burden the already-tortuous discussions with an issue that

we did not need to resolve until after the resolution had passed.

Fortunately, the other P5 quickly agreed to this: France in particular

realised early on that trying to resolve this issue would make

negotiations more difficult rather than easier. Instead discussion

focussed on when and under what conditions sanctions should be

suspended.

The End-Game

As the autumn months slipped by, we knew discussion could not last

indefinitely. The pressure was on us, particularly from the region, to

get a result. With the membership of the Council changing at the end of

the year, when four of our cosponsors would leave the Council, time was

running out. We stepped up the pace of meetings, and encouraged

attendance from capitals to reduce the scope for delay.

As discussion headed into its final weeks, it became clear that the

ambiguity inherent in the trigger language we, the French and Americans

had worked out together, was becoming more a hindrance than a help. This

text in complex language essentially said that sanctions suspension

would be decided by the Council after a report by the new Executive

Chairman of UNMOVIC that Iraq had cooperated for 120 days and that this

report would also cover progress made by Iraq in fulfilling the key

disarmament tasks (even this description is a simplification of what the

resolution contains). Russia, in the form of its vigorous and tenacious

Permanent Representative, teased away at this language, demanding to

know what precisely was meant by progress and insisting that all

ambiguity be removed. We argued that whether the progress was sufficient

to trigger the suspension of sanctions was something only the Council

could judge at the time. In other words, the decision should be

deferred. We, the French and the Americans realised that such ambiguity

was the only way we could conceivably bridge our differences.

It emerged that behind this textual difference lay deeper political

differences that perhaps could never have been resolved by negotiation

on the text. As the negotiations reached their climax, the Russians

revealed that they were working only for a resolution on which Russia

could abstain. They were not aiming to vote for the resolution. China

echoed this position. France in the end confirmed that it too would only

abstain if the resolution could not be unanimously supported, despite

the extensive work we had done together on the text. Naturally, we were

disappointed to hear this news, particularly from the French.

I do not know why these countries decided to abstain. No doubt, like all

of us, they in the end made a calculation of their overall interests,

including their relationship with Iraq. The Iraqi Prime Minister visited

Moscow in early December and argued that Russia should veto the

resolution. The Russians may have concluded that abstention provided

them with a good balance: it would avoid unnecessarily irritating the

Iraqis (with whom they have well-known common interests, in terms of

debt owed and oil contracts in the offing) but also minimise damage to

relations with the West, which would undoubtedly have been undermined by

a Russian veto (the Chechnya campaign had recently begun). As for the

French, they argued to us that a non-unanimous resolution would be

diminished in force, and the Iraqis would be unlikely to comply — in its

way a self-fulfilling argument.

By the second week of December, it was clear to all concerned that

further negotiation would achieve little. There seemed no further point

in massaging the trigger language when only a Russian abstention was on

offer in any case. The precision the Russians were demanding would have

made the conditions for suspension too lenient, reducing to an

unacceptable degree the obligations on Iraq and the real leverage on the

Iraqi government to cooperate. In any case, the Russian declaration of

intent to abstain naturally reduced our and the Americans’ willingness

to consider further concessions. The French, perhaps the most

discomfited by the prospective outcome before them, were the last to

accept this reality and insisted on further attempts to bridge the gaps,

but these in the end proved futile.

When we finally took the resolution to the vote on 17 December, we knew

that all efforts to reach consensus had been exhausted. It was therefore

the best possible outcome we could have achieved in the circumstances.

The negotiations had lasted perhaps ten months (depending on where you

judge that they began); in any case they lasted far longer than we had

anticipated. Exhausting though the effort was, the sheer duration of the

talks demonstrated to everyone that every attempt had been made to

obtain agreement. I doubt if anyone will be keen to repeat our effort

for a new comprehensive resolution for some time yet.

At the adoption, every Council member, including those who abstained

(Malaysia joined China, Russia and France), stated that the new

resolution represented a new, and indeed the only, way forward for the

UN’s relationship with Iraq. As I write in January 2000, work on

implementation of the resolution has begun, as have the efforts to

persuade the Iraqis to comply (the Russians, Chinese, French and

Malaysians have all called on Iraq to comply with SCR 1284). This may

prove a long task. But Iraq must in the end heed the reality that

compliance with the resolution is the only way out of sanctions and back

to a normal relationship with the rest of the world.

–––––––––––––––––

I was not allowed to send the article for publication. The British

embassies in Paris and Washington both opined that its publication might

risk offending their hosts.

Looking back, the self-confident, if not triumphalist, tone of the piece

is as striking as its employment of a very particular form of writing to

describe the events in which I had participated. Instead of writing, for

example, what the “Russian ambassador said”, I wrote what “Russia

wanted”. Note too the repeated and unconscious use of the “we” word to

describe UK policy. But what is more striking now is that what I wrote

is not how I remember what actually took place.

For instance, I wrote that the “middle ground” countries like Brazil and

Canada all had particular national concerns about what should go into

the resolution. But when I remember now, I realise that this was not

what I actually observed. For when the ambassador and I talked to the

members of these delegations, as we did many times, one rather startling

truth was evident, and that was that these supposedly “national

concerns” were not “national” concerns at all.

Since the negotiation had become framed as a great big negotiation about

what the Council should “do” about Iraq, many of the “experts”, myself

included, had developed a lot of whizz-bang ideas about how to untangle

the Gordian knot. This was after all our job, or as we chose to see it.

The Canadian, Brazilian and Slovene “experts” (my opposite numbers) were

no different, and had all taken it upon themselves to develop particular

hobby-horses. The Canadian expert had become obsessed with the oil

issue, and in particular about something called Production Sharing

Agreements; the Brazilian with various arcane aspects of the

humanitarian issue. These personal interests became transformed into

national concerns.

For what we found when we lobbied their ambassadors was that they rarely

understood the supposedly national concerns on which their experts had

briefed them. For instance, I prepared my ambassador for a detailed,

technical discussion of the oil investment issue with the Canadian

ambassador, only to discover that the Canadian had the flimsiest grasp

of what was allegedly a serious national concern. This did not prevent

the latter from insisting the provision he wanted be included in the

resolution. When our High Commission (as embassies in the British

Commonwealth are known) in Ottawa talked to “Ottawa”, i.e. the Canadian

Foreign Ministry, they told our diplomats that the concerns were all

entirely generated by the expert in New York.

If the delegations became particularly obdurate, we would ask London to

send in our embassies in the countries concerned to find out what the

foreign ministries thought about their “national concerns”. Without

exception, we found that Brasilia, Ottawa or whichever capital were

either completely unaware of what their delegations were doing in their

name or that, if they were not unaware, they took no interest whatsoever

in the content of the issue at stake. Sometimes the ambassadors chose to

adopt their experts’ concerns as their own and thus of their country,

sometimes they did not. It was, it seemed to me, entirely arbitrary and

in any case it didn’t really matter.

What mattered in winning over the “middle ground” was not the

deliberation over the actual content of the resolution — but rather the

political arm-twisting that went on to get the non-permanents to see

matters “our” way. It was clear to those countries, and if it wasn’t

clear it was made clear to them that in the final analysis they would of

course have to end up supporting us, or rather the US. There was no way

that, put to a vote, the Canadians, Slovenes or Brazilians would vote

against us. This message was usually conveyed in private telephone calls

between foreign ministers or, in the case of Slovenia, during a state

visit by the US President. It was merely a question of how long it took

for them to get the message. You will notice that this version of events

makes no appearance in my so-called “insider’s account of the

negotiation”, as I had titled my article.

Reading the resolution now,[55] I am appalled by its ludicrous

complexity. The “trigger” section (section D) is almost unintelligible:

even at the time of its adoption, I suspect that only a very few people

— and I was one of them — could have explained what it actually meant.

Read, if you can bear, just one of the paragraphs setting out the

conditions for the trigger:

33. Expresses its intention, upon receipt of reports from the Executive

Chairman of UNMOVIC and from the Director General of the IAEA that Iraq

has cooperated in all respects with UNMOVIC and the IAEA in particular

in fulfilling the work programmes in all the aspects referred to in

paragraph 7 above, for a period of 120 days after the date on which the

Council is in receipt of reports from both UNMOVIC and the IAEA that the

reinforced system of ongoing monitoring and verification is fully

operational, to suspend with the fundamental objective of improving the

humanitarian situation in Iraq and securing the implementation of the

Council’s resolutions, for a period of 120 days renewable by the

Council, and subject to the elaboration of effective financial and other

operational measures to ensure that Iraq does not acquire prohibited

items, prohibitions against the import of commodities and products

originating in Iraq, and prohibitions against the sale, supply and

delivery to Iraq of civilian commodities and products other than those

referred to in paragraph 24 of resolution 687 (1991) or those to which

the mechanism established by resolution 1051 (1996) applies;

This complexity was a function of the political divisions underlying the

text. We could not agree, hence we sought resolution in ambiguities.

This approach was to have its own price later.

Sandy Berger, then US National Security Adviser, once described the text

of the resolution as “talmudic” in its complexity and “humongous” in its

difficulty. Because of this complexity, and despite the gravity of the

issue, the negotiations were conducted to a very large extent by

diplomats. There was only occasional involvement by senior politicians

at crucial moments. Usually when this happened, the ministers would be

quite unable to get to grips with the tangled syntax and esoteric

symbolisms of the words (such as the difference between cooperation and

compliance). This was understandable given the short time ministers

invariably had to prepare for such contacts. Their interventions were

therefore of little help, except for the arm-twisting that went on to

get the non-permanents on-board (arm-twisting didn’t work with the P5).

The views and prejudices of the sometimes quite junior diplomats

therefore mattered more than I had suspected. Some contributed a great

deal to the resolution and our effort to reach agreement (including

among those who later abstained). Some did not. One member of a P5

delegation was especially destructive. After a long day’s negotiation, I

would return to my Mission to write the telegram for London recording

what had happened. The next morning I would return to the office to see

the reports from our embassies in the other P5 capitals on their

thoughts on the state of play of the negotiations. The report from his

capital retailed a version of the previous day’s discussion which I

could not recognise. In every case, the worst possible interpretation

had been placed upon what we and, above all, the Americans were saying.

This was very much to the detriment of our aim of agreement and indeed I

am convinced it contributed to his country’s decision to abstain. But it

would be wrong to single out one diplomat for putting his own personal

interpretation on what was going on, because, to greater and lesser

degrees, that was what we were all doing.

One of the things you realise when participating in a process like this

is how personal it is. We would negotiate for hours in small,

uncomfortable little rooms (often the “P5 room” off the corridor leading

to the Security Council). What went on in there was reduced by me, and

my colleagues in other missions, into neat, tidy summary records which

were transmitted back to our capitals (“Russia proposed x; US conceded

y”). It was for me, with the endorsement of my ambassador who checked

what I wrote, to decide what was important and what was not and how to

report it. If we felt we needed more negotiating room from London, we

would exaggerate the extent of opposition on that point. If we didn’t

like our instructions from London on another point, we would emphasise

our opponents’ arguments against it. This much I think any negotiator

under the control of a distant authority would understand.

But there was something more too. Particularly during discussion of the

trigger, which had become a very intimate P5 affair, conducted largely

by the ambassadors with the experts at their side, there were things

going on which did not fit into the conventional reports we were

required to write home. I remember one particular afternoon during a P5

meeting in the US mission when agreement seemed within our grasp. It

rested partly on the interpretation of a word but partly on something

much more intangible, describable only by words like goodwill and trust.

When the history of this episode will be written, it will no doubt adopt

an analysis based solely upon the interaction of interests. But how the

negotiators interpreted those interests and how they chose to report our

expression of our positions involved an altogether more personal aspect.

Sitting in the upstairs conference room of the US mission on First

Avenue, the UN complex across the street, I sometimes had the feeling

that agreement was hanging in the air above the darkly veneered

conference table like some hovering phantom. If we all reached out for

it at once it would become real; instead we were swiping at it one by

one, failing to make the connection.

What was this about? A word that never appeared in my telegrams

reporting the talks, which, looking back, I think should have done.

Trust. Intangible and immeasurable, it was a component that would, if

extant, have comprised the missing piece in our jigsaw puzzle. The

Russians, who were by some way the most tenacious in their opposition to

and criticism of our approach, simply did not trust that our intentions

were not once more to find a pretext to attack Iraq. Underlying that

distrust may have lain an interest in preserving the political status

quo in Iraq which was, theoretically, beneficial to Russia’s economic

interests, but had the distrust been erased then we would have known

more clearly that the interests were the motor.

It is always easy to attribute to one’s opponents the base and selfish

motives of economic interest. This is how the British and American press

routinely described French and Russian motives in their analyses of why

those countries refused to support the US military campaign in 2003.

Meanwhile, to ourselves, we routinely attribute “higher” motives of

security, democracy, freedom, when of course the material motives are,

with only a few exceptions, also at play. But I have often felt, looking

from inside the box of policy-making, that it is too simplistic to

assign motives in this way.

The 2003 war is discussed in chapter 4, but I do not share the view of

those who think the war was “about” oil, any more than I think French

and Russian opposition (or indeed German or anyone else’s) opposition

was “about” their economic interest in the existing regime. From my

experience, and I have talked to a number of senior diplomats and

foreign policy-makers who share this view, only very rarely do

decision-makers set down a list of their motives, objectives and

“interests”. More generally, this is an unordered and iterative process

where a paradigmatic view of a situation is built up and then

continually reinforced until, in a process similar to the shifts in

scientific views described by Thomas Kuhn,[56] something dramatic

happens that forces that view to change.[57] Those involved in

formulating and expounding the view accumulate a series of facts to

justify their interpretation. I suspect that the Russians do this just

as much as we do.

Though their position may also have been “about” economic interests,

even based upon those interests, the Russians genuinely believed that

the US had no intention ever to lift sanctions regardless of Iraqi

performance on disarmament. There was much evidence to support this

view. President Clinton had said so publicly. The US insistence, during

the inspection process, that only absolute and complete fulfilment of

every last stipulated obligation of the resolutions would lead to

movement on sanctions — what movement they invariably refused to specify

— reinforced the impression. In 1998 the IAEA had reported that Iraq had

met its obligations to disarm itself verifiably of its nuclear

weapons-making capability, barring two minor issues. In the Security

Council both the US and we refused to agree a statement giving public

acknowledgement of this achievement, which was undoubted progress by the

Iraqis. This instance in particular was often mentioned to me by the

Iraqis, French and Russians as a case of bad faith: if the Iraqis were

making progress we should at a minimum say so and pay public heed. But

we did not — the US delegation told us that in domestic political terms

the Administration could not make any suggestion that Saddam was doing

as he was supposed to.

There was a personal aspect too. The Russian ambassador felt that he had

been lied to, both by the US and UK and by Richard Butler, the head of

UNSCOM. Before Desert Fox took place, we had managed to squeeze out of

the Council a resolution yet again demanding that Iraq give UNSCOM full

cooperation. During the negotiation, Ambassador Sergei Lavrov

specifically asked us, in the Council Chamber, whether we regarded the

language of the resolution as authorising the use of military force in

the event of Iraqi non-cooperation. We responded that it did not. And

yet, when Desert Fox arrived, we did indeed use this resolution as part

of our legal justification for the use of force (a similar trick was

pulled before the 2003 war). Lavrov was also obsessed by what he claimed

was Butler’s deliberate deceit in telling the Russians in Moscow that

Iraq was cooperating, shortly before returning to New York to issue his

report stating that Iraq had not in fact cooperated.

During the P5 negotiation there was a particular moment that stands out

highlighted in my memory (again, unmentioned in my article). The Russian

ambassador asked the US delegate (that day it was an Assistant

Under-Secretary from Washington) straight out about what was really the

US position on sanctions, specifically, what would Iraq qualify for in

terms of sanctions lift if it met the conditions set out in resolution

687? (The paragraphs in this resolution established what Iraq must do in

terms of disarming itself of its WMD and missiles in order for sanctions

to be lifted, which means that sanctions are irrevocably terminated,

rather than suspended, which means what it says, i.e. that sanctions are

suspended but could later be reimposed.) The US official looked

discomfited and stared around him, clearly unprepared for so direct a

question. After an uncomfortable and telling pause, “Suspension, at a

minimum” was his reply and he looked disquieted offering even this

generous an interpretation of US policy, something which no member of

the Administration would bring himself to say publicly, for fear of

seeming “soft” on Saddam.

This statement — that the US would only suspend sanctions if Iraq met

the conditions for lift — seems relatively innocuous but, to the

cognoscenti, it was highly loaded. It sent a shock through the French

and Russian delegations. The experts feverishly scribbled down the

quotation, word for word. I knew immediately that “we” had scored a

major own-goal. I am sure that the telegrams transmitted back to Paris

and Moscow that evening highlighted this very point in triplicate.

Perhaps it was brought to the special attention of Putin and Chirac

when, a few weeks later, they were making their final decisions on how

to vote. The US had admitted, in all candour and in a private

negotiating chamber, that even if Iraq met the conditions for lift, it

would only agree to the suspension of sanctions. For the French and

Russians, this was proof positive that the US was acting in bad faith:

while demanding the fullest possible compliance from Iraq down to the

last letter of the resolutions, it was not prepared to keep its side of

the bargain by lifting sanctions, even if Iraq met those conditions.

That year of negotiation was partly about finding a point at which the

differing views of the Iraq issue, above all among the P5, could find

convergence. Our lengthy discussions were about texts and words, and as

they were reported, were a process of finding forms of those words,

terms and compromises to produce that meeting point. If a historian were

to examine the documentary record (I alone must have written hundreds of

detailed telegrams about this one negotiation), that is what he or she

would see. This is the narrative form that my article, quoted above,

would take. The press, denied access to our little chamber, reported

this anodyne version of events, fed to them by press officers highly

fluent in the discourse.

But it was also about trust among small groups of people (all men). In

each country, only a small number of people were involved in deciding

what each country wanted. We had all been deeply, perhaps too deeply,

immersed in this complex and tortured subject. Trust was the evanescent

phantom that escaped us. And that moment, when the US official replied

to the Russian’s question, was the moment when I realised that it had

evaded us for good.

10. INDEPENDENT DIPLOMAT, OR THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TABLE

“…The wise man belongs to all countries, for the home of a great soul is

the whole world.”

Democritus, quoted in Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies

Hargeisa, Somaliland

We are driving along the long road from Berbera on the Red Sea coast,

back to Hargeisa, the dusty capital of Somaliland. I am with Edna Adan,

the 69-year old foreign minister of Somaliland, a government driver,

Magan from the Ministry and a bodyguard. This has not always been a safe

road; a year ago, a German aid worker was ambushed here and his Somali

companion shot dead. We’ve spent the day in Berbera to witness and

celebrate a significant moment in Somaliland’s development as a state.

Fifty long steel containers, loaded with wiring and machinery for a

large state electricity company, have been delivered by ship at Berbera

to be trucked to Ethiopia, 150 miles inland up this road. This is the

first official trade shipment other than food aid since Somaliland was

re-established as a state in 1991. A small moment maybe, but a

significant one for this diminutive and young country.

Edna Adan is something of a folk heroine in Somaliland. The former wife

of one of Somalia’s former prime ministers, she has used her retirement

savings and her pension (she worked for the UN) to build and run a

maternity hospital in Hargeisa. In a poor town, the hospital is a

much-loved institution built from a rubbish tip by a much-loved woman.

Wherever we go in Somaliland, she is greeted by patients, parents of

patients and simply ordinary people, who stop to thank and admire her.

There hasn’t been much traffic; in fact the road has been all but

deserted for most of our journey. But in front of us a white car is

driving in the middle of the road, preventing us from passing. It’s an

old car and it is spewing a long black cloud of unfiltered exhaust.

Although the windows of our four-by-four are closed, the smoke chokes

and irritates us. Our driver accelerates and sounds his horn, but still

the car in front doesn’t give way. Indeed, it seems deliberately to be

blocking our path. The Somalilanders in my car exclaim, “What’s he

doing?”, “He’s driving dangerously!” We are a little tense, silently

aware of what has happened before on this road. But eventually we get

past.

A little later, we stop. Minister Edna (as she is known, or, more often,

simply Edna) wants to give the biscuits we have brought for our journey

to children we pass. They are poor village children. We can see them

chasing goats or simply standing, doing nothing but watching our car go

by — a rare sight. Somaliland is one of the poorest countries in the

world. The large majority of its people barely subsists. Our car slows

when Minister Edna spots a child. But each time we pull over and the

driver and guard gesture to the child, they run away. Minister Edna says

that she thinks they’ve been warned by their mothers to keep away from

strangers. The children scamper away, sometimes shouting to one another.

Laughing, we drive off.

Too late! While we were at the side of the road, the awful white car has

overtaken us again and once more we are trapped in its fumes. Revving

and beeping, our driver tries to overtake, but again the dirty white car

sits in the middle of the road, blocking our way. We can see the car is

filled with men. Annoyed and perhaps a little nervous, the Somalilanders

grow more agitated. With a frenzy of horn and engine noise, accompanied

by much swerving to and fro across the otherwise empty road, our driver

manages to get our car alongside.

Our bodyguard leans out of the window as we pass and gestures at the

white car to stop. As they pull over, he jumps out carrying his AK-47

rifle at the ready. Minster Edna tries to stop him, but it’s too late

and he and our driver are quickly making their points emphatically to

the occupants of the white car. They’re speaking Somali, but even I can

understand what they are saying. I feel nervous.

But within about ten seconds, there is laughter and smiles. The driver

of the white car, a young man with the pale, slender mien of many

Somalis, emerges from the car. Grinning, he mock-salutes the bodyguard

who is now mollified and laughing too. The young man comes to the

window. Suddenly, he recognises Minister Edna. He is immediately shy and

even more repentant for his bad driving. Apologising, he reaches into

our car, tenderly grasps Edna’s hand and kisses it, and we move on.

I resigned from the British Foreign Office in September 2004. The

breaking point finally came when I testified (in secret) to the official

inquiry into the use of intelligence on Iraq’s WMD (the Butler Inquiry,

as it was known). I wrote down all that I thought about the war,

including the available alternatives, its illegality and the

misrepresentation of what we knew of Iraq’s weapons. Once I had written

it, I realised at last, after years of agonising, that I could no longer

continue to work for the government.

I sent my testimony to the Foreign Secretary and the head of the Foreign

Office (the chief civil servant, known as the Permanent

Under-Secretary). Neither replied. My career as a formal diplomat of the

British state was over. My testimony to the inquiry was only the

proximate reason for my resignation. For years, my disillusionment and

doubt about diplomacy had been growing.

During my work on the UN Security Council, I had often been struck by a

very obvious imbalance — between the diplomatic resources and skills of

the powerful countries, and everyone else. As British diplomats, we had

considerable advantages. With reams of telegrams and intelligence

reports, I was better briefed than most other diplomats present. Our

mission was among the largest at the UN, with squads of diplomats

covering every issue. In negotiation, our experienced lawyers could

ensure that any textual changes were turned to our benefit. We could

consult our capital in real-time without fear of interception: unlike

many others around the table, our communications were secure. And the UK

took pride in drafting more resolutions than anyone else: we would send

regular statistics back to London to prove it.

Such advantages are available to a handful of the world’s most powerful

countries — China, the US, Russia, France, Britain. By no coincidence is

their real (economic and military) power multiplied by this

less-recognised but nonetheless forceful diplomatic power.

Meanwhile, everyone else was at a considerable disadvantage. The

numerous smaller UN missions struggle to cover the enormous and

proliferating agendas of the UN General Assembly, Security Council and

specialised committees with just one or two horribly overworked and

under-equipped diplomats. (At the World Trade Organisation in Geneva for

instance, many poor countries cannot afford to maintain missions, let

alone the experts they need to track and influence highly complex trade

negotiations.)

Often those with most at stake are not even allowed into the room where

their affairs are being discussed. This imbalance of course does not

serve those marginalised, but nor, paradoxically, does it serve the

powerful. In this complex and interconnected era, agreements that fail

to take into account the interests of all concerned parties are not good

or sustainable and too often they fall apart. The ultimate effect is a

less stable world. If people are ignored, they tend to find ways —

sometimes violent — to get heard.

This was the inspiration behind the foundation of Independent Diplomat,

a non-profit diplomatic advisory group. I wanted to try to remedy the

diplomatic deficit I had witnessed at the Security Council. The idea was

to establish a network of experienced practitioners (former diplomats,

international lawyers and skilled analysts) whose expertise would be

available to help small, inexperienced or under-resourced countries and

political groups with their diplomacy — “a diplomatic service for those

who need it most”.

I began work in the basement of my flat in south London in the autumn of

2004. Independent Diplomat’s first contract, signed early the next year,

was with the government of Kosovo, to help advise it during the

UN-supervised process that would determine the province’s final status.

Kosovo, technically still part of Serbia though governed separately by

the UN since 1999, was not allowed any diplomatic representation or a

foreign ministry, yet it was required to participate in a complex and

highly-charged diplomatic process involving many diplomatic actors (to

start with, the UN, the EU and the six countries of the Contact Group

who dominate south-east European diplomacy, as well, of course, as

Serbia itself).

The philosophy of Independent Diplomat is straightforward. We work for

our clients. Unlike many other NGOs or international agencies, we are

simply at the disposal of the countries and groups that choose to use

us. We try to help our clients, through advice and assistance with

diplomatic tools, to achieve their international goals. There is only

one important condition. All those we help must be democratic and

respectful of international law and human rights. No country is perfect

in this regard, but the board of Independent Diplomat, which scrutinises

all prospective projects we undertake, must be convinced of the general

“direction of travel” of our potential clients. On this ground, we have

turned down several groups and countries that have approached us. Our

hope is that by helping countries and political groups to use the

existing international machinery and international law we are helping

reinforce peaceful and lawful means of arbitrating international

business.

Our work for our clients consists of behind-the-scenes strategic advice

as well as practical assistance with things like communications to the

UN Security Council,[58] speeches or formal diplomatic presentations. We

don’t represent our clients diplomatically or lobby for them. I always

felt that the sight of a sharp-suited westerner lobbying for a faraway

group in the corridors of Washington or New York was unconvincing: it

spoke more of money than integrity. In any case, having been on the

receiving end of such lobbying before, I concluded that the people

themselves of a country or region were the most convincing advocates of

their own cause.

There is a harder edge to why Independent Diplomat needs to exist. For

many of our clients, it is predictable that if they are not heard and

their views not taken into account, there may be conflict. Most

observers of the Balkans would agree that if the final status process

(which is underway as I write this) does not conclude in the formation

of a new state of Kosovo, there is likely to be renewed war in that

corner of south east Europe. In the Western Sahara, the frustrated

wishes of the Saharawi people for self-determination could one day break

out into renewed violence, though for the moment the Polisario Front

very much abjures it. The ceasefire was agreed in 1991, since when there

has not been one iota of progress in fulfilling its conditions.

Though our work is practical, there is also a more subtle element to it.

We encourage our clients to be confident and assertive in their demands

of the world. It is clear already from our work that many countries and

political groups do not feel that the institutions of world diplomacy

are “theirs”. They find these forums intimidating and forbidding. Any

scrap of attention they receive there is gratefully accepted, when in

fact our clients, like any citizens of the world, should be demanding

their rights as equals, not as demandeurs. Despite the high-sounding

claims of the UN charter or the European Union, the truth is that a

great many people feel excluded from these institutions, and perceive

that their relationship with them is not of equality but of

supplication. It is perhaps not surprising that they should feel this,

for in many cases, like Kosovo, they are literally excluded.

By coincidence, our first three clients are self-determination cases.

Though in two of those — Kosovo and Somaliland — the governments are

democratic and running affairs in their territories (the Polisario do

not — yet — control the territory they claim), as non-states they are

not given the same status as states in inter-governmental forums such as

the UN. When Independent Diplomat finally managed to find a way for the

Kosovo Prime Minister, a democratically-elected government leader, to

attend discussions of his own country at the UN Security Council, he was

not allowed to speak or sit at the Council table (unlike, for instance,

Serbia) and he was described, humiliatingly, as a member of the UN

Mission in Kosovo delegation, a group of unelected international

officials. I found his treatment by officials and diplomats at the

Council rude and dismissive, and I said this to my colleagues in the

Kosovo delegation. They said they were used to it.

As I write in the summer of 2006, Independent Diplomat has grown to a

handful of staff with two offices in London and New York. We are

planning to open offices in Brussels (to cover the EU), Addis Ababa (the

African Union) and other multilateral diplomatic centres. We are helped

by a wide and growing network of advisers and experts around the world

who help us case-by-case with our projects. We now have two other

long-term clients in addition to Kosovo: the government of Somaliland

and the Polisario Front of the Western Sahara (see chapter 6).

Though I still work in diplomacy, it is very different from my career in

the British foreign service. What I thought would be difficult has

proved easier than I expected and what I thought would be easy has been

harder. As a British diplomat I was steeped in the privilege of

membership of the closed circle of powerful countries. Leaving that

circle, I thought it would be difficult from the outside to work out

what was going on inside. I was worried that because I was an “informal”

diplomat, the “real” diplomats would not tell me what they were doing.

This has not proved to be the case. To my surprise, most diplomats and

officials (such as the UN envoys dealing with the Western Sahara or

Kosovo) have been open about their work. Indeed, many seem to use

Independent Diplomat as a kind of confessional where they tell us what

they really think, rather than what their institutions require them to

think.

Given the chance, the frustration, cynicism and despair induced by the

official discourse of diplomacy can easily spill out. The formal

traditions, terms and morals of diplomacy form a kind of strait-jacket

that many of the diplomatic world’s denizens are eager to escape from.

Officials tell me things as Independent Diplomat that they would never

confess when I was a British diplomat. Ambassadors tell me of their

secret sympathy for the Saharawis, or the necessity of independence for

Kosovo, or their frustration with their ministry (or ministers). Unbound

by the official line, their true thoughts are revealed. Members of the

great institutions of diplomacy — foreign ministries and multilateral

bodies — have asked Independent Diplomat to research policies and ideas

that they are not permitted to explore in their official work. This is

an unexpected stratum of the world of diplomacy that Independent

Diplomat has been able to tap into, and use to the benefit of its

clients.

But it has been harder than I expected to establish and fund the

institution. Independent Diplomat’s clients are by definition the poor

and marginalised, and cannot afford to pay the fees that would sustain a

commercial agency. So we have been forced to seek funding to support our

work. Naively I thought that fundraising would involve emailing a letter

to the various foundations and a large cheque would soon follow in

response. After a few emails came back with the stock rejections from

junior staff members, it became clear that this expectation was false.

In the world of diplomacy, the idea has been warmly greeted. Many

diplomats immediately recognise the diplomatic deficit that Independent

Diplomat was set up to address. Indeed many ask why such a group has not

been established before, such is the glaring need. But in the world of

charitable foundations and other funders, it has been harder to

convince. For many diplomacy is still a very closed world. Some have

asked me to explain what diplomats actually do. In the human

rights-oriented culture of many large foundations, there is a scepticism

(well-founded in my experience) that diplomats do any good at all. Most

seem to regard them and their habits as inherently amoral, driven by the

heartless calculus of real-politik. Why then would the world need an

independent diplomat?

As anyone who has tried to set up a charity or non-governmental

organisation will tell you, it’s a tough business. There seems to be a

kind of Darwinian competition at work for new organisations where the

foundations wait to see who will remain standing after their first year

or so, to test whether their ideas and commitment are truly viable.

Though harsh, it cannot be denied that this technique works. Like the

senior officials who decide policy in foreign ministries, the

decision-makers in the foundations are guarded by legions of

gate-keepers whose job, it seems, is to prevent the hordes of begging

NGOs stampeding their bank accounts.

It has taken time therefore to win support — and most crucially funding

— for the organisation. My first break came from “Unltd”, a foundation

that supports social entrepreneurs in Britain. I then was fortunate

enough to win a fellowship from the Quaker Joseph Rowntree Charitable

Trust. Independent Diplomat’s first institutional grant came from George

Soros’s Open Society Institute, appropriately enough, given that

Independent Diplomat was designed to address a deficit Karl Popper would

have recognised.

The benefits of Independent Diplomat have been many. The slow

rediscovery of my own intellectual independence and conscience has been

refreshing. I am reminded of how I felt about politics and the world

when a student: invigorated, interested and angry. Somehow, being an

official diplomat had drained me of one of the things that defined who I

was. It had taught me to defend the existing order rather than noticing

its injustices and seeking to change them.

More unexpected has been the radical change of view from the other side

of the table. Things look very different when you are a Somalilander or

a Kosovar. The world does not seem arranged to suit you, rather the

contrary. Global institutions can often seem impenetrable and hostile,

in sharp contrast to the days when I was one of the countries that ran

them. Nor had I realised how much I had to learn from those with whom

Independent Diplomat has worked. I have been humbled by the energy and

courage of people like Edna Adan of Somaliland. Working with Independent

Diplomat has meant that my colleagues and I now spend a lot of time with

her, the Kosovo final status delegation or the leaders of the Polisario

Front. We have been required to learn how it is to be in their shoes (a

process that never ends). In so doing, I have been introduced to values

which are less prominent in my own society, whose representatives claim

to offer its virtues as a model to the rest of the world. How many

ministers in Britain run hospitals funded from their own pension? In

Kosovo (described recently in the Financial Times as a “moral

wasteland”), the hospitality and generosity shown to me and other

visitors contrasts uncomfortably with the experience of social behaviour

in Britain. “We”, it seems, have much to learn as well as to teach.

In spite of these compensations, my mental journey from formal diplomat

to Independent Diplomat has not been easy. Casting off the identity of a

British diplomat was a painful business. I missed my former colleagues

and the comforting sense of rightness that the Foreign Office somehow

wordlessly encourages in its staff. I missed the intellectual framework

of interests and what “we” thought of as the immediate point of

reference when confronted by any new political situation. It was a

struggle to learn again how to work things out on my own. At first, this

was vertiginous and uncomfortable, so deeply rooted was the mental

framework instilled in me. I felt lost without it.

More prosaically, I missed telling people I was a British diplomat and

the approving nods that usually followed such a statement. I confess

that I enjoyed the status that my career involved (though interestingly

now that I am no longer a British diplomat, people no longer flatter me

and instead tell me what they really think about British diplomacy…).

The colleagues with whom I joined “the office” in 1989 are now becoming

heads of department, some are ambassadors with large residences and

official cars. In the early months I thought of this as another enormous

phone bill I couldn’t pay thumped on my doormat. I missed the

comradeship and team spirit — “the office’s” virtues.

In parallel to this personal disorientation, I felt a more political

fragmentation. When I read the press or travelled, the old sense of

order and certainty I had enjoyed as a British diplomat fell away. The

forces I saw at work in the world, of economy, belief and human

behaviour, seemed less and less under the control of governments and the

organs of international cooperation. The world appeared much more

complicated and chaotic than it had when depicted in the flow of

telegrams and memos which had hitherto comprised the lens through which

I saw it. The international meetings, with their grand statements and

assumption of control, continued. But now I was no longer part of them,

it was not mandatory to believe their claim to be in command of events.

Indeed, it seemed clearer and clearer that they were not.

This was disconcerting. As a diplomat but also as an ordinary person, I

had been comforted by the belief that the ubiquitous “they” of

governments were in control of matters, that if things went wrong, they

could put it right. Now I had seen how wrong governments could be, and

how poorly they understood the situations they claimed to be

arbitrating, I could no longer pretend to be comforted. Like Neo in The

Matrix, I felt I had taken the red pill and seen the world as it really

was, rather than as we wished to believe it: the desert of the real.

On September 11, 2001 I was in New York at the British mission to the

UN. Like millions of others, I witnessed the event that triggered the

“War on Terror”. I experienced the horror and grief on the streets of

New York (my apartment was on Union Square where crowds would gather to

mourn). That night, I told a friend that governments would seize the

chance to reassert themselves.

From the inside, I watched my government adopt the US Administration’s

naming and framing of their reaction, from using the name “9/11” (no one

in New York called it that until Washington did), to the adoption of the

metaphor of the “War on Terror”. It was clear from the beginning that

this nomenclature implied, deliberately, a particular response:

militaristic, a-legal. That it also played straight into the hands of

Al-Qaeda, who sought and revelled in the status of enemy of the West,

seemed not to occur to its originators. This was obvious to all those

like me who had worked on the Middle East and watched Al-Qaeda for

years. It was equally obvious that any solution to the “terrorist”

problem would require at last addressing the noxious and enduring

problems of the Middle East — in particular Israel’s occupation of the

Palestinian territories, the case above all others that drove the sense

of injustice and the accusation of the West’s “double standards” in its

approach to the Muslim world.

Four years later I was in London when suicide bombers, young men from my

own country, struck the underground and buses. The invasions of

Afghanistan or Iraq had not undermined the appeal — or rather the anger

— that drove young men to kill others. Instead, they had strengthened

it. Governments — Russia, the US, Britain — continue to use the word

“terrorist” and now “Islamic fascist” as a means of closing off

discussion of the deeper causes of conflict, ones which they show no

intention of addressing, whether in Palestine, Chechnya or anywhere

else. Meanwhile, these governments claim that the “terrorists” are

attacking our “values” or “freedoms”, when even the most cursory reading

of the motives of the terrorists shows that it is our governments’

policies in the Middle East that provide at least part of the cause of

their rage, rather than our “way of life”.

All such governments want to pretend, and their populations — like me —

want to believe, that they are capable of protecting their people and

controlling the affairs of the world. In the disorder of the early

twenty-first century, they seem less and less able, just as their

rhetoric becomes more and more strident. We seem caught in a spiral,

where the more our governments use brutal tactics to defend their claim

to protect us, the more they will incite those who wish to attack us. As

long as this goes on, we can only expect more violence and disorder.

The cliché of contemporary discussion of international affairs is a

cliché for a reason: more and more of our problems are transnational in

nature, and do not lend themselves to solution by individual states but

only by collective action. Terrorism is one, but so are disease (SARS,

bird flu), global warming and migration. To deal with these issues, the

traditional calculus of identifying one country’s interests, then

arbitrating these with other countries, makes little sense. The causes

of these problems are complex, and their solutions require detailed,

long-term and collective action.

For all the novelty of these global crises, the challenge is still a

basic and familiar one: how can we govern the world? How can we design

and implement good, effective policy?

Over fifty years ago, Karl Popper pondered this problem and produced in

The Open Society and its Enemies a vigorous and thorough exposition of

why democracy was the only effective system of government. The dilemma

we must deal with today is that there is no global democracy. Those

designing policy whose impact may be felt worldwide have scant access to

those experiencing its effects. It is unarguable therefore that we need

ways for those affected by international policy to respond to those who

formulate and implement it, whether in the Security Council in New York,

or Washington or Moscow. Independent Diplomat is one small way of

tackling that problem. I hope it will grow and expand, for the need is

great, as the many governments and political groups that approach us

bear witness. But even I would not claim that alone it would be enough.

11. CONCLUSION THE END OF “DIPLOMACY”?

“Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs

which properly concern them.”

Paul Valéry

All politics, said Tip O’Neill, long-time Speaker of the US House of

Representatives, is local. He was wrong.

There is not one aspect of our contemporary lives, save our private

emotions, which is not in some way affected by what is going on

elsewhere in the world. Perhaps even our emotions are not immune, given

the omnipresent and insidious effects of our economic, cultural and

physical environment. Globalisation has done for the notion of locality

what the internet has done for the paper letter. All politics is

international.

The spread of global markets and global production has made us familiar

with how jobs in south Wales or Pennsylvania are affected by wage levels

in the Pearl River Delta. But how is it that a subsidy for cows can

affect immigration? (The answer is that agricultural subsidies in Europe

and the US reduce export earnings in developing countries, and thus

income and employment levels, thereby increasing pressures for

migration, legal or, more often, illegal.) Plans for your retirement can

be affected by your employer’s need to reduce pensions in order to keep

costs as low as its Chinese or Korean competitors (as General Motors has

discovered).[59] In the European Union food standards require your

morning boiled egg to be of particular colour and shape. Worldwide, the

food we eat, as well as the quality of the air we breathe, is more and

more a function if not of internationally-imposed rules, then of

internationally-propagated norms. Everything is connected.

It’s hard now to name one aspect of our contemporary existence that does

not have an international aspect. Even things which were once thoroughly

local — fashion, celebrity — are more and more international. Benetton

or Louis Vuitton are as recognised on the streets of Johannesburg as

they are in São Paulo.

Ease of travel and the vast disparity between life in some rich

countries and everyone else has created vast flows of migration which

are changing societies as fast as any social movement, even revolutions,

in their history. Over 200 million people now live outside their country

of origin, according to a recent UN survey, up 25% since 1990 (and

doubtless accelerating). Global culture not only means that everyone

knows Britney Spears or MTV. It also means that street gangs in Sierra

Leone (and, in its earlier civil war, its murderous militias) emulate

the culture — and the easy violence — of South Central Los Angeles. Our

world is in flux.

This observation is now so widely accepted as to be utterly banal. But

what is very odd about our globalised world of the twenty-first century

is that we still use nineteenth and twentieth-century ways of

arbitrating it. The diplomatic machinery and modes of thinking about

international relations have hardly changed at all. “International

relations” and “foreign affairs” are treated as separate discourses when

in reality they are thoroughly intrinsic to — and inseparable from —

everything else. Indeed, the separation into a discrete discourse has

created an artificiality of thought both among the practitioners and

those who study them.

At universities, students attend courses on “international relations”

where they are taught theories — liberalism, neo-liberalism, realism —

which attempt to give order to this maelstrom. In legislatures,

discussion of foreign affairs is sequestered in special committees and

debates which few attend, where “specialists” analyse the doings of

Iran, Israel or Venezuela as if they were amoebae in a Petri dish

(invariably essentialising of course). Meanwhile, rarely bothered by the

attentions of those whom they are supposed to be serving, the diplomats,

un-named and mostly un-scrutinised, go about their business.

As the international aspect of politics becomes more important, domestic

politics has become ever more nugatory and trivial. In the West, the

policy differences between political parties have shrunk as they

converge around liberal-market policies. Denied meaty policy to argue

over, politics focuses on personality (witness Italy’s 2006

parliamentary election) and individual credibility in delivering

otherwise almost identical policy. Yet voters feel instinctively that

big stuff is going on, and they’re right. Migration, globalisation and

terrorism have combined to create a deep sense of insecurity. These

forces are of course at play all over the world, in China as well as

South Africa. And we all need a politics that is able to come to terms

with them.

At a theoretical level, we are confronted with Karl Popper’s deficit.

Democracy works at the national level: the electorate provides the

feedback to government (through elections and other means), thus

enabling government to correct inevitably inaccurate policy (policy is

inevitably inaccurate because no government can have perfect knowledge).

This feedback system — democracy’s greatest virtue — does not function

at the international level. Those affected by decisions made in

international forums, or those affected in country B by the policies of

country A, have no way to inform the decision-makers of the rightness or

wrongness of their policies. There is no democracy in international

affairs.

There are a number of ways to start to address this deficit, some of

them radical, but none of them impractical.

First, and most simply, the discourse of diplomacy needs to be returned

to earth. The pretentious and confusing terminologies of diplomacy must

be simplified, and if possible, abandoned. When talking of

globalisation, it might be simpler to talk about the homogenisation of

global cultures, the liberalisation of capital markets, the movement of

labour, or whatever it is we mean by the term rather than one that is

bandied about without specification. Instead of referring to WMD, we

should talk about nuclear, biological or chemical weapons and their

vastly different qualities and capabilities, rather than a word designed

to confound and terrify.[60] The UN Security Council should refer to

“private meetings” rather than “informal consultations of Council

members”. And its public meetings should genuinely be public. The public

is allowed to attend the legislatures of many democracies around the

world; they should be allowed here too. Bureaucrats in places like the

European Union must strive at all times to simplify the ludicrously

arcane language of multilateral foreign policy machinery (CFSP is the

EU’s common foreign and security policy, or GASP, its acronym in German;

COREPER, the committee of permanent representatives where much of the

real intra-EU bargaining is done).

Second, the world of diplomacy badly needs ventilation, or it may risk

extinction (see below). A new non-government organisation called

Security Council Report[61] now publishes on the web detailed briefings

and reports on past and future meetings of the UN Security Council. Its

product is outstanding and very helpful to the many who are trying to

understand the workings of that secretive organ. But it need not have

taken an NGO to do this. The Council itself, and its large and

generously-staffed Secretariat, could easily have agreed to provide such

a service, which would help reinforce the legitimacy and effectiveness

of the Council. The European Union and other major multilateral organs

(the World Trade Organisation, the African Union) should do the same if

they too are not to be seen as closed, unrepresentative and thus

illegitimate.

Most simply of all, these institutions should publish lists of which

official does what. It is still absurdly difficult to telephone the UN

or EU or WTO and speak to anyone with responsibility for any particular

issue, from Palestine to banana imports. At the national level, foreign

ministries should do likewise. In the British Foreign Office, the office

directory is a classified document. This has the effect of preventing

the ordinary public from contacting those who are making policy

decisions in their name.

The veil of privilege and secrecy that surrounds international diplomacy

should be lifted. There is nothing special about diplomacy. It requires

no particular genius to practice. The doors of diplomacy are closed in

part to obscure this truth. The deference shown to diplomats is no more

necessary than the deference shown to ordinary government servants. The

arcane nomenclatures of “Your Excellency”, “Minister Counsellor” and

other ornate titles, the diplomatic uniform, cockaded hats and ribbons

worn by ambassadors at formal occasions, can be put into the museum

displays where they belong with the other artefacts of previous

centuries.

Third, more deliberate means of accountability need to be established.

Diplomats should be open to scrutiny and held responsible for their

decisions as anyone else. In Britain, the introduction of a Freedom of

Information Act sent shudders around the diplomatic service. But in

Britain, a very large amount of information is still concealed

unnecessarily in the name of national security. Parliament debates

foreign affairs in Foreign Office questions (known, obscurely, as

“TOPS”) only once a month. It is a ludicrous spectacle, where the

Foreign Secretary works through a long list of pre-submitted questions

from MPs at a breakneck pace, covering issues of enormous subtlety and

complexity (from Palestine to Zimbabwe) with the briefest possible

answers. Even then, he or she doesn’t manage to answer all the

questions. But at least the Foreign Secretary appears in Parliament, the

US Secretary of State doesn’t do questions in the full Senate or House

of Representatives.

At least in the US, ambassadors are quizzed by congressional committees

before appointment (in Britain, there is no such system). But even here,

the Senate and House are kept out of the inner business of the State

Department and other agencies of international affairs. Somehow,

everyone has grown to accept that it is not the public’s business.

In both America and Britain, the legislatures appoint committees to

scrutinise foreign policy. In both countries, reflecting the snobbery

and élitism of diplomacy itself, appointment to such a committee is

reserved for the most senior and experienced senators and members of

parliament (who tend immediately to mimic the pompous intonations of

ambassadors and other “statesmen” in their commentaries). In the US,

these committees are well-staffed and funded; in the UK, the Foreign

Affairs Committee is so under-resourced that it can only manage to

examine a few issues every year (it therefore tends to choose issues of

meaningless generality like the “war on terrorism” or “globalisation”),

although its funds, happily for its members, do stretch to vital

“information-gathering” visits (where the diplomats organising them are

careful to book expensive hotels and leave plenty of time for “shopping”

in the programmes). But in both countries their work is limited to the

separated territory known as international relations.

If we acknowledge the reality that almost every policy is in some way

about what’s going on in the rest of the world, the international

element should be integrated both into government and its checks and

balances, across the board. Instead, at the moment, it is separated and

treated as a special discourse unto itself with its own special rules,

words and traditions. Indeed, this élitism is a function of this

separation. In order to validate an unjustifiable separation (and

immunity from scrutiny), diplomats must constantly affirm their élite

status.

Here’s the most radical suggestion. We should consider abolishing the

separate cadre of diplomats altogether. When international communication

and arbitration is ever more necessary, we should divest ourselves of

diplomats.[62] There are ten good reasons why:

1. The existence of diplomats reaffirms the separated nature of

diplomacy and international relations from other areas of policy, when

in fact they are inextricably connected.

2. Diplomats tend to be generalists and unskilled in the complexities of

the global issues, from trade to terrorism, which now dominate our

world. (The meagre two weeks I spent on induction training before

starting work is very revealing in this respect.) Although I spent four

and a half years reading intelligence on Iraq’s weapons and arguing

about them with other diplomats, my knowledge was inferior to life-long

experts.[63] On issues such as global warming, both the science and the

policy are beyond the grasp of diplomats who may only be appointed for

temporary periods to handle negotiation. On terrorism, I well remember

my embarrassment listening to my then ambassador attempting at the UN

General Assembly to overcome decades-long argument over the definition

of terrorism by offering this designation: “If it looks like a

terrorist, if it acts like a terrorist, if it smells like a terrorist,

then it is a terrorist” (emphasis was his).

3. It is ridiculous to pretend that the wishes and needs of an entire

country can be embodied in a single diplomat, or embassy, or ambassador.

The idea that an individual can accurately prioritise or balance these

requirements, especially in the absence of any scrutiny, is unjustified.

This was conceivable in the eighteenth century when the international

needs of a country were much simpler and fewer (and where, absent

democracy, the populations had little choice but to accept it); it is

inappropriate for the vastly-connected era we now live in.

4. We need instead to promote multiple links at multiple levels between

governments, avoiding the narrowing and outdated structures of

traditional diplomacy. In some ways this is already happening. (I was

struck for instance during my posting in Germany in the early 1990s that

the Chancellor refused to see ambassadors — he considered them

irrelevant.) In Europe, domestic ministers do a great deal of business

directly with one another through the European Union, avoiding the

traditional embassies altogether (albeit through the creation of a whole

new set of impenetrable multilateral machineries). Ministries of

environment now increasingly handle discussion of environmental issues,

including global warming or ozone depletion. As international aspects

intrude onto domestic policy, domestic ministries are taking over the

traditional preserves of the diplomats. This process could usefully be

accelerated.

5. Likewise, diplomats on the ground have not proved very skilful at

monitoring local political trends. The British embassy in Tehran failed

to notice the emerging revolution in Iran in 1979. Despite the lessons

from that episode (to his credit, the then British ambassador taught

others how to avoid his mistakes[64]), the embassy again failed to

predict the electoral victory of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005.

Why this happens is easy to see, and has little to do with the personal

skill of those individuals concerned. Diplomats tend to be posted for

short periods; usually only a minority are trained in local languages.

Their need for comfort and, increasingly, security tends to place them

in secure, expat enclaves where they have little contact with the

“locals”. This is of course especially true in those countries least

like our own (Pakistan, China) and where, arguably, we have the greatest

need to understand (postings to such “difficult” posts tend to be

shorter too). This task is therefore perhaps better performed by real

country experts, fluent in local languages and steeped in local custom,

than the temporarily-posted diplomat. Already, an NGO called the

International Crisis Group[65] (ICG) is deploying such analysts in the

trouble spots of the world. The ICG has also taken the radical step of

employing local experts (ex-journalists, political scientists and the

like) to interpret what’s going on. Thus, the ICG’s reports are often

more sophisticated and better informed than the “internal political”

telegrams I produced and read as a diplomat (even though the latter are

often classified, and the former are available on the worldwide web).

After the riots which shook Kosovo in 2004, I accompanied the UN Special

Representative around the UN headquarters in New York to explain what

had gone wrong. All of those whom we spoke to, including senior members

of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) referred to the ICG

report (produced by a Briton with years of regional experience and a

local Kosovar) rather than the UN’s own reporting from the field. It was

more objective (and critical of the UN) and simply better.

6. Diplomats have an existential interest in preserving the secretive

traditions of diplomacy, which exclude outsiders, in order to maintain

the mystique and status of their rôle. The more threatened by outside

intrusion they become, the tighter they will close their doors. This

tendency is already evident in the UN Security Council, where those who

are resisting calls for more public meetings complain that publicity

will drive the “real diplomacy” (i.e. the sort of cantankerous

discussion described in chapters 3 and 8) out of these forums and into

more private places. This argument is true but it is insufficient. What

states want to keep secret they will, and they always have done.

7. The existence of diplomats tends to reaffirm the state-centric

“realist” way of thinking about international relations. The diplomat is

the international exponent of his state (not his government). This way

of thinking accentuates and emphasises difference by forcing the

practitioners to define their positions in terms of nation-states and

anachronistic and invented identities (see chapter 5 “Them and Us”). It

also rests on and continually reinforces Hobbesian notions of how the

world works, i.e. of perpetual chaos without the enforcing hand of the

state. These ways of thinking are circular (the state provides security;

there is no security without the state) and can exacerbate, not reduce,

conflict (the concept of pre-emptive war stands as the pre-eminent

example). To take one example, in the debate in the UN Security Council

on sanctions on Iraq, difference between the diplomats was habitual (and

bitter) to the extent that we could barely imagine agreeing. In 2001, we

had to agree a “control list” of items to be prohibited for export to

Iraq. Such was the technical complexity of the items concerned, the

diplomats had to leave the negotiation to experts in dual-use goods and

other military technology. To the diplomats’ great surprise, these

experts were able quite easily to agree the list, over which the

diplomats hitherto had argued for months. To them, it was relatively

straightforward to agree what was potentially risky to export to

Saddam’s Iraq and what not.

8. This state-centric “realist” way of thinking is inherently amoral,

and forces its exponents, including diplomats like me, to abandon their

own personal moral sense. In long-serving diplomats, the morality of the

state tends to subsume entirely any personal moral sensibility (or

submerge it to the point of invisibility). It is continually reinforced

in the organs of diplomacy, such as the British Foreign Office, that the

morality of the state, which is a form of immorality, is seen as

superior to personal morality (raison d’état etc. etc.). This creates

the possibility of bad, immoral policy such as sanctions on Iraq, or the

Security Council’s treatment of the Western Sahara, which make perfect

sense in the “realist” security-centred way of thinking, but very little

moral sense in terms of minimising human suffering or resolving

disputes. Ordinary government servants, who lack the elevated status of

diplomats, and who tend to be closer to the concerns of ordinary people,

one hopes, are better immunised against this amoral sensibility.

9. While we are not about to get rid of the state, we should recognise

the importance of, and give more weight to, the many other actors

involved in international affairs. The existence of diplomats at the top

of the pile tends to squeeze out these other actors, to the detriment of

inclusive and thus effective policy-making. Governments like to think

that they are in charge of world events. Diplomats exist, and have a

strong self-interest, in reaffirming this solipsistic world view. Their

dispatches and telegrams (even today, as you will see when they are

eventually released) are full of grandiose statements about how this or

that world problem might be solved (the omnipotent “we” again). This

flatters the egos of the politicians whom they serve; it flatters their

own egos. But they are wrong. Governments and diplomats are as much (if

not more) impotent witnesses to world events as they are instigators.

History suggests that even the ultimate preserve of government —

war-making — has myriad and unpredictable antecedents and consequences.

Governments are far from wholly in charge. The organisation of

government internationally and of international affairs generally should

better reflect this reality.

We will still need embassies to organise ministers’ visits and look

after distressed travellers who lose their passports (indeed, as tourism

swells, we will doubtless need more). There’s no reason why embassies

cannot still try to provide good on-the-ground analysis of what’s going

on, despite their inevitable limitations (indeed, this need is all the

greater as decision-making is concentrated in capitals and the remove

from reality increases). But already in the European Union (EU), the

embassies of other EU members are becoming like bus terminals for

visiting delegations of home government servants and ministers as they

visit their opposite numbers in ever-increasing numbers. Groups of

businesspeople come and go, using the embassy as they would an exclusive

club, to impress their customers and business contacts

(government-favoured businesses, notably the arms industry, tend mostly

to benefit from this privilege). The ambassadors in such embassies, who

have to put up with streams of official visitors using their residences

for accommodation, have become glorified hotel managers, laying out the

fancy crockery with tedious frequency.[66] The days of the professional

diplomat as it once was conceptualised, the grand plenipotentiary

representing in toto the political needs of his country in another

state, are numbered if not already past.

10. Meanwhile, for the ordinary public, the self-serving élitism and

fake-omnipotence of the world’s diplomats has created a comforting

illusion: that they are in control, allowing the rest of us to get on

with our lives. We are not entitled to this illusion. The pact of

irresponsibility must end. We must correspondingly take more

responsibility for our own international affairs. Our votes, and our

behaviour, have international consequences. Every action, whether buying

fruit, employing a cleaner, or choosing where to take your holiday is

international, and is, in its way, a form of diplomacy. Everyone is a

diplomat.

For obvious reasons, commercial companies have been the first to adapt

to this reality. Bosses of big banks and manufacturers now visit China

far more often than do our politicians (and thus know much more about

it). Multinationals have long ago transcended the bounds of national

location and identity. Exxon Mobil has a large political department to

monitor and negotiate with the many governments with whom the company

has dealings. McDonalds and Google are effectively conducting their own

diplomacy, such are the multiple effects (local, international, social,

economic, aesthetic, environmental) of their decisions. It was notable

that during his 2006 visit to the US, Chinese President Hu Jintao

visited Microsoft in Seattle before — and for longer than — he visited

the Capitol. Watching the visit, I was struck by how Bill Gates squired

the President around in the same manner an ambassador would have of old.

Shareholders and consumers should be aware of this in their choices.

Some commentators on this trend, notably Thomas Friedman, argue that

this massive commercial interaction is bound to have positive effects,

that the internet for instance can only promote openness and free

speech. Reality suggests that commerce and technology can be as

ambiguous in their effects as anything else. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft

have all been accused by Amnesty International[67] of abetting

censorship and repression in China by supplying equipment and adapting

their search engines to block certain sites and, in Yahoo’s case,

assisting the Chinese authorities in identifying on-line anti-government

critics. In response, they have argued that no company alone can change

Chinese law, by which they must abide. The solution is therefore

obvious.[68]

These forces must be pointed in the right direction if they are to be

for the good. Effective foreign policy, whether in promoting labour

rights or environmental standards, now requires coalitions of actors —

the private sector, civil society and government — acting in concert to

be effective.[69] If foreign ministries are to be effective, even

relevant, in the future, as propagators of policy and change they must

consider how to organise such coalitions, and how to encompass, direct

and inform these many different strands and effectors of policy.

The NGO Global Witness has been tracking how wars are fuelled by the

exploitation of natural resources — timber, diamonds — by unscrupulous

governments and traders. Global Witness popularised the notion of

“conflict diamonds”, whose extraction (often in conditions of dreadful

cruelty) was controlled by warlords in West Africa (Liberia’s Charles

Taylor being the most infamous example) but bought by international

diamond trading companies and sold on the high street. The proceeds went

to buy AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades which were then used in the

vicious and destructive wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone and elsewhere.

Global Witness’s work has done much to highlight a connection that both

stimulates and sustains conflict, and as a result, governments and, to a

limited extent, the diamond trade itself are having to take action.

There is a long way still to go towards global rules and norms to

inhibit such trade. The fact that Global Witness is run on a shoestring

(its founders raised their first funds by shaking collecting tins at

underground stations) and funded by philanthropic foundations

illustrates that its ideas are still outside the foreign policy

mainstream.

The practice and process of diplomacy, then, needs to change into

something much more diverse and eclectic, such that we perhaps shouldn’t

give it a collective name — such as diplomacy — at all.

Beyond this transformation of diplomacy, there are other steps too,

which involve a conscious abandonment of the state-centred thinking so

intrinsic to the nature of international relations and diplomacy today.

This touches on the substance, more than the process, of international

relations. Here we must step into more idealist territory.

Cosmopolitanism dates from Greek society in the fourth century BC. A

cosmopolitan is a citizen of the world — someone whose loyalties

transcend a particular state or polity. As argued in more recent

expositions,[70] cosmopolitanism embodies the idea that we have

obligations to other human beings outside our nation, and that we must

take seriously the ways in which people in different cultures choose to

live. We may not agree with them, but we have to deal with them.

In a world of massive interaction, it seems we have little choice. In

our world today, how the Russian government treats the Chechens may

affect our safety riding the subway in London or New York City. Working

conditions in Pakistan affect employment in Europe. Carbon emissions in

Australia may endanger biodiversity in Sussex or Utah, or cause sea

levels to rise in Bangladesh. Less selfishly, our emotions are touched

by the suffering in Darfur.

Meanwhile, many of the things that most worry us, and undermine both our

sense of well-being and our actual safety, do not fit into the

conventional measurement of classical economics or theories of

international relations. Our concern for the suffering of others, for

instance, is not easily quantified,[71] and nor is our instinct for

nature — a profound human characteristic that has no measure in economic

theory but has been demonstrated in countless studies. There are things

beyond measure, beyond calculation. No one calculating Britain’s or

America’s interest in not intervening in Bosnia in the early 1990s would

have considered their decision’s effect on the antipathy of Muslims in

Egypt (or Leeds), sometimes many years later.

In the morass and confusion of forces at work in the twenty-first

century, we need guideposts to steer our path. The intuitions and

prejudices of less-connected eras are a help, but insufficient. As Tony

Blair has said, we are looking at a world as an ever-changing

kaleidoscope. As we are dazzled by its many colours and shapes, we still

need criteria by which to make decisions — to guide us.

In contrast to the eclecticism I advocate for the future of diplomacy,

we badly need singular if not to say universalist ideas of how to treat

one another and arbitrate our global existence: common norms, if not

common rules. Such universalism is naturally perilous. Many of our

shared problems are classic “tragedies of the commons” where corrective

action implies costs for the actor (such as a carbon tax), and where

“free riding” is rewarded. Invoking singular standards immediately draws

an accusation of the very essentialism I have earlier attacked.

Since Russia’s government bears no cost directly (in electoral terms)

for brutality in Chechnya (even if New York City may), what motive does

it have to change policy? Put simply, the problem bedevilling

international policy is that those deciding it are very often not those

affected by it.

Here, Popper might guide us once more. The realist, interests-based

model of national foreign policy-making encourages competitive,

short-term and ultimately counter-productive policy. Moreover, as Popper

demonstrated, it is futile for any government, even on the well-trodden

ground of domestic policy, to claim it knows what is right to do:

knowledge is inevitably imperfect, so there must inevitably be error in

policy-making. Instead, he proposed a simple criterion as the starting

point for policy-making: the minimisation of suffering. This is an

inversion of the normal calculus of policymaking: what do we want?

Popper argued it is impossible to know the sum of human wants, they are

so varied and sometimes unknowable. Policymaking should therefore start

at the other end.

This criterion does not give us specific guidance in each case — how

should we minimise suffering in Darfur? — but it orients us on the aim

and the starting-point of policy, rather than flailing around in a

welter of differing objectives (“security”, “stability” “freedom” — to

which the query is always raised, whose?). The details of any policy can

only be worked out in the closest possible encounter with the facts, the

reality, of any situation, avoiding as much as possible imposed

intellectual models and metaphors, beyond this broad objective. It is

also a universal objective, un-possessed by any one culture or religion,

and therefore one on which the world community can, perhaps, agree. This

is not to dispose of the law and mechanisms of human rights, development

and the other motors for the betterment of humanity, but to try to

regroup them in a new collective heading, to which all can agree. Our

present discord needs a new consensus.

Even if such a common aim could be agreed, we would still need some kind

of organisation to deliver it. Sadly, our institutions for international

cooperation, above all the UN, are in bad shape. The scandal of the

oil-for-food programme has undermined public confidence in the UN,

already weakened by the routine criticism of the Right in the US, which

is so sceptical of international law and collective action. My own

experience working in a UN field mission confirmed that it remains an

institution internally riven by favouritism and inefficiency[72] (I

remember one senior member of the mission advising me that, if I wanted

a career in the UN, to spend my time cultivating senior “friends” in the

UN system rather than doing my job). Meanwhile, for many other countries

outside the closed circle of the P5, the UN’s authority is weakened by

the unrepresentativeness of the membership of its most powerful organ,

the Security Council, and, as a result, the arbitrariness and injustice

of many of its decisions (or lack of decisions). Its legal and moral

authority is thus much the less.

Any reform must therefore tackle these twin problems. The non-western

world tends to suspect “management reform” as camouflage for US attempts

to weaken the UN (a suspicion fed by the appointment of a US ambassador

to the UN who is famously hostile to it) when such reform is urgently

necessary. The UN leadership (the Secretary-General and others) claim

that much as they wish to reform, they cannot without the membership’s

consent (when in fact there is much that they could do internally

without seeking political agreement). Reform needs to be packaged, in a

new compact (maybe a new San Francisco conference, like the one where

the UN was founded), with expansion of the Council membership and

constitutional reform of the charter. This might address the sensible

conclusions of the Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel, whose

recommendations, inter alia to update international law on the use of

force, languish unimplemented.

Security Council reform is famously difficult, and has failed at several

attempts, mainly because the candidates for membership cannot agree who

should join (and for every candidate there is an equally hostile

“anti-candidate” who wishes to see them fail, namely India (opposed by

Pakistan), Germany (Italy), Japan (China) etc.) and because of the lack

of enthusiasm from the P5, who, while often mouthing support for

expansion, quietly prefer the privileges of the status quo (their veto

power). They must realise that the erosion of the authority of the UN is

already the result of this complacency.

As the UN’s Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown has argued,[73]

the US recognises, but all too rarely acknowledges publicly, that it is

a major beneficiary of the UN in all kinds of ways (cut-price

peacekeeping for one, in places where the US does not wish to send its

own troops). More broadly, all democracies have an interest in

maintaining the international rule of law: without it, we’re in the

jungle. Do we want a world where communist (if that’s the right word)

China feels untrammelled by global rules, any more than it does already?

But, as I have argued, the crisis of diplomatic legitimacy has deeper

roots than the complaints of mere governments. Our problems are global

and we need a global politics to deal with them. The UN is an

organisation of governments, and as it is currently constituted, it can

never become a democratic organ. Even if every member state were

democratic, it would still entail the problem of all inter-governmental

bodies, namely that it operates at several removes from the reality of

those whose lives it arbitrates. Those negotiating its policy would

inevitably be required to pay more heed to the needs of other

governments than the people affected by the policy. They must, if they

are to reach decisions on anything.

Some global conferences — on the environment, and trade — have opened

forums for NGOs to participate, albeit with no decision-making power.

But NGOs have their own crisis of legitimacy too — whom do they

represent? Mass membership organisations (Greenpeace, Amnesty

International) have an answer to this challenge, but others do not or

they represent positions which are not discussed with their memberships:

they are far from democratic. In any case, no government will ever be

willing to give NGOs, however democratic, equal influence on

policy-making.

Often these NGOs have evolved and express themselves as single-issue

campaigns — to ban landmines, or to end poverty. No one can deny the

importance of these causes. But they cannot admit the complexity and

interlinkage of contemporary problems. The Live 8 campaign was a

compelling example of a widely-shared concern expressed as an

all-too-simple solution. The multiple dimensions of any serious policy

challenge, from ending poverty to tackling terrorism, lend themselves

poorly to a narrowly-based campaign. Sending a text message “to the G8”

does not amount to real political engagement.

We also must confront Isaiah Berlin’s assumption, which is all the more

true in a diverse and complex world, that no priority can always be

absolute. Politics is a business of trade-offs and compromise, where

human needs and desires must sometimes yield to one another. This is the

essence of good politics — the discussion, the choosing, the decisions —

tested against democratic scrutiny. In short, we need a global politics.

Global movements address single issues. Only global political parties

can begin to deal with the complex. Only parties, elected in some way,

can claim the fullest legitimacy to speak for people, a problem NGOs

will always be challenged by. Global political parties may seem

hopelessly utopian, but the idea is unavoidably logical. Only parties

can legitimately claim to represent those who choose them, or pay their

membership dues. Only a global politics can lift us above the zero-sum

games of governments short-sightedly arbitrating their “interests” in

international forums.

This is not to advocate the immediate establishment of a world

parliament. Institutions cannot simply be invented to solve a problem.

They have to evolve, and become accepted as legitimate. The European

Parliament has suffered from this very problem since its inception:

founded as the élite’s answer to the problem of the “democratic deficit”

of the European Community (as it was then known), it has struggled for

popular acceptance, not helped by the gross extravagance of its

procedures and members. Institutions should be wanted, not designed.

A start might be made with the evolution of campaigns into parties. And

as they evolve, a chamber might be established to sit alongside the

General Assembly of the UN:[74] not (yet) a parliament, but an elected

body of individuals, which would offer advisory resolutions on topics

under discussion at the Council and GA. It would not have power to

decide (this would be too much to ask): as the European Parliament has

shown, you do not create legitimate or popular institutions by simply

giving them powers; rather, they must develop and become accepted as

legitimate first. Elections to this body must be democratic — thus

encouraging democracy around the world — and proportional to population

in order to avoid the imbalance of the General Assembly, where small

countries outnumber the votes of the large, though they are together

much smaller in population.

To avoid the grotesque costs (and resulting unpopularity) of the

European Parliament, the new body might meet mostly on-line, by

video-conference, with only occasional formal meetings in rotating

cities, thereby also avoiding the creation of a new cadre of parasitical

expatriates located in some expensive international capital. This

chamber might have a limited life, ten years perhaps, to see whether it

can become a respected and influential forum for international

discussion. If it passes the test, a further international conference

might grant it initial and limited powers (perhaps starting with

co-decision on the UN budget), which might accrete as time goes on (it

should be a long process). A massive leap of the imagination, for sure,

but a dose of idealism is perhaps what we need right now.

This book has criticised the unwarranted and unscrutinised power of

unelected officials who deal — often badly — with ever more of our

collective business. The only long-term answer is for elected

representatives to take their place. It is odd that this idea should

seem today so far-fetched, when our shared problems so urgently demand

wise collective decisions by actors we regard and accept as legitimate.

The alternative is more bad decision-making, institutions that will

continually struggle for authority and effect, and, in parallel, many

people whose problems are not addressed, who feel disenfranchised, and

thus disposed to violence to air their grievances. Framed this way, the

direction we should travel is obvious.

As I end this book, I find myself again offering grandiose solutions to

other people’s problems, much as I did as a diplomat. Perhaps I should

say simply this. I found that traditional diplomacy — the way the

world’s business is done — as I practised it in the British foreign

service, left me, in the old sense of the word, “demoralised” — bereft

of my own principles and sense of meaning. The system I helped to manage

and defend seemed to me out of kilter with the world’s reality, and what

was most important to me. In working for other countries and peoples,

and getting to know their needs first rather than imposing “our” chosen

solutions (invariably without consulting them), I have found more

meaning and value than the exposition of “our” desires, which were in

practice often invented, ever did. I can’t offer it as an example for

everyone: I wouldn’t assume to know what they are like. But it worked

for me.

[1] Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.

[2] Reproduced from CITIZENS: A CHRONICLE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

permission of PFD (

www.pfd.co.uk

) on behalf of Professor Simon Schama.

[3] A much-misused term, but in this context it meant chemical, nuclear

and biological weapons, and missiles of over 150km range.

[4] The United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection

Commission: this is my footnote in history since I invented UNMOVIC’s

name, late one night during the negotiations on Security Council

resolution 1284 (1999), which established the agency.

[5] We must all be grateful to President George W. Bush who, albeit

inadvertently, revealed the truth of the direct and demotic nature of

real diplomacy at a G8 summit in July 2006. Overhead on a microphone, he

tells Prime Minister Tony Blair (after thanking him for the gift of a

sweater) that the solution to the Lebanon crisis was “to get Syria to

get Hizbollah to stop doing this shit”. The President is far from alone

in using such language. It is a common misperception that the behaviour

and speech used in diplomacy are refined, elegant and measured (indeed

the adjective “diplomatic” is used to describe such language). In

reality diplomacy is often much more crude and harsh. For example, I was

once told by a senior Asian ambassador: “I would rather be fucked up the

arse with a rusty spoon than agree with you, Carne”.

[6] Samantha Power’s A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of

Genocide, London: Flamingo, 2003, is particularly good.

[7] It didn’t help that of course we only had a full embassy in

Belgrade, the capital of what was once Yugoslavia. Inevitably the

reporting from there tended to reflect the Belgrade view of affairs.

There were no posts in Zagreb, Sarajevo or Pristina. This is another way

in which the “statist” view of the world contributed to our

misunderstanding of that debacle.

[8] This was that in German law, thanks to Germany’s history of shifting

borders (only “finalised” with reunification in 1990), citizenship is

conferred by parentage (or race) not place of birth (ius sanguinis as

opposed to ius soli), and thus ethnicity and religion become especially

important in determining German-ness. This explains why a child born to

Turkish parents, even if raised in Germany with German as its “natural”

language, is not considered German, legally by the state or culturally

by many if not most Germans. Another consequence was that a Russian of

originally German stock (even if many generations previously) had an

immediate right to German citizenship, while a Turk born in Germany,

even if second or sometimes third generation, did not. One shocking

piece of evidence supporting the theory is that German immigration

officials were reportedly using lists of German settlers in Russia

prepared by the SS in the Second World War to check the veracity of

claims by Russians claiming German heritage.

[9] At the request of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, amendments

have been made to this chapter to protect national security, as they

have elsewhere in the book.

[10] There are some, more expert on Afghanistan than me, who argue that

a policy premised upon a strong centre and subordinate regions was naïve

in the first place as it failed to acknowledge the fragmented and

essentially tribal nature of the country where all are minorities. A

better strategy, they argue, would be to build a more decentralised

structure. See, for an example, “The Myth of ‘One Afghanistan’”, Charles

Santos, Los Angeles Times, May 25, 2003.

[11] In recent years at the UN in New York it has become fashionable to

call the non-permanent Council members, who serve on the Council for a

two-year temporary term, “elected” members to emphasise their supposed

legitimacy in contrast to the unelected status of the Permanent Five

(P5) countries (the US, France, Russia, China, the UK). I have chosen

not to use the term “elected” since it is inaccurate when most of the

ten temporary members are not elected in contested elections, but are

given seats by rote according to their regional group and place in the

alphabet. Only two of the five countries elected every year win their

seats through competitive elections of the UN membership, which are

themselves often stitched up through backroom deals between countries.

[12] You will not find in this chapter a discussion of the Oil-for-Food

“scandal” that has erupted in recent years. On this I have nothing to

add to the excellent Volcker report (to which I testified at length).

[13] This term, now familiar to many, comprises non-conventional weapons

including chemical, biological and nuclear ones. In Iraq’s case it also

meant ballistic missiles over 150km range (the full details were set out

in “the mother of all resolutions”, Security Council resolution 687,

which in 1991 set out the precise terms of Iraq’s obligations).

[14] I hesitate to confess that the delegates responsible for

negotiating a particular issue in the Security Council are called

“experts” in the unofficial yet traditional nomenclature of that organ.

I hesitate to confess it because of course most of us, myself included,

were not expert, having no first-hand knowledge whatsoever of the

countries we were dealing with.

[15] She said this during a television interview on the BBC.

[16] The term “Arab street” is one that remains common in western

diplomatic descriptions of the Middle East, despite Edward Said’s

compelling attack on such Orientalist depictions. Like other such

locutions, it reveals far more about its user than what it purports to

describe. When reading it, one can safely assume that the originator has

been nowhere near the “street”, wherever that may be.

[17] See, for example, “Ssh, they’re arguing”, Barbara Crossette, New

York Times, 17 June 2001.

[18] The word prohibition is a simplification since the import of the

goods by Iraq was not explicitly prohibited in any case except that of

purely military items, but the export of those goods on the list was to

be reviewed by the UN sanctions committee (a sub-committee of the

Security Council) and possibly approved if the Committee judged the

end-use of those goods to be legitimately civilian.

[19] These are discussed in chapter 4 below, but in general amount to

the more rigorous enforcement not of generalised trade sanctions but of

specific, targeted measures against the Iraqi government’s illegal

export of oil (through Turkey, Syria and the Gulf) and the stricter

enforcement of import controls at Iraq’s borders. A further technique

was the aggressive pursuit of the regime’s illegal financial holdings

abroad. None of these measures was ever properly or energetically

pursued by either the UK or US governments, thus helping to create the

situation where sanctions not only failed to force Iraqi compliance but

also produced negative humanitarian consequences, a doubly bad policy.

[20] A version of this chapter first appeared in the Financial Times, 29

January 2005.

[21] This was the official British inquiry into the use of intelligence

on Iraq’s WMD headed by Lord Butler, to which I testified in the summer

of 2004.

[22] The Volcker Inquiry into the oil-for-food scandal found no such

evidence.

[23] Game metaphors have been common in theories of international

relations for some time. “Domino Theory”, for example, proposed,

erroneously as it turned out, the idea that if one country fell to

communism, its neighbours would “tip over” into communism in an

unstoppable chain reaction. Domino Theory was one of the main

justifications for US involvement in Vietnam.

[24] This policy was thankfully soon changed, largely as a result of

pressure from the unions. Britain now has its first openly gay

Ambassador (though there were presumably many gay Ambassadors — albeit

in the closet — before).

[25] As George Lakoff has asked in Whose Freedom?, New York: Farrar,

Straus and Giroux, 2006.

[26] Since this debacle, it has been commonplace for British officials

to claim that the threatened French veto blocked the resolution. In

fact, there is no evidence that the draft resolution had attracted close

to the nine votes required to pass in any case. My own research with

other countries on the Security Council at the time suggests the UK’s

true vote count was closer to six. In other words, the putative veto was

irrelevant, as the resolution could not have been voted through in any

case.

[27] Most notably Brendan Simms’s Unfinest Hour: Britain and the

Destruction of Bosnia, London: Allen Lane 2001.

[28] One extreme example of this delineation and separation of sides is

described in chapter 3, “The Negotiation” (1).

[29] The study was published in Science, 7 October, 2005.

[30] See The Economist, 29 July 2006

[31] See Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It?

How Can We Know?, Princeton University Press, 2005.

[32] Wherever it is in the world, the British government, like the US

government, operates on “Zulu time” otherwise known as GMT. This is one

of the myriad small ways that a common identity is fused with that other

great exponent of the state: the military, which operates on the same

time system.

[33] This example, like that of Northern Ireland, is — I fear — another

reason to believe that terrorism “works”, at least in highlighting a

particular dispute if not in resolving it.

[34] Independent Diplomat (see chapter 9) now advises the Polisario

Front on its diplomacy.

[35] Layard, Professor Richard (Lord), “Happiness: Has Social Science a

Clue?”, Lionel Robbins Memorial Lectures, London School of Economics,

March 2003.

[36] The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press 2002 Global

Attitudes Survey; Gallup International Survey, the Voice of the People,

September 2002.

[37] See chapter 4, “War Stories”.

[38] Quoted in the Financial Times, 28 May 2003.

[39] See, for instance, Robert Cooper, The Breaking of Nations, London:

Atlantic Books, 2004.

[40] The British government now does consult “Muslim groups” but at no

time during my work on the Islamic world did such consultation take

place.

[41] Amnesty International Report on Morocco.

[42] This cynicism is widely shared among diplomats. In my work on

sanctions against Iraq in the so-called 661 Committee of the UN Security

Council, one of the UK’s fiercest and most skilled adversaries was a

Russian diplomat named Alexsander S. He was beautifully fluent in

English and articulate and meticulous in picking apart our arguments.

Upon getting to know him, I found that he evinced little or no faith in

the system he was serving. For him, it was just a job, advocacy for the

sake of advocacy, much as a lawyer. “It’s all bullshit”, he would say,

making a wry face.

[43] 17 October 2006, Foreign Office Minister of State Kim Howells gave

the following answer to a parliamentary question: “The UK fully supports

the efforts of the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, and his Personal

Envoy to Western Sahara, Peter Van Walsum, to assist the parties to

achieve a just, lasting and mutually acceptable political solution,

which will provide for the self-determination of the people pf Western

Sahara. The UK is in regular contact with representatives of the parties

to the dispute and the UN. The UK will continue to encourage all parties

to engage with the UN process. There are, however, no plans for a UN

referendum to be held in the near future.”

[44] This portrait is an amalgam of ambassadors I have known.

[45] The 1991 war was widely referred to in the West as the Gulf War,

even though there had already been a long and much more bloody “Gulf

War” between Iran and Iraq in 1980 -9.

[46] See chapter 4, “Them and Us”.

[47] See John Gray’s, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals,

London: Granta, 2004.

[48] Reproduced, with kind permission of the publisher, from Christopher

[49] Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius, Harmondsworth: Penguin

Books, 1991 reprinted edn.

[50] George Lakoff’s work on metaphor is instructive on all this.

[51] In 2003, during a Middle East summit in Aqaba, President George W.

Bush described how he deliberately steered Israeli Prime Minister Sharon

and Palestinian Authority President Abbas out of the formal room in

which they had been seated into the garden. “What I wanted to do is to

observe the interplay between the two; did they have the capacity to

relax in each other’s presence for starters? And I felt they did.”

(Source: Financial Times, 6 June 2003.)

[52] Nina Khruscheva of the New School has argued that culture never

lies about politics even when politicians do, that for instance that

while Donald Rumsfeld denies that the US has an imperial project, the

contemporaneous movies Troy, Alexander the Great and Kingdom of Heaven

tell a different story (Financial Times, 19 April 2006). I am not sure I

would go as far as Khruscheva; Capote, Brokeback Mountain or Crash

suggest rather different narratives.

[53] Though I have lightly edited the piece, the style and content

remain essentially the same as when I wrote it in January 2000.

[54] One night in New York, I had to come up with a new name for the

agency, in part because agreement seemed to require that we change the

name from that in the UK draft up till that point (this was the acronym,

UNCIIM, for UN Commission for Inspection and Investigation and

Monitoring, a word that, to Russian and French ears, sounded too much

like one designed for the pursuit of criminals). We needed a new name

that incorporated the key concepts of MOnitoring,

Verification,Inspection and Commission. UNMOVIC was the construction

which, after several hours of crossword-like pondering, I came up with.

[55] For the full text go to

www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/

[56] Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University

of Chicago Press, 3^(rd) edn, 1996.

[57] I would suggest that a classic example of this phenomenon, examined

in chapter 2, is that of the break-up of Yugoslavia. It was not only the

massacre of Srebrenica that produced a shift in the view of that war as

a “civil war”. It was psychologically impossible for the Conservative

government, then in power, to admit this, but the massacre and the

dawning understanding that the war was very much not a civil war

produced a paradigm shift in the incoming Labour government which later

adopted in Kosovo an altogether more interventionist approach.

[58] Somalia, Kosovo and Western Sahara are all on the agenda of the UN

Security Council.

[59] GM is famously burdened by massive obligations — amounting to some

$85bn — to fund the pensions of its former and current workers.

[60] At the inquiry into the death of British weapons scientist (and my

former colleague), David Kelly, one of the Ministry of Defence

witnesses, Brian Jones, said “I think ‘weapons of mass destruction’ has

become a convenient catch-all which in my opinion can at times confuse

discussion of the subject.”

[61]

www.SecurityCouncilReport.org

[62] I am aware that this proposal will strike some as unrealistic.

Trotsky gave us the notion of a “transitional idea”, a demand that you

know to be unrealisable in the current circumstance, but in making it

you may nevertheless change the current system for the better, and

ultimately it may be shifted to where the demand can be realised.

[63] Who included, for instance, David Kelly on whom I and the UK

Mission to the UN relied on heavily for expert interpretation of the

evidence on Iraq’s biological weapons programme. For instance, I asked

him many times to brief other Security Council delegations on Iraq’s

weapons programmes, along with other British experts on chemical weapons

and ballistic missiles. Somewhat belying the British government’s

portrayal of him after the infamous Today programme No. 10 dossier leak,

we regarded him at the UK mission as Britain’s foremost and most

authoritative expert.

[64] In brief, these were that the embassy had neglected on-the-ground

political reporting in its rush to sell British goods to the Shah. Sir

Anthony Parsons, the ambassador, argued that embassies should always

ensure that they had diplomats fluent in local languages who were tasked

to go out and listen to ordinary people. He also warned against the

tendency in reports back to the capital to emphasise developments

favourable to our interests, and downplay less positive news.

[65]

www.crisisgroup.org

[66] My ambassador in Germany once wearily told me that six nights out

of seven he was either entertaining officially or attending official

dinners.

[67] Amnesty International Report, 20 July 2006

[68] The Open Society Institute — not a government, note — is working

with universities to develop a Code of Conduct for IT companies

operating in China.

[69] The UN’s Global Compact was a start at this challenge, but it needs

to be more widespread. The Global Compact was, by dint of who instigated

it, not a mass activity.

[70] Such as Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates’s

Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, New York: W. W. Norton,

2006.

[71] An economist might argue that this concern is easily counted in the

amounts individuals choose to give to charity, but this does not take

into account reservations people may have — which may inhibit such

giving — about the effectiveness of aid and other relevant factors.

[72] Shirley Hazzard’s, People in Glass Houses, London: Macmillan, 1967,

reprinted 1996, shows that such problems are of depressingly long

standing.

[73] See his controversial speech “Power and Super-Power: Global

Leadership in the Twenty-First Century”, delivered at the Century

Foundation and Center for American Progress — Security and Peace

Initiative, New York, 6 June 2006.

[74] Perhaps another “transitional idea”.