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"Richard T" has posted a fascinating comment on my "Kosovo-Georgia Connection" post of 21 August, speculating that the principal motive behind American wooing of Georgia and sponsorship of Georgia for NATO membership may be to secure bases from which US and perhaps Israeli aircraft could attack Iran without needing to overfly any Arab country.  This seems to me to raise enough important issues to merit a post to itself, and this is it.  Richard T's comment, and my response to it, are accordingly reproduced below.  Further comments, by Richard or others, will be very welcome:  please append them below.  (I might add that several other comments appended to the Kosovo-Georgia Connection post are also exceptionally interesting, and well worth reading.)

Comment by: Richard T:  posted Aug 26, 8:26 AM

I commented on a previous article about the wider Caucasus region.  I have been thinking about this further and I am increasingly coming to a view that the Russian aspect of it is an unintended consequence. 

Apart from some residual cold war rhetoric from the neo-cons,  I cannot see any major strategic drive to embroil the USA with Russia despite some provocation from the Russian Government.  I can see strategic advantage for the USA in having a friendly base in the Caucasus looking to the south east - towards Iran - particularly as the Iraqis have thwarted US intentions of long term occupation there.  It follows then that the US Government's attempt to get NATO membership for Georgia is neither altruistic nor necessarily beneficial to the rest of the western allies.  What appears to be a lack on the USA's part of any serious consideration of consequences from Russia or other neighbouring countries is consistent with the poor quality of analysis which has been displayed by similar White House initiatives.    

I suspect therefore that this is a smoke and mirrors ploy by the US Government to establish a bridgehead in Georgia aimed at Iran not Russia; the Israeli association might be thought to reinforce this.  The strategic advantages for both the USA and Israel are immense - no overflight of Arab countries by either Israeli (or US) aircraft and missiles and a very significant shortening of the distances to Tehran and the Iranian research sites as compared to what they would be from Israel. 

The action by the Georgian President to take advantage of his new friends to settle domestic scores may not have entered the calculations of the White House and hence the opportunity they have given Russia to wreck an American strategy, to embarrass the West by exposing the double standard vis-à-vis Kosovo and to reinforce the dangers of meddling on Russia's doorstep.  I suspect that the implications have not gone unnoticed in Tehran hence the unusual silence from that quarter.

Brian writes:  Thank you for this ingenious scenario.  My main reservation is over the length of time in which the US can reasonably expect to have military and air bases in Iraq.  My guess is that the Americans — or at any rate the Bush administration — intend to keep troops stationed in Iraq for a great many years, with substantial air bases to support them. Three years ago it was reported that they were planning to build four giant bases Iraq:

Under the plan, for which [a senior US official in Baghdad] said there was no "hard-and-fast" deadline, US troops would gradually concentrate inside four heavily fortified air bases, from where they would provide "logistical support and quick reaction capability where necessary to Iraqis". The bases would be situated in the north, south, west and centre of the country. He said the pace of the "troop consolidation" would be dictated by the level of the insurgency and the progress of Iraq's fledgling security structures.  … A report in yesterday's Washington Post said the new bases would be constructed around existing airfields to ensure supply lines and troop mobility. It named the four probable locations as: Tallil in the south; Al Asad in the west; Balad in the centre and either Irbil or Qayyarah in the north. US officers told the paper that the bases would have a more permanent character to them, with more robust buildings and structures than can be seen at most existing bases in Iraq. The new buildings would be constructed to withstand direct mortar fire.

The same report speculated that –

The plan … also foresees a transfer to Iraqi command of more than 100 bases that have been occupied by US-led multinational forces since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. 

A later report (2006, partially up-dated in 2008) introduces a detailed study of the issue of 'permanent' US bases in Iraq and says:

Many of the US bases in Iraq already have, or are now building, facilities which will keep the US government – if not the Iraqi people – happy for the foreseeable future.

This plan depends, presumably, on the willingness of future Iraqi governments to agree to virtually permanent US bases on Iraqi soil, and in June this year (2008) the present Iraqi government was said to be resisting far-reaching US demands:

Negotiations between Washington and Baghdad reached a stalemate on Friday after Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, said US requests to keep a string of military bases across Iraq represented a grave infringement on Iraqi sovereignty. America is demanding the right to conduct independent operations, arrest and hold suspects, freedom of Iraq's airspace and territorial waters as a legacy of its 2003 invasion to depose Saddam Hussein …   With a continued US troop presence a clear buffer to Iran's expanding influence across the Middle East, Mr Maliki has had to reassure Tehran that no American attack will originate in Iraq. In response, Washington rejected a Nato-style clause requiring it to automatically defend Iraq from attack.  [Emphasis added.]

I doubt if the Americans will easily give up the neo-cons' dream scenario of an acquiescent government in Baghdad which gives Washington carte blanche to maintain a long-term military presence, with air bases, in Iraq from which to conduct operations anywhere in the middle east, including of course against neighbouring Iran:  this, after all, was and presumably remains one of the principal objectives of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003.  US and Israeli freedom to use Iraqi airspace is obviously much more valuable to both countries than similar bases in Georgia, from which aircraft would have to fly over Turkey, Armenia or Aazerbaijan to reach Iran — not Arab states, true, but countries whose permission for military overflights in operations against the regional super-power (Iran) couldn't be taken for granted.  Turkey, you will recall, although a NATO member country, rejected US requests for use of its territory or airspace for the attack on Iraq in 2003:

Plans for opening a second front in the north were severely hampered when Turkey refused the use of its territory for such purposes. In response to Turkey's decision, the United States dropped several thousand paratroopers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade into northern Iraq, a number significantly less than the 15,000 strong 4th Mechanized Infantry Division that the U.S. originally planned to use for opening the northern front.  (Wikipedia, 2003 invasion of Iraq)

In 2007 it was reported that –

Azerbaijan recently (mid-March) granted NATO the permission to use two of its military bases and an airport to "back up its peace-keeping operation in Afghanistan" including support for NATO's "supply route to Afghanistan".  NATO's special envoy Robert Simmons insists that the agreement has nothing to do with US plans to wage aerial bombardments on Iran.  Media sources in Baku have intimated that this timely agreement is directly related to ongoing US-Israeli-NATO war plans. Its timing coincides with US naval deployments and war games in the Persian Gulf. …  Meanwhile, the Defense Ministry of Azerbaijan released a statement to the effect that  "Azerbaijan's territory will not be at the disposal of any country for hostile acts against neighbours [Iran] " (See Mardom Salari (Farsi), BBC translation, 5 April 2007). 
This announcement by the Azeri Defense Ministry was in response to an off-the-cuff statement by US Undersecretary of State Matthew Bryza, at a press conference in Georgia (March 30) to the effect that  "The United States hopes for permission to use airfields in Azerbaijan for military purposes."
"A lot of planes overfly Georgia and Azerbaijan on the way to Afghanistan. Should it prove necessary, we would like to be able to use an airfield in Azerbaijan," the US diplomat said, answering a question concerning the modernization of a military airfield in Azerbaijan with the Americans' help. (Nezavisimaya Gazeta, April 2, 2007) (emphasis added)

No doubt the Americans regard the recruitment of Georgia into the family of compliant, 'pro-western' allies in the region, ideally as a member of NATO, as a useful back-stop or insurance against the possible loss of facilities in Iraq at some future time.  But their first priority must surely be to ensure, by force if necessary, that future governments in Iraq will continue to acquiesce in US bases, facilities, and overflying permission.  Not only does Iraq border directly on Iran (as well as on Jordan, Syria, Turkey and Saudi Arabia), but not on Russia:  Georgia has no common border with any Arab state, and has the major disadvantage of being right in Russia's back yard, and with a long history of being regarded by Russia as a vital part of its security buffer zone, never to be allowed to fall into the hands of a potential enemy of Russia.  I draw the conclusion that American wooing of Georgia and sponsorship of Georgia for NATO membership are mainly designed to reduce Russian influence in its own immediate vicinity, to  minimise Russia's sphere of influence, to protect the oil pipe-line that by-passes Russia, and to send a signal to Russia that even in Russia's back yard America holds the cards.  Possible use of Georgia for US and/or Israeli military operations against Iran would be an additional and fairly iffy bonus:  Iraq is a much better option for that.  I agree that the foolish Georgian attack on South Ossetia and the violent Russian response have placed a sizeable road-block in the way of any such American ambitions regarding Georgia.

It's interesting to speculate about the likely attitude to all these American plans and ambitions of a future Obama administration.  I wonder whether it would herald any radical change?  All the signals suggest that a McCain administration would change very little of existing US middle east and Caucasus policies, if anything at all.  They seem to me extremely scary. 

I am putting a copy of this exchange on Ephems as a new post [i.e. this], in view of the important and interesting issues discussed.  Will anyone wishing to pursue the discussion with further comments please append their contributions below? 

Brian

In writing about Kosovo and Georgia, I am handicapped by having no first-hand experience of the area, apart from having served in Moscow in the early 1970s, including a brief visit to Georgia during that time. So it's reassuring to find that someone with perhaps more extensive first-hand knowledge of the Balkans than almost any other UK commentator has written an analysis which closely mirrors my own (also e.g. here and here).   Sir Ivor Roberts was appointed Chargé d'Affaires and Consul-General in Belgrade in March 1994, and after recognition of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia by the United Kingdom, became Ambassador. During his time in Belgrade he conducted negotiations on behalf of the international mediators (Lord Owen and Carl Bildt) with both the Yugoslav authorities and the Bosnian Serbs. He was also involved in the negotiations for the release of British soldiers held hostage by the Bosnian Serbs in May/June 1995. He left Belgrade at the end of 1997, barely two years before NATO started to bomb it.  From January 1998 to February 1999 he was on a sabbatical as a Senior Associate Member of St. Antony's College, Oxford, writing and lecturing on his experiences in Yugoslavia.  He served subsequently as British ambassador to Ireland and then Italy.  He retired from the Diplomatic Service in September 2006 on his election as the President (Master) of Trinity College, Oxford, his current appointment.

Sir Ivor has written quite extensively about Kosovo, most recently in an article in The Tablet in which he traces the origins of the current Georgia-Russia conflict directly to western misjudgements over Kosovo.  You can read extensive extracts from his article here.  I urge you to do so.  You can read the full text online if you are a subscriber to The Tablet, or in hard copy if you buy it. 

Not only did western mishandling of the Kosovo problem (and the misconception that western military intervention against Yugoslavia over Kosovo had been a success) encourage further and even more disastrous blundering in Iraq:  it has also had seriously negative consequences for the west's relations with Russia and for Russian perceptions of western intentions — consequences that we see now in Georgia and in western impotence in the face of that challenge.  It's too late to undo those Kosovo mistakes now, but it's not too late to begin to recognise them as mistakes and to try to learn some lessons from them in our future approach to Georgia (and Ukraine) in relation to Russia.  For US, UK and some other western leaders to go on about Russia's "unacceptable" behaviour in Georgia[1] and to reject any suggestion that Russia, like any other powerful state, will seek to insist that its smaller neighbours pay regard to Russian interests, simply compounds past mistakes instead of facing reality.  Not only Georgian but also Ukrainian leaders, and policy makers in Washington and London, would do well to study the history of Finland's sensitive handling of its relations with Russia — as well as Ivor Roberts's shrewd analysis of where we, or they, have gone so badly wrong.

[1]  Of course recent Russian behaviour in Georgia has been disgraceful, brutal and disproportionate, and deserves to be condemned.  But it's as well to remember that even before the recent conflict Russia had military forces stationed legally in Georgia under an earlier agreement with the Georgian government;  and that in numerous ways, geographically, culturally, historically and ethnically, Georgia is indelibly written into Russia's DNA (as indeed is Ukraine).  To understand how Russians react to western bluster about Georgia's inalienable right to join NATO in complete disregard of Russian objections, it's only necessary to consider how any American administration would have reacted if the Russians had recruited Cuba — or Mexico — as a member of the Warsaw Pact: and indeed how the US did react when the Soviet Union started to station missiles in Cuba.   For George W. Bush of all people to berate Russia for 'invading' the sovereign territory of independent Georgia, after his own record in Iraq, requires a certain chutzpah.  And to say, as Bush has said, that the days of  "spheres of influence" are over is cloud cuckoo land.  Every big and powerful state, including throughout most of its history the United States, seeks to ensure that its neighbours pay due regard to its vital interests and are not allowed to fall under the control of its foreign adversaries or potential enemies.  Add to that Russia's built-in paranoia about the need to protect itself against the threat of western attack, and you can't easily mistake Russian actions in its 'near abroad' for simple aggression.  Like the man said, just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.

Brian 

It's increasingly depressing to observe what appears to be a steadily widening gap between the reactions to the Georgia crisis in the US and those of liberal and other opinion in Europe, revealing fundamental differences of political philosophy and perception (please see some initial observations on the issues here and the comments appended to them). 

One shouldn't generalise about opinion in such a disparate country as the United States, but from watching and listening to even quite liberal commentators on (e.g.) CNN, in the New York Times (for example this), and various American pundits interviewed on UK television current affairs programmes, as well as the comments of Senators McCain and Obama, there seems to be an evolving consensus behind the belligerent President G W Bush and Condoleezza Rice.  By contrast much informed comment in the British media — including in the right-of-centre London Times, e.g. here, and by the conservative commentator Simon Jenkins here — takes a radically different view.

At the risk of over-simplifying complex issues, the two conflicting viewpoints are looking like this:

The principled idealists and tough guys:

"Georgia is an independent, sovereign state.  As such, it has an absolute right to form and join whatever international alliances it chooses, including NATO and the EU (if they will accept it).  It also has every right to resist bullying and interference from its big neighbour, Russia, which for centuries has sought to dominate it, as it has sought to dominate other smaller countries on Russia's borders.  It's not surprising or improper for Georgia to look westward  rather than eastward for support and friendship, given the rocky history of its relations with Russia.  Georgian membership of NATO would represent no military threat to Russia:  but it would serve as a useful warning to Russia of the possible consequences of continued Russian interference in Georgia's affairs. 

"The oil and gas pipelines passing through Georgia with supplies for the west that don't pass through Russia (and are therefore not potential instruments of Russian blackmail) are an important western interest justifying the west in supporting Georgia against the threat of Russian interference. 

"If Georgia had been admitted to NATO membership at the NATO meeting in Bucharest last April, as some of us proposed, it's unlikely that Russia would have dared to send its tanks and troops into Georgia itself on the flimsy pretext of protecting its own citizens in South Ossetia.  Many of these Russian "citizens" are anyway only nominally Russian because the Russians have handed out Russian passports to numerous South Ossetians.  South Ossetia is still legally part of Georgia and Russia has no business encouraging it to secede.

"Russia's policies and actions are a throw-back to by-gone Soviet days and have no place in the Europe of 2008.  Its military invasion of Georgia has no legal basis and constitutes clear aggression. It's important that the international community should not allow aggression to succeed:  a military response is ruled out as disproportionate and too dangerous, but Russia must be subjected to other penalties as a deterrent to any repetition of this unacceptable behaviour.  These could include postponement of Russian membership of the World Trade Organisation, suspension from the G8, a western boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, and other kinds of boycott and isolation, until Moscow realises that aggression and other bullying do not pay." 

The alternative view may be summed up as that of – 

The realists with a sense of history:

All big and powerful countries inevitably use their power and influence to ensure that their vital national interests are not subverted or threatened by their smaller neighbours.  This is the essence of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 according to which the United States claims the right to prevent outside interference in the affairs of the western hemisphere — and even goes further than that:

Most recently, during the Cold War, the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (added during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt) was invoked as a reason to intervene militarily in Latin America to stop the spread of Communism. 

American action against governments in Cuba and Grenada, Panama and Chile comes to mind.   A further implied extension to the Monroe Doctrine was represented as entitling the US to invade and occupy Iraq in defence of its own interests and allegedly in defence of the interests of the Iraqi people.   

The concept of a major power establishing a local sphere of influence and defending it, if necessary by force, against external incursion has a long history, and while not formally enshrined in international law, is simply a statement of how big powers inevitably behave in order to protect their security and advance their interests.  No country attaches more importance to preserving a cordon sanitaire as a defensive moat around itself than Russia, invariably and traditionally paranoid (for obvious reasons) about being attacked from the west.  The steady expansion of NATO and the EU in the direction of Russia, since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, has inevitably fed this paranoia, as has the proposed stationing of American Star Wars missile defences and missile sites in nearby Poland and the Czech Republic.  Other diplomatic rows over issues large and small have added to Russia's sense, not wholly illusory, of being under siege.  In the 1960s the stationing of Soviet missiles in Cuba, just a few miles from the coast of Florida, caused a major global crisis and the Americans were prepared to take any steps to get them withdrawn;  we should not be surprised that the Russians feel much the same about their increasing encirclement by NATO and by western missiles and Star Wars installations.  The west's attempt to freeze Russia out of the Kosovo negotiations and participation in the internationalisation of that Serbian province in 1999, in an area where Russia has major and legitimate interests, was both misconceived and unsuccessful.  Now, with South Ossetia similarly seeking to secede from Georgia, the tables are turned.

In these circumstances Georgia's sudden abandonment of its peace proposals for ending small-scale violence in South Ossetia  (where Russian troops were already present in a peace-keeping role) and its launch of an extremely violent attack on the break-away province, which had been autonomous de facto from 1922 to the end of the USSR, was bound to be taken by the Russians as intolerably provocative, and as demanding a response.   It's not unreasonable, indeed, to suspect that Saakashvili launched his attack in the deliberate attempt to provoke a Russian military response which in turn would force the US, and perhaps the rest of NATO as such, to come to his assistance.  The consequences are plain to see.  Saakashvili was clearly in the wrong to attack South Ossetia just when peace talks were scheduled to begin;  Russia was equally or more wrong to over-react and to send its troops and tanks into Georgia proper, where they still are.  President Sarkozy, holding the EU Presidency, has negotiated a cease-fire which both sides have now signed, and the Russians will presumably honour it by withdrawing from Georgia in its own good time, but perhaps not while US "humanitarian aid" forces remain in the country.

If Georgia had been admitted to NATO earlier this year, the effect would almost certainly have been that Saakashvili would have been emboldened to launch his provocative assault on South Ossetia even earlier, in the confident belief that any Russian military response would have been met by NATO military support under the terms of NATO's North Atlantic Treaty.   Georgia's status as a NATO member would hardly have deterred Russia from responding as she did to the attack on South Ossetia since the risk of an all-out war between NATO and Russia would undoubtedly have given cooler NATO heads pause.  Failure to honour its treaty commitment to Georgia would have exposed NATO as a paper tiger and NATO membership as worthless, while Russia would have been correspondingly strengthened, much as has actually happened.

The western response to this unsavoury and dangerous episode should plainly be to engage Russia much more actively in international institutions and consultations:  further to isolate her (as the Americans seem determined to do) can only make matters worse.  There should be a halt to any further NATO or EU expansion into countries bordering Russia and an explicit acceptance of Russia's primary responsibility for maintaining order, resolving conflicts and settling disputes in her own back yard, provided that she acts exclusively in accordance with the rules set out in the UN Charter.   Given Russia's huge importance as a supplier of gas and oil, there's a strong western interest in encouraging full Russian participation in international affairs and in firmly discouraging Russian paranoia about western intentions towards her.  Russia is a major country — a legitimate nuclear power, a permanent member of the Security Council, the most important player in her own region, with significant military and economic resources.  She is entitled to be treated with more respect and attention than she has been accorded by much western policy in the last decade.  This is a matter of practical realism and self-interest for the west, not an occasion for moralistic finger-wagging from the west's glass house.

_________________________ 

No prizes for guessing which camp I'm in.  Unfortunately it looks as if the two positions are irreconcilable.  The despatch of American troops to Georgia with a  mission to deliver humanitarian aid, while there are still Russian forces at various locations in the country, is hardly likely to help in cooling the temperature: there are plenty of other sources of humanitarian aid, eg through the Red Cross or the UN, without risking a confrontation in a semi-war situation and in a small country where law and order have broken down, between American and Russian troops at a time when their respective governments are engaged in a vitriolic slanging match.  There are surely less dangerous ways for Mr Bush to try belatedly to construct a legacy for himself in his remaining weeks in office.

Update (18 Aug 08):   Another Conservative but clear-eyed commentator, Sir Max Hastings, sets out in an article in today's Guardian, with penetrating and not unsympathetic insight into the Russian psyche, the irrefutable case for not accepting Georgia or Ukraine as members of NATO.  Writing in the Sunday Times of 17 August another usually perceptive Tory, Michael Portillo, arrives more reluctantly at the same conclusion, but only after a prolonged lament over the absence of Blair-like grand-standing in the form of the seizure of a hollow role for Britain in the Georgia crisis (the column is headed A world role for Britain slips away — thank goodness, some of us say;  and about time, too).  Meanwhile the gun-toting macho cold warriors demanding NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine are joined, not only by David Cameron after his visit to Tbilisi [see comments below], but even more ominously, and surprisingly, by the hitherto soberly realistic Angela Merkel after her own visit to the Georgian capital.  What is Saakashvili putting in his visitors' cabernet sauvignon?  Our own young Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, is to be despatched by Gordon Brown to Tbilisi shortly:  let's hope that he at least will stick to bottled water.  As Hastings and others point out, if Georgia joins NATO and is then subjected to a further Russian invasion, perhaps provoked by a fresh act of folly by its madcap President, NATO will have to choose between honouring its NATO treaty commitment to go to war with Russia in Georgia's defence, or doing nothing, thereby exposing NATO's pledge of mutual military support as worthless.  The Guardian's front page lead today points up the humour implicit in the western position with its splendid headline:  Russia warned: withdraw from Georgia, or else (or else what?). 

Brian 

J. and I visited the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, and the Georgian town of Gori, in the early 1970s, a decade and a half after Khrushchev's "secret speech" denouncing Stalin and the cult of personality.  Gori was one of the very few places in the then Soviet Union where a huge statue of Stalin dominated the town square, as it still does today:  the Stalin cult was still in full swing, for Gori is where the great leader, dictator, mass murderer and general monster was born.  We visited the birthplace itself, then as now a Stalin museum, full of framed photographs of the great man in his early days, often in groups of co-conspirators from which Trotsky and other non-persons had been amateurishly air-brushed out.  With a few creditable exceptions, UK media comments on the current conflict in Georgia, with all the references to Russian tanks in Gori, have failed to make the connection with Stalin, even though there can be very few Russians or Georgians who read and hear the name Gori without Stalin's name coming instantly to mind.  In a recent Russian poll in which people have been voting for the greatest ever Russian, Stalin has so far led the field;  and he wasn't even a Russian. 

This all helps to illustrate the strong Russian feeling that Georgia, whatever its current legal status as a sovereign independent state since 1991, just before the break-up of the USSR, is an intrinsic part of Russia's long and turbulent history.  Georgia was not forced into the Russian orbit by the Bolsheviks' incorporation of the country into the Soviet Union after 1918:  it was incorporated into the Russian Empire in December 1800, having been under formal Russian protection since 1783, 225 years ago.  Perhaps this helps to explain Russia's reactions to the strident efforts by NATO and the EU to sign up Georgia as a member of these two western alliances and thus to place it under western, meaning in effect American, German, French and British protection — all part of the expansion of both NATO and the EU to Russia's own borders, removing its one-time defensive cordon sanitaire and inevitably feeding traditional Russian paranoia about its traditional enemies to the west.

None of this is meant to condone the brutality of Russia's incursion into the breakaway statelet of South Ossetia, still less into Georgia proper;  nor does it excuse the way the leaders of the Soviet Union, including Stalin, held the constituent republics, including Georgia, as virtual colonies for the mere 73 years in which the USSR existed.  But in judging the rights and wrongs of the current conflict, we do well to remember the salient facts of the history of the Caucasus and its implications for the way that the people most closely concerned see each other and themselves.  

As so often, Simon Jenkins has written the definitive analysis of the conflict in his Guardian column of 13 August 2008.  It's well worth reading in full.  Here are some of his principal points:

This week's operation in Georgia has displayed the failure of the west's policy of belligerence towards Vladimir Putin's Russia. The policy was meant to weaken Russia, and has strengthened it. The policy was meant to humiliate Russia with Nato encirclement, and has merely fed its neo-imperialism. The policy was meant to show that Russia "understands only firmness" and instead has shown the west as a bunch of tough-talking windbags….

Bush says that great powers should not go about "toppling governments in the 21st century", as if he had never done such a thing. Cheney says that the invasion has "damaged Russia's standing in the world", as if Cheney gave a damn. The lobby for sanctions against Russia is reduced to threatening to boycott the winter Olympics. Big deal….

In South Ossetia both sides appear to have committed appalling atrocities, and can thus generate a sense of outrage in front of whatever camera is pointed at them. Georgia's government claimed the right to assert military control over its two dissident provinces, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, even if they were openly in league with Russia. Equally, Russia felt justified in stopping the consequent evictions and killings of its nationals in these provinces, in which it had a humanitarian locus as "peacekeeper".  The difficulty is that entitlement and good sense are rarely in accord. Georgia may have been entitled to act, but was clearly unwise to do so. Russia may have been entitled to aid its people against an oppressor, but that is different from unleashing its notoriously inept and ruthless army, let alone bombing Georgia's capital and demanding a change in its government….

Saakashvili thought he could call on the support of his neoconservative allies in Washington… It turned out that such "support" was mere words. America is otherwise engaged in wars that bear a marked resemblance to those waged by Putin. It defended the Kurdish enclaves against Saddam Hussein. It sought regime change in Serbia and Afghanistan. As Putin's troops in South Ossetia were staging a passable imitation of the US 101st Airborne entering Iraq, Bush was studiously watching beach volleyball in Beijing….

Once such conflicts could be quarantined by the United Nations' requirement to respect national sovereignty. That has been shot to pieces by the liberal interventionism of George Bush and Tony Blair. The result has reinvigorated separatist movements across the world….

The west's eagerness to intervene in favour of partition, manifest in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Sudan, is more than meddling. It encouraged every oppressed people and province on earth to be "the mouse that roared", to think it could ensnare a great power in its cause.

The parallels are glaring. If we backed Kosovo against the Serbs, why not back South Ossetia against the Georgians? But if we backed the Kurds against the Iraqis, why not the Georgians against Russia? Indeed, had Nato admitted Georgia to full membership, there is no knowing what Caucasian horror might have ensued from the resulting treaty obligation. Decisions which in Washington and London may seem casual gestures of ideological solidarity can mean peace and war on the ground….

The west has done everything to isolate Putin, as he rides the tiger of Russian emergence from everlasting dictatorship. This has encouraged him to care not a fig for world opinion. Equally the west has encouraged Saakashvili to taunt Putin beyond endurance. The policy has led to war. If ever there were a place just to leave alone, it is surely the Caucasus.

In this tragic melée there are no good guys and bad guys, only bad guys — leaving aside the innocent civilians of South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Georgia who are its victims.  Until just a few days ago the Georgian President Saakashvili seemed to be groping for a peaceful resolution  of the quarrels besetting the region.  In the words of Thomas de Waal in an essential account of these events,

On 7 August, after days of shooting incidents in the South Ossetian conflict-zone, President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia made a speech in which he said that he had given the Georgian villagers orders not to fire, that he wanted to offer South Ossetia "unlimited autonomy" within the Georgian state, with Russia to be a guarantor of the arrangement.

Both sides said they were discussing a meeting the next day to discuss how to defuse the clashes. That evening, however, Saakashvili went for the military option. The Georgian military launched a massive artillery attack on Tskhinvali, followed the next day by a ground assault involving tanks. This against a city with no pure military targets, full of civilians who had been given no warning and were expecting peace talks at any moment.

This sudden abandonment of his peace initiative and recourse to military force against the South Ossetians seems to have been intended to provoke the inevitable Russian military intervention which Saakashvili apparently believed would bring his American friends and their NATO allies riding over the hill to his support.  A moment's thought would have convinced him that even George W Bush was unlikely to walk into yet another war on behalf of distant Georgia, especially a war against a still formidable and nuclear-armed Russia.  The Iraqi army of Saddam Hussein (and its successor Iraqi nationalists) and the Taliban in Afghanistan are a quite different order of enemy for the American neo-cons to take on, and even they are currently keeping the Americans fully occupied.  So the Georgian attack gave Putin a golden and virtually risk-free opportunity to send his tanks and artillery into South Ossetia and beyond, nominally to defend the substantial numbers of Russian citizens there from the Georgian assault, but actually to reassert Russia's military and other dominance in the area, to warn Saakashvili and the west against any idea of bringing Georgia into the west's sphere of influence and to punish the Georgian régime for its impertinent challenge to Russia's superior might.  He has demonstrated the powerlessness of the west, when the Russian chips were down, to protect Georgia against its powerful neighbour.  We can all shout as loudly as we like that the Russian response has been unforgivably violent and excessive;  Putin is unlikely to take any notice.  He has achieved everything that he set out to achieve;  Georgia has achieved nothing apart from the loss, probably now irretrievable, of any hope of reincorporating South Ossetia (or by analogy Abkhazia either) even loosely into Georgia.   

There are some salutary lessons to be learned from all this, many of them eloquently spelled out by Simon Jenkins:

• The eastward expansion of NATO has aggravated Russian paranoia to a dangerous degree, and any further expansion would risk further destabilising the whole anyway perennially unstable region.

• If NATO had yielded to the temptation, and to Georgian blandishments, to admit Georgia as a NATO member at its meeting in Bucharest earlier this year, Saakashvili would have been encouraged to use his army against South Ossetia even earlier than he did, and Russia is unlikely to have been deterred from sending in its tanks in response.  The whole of NATO would then have been committed by treaty to come to Georgia's defence against Russia.  Averting a third world war would have been a test for western statesmanship that the west might well have failed.

• The west's attitudes to small secessionist movements within sovereign states have been disastrously confused, inconsistent  and unprincipled.  We intervened illegally and violently in support of Kosovo's terrorist movement for secession from Serbia and actively helped to bring it about, while stridently denouncing Russia's much less violent support for the South Ossetians against Georgia;  and we seem to regard Russia's insoluble problem with secessionist Chechnya as just another excuse for criticising the Russian government.  With a serious and unsolved secessionist problem of our own (Scotland), it's about time that we stopped telling others how to cope with theirs.

• The illegal attack by NATO on Yugoslavia in 1999, and by the US, UK and a few others on Iraq in 2003, have disqualified the leading countries of the west from holding up their hands in mock horror when Russia uses its army, some of it already there in an accepted peace-keeping capacity, to retaliate, however excessively, against Georgian military intervention in South Ossetia — that disqualification being another malign consequence of the Iraq misadventure.

• For oil and many other reasons, it's time we learned to live with the reality of Russia, however much we may dislike much of what goes on there since its conversion to raw capitalism.  We could start by terminating our pointless demands for the extradition of a Russian citizen to Britain when such extradition is expressly forbidden by the Russian constitution (a pity we don't have a similar provision in ours).
   
• Above all, we should recognise the reality that a country like Russia is going to maximise its influence and power in neighbouring countries, being as much entitled in realpolitik terms to a sphere of influence as any other — including the United States.   Western attempts to create a sphere of influence in Russia's back yard are bound to lead to instability, conflict and ultimately bloodshed;  no Russian government could acquiesce in them.  We should stop misrepresenting Russian resistance to such western expansionism as if it was Russia that was reverting to some kind of imperialism.  Russia's neighbours are condemned by geography to accommodate Russian interests and security requirements, just as Ireland, Mexico and Canada, and much of Latin America have had to do in respect of their bigger or more powerful neighbours.  Get used to it!

Update (13 Aug 08):  Another brilliant commentary on this affair — as brilliant, I mean, as Simon Jenkins's — appeared in today's Times.  Michael Binyon's column provides a comprehensive catalogue of all the ways in which western policy since the collapse of the Soviet Union has failed to accommodate itself to the realities of the new Russia, and has thereby walked into this week's trap so patiently and lethally prepared for it by Mr Putin.  Obligatory reading.

Brian 

A comment on a recent post posed a formidable challenge:

Not so long ago, I remember asking you 'What is the Labour Party for?' 'Twas not a rhetorical nor, I hope, a totally silly question and it still awaits an answer… Old Labour, New Labour, whichever, I have despaired of it for years, though in a 'pure' form I would support it. My problem is that successive Labour governments and leaders (from Wislon onwards) have, for me, so befogged that purity that I now have only the (inevitably!) haziest idea of what I once thought that I believed in. The Iraq adventure was the penultimate straw, and then came Brown… What could possibly persuade me to vote Labour again? Whatever Labour might have been 'for' in the past, what now? What in essence is the philosophical stance that Labour should proclaim? 

….I hope I'm not slipping into old professional habits and requesting an essay! Just a straightforward and very brief paragraph, say?

To save unnecessary agonies of meditation and composition, here, with minor editing, is an extract from an earlier post on this blog:

It's true that the Labour Party under Blair and now, apparently, Brown, has moved far to the right, occupying considerable territory once the preserve of the Tories, while Cameron is sporadically trying to drag the Conservatives kicking and screaming towards some limited areas once occupied by Labour; but that doesn't make them indistinguishable, and it's an indolent cop-out to pretend that there's now nothing to choose between the main party of the left and the main party of the right.  It's still true, as always, that in general, and despite multiple backslidings, the left stands for maximum equality of outcomes and not just of opportunity: for a positive and proactive role for the state's authority at every level in promoting social justice and prosperity and not for uncontrolled laissez-faire individualism: for protecting the weakest and most vulnerable against the interests of big business, privilege and property: for putting reform and progressive change ahead of continuity, stability, or preservation of the status quo:  for internationalism rather than narrow nationalism:  for due process and the rule of law, human rights and individual liberty, even if necessary at some cost to security and social discipline;  freedoms and responsibilities, but above all freedom.  And in general the political right stands for the opposite of all those things.

To this should be added that a true party of the left supports the rule of law in international affairs as represented by the Charter of the United Nations, and opposes the use of force in international relations except in self-defence or when explicitly authorised by the UN Security Council;  regards national and international action to relieve poverty, ignorance and disease in poor countries as being at least as urgent a priority (if not a more urgent one) as the relief of poverty, ignorance and disease in our own country;  recognises climate change as an immediate threat to the future of the planet and accepts the need for urgent international action, if necessary at the expense of the living standards of the rich and the relatively rich, to minimise its effects;  believes that business and the City have obligations to others besides their shareholders, including their customers, suppliers, employees and society generally, and that these should at last be recognised in law; wishes to end the over-centralisation of the government of Britain by devolving more extensive powers to all the four nations of the United Kingdom and beyond them to local authorities, counties and cities, towns and villages, parishes and wards, so that responsibility always resides at the lowest and most local level possible, and the authority to whom an aggrieved citizen turns first is the local mayor or parish councillor, not an MP in distant Westminster — even if this results in unequal standards in different parts of the country;  is strongly opposed to anything likely to lead to the break-up of the United Kingdom and is prepared to go to almost any lengths in further devolution and power-sharing to avert it (subject only to the commitment that has been given to all the people of Ireland, north and south);  recognises that our foreign policy objectives can be better and more effectively achieved when we act as a fully participating member of the European Union than by seeking to act alone;  regards the EU as an overwhelmingly positive dimension of our international activities and as an indispensable instrument for positive change;  and is not afraid to say that the word which encapsulates all these values, aims and priorities is socialism. 

This reference to equality of outcomes in the earlier piece prompted a lively discussion in comments, to which this was the reply:

Of course no-one, even the most Utopian, advocates total equality of wealth and income for all; but if there’s to be any justice and humanity in the way society is ordered – real respect for “the equal worth of all” [a phrase used approvingly by Tony Blair] – it’s essential that the state should intervene actively in the economy to minimise the gross inequalities which ‘equality of opportunity’, market forces, flexibility in the labour market, and the rest of the capitalist shibboleths automatically produce.

It seems to me that gross and blatant inequality, whether of income, wealth, educational and cultural access, health, life expectancy, everyday living conditions, personal security, or any of the other elements that together constitute the opportunity to enjoy the right to the pursuit of happiness, disfigures the society in which it occurs: creates tensions and divisions which threaten social peace and stability: condemns its victims to material and cultural deprivation: and leads to all the other evils so accurately predicted by Michael Young…. The unavoidable corollary of this is that we should pay at least as much attention to the greatest possible equality of outcomes as we do to equality of opportunity. Whether we speak of aiming at the greatest practicable degree of equality in all fields, or of pre-empting or eliminating as far as may be practicable the inequalities which flow from equality of opportunity, the principle is the same. My charge is that New Labour, in its effective dismissal of equality of outcomes and its commitment to equality of opportunity and a meritocracy, doesn’t understand any of this, and that its position belongs on the right of the political spectrum and not on the left. As Anthony Crosland argued long ago, the concept of equality is central to the modern interpretation of socialism.

[In reply to this, the question was raised what in more concrete terms was meant by greater equality of outcomes as a central objective of the left:]  Action to promote equality (and to remove unnecessary inequality) is needed all the time in every sphere of government activity: there’s no snake oil or magic bullet. But a good symbolic start would be to increase the marginal rate of income tax on all incomes over, say, £100,000 a year, take a million low earners out of any income tax obligation, and scrap many of the current allowances that benefit mainly top earners.  (Actually there are cogent if counter-intuitive arguments for a flat rate tax with no allowances at all but with a starting-point set high enough to exclude many more from any tax obligation and the rate set at a level that would actually be sharply progressive, i.e. redistributive and pro-equality, in its effects…) We might also consider legislation to impose a maximum percentage gap between the highest and lowest salaries (including benefits in kind) paid to employees, including managers at all levels, by companies above a certain size. But this is about more than simply incomes, or even incomes and wealth: it’s about the huge inequalities in quality of life, education, culture, and ability to realise one’s maximum potential (which is where it overlaps with ‘equality of opportunity’:  fine if it’s allied to pro-active measures to limit and minimise inequality of outcomes;  reactionary and retrograde if it's not). There are many desirable measures to address the problems of climate change that would have the incidental effect of reducing inequality. Removing the charitable status of private schools (so-called public schools) would be a good first step towards greater educational equality, although much more is needed there. No huge effort of imagination is needed to think of numerous other ways of moving towards the objective, if the will is there.

It would need a sizeable book to provide an adequate response to the challenge:  what is the Labour Party for, what used it to stand for, what is it for now?  But I hope this suggests at least a few preliminary answers.  Clive?

Brian 

Thoughts about the passing scene crowd in, none seeming worth a separate Ephems post.  Here's what I've been jotting down.

*   *   *   *   *

I suppose most of us Old Labour people have now given up in despair on Gordon Brown.  When Blair was at last defenestrated there seemed a faint chance that Brown, once installed in No. 10, despite having been Blair's chief accessory to the betrayal of most of the Labour party's aims and values, might set a new course for the government, by abandoning some of Blair's more egregious follies (42 days detention without charge, Trident, aircraft carriers, keeping troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, ID cards and the national data-base, ASBOs, more and more prisoners in ever more prisons, half-heartedness in the EU accompanied by slavish attention to Washington, the UK-US extradition treaty, control orders, kowtowing to the Saudis and covering up for BAe, privatising more and more of our schools and hospitals, PFIs, leaving the railways in incompetent private hands, forcing down the standard of living of public sector workers while refusing to raise taxes on obscene City and business salaries, bonuses and dividends, taking the government's cue from Rupert Murdoch and the Daily Mail, micro-managing everything in sight in a passion for over-centralisation, and all the rest of that Blairite stuff).  When he first became prime minister, Brown put all the emphasis on change.  But he has changed nothing.  It's that failure to dump his inherited baggage, and the aspects of his character which apparently prevent him from working harmoniously with his colleagues, or delegating responsibility to them or to anyone else, or making timely decisions and sticking to them, or trusting and listening to his officials, that can now be seen to make him unfit to continue as prime minister.  The irony is that his premiership will be destroyed mainly by an economic downturn for which he bears no responsibility whatever, and which he seems to be trying to cope with rather sensibly.  Anyway, for whatever reason, he should go and go quickly — and whichever Miliband succeeds him, there should then be a very early general election fought on a brand-new, radical, egalitarian, small-l liberal Labour manifesto.  If Jack Straw, Charles Clarke, Alan Milburn, David Blunkett or any others of that discredited crowd manage to seize the crown, it will really be the end of the party as we used to know it.

*   *   *   *   *

Yet more folly seems to be about to get shoe-horned into official Labour policy for the next election:  a reduction in the voting age to 16.   The Guardian's senior political commentator, the almost always reliable Michael White, got it absolutely right:

Even at 18, voting - like backpacking - can be risky. You may argue that, since a weekend poll revealed that one voter in three blames the government for higher petrol prices, it is risky at 36 or even 66. But at least the wrinklies have knocked around a bit and bother to go and vote at elections in respectable numbers. Among the young, the 18-to-24 cohort, the turnout was 39% in 2001 (the latest figures I can find), compared with 59% overall in that miserable year. What's more, the move comes at an odd time when the old folks are busy trying to stop young people taking on other responsibilities such as buying tobacco - now banned until 18 - or drinking (there is talk of raising the legal age to 21), both pretty self-defeating, I suspect.
(Michael White, "Allowing 16-year-olds to vote is neither wise nor sensible", Guardian, 29 July 08)

 A letter advocating this change in the Guardian of 31 July 08 was co-signed by luminaries of the British Youth Council, Children's Rights Alliance for England, Electoral Reform Society, Funky Dragon, National Youth Agency, and the UK Youth Parliament.  Says it all.  No political party committed to giving the vote to children can expect to be taken seriously ever again (except by children).

*   *   *   *   * 

Today's Guardian announces the publication of what promises to be an excellent report by the admirable Dr Tony Wright's Public Administration Select Committee.   This report concerns the government's attempts to prevent the publication of memoirs, and even comments in the media, by former diplomats and other public servants on matters with which they were concerned while in government service, without prior permission from the government.  The committee rightly challenges the government's claim to the right to be the ultimate arbiter of what it's in the public interest to publish even if it may embarrass past or present ministers and officials by exposing their mistakes (and worse), pointing out that the principle that such decisions should be made by an independent body has already been firmly established by the Freedom of Information Act and the procedures it lays down.  The heading of the Guardian's report ("MPs challenge gag on former diplomats") is a succinct summary.  The committee's report is clearly a triumph for, especially, Sir Edward Clay, former British High Commissioner in Kenya, who has been waging a lively war with the Foreign Office over the right of retired diplomats to comment on international affairs in radio and television interviews and in articles in the press without getting prior permission from the government — provided of course that they don't give away information legitimately classified as confidential or secret in the process.  His view is now strongly endorsed by Tony Wright and his committee.  Whether the FCO will take any notice is, of course, another matter.  If it does, perhaps we may at last be given permission by our ministers to read Jeremy Greenstock's memoir of what happened over Iraq while he was UK Permanent Representative at the UN and later as the government's special representative in Baghdad, a book long ago written by Greenstock but still banned by ministers.  The government's response to Dr Wright's committee's report will be extremely interesting and revealing.  Don't bet the farm on a sudden rush of liberalism to the ministerial head.

 *   *   *   *   *

 And now yet another little folly rears up and bites us in the nether regions.  The new high commissioner in Zambia is to be a married couple:  one high commissioner, two diplomats.  Apparently they will share the job, four months on and four months off.  The one who's temporarily not the high commissioner will be the high commissioner's spouse, doing the menus and placement for the great man's (or woman's) dinner parties, looking after their small children, managing the Residence staff, keeping the entertainment allowance accounts, and mopping the high commissioner's fevered brow when he, or she, gets in from work.  What the off-duty not-high commissioner won't presumably do is visit the inner sanctums of the high commission offices to read the classified telegrams, instructions and briefings on the high commissioner's computer screen, to prepare her/himself for the next 4-month stint.  What will happen when the two half-high commissioners can't agree on their policy recommendations to London is far from clear:  there'll be nobody there to arbitrate.  On the face of it this is an unworkable, indeed rather silly, attempt at political correctness.  What the hapless high commission staff, its leader changing over every few weeks, will make of it, goodness knows.  The Zambian government will also find it hard to work out who really speaks to them on behalf of the UK.  A whole new protocol to cope with it will need to be worked out.  In the local diplomatic corps, spouses of other high commissioners and ambassadors in Lusaka may be a shade less than enchanted by the situation.  Meanwhile the FCO's announcement of the new twin-headed appointment is remarkable, not only for its startling substance, but also for describing the potted biographies of the happy couple as their "curriculum vitaes".  Vitaes?  Nought out of ten for Latin, chaps.  It wouldn't have happened in my day!   Still, at least there'll be only two of them:  what will really test the system is when a ménage à trois is appointed British ambassador in Washington.  Oh, you may laugh…

   *   *   *   *   *

The Beijing (or, as I would prefer to say, Peking) Olympics are almost upon us, preceded by an appalling terrorist attack in north-west China and heralding an even more mind-blowingly lavish opening ceremony than anything we have seen at previous Games, since the steady 4-year expansion of these rituals is subject to the iron law of inflation.  The justification for giving the Games to China seems to be that this massive exposure to the outside world will give a valuable push to the improvements in China's human rights record that we would all like to see (rather as the principal raison d'être of the European Union is now solemnly represented as being to encourage democracy and human rights in the countries that want to join it).   What, then, was the justification for imposing the 2012 Olympics on London?  Not, presumably, to jolt our government into improving its human rights performance, although that would certainly be a most welcome by-product.  No:  it seems that we need to spend several tens of billions of pounds on bigger and better sports facilities in and around London, and to reclaim hundreds of acres of wasteland east of the capital for affordable housing and other development, and despite our awareness of these urgent needs, we wouldn't do anything about them unless galvanised by the prospect of the Olympic visitation in four years' time.  So billions of pounds of taxpayers' and Lottery money are being diverted from other worthy causes to the Olympic behemoth without any rational assessment of competing priorities, simply because we are stuck with the responsibility for putting on the circus and there's no way to change our minds now.  We sink ever more deeply into economic recession, with savage cuts in other  government expenditure, rising unemployment, attacks on public sector workers' living standards, and other such miseries; but spending on the Games remains inviolate and inviolable.  On second thoughts, though, perhaps the justification for having the Games here in 2012 is an old-fashioned Keynesian remedy:  instead of employing people to dig holes in the ground and fill them in again (so as to provide employment and stimulate demand), we're employing them to dig holes in the ground and then build giant stadiums in them, ready to be dismantled as soon as the runners and jumpers have finished their two weeks' running and jumping in four summers' time.  You know it makes sense really.

 *   *   *   *   *

Why do our British commentators on American politics keep on referring to Senator McCain's "ailing" or "flagging" campaign for the Presidency, when the public opinion polls in the key states where the election will be decided show him and Senator Obama running almost neck and neck? Is it wishful thinking?  Both candidates are seeking to overcome quite serious electoral disabilities: one is old and a member of the same party as George W Bush (but highly experienced in politics and war); the other is inexperienced, looks worryingly young, is black, liberal, half-African, an intellectual who uses long words and expresses complex ideas, behaves as if he has already won the White House, is adored by a crowd of 200,000 Germans and is very widely believed by numerous American voters to be a closet Muslim.  Which set of disabilities seems to you the more formidable?  Yes, I'm afraid so.

Brian   

Whatever you think of Iain Dale and his Tory politics, you'll probably enjoy responding to his annual invitation to help choose the UK's top 100 political blogs by sending in your choice of your own top ten.  It's all set out more colourfully here, but the main points are these:

Guide to Political Blogs 2008-9: Vote for your Top Ten Blogs
Take Part & Win £100 worth of Political Books!

In early September TOTAL POLITICS, in association with APCO WORLDWIDE, will publish the 2008-9 Guide to Political Blogging in the UK. It will contain articles on blogging by some of Britain's leading bloggers, together with a directory of UK political blogs, and a series of Top 20s and Top 10s. The book will be available at the Green Party, TUC, Labour, LibDem and Tory Conferences, where TOTAL POLITICS will have exhibition stands.

We're asking for your votes to decide the Top 100 UK Political Blogs. Simply email your Top Ten (ranked from 1 to 10) to toptenblogs@totalpolitics.com. If you have a blog, please encourage your readers to do the same. I'll then compile the Top 100 from those that you send in. Just order them from 1 to 10. Your top blog gets 10 points and your tenth gets 1 point.

The deadline for submitting your Top 10 is Friday August 15th. Please type Top 10 in the subject line. Or you can of course leave your Top 10 in the Comments on this post [nb. not please on Ephems! — BLB] .

Once all the entries are in a lucky dip draw will take place and the winner will be sent £100 worth of political books!

The rules are simple:

1. Please only vote once
2. Only blogs based in the UK, run by UK residents are eligible or based on UK politics are eligible
3. Votes must be cast before Friday 15 August
4. Blogs chosen must be listed in the Total Politics Blog Directory.
5. You must send a list of TEN blogs, ranked. Any entry containing fewer than ten blogs will not count.
6. Anonymous votes left in the comments will not count. You must give a name

So, once again, the email address to send your TOP TEN BLOGS to is…

                     toptenblogs@totalpolitics.com 

The Comments on Iain Dale's post, 56 of them at the last count, are worth a visit on their own, including some contributors' lists of their Top Ten, although so far, unaccountably, none seems to include any votes for Ephems.  Perhaps my army of fans are both sending their votes in by private e-mail.   Canvassing for support doesn't seem to be outlawed by the rules, but might be thought to be bad taste, so I'll gracefully refrain.

Once again, please send your top ten blogs list to toptenblogs@totalpolitics.com, not to this blog, whether as a comment here or as a private message from Ephems.

Brian

Don't panic:  this isn't going to be yet another re-run of my theme-song about NATO's illegal attack on Yugoslavia over Kosovo in 1999 having been an unalloyed failure, contrary to the prevailing wisdom.  Anyone who wants to see that argument and the evidence for it can easily do so by clicking, for example, here and, especially, here (among many other posts littering this blog for years).  My purpose here is to recommend a deeply depressing, superbly well documented article in the London Review of Books, 17 July 2008 issue, by Jeremy Harding, about the current situation in Kosovo, nearly nine years after NATO's air war against the Serbs on behalf of the Kosovo Albanians, and a few months after the Kosovo Albanian majority in Kosovo, cynically egged on by the United States, Britain and much of the rest of the EU, unilaterally declared Kosovo independent in the face of furious opposition from Serbia, Russia and some others:  an act disagreeably reminiscent of white Southern Rhodesia's disastrous Unilateral Declaration of Independence, or UDI, on 11 November 1965.  

Harding's article graphically describes the dire economic situation in Kosovo: 40 to 50 per cent unemployment, infant mortality rates worse than those in Mexico or even the Occupied Territories of Palestine and twice those in Serbia, a Kosovo Serbian minority numbering around 200,000 wholly dependent on "money from Belgrade, a system of local patronage, and, like many Albanians, on racketeering." 45 per cent of the population live below the poverty level, i.e. unable to meet basic needs:  "around 15 per cent live in extreme poverty, earning less than a euro a day."  Harding comments:

No one would have imagined that a UN protectorate in Europe, stuffed with NGOs and awash with donor receipts, could perform so badly. Kosovo has low growth, no inflation, and few signs of an emerging economy. The roads are bad, the water supply is subject to cuts – the water is contaminated in any case – and the two coal-fired power stations in Obiliq, a township outside Pristina, are dying behemoths, polluting their way to extinction, unable to provide domestic users with regular electricity. Obiliq itself, stifled by their exertions, has a higher rate of respiratory disease than anywhere else in Kosovo.

Once a supplier of farm produce to other parts of Yugoslavia, Kosovo now brings in almost all its food, along with fuel and building materials. Its leading ‘export’ is scrap metal, a harvest of rundown plant from the Milosevic era and Nato bomb damage. Kosovo’s trade gap is dramatic: imports account for 90 per cent of legal cross-border trade. The UN, the EU and Nato have frozen the conflict between Serbs and Albanians for the last four years; inadvertently, too, they’ve kept development on ice. 

Of course things weren't much, if any, better in the days of Serbian rule immediately before 1999, when Kosovo was by universal recognition a province of Serbia — as, according to Serbia and its allies, legally it still is.  But Kosovo UDI has precipitated a fatal breach with Serbia, on which Kosovo's economy has hitherto largely depended.   Relations had anyway been badly damaged by the western intervention (brokered with the Serbs by US, Russian and Finnish diplomacy) under which Serbian military and administrative rule has been replaced by a UN-sponsored international military and civilian authority, ending the ethnic cleansing of the Albanians by the Serbs.  Then relations were even more seriously undermined by the ethnic cleansing of the Serbian minority in Kosovo by the Kosovo Albanian majority, carried out under the noses of UN, NATO and EU troops and administrators. 

The 'independence' declared by the Kosovo Albanians and promptly recognised by Washington, London and most other western capitals is a pretty unconvincing thing.  Predictably, neither Serbia nor Russia recognises it, nor is either likely to do so in the foreseeable future.  This means that membership of the UN for Kosovo is out of reach, since any application for it would inevitably be vetoed by Russia (and, probably, by China), even if the necessary nine-vote majority for Kosovo admission were to be obtainable in the Security Council.  Economic independence is similarly out of reach:  the only hope for Kosovo, now that it has cut itself off from Serbia, lies in the EU, although any glimmer of hope of eventual EU membership for Kosovo is so far down the road as to be virtually invisible — while Serbia's journey along the path to EU membership has now accelerated with the handover of Radovan Karadžić to the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague on charges of genocide and other war crimes.  Little support for Kosovo from UN bodies is likely, given Russia's certain opposition to anything that might smack of UN recognition of Kosovo's 'independence'. 

As Jeremy Harding shows, the international bodies that have been governing Kosovo in the nine years since 1999 — NATO, the EU, the OSCE, under a rather nominal UN umbrella in the shape of Unmik — have an extremely unimpressive record when it comes to promoting economic and social development in this poverty-stricken backwater of Europe.  With the gradual dismantling of UN authority and increased dependence on the EU, it seems unlikely that Kosovo will prosper any more in the next nine years than it has done in the last nine.  It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the declaration of independence was a dreadful mistake. Jeremy Harding again:

The unilateral declaration of independence came on 17 February; it was made amid much jubilation in the Kosovo assembly, in signal disregard of SCR 1244, and pinpointed the tensions between the UN and the government. Over the years there have been many disagreements, yet the tendency to bat decisions back and forth has been a problem too: it has suited the Kosovo government to blame its failings on Unmik, while Unmik has been happy to criticise locals when its own shortcomings are under scrutiny. Perhaps the EU, now preparing to take over from the UN, will bring an end to this inertia, but it is not a foregone conclusion.

Kosovo Albanians have lived in dependency for generations, and the years under Unmik, with its fudges and flops, have seemed like a forced march along a familiar road. The only period of which they speak fondly – older people, obviously – lasted from the end of the 1960s until the beginning of the 1980s: a time of prosperity, growth, regional autonomy and relative democracy for Kosovo within the Yugoslav Federation.

The tragedy is that a similar status of extensive autonomy under almost nominal Serbian sovereignty was probably available to Kosovo as an alternative to the equally nominal 'independence' which the western powers encouraged Kosovo to declare.  It's described as 'supervised independence', surely the most glaring example of oxymoron in modern times:  if you're supervised, you're not independent. In the run-up to UDI, Serbia, clearly under pressure from Moscow, urgently offered to restore Kosovo's autonomous status, brutally stripped away by Milosevic in the late 1980s.  It would have meant Kosovo acquiescing in continued Serbian sovereignty, and forgoing the trappings of full independence for which the Kosovo Liberation Army had fought.  But it would have ensured Russian as well as western support; Kosovo membership of the EU as technically part of Serbia would have become an attainable objective;  some kind of UN observer status could probably have been devised, with Russian and Serbian agreement; possibilities of UN, Russian and Serbian as well as EU and other western economic support would have opened up;  Kosovo could have enjoyed almost all the practical advantages of independence without having to cope with the penalties that it is now paying for a UDI that is incapable of achieving universal recognition.  Kosovo, in short, threw away the realities of a generally recognised and rewarded autonomy, for the sake of an independence which is so attenuated as to be almost unrecognisable.   The daunting implications of this are vividly described in the LRB article.

US and UK policy towards Kosovo and Serbia committed an unforgivable blunder with the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, an illegal act of aggression which achieved not one of its stated objectives.  Now, nine years after Serbian authority was driven out and Kosovo placed under international control, the US and the UK, with others, have blundered again in encouraging the Kosovo leaders into a damaging and probably irreparable breach with their Serbian neighbours by insisting on a fake and moth-eaten form of 'independence' which falls far short of the real thing.  It looks very much as if western attention to the Kosovo problem is going to leave that unhappy province in virtually permanent international limbo, and virtually permanent poverty too. 

Brian 

This is a contribution from a not-disillusioned friend who never had any illusions.  It leaves me with nothing to add:

There is one person whose partial responsibility for the Glasgow East disaster is generally ignored. That is David Marshall, whose 'ill-health' brought about this unnecessary by-election. While all other reporters merely put the diagnosis in quotation marks, printed or unprinted, Michael Crick eventually revealed the nature of the ill health on Newsnight. According to Crick, the allegation is that Marshall had been using parliamentary allowances to pay his wife and daughter, Conway style. Also, allegedly, from another allowance he had been paying himself rent to use his residence as the constituency office — but Crick was unable to find anyone who had ever seen the home in use as a constituency office.

I believe that Mr Marshall has denied any any wrongdoing.  Received political wisdom has always been that the electorate punishes parties which send them to the polling stations without good cause . So Labour was fighting at a disadvantage anyway, particularly when they couldn't get anyone to agree to stand until the last minute.  And there must be a story behind that.  Some of the many Scots who inhabit both front and back labour benches might usefully turn their attention to introducing democracy and transparency into the Scottish Mafia.

But David Marshall is not the main architect of this defeat.  Gordon Brown is the man who is now pulling down the Labour party in his own downfall.  I said for years that he was a destabilizing influence and that Tony Blair should sack him. Whatever the spin doctors were saying, anyone who read the newspapers and listened to the political programmes had to be aware that throughout the Blair years, Gordon Brown's main agenda was to assume the office which he regarded as rightfully his. Disloyal briefing, backstabbing, hiding behind others, never standing up to be counted — it was a dreadful atmosphere for a group of bright young politicians to be schooled in government.  It was obvious that the centre of government was a battleground for factions. This inevitably meant that no natural successors to Tony Blair could emerge.  Nobody but GB was allowed to be seen to shine or to contemplate advancement.   I suspect that this was also one reason why there was such a constant merry-go round of ministerial changes. Nobody ever stayed long enough anywhere to build up expertise or respect. So when GB is seen as a flop, we are left with an old weary gang of place servers and has-beens.  His activities over 11 years have helped to corrupt and destroy the future leadership of the party.

I won't write an essay on Tony Blair. I left the Labour Party because of the cavalier way he took the country to war and then showed that he didn't give a damn about the poor bloody infantry he sent off to fight it. The sickening hypocrisy of the weekly 'tributes' at PMQs has been continued by GB.  And don't forget that he was a powerful member of the Cabinet that allowed the British Army, and Navy and Air Force, to be turned into Hessian soldiers at the behest of US overlords.

He deserves defeat and so do all those people who knew what he was like and were too cowardly, or stupid, or ambitious, to warn about what would happen.

————–

Can't argue with that. 

Brian 

Yet more questionable snippets from the media and nearby: 

Labour Central lets you share Labour related content with the rest of the Labour community.  You can do this in two ways - with the Labour Central toolbar or by placing the URL of the content you want to share in the box below. We'll then try and automatically work out what your trying to share.
(http://www.labour.org.uk/central/home)  [Why has "your" instead of "you're" suddenly spread like an epidemic?]

We gave the impression that the Citroën C1 is presently exempted from the London congestion charge.
(The low-carbon motorist, page 8, Budget report, yesterday.  Guardian, Corrections and clarifications, 14 March 2008.)
[Guardian Style Guide: "presently means soon, not at present"]

A spokeswoman for the Department for Transport said last night … "…That is why one of the many things we are consulting on are obligations around air quality which we agreed with other government departments…."  (Guardian, 13 March 08)
[One of the things are?  Obligations around air quality?  what exactly did we agree with other departments — consulting, obligations, air quality?] 

[H]ermits are making a come-back in Italy…  The majority [are] former clergy or missionaries.  "The number of women reflects the amount of ex-nuns who have sought out a degree of autonomy in life that they could not find before," said Turina [a sociologist at the university of Bologna].  "Some are equipped with internet, which doesn't necessarily disqualify you," said Turina. "It's like meeting people.  You do it within a spiritual framework."
(Guardian, Laptops but no beards for new hermits in Italy, 13 March 08.)
["The amount of ex-nuns" is a phrase that must have sounded better, or at any rate less hilarious, in Italian. It suggests that the ex-nuns were all weighed together on an enormous set of scales, each presumably with her laptop.  But the rest of the story is to be treasured, too.]

Mr Obama predicted that the Republicans will attack whomever becomes the nominee…
(Times, 17 Apr 07  'Obama grilled over patriotism and links to militant') 

Accordingly, she advised that caution should be exercised when considering the views of he who had uttered the threat… 
(para 27, Judgment of Lord Justice Moses and Mr Justice Sullivan in BAE fraud investigation case, High Court, 10 April 08 
http://extras.timesonline.co.uk/pdfs/bae_judgment_10.4.08.pdf)

"Gordon Brown kicks off his three-day state visit by appearing on breakfast television"
(Caption to Guardian photograph of Gordon Brown on official visit to the United States, 17 April 08)
"The pope is greeted at a Maryland air force base by President George Bush ahead of his six-day visit" (Caption to Guardian photograph of the pope on his state visit to the United States, 17 April 08)
[A contrast in celebrity welcomes!]

No one thinks, having seen the results at polling stations, that President Mugabe has won this election. A stolen election would not be a democratic election at all. As the general secretary has said, the credibility of the democratic process depends on there being a legitimate government.  (Gordon Brown, UN Security Council, 16 Apr 08, in clip shown repeatedly on television news bulletins: see (and hear) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7351105.stm.)

but:

No one thinks, having seen the results at polling stations, that President Mugabe has won this election. A stolen election would not be a democratic election at all. As the secretary-general has said, the credibility of the democratic process depends on there being a legitimate government. 
(Gordon Brown, UN Security Council  16 April 2008, text on No. 10 Downing Street website   http://www.pm.gov.uk/output/Page15286.asp)

and:

There will be a meeting of the South African ministers this weekend.  They will discuss whether the democratic principles have been upheld and will report on that. The General Secretary of the United Nations, the Secretary General has now announced that he's prepared to offer the officers of the United Nations to help. 
(Gordon Brown, interview with Nick Robinson, BBC political correspondent, 17 Apr 08  http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/newsroom/latest-news/?view=PressR&id=3125802) (Emphases added) 

[Robert Wardle, head of the Serious Fraud Office] also wants new offences of "false accounting".  Observers think that these may have been quicker in catching companies such as BAE, …
(David Leigh, G2, Guardian, 18 April 08 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/18/bae.armstrade)
["May" have been?  Well, were they, or weren't they? (And see 'comments', below.)]

We have a disturbing report from Tanzania, where witchdoctors are peddaling the myth that possession of a potion made of an albino's hair, blood or limbs paves the way to riches.  (Newsnight daily e-mail, 22 July 2008, Gavin Esler.)
[Witchdoctors on bikes are a charming thought.  Perhaps they have laptops, too, like the ex-nuns?]

In the past six months, it has become patently clear people see in him whatever they want to see. After being told his parents' race and nationality, more than half (55%) of white people said he was biracial while two-thirds of African-Americans said he was black, according to a Zogby poll. A New York Times poll last week showed two-thirds of black people believe he is very patriotic while one in five whites believe he is not very patriotic. 
(Gary Younge, Guardian, 21 July 08, "People see in Obama what they want to see - that's a blessing and a curse"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/21/barackobama.uselections2008)
[It seems that (leaving aside the "Don't Knows"), 66% of black people and 80% of whites think he's patriotic, which I ungenerously suspect is the opposite of what Mr Younge is trying to tell us, if it means anything at all.] 

A vibrant media, although under threat from many sides, also exist.  (Observer, main editorial, 20 July 08)
[I know, whether media is or are singular or plural is — are? — a little tricky, so the safest thing is to make it both, as here.]

When you see this generation en masse there seem good reasons to argue that in the main, our society is robust, tolerant and works pretty well.  (Henry Porter, Observer, 13 July 08). 
[Trouble with lists again:  I suspect that some cloth-eared Observer sub-editor may have removed the indispensable 'and' after 'robust', thus incurring poor Henry's wrath, no doubt.  That sub-editor is dim, illiterate and ought to look for different work.]

As the Tories roared, I was reminded of the Thurber cartoon in which a fencer neatly slices off his opponent's head, with a cry of "Touché!" The joke is that the other fellow simply doesn't realise what has happened.  (Simon Hoggart 18 Mar 08 http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/mar/18/houseofcommons.gordonbrown)
[No, that isn't the joke, Simon. Anyway –
'In fencing, touché (French: touched) is used as an acknowledgement of a hit, called out by the fencer who is hit' — Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch%C3%A9 (emphasis added)]

Practise makes perfect.  (Andrew Rawnsley, Observer, 27 July 08)

…the procedures … provide a means to allow practitioners to show they practice in line with the requirements of the national occupation standards for nutritional therapy…
(Mike O'Farrell, CEO, British Acupuncture Council, letters, Guardian, 28 July 08)

The Soya Protein Association refutes your article.  (Letter, Guardian, 26 July 08). 
[The letter advances counter-arguments to those in the Guardian's earlier article but does not 'refute' it.]

[Shriti] Vadera refutes the idea that business has fallen out of love with Labour  (David Teather, profile of Shriti Vadera, Guardian, 26 July 08) 
[No, she doesn't.]

Still they come! 

Brian 

I have been copying my treasured Billie Holiday LPs and 45s (remember LPs and 45s?) into my iPod via iTunes on my computer, as part of my battle against terminal boredom as I pound the treadmill and pedal furiously on the stationary exercise bike at my local gym.  To do this I have been using a miraculous machine, a birthday present from my imaginative offspring, which converts the sweet old records into mp3 files.  At about the same time the Guardian has been issuing with the newspaper booklets of (mostly contemporary) song lyrics in its series "Great lyricists" [sic].  One of these, a collection of lyrics by Bob Dylan, has prompted a pungent attack by everyone's favourite Aussie Sheila, Germaine Greer, who quotes a few lines of a Dylan lyric and comments:

It's not verse, not even doggerel. Nor is it prose, because it doesn't make sense. Its combination of pretentiousness and illiteracy isn't surprising, which would be something; it's just annoying. God knows why the texts put to 20th-century music began to be called lyrics rather than words.

Dr Greer goes on to compare Dylan's words with the best-known poem by William Blake (O rose, thou art sick), not necessarily to Mr Dylan's advantage.   This has earned her a magisterial rebuke, very Guardian, from Michael Horovitz (identified as a jazz troubadour, Poetry Olympics tochbearer and editor-publisher of New Departures, described in Wikipedia as "often considered … to be one of the last living links to the Beat poets and their milieu") under the wonderfully predictable heading: Bob Dylan does not deserve this snobbery and pedantry.

I don't always agree with Dr Greer — who does? — but I'm bound to say that I think she has a point, even though I enjoy some of the Bob Dylan classics.  One of the many glorious songs sung by Lady Day and now securely housed in my iPod is that great standard, These Foolish Things, written by Eric Maschwitz and others.   Here are a sample verse and chorus:

The smile of Garbo and the scent of roses,
The waiters whistling as the last bar closes,
The song that Crosby sings
These foolish things
Remind me of you.

How strange, how sweet to find you still!
These things are dear to me
That seem to bring you so near to me!
The scent of smould´ring leaves, the wail of steamers,
Two lovers on the street who walk like dreamers,
Oh, how the ghost of you clings –
These foolish things
Remind me of you. 

One of the Guardian Great Lyricists, with a booklet to himself, is Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys.  In his Foreword the poet, playwright and novelist Simon Armitage writes that –

[O]f all those writing lyrics today, Turner is among the most poetic.  His use of internal rhyme exists to be admired and envied.

Here's a sample, chosen more or less at random, of Mr Turner's poetic lyrics; it's from a song called Red Light Indicates Doors Are Secured:

You see her with the green dress?
She talked to me at the bar
How come it's already two pound fifty?
We've only gone about a yard
Didn't you see she were gorgeous
She were beyond belief
But this lad at the side drinking a Smirnoff Ice
Came and paid for her Tropical Reef

But I'm sitting going backwards
And I didn't want to leave
I said it's High Green mate
Via Hillsborough please

[Original punctuation]

You don't need to compare that with Blake.  Eric Maschwitz will do.  "Snobbery and pedantry"?  Who, me?  I never said a word! 

I rest my case.

Brian 

Today's Guardian treats us to a précis of an exceptionally emetic[1] piece in Comment is Free (the giant Guardian blog) by Ruth Lea, formerly of the Institute of Directors and currently director and economic adviser at the Arbuthnot Banking Group (which "offers outstanding Private Banking and Wealth Management services") and a governor of the London School of Economics.  Ms Lea explains that the current strike by public sector workers against the government's pay deal, which represents a cut in their standard of living in real terms, is unjustified:  any pay award above the level of inflation just leads to even higher prices, you see, so any such pay increase is bad news for all the rest of us.  Why single out public service workers for pay cuts as part of the government's attempts to contain inflation?  Because there's more job security in the public sector than in the private sector (a woefully out-of-date assertion), and also because above-inflation awards in the public sector will incite private sector workers to demand similar inflationary awards (which presumably wouldn't have occurred to them without those wicked nurses and teachers and postmen setting a bad example):

And – surely the clincher – council staff workers must realise that they will be condemned as irresponsible and unfair if they push for high pay awards when their private sector friends may be losing their jobs.

Ms Lea's article (worth reading in full on CIF, if you have a sufficiently strong digestive system)  prompts at least two questions:  

First, is she really unaware of the intense resentment among public sector workers, many of them among the lowest paid in the land, over the Government's attempt to place the whole burden of reduced living standards at a time of mounting inflation on them, when there is not the slightest effort to spread the burden more fairly by using the tax system to curb monstrously inflated salary increases and astronomical bonuses, often quite unrelated to performance and way above the level of inflation, awarded to one another by her friends in the City and business?  Or is she aware of this (wholly justified) resentment, but can't understand it?  Or does she fail to acknowledge it simply because it would spoil her self-serving argument?  Her failure even to mention it does leave rather a large hole in her treatment of the issue.

Secondly, what on earth does the Guardian think it's doing publishing this reactionary rubbish, not once but twice –  in print, and in Comment is Free?  There are plenty of far right-wing media outlets only too happy to host this kind of stuff in defence of Ms Lea's fellow-bankers and their living standards.  God forbid that these people's inalienable right to an annual hike in the salaries and bonuses that they pay each other should be threatened by a pay award to rubbish collectors and librarians in line with, or even above, the level of inflation, to ensure that at least they don't continue to get a little poorer every year.  

Old-fashioned Old Labour class envy?  No:  just an invitation to recognise the indefensible unfairness of government tax and inflation policy — the policy, so help me, of a Labour government (best read with a Kinnockian Welsh accent[2]). 

[1] emetic:  vomit-inducing

[2] 'Kinnock raged at Hatton and Militant, saying: "You end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour coun