Fallacy #1: The most urgent need is for an immediate, unconditional end to the fighting by both sides.

Wrong.  The immediate need is for the establishment of an international monitoring and peace-keeping force to monitor observance of a cease-fire by both sides, to supervise the reopening of the legal crossing-points into and out of Gaza and the closing of the tunnels into Egypt, to enforce the UN arms embargo, and to hold the ring while a UN good offices group tries to help Hamas and Fatah in both Gaza and the West Bank to heal the rift between them and find a way to share power.  An Egyptian initiative on these lines, supported by France, is still being negotiated and has reasonable prospects of success; it has been widely commended by a number of relevant governments and is explicitly welcomed in yesterday’s Security Council resolution 1860 (2009).  It’s a conditional, not an unconditional, cease-fire that’s urgently needed.

Fallacy #2: International pressure expressed in UN Security Council Resolutions, EU and other governmental declarations, articles and letters in the western media, demonstrations and marches on the Israeli Embassy, needs to be exerted on Israel to force it to stop fighting at once and withdraw from Gaza.

Such action may make people who are very naturally outraged and distressed by the daily horrors of the conflict feel better, but on its own it will achieve nothing but (1) feed Israel’s far-from-irrational paranoia and intensify its excessive dependence on the Americans, and (2) encourage Hamas to continue its rocket attacks on Israel in the vain hope that Israel will be forced to bow to international pressure and withdraw from Gaza with none of its objectives achieved.

Fallacy #3: If there’s enough international pressure for a cease-fire, Israel and Hamas will be forced to stop fighting.

Both sides have certain legitimate objectives for their resort to violence (as well as some less legitimate aims):  Hamas seeks an end to the Israeli blockade of Gaza;  Israel seeks an end to both Hamas rocket attacks and illegal arms smuggling into Gaza.  International action is perfectly possible to help both sides to achieve these aims — provided that they stop using violence to achieve them.  Neither side will stop the use of violence against the other unless given a political motive for doing so.

Yesterday the Security Council adopted a resolution — not under Chapter VII of the Charter, and so not binding — calling for an immediate cease-fire.  Both sides in the conflict explicitly rejected the resolution. The next day The Independent reported that:

Israel and Hamas responded to a UN peace demand by hammering away at each other with bombs, shells and rockets today. [Independent, 9/i/09]

It’s difficult to see what has been achieved by what is hardly more than a futile gesture instead and in advance of concrete measures to provide a motive for ending violence and to set up a new internationally supervised arrangement to maximise the chances of an eventual cease-fire being reasonably durable — as indeed the UNSC Resolution itself requires, but without accompanying its impeccable sentiments by practical action.

The US abstained on the resolution for precisely this reason:

[Condoleezza Rice] said that the United States thought it important to see the outcomes of the Egyptian mediation efforts in order to “see what this resolution might have been supporting”, and that was why her delegation had abstained in the vote. Still, after a great deal of consideration, the United States had decided that the resolution, the text, goals and objectives of which it supported, should be allowed to go forward.
http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=42218

The French, although they voted in favour of the resolution, criticised it even more explicitly and on the same grounds:

BERNARD KOUCHNER, Minister for Foreign Affairs of France[and this month's President of the Security Council], speaking in his national capacity, … expressed regret that it had not been possible to give a little more time to reconcile different views or to endorse the results of negotiations now under way.  The message of hope needed to be heeded without delay and negotiation under way needed to achieve prompt results.

The Security Council has wasted several days agonising over the small print of a resolution which has achieved precisely nothing, instead of working on practical measures whose outline has been perfectly clear since the outset of the conflict.  Why has the real work been left to the Egyptians and the French?  It’s inexplicable, and inexcusable.

Fallacy #4: The reaction of Israel to the periodic rocket attacks on it by Hamas has been ‘disproportionate’ and therefore illegal, since Israel has already killed far more Gaza civilians than the number of Israeli civilians killed by Hamas rockets.

This implies that Israel has some kind of duty under international law to wait until enough of its citizens have been killed by Hamas to justify an attack that would entail roughly the same number of casualties — presumably terminating the military action when the same number of Gaza civilians had been killed, whether or not the purpose of the action (ending the rocket attacks) had been achieved.

The concept of a proportional response also implies a sort of equivalence between Israel and Hamas.  No such equivalence exists.  Whatever one might think of Israeli excesses and lack of restraint, of its obstinate refusal to act to dismantle the illegal settlements in the West Bank and to stop its brutal treatment of the Palestinians, the fact remains that Israel is a recognised state with a right and duty to defend its citizens against attack.  Hamas is not a legitimate government (it won the Palestine-wide elections of 2006 but then seized power from the legitimate institutions of Fatah in a coup accompanied by bitter factional fighting in the same year) and Gaza is not a state.  Hamas’s formally proclaimed objectives — to eliminate the state of Israel by force — are manifestly contrary to international law, including the Charter, and in no way justify using violence, especially against innocent civilians, to achieve them.  It is a non-state agent to which any definition of ‘terrorist’ , however mealy-mouthed, ineluctably applies.  Israel, by contrast, has a strong case for arguing that it is acting in exercise of its “inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security” — the words of Article 51 of the Charter.  Regrettably, the Security Council has not yet taken any such measures.  Yesterday’s innocuous but ineffectual resolution is absolutely no substitute for them.

Fallacy #5: The international community has an obligation to recognise the Hamas administration of Gaza and to respect its policies, including conducting negotiations to settle current disputes, because Hamas won the 2006 Palestine elections.

No such obligations flow, or can flow, from winning an election.  Hitler and the Nazis won democratic elections in Germany but this conferred on them no entitlement to international respect for their policies.  It may be (and probably is) convenient and desirable for (e.g.) the Americans, the Quartet and the Israelis, and other Arab governments, to enter into and maintain a discreet dialogue with Hamas leaders, but Hamas’s proclaimed objectives and policies don’t at present provide sufficient common ground or legitimacy to make formal relations, still less formal negotiations, possible or desirable.

Fallacy #6: Tony Blair is the ‘peace envoy’ of the Quartet (the US, Russia, the UN and the EU), charged with giving fresh impetus to the Arab-Israel peace process.

Mr Blair’s job is totally unconnected with the peace process, such as it is (or isn’t):

In his new role as envoy to the Middle East, Tony Blair will be charged with shoring up Palestinian institutions, but not with trying to nail down a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians because Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, is handling that job herself, [US] administration officials said Wednesday. …
[T]he State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, said in announcing the appointment…  “Secretary Rice and President Bush are going to focus on the political negotiations, as they have, and Mr. Blair is going to focus his considerable talents and his efforts on building those Palestinian institutions.” Bush administration officials defined Blair’s mandate as one in which he would mobilize international assistance to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, identify and secure financing for Palestinian institutions and governing tasks, and hash out [sic] plans to promote Palestinian economic development. [International Herald Tribune, 28 June 07 http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/28/america/28blair.php]

– and many other sources, such as:

Is Tony Blair going to solve the Middle East conflict then?
He might like to think so, but he’s actually constrained by the narrow job description as defined by the international Quartet which appointed him.
[Independent on Sunday, 15 July 2007, http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1P2-7510519.html]

While a conflict of this ferocity, inflicting such appalling suffering on so many helpless and guiltless people, continues to rage, it’s pure — or impure — self-indulgence to waste time on the blame game, however satisfying that might be.  There’ll be ample opportunity to resume that later, helpfully or otherwise.  The immediate task is to bring the violence to an end and to do it in a way that will reduce as far as possible the risk that it will start again as soon as the world has lost interest in it.  Simply clamouring for an immediate cease-fire (and especially demanding that it be ‘unconditional’) on its own is not only pointless: it actually hampers and delays the hard work of hammering out practical new arrangements that might actually bring about an end to the fighting, and provide some hope of contributing to a longer-term settlement.  It performs no useful service to the bereaved and dying of Gaza, or to the beleaguered citizens of Israel living within range of Hamas rockets, to pretend otherwise.

Turning a blind eye to the flaws in all these fallacies does potential harm to the prospects for peace; it certainly does them no good.

Brian

We saw ‘Australia’ in Athens but I’m afraid I can’t share your enthusiasm. It had some good moments — e.g. the cattle stampede — but overall we thought it was curiously amateurish — ultra-corny plot, stilted dialogue and surprisingly inept direction; we were disappointed.

By contrast J, who has bionic antennae for the bogus or sub-standard, wrote the other day:

Yesterday we went to see Australia, which we both enjoyed enormously notwithstanding stupid articles by the likes of Germaine Greer.  It is an epic film of the ’40s, 50’s Hollywood variety with Australia’s extraordinary inland scenery providing fair competition for Monument Valley, cattle drives to equal those in any Western, the bombing of Darwin resulting in Gone With The Wind Atlanta scenes and a sentimental story with a happy ending. This isn’t a spoiler: you can tell from the whole spirit of the film that it has to have a happy ending. There were just one or two moments when Nicole Kidman produced a shrill giggle as from her Chanel Number 5 advertisement, ‘I love to Daaaance’ (also directed, like Australia, by Baz Luhrmann). But most of the time she was lovely and not at all like the Botoxed character portrayed by some of the critics. Hugh Jackman is also lovely. Somewhere Over the Rainbow, and the swelling chords of Nimrod, bring a tear to the eye. Baz Luhrmann is true to his generation of Australians in a desperate effort to put Aboriginal culture, problems and solutions in the forefront of any film about Australia. It certainly makes a contrast to the treatment of indigenous peoples in most of the great Hollywood westerns, made of course in a different era. Some might think that Lurhmann defeats his purpose by too much repetition of the old man standing on one leg, a bit of a caricature, but you can’t fault him for trying. At least, unless you’re Germaine Greer, you can’t.

Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman

There’s a much more perceptive review or article than Professor Greer’s here, which differs from Germaine Greer’s in spotting that Australia is not a documentary, nor a history, nor a political polemic, nor a naturalistic romantic drama, although it combines elements of all these. As Luhrmann himself says, it’s a cinematic smorgasbord, with a heavy emphasis on the cinematic: the film has enchanting echoes of immediately pre-and post-war Hollywood epics, including most obviously Gone with the Wind and numerous Westerns; of magic, fable and fantasy, drawing explicitly on The Wizard of Oz; and illuminated by familiar Luhrmann directorial signatures, most obvious in Moulin Rouge! – a film which incidentally I disliked, but whose highly individualistic style comes off magnificently, I think, in Australia. As the New York Times review put it, -

Baz Luhrmann’s continent-size epic, “Australia,” isn’t the greatest story ever — it’s several dozen of the greatest stories ever told, “The African Queen,” “Gone With the Wind” and “Once Upon a Time in the West” included. A pastiche of genres and references wrapped up — though, more often than not, whipped up — into one demented and generally diverting horse-galloping, cattle-stampeding, camera-swooping, music-swelling, mood-altering widescreen package, this creation story about modern Australia is a testament to movie love at its most devout, cinematic spectacle at its most extreme, and kitsch as an act of aesthetic communion.

Roger Ebert’s finely balanced review in the Chicago Sun-Times expressed all the right and necessary reservations, but concluded:

“[Gone With The Wind],” for all its faults and racial stereotyping, at least represented a world its makers believed in. “Australia” envisions a world intended largely as fable, and that robs it of some power. Still, what a gorgeous film, what strong performances, what exhilarating images and — yes, what sweeping romantic melodrama. The kind of movie that is a movie, with all that the word promises and implies.

J and I lived and worked for altogether seven years between 1973 and 1994 in Australia, a big fascinating country with a big-hearted, larger-than-life population that deserves to be celebrated by a really big film like Baz Luhrmann’s.   Admittedly I would gladly watch a three-hour movie consisting exclusively of the beautiful Nicole Kidman reading extracts from the Sydney telephone directory; but it’s not only, or mainly, a devotion to that outstanding actress that impels me to urge you to go and see Australia and to judge it for yourself. Just don’t judge it as something it was never meant to be. Go and see Australia, too, with the same proviso.

Brian

As I write (mid-November) the final results of the US presidential election are not in, but we know enough to highlight some figures.  With 66.7 million popular votes and counting, and with a lead of 6.5 percentage points over John McCain, Barack Obama won more popular votes than any other US presidential candidate in history:  nearly 8 million more than John Kerry in 2004, and a cool 15.7m more than Al Gore in 2000 (when Gore won more popular votes than GW Bush, but lost in the Supreme Court - remember?).   Obama’s share of the popular vote (52.6%) was the highest of any Democratic candidate since LBJ (1964), and higher than any Republican since 1956 except GWH Bush, Reagan (1984) Nixon (1972) and Eisenhower (1956).

Some suggest that Obama won because many Republicans failed to vote, but the figures scarcely confirm this:  Senator McCain won 58.3m votes (46.1%, comparable with GW Bush in 2000 with 47.9%), 3.8m fewer than G W Bush in 2004 but 7m more than the same Bush in 2000.  Each candidate won a very respectable share of the vote, on probably the highest percentage turnout (over 60%) for 40 years.  Those who imagine an entire American population transformed by the election into leftish, colour-blind liberals need reminding that Senator McCain, after a policy-lite campaign driven by smears, innuendos and outright lies, nevertheless won 58.3 million votes across the country, including an estimated 55% of white voters, taking almost all the mid-west (from Montana and North Dakota southwards) and the south, apart from Colorado, New Mexico and Florida (where Obama won by 51-49%).  Equally sobering, McCain was ahead in the polls until the financial crisis broke and he frivolously selected Governor Palin as running-mate, two events that probably lost him the election. 

The victory of Barack Obama is hugely welcome to almost everyone in the outside world, but he will have a monumental task in living up to the extraordinary expectations that have been raised, especially confronting the challenges of climate change, global recession, world poverty, terrorism and foreign oil dependency, and two unwinnable wars - the poisoned chalice about to be handed to him by George W Bush.

*   *   *   *   *

Was Mrs Thatcher, as she now isn’t, the first British political leader to confuse the economics of the private household with those of government, excoriating all borrowing as fecklessly irresponsible and asserting as common-sense that government must always balance its budgets?  Such misconceptions have contaminated much comment on the financial crisis, people who should know better denouncing orthodox proposals to slash interest rates, reduce taxes on and increase benefits to the less well-off (who have the highest marginal propensity to spend rather than save, thus helping to boost demand in a recession), bring forward government spending on labour-intensive infrastructure public works, especially when environmentally positive, and fund this from increased government borrowing - since the only alternative is increased taxation, likely to deepen the recession.  All good Keynesian economics: how surprising that it should appear controversial!  The government’s critics are now agonising about the fall in the value of sterling. Massive exchange rate gyrations are unwelcome; but a fall in sterling helps exporters and so reduces deflationary pressures.  Who’d be a finance minister at such a time?

J however explains our new non-policy on Christmas cards far more incisively. She puts it down to ’senile inertia’.

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A few years ago, when I was involved in that splendid institution the Royal Hospital for Neuro-Disability (non-profit, non-NHS, but many of the patients funded by their local health authorities), I used to pop in to see one long-stay patient, who had been severely disabled by an asthma attack as a young curate but whose mind and, especially, sense of humour had remained (and still remain) unimpaired.   His Christmas e-mail reminds me that his website is a real treasure-trove of jokes of every conceivable kind, many really funny (and that’s not just the few that I have contributed). The best thing I could find this year in reply to his message was:

“There was a little confusion at the meeting there at the White House when President Bush was told that Obama was coming. He said ‘Oh, you mean we caught him?’” (David Letterman).

Well, it made me giggle, anyway.

+ + + + +

Yet another admiring programme about Prince Charles has been on television recently. Some of it has been (presumably unintentionally) revealing. I loved the bit where HRH explains why he likes to be accompanied at all times by a member of his staff with a pen and a notebook. “If they don’t write down everything I say, it gets forgotten and nothing ever gets done.” Boswell, where art thou?

The Princess of Wales, Camilla (to give her her rightful title, even if she has been prevailed upon not to use it) has a walk-on part in the programme and performs it with notable grace. If and when the Prince succeeds his mother on the throne, Queen Camilla (to give her her rightful future title, even if she continues to be prevailed upon not to use it) shows every sign of being an excellent Queen Consort and probably an extremely good influence on a potentially wayward monarch.

+ + + + +

Tony Travers, the director of the Greater London Group at the LSE, had an interesting piece in Tuesday’s Guardian about what he called “a catalogue of struggles between the Conservatives and Scotland Yard”, of which the latest round has been the denunciation, now retracted with apologies, by Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick, of the Tories’ alleged and denied role in publicising Quick’s private address in the Daily Mail (damn!), forcing him and his family to move to a different address.   Quick, head of Special Operations at the Yard — not head of counter-terrorism as commonly said, although counter-terrorism is one important element in his command — is in charge of the investigation of two years of systematic leaks to a front-bench Conservative MP by a Conservative activist and civil servant at the home office.   A potentially useful debate on the rights and, especially, wrongs of party-political leaking by civil servants to anti-government MPs has unfortunately been sidelined by the huge row over the arrest for questioning of the MP in question by Quick’s coppers, and the search of the MP’s parliamentary office for evidence.   The police didn’t have a search warrant for the latter activity, but they did have written permission for it from the parliamentary Serjeant-at-Arms, which seems to me just as good.   Anyway, such has been the hysterical uproar over the treatment of the MP by the police that it now looks as if the original police investigation of systematic leaking from the home office may be abandoned, much to the obvious relief of the more perceptive Tories.   If there’s really a “struggle between the Conservatives and Scotland Yard” going on, I know whose side I’m on, for once.

The last sentence of Mr Travers’s article, by the way, referring to the two adversaries — the Tories and the Metropolitan Police — reads:

Both sides are better than the other would have us believe.

Who, I wonder is this “other” who would have us believe something? Obviously an unidentified third party. It’s a pity that good clear expressions such as “each other” and “one another” are being supplanted more and more by “both”, in this context ‘both’ inaccurate and ambiguous.

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J and I listened with nostalgic attention to the live radio broadcast this afternoon, Christmas Eve, of the traditional Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge.  We have been overseas for each of the past six or seven Christmas Eves so this was the first time we had heard the live broadcast for a long time.  We were both sadly disappointed.  The King’s choir, world-famous for its clarity and purity of tone, sounded muddy and even under-rehearsed.  The boy solo treble who, as always, introduces the service with “Once in Royal David’s City” sounded understandably but regrettably nervous.  The new carols sung for the first time in this event sounded tuneless and inaccessible (surprisingly: at least one of them was by the late Peter Tranchell, who composed great quantities of memorably tuneful music for cabaret and musical comedies when I was a Cambridge undergraduate, rather a long time ago).  Even some of the old, familiar, traditional carols had been tinkered with for no discernible purpose unless to irritate.  To cap it all, the nine lessons were almost all read by the usual assorted King’s big-wigs and small-wigs in a mannered and distracting style, with strong stresses in odd places.

Perhaps the Festival has always been like this and it’s just that when we were younger we didn’t notice, or didn’t mind.  Now we do.

+ + + + +

Polly Toynbee, the Guardian’s resident humanist and secularist, headed her Christmas column:  “My Christmas message? There’s probably no God,” a partial quotation from a poster message that’s to appear shortly on a fleet of London and other buses in a new secularist campaign:  “There’s probably no God.  Now stop worrying and enjoy your life“.  This seems to me to strike all the right notes.  No dogmatic assertion that God doesn’t exist:  just a suitably cautious reminder that on the balance of probabilities and the available evidence so far, his existence is more improbable than probable, and thus no more a sensible hypothesis on which to build our lives than any other improbable proposition.  The advice to stop worrying about it also seems apt, given the pervasive guilt and obsession with sin relentlessly propagated by much religion.  And the exhortation to enjoy life pithily reminds us that it’s — probably — the only one we’re going to get, so it’s no good putting up with misery and oppression now in the vain hope that it will all be all right in the next one.  Polly’s article has prompted the predictable tsunami of abusive denunciation from the dwindling ranks of the God-fearing faithful: 723 comments in Comment is Free, and counting;  and a raft of laughably feeble ripostes on today’s Guardian letters page, including efforts by a Right Reverend, a Prebendary and a Rabbi, arguing variously that religion has contributed wonderful art, poetry, etc. to our culture;  that “belief in atheism” is no more “rational” than “the adoption of religion” — breathtaking!;  that Ms Toynbee’s liberal values are “largely based” on “Christian principles” (so much for millions of Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Druids and flat-earthers);  and that Polly shouldn’t attack religion at Christmas time.   One letter denounces the invitation not to worry, because “True religion demands that we should be worried about our world, particularly in these troubled times, and take our lives and our responsibilities seriously.”   Controversial stuff!  Judging by those 723 comments on the Guardian website, the Toynbee column will have attracted a massive postbag of letters about the Toynbee column and submitted for publication in the paper.  If those selected for publication today were really the best of the lot, God help the religious lobby (so to speak)!  Sensible Christians like the intellectually rigorous and clear-sighted Revd. Giles Fraser, the vicar of Putney, must be thinking: “with friends like these….”

+ + + + +

Happy Christmas!

Brian

]]> http://www.barder.com/ephems/1400/feed http://www.barder.com/ephems/1377 http://www.barder.com/ephems/1377#comments Thu, 18 Dec 2008 10:11:50 +0000 Brian http://www.barder.com/?p=1377 The 6 March 2008 issue of the New York Review of Books includes a magnificent demolition job in a review of the memoirs of that rascal of the far right, John Bolton, by the veteran retired international public servant, Sir Brian Urquhart.  (Hat-tip: to Dr Lorna Lloyd at Keele, who alerted me to this review in the NYRB.) Earlier this year, Sir Brian recorded an interview lasting nearly an hour for a University of California at Berkeley series of Conversations on International Affairs, all eight parts of which are available on the Berkeley website.  Both the book review and the extended interview are compulsory reading and viewing.  You would never guess from the vigour and forthrightness of both that Brian Urquhart will be 90 next year (2009).

Brian Urquhart is by any reckoning the most distinguished and accomplished British national or international public servant of his generation, perhaps of any generation.  He served in the British army and military intelligence throughout World War II in North Africa and Europe.  In the words of his Wikipedia entry, –

Urquhart is well-known for his attempts to persuade the planners of Operation Market Garden to modify or abort their plans, in light of crucial information obtained from aerial reconnaissance and the Dutch resistance. The episode was described by Cornelius Ryan in his book on “Market Garden”, A Bridge Too Far. In the film version, directed by Richard Attenborough, Urquhart’s character was renamed “Major Fuller”, to avoid confusion with a similarly named British General.

Urquhart was a member of the staff involved in the setting-up of the United Nations in 1945, and has advised every Secretary-General of the United Nations since its inception. His main fields of interest and operation at the UN have been conflict resolution and peacekeeping. Urquhart organized the first peacekeeping force (in Egypt after the Suez crisis). To differentiate the peacekeepers from other soldiers, the UN wanted to have the soldiers wear blue berets. When that turned out to take six weeks to make, Urquhart proposed the characteristic blue helmets, which could be made in a day by painting over regular ones.

As Undersecretary-General, Urquhart’s main functions were the direction of peace-keeping forces in the Middle East and Cyprus, and negotiations in these two areas; amongst others, his contributions also included work on the negotiations relating to a Namibia peace settlement, negotiations in Kashmir, Lebanon and work on peaceful uses for nuclear energy.

Sir Brian Urquhart

Brian Urquhart retired from the United Nations Secretariat in 1986 (22 years ago!) and since then he has been an indefatigable advocate for liberal international causes, writing books and articles, lecturing and giving countless interviews about all the subjects on which he has absolutely unrivalled expertise: the UN, the role of international law in general and the UN Charter in particular, peace-making and peace-keeping, the role of the super-powers, non-proliferation and disarmament.  His output of authoritative, meticulously documented book reviews and other articles for, especially, the New York Review of Books (listed here) is phenomenal and, happily, continuing.  In the words of one potted biography:

Sir Brian has written several books, including brilliant biographies of Dag Hammarskjöld and Ralph Bunche. He has also written an autobiography, A Life in Peace and War, published by W.W. Norton and Company. His books on decolonization, and more recently on reforming the United Nations system, have projected him into the international limelight of transnational politics. A tireless speaker and activist, Sir Brian [was] deeply involved in the events surrounding the fiftieth UN anniversary. His pieces on the UN volunteer force and the responsibilities of the UN system published in The New York Review of Books in 1993 and 1994 have set the terms of the debate for all future discussions of rethinking the UN system.

Knighted in 1986, Sir Brian has another, rarer distinction: his portrait, by Philip Pearlstein, hangs in the National Portrait Gallery (room 35).

During my time in the late 1970s and early 80s as head of a Foreign & Commonwealth Office department, heavily engaged for several years in the seemingly endless and tortuous negotiations leading eventually to the independence of Namibia under processes arising directly from a UN Security Council resolution, I periodically had some contacts with Brian Urquhart, then UN Under-Secretary-General and one of the two or three most senior members of the UN secretariat.  He was, and no doubt still is, an extraordinarily good listener, ready to consider seriously any ideas and proposals emanating from any quarter without regard to its rank in the hierarchy.  He was incredibly flexible and innovative, not the qualities most commonly found (in those days, anyway) in UN secretariat officials.  He was strikingly courteous, calm and patient.  If he had any defects as an international diplomat, you’d have had a job picking them out.

One more snippet about this many-sided, many-talented man. As his Wikipedia entry quoted earlier relates, during the second world war Brian Urquhart was an officer in the British Airborne Corps of parachute and glider troops. On one of his parachute drops — his last, as it turned out — his chute failed to open and he was very badly injured, not surprisingly. After six months in hospital he was sufficiently recovered to resume his military duties but not to make any more parachute jumps. As the Airborne Corps’s chief intelligence officer it was his job to give advice on possible dangers and risks to the planners of the ill-fated plan for a mass parachute drop to capture three key bridges over the Rhine (one of them at Arnhem) in advance of the Allied armies as they pushed across the Netherlands towards Germany. Urquhart assessed the risks of failure as so high that he felt bound to advise that the project should be abandoned. This was not the advice that General Montgomery and the other generals wanted to hear and Urquhart was unceremoniously moved to other duties. He was subsequently proved to have been right and the Arnhem and other landings were a costly failure. In one of his Berkeley interviews, Urquhart reflects on the lessons he learned from this traumatic experience:

Well, the thing went very seriously wrong and I then realized what I hadn’t realized before, that these generals and great commanders and politicians who were so admired during the war were actually just like everyone else. They were vain, they were ambitious, they very often made extremely faulty judgments. I had not thought of that before; I had always thought that they were kind of super-people and I must say that the feeling has remained with me for the rest of my life. I never again trusted famous, glamorous leaders to resist vanity and ambition and make the right, mature decision, and get it right.

Recent British and American history alas provides ample confirmation of the rightness of that penetrating conclusion. Historians may not always give enough weight to the role of glamour, vanity and ambition on the part of political and military leaders in driving them on to fatal misjudgements and consequent disasters.

British people should be proud of Sir Brian Urquhart:  those who know about him undoubtedly are.  It’s a pity that he isn’t more widely known and his exceptional record more widely appreciated, although he’s not the kind of person who seeks or would enjoy celebrity status.  It’s not perhaps too late for a Nobel Peace Prize, which would make him better known.  That would be one in the eye for the appalling John Bolton, although several decades too late for the Arnhem generals.

Update (5 January 2009): This post has prompted Alan James, Emeritus Professor of International Relations at Keele University, to send me the following reminiscence, which he has authorised me to quote attributably here:

In the mid 1960s I was commissioned by Alastair Buchan, Director of the Institute for Strategic Studies (as it then was), to write a book on peacekeeping. He and Brian Urquhart were friends, which doubtless helped with introductions when I travelled to the Middle East and Cyprus to see the sort of thing on which the UN was engaged. I also visited North America and there met Brian, he being in a senior position in the peacekeeping section of the UN Secretariat. As I maintained my interest in peacekeeping, this was followed over the years by many other meetings. Most of those which took place prior to his retirement were when he was head of the peacekeeping section, but despite his considerable responsibilities he was invariably ready to see me. Even more valuable - and remarkable - was the fact that he was always exceedingly helpful. He would comment in an acute, frank, unstuffy, and often amusing way on my questions, put me in touch with others who could help, and smooth my way on visits to UN peacekeeping operations. I could not have asked for more.

I might just underline your point that his books and articles are no run-of-the-mill memoirs and analyses. When in 1987 I presented him for an honorary degree, I referred to him not just as a ’soldier and very distinguished servant of the UN’, but also as a ’scholar’ - a standing he had achieved alongside his work as an international official.

(Another) Brian

I would be interested in your view of 2 recent events involving Gordon Brown. The first is his reported reluctance to agree to the Tories’ request to be granted access to senior Whitehall officials as from early 2009 in accordance with the convention which enables opposition parties to prepare for possible office. This despite Labour having in 19997 being given similar access some 18 months before the last date for calling an election.
The second is the premature release by No. 10 of partial and unchecked knife crime statistics despite their being warned that they should not do so.
Both issues could perhaps be considered as relatively unimportant compared with the economic crisis but they appear to me, at any rate, as examples of shabby political manoeuvres designed to thwart the opposition from gaining any advantage - at any cost, and at odds with Brown’s avowed intent to insist on transparent and honest government.
I look forward to your reaction but somehow I doubt that these are issues which will feature on your blog site!

So here goes.

(1) Tory access to civil servants before the next general election: This seems to originate from a story in the Times of 12 December by Sam Coates, ‘Senior Political Correspondent’, headlined “Gordon Brown provokes Tory anger by delaying consent for Civil Service handover talks” and beginning:

Gordon Brown is risking a political row by considering blocking the Conservatives from meeting senior civil servants in the new year to discuss their proposals for power.  Plans for the Tories to hold meetings with permanent secretaries from every department, widely expected to begin in January, have been put on hold because the Prime Minister has not yet given authorisation. Labour was allowed to begin talks with senior civil servants 15 months [sic] before the 1997 general election…

There are several things worth noting about this story.  First, it is wholly speculative, and relies entirely on what unspecified “Whitehall sources” are said to have “suggested”.  The sole fact in the report is that when the Cabinet Secretary gave evidence to a parliamentary select committee –

Asked at what point in the electoral cycle the Civil Service would talk to opposition parties, Sir Gus [O'Donnell] replied: “It’s when the Prime Minister agrees that with the Leader of the Opposition. I’m aware that the Leader of the Opposition has written to the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister will respond.”

This falls far short of evidence that the prime minister is “delaying consent for Civil Service handover talks”, as the headline asserts, or even that he is considering doing so.  All we know is that David Cameron has asked when the contacts can begin, and that Gordon Brown has not yet replied.

Secondly, this is all rather premature.  The Electoral Commission website confirms that “A general election to elect the new Parliament must be held by no later than Thursday 3 June 2010.”  If the 15-month precedent of 1997 is followed, that would suggest that Tory contacts with civil servants might begin in or about March, 2009, i.e. in three months’ time.  We might be forgiven for suspecting that Mr Cameron’s request is designed more to reinforce the impression that a general election is or should be imminent than to elicit information.  It’s true that Tony Blair, when still prime minister, told Cameron that the contacts could start at the beginning of 2009, but he had no business seeking to pre-empt his successor’s decision on timing;  Brown is under no possible obligation to regard himself as bound by Blair’s mischievous promise, since the timing is within his own discretion;  and anyway the precedent of what did or didn’t happen in 1997 is no more binding than the precedents of other general elections either before or after 1997.  There’s therefore no basis for describing whatever date Brown eventually sets as a “delay”, since there’s no established start date from which to measure delay.  Moreover, if Brown had replied instantly that Cameron and his colleagues could start talking to the civil servants “immediately” (i.e. even before the date offered by Tony Blair), it’s a cert that Mr Murdoch’s Times and other noisy tabloids would have been running banner headlines announcing that Brown was obviously planning a general election early in 2009 (which may or may not be the case:  the chances are that he has very sensibly not decided yet when to call the election).  That this was indeed Cameron’s real purpose in demanding immediate access to the civil service is amply confirmed by what he said in his letter to Gordon Brown, as quoted by the BBC:

Given that you have allowed members of the Cabinet to speculate openly that an election is to be called imminently, I am asking you today to give the necessary instructions for such meetings to begin immediately.

Thirdly, it might (equally mischievously) be argued that since at least one Tory front-bench MP, and probably more than one, has been enjoying regular and systematic access to at least one home office civil servant for about two years, and possibly to at least one Treasury civil servant too, there’s no special hurry about putting such access on a legitimate basis.  Mr Coates of the Times doesn’t mention that, for some reason.

My conclusion is that the Times story has no basis.  It’s not a story at all:  it’s political propaganda.  As political reporting, it’s a dud.  If and when the prime minister sets a date for these contacts to begin which leaves inadequate time for Tory shadow ministers to get briefing from their putative future department heads, that will be the time to bang on about the anger supposedly caused by his unfairness.

Update (pm 14 Dec 08):  Sam Coates is at it again in today’s Sunday Times:

Transition talks blocked

A former head of the civil service criticised Gordon Brown last night for seeking to block “transition” talks with the Tories. Lord Butler of Brockwell, cabinet secretary for a decade until 1998, said the prime minister’s actions had been “wrong” and “regrettable”. Under a convention dating to the early 1960s, the Conservatives were due to open discussions in the new year to brief civil servants on their plans for government so as to ensure a smooth transition if they win the next election. However, Sir Gus O’Donnell, the present cabinet secretary, said last week that Brown had yet to give his permission for the talks. Butler said: “It would be a pity if that permission wasn’t given. In fact, it would be wrong.”

Once again, the sub-heading states as a fact what has clearly not in fact happened;  and this time Lord Butler’s comments are said to refer to “the prime minister’s actions” which “had been” wrong and regrettable, as if the prime minister had done something both concrete and deplorable, whereas it’s clear from the direct quotation that Butler’s comments were purely conditional:  “It would be a pity if that permission wasn’t given. In fact, it would be wrong.”  Not content with that flagrant misrepresentation, Mr Coates conflates an alleged convention “dating back to the early 1960s” with a one-off undertaking about the timing of pre-election talks in 2009 given by a man (Blair) who isn’t now even a member either of the government or of parliament.  Even editors of once-great British newspapers now appointed by Rupert Murdoch ought not to be approving this sort of stuff for publication.

(2) “Premature release by No. 10 of partial and unchecked knife crime statistics”: As far as I can discover, the ‘fact sheet’ containing these partial and unchecked statistics was issued by the home office at the behest of someone in No. 10, not by No. 10 itself, although I can’t find any sign of it on either department’s website, so it’s difficult to be sure.  Since both were warned beforehand that the figures were not yet checked (as required by the statistics code of practice), that those intended to be quoted were incomplete and therefore gave only a partial picture, and that accordingly it would be premature to release them now, it was plainly quite wrong and indefensible to go ahead regardless and issue the fact sheet.  An inquiry is reportedly under way into how this blunder came to be committed and who — probably primarily in No. 10, but also in the home office — was responsible for it.  As the Tories and LibDems have gleefully remarked, such idiotic mishandling of official statistics brings all government statistics into disrepute by undermining public confidence in them.  In other words, the fact sheet was another dud report.

None of which means that the basic message sought to be illustrated by the incomplete and selective statistics was necessarily — or even probably — untrue:  namely, that (contrary to the impression deliberately given by the right-wing tabloids and opposition politicians) knife crime is declining.  From such officially checked and published statistics as are currently available, e.g. here, here and here, it seems likely that knife crimes are indeed declining, or at worst roughly level, in the areas where special police measures have been introduced (a qualification conscientiously emphasised by ministers in the context of the fact sheet — whether it was also made clear in the fact sheet itself, I don’t know and can’t find out).  In the words of these documents themselves,

These statistics on crime in England and Wales are prepared by staff of the Government Statistical Service under the National Statistics Code of Practice. They are produced free from political interference.

It was the present Labour government that established the independence of the Government Statistical Service, precisely to avoid suspicion that official statistics are massaged for political purposes.  The blundering issue of the fact-sheet was in blatant breach of the government’s own rules.  It was an own goal,  providing predictable joy to those spectators in the grandstand who see advantage for themselves in encouraging the false idea that violent crime is a mounting threat to us all, despite the inconvenient fact that it isn’t.

And I’m happy to discuss both these dud reports on my blog: QED.

Brian

The leading classical music magazine, Gramophone, has described the project like this:

The idea is to bring together a collaborative orchestra online by targeting as many musicians as possible around the world, made possible by the internet revolution. For the project, Tan Dun has composed the “Internet Symphony No 1, ‘Eroica,’” a piece which attempts to conjure a “21st century sound,” and which features hubcaps in the percussion section. By going to www.youtube.com/symphony, you can watch his performance with the London Symphony Orchestra.

Then anyone from Tasmania to Timbuktu, from Trenton to Tokyo, is invited to audition online now until January 28. Just download the part of your choice – violin, flute, bassoon, whatever – and play it with Tan Dun giving you the downbeat. You must also submit a video that shows off your musical and technical abilities. Hundreds if not thousands of entries are expected.

Then a panel made up of experts drawn from the LSO, the Berlin Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony and other leading orchestras, will choose a group of semi-finalists in February 2009. This is eventually winnowed down to the lucky finalists in March – determined by vote on YouTube. The democratisation of classical music has never been so palpable.

Perhaps even more strikingly innovative, Gramophone adds that

In addition to the culminating Carnegie performance, the most impressive videos submitted will be “mashed together” to create a YouTube Symphony, presumably watchable online.

Tan Dun

You can watch and hear Tan Dun, who has composed the inaugural symphony, and his collaborators talking about the project here.  And Tan Dun conducts the LSO in a performance of his symphony — including the hub-caps and car brake disks used as instruments — here.

If news of this project doesn’t energise flagging music departments and school orchestras all over the world, nothing will.  Classical music purists (including me) may raise a sceptical eyebrow or two at the idea of choosing the orchestra performers at the final stage of the selection process by popular vote on YouTube, a palpable concession to the current vogue for ‘reality TV’ and shows such as the Popstars series, America’s Got Talent, Dancing with the Stars, and Celebrity Duets, in which winners are ’selected’ by the votes of viewers.  But if this increases popular interest and involvement in the whole project, good luck to it.  Anyway, since the earlier stages of selection will be in the hands of professional musicians, there should be no risk of the final outcome being corrupted by what one might call the John Sergeant effect.

So get that dusty viola down from the attic, all you musical geniuses out there;  polish up the long neglected clarinet, and get the old piano tuned.  Then download your score from YouTube and get practising.  And if you’re a school music teacher, now’s the time to expose your star pupils to a spot of global competition.  Who knows?  They might yet be on the plane to New York to start rehearsing next March.  The danger that the glories of classical music might have lapsed into oblivion in 20 years or so might yet be kept at bay.

I ought, I suppose, to declare an extremely indirect interest in all this.  The prominent classical music promotion and consultancy firm 21C Media Group, based in New York, has been involved closely with the YouTube Symphony Orchestra project since its conception about a year ago (see the press release on its website here).  I have no financial stake in 21C, only a proud paternal one, explained here.

Brian

A short time after this, Jill’s own reply to my question arrived:

The short answer to your question is that I don’t know. Curiosity is
probably the best answer.

The odd thing about Bhutan is that it’s not easy to write it up in the way I
did in Vietnam. However it’s a fascinating place - and of course I’m snared
by the fact that you hadn’t heard of Thimphu, (or I presume you hadn’t,
seeing you didn’t know it was Bhutan’s capital city), so here I
go….

Well, at almost exactly the same time as you and I were biting our nails lest
Obama didn’t win, in Bhutan the 5th king was about to be crowned. He’s 28.
The ‘old king‘ (aged 53 - yes, we should be so lucky!) abdicated in 2006 in
favour of his son who was crowned on 6 November, a date determined by
Buddhist astrologers after much consultation only resolved in about August
this year. (How on earth would western astrologers — whoops, spin doctors –
cope? We are talking here about having only a couple of months to prepare
for a coronation!)

6 Niovember was also the date on which I arrived in Paro, the only spot with
enough flat space — just — for an airport.

A couple of days later I got to Thimphu where the coronation was still being
celebrated. What I was not prepared for was that the next day, not on the
official royal schedule, was one which the new king determined would be his
opportunity to greet all those citizens who’d queued unsucessfully in the
previous three days.

From my hotel window at about 7 a.m. I saw the crowds in the Thimphu stadium
(photo). It was only later that I learnt why they were there. And much later
I was there too! When the main gates to the stadium were locked to any more
visitors, and people were being shepherded to an entrance near the ground
level of the stadium, I couldn’t believe it that a) we found ourselves right
next to the entrance and b) it was a sudden hush which heralded the arrival
of the king.

(Where on earth are people quiet when celebrities are about to arrive?
Perhaps in Britain respect for the monarchy is such that this sort of thing
can happen. The Australian Governor-General, lovely though she is, is
certainly not treated with such awe. Although I doubt that her arrival would
provoke much excitement anyway.)

Where else wouldn’t you be frisked for cameras, phones etc. etc? Here we’d
been asked to hand in cameras - which I didn’t do - and then that was that!

I got a glimpse of the king, flinging the distinctively regal yellow
toga-like stole as he walked in, and then as he began going along the rows
of people offering him their white scarves - which he would be accepting for
the rest of the day. An amazing endurance test for him.

What does all that say about the Bhutanese? They certainly love their king,
indeed their kings - as the posters around Thimphu proclaimed. It’s not just
the new (5th)king whom they love; it’s “our kings” - not just the present
king, but his father.

At another extreme, geographically as well as conceptually, try the Buddhist
festival in central Bhutan. It’s at the temple to the Future Buddha and it’s
an occasion for the re-enactment of Buddhist rituals. That’s code for
“religious mumbo-jumbo of the kind which mediaeval Roman Catholic priests
could only have dreamt of”. The dancing’s fun, especially if you don’t know
what it means, and it clearly creates an occasion for the locals to get
together and have fun.  (See photo).

Buddhism is central to Bhutan - Buddhism existed as the unifier of the
region much as Greek mythology did in what is now known as Greece, in
pre-classical times. Politically there was no Bhutan before the 17th
century. Prior to that Buddhism, and its source of influence, Tibet, was the
unifying factor in a geographic area which had no other source of identity.
(Difficult for former colonialists to come to terms with a land without
borders, given that so many borders have been determined, if badly, by
colonial powers.)

Two temples remain testimony to the Tibetan drive to spread Buddhism: Kyichu
lakhang, and Jampa lakhang.

Kyichu Lakhang (see photo) was first established by Tsongtsen Gampo in 7th
century. Tsongtsen Gampo was 22nd king of Tibet at a time when Tibetan
control extended across central Asia and as far east as Chang-an (modern
Sian) in China. His marriage to a Tang Dynasty princess would have been a
dynastic one to cement the political relationship of Tibet and China. As
Buddhists, Tsongtsen Gampo and his wife were alarmed when the Jo (as in
‘Jomolhari’) - or ‘Lord’ - which they were carrying somewhere got stuck in
the mud. His wife attributed this to a demoness so she got out her geomantic
divination charts and determined to pin the demoness’s body in 108 parts of
the Tibetan world, two of them in the Bhutan area: one at Kyiuchu (the name
incidentally of the river in the Lhasa plain) and one at Jampa in Bumthang.

The social structure/level of prosperity? The politics of the place?

I found it very hard to categorise Bhutan. It’s poor. It’s predominantly
rural. It does not have beggars. It is clean. People wear shoes. Kids learn
to read and speak English at primary school. It is dignified. Houses are
quite substantial. The notable exceptions are the Indian road-workers whose
houses are flattened out tar barrels, pathetically painted with ‘welcome’
signs on their doorways.

But how on earth did the 3rd king, some time in the 50s, mandate the end of
serfdom, the end of slavery, and the end of limitless private ownership of
land?  He decreed that land would be re-allocated so that no-one would hold
more than 25 acres per family for agricultural or developmental purposes.
This is the sort of stuff of centuries of social reform in Europe — or else
revolution! How was it achieved in Bhutan?

This is a country which saw its first cars when we were first seeing
television.  It’s a country for which transport has meant that it’s become
possible to have contact from one end of it to the other.

Each king has pushed Bhutan further into the international community –
membership of the UN was about 1972 - in order to confirm Bhutan’s
distinctive national identity. Dictating democracy was only one further step
in a direction of political modernisation begun decades ago. This is
apparently intended to shore up support should there be any aggression
against a small independent (failed?) Himalayan state.

There’s a whole range of issues about Bhutan’s affirmation of national
culture, not least in regards to the problem created by the king’s
determination in the 1990s to assert Bhutanise citizenship, that are
creating tensions within Bhutan as well as with its neighbours, especially
Nepal. However that’s one thing which I’d love to hear more about from
bloggers, but won’t go into more detail about now.

Just in case I haven’t made enough of the point that Bhutan has some
spectacular scenery, I’ll add a couple more attachments.

Cheers for now,
Jill

A small selection of Jill’s Bhutan photographs is here.  Click the first thumbnail to see the picture full size, then hover the mouse pointer over the centre of the right-hand side of it and click the arrow to see the next picture, etc. You can read more about Jill’s background here.  Her diary of her visit to Vietnam in 2007 is here.

(1) Contrary to much of what’s currently being said by MPs and journalists about the Damian Green brouhaha, it’s not only information concerning “national security” that sometimes needs to be protected from untimely public disclosure, or (sometimes) from disclosure at any time. Publication, or publication at the wrong time, of other kinds of information may do harm to (for example) the markets; to the legitimate business and financial interests of blameless companies and individuals; to the currency; to trust between the British and other governments; to international trust in the discretion of British politicians, diplomats, civil servants and others (by raising doubts about whether things communicated to such people in confidence will be made public); and to trust between ministers and officials. All this may be damaging, to a greater or lesser extent, to Britain’s national interests without in any way touching on “national security” or the unauthorised disclosure of information protected by the Official Secrets Act. Some of these kinds of disclosure may cause only trivial damage in each individual case but may have a much more serious cumulative effect if constantly repeated over a long period.  The assertion, much heard in recent days, that all government information other than information involving national security can safely be made public, and should be, is rubbish.

(2) Any assessment of the justification, or lack of it, for keeping some kinds of government information secret needs to take account of the virulently confrontational and antagonistic character of British politics, in which all oppositions of whatever political complexion, and the tabloid press which supports them, seize selectively and unscrupulously on any stick with which to beat the government, and vice versa. This means that the public disclosure of official advice to ministers which warns of possible negative consequences of a policy option later adopted as government policy is certain to be seized on by the opposition and parts of the media as ammunition for denouncing the policy in question — even if the original policy advice concluded that the predicted negative consequences would be outweighed by greater benefits. Publication of official advice would also make it much more difficult for ministers to overrule official advice and act contrary to officials’ recommendations, since the official advice, once published, would be used to undermine the policy actually adopted. The acceptability and authority of official policy would also be undermined by the knowledge that it had been adopted contrary to the recommendations of officials. This would put a heavy premium on acceptance of officials’ advice even when it runs contrary to ministers’ political judgement and instincts, thus seriously limiting the options available to elected ministers.

(3) The likelihood, or even a remote risk, that officials’ advice, or records of discussions between ministers or between ministers and officials leading up to a policy decision might be published, will cause records of such advice or discussions to be destroyed or, even worse, result in no such records being made. Failure to make and keep records of the reasons for policy decisions is inimical to good government and to the accountability of ministers, as the sofa style of government employed by Tony Blair demonstrated. Bad decisions are much likelier when there is no record of who said what in the discussions leading up to them or when officials have been excluded from the discussion for fear of damaging leaks. Future historians also have a claim on the proper procedures being followed, and these include proper records — many of which can’t safely be made public for the reasons in (1) and (2) above.

(4) Of course there’s a strong countervailing public interest in making public the maximum possible amount of information about government decision-making, including as far as possible the facts and figures on whose basis policy decisions are made; and in particular there’s a strong public interest in the exposure of government wrong-doing (cover-ups of illegal or corrupt activity, unwarranted lying or misrepresentation of facts, dirty tricks, deliberately misleading misinterpretation of statistics, and so forth). It’s right that the law currently offers conditional protection to an official whistle-blower who can demonstrate that his disclosures perform a public service of this kind, and that he has tried but failed to put matters right through official channels before resorting to his whistle:  in short, that his action is in the public interest. Even in these fairly restricted circumstances, however, the benefit to the public interest may need to be balanced against likely damage of the kind described above, for example if it involves the disclosure of classified information provided in confidence by a foreign government.

Finally, descending from the general to the particular, it’s worth noting that unauthorised disclosures of government-owned information designed to provide ammunition for the official opposition to fire at the government for party political advantage clearly doesn’t qualify for protection as being in the public interest, unless it can be shown to be the only available means of unmasking government wrong-doing of some kind. I suspect that Messrs Galley and Damian Green might have some difficulty in showing that this applies to the information that the former has, um, allegedly been “regularly” and “systematically” leaking to the latter over the past two years.

Brian

The solicitor for the Home Office worker who leaked information [Christopher Galley] says he did it because it was material that was “important for the public to know”.

The problem is that Mr Galley’s ministers took a different view of what material needed to be made publicly available, and their view would have been informed by all sorts of considerations of which Mr Galley could not have been aware.  There’s no suggestion that he was sending government information, without authority, to Damian Green in order to expose wrong-doing of any kind;  he was not a whistle-blower of that traditional kind.  He just thought he knew better than ministers what information should be released, and when.  Even then he sent it to a Conservative opposition MP, not to the press.

The Home Office Official

If every unelected civil servant, senior or (like Mr Galley) junior, claimed the right to override elected ministers’ decisions about what sensitive government information should and should not be released, and on what timing, the work of government would grind to a halt.  Ministers would be unable to trust their officials and would have to keep vital information from them (the reverse of what seems to have been happening in this case!).  Anyway, it’s clearly an offence under both common law and statute law for an official to disclose information obtained in the course of his duties to a third person without proper prior authority.  And it’s an offence for a third person to encourage an official to do so, although we don’t know whether Mr Green did encourage Mr Galley.  He has denied that any financial inducement was offered or given.

The claim that Mr Galley’s motive in leaking the documents was to enable the public to know what he thought they should know, the ‘public interest defence’, is inevitably going to have to be examined against the background of Mr Galley’s position as a Conservative Party activist.

The Times report quotes Mr Galley’s solicitor:

The former Conservative council election candidate had first met Mr Green in the Houses of Parliament in 2006 and “regularly” supplied him with information for the next two years, Mr O’May said. [Emphasis added]

In the words of a report in the Daily Telegraph, no less, a pretty reliable source on matters affecting the Conservative Party, –

Relatives of Mr Galley revealed that he had held political ambitions since his school days. He has previously stood as a Conservative candidate in an election for Sunderland city council.

Christopher’s uncle Kevin Galley, Christopher’s uncle, said last night: “I just don’t understand how he could have got caught up in something like this.

“He loved politics and I think he was a member of the Conservative Youth.”

It’s also reported, and not so far denied, that Mr Galley had applied for a job in Damian Green’s parliamentary office and had met Mr Green in connection with his application (which was evidently unsuccessful).

You can see and hear the statement by Mr Galley’s solicitor, Mr O’May, of Bindmans solicitors, on the BBC website here — and on several others.

My initial reaction to the news of Mr Green’s arrest and the searches of his offices and homes was that although an investigation of the leaks was manifestly right and necessary, the manner in which the investigation was being conducted appeared to be disproportionate to the suspected offence (or offences) and unnecessarily heavy handed.  Now, as more of the facts seep out, I’m not so sure.  Two years!

Brian

It certainly looks as if the police yielded to the itch for drama and allowed themselves to get carried away by their enthusiasm for tracking down leaks of government information and teaching those responsible for them a salutary lesson.  They may also have been pretty obtuse if they failed to foresee the amount of indignation and anger that their treatment of Mr Green would inevitably provoke.  But before we all get carried away on a tide of protest, it’s worth trying to nail a few myths, many of which are prominently featured in today’s media reports.

Myth No. 1: That Mr Green was arrested and his homes and offices searched by anti-terrorism officers, acting under anti-terrorism law.  The police have denied that anti-terrorism officers were involved in the arrest, questioning or searches, and that Mr Green was arrested on suspicion of offences under any anti-terrorism law.  Even the police would hardly issue such a denial if the truth was otherwise. (The Guardian publishes this denial but elsewhere reports as fact that anti-terrorism officers arrested Green in connection with suspected offences under anti-terrorism legislation, and prominently publishes a letter protesting at such abuse of anti-terrorism law and powers.)

Myth No. 2: That Mr Green was arrested under the Official Secrets Act. Contrary to some reports, there’s no evidence that Mr Green is suspected or accused of any offence under this Act.  (It seems that the arrest etc was on suspicion of “aiding and abetting misconduct in a public office“, a common law offence which seems to refer to the action of the junior Home Office official accused of leaking information to Mr Green, not to any “misconduct in a public office” by Mr Green himself, although this is not yet 100% clear.)

Myth No. 3: That the police action was in breach of “Parliamentary privilege”, a term much bandied about in media interviews and reports. But parliamentary privilege does not protect MPs from arrest or investigation, charge or trial, in connection with suspected breach of the law.  Nor does it prevent the police from pursuing their investigations within the Houses of Parliament — especially as in this case they had sensibly taken the precaution of informing the senior official of the House of Commons, the Serjeant-at-Arms, of what they intended to do.  (According to several reports, the Speaker was also informed in advance, presumably by the Serjeant-at-Arms if not by the police direct, and raised no objection.)

Myth No. 4: That the documents leaked to Mr Green were classified ’secret’ (as alleged by, among others, the Guardian; the FT prudently says only that they were ’sensitive’).  We simply don’t know, and probably never will, whether the documents were ’secret’, ‘confidential’, ‘restricted’, or indeed even ‘unclassified’.

Myth No. 5: That since no ministers were told in advance of the police’s intentions regarding Mr Green, no minister can be held responsible for what the police did;  and anyway the police are independent of political control in operational matters (which is true).  However, those informed by the police in advance appear to have included the Secretary to the Cabinet and Head of the Home Civil Service;  the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office (who had originally asked the police to investigate the leaks to Mr Green); and the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson (who, according to some accounts, did raise doubts over the need to act as proposed).  As the FT remarks, “last night Whitehall insiders were incredulous at the idea that [the Cabinet Secretary] and [the Home Office permanent secretary] did not immediately inform ministers once they were told what the police intended to do.”  Even if ministers were not told in advance, as they seem to be claiming (although in rather suspiciously cautious language about not having “been involved” in the decision), the fact remains that they should have been.  If they weren’t told, they are evidently guilty of a culpable failure to ensure that their senior officials knew what kinds of information needed to be passed immediately to ministers.  “Nobody told me, guv” is no defence for a minister whose department has behaved wrongly.  If the police are deemed to have exceeded their powers, or to have breached parliamentary privilege (e.g. in interfering in Mr Green’s ability to communicate with his constituents), or to have acted in a political context without proper political authority, or simply to have over-reacted in a manner disproportionate to the nature of any offence apparently committed, then the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, is responsible and should resign.  This was not a purely operational matter, as the police tacitly recognised when they gave advance warning of it to senior officials and the Mayor.

Myth No. 6: That it is the duty of civil servants to leak information to MPs or the media if they believe that the information reveals dishonesty, other immoral behaviour, or policies to which the civil servant objects on moral or political grounds.  No such duty exists or can exist.  Indeed in any such circumstances an official has a duty to protect the confidentiality of the information in question but also a duty and right to take his or her objections or qualms to higher authority in the civil service, up a prescribed route, and ultimately to the head of the civil service himself. If this produces no redress, the official may ask for transfer to other, unrelated duties, or, in the last resort, must resign, and (provided that he or she is willing to risk prosecution for doing so) only then take the information to an MP or the media.  All governments of whatever party and whatever country need to be able to protect certain kinds of information from being revealed publicly, for example when it relates to discussion of possible policy options before decisions are taken, or information provided to government in confidence, or information whose disclosure is likely to damage national security:  and they are entitled to rely on the discretion of their officials in protecting that confidentiality.  It’s not for an unelected official to override the policies or decisions of elected ministers as to what information should be released, and when it should be released.  Those who can’t accept such restraint on their freedom to pass whatever information they like to whomever they like don’t belong in the public service.

Myth No. 7: That whistleblowers are performing a public service and should be protected.  There’s room for legitimate debate about this as a general proposition, subject always to the considerations in Myth No. 6 above.  But there’s no evidence so far that in this particular case the Home Office leaker was motivated by conscientious objection to any particular government action or policy.  The leaks seem from the nature of the information leaked to have been motivated mainly by a desire to provide ammunition to the parliamentary opposition and thus to cause difficulty for the government.  If that proves to have been the case, there would seem to be no possible argument for protecting the leaker from the consequences of his or her action.

Myth No. 8: That MPs (especially opposition MPs) and ‘investigative’ journalists can’t do their jobs without receiving leaked information from moles within government.  This is stated with startling clarity by John Kampfner, former editor of the New Statesman, in a column in today’s Guardian:

What is the point of the media if it does not see its primary task as gathering information to hold power to account? Investigative journalism takes time and money. One can count on the fingers of perhaps two hands the serious practitioners, many of whom rely on whistleblowers.

It’s depressing to find such an experienced and sophisticated journalist as John Kampfner propounding such a dangerously inflated — indeed distorted — view of the main function of the media, as well as the pernicious doctrine that it’s perfectly OK to collude in, and benefit from, the commission of an offence by another person so long as the objective is the noble one of “holding power to account”.  The same untenable view is implied by the Guardian’s editorial comment today.

It’s right to draw a distinction between on the one hand the action of an MP or journalist who receives a brown envelope through the post, unsolicited, containing juicy information, however improperly leaked, and who then makes public use of it; and, on the other hand, action by an MP or journalist actively to incite a public servant to provide sensitive information in breach of his or her duty of confidentiality.  Since improper leaking of information by an official is an offence (whether under the Official Secrets Act or, as here, apparently, under common law), inciting another person to commit such an offence must itself be an offence as well, perhaps in some cases the offence of conspiracy.  Damian Green’s Tory colleagues have strongly denied that he had in any way encouraged the alleged leaker to leak, e.g. by offering either money or any other kind of inducement for the leaked information.  It may or may not be relevant that the leaker had apparently asked for a job in Damian Green’s parliamentary office and had been turned down.

There are those — and no doubt some of them will comment indignantly on this post — who see no need for confidentiality at any time for any information held by government; who regard all attempts at protecting the sensitivity of certain kinds of information as a conspiracy by ministers and officials to deceive the public by withholding from it information to which it is morally entitled; and who believe that all secrecy is prima facie evidence of criminality.  Such an extreme view hardly deserves to be rebutted.  There’s no government in the world that works in a totally transparent goldfish bowl;  and it’s unlikely that all the world’s governments are engaged in a sinister conspiracy against their own citizens (even if some undoubtedly are).  It’s certainly true that successive British governments have been and still are unnecessarily secretive, not venturing to make public much information which in practice could (and sometimes should) be released without the slightest risk of damage to the public interest.  The Freedom of |Information Act has gone a considerable way towards overcoming this obsessive secrecy.  All the more reason, then, to reduce to the absolute minimum the unsavoury, and possibly illegal, reliance by MPs and journalists on the betrayal of their duty by moles within government.  Leaks are of course bread and butter to both opposition MPs and journalists, so it’s hardly surprising that this episode has stirred up such self-righteous indignation in both media and parliamentary circles.  Cui bono?  The government’s case on the other side is largely going by default:  there’s so far been a sad lack of ministers or others stating a perfectly proper and persuasive case with the explanations required to convince ordinary people of its cogency.  Most ministers are MPs too, and probably expect to be in opposition shortly, whereupon they too will suddenly recognise the rightness and necessity of leaks.

But I still think the police action was excessive!

Brian

Sir,

Lord Bingham’s authoritative declaration that the UK and US attack on Iraq was illegal, and Lord Goldsmith’s reasons for disagreeing, raise very important questions and you are right to call for a full public inquiry into them (Time for a full inquiry, Editorial, November 19). The government’s argument that the invasion, without a Security Council resolution explicitly authorising it, was nevertheless legal is set out in the Attorney-General’s advice to Mr Blair of 7 March 2003 and now repeated by Lord Goldsmith. It argues that during the secret negotiations of the text of resolution 1441, Russia and France and other Council members originally wanted the resolution to specify that the Council should take a further “decision” on what to do if Iraq continued to fail to comply with its obligations: and that by agreeing to abandon that language in favour of a requirement that the Council should merely “consider the situation” (as in the text eventually adopted), they accepted that force could be used by any state without the need for a further “decision” by the Council. There is no public record of the “negotiating history” of 1441: all we have is Lord Goldsmith’s account of it, based on his private discussions with the British and American participants. Any public inquiry should seek to establish whether the Russian, French, German and other governments agree with this interpretation, which seems at first sight far-fetched: as Lord Bingham said, it “passes belief”.

Any inquiry also needs to establish an authoritative interpretation of the UK’s formal “explanation of vote” on 1441, explicitly disavowing any “automacity” in the resolution (”There is no ‘automaticity’ in this Resolution. If there is a further Iraqi breach of its disarmament obligations, the matter will return to the Council for discussion as required in Operational Paragraph 12. We would expect the Security Council then to meet its responsibilities”). This was widely assumed at the time to mean that 1441 did not imply authority for an attack on Iraq without a further Council resolution authorising it. If it didn’t mean that, what did it mean? Did other Council members agree to drop the explicit requirement for a further Council “decision” in exchange for an assurance by the sponsors of 1441 that it would not be taken as authority to use force without a further decision by the Council?

These may sound like unimportant technicalities, but we need definitive answers to them if we are to be able to judge whether our own elected government committed a war crime in March 2003.

Yours sincerely
Brian Barder (HM Diplomatic Service, 1965–94)
London SW18
http://www.barder.com/ephems/
19 November 2008
[Hyperlinks added -- BLB]

There’s a fuller discussion of these and other related issues in my Ephems blog post of April 2005 at http://www.barder.com/ephems/194, which shows how long we have been waiting for answers to all these questions.  Some of those answers might be provided in the book about the whole Iraq affair by Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the UK Permanent Representative to the UN at the relevant time, and subsequently the senior representative of the British Government in Baghdad soon after the invasion and occupation.  Sir Jeremy, much to his credit, has not been unduly reticent in expressing strong views about the failings of the US and UK governments during his time as a senior public servant and major participant in these events.  Unfortunately, however, ministers have so far blocked publication of his Iraq book:  all the more reason for a full public inquiry, without further delay, into all the events leading up to and following the invasion and the occupation.

More than five years have passed since March 2003, and there can be no grounds for arguing that the findings of an inquiry, however damning, could somehow damage the status or morale of British or other coalition forces now on active service in Iraq.  Whatever the outcome of a proper fact-based scrutiny of the legality, or lack of it, of the original attack on Iraq, no-one can doubt that there’s a sound legal basis, approved by the UN, for the presence of coalition forces now.  We need an inquiry, not just to rake over the blunders and probably the crimes of the past, nor even mainly so that those who were responsible for them can be held to account, but more fundamentally so that the necessary lessons can be learned for the future conduct of governments and for the role of the United Nations.

Meanwhile, as we continue to wait, no-one should lightly dismiss the Guilty verdict now pronounced by Lord Bingham, very recently retired as the senior Law Lord and formerly both Master of the Rolls and Lord Chief Justice, generally acclaimed as probably the finest legal mind of his generation.  He will have chosen his words with the utmost care and only after rigorous scrutiny of the issues.  The suggestion (by a Labour MP) in another of today’s Guardian letters that he should “read UN resolution 1441″ before expressing an opinion is simply sad.

[1] Up-date (21 November 2008): Comments below by Robin and Ed Davies show that I was technically and actually wrong to describe the illegal attack on Iraq as a “war crime” — the term used in the original title of this post and also in my letter to the Guardian. I should have said “crime of aggression“, which, as Ed shows, is no less serious:

To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole. [Robert H Jackson, chief American prosecutor at Nuremburg, quoted here]

(However, I take some comfort from Jackson’s use of the word ‘other’ in this quotation, suggesting that initiating a war of aggression is a member of the family of ‘war crimes’, distinguished from the others by being the ’supreme international crime’.)

Brian

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd8f9Zqap6U .

It lasts some three and a half minutes.

It’s also available on The Huffington Post (online newspaper) of 18 November at –

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/15/obama-urges-congress-to-m_n_144035.html

The meatiest part of the extended interview with the Obamas on the CBS “60 Minutes” programme on 16 November is at

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4608192n

The rest is on other clickable clips from the programme in the right-hand panel of the page (complete with Viagra commercials).

There’s also a transcript (with more links to the video clips) starting at

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/11/16/60minutes/main4607893.shtml

and continuing on several more pages (with a link to the next at the end of each page). It combines policy discussion with more personal stuff: well worth hearing or reading, IMFFHO.

Extract on government borrowing (George Osborne and David Cameron please note):

Kroft: Where is all the money going to come from to do all of these things? And is there a point where just going to the Treasury Department and printing more of it ceases to be an option?

Mr. Obama: Well, look, I think what’s interesting about the time that we’re in right now is that you actually have a consensus among conservative Republican-leaning economists and liberal left-leaning economists. And the consensus is this: that we have to do whatever it takes to get this economy moving again, that we’re gonna have to spend money now to stimulate the economy.

And that we shouldn’t worry about the deficit next year or even the year after. That short term, the most important thing is that we avoid a deepening recession. [Emphasis added]

Newsflash:

The fullest account that I can find of Lord Bingham’s important lecture questioning the legality of the attack on Iraq is in the Daily Telegraph of 17 November, at http://bit.ly/dhFn. The full text of Lord Bingham’s lecture seems not yet to be available online. Lord Goldsmith’s response looks like the most explicit statement issued so far of the proposition that there was no need for a “second resolution” of the Security Council. There’ll be some comment on this soon in Ephems — watch this space.

Brian

Some suggest that Obama won because many Republicans failed to vote, but the figures scarcely confirm this: John McCain won 58.3m votes (46.1%, comparable with GW Bush in 2000 with 47.9%), 3.8m fewer than GW Bush in 2004 but 7m more than the same Bush in 2000. Each candidate won a very respectable share of the vote, on probably the highest percentage turnout (over 60%) for 40 years. Those who imagine an entire American population transformed by the election into leftish, colour-blind liberals need reminding that Senator McCain, after a policy-lite campaign driven by smears, innuendos and outright lies, and representing the party of the most unpopular President in American history, nevertheless won 58.3 million votes across the country, including an estimated 55% of white voters, taking almost all the mid-west (from Montana and North Dakota southwards) and the south, apart from Colorado, New Mexico and Florida (which Obama narrowly won, 51–49%). Equally sobering, McCain was ahead in the polls until the breaking of the financial crisis and his frivolous selection of Governor Palin as running-mate, two factors that probably lost him the election.

The victory of President Elect Barack Obama is hugely welcome to almost everyone in the outside world, as several polls confirm; but he will have a monumental task in living up to the extraordinary expectations that have been raised as he confronts the challenges of climate change, global recession, world poverty, terrorism and foreign oil dependency, and two unwinnable wars – the poisoned chalice about to be handed to him on 20 January by outgoing President George W Bush