Whatever the Saudis’ faults – and, after seven years here I need no instruction in their streaks of pride, avarice and indolence – they do live in the presence of God. It is, perhaps, hard to do otherwise when the entire country stops five times a day for prayer. For some, this is religiosity with a large dose of hypocrisy. But not for most. This is a deeply religious society and, because Islamic, deeply conservative. There are those, including the Crown Prince and Foreign Minister, who favour cautious reform but visible foreign pressure undermines their efforts. The fact is that the West’s secular approach to life is deeply offensive to many here. Nor are the Saudis necessarily wrong. I recently came across Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s verdict on what went so terribly astray in Russia under communism. Written in 1983, it is worth quoting in full:
Over half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’ Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’
I note in passing that, in Britain, the so-called Millennium Prayer made no mention of God …
HM Diplomatic Service
It is not terribly British but it is worth stating for the benefit of newcomers, that our Diplomatic Service is one of the finest in the world. American economic and military power puts them in a class of their own. But, in my experience, only the French can match us, with the Germans and the Japanese a pace or two behind. The problem for the State Department is that there are so many players in Washington that, however good their advice, it is frequently not taken. We too risk a similar fate as government focuses ever more intently on the management of the press rather than on the formulation of policy.
Kosovo was a classic example. A whole series of political misjudgements as to how the Yugoslavs would respond to the threat and use of force led to military action which only narrowly avoided degenerating into a very costly ground campaign. The outcome appears to be ethnic cleansing of Serbs rather than Albanians while several thousand British troops remain stuck in Kosovo indefinitely. Yet our propaganda machine projected this as a magnificent victory; Goebbels must be grinning in his grave. After the last diplomatic failure on this scale (Tehran 1979) a full report was written and the necessary lessons learned and applied. Has anyone dared to enquire as to what advice was offered on Kosovo, to whom, and when?
If we are to avoid similar ‘victories’ in future, we must improve the political/military interface at policy level in Whitehall. With the demise of the Soviet Union our defence forces have become increasingly an instrument of foreign policy. This makes it the more important that the political consequences of military action (and threats of action) be thoroughly thought through before we set in hand events which take on their own momentum. My views on Desert Fox1 are well known. Here I simply note that Saddam has not been significantly weakened; the Inspectors have been withdrawn and have not returned; the Security Council is, in reality, split and we are left with a war of attrition in the air. All, except for the last, were consistently forecast from here throughout 1998.
Whitehall battles are the stuff of bureaucracy; a martial art of their own. But our role will be vacuous if it is not founded on thorough local knowledge. It is instructive that, over the last fifteen years, the endless grinding of our administrative wheels (nowadays described as ‘modernization’), although maintaining the necessary resources has otherwise had no effect whatever on the actual task here. The key requirements are experience and access so as to get the ‘feel’ of an opaque and secretive society, and to make the judgements on which the furtherance of our interests depends. The Service is now moving in the right direction – towards greater continuity and expertise. They certainly count. At one point I had more experience in the Middle East than all my EU colleagues put together. And this Embassy still has more Arabists than all the other Western Embassies combined. That is why we are in a class of our own.
I have viewed with dismay the spread of ‘Political Correctness’ in recent years. Intellectual honesty is the foundation of our Service; Political Correctness its antithesis. ‘Diversity’ is the latest of several rather fatuous fashions. The truth is that diversity is irrelevant to diplomacy. No foreigner I have ever met knows or cares whether the Service has fifty per cent women, ten per cent homosexuals and five per cent ethnics. His (or her) only interest is whether a diplomat has something useful to contribute. Furthermore, ‘targets’ are but a thinly disguised form of positive discrimination; this undermines the fundamental principle of the public service that promotion should be based on ability alone. The risk is that ‘minorities’ will be promoted because they are (just) credible, not because they are the best; if so, they will become symbols, not of inclusion but of incompetence. The Service should cease to be invertebrate in the face of this politically motivated interference.
I am well aware that I (again) fly in the face of fashion in suggesting a franker approach to the conflict between career and family which is so difficult for women officers. Those of us who have seen a full career know the strains of children at boarding school, of their transition to university, and of parents whose health is failing. The brunt of these pressures tends to fall on the mother, emotionally if not also practically. All these pressures are magnified by distance and by the mobility obligation and they come at a time when, for senior staff, the stresses of a demanding job are intense. Taken together they are a great deal to bear. A woman officer should not, therefore, count it a failure, and nor should we, if in her thirties she decides that there are far more important things in life than Foreign Office telegrams. Crèches, job sharing etc can postpone the central problem, but cannot solve it.
By contrast, one of the great attractions of the Service is that there is so much to share with your wife – the highs to be enjoyed, the lows to be endured and the humorous moments to be savoured together. I know that I could not have done it without my wife; indeed, it is hard to express my debt to her.
I conclude with a puff for the Public Service. My wife and I have been brought up to it and are deeply committed to it. The idea promoted by private sector consultants that you can ‘drive your own career’ is simply absurd. The sense of purpose and the satisfaction of public service cannot be matched by the pursuit of a personal agenda, still less of personal gain.
So I leave the Service well content but I echo Sir Francis Walsingham: ‘Would that I had served my God as I have served my Queen.’ It is to that which I shall turn my attention in such years as He may grant me.
GREEN
1. Desert Fox: 1998 bombing campaign by Britain and America against Iraq for refusing to allow in weapons inspectors, in defiance of United Nations Security Council resolutions. The four-day attack with cruise missiles and aerial bombing destroyed what little military infrastructure Saddam Hussein had managed to rebuild since the end of the first Gulf War. Saudi Arabia opposed the campaign and refused to let America launch air strikes from its bases.
‘Departing from international humanitarian law even just a little is like being just a little bit pregnant’
DAME GLYNNE EVANS, HM AMBASSADOR TO PORTUGAL, 2004
In 2004, fifty-two former British diplomats signed a letter to The Times criticizing British policy in the Middle East. While stopping short of condemning the invasion of Iraq outright, the letter was unstinting in its attack on the coalition’s tactics, calling its belief that a democratic society could be imposed upon Iraq ‘naive’, and
its occupation strategy ‘doomed to failure’.
Many serving diplomats also had serious reservations. Elizabeth Wilmshurst, a senior Foreign Office lawyer, resigned two days before the invasion, believing the war was illegal. Others found different ways to express their discontent. In her valedictory Dame Glynne Evans makes an elegant case for sticking to international law; even in times of crisis, and however strong the pressure from allies to backslide. The case is made softly, and it is voiced as a warning, rather than direct criticism.
As well as spells in Spanish-speaking countries Glynne Evans had great experience in multilateral bodies. Postings in Brussels and on secondment to the United Nations in New York gave her expertise in international peacekeeping and conflict diplomacy. Her comments on international humanitarian law carried weight.
Evans’s despatch was addressed, as is usual, to the Foreign Secretary. This was Jack Straw. Mr Straw had been Home Secretary, and Evans ambassador to Chile, when the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London on an extradition warrant for crimes against humanity. Straw eventually ordered Pinochet’s release on medical grounds before a trial could begin, a decision which Evans clearly supported.
En route to the door …
I told the BBC team on True Brits that I joined the FCO on the maverick quota. I am sure I would not get through the doors today. I have found the Foreign Office over the years fascinating, and also pompous and infuriating. And successive line managers have found me infuriating, unbiddable and much more besides, never mind the state of my desk. I had a most unpromising start. I am grateful to the Foreign Office for keeping me on the books and allowing me space. I loved working for the British Government and promoting British interests overseas on behalf of all departments; … [but] I have always preferred the long hours in London and working with Ministers to any overseas post, and my 5 and a half years in ECD(E)1 and six years in UND2 were highlights, which gave much scope for both new approaches to old problems and creativity with the new challenges. I was lucky in my bosses who gave me latitude and top cover for risky approaches, sometimes ex post facto, from launching the Sarajevo airlift over a weekend to spending one August devising the gloriously technical mutual Advance Implementation of EC Rights between Spain and Gibraltar, annexed to the Spanish Accession Treaty that oiled the Lisbon agreement and opened the frontier. That said, the detention of Pinochet made life in Chile unusually interesting and not only in the sense of the old Chinese curse. It was rare to be at the centre of so major a historical shift and I have never received quite so many death threats. And the European football championship in Lisbon was a once-in-a-lifetime event for us all and a fantastic note on which to exit.
I have spent most of my career on multilateral work. We have always made a point of standing by international law and as Permanent Members of the Security Council, have been able to consider ourselves custodians of good international behaviour. Departing from international humanitarian law even just a little is like being just a little bit pregnant. You, sir, know that well from the Pinochet case when you stood by principle and the rule of law. The ICRC3 historically have regarded us as sound custodians and practitioners of IHL.4 In 1990 they told me that the UK MOD-FCO presentation on preparations for the First Gulf War was so exemplary they could have wished for a video; they wished others followed our example. In my time, I have had stand up and knock down battles with the Americans over IHL, and lived to win the battle and tell the tale, even with John Bolton.5 The Americans may hate our legalism, but that is not to say they are right and we are wrong. I believe we need to fight back, and hard, for our principles. In the same way, we need to sell ourselves and the largely unsung work we do much more aggressively in Whitehall and to the public as part of the non-stop battle for resources. We should not be ‘gentlemen’ any more, but warriors (and amazons).
The London Business School have always been fascinated to find from their assessments that senior members of the Diplomatic Service do not work for financial reward, we work for the fun of it and for recognition that we are valued (we hope) and that sometimes we can contribute to the course of history … I have long argued for the FCO to have a serious social outreach programme as a means of overcoming our image. I hope it may yet happen. I have been privileged to serve and work with so many talented and tolerant colleagues. But to stand by my principles, I shall now cultivate my garden with a new career as a volunteer social worker and see where that leads.
EVANS
1. ECD(E): European Community Department (External).
2. UND: United Nations Department (in the FCO).
3. ICRC: International Committee of the Red Cross.
4. IHL: International Humanitarian Law.
5. John Bolton: Combative US representative to the United Nations (2005–6); the neocon’s neocon. Bolton’s appointment hearing in Congress was dominated by his visceral opposition to the UN, summed up in a widely circulated video from 1994 showcasing his views on its inefficiency: ‘The Secretariat Building in New York has 38 stories. If you lost ten stories today, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.’ Bolton’s appointment was never confirmed by the US Senate.
‘Bullshit bingo’
SIR IVOR ROBERTS, HM AMBASSADOR TO ITALY, SEPTEMBER 2006
The last valedictory to be circulated in the traditional manner, and arguably the last straw that broke ministers’ and mandarins’ tolerance of the tradition, we reproduce this almost in extenso. Hours after Sir Ivor Roberts’s telegram was sent, ambassadors were told that the practice of distributing valedictories widely around the Service was to be discontinued. Someone had thrown a serious wobbly.
Roberts had sent his to all diplomatic posts; some 4,000 people. The advent of email meant valedictories no longer remained ‘in the family’ and the question was not whether, but when, it would reach the outside world via a leak. It was in fact six months after Roberts left Rome that the Independent’s Jerusalem correspondent got hold of a copy, writing it up as a ‘devastating attack on Blair’s “bullshit bingo” management culture of diplomacy’. The article made much of a previous remark by Roberts in 2004 (spoken in private, but also leaked) that US President George W. Bush was ‘Al Qaeda’s best recruiting sergeant’. A strain of anti-neocon opinion is certainly apparent in Roberts’s despatch.
Like many of his colleagues, Roberts regrets the ban on valedictories: ‘It seemed to me that the accumulated wisdom of someone who has served for almost 40 years, in my case, in diplomacy ought to be shared as widely as possible, and not limited to a handful of people in London who might or might not have a particular axe to grind in burying that criticism or those reflections if they were felt to be politically inconvenient.’
Roberts is now President of Trinity College, Oxford, and the author of Satow’s Guide to Diplomacy – a handbook which teaches diplomats how to behave.
Atque Vale
I return full circle to the university I left in 1968, being, I’m told, the last person to retire under the 60 rule.1 If I’d been born a week later, I’d be under the wire. But after 38 years in harness, it’s time to shuffle off in any case. I have no regrets nor complaints at the postings I’ve had. I’m particularly grateful to have had the opportunity of heading three Missions in Belgrade, Dublin and Rome even if it has brought me into some outlandishly disreputable company over the last twelve years. Negotiating with war criminals in the Balkans (indeed nearly everyone I dealt with is now either dead – several suicides – in prison or on the run), surrendering my immunity to give evidence in a Dublin court against the head of the Real IRA (fortunately he got twenty years) …
The Foreign Office I leave is perforce very different from the one I entered in 1968. And most changes have been for the better, particularly those long-overdue reforms on the status and parity of women. Over hierarchical, too deferential, rigid regulations where women had to offer their resignation on marriage, as did those of us who married non-Brits. But the culture of change has reached Cultural Revo
lution proportions with no opportunity for new working methods to put down roots. Three recent criticisms of the FCO are disturbing. Chris Patten mused that it was ‘sad to see experienced diplomats trained to draft brief and lucid telegrams … terrorized into filling in questionnaires from management consultants by the yard … and expected under Orwellian pressure to evince enthusiasm for this work’. The former foreign policy adviser to John Major, Rodric Braithwaite, claims that No. 10 has reduced the Foreign Office to a ‘demoralised cipher’ while a recent Independent editorial asked ‘What is the Foreign Office for?’. Tempting as it is to brush aside such comments as unconstructive, perhaps we need to ask whether they have a point? Can it be that in wading through the plethora of business plans, capability reviews, skills audits, zero-based reviews and other excrescences of the management age, we have indeed forgotten what diplomacy is all about? Why have we failed so signally to explain to the likes of the Cabinet Secretary that well-conducted diplomacy cannot properly be measured because diplomatic successes are more often than not elusive or ephemeral? The diplomat is condemned to a Sisyphean task in which, as (s)he attempts to grapple with one conflict, another breaks out. We manage or contain disputes; very rarely do we deliver a quantifiable solution. Indeed we should be sceptical of ‘permanent’ solutions or models: think democracy in the Middle East or war on terror. Diplomacy is the classic example of the Spanish proverb, ‘Traveller, there are no roads. Roads are made by walking.’ We need to keep flexible and innovative and be less worried about strategic priorities which may need to be displaced at short notice or added to with no commensurate additional resources. Priorities and objectives have their place, clearly. But an excess of them smacks of a command economy with its long and inglorious pedigree. Ordered to come up with a business plan by Stalin in 1929, Commissar Maxim Litvinov refused. ‘The Commissariat for Foreign Affairs cannot, unfortunately, put forward a five-year plan of work. We have to deal with a number of factors that are scarcely subject to calculation, with a number of elements outside our control … International affairs are composed of those of a large number of countries, built on different lines from our Union, pursuing other aims than ours, and using other means to achieve those aims than we allow.’ Rather prissy and fastidious coming from the pen of Comrade Litvinov but the point is valid. I suggest a variant of it be used on the Treasury …
Parting Shots Page 13