by Alex Evans | Jul 21, 2010 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa, UK
Carne Ross – who now runs Independent Diplomat, but who used to be a Foreign Office diplomat based at the UK Mission to the UN until he resigned in protest at the decision to go to war in Iraq – gave evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry last week; here’s his testimony.
Carne comments in an email to me and others (quoted with his permission) that:
Before I testified, FCO officials refused to give me access to all the documents I requested. They also pressured me – apparently on behalf of the Cabinet Office – to delete references to some of the most egregious documents including those directly illustrating how the government exaggerated the WMD case (I refused, though I agreed to a couple of insignificant redactions at FCO request). It was not a pleasant experience nor was I left feeling that Chilcot et al are equipped for the task of dismantling a well-constructed infrastructure justifying the government’s decisions.
Chilcot’s panel has largely been offered a narrative that war was more or less unavoidable because Iraq was escaping from sanctions and containment was collapsing. There is some truth to this, but there is also an alternate account – namely, what the Foreign Office actually believed at the time. The testimonies of other witnesses showed clearly that many are painting a picture at odds with that evident in the internal policy documents and, secondly, that the panel is not forcing them to reveal the true picture, and instead letting them proffer their account without much challenge.
Tediously therefore, for these reasons, the fight for full revelation and the truth must continue. My main conclusion is that the answer lies in more or less full disclosure of the relevant documents (as no less than the Deputy Prime Minister seems to have suggested). Chilcot instead seems to be proposing partial disclosure when requested by witnesses. This is in no ways adequate.
See also this by Chris Ames in the Guardian.
by Richard Gowan | Jul 21, 2010 | Cooperation and coherence, North America, UK
Speaking together at the White House today, Barack Obama and David Cameron had a lot to say about the “special relationship” between the U.S. and UK. But this was hard-headed stuff. Here’s Obama (with emphasis added by GD):
Above all, our alliance thrives because it advances our common interests. Whether it’s preventing the spread of nuclear weapons or securing vulnerable nuclear materials, thwarting terrorist attacks, or confronting climate change, or promoting global economic growth and development, when the United States and the United Kingdom stand together, our people —- and people around the world — are more secure and they are more prosperous.
And here’s Cameron:
Our relationship is one that has an incredibly rich history. It is based on ties of culture and history and, yes, emotion, too. But for all those things, I think it has also an incredibly strong future that is based on results — results of a positive partnership of working together, agreeing where we agree; when we have disagreements, working through them and coming to a fair conclusion.
So, this is a special relationship, but should be judged on (i) interests and (ii) results. Who does this remind me of?
As you knew at once, it’s Henry John Temple, the 3rd Viscount Palmerston and British PM during the U.S. civil war. Palmerston is famous for saying this:
We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.
To which he added, a bit less famously:
With every British Minister the interests of England ought to be the shibboleth of his policy.
Obama and Cameron both seem to be in a Palmerstonian mood. This replaces the Churchillian mood that characterized the Bush-Blair era (remember the bust?). That’s a downgrade, but we are not back in the days of Washington and Lord North!
Note 1: For earlier thoughts on Palmerston and U.S.-UK relations (and the “shibboleth” line) check out this 1969 Foreign Affairs article by another PM, Edward Heath.
Note 2: For more recent thoughts on “the Palmerstonian moment” in U.S. policy, see this 2008 piece by Richard Haass of CFR.
Note 3: Am I the first to compare the new UK leadership to Palmerston? No.
Note 4: That said, if you search for “Palmerston” on Google News right now, the first hit is a rather diverting story about a “naked pie man” in New Zealand. Here he is!
Note 5: Palmerston was a Liberal. The Liberal Democrat History Group notes that, while he was still a relatively junior politico, he and his party backed a coalition administration with the Tories led by the Duke of Wellington, “but only reluctantly in what they saw as an ultra-Tory government.” It didn’t last long.
by Alex Evans | Jul 19, 2010 | Cooperation and coherence, Global Dashboard
Britain’s new National Security Council is built along much the same lines as its counterpart on the other side of the Atlantic – but if we’re copying the American model, how come we didn’t create a National Intelligence Council to go with it?
In the US, the NIC partly plays the role that the Joint Intelligence Committee performs in the UK system (although the National Intelligence Estimates that NIC produces are much more in-depth than JIC assessments). But the NIC also performs several additional tasks which are not well performed in Britain’s new system for foreign policy co-ordination.
For instance, in the US the NIC has the job of overall risk surveillance in the foreign policy domain over a 3-5 year timescale, including transnational threats and global issues as well as individual regions, and with strong emphasis on connecting the dots to see the larger picture (as for instance in NIC’s recent report on Global Trends to 2025). Unlike the JIC, the NIC uses both secret and open source data in drawing together this composite assessment – rather than falling into the Cold War trap of assuming that all the important information will come from covertly obtained data. And while the UK has experimented with a Strategic Horizons Unit in the Cabinet Office, it has suffered from being divorced from actual policymaking – unlike the NIC, which is firmly embedded in all levels of the NSC process.
This in turn allows the NIC to perform the second key role missing from the current UK configuration: the ‘red team’ challenge function that David and I call for in our Chatham House report Organising for Influence. The NIC’s seat at the NSC table in Washington comes with a clear mandate from the President to test other players’ assumptions, challenge policy options, and provide an additional view for policymakers. In the UK, by contrast, no part of the government enjoys the same ‘licence to be awkward’ – which creates a risk of groupthink, or alternatively of inter-departmental turf warfare with inadequate attention paid to the big picture.
Third, the NIC has a critical role in briefing Congress on long range foreign policy issues, increasing legislative awareness of the foreign policy context (senior NIC staff describe the role as complementary to that of the Congressional Budget Office in creating shared awareness of challenges facing the US). While the UK’s Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee does get access to (some) JIC data, the security classification of JIC assessments clearly prevents them from being shared with, say, the Foreign Affairs, Defence and International Development Select Committees. A UK version of the NIC, on the other hand, could provide unclassified, open source assessments to Parliament – enhancing Parliamentary involvement in, and oversight of, Britain’s foreign policy context.
Finally, the NIC plays a crucial role in bringing external thinking in to government on foreign policy issues by trawling the academic and think tank communities for ideas, including through its NIC Associates program. The UK, by contrast, tends to find this a lot more difficult. While the Strategic Horizons Unit undertook extensive outreach for the update of the NSS, it was badly linked to actual policymaking as noted above; and while FCO’s Policy Planning Staff is theoretically charged with maintaining close links with think tanks, in practice it has not done so for several years.
Admittedly, the NSC probably needs a bit of time to bed down before any more changes are made to the UK’s foreign policy architecture (there’s also the small matter of the Strategic Defence and Security Review to get out of the way). But when the government reviews its new arrangements, probably some time next year, it should give serious thought to a UK NIC.
by Michael Harvey | Jul 16, 2010 | Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, Latin America and the Caribbean, North America, UK
– This week’s Economist sees Lexington bemoan those advancing the discourse of American exceptionalism, suggesting that “[t]he last thing the country needs is to be distracted from its practical problems by the quest for an elusive greatness”. Elsewhere, The Spectator’s Coffee House blog remembers Jimmy Carter’s fabled 1979 speech in which he spoke of a US “crisis of confidence”.
Delivering the annual lecture at The Ditchley Foundation last week, Strobe Talbott suggested that the “promise” of the Obama Presidency – both in the domestic and the international arenas – is now “at risk”. “[W]hatever fate is in store for the current president of the United States”, Talbott argued,
“one thing is for sure. His success in tackling the major issues of our time will depend on his establishing a degree of common purpose with his partners in national governance at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue and with his partners in global governance around the world.”
– Elsewhere, over at The Cable, Josh Rogin reports on the slow progress of reviews into US development policy – the Presidential Study Directive on Global Development and the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review. The Economist, meanwhile, highlights Brazil’s growing identity as a significant aid donor.
– Finally, the head of the UK Financial Services Authority, Adair Turner, cautions against the default acceptance of prevailing economic ideology, suggesting that policymakers would do well to draw on a diversity of economic opinion. Joseph Stiglitz, meanwhile, explores the Keynesian prescription for the global economy.
by Alex Evans | Jul 15, 2010 | Influence and networks
Lest any GD readers are labouring under the misapprehension that Frank Luntz is actually a serious pollster (unlikely, I know), feast your eyes on this excerpt from a 2 page orgy of huff-and-puff in the last issue of GQ:
The public have now decided, wisely, that a bigger, more powerful government won’t solve the problems that government itself created. In fact, roughly 70 per cent of Americans agree with the following statement:
“Washington doesn’t have to get rid of everything that’s right with America to fix what is wrong with our country. Even though our economy faltered, we must not replace the economic freedoms that made this country great with new regulations, new bureaucracies and a government takeover of individual opportunity.”
Awesome in its scientific rigour, isn’t it? Put like that, the real surprise is that Frank managed to find 30% of Americans to disagree. Oh, and if you were wondering who the pollwas conducted for – yeah, Fox News.
Frank ends his diatribe with a call on politicians to commit to “find at least one per cent of waste to cut in current government spending”. Perhaps we could start with that portion of the TV license fee that pays for Frank’s appearances on Newsnight.
