by Alex Evans | Jul 23, 2007 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa
The UN Security Council decided on Friday to terminate the mandate of UNMOVIC – the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, itself the successor to the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) established in 1991 to oversee post-war dismantlement of Iraq’s CBRN arsenal. Condi Rice and Margaret Beckett had written wrote a joint letter to the Security Council – the latter less than a week before her departure – saying:
“Together with the government of Iraq and other Member States, the United States and the United Kingdom … have been working since March 2003 with the objective of locating and securing, removing, disabling, rendering harmless, eliminating or destroying weapons of mass destruction … developed under the regime of Saddam Hussein … We wish to inform the Security Council that all appropriate steps have been taken to secure, remove, disable, render harmless, eliminate or destroy … all known elements of Iraq’s known weapons of mass destruction.”
There’s a certain amount of predictable sniggering at the news in many quarters. Well, sure they’ve been ‘secured, removed, disabled, rendered harmless, eliminated or destroyed’: there were none, right?
But in case you were thinking that UNMOVIC’s demise looked like an exercise in closing the stable door four years after the horse had bolted, Richard Weitz at World Politics Review argues that in fact, closing UNMOVIC down was a serious mistake.
(more…)
by Alex Evans | Jul 7, 2007 | Cooperation and coherence, Global system, Influence and networks
George Packer at the New Yorker has a terrific post asking why it is that bad news rarely seems to permeate to the top of organisations, and why those at the top often seem to know less than everyone else. He writes: “At different stages of the war, I’ve had different theories, and have sometimes held them all simultaneously:
1. They’re lying. They don’t tell the truth in public—bad for morale, bad for them—but they know.
2. Bad news doesn’t get to the top. According to Sy Hersh in this week’s New Yorker, that was General Antonio Taguba’s initial explanation for why Donald Rumsfeld claimed not to know about Abu Ghraib long after he could have read the General’s investigative report: his underlings kept it from the boss, fearing his wrath.
3. They don’t want to know, so they insulate themselves from bad news. Hersh reported that this was the real reason for Rumsfeld’s ignorance about the details of the Abu Ghraib abuses: he refused to read the report.
4. They hear bad news and then immediately dismiss it. George Tenet, on page 447 of his new memoir, offers this bit of evidence: “As early as the fall of 2003, it was becoming clear that our political and economic strategy was not working. The data were available, the trends were clear. Those in charge of U.S. policy operated within a closed loop. Bad news was ignored.”
There’s an important link here to management literature about a particular class of organisations called High Reliability Organisations – places like nuclear power stations or aircraft carrier flight decks that are both (a) inherently unsafe and yet (b) tend to have very good safety records. (For an excellent discussion of HROs, see Managing the Unexpected by Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe).
One of the features that such organisations tend to share is a preoccupation with failure, which is seen as an opportunity for learning. Weick and Sutcliffe note that,
Research shows that people need to feel safe to report incidents or they will ignore them or cover them up. Managerial practices such as encouraging questioning and rewarding people who report errors or mistakes strengthen an organisationwide culture that values reporting.
The reason: any lapse is seen within an HRO as “a signal of possible weakeness in other portions of the system”. What’s so striking about HROs’ preoccuptation with failure is that governments and foreign policy agencies tend to be organised along diametrically opposite lines: they are pathologically preoccupied with success. Junior officials in government agencies often find themselves under pressure, whether implied or explicit, to report “good news stories” up the information food chain, in order to show that the current approach is working.
While senior policymakers will, inevitably, always want to have good news to tell the outside world, it’s crucial to ensure that internal communications give the unvarnished truth – and that, in turn, relies on clear signals to officials that they will be rewarded for telling it like it is. None of this will come as news to good ministers. Conversely, a failure to remember it lies at the very heart of why the US and UK went to war in Iraq.
by David Steven | Jul 7, 2007 | East Asia and Pacific, Global system
These days, the American right – sinking ever-deeper into a paranoid, unreasoning funk – is mostly obsessed with Islam abroad and immigrants at home. But there are still some old-style commie-fighting cold warriors out there, and they have China in their sights.
Larry Kudlow – National Review’s economics editor and a CNBC presenter – is in the vanguard. Thanks to him, we can now see what the dastardly reds are now up to. They’re trying to kill our children.
Is China trying to poison us, our kids, and our pets? Are Beijing’s communist hardliners waging some clever, clandestine, economic/military war against U.S. citizens? Now, before flatly dismissing the idea, consider that China freely admits a lengthy record of safety woes.
Check out yesterday’s Wall Street Journal for Pete’s sake. According to China’s own findings, almost 20 percent of Chinese goods fail to meet quality standards. 20 percent…
Could this be a calculated Communist strategy? Is China trying to poison our pets and our kids? Maybe the folks suspicious of China are right after all?
by Elizabeth Sellwood | May 10, 2007 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa
Noah Pollak’s National Review article, posted on Michael Totten’s blog today, reminds me of our internal debates during the Lebanon war last summer (when I was working for the UN) about peacekeeping options for south Lebanon.
Pollak’s article, subtitled “The UN organisation is ineffective as it is unaccountable” is a standard piece of UN-bashing. Pollak argues that unlike the Israeli government, which is being thrashed by the Winograd Commission and its fallout, the UN has “quite remarkably escaped any opprobrium for its own important contribution to the outbreak of war last summer”.
Pollak recalls that since 1978, when UNIFIL was established, “a concatenation of nearly identical UNIFIL-related resolutions has been issued by the Security Council, always with one thing in common: Events on the ground are never permitted to affect UNIFIL’s mandate. Through a combination of diplomatic foolishness and bureaucratic inertia, UNIFIL has remained impervious to any evaluation of its actual utility in bringing peace and security to southern Lebanon.” Pollak recounts a “long history of terrorist provocation in southern Lebanon”, from the PLO to Hezbollah, throughout which “the world’s diplomatic corps has maintained the self-congratulatory fantasy that more extensions of UNIFIL’s mandate will help the region”. (more…)
by Alex Evans | May 8, 2007 | Cooperation and coherence, Global system, Influence and networks, UK
When Gordon Brown takes over as PM, there will be no shortage of clouds on the international horizon. Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan will vie for his attention, of course. But he will also need to push for a breakthrough on the slow burning drivers of instability.
Climate change, resource depletion, fragile states, global economic imbalances, infectious diseases: it’s easy to write a shopping list of the risks for which the world has little insurance. One day, a number of these threats will combine in a ‘perfect storm’. The modern world’s vulnerability to shocks will then be cruelly exposed.
Protecting its citizens from risk is core business for any government. Brown has already signalled that he wants to lead a renewed effort to tackle the major sources of global uncertainty. To succeed it will be critical for him to know he can rely on Britain’s foreign policy apparatus.
There’s just one problem. He can’t.
We’ve just published a paper on this, formatted as a note to Gordon Brown, plus a shorter article on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site.
