The special guest for this simulation exercise was the Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon Paddy Ashdown, former UN High Representative to Bosnia and probably the only man to be crossed off Hamid Karzai’s christmas card list (which is pretty hard to do - even Mullah Omar is back on it, for pity’s sake). Now personally I don’t think that Ashdown’s experience is necessarily a useful guide to anything much, but that experience has been hard-won and his book will be a staple on many university courses for years to come.

Naturally I took the opportunity to hear Lord Ashdown’s evening talk in a draughty and badly-lit metal shack, but I was equally interested to see the reaction of the 150-odd other people who were attending. Apart from about 10 of us, everybody in the room was a uniform, and nearly all officers, and mainly British. These are not people with a necessarily nuanced views of the world, although they do have a broader range than most people would expect (certainly wider than I expected when I first started working alongside the military in 1999).

Ashdown’s an excellent speaker, but I’m not going to go into the detail of the talk. It’s probably NATO-classified anyway. He started out by telling us that he was going to say some contentious things, but frankly they’d only have been contentious if you hadn’t picked up a copy of The Economist in the last 5 years. Although he delivered a nice synthesis of how global trends are likely to impact on the international community, the UK and the military, with a clear focus on war and peace operations, this was fairly routine stuff.

About halfway through the talk, however, I was struck by how much of a challenge the future presents for somebody like Paddy Ashdown. When he talks about the rise of Asia, I see the white scared of the rising tide of colour. When he talks about the lawlessness of the new cities, I see the rich running from the poor mob. When he talks about the loss of national identities and borders, I see the politicians watching their natural habitat being worn away. When he talks about how we might preserve western liberal values in a world where the west no longer gets to make the rules, I see the powerful watching power slip through their fingers.

I freely admit that I could be wrong about this, and I’m fairly certain that Ashdown himself would deny it (although somehow I doubt he’ll be posting a comment on this blog). Yet it remainsl the case that everywhere you look, fear is palpable, fear based on uncertainty - which is also why so much hope is being vested in President-elect Obama (most of this hope is misplaced, but that’s another post for another time). Listening to Ashdown, I realised that what we’re missing right now are people who can think outside the traditional parameters of left and right, black and white, church and state, yet still present a coherent vision of what’s to come.

There are some who think they’re doing that sort of thinking, but generally they’re only reacting to these existing concepts, not moving beyond them; and writing from a position from which power is slipping away, rather than a position to which power is moving. We need to acknowledge that the ascendancy of Ashdown Man was not pre-ordained. Nation states aren’t the natural order of things; the white west doesn’t have any cast-iron claims to superiority; the current distribution of wealth was nice while it lasted, but was never going to last that long; and so on. Once we can get those blinkers off, we might be able to generate the visionary thinkers that we need to navigate this new world in which we find ourselves.

Unlike ARRCADE Fusion, this isn’t an exercise.

On my last night in eastern Chad, shooting erupted outside the house and continued for 30 minutes. A stray bullet crashed through the ceiling, landing a few feet away.

In the morning, a kitchen worker was asked if the shooting had scared her. She laughed.

“C’est la musique Chadienne” - It’s Chadian music, the soundtrack by which people live their lives.

Until the US-led invasion in 2001, Afghanistan was the cockpit of ascendant Islamist terrorism… Between 1998 and 2005 there were five big terrorist attacks against Western targets - the bombings of the US embassies in Africa in 1998, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, 9/11, and the Madrid and London bombings in 2004 and 2005. All owed their success either exclusively or largely to Afghanistan’s status as a training and planning base for al-Qaeda. In the past three years there has been no attack on anything like that scale. Al-Qaeda has been driven into a state of permanent flight.

I’m no expert but that looks like a Black Swan waiting to happen.  The rest of his piece is equal parts hackwork and guesswork:

• “Afghanistan has been a signal success”! No actual metrics for success provided, of course - that would make it too easy for somebody to point out that it hasn’t been much of a success at all.
• The surge “has been a triumph of US military planning and execution”! Well, so was the initial invasion - but things didn’t go so well after that, which is why we needed the surge in the first place.
• The crazed head-choppers of al-Qaeda have caused “the discrediting of the Islamist creed and its appeal”! Well possibly, but it’s hard to see how we get to take any sort of credit for that.

And so on, and so forth, until we get to my favourite moment:

It’s only their apologists in the Western media who really failed to see the intrinsic evil of Islamists. Those who have had to live with it have never been in much doubt about what it represents. Ask the people of Iran. Or those who fled the horrors of Afghanistan under the Taleban.

Ah, the “intrinsic evil of Islamists”. They’re not like us, you know - they’re more like mutant nazis or alien demons, which means we can kill as many of them as we like. Oh, did you notice Baker cheekily slipping in the Iran = Taleban meme at the end there? Roll on the next installment of the Long War.

Opposing the war Hall, like the rest of the many Iraq-war smugwits in the camp of those who opposed the war, favoured the continuation, sine die, of a regime of torture and murder.

It is a truism, of course, that many (although not all) of the pro-war camp were surprising muted in their opposition to Saddam Hussein while he was busy committing genocide against the Kurds, and for an extremely long time thereafter. Presumably this means that at that point they also favoured the continuation of a regime of torture and murder - perhaps Norm could tell us what changed their minds?

Meanwhile Oliver Kamm descends into self-parody, proclaiming “Bush made the world a safer place”. Witness:

The most fundamental decision in western security policy in the past seven years… has been the recognition that the most voluble adversaries of western society… are a reactionary, millenarian and atavistic force with whom accommodation is impossible as well as intensely undesirable.

Back in the real world, Israel and Hamas agree a ceasefire pending negotiations on re-opening the Rafah border crossing. It is noticeable that those who decry the slightest hint of jaw-jaw and bray most loudly for war-war are frequently those who are unlikely to ever suffer the consequences of war-war. The result is that, while Israel desperately but understandably seeks accommodation with its opponents, professional satirists such as Kamm are busy apparently telling them that they shouldn’t - for their own sake.

Those readers unfamiliar with this brand of satire may require some help understanding passages like this:

For all Bush’s verbal infelicity, diplomatic brusqueness, negligence in planning for post-Saddam Iraq, and insouciance regarding standards of due process when prosecuting the war on terror, the world is a safer place for the influence he has exercised.

“Verbal infelicity” = lying. “Diplomatic brusqueness” = war of aggression. “Negligence in planning for post-Saddam Iraq” = completely dropping the ball at the most critical point. “Insouciance regarding standards of due process” = heavily editing the Geneva Conventions and sanctioning torture. “The world is a safer place” = pretty much as it sounds, unless you’re an Iraqi citizen.

I’m under no illusions that my opinion counts for anything with either Norm or Oliver, but I truly wish that the pro-war camp would just face their truth. Iraq has been a terrifying mess since the beginning (although the results of the surge have been a welcome relief in terms of the human cost) and pretending otherwise is just a fool’s penny in the fountain. Opposing that war - and wars to come - doesn’t make you an apologist for genocide; it can simply mean that you’ve seen how these games tend to play out on the ground.