History is important in diplomacy

When PR men want to sell journalists a line, their favourite opening gambit is gross sycophancy. “Hey, I lurve your work,” they smarm. “It’s great to meet ya, you’ve been doing wonderful stuff.” Reporters know they are lying. We suspect they have never read a damn word we have written. But we remain in danger of being flattered by their shameless eagerness to please into turning off our bullshit detectors.

Never forget the only job David Cameron had outside politics was as a

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PR man buttering-up contacts on behalf of the TV station Carlton, whose disappearance raised the quality of British television overnight. “In my experience, he never gave a straight answer when dissemblance was a plausible alternative,” said the Telegraph’s veteran business reporter Jeff Randall, who dealt with him regularly.

“I wouldn’t trust him with my daughter’s pocket money.”

Under Cameron the Foreign Office has become the marketing department of Great Britain Inc. He has decided that Simon Fraser, permanent secretary at the Department for Business, should be the next head of the diplomatic service and run it on commercial lines. He envisages a future when corporate hotshots and CBI bureaucrats can become Her Britannic Majesty’s ambassadors to far-flung lands the better to cut deals with the natives. Labour’s ethical dimension to foreign policy,

such as it was, is history. Cameron tours the world not as statesman or democratic leader but as Britain’s head of PR, whose job is to suck up to potential customers until they buy a nuclear reactor or Hawk jet. If alert listeners catch a direct falsehood in his sales patter, aides are on hand to explain that he “misspoke” or was misunderstood.

Take as an example Cameron’s speech to Turkish politicians and business leaders last week. It was a dismal exposition of the consequences of turning a foreign policy into a sales strategy, and replacing honest evaluations with wholesale evasions. He might have levelled with the Turks as he supported their bid to join the EU. He might have said or implied that opposition to Turkey’s entry from Angela Merkel and her many supporters is based on cultural determinism if not outright racism. Confrontations with militant Islam from the Rushdie affair through to the ludicrous “cartoons’ crisis” have convinced many Europeans that the borders of Europe should be the orders of Christendom. The best response for the Turks and anyone else who wishes to see democracy prosper is to say that the EU confounded the pessimists and lived-up to its highest aspirations when it took the rule of law and respect for human rights into the unpromising territory of the former satellite states of the Soviet empire.

They could add that Turkey too has tried to abandon its militarist past, which saw the mass slaughter of the Armenians in the First World War, the ethnic cleansing of Greeks and Jews, the invasion and partition of Cyprus and the relentless oppression of the Kurdish minority. Cameron did just that, and praised Turkish politicians to the skies for allowing Kurds to broadcast in their own language, and abolishing the death penalty as they tried to get themselves ready for EU membership.

But so intent was he on securing access for British companies to the Turkish market, he lacked the courage to be a candid friend. He could

not add that Turkey’s progress had halted, and until it restarted, Europe cannot and should not allow it into a club whose first task was to confront the horrors of Nazism and communism the better to overcome them. He did not dare say that the supposedly “moderate” Islamist prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is disinterring all the ghouls from Turkey’s past, as he grows ever more reckless in his denial of atrocity and indulgence for mass murderers.

Erdogan refuses to join the EU in supporting the charges of crimes against humanity in Darfur the International Criminal Court has levelled against Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir. On the contrary, he has invited the blood-soaked brute to Turkey. He has his own culturally determined, not to say historically demented, grounds for knowing Bashir is innocent. “No Muslim could perpetrate genocide,” he said.

As with new crimes, so with old. After the US Congress agreed to recognise the slaughter of the Armenians as the first genocide of the

20th century, Erdogan said he’d expel 100,000 Armenians currently resident in his “moderate” Islamist state. I think Christopher Hitchens was alone in pointing out that if Angela Merkel had imitated his xenophobic demagoguery and threatened to expel Turkish guest workers because she had taken offence, there would have been mobs protesting outside German embassies. But because the world thinks that he is a valuable business partner, the British prime minister couldn’t tell the Turks that their leader was taking them down a dead end. The only reform Cameron wanted was, predictably, for Turkey to accept the EU competition charter and open its markets to British businesses.

“Who now remembers the Armenians?” asked Adolf Hitler as he ordered the extermination of the Jews. Not David Cameron, who could not even remember that Britain fought Hitler alone in the Blitz as he sought to suck up to Obama by declaring that Britain was America’s “junior partner” in 1940.

His wilful amnesia makes his denunciations of Pakistan seem simultaneously accurate but devious. We did not need documents on WikiLeaks to tell us that elements within the Pakistani intelligence services are on the Taliban’s side. But he ought to know that the Taliban has also murdered thousands of Pakistani civilians in atrocities that the western media barely bother to cover. For Cameron to say that Pakistan was exporting terrorism without acknowledging that Pakistanis were also victims of terrorism, was simply playing to the prejudices of his Indian listeners the better to persuade them to cut deals with the throng of eager British businessmen he had brought in his wake.

Watching him tour the world, I feared that our new centre-right government thinks it can take a holiday from history and concentrate on the lucrative and agreeable business of finding new contracts for BAE and markets for Tesco instead. History has a habit of teaching people the hard way that there is no easy escape from political and moral responsibility. If you do not seek to mould the world, the world will most certainly seek to mould you.

Nick Cohen
The Observer/UK
Sunday 1 August 2010