ninme

Because we know how it would go if we did what they want, and it doesn’t work, and yet we still have to listen to them complain how much better it would be if we did, as if they’re relevant to anything or anyone.

The Spectator - Action stations, by Mark Steyn

For example, I’d be far more amenable to criticism of American policy in Iraq if it weren’t being levelled by the same folks — notably Do-Nothin’ Doug Hurd — who fiddled transnationally while Yugoslavia burned. Bosnia is, in fact, everything the anti-war crowd predicted Iraq would be: 250,000 people were killed, which is what the more modest doom-mongers estimated would happen in Iraq, and that’s 250,000 out of a population a fifth the size of Iraq’s. We were told that toppling Saddam would do nothing but create thousands more radical Islamists across the Middle East. In fact, it’s Bosnia where, under the nose of its EU viceroy, Wahabist infiltration is recruiting tomorrow’s jihadi. Week after week, we’ve seen sob stories on the TV news in which some hapless Baathist clerk from the Department of Genital Severing reveals that he’s been out of work now for two years, but when was the last time you read a piece on unemployment rates in Paddy Ashdown’s Bosnia? It’s officially 45 per cent, and it’s only the drug-dealing, child sex and white slave trade that boom around every UN mission that’s holding it down that low. However Iraq turns out, it’s already a hundred times healthier than Bosnia, and its effects are rolling on through Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Kuwait, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. But because Bosnia is the quintessential expression of international lack of will, it will always get a better press than Bush’s ‘war for oil’.

Most Westerners remain committed to wasteful incompetent transnationalism on the grounds that, by golly, it may do nothing for the poor and suffering of this world but it makes me feel good. The G8 summiteers will get a taste of this next month when they fly in to Gleneagles to get berated over Africa by elderly Caucasian pop stars. The whole G8/Africa thing these last few weeks rang a vague bell with me: where had I heard that before?

Oh, yeah, that’s right, I went to the 2002 G8 summit in Alberta. And, mainly because the then Canadian prime minister didn’t want it to be all about terrorism and war and Iraq and other issues to which his own country was and is entirely irrelevant, he’d decided to make Africa the big centrepiece. A bunch of friendly dictators were flown over for photo-ops with the G8 bigshots, and the papers were full of cooing reports about the Canadian prime minister’s breakthrough Africa initiative. Well, the Calgary papers were. The Fleet Street papers were full of cooing reports about the British Prime Minister’s breakthrough Africa initiative. But the point is, whoever’s initiative it was, plenty of Western leaders were eager to take credit for it. Except for Bush, who, as with the tsunami, was roundly criticised for embarking on his own direct initiative with Africa.

Anyway, the 2002 initiative was called ‘NEPAD’, pronounced ‘kneepad’. And not having heard a thing about it in the three years since a Canadian G8 official triumphantly handed me the press release, I wondered how it was getting on. Well, there’s an official report on ‘NEPAD’s Achievements In The First Three Years’, but even on a close reading it’s kind of hard figuring out what’s actually happening:

(Which he lists)

Terrific. So they launched comprehensive studies to develop a comprehensive development study for holding meetings on developing more comprehensively a framework for studying the development of further meetings. So comprehensively did they do this that in 2004 the NEPAD secretariat overspent its seven-and-a-half million-dollar budget by more than two million dollars. Still, I’m sure the taxpayers of Finland, who chipped in half a million bucks to NEPAD’s ‘communications and conferences’ bill, ‘travelling costs’, ‘corporate services’ and other expenses, enjoyed the delicious frisson of ‘doing something for Africa’.

It’s the same thing with Iraq. Remember a couple weeks ago, when Blair was here trying to get Bush to do all sort of things for Africa, Bush kept patiently pointing out that there’s already the Millennium Plan for Africa, which is only a few years old and which has a lot of money pumped into it (as I said at the time, “Let one major, expensive, multi-year plan play out a little before launching oneself at the next one for the sake of headlines and good will from aging rock stars,” but even if one is doing something, without the appearance of doing lots everyone gets bored and looks the other way, so the politicians have to have a never-ending list of things they’re doing to wave in front of the public, which of course means a never-ending list of multi-year-billion-dollar-multilateral plan for something, even though it’s going to be replaced, but not killed by, another one in a matter of months, so they’re all not working concurrently. So now in Iraq, even though everyone in the administration has said it’s going to take a long time and be hard work, everyone needs “a new plan” even though the old one is still ticking steadily away. What’s the point having a new plan unless the old one has been scrapped?

And this is just too good to go without being pointed out (although I have complete faith in all my readers that they’ve already linked through and read the whole thing):

Any large gathering of world leaders is a waste of time, especially if there’s any kind of permanent secretariat or bureaucracy involved. Mr Bush will be polite at Gleneagles, but it’s no coincidence that his closest relationship is with a man he hardly ever meets in person, and never at the big talking-shops — John Howard of Australia, who doesn’t get to go to the G8 or Nato or the EU and yet works more effectively with America than Canada or any of the so-called ‘major European allies’ like France and Germany. Summits are, so to speak, one huge bluff.