Gaza – does anyone remember the real causes behind the ‘here and now’?

Israel’s current actions – indeed its actions since 1948 – are based on three core drum-beat principles; it has a right to exist; it has the most moral Armed Forces in the world; and it is surrounded by enemies intent on its destruction. But there is a fourth ‘truth’, never acknowledged by Mark Regev or other spokespersons, that Israel itself caused all of the current conflict decades ago by taking more land than the UN allotted to it in 1948 (1) , and driving out the indigenous population (2). Then taking yet more land when it occupied the West Bank in 1967 (3).

However, owing to lobbying by AIPAC, BICOM and the main Parties’ Friends of Israel groupings, these root causes are never discussed. Current dialogue remains anchored to the three principles of self defence and so on, thus ensuring that the actual causes for the current situation are kept firmly off the media and social media agenda. In other words keeping the world focussed on the ‘here and now’ rather than the original causes.

Unusually, it took an old soldier to say what these causes are, on a recent phone-in to Jeremy Vine’s Radio 2 show. After the usual predictable pro and anti-Israeli calls, he had his say. He had served in Palestine after WW2 and remembered, he said, how Jewish/Zionist terrorists assassinated, bombed and hanged UK Service personnel, booby-trapping their bodies. The ex-Soldier stated that the root cause of all of what has happened since the British pulled out was not Palestinian terrorism – but Zionistic land and water grabbing. I sat up and listened more keenly.

The old soldier had certainly done his history homework. He pointed out how Jew and Muslim lived relatively peacefully together in Palestine for hundreds of years – until the Zionists grabbed the agenda in the early 20th Century. He had a point. The UN mandate allotted fair shares of land between Jew and Arab in the late 1940s. But after the Arab League rejected the proposal, Israel seized far more land than was originally allotted to it. And decades before the onset of Qassam rockets or suicide bombers, Israel took more land in the 1967 War by occupying the West Bank.

This, said the old soldier, was the root cause of all the current issues – not Hamas rockets or Al Aqsa Brigade ‘martyrs’ – but Israel taking more than its fair share of land in 1948, expelling the indigenous population then denying them a right to return to their former homes and villages, then doing it all again 1967.

As long as these root causes – the events of 1948 and 1967 – are not addressed, the Israeli Defence Forces will, many argue, keep breeding future Arab generations of those who just want their homes, their land, and their lives back.

The problem is that if these root causes are never spoken of, the chances of achieving a sustainable peace in the region are virtually zero. If they were discussed, it would undermine all the Knesset and pro-Israeli lobby arguments in one fell swoop. More positively, it could also give real incentives to those who refuse to negotiate and bring all parties back to the table.

If there was some way of getting the Quartet, the EU and even Israel itself to address these original root causes, and if social media could galvanise the collective conscience and lead the rest of us to remember, then future peace talks might have an outside chance of starting on a fair and level playing field.

1 Cragg, Kenneth. Palestine. The Prize and Price of Zion. Cassel, 1997. ISBN 978-0-304-70075-2. Pages 57, 116
2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestinian_exodus
3 http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/850855/Six-Day-War

Red Teaming – how policy drafting and public blowback could be less painful…

Foot and Mouth? John Gummer feeding beef burgers to his baffled daughter? Badger cull policy? Somerset under water and the policy background and responses? No – these weren’t just ‘stratcom’ or media handling disasters – they were also examples of policies that were not terribly well drafted in the first place. Lots of reasons for this – time and political pressure, resource denial, being doomed to succeed no matter what – we’ve all been there and suffered.

Right now we have a number of policies and strategies in the making, undergoing internal consultation. Others need reviewing. And they’ll probably end up being ‘business as usual’.  And probably with the same mistakes and stratcom disasters waiting to happen, built in to them. But it doesn’t have to be like this. Let’s go back a few years to find out why not.

In 1999 the US Aerospace Defence Command wanted to conduct exercises to practice defence against terrorist attack by simulating what the White House at the time said was unimaginable: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into ground targets to cause mass casualties. One of the imagined targets was the twin-towered World Trade Centre. But that drill was not run after US Defence officials dismissed the option as being unrealistic.

So 9/11 was enabled by policy officials who dismissed such an attack as unlikely, unrealistic and sensationalist. This rejection was caused by policy ‘group-think’ (the desire for solidarity or unanimity within a staff branch or team, driven by reluctance to disagree with senior managers to keep the peace and not to step out of line, and so on). What happened next was world-changing history. How could this have been avoided? Enter your Red Team.

 Basically Red Teaming is ‘proofing’ your policy thinking and formulation and ironing out weaknesses, assumptions and group-think analysis. It helps you imagine the unimaginable (like the 9/11 attack in the US, and the 7/7/ attacks in London). Red Teaming challenges assumptions and identifies weak points in your plans, programmes and policies. It casts an independent and objective look that can help policy drafters identify group-think, improve their analyses and help correct faulty or flawed thinking before a strategy or policy is signed off and launched.

 Red Teaming helps combat policy bias. We and our teams are subject to biased thinking and the need to simplify complex issues by making assumptions and using ‘what worked before’. Policy formulation bias persuades us to put more weight on information or data that leads us along our desired direction or that agrees with our thinking. This binds us to the principle task and blinds us to other factors that might disrupt it. In the worst instance, risk is deliberately disregarded because its outcomes and implications don’t fit our script.

 Red Teaming can assess the strength of your policy evidence base, identify alternative options or outcomes, and test a draft plan or policy through the eyes of the recipient (or ‘stakeholder’ (yuk!). Asking the question ‘so what?’, a Red Team can make us ask how do we know those called on to do their bit in our national (insert name) strategy call to action. How do we know they’ll act, and what do we do if they don’t? What’s the back up plan? If there isn’t one, what are the consequences? What are the risks of the national (insert name) strategy failing? Would any of the progress already being made happen anyway regardless of your national (insert name) strategy? If yes, why waste resource having one?

 So let’s start Red Team thinking in your Operational Planning Teams and Working Groups and brain storm, carry out devil’s advocacy, impact/probability ad centre of gravity analyses, key assumptions checks, outside-in-thinking, and the dozen or so further Red Team devices ,to ensure its not your daughter having to eat junk burgers in front of the nation’s press.

 

Running the GNR for Asthma UK

Please go to Virgin Money Giving Kerry Hutchinson and help me raise for this great cause. Thank you.

The automaton body politic

Not for nothing was England once known as ‘Perfidious Albion’ – it would change policy stances more often than a modern quick-change model on a catwalk. Ah yes, those days when foreign policy was as reliably firm as blancmange in a microwave set on high. But not nowadays, of course.

No, Foreign Secretaries and their FCO policy officials who devise and draft policy these post-Great Game days can be relied upon to issue policy that is robustly embedded in the nine points of policy-making as set down by the Cabinet Office and the Better Regulation Executive (BRE). To which all Government Departments abide by, thanks to the Civil Servants who have attended the National School of Government’s long policy course, and who bring their newly learned policy formulation skills back to their Departments.

For example, one of the nine points is the evidence base. If the cake is burnt, next time turn oven down, if the crèche is getting closer, pull up joystick and avoid crashing plane into school etc. Evidence-based policy making, therefore, is still A Good Thing.

So why is it then, that successive post-WW2 UK FCO policy officials  have been so spectacularly good at learning policy formulation, yet are  so persistently bad at applying what they learn? This new coalition Government did cause me to  hope that Things would Change. Alas, the nine points of policy making are shown the door yet again, after the briefest warming of chapped theoretical hands by the new bluish-yellow fire.

Take, for example, any State or foreign Government where such things as rule of law, unlawful imprisonment without charge or trial, no freedom of movement  and so on- you know the rest – are routinely scorned. The FCO  policy reaction is, naturally, ramped up by degree, according to the lack of response from the said foreign power. Critical dialogue I think it’s called – being a ‘critical friend’.  If that doesn’t work, then there is the nuclear option of immediate sanctions, trade embargoes and the like.  The evidence base for this policy is that it actually works, as a last-resort foreign policy option – South Africa is the example here of course.  And for persistent infringement of international humanitarian law and human rights law, there is the entirely moral example of UK sanctions against the Burmese junta for their treatment of the heroically modest Aung Sang Suu Kyi. Good stuff.

But there is one country alone on this planet where uttering its name causes the FCO policy body to suddenly do the opposite and snap into all the alertness of a mesmerised automaton; mention of which country makes the FCO chuck out all nine points of policy-making as though each were nine reincarnations of Thomas a Becket. A country where rule of law applies to one race only, where there are 27 laws on the country’s statute books that favour one race over another, where the other race has no freedom of movement, freedom of expression, or freedom of association; where child arrests and detention without charge or trial are routine, and where shooting dead of nosy but totally innocent foreign nationals is shrugged off.

And, predictably, the foreign policy of our Roosevelt-like ‘New Deal’ Government is now reassuming automaton mode in relation to the country in question, with Nick Clegg having to significantly neuter a morally upstanding and utterly just Party policy approach agreed at the 2009 national Conference. Why? The price of a seat probably – who knows? Either way, the body politic is now once more a zombie, dead to the nine points of policy-making, especially the evidence base.

The morally indefensible FCO policy response to Ministerial Correspondence and DWO (Deal With Officially) correspondence on questions pertaining to the country in question, about sanctions, international humanitarian law and human rights law, racial discrimination and so on, is that evidence-based policy-making does not and must not apply to the country in question. Because, the line goes, sanctions don’t work (Burma? South Africa?)and anyway this country is our ‘strategic partner’. Ah, so that’s all right, then.

This two-faced stance is one of such monumental hypocrisy  that one could be forgiven for thinking the FCO policy drafters are in the pay of the Devil himself. So what?

Well, there is a moral price we all pay for our country’s foreign political  perfidious moral blindness and totally illogical automaton approach, because the craven and obsequious policy stance towards this country, causes continued anger among Muslims worldwide, And as a policy official myself, the FCO policy approach towards this country simply beggars policy belief.

So the FCO’s fawning approach to the country in question has wider implications for UK plc. As someone about to go off to Helmand soon again, what answer do I give to Muslims there who ask me, as they did when I was there last year, why the UK Government condemned South Africa, condemns Burma, yet turns a blind eye and a deaf ear to Israeli breaches of international humanitarian law, UN Resolutions and human rights law, thereby supporting Israel in its illegal occupation of Palestine? How do I explain the FCO policy rationale to them, Mr Hague?