Here. Not totally sure that the guy listed opposite Cardinal Schönborn is really in the running…

Thanks to , on his other blog:

opening scenes

full plot (provisional version)

Well, my interview for the Brussels NGO executive director post is on Monday morning. Not totally certain I want it; not totally certain that they can match my current salary. Anyway, we’ll see…

Page views on my website so far this month:

308 South Belfast
160 North Belfast
151 Fermanagh and South Tyrone
144 Foyle
139 Upper Bann
134 South Down
129 West Tyrone
129 East Londonderry
124 East Belfast
120 Newry and Armagh
118 West Belfast
118 North Down
116 South Antrim
114 East Antrim
108 Mid Ulster
103 North Antrim
97 Lagan Valley
87 Strangford

South Belfast wins through having a) probably the least predictable result and b) probably the highest number of internet users!

I had hoped, while on this trip, to be able to buy a copy of ‘s Iron Sunrise, to round out my collection of Hugo-nominated novels. I have been unable to find it in:

• Washington
  • Books-A-Million on Dupont Circle
  • Kramerbooks
  • the big Borders near the White House
• New York
  • Barnes and Noble 66th/67th and Broadway
  • Forbidden Planet on 14th and Broadway
  • Borders on the corner of Wall Street and Broadway

I hope this means that everyone has been buying it rather than that there is some problem with distribution. Plenty of copies of The Family Trade but with all due respect I’m going to wait until that one is in paperback. In the end I just bought Banner of Souls by to read over dinner.

Started off yesterday by meeting an old friend for breakfast near his apartment on the Upper West Side. Some splendid architecture around there:

We walked from there across Central Park…

…to my first meeting of the day, in a particularly ornate embassy (which I won’t identify here, though it’s probably easy enough to work out).

My camera’s batteries then ran out and I wasn’t able to get new ones until after I’d finished work. However I found what claims to be the largest used book store in the world, on 14th and Broadway (though I’m sure I’ve been in bigger ones in Berkeley):

Unfortunately my jet lag was at its peak and I felt I had to keep moving rather than browse; so I set off down to Battery Park, to see if there are any remnants of the colony of New Amsterdam. Plenty of monuments, including the dented sphere salvaged from the World Trade Centre:

and a distant view of the Statue of Liberty:

but the only trace of the original colony is this monument with inscription in Dutch:

Finally I walked through the Stone Street Historic Neighbourhood (historic in that some of the houses date back as far as 1835) to Wall Street, where John Adams presided over the first ever sessions of the United States Senate, and George Washington was sworn in as the first president in 1789:

By now the light was fading, but the World Trade Centre site is only a couple of blocks away and I was able to take one last picture:

Opening sentence of our next report, with footnote:

The Sandzak of Novi Pazar is chiefly remembered as one of the smaller pieces in the game played by the Great Powers before World War I, an obscure place which doomed those who got too closely involved with it.*

* See, for instance, “The Lost Sanjak”, a short story by Saki (H.H. Munro) published in 1910, whose protagonist’s failure to remember the location of Novibazar (Novi Pazar) proves fatal; and Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, in which a minor character, Lord Blatherard Osmo, “occupied the Novi Pazar desk at the Foreign Office … for on this obscure sanjak had once hinged the entire fate of Europe”, and similarly comes to a very sticky end.

Lord Blatherard Osmo in the Pynchon novel is found drowned in a bath of tapioca, which I think qualifies as suitably sticky.

4) The Snow Queen, by Joan D Vinge

That’s it, folks; I’ve now read every single one of the winners of the Hugo Award for Best Novel. And it was a good one to finish up with. I have not read anything else by this author, though her ex-husband of course is ubiquitous these days (and I find his work difficult to get into). A great story of concealed clones, hidden knowledge, the interaction between cultures, and good pacing and characterisation. Kept me going through the jetlag.

At some point I will have to do a brief thumbnail page on all the Hugo winners now that I have actually read them.

Outside the State Department yesterday:

Inside the State Department:

For once, I was not selected for secondary screening on leaving DC – and was on my Irish, not my British, passport…

Dupont Circle:

World Bank:

Old Executive Office Building (home of the National Security Council)

White House from the north (looks surprisingly modest in size)

Well, folks, I’ve done it: gone out and bought a digital camera, since they are so much cheaper here in the States.

The Lincoln Memorial is one of my favourite things. Here is Lincoln looking out of it past the tourists:

And here’s the full text of the Gettysburg Address carved on the wall inside:

And the view of the Washington Monument and Capitol from below:

And a couple taken from The Ellipse, first looking south to capture the Washington Monument again, with the dome of the Jefferson Memorial visible behind it:

And finally, the White House with flag at half mast (due to dead Pope):

Vladimir Voronin re-elected President of Moldova today – with help from the Christian Democrats??? I really hadn’t expected that.

(OK, not a lot of people care about this.)

So, there we are in one of the Senate office buildings, on our way to our meeting, when I realise that the group of people who just got in the lift are talking French and Dutch to each other with Belgian accents – and what’s more, I know one of them, because he’s asked me to speak to the Belgian Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee three weeks from tomorrow. The usual greetings are exchanged, and they go off to see Dick Lugar.

So I have actually greeted a senator by name in the U.S. Senate offices. (OK, so he is a Belgian senator…)

All the flags are at half mast – dead Pope.

A new website with a sane take on Kyrgyzstan.

3) The Wanderer, by Fritz Leiber

The second last of the Hugo-winning novels for me to read, first published in 1964. Set in the very near future (Russians and Americans have manned missions to the moon). A rogue planet appears out of space and starts to dismantle the moon. The resultant high tides and earthquakes cause widespread devastation on Earth.

So far, so pulp. But what I think won Leiber the award is that the story is so well written. A dozen or so different viewpoint characters, some of them rather less prominent than others; a proper sensawunda with regard to the main plot; aliens who actually seem alien; a surprising amount of sex (of course, this was coming into the Swingin Sixties I suppose).

Amused that one character claims to be Guillermo Walker, a direct descendant of the William Walker who took over Nicaragua in the 19th century – there is in fact a real American diplomat of that name and ancestry, but he would still have been a student when this was published.

Recommended.

2) Investing in Prevention: An International Strategy to Manage Risks of Instability and Improve Crisis Reponse, by the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit

This almost 200-page report from the British government is trying to be several things at once: a digest of the academic literature on what makes states unstable, a suggested best-practice manual for other governments and international organisations wanting to make a difference to states at risk from instability, and an agenda from one part of the British government which the Cabinet Office (or at least the Strategy Unit) hope they can get the other (unnamed) British government actors to buy into. The whole thing is on-line here (PDF).

There’s a lot to like in this report. The author clearly had a good time finding alliterative checklists of conclusions (all emphasis below is in the original text):

“First, a sophisticated understanding of the specifics of a country or region is essential as a basis for effective action.
Second, the scale of engagement needs to increase to ensure that sufficient resources are deployed in priority stability investments.
Third sustained support is needed to ensure that resources committed actually achieve the intended effect.
Fourth, systemic and coherent engagement across different types of actors (military, diplomatic, development, rule of law, etc.) and the international community is necessary.

and, if you can alliterate on the letter “i”,

The first strategic response is investing in stability by building country capacity and resilience.
The second strategic response is aligning incentives of domestic power-brokers with stability.
The third strategic response is to increase international responsibility…
Improving response to crises is the fourth strategic response.

That pretty much summarises the main conclusions, which are partly a wish-list for what the whole international community could do better, but also an agenda for the UK’s presidency of the G8 this year and of the EU from July to December. The one specific and concrete policy innovation suggested is a new “Partnership for Stability” arrangement, between the UK (and its partners) and countries at risk of instability. I was also interested in the concept of a “Special Advocate” for individual cases of countries at risk, though the text seems more to be describing best-practice scenarios of what happens at the moment rather than elaborating the idea for future development and deployment.

There are a number of insights that I found interesting. For instance, along with a table of those countries whose 1998 real per capita income is at levels last reached in 1960 or earlier (13 in Africa, also Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela), the shocking observation that “evidence suggests prolonged economic decline of a decade or more is usually the result of conscious decisions by elite groups”. Another point: having one or two key natural resources is usually a recipe for instability (Botswana is singled out as an exception). Another point: “Ethnic dominance – having one or two large ethnic groups – makes a country more at risk than when there is a greater degree of ethnic diversity.” The likely destabilising effects in the next few years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, of climate change, and of trade reform (especially as regards sugar). The massive shortfall in provision of personnel for international peacekeeping missions. (This last will be no news to , I suspect.) And I found the sections on “aligning incentives of domestic power-brokers” coherent and convincing, once I got past the throat-clearing (though I missed any reference to the role of the intelligence services here or elsewhere).

With all of that, I found a few rather surprising weaknesses. The first is that it has not been adequately proof-read. Occasional sentences – “The EU and NATO have provided strong external stabilising for middle and eastern European countries after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact” – don’t even sound as if they were written by English speakers. (Another example: “In countries at risk of instability, these institutions are of ten [sic] either not able or are [sic] not designed to stop the change process from turning violent.”) One graph which, according to the text, should show that the number of worldwide conflicts has fallen since 1946 clearly demonstrates the opposite.

And I was troubled by specific inaccuracies on the cases that I happen to know something about: a statement strongly implying that all Albanian violence in Kosovo and Macedonia is irredentist in motivation misses most of the picture, as I’ve argued at length elsewhere

1) Broken Angels, by Richard Morgan

Morgan’s second novel about far-future mercenary Takeshi Kovacs, here caught up in a struggle for control of the artifacts of a lost alien race in the middle of an ideological rebellion. The plot is straight out of pulps (as is the extreme violence), but Morgan’s tight and sexy prose keeps you reading. Did I pick up a nod towards Douglas Adams, where Kovacs responds to one of his colleagues telling him they are safe, “Must be a new definition of the word”? Fun stuff, and I’ll get the next in the series.

Just bumped into the head of the EU’s international police unit, walking down Connecticut Avenue.

Thanks, everyone, for your earlier comments.

Three best commentaries on the Pope, from quite different directions: Scots leftie of Hebridean evangelical background links also to famous dissident Catholic theologian has a working journalist’s perspective.

I hope they taped Doctor Who for me back at home.

Missed plane in Brussels. Flying to DC via Frankfurt.

More rubbish from John Laughland in the Guardian today. If Kyrgyz demonstrators say they want their country to be the 51st state of the US, that suggests that they have not been talking to the US Ambassador rather than that they have. And as usual, he totally ignores the real internal factors, such as stealing the elections in a country where people expected better, which led to the fall of the Kyrgyz government. (Though he undermines it slightly by quoting from a US official who claimed to be “promoting democracy” in Belarus in 2001 – yeah, look how effective the sinister external manipulations of the CIA etc have been there!)

The best reflective piece I’ve seen on Kyrgyzstan is from Transitions On Line, and the best blow-by-blow account from IWPR. Of course my own colleagues predicted all this last summer.

Exchange between me and two of my colleagues on a minor point of nomenclature in a draft paper – the current text refers to Zeljko Raznjatovic “Arkan”.