Nations will be made of ink

Joseph De Maistre said that nations are not made of ink. In the future they will be. Made of values, anyway, which come to the same thing.

At the moment, European countries are ethnic states, made of blood and history, even where the bloodlines are partly fictitious. Renan, we recall, defined a nation as a group of

Email from the Englishman in Damascus

Joe, the Englishman who lived twelve years in Damascus, sent me these comments, which he says are quick and garbled, on yesterday's post about him.

Since the regime is essentially Alawite and one of the smallest minorities in the country they have looked after the other minorities with exception of the Kurds to act as a barrier to the Sunni majority. There has never been much in the way of sectarian disputes other than resentment of Alawites unfairly promoted to positions of power. If you look at the history of Syria, and remember Damascus is the oldest city in the world, the various faiths have happily lived side by side, so the last forty years of the Assad domination is only blip. Damascus old city is divided amongst all faiths including Jews and

I was in Syria in 2007

I was in Syria in 2007 and this is what I saw. 

I was also in Beirut last October. I had a couple of interesting conversations. My taxi driver warned me the migrants in Europe were thieves and bad people (this was seven weeks before Cologne) and a man who knew Assad told me he is "useless, completely useless, a really poor quality person". I wrote about it here.

What is really going on in Northern Syria

This is a link to two exceptionally important interviews, one with Peter Oborne, an unusually fair-minded journalist with no axe to grind, whom I know and trust, and one with the very knowledgeable Alastair Crooke, an ex-MI6 man who then became Middle East adviser to Javier Solana. The story they tell is very much at odds with the interpretation of the war you read in the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian and the Washington Post and hear on the BBC. There is no doubt that the Syrian forces have committed absolutely terrible atrocities, but the rebels have done the same.

The next step in the war will probably be a race between the Russo-Syrian forces and the

Former MI6 man says 'The Syria War Will Not Be a Quagmire -- Because Putin and Assad Are Winning'

I recommend you click on this very interesting article by Alastair Crooke in the Huffington Post about the sudden recent successes of the Russians in Aleppo, which he thinks mean victory for the government is imminent.  Alastair Crooke used to work for M16, writes regularly for the Guardian and was Middle East adviser to Javier Solana, the EU's High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy, from 1997 to 2003.

Points from the article include:

If government forces, moving north, can make friendly contact with the Kurds in the northeast, almost all Nusra and allied rebel forces would be nearly surrounded. The insurgents would be caught in a cauldron with their backs to a lightly populated and forested territory.


The ISIS-controlled corridor, especially the Jarablus border crossing with Turkey, remains effectively open. Turkey has proclaimed this represents its "red line." Were this corridor to be closed by the Syrian Kurds, the Turks have indicated they could respond by invading Syria. The YPG say nonetheless, that they are contemplating just such a move.

...Syria seems to be heading not towards a "quagmire" as many western politicians have suggested, but rather to a clear military outcome. As one

Sun Tzu in his Art of War explains the crisis in the Western world today

"If you know your enemy and you know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself you will succumb in every battle."

Whatever one thinks of him, Trump is a genius

I was arguing with a Romanian friend (Romanians are often tremendous intellectual snobs) who insisted that Donald Trump, Sarah Palin and George W Bush were all too stupid to be president.

About Sarah there is no question. But not about the others.

Stupid people do not do what Trump has done, destroy the Bush dynasty, outsmart the Republican party and runs rings round every other politician. He is a born natural for politics. Think Tony Blair in England, Ion Iliescu in Romania.  Of course, it's intuitive with Trump, as with Berlusconi, Blair and Putin. Hitler too, I suppose, and probably Pericles. All great politicians and artists are intuitive.

I long considered Putin a stupid man in many ways, a poor strategist but a very good tactician. (I remember an English friend of mine, who lived in Russia, telling me 'Russians

Peter Tweedie on the Colectiv disaster

I was sorry to hear last week that Peter Tweedie has died, aged 68, though I didn't know him. I think I met him three times and not since the turn of the century. He brought Rigips, the construction materials company, to Romania and thereby gave birth to a word for a partition that has entered the Romanian language.

I regret not having known him. He was one of the few foreigners who came to Romania before the revolution and they are always more interesting to me than the ones who came