Readers of this blog will be aware that I am no fan of US
Middle East “expert” Dennis Ross, one of those members of the US foreign policy
establishment who migrates between the State Department and the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee and its offshoot and its offshoot the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), one of those people of whom I feel if
you asked the question, “Do you serve the United States or Israel”, they would
not understand the question.
Ross, who is known around Washington as “Israel’s lawyer” has
never made any secret of his feelings towards Israel, so there is nothing
stealthy or furtive about his manoeuvring in support of that country, but this
being the case, the reliance that the Obama Administration, supposedly
dedicated to creating a new relationship with the Muslim world and with Iran in
particular, placed upon him is nothing short of extraordinary.
In March 2009, in Hillary's
envoy: not everyone is cheering, I commented on his bizarre appointment as
Hillary Clinton’s special adviser on Iran, and followed up with a post in May
2009 – Iran:
Hillary’s envoy (contd.) – in which I noted the views of an Orthodox Jew
who had served as US Ambassador to Israel and Egypt, who commented that in
Middle East peace negotiations:
The perception always was that Dennis started from the Israeli bottom
line, that he listened to what Israel wanted and then tried to sell it to the
Arabs.
Further posts
included Dennis
Ross on the move?, noting rumours that he was moving to the White House,
and Making
U.S. Iran policy, an extended analysis of the dysfunctional way in which
the US Administration was approaching Iran, and Dennis Ross’s role in that.
Andrew Sullivan
addressed this theme in March 2010 in a post Dennis
Ross Bats for Netanyahu on The Atlantic’s blog The Daily Dish.
An interesting addition to the dossier was published as an
op-ed piece in Al Jazeera, 23 November 2011, following the announcement that
Ross is leaving his post. Entitled The incomplete
legacy of Dennis Ross, it was contributed by Robert L. Grenier, chairman of ERG Partners, a financial advisory and
consulting firm. Grenier retired from the CIA in 2006, following a 27-year
career in the CIA's Clandestine Service. He served as Director of the CIA
Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) from 2004 to 2006, coordinated CIA activities in
Iraq from 2002 to 2004 as the Iraq Mission Manager, and was the CIA Chief of
Station in Islamabad before and after the 9/11 attacks.
During the Clinton era he was the
deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia, and saw
at first hand how Ross exercised his undoubted influence to undermine rather
than strengthen efforts to create a durable peace following the signature of
the Oslo accords.
Grenier’s summary assessment of
Ross’s contribution over his time in US Government is:
During his eight years as chief architect of the peace process under
Bill Clinton, Dennis was not so much a cause as a symptom of the deep,
disqualifying political dysfunction at the heart of US policymaking in the
Middle East. Without the dysfunction, you would not have had a Ross to exploit
it.
And now, we are told, Dennis is leaving, after nearly three years in
the Obama administration. His increasing prominence over those three years is a
mark and a measure of Obama's growing disappointment and failure. For an
administration which started with such elevated goals in the Middle East, it
has come to this: Instead of engaging Iran constructively, as it had hoped, it
has devolved instead to a sterile, sanctions-based stalemate, with scant
international support, strongly shaped by Ross, who advocates an Israel-centric
posture against the Islamic Republic. And instead of exerting judicious
pressure on both Israel and the Palestinians to achieve the two-state
breakthrough which US interests would dictate, Obama has had to cave instead to
the overwhelming political influence of Binyamin Netanyahu, and has looked to Ross
as his shield against a pro-Israel lobby which would otherwise turn against
him, and may yet do so.
The problem is, as Grenier puts it:
In his many years of successful advocacy, he has precisely mirrored
both the strengths and weaknesses of his client, and therefore must be assessed
as having represented his client badly: Like the Israelis, he is a brilliant
tactician and a strategic ignoramus. A better advocate might have saved his
client from himself. Instead, Dennis' many years of successful temporising have
helped to bring Israel to the point where a two-state solution is no longer
possible. Thanks in some measure to Dennis' efforts, Israel in future can be
Jewish, or it can be democratic: It cannot be both. Having served Israel to the
point of helping to destroy Zionism: That is the very definition of
catastrophic success.
In an interview with Lyndal Curtis on ABC NEWS 24 on 22
November 2011 (see here)
Defence Minister Stephen Smith commented on the need for Defence to contribute
to the savings necessary for the government to bring the budget back to
surplus:
LYNDAL CURTIS: If there are savings found in Defence will there be real
savings or delaying spending? And could, if there is a delay in spending, could
that create a capability gap?
STEPHEN SMITH: Well two things. Firstly, again I won’t get into the
detail; people should wait until my MYEFO comes out or, in some respects
more importantly, wait until the budget comes out next year before descending
into the detail.
But in terms of capability as we know because you’re dealing with a big
capability program and you’ve essentially got a capability plan which covers a
span of a decade or more, there’s always movement, there’s always moving
around. We’ve seen that in the past and there are no surprises there. And that
always occurs not just under this Government but under previous Governments – I
suspect it always will. What we don’t want to do is to do things that have an
adverse impact on capability or on operations and I’ve consistently made it
clear as Minister that if Defence does make a contribution to a general budget
outcomes then that will not in any way adversely impact upon our operations.
Firstly whether that’s Afghanistan, Solomon Islands or East Timor and secondly,
we are always very conscious about capability; but there’s always movement on
the capability front either as a result of action by industry or as a result of
technical or other difficulties. There’s always movement at that station.
The Minister’s assurance that the savings will not have an adverse
impact on operations is entirely appropriate and in the short run at least is
entirely achievable, but that is only part of the story:
(1) The corollary of the protection of
expenditure required for operations is that the savings will come from a
mixture of the capital equipment program and the budget for through life
support (maintenance) of valuable, complex equipment, both of which are an
essential part of capability. This has
an inevitable consequence for future operations and the military response
options available to future governments.
(2) As the Minister reminded us earlier in the
interview:
In the course of the last budget, Defence effectively made a contribution
of about four billion dollars over five years to help return the Government to
surplus and that was as a result of more effective work we were able to do
under our Strategic Reform Program.
(3) The savings garnered under the Strategic
Reform Program were to have funded the very ambitious re-equipment of the
Australian Defence Force outlined in the 2009 Defence White Paper, but as the
Minister’s remarks make clear, they have instead been harvested as savings.
(4) …The
notion that savings merely “delay” defence expenditure (“slip everything to the
right”) is a spurious one – in plain English, any savings represent a reduction
in expenditure. In last year’s Budget
Defence had its budget reduced by an average of $800 million per annum for five
years. That sounds like real money to
me.
(5) Those
savings and the prospect of more in the next Budget make a mockery of the “certainty”
that the Rudd Government gave to Defence, in the context of the White Paper, that
the Defence budget would increase in real terms by 3.3% until 2018 and 2.3%
after that.
Some over-arching comments about the state of the Defence
re-equipment program:
(2) Even if they were, nowhere does the Defence
White Paper demonstrate that the combination of the $20 billion in savings plus
the then projected growth of the Defence budget would be sufficient to cover
the cost of the ambitious re-equipment program, let alone the increase in
through-life support and personnel costs for an expanded and modernised defence
force.
(3) The reductions in Defence outlays only
serve to take the re-equipment program even further from being achievable.
(4) Delays in decision-making at the National
Security Committee of Cabinet are further compromising the program. To take just one example, as I remarked
almost two years ago in Future
submarine: no time to waste, the Government was even then bumping up
against some severe timelines if it wishes to bring a replacement submarine
into service in 2025. In order to do
that we would need to be undergoing sea trials in 2022, and working back from
there we would need to be cutting metal in 2016. That is no longer achievable, so the delays
have already committed the Australian public and a future Australian Government
to a multi-billion dollar refit of the Collins class submarines, in order to
enable us to maintain a submarine capability at all – and that will be a 1990s
submarine operating in the demanding environment of the 2020s. These delays have real consequences.
I think we have arrived at the stage where we need to go
back to the drawing board on the Defence White Paper and re-define what it is
that we want the Australian Defence Force to do, what capabilities it will need
in order to perform its allotted tasks, and what funds Government is prepared
to commit to that end. Above all, the stated requirements must be backed up by
the necessary resources, or they are just words on paper.
The announcement by the Prime Minister that she intends at
the forthcoming ALP National Conference to seek a change in the Party’s
Platform to permit the export of uranium to India is of concern on three
grounds: the content of the policy change; the apparent failure to extract
anything in return for what is by any measure a major policy shift; and the
extraordinary decision-making process by which this change is to be brought
about.
The change has been presented publicly as little more than
an administrative matter designed to correct an anomaly in our current export
policy.The narrative runs that the
policy discriminates against India because we are prepared to export uranium to
China, a nuclear weapon state, but not to India for peaceful use. This is
arrant nonsense.
Australia’s uranium export policy was established in the
late 1970s following an extensive public inquiry (the Ranger Uranium
Environmental Inquiry 1976-77) chaired by Justice Russell Fox.The policy was a product both of Australia’s
strong commitment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which had
entered into force in 1970, and to the finely balanced set of recommendations
produced by Justice Fox to garner the widest possible consent to the mining and
export of uranium within an area of extraordinary environmental value,
inhabited by indigenous people living a traditional lifestyle.
Under the framework set forth by Fox, mining would be able
to proceed under a strict regulatory regime, with strong environmental
monitoring and research, the Kakadu National Park would be established, and
Aboriginal title would be granted over a number of areas of land in the region,
including the Ranger Project Area.
This was a package deal, and the Fraser Government wisely
decided not to tamper with it.
On the question of exports of uranium, the Fox Report
recommended:
No
sales of Australian uranium should take place to any country not party to the
NPT. Export should be subject to the fullest and most effective safeguards
agreements, and be supported by fully adequate back-up agreements applying to
the entire civil nuclear industry in the country supplied. Australia should
work towards the adoption of this policy by other suppliers.
This has remained the basis of Australian policy to the
present day.It is an approach that has
had the advantage not only of supporting the NPT (and hence our own
non-proliferation objectives) by making access to the world’s largest supply of
low cost uranium available only to parties to the NPT, but also of enabling us
to use the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)’s safeguards and
inspection regime as our primary worldwide infrastructure for verification of
the appropriate handling of “Australian Obligated Nuclear Material” (AONM).
In implementing Fox’s recommendations the Fraser Government
went beyond simply requiring states wanting to purchase Australian uranium to
be parties to the NPT.They were
required to enter into a bilateral safeguards agreement which required, inter
alia, that in relation to all AONM the importing party would seek Australia’s
prior written consent to transferring the material to any third party,
enriching it beyond 20% U-235, and reprocessing it.This has remained the policy to the present
day, and the April 2006 agreement between Australia and China embodies those
principles.
India is not a party to the NPT, has never been, has
developed a nuclear weapons capability as a non-member of the Treaty, and
accordingly, is in an entirely different position from China vis a vis
Australian uranium export policy.
As part of a deal to enable India to gain access to US and
other nuclear technologies, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and then President
George W. Bush issued a joint statement in July 2005 to the effect that India
would separate its civil and military nuclear activities and place all its
civil facilities under IAEA safeguards, in return for which the United States
would work toward full civil nuclear cooperation with India.An IAEA Safeguards agreement was signed in
2008, and India was granted an exemption by the Nuclear Suppliers Group, an
export control group that had been established mainly in response to India’s
first nuclear test in 1974.
The IAEA Safeguards Agreement with India is not without its
critics.Daryl G. Kimball, Executive
Director of the Washington based Arms Control Association notes that:
The agreement is based on the IAEA's facility-specific safeguards (INFCIRC 66 Rev. 2 ) but contains a number of
"India-specific" modifications that raise serious questions about the
meaning and legal requirements established by the agreement, particularly as
they affect its entry into force and the conditions under which safeguards may
be terminated on facilities and materials subject to the agreement.
He goes on to say that the agreement contains important
ambiguities because there does not appear to be common understanding between
the Government of India and the IAEA Board regarding three critical areas:
whether or not India can withdraw facilities from the agreement in certain
circumstances, i.e., whether material and facilities once placed under
safeguards must remain there in perpetuity; the absence of a declaration
stating the facilities, items and materials that India is intending to place
under safeguards, and the status of material subject to safeguards under
previous agreements.The full analysis
of the Agreement by Kimball et. al.
may be accessed here.
As a consequence of these changes India is now in the
privileged position of being the only known country with nuclear weapons which
is not a party to the NPT but is permitted to carry on nuclear commerce with
the rest of the world.The
discrimination is in India’s favour, not against it.
It may be that this change in India’s circumstances warrants
a review of Australian policy, but that is by no means clear.An equally tenable position for Australia
would have been to state that for over 30 years Australia has had a policy that
it will not export uranium to countries that are not parties to the NPT and
that is not going to change.
Certainly granting India this favoured status has served no
discernible non-proliferation objective, and one of the questions which ought
to be addressed by Australia is whether any benefits to our non-proliferation
objectives can be secured as a quid pro
quo for a modification of our longstanding policy.Perhaps not, but the question ought to be
calmly and systematically addressed, and used as part of the bargaining
process.
Unfortunately, what we have seen here is yet another example
of the Prime Minister’s penchant for making announcements first and entering
into the negotiations later.We saw a
classic example of this in relation to the “Malaysia Solution” for the offshore
processing of asylum seekers, and one would have hoped that the lesson would
have been learned by now.One of the
essential criteria for success in any government to government negotiation (as
in most other negotiations) is to have time on your side. It is of fundamental
importance to be able to communicate to the other side that you are not in a
hurry regarding the matter in question. Once the other side knows you are in a
time bind, they have only to wait you out. So once the Government has made an
announcement on any matter that it is going to negotiate a with another country
a “solution” to what is presented to the Australian public as some kind of a
problem for us, the other side knows that the Government looks and feels
sillier with every passing day that an agreement is not in place and it is just
a matter of time for the prize to fall into their hands on the most favourable
possible terms.The Gillard Government
is not unique in this respect. John Howard made it clear that he was so anxious
to have a Free Trade Agreement (sic.) with the United States that our great
ally knew it would not have to give much away.
As for the process by which this momentous change is to be
brought about, it is so extraordinary that you couldn’t make it up.
Julia Gillard is the Prime Minister of Australia.As such, she leads the Executive Government,
sets the Cabinet agenda and chairs, leads and controls its deliberations.She has commenced the process of changing
Australian uranium export policy by announcing to the Australian public, and
then telling the Prime Minister of India face to face, not that Cabinet, after
due consideration, has made a decision on this matter, but that she has decided
to go to her party’s forthcoming national conference and seek a change in the
party’s platform.
This approach apparently sets aside the requirement to consult
colleagues or seek advice from officials beyond her own immediate circle.It has become a matter of public record that
she did not consult the Foreign Minister, the Minister principally responsible
for Australian nuclear safeguards policy, indeed all matters relating to
non-proliferation, arms control and disarmament.She is quoted in the 20 November edition of The Sunday Age (see here)
as defending her decision not to consult the Foreign Minister on the basis that
“It’s a leader’s decision, and I made it”.
Surely the more appropriate sequence would have been to have
the Cabinet discussion first, and make a fully informed decision as to whether
or not a change in the policy is desirable, and what its ramifications are, then
take the matter to the party if needs be, armed with the support of a properly
considered Cabinet decision.
When it suits her, the Prime Minister ignores the party
platform – vide her steadfast refusal to contemplate abandoning the “Malaysia
Solution” and implementing that part of the platform which commits the party to
onshore processing of asylum seekers.And when it suits her, she invokes the Departmental “experts” as the
last word in authoritative policy-making (same issue – the “Malaysia Solution).
So why the rush to judgement on this one, why the need to
change the platform before the due process of governmental deliberations has taken
place, and once she has made an exception for India, what is she going to say
to our allies in Pakistan and her dear friends in Israel?
Note: This item
was first posted on the ABC’s The Drum website
on 21 November 2011. Access it and 136 comments here).
Bio
note: As Deputy Secretary in the Department of Trade
and Resources in the late 1970s I was directly involved in the Fraser
Government’s consideration of the recommendations of the Ranger Uranium
Environmental Inquiry, and in the negotiation of several bilateral safeguards
agreements.
The Iranian nuclear program is back in the news, with the
media publishing a restricted report to his Board of Governors by the
Director-General of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, on the subject
of the implementation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Safeguards
Agreement with Iran, and the compliance of that country with relevant UN
Security Council resolutions (see full report here).
As predictably as death and taxes the news has been
accompanied by Israel indicating that it is considering a pre-emptive military
strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and demands from the United States for
tighter sanctions.
This report has received more than usual attention on this
occasion because the IAEA has crossed a kind of nuclear threshold of its own,
coming explicitly to the conclusion, for the first time that I am aware of,
that there are aspects of the Iranian program that are only relevant to the
development of a nuclear explosive device, and stating in its concluding
summary:
53. The Agency has serious
concerns regarding possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear
programme. After assessing carefully and
critically the extensive information available to it, the Agency finds the
information to be, overall, credible.
The information indicates that Iran has carried out activities relevant
to the development of a nuclear explosive device. The information also
indicates that prior to the end of 2003, these activities took place under a
structured program, and that some activities may be still ongoing
Decoding that paragraph just a little, the IAEA feels it has
a good picture of a structured program relevant to the development of a nuclear
weapons capability prior to the end of 2003, but is not sure what the Iranians
are up to now. This does not tell us
much that is new. A 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate stated (see here) as the first of its
“Key Judgements”:
We judge with high confidence
that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; we also assess
with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the
option to develop nuclear weapons.
The incoming Obama Administration was briefed in similar
vein by US intelligence agencies in 2009.
This leaves us with many questions to be addressed. Does
Iran have a “legitimate” reason for a nuclear electricity program, and if it
does, why is it so insistent on developing its own enrichment capability and
facilities? Why does it have undeclared
sites that come to light from time to time, and why are so many of these
facilities, ostensibly for peaceful purposes, buried deep underground? Is Iran developing a bomb, and if so, how
worried should we be, and should we try to do something about it?
Many have for a long time drawn dark conclusions from
Iranian insistence on having the full suite of nuclear fuel cycle capabilities
in-country. This insistence is in fact
of little evidentiary value concerning the peacefulness or otherwise of Iran’s
nuclear intentions, because Iran’s experience in this field would provide
adequate justification for full independence for a purely civil program – which
independence is the treaty right of all members of the NPT.
The history of the Iranian nuclear program dates back to the
days of the Shah. In 1978 I was involved
in negotiating a nuclear safeguards agreement to cover the intended supply of
Australian uranium, visited Tehran, and was given a site tour of the power
station which had been under construction at Bushehr since 1975 by the German
company Kraftwerk Union AG – the same plant that was finally completed by the
Russians and began feeding power into the Iranian grid in September of this
year (not much sense of urgency there!).
The Shah saw a nuclear power program as an alternative to burning the
nation’s valuable petroleum resources, a sign that Iran was at the first rank
of technological capability and hence a source of international prestige, and
in all probability, the source of a nuclear weapons option – all views that in
time came to be adopted by his Islamic Revolutionary successors.
In light of its historical experiences Iran’s attitude to
any proposal for dealing with its emerging nuclear technological capability
will be governed by three headline considerations:
(1) Iran will not agree to any proposal which
accords to it a status that is inferior to that of other nations. As is the
case with China, Iran regards itself as the heir to one of the world’s great
civilisations, and is a country which was very much put upon by the West at a
time when it was militarily weak. Over the last century or so it has known
foreign military occupation (Britain and Russia), resource theft (the
Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, now known as BP), intervention in its internal
affairs (the 1953 overthrow by the CIA of the Mossadeq government), military
invasion (Iraq, assisted in a variety of ways by the United States), and of
course economic and financial sanctions (ongoing). Accordingly, it will not
settle for any arrangement which it regards as humiliating, even if there are
costs in rejecting what might look like an attractive deal.
(2) Iran lives under the constant threat of attack
by Israel and will not do anything to limit the development of its military
response options. I believe for a variety of reasons that Iran has not yet made
a decision to move to a military nuclear capability, and is unlikely to do so
if it feels it can avoid it, but the ambiguity about the extent of its nuclear
capability is part of its deterrence strategy.
(3) Iran has absolutely no reason to trust the
West on this matter. In 1974, during the Shah’s time, Iran lent $US 1 billion
to the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) to build its Eurodif enrichment
facility, and acquired a 10 per cent indirect interest in Eurodif through the
Franco-Iranian company Sofidif – a stake that still exists. Iran paid another
$180 million for future enrichment services to fuel its nuclear power plants.
After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Khomeini regime
cancelled the Shah’s nuclear program and sought refund of this investment.
There followed a decade of bitter litigation, as a result of which Iran was
reimbursed a total of $1.6 billion for its 1974 loan plus interest. It remains
an indirect shareholder in Sofidif, but under the 1991 agreement which settled
the litigation it has no access to technology and no right to take enriched
uranium. It has the shareholder’s right to dividends, but financial sanctions
against Iran mean that it cannot even receive these dividends.
Iran also has a 15% stake in the Rössing uranium mine in
Namibia, the world’s third largest uranium mine, of which the main other owners
are Rio Tinto (68%) and the Government of Namibia (10%). There are two Iranian Directors, Messrs S.N.
Ashrafizade and A.V. Kalantari, but Iran does not have contracts for the
purchase of uranium. It is ironic that a company partly owned by Iran, and which
sells uranium to the United States, cannot sell uranium to Iran.
So a country which has for thirty years had a stake in one
of the world’s largest uranium mines and in a uranium enrichment plant, but has
seen those stakes effectively frozen all that time, is being asked to believe
that it can “trust us” to look after its civil nuclear power needs. Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has referred explicitly to this situation in various
public comments.
The development of nuclear weapons capability by Iran or any
other country can hardly be viewed as a positive development, but it is not an
occasion for the international hysteria that Israel and its US partisans
constantly attempt to drum up. Since the
early 1990s, when Israel started to run out of the sorts of threats that would
enable it to engage Washington’s attention in a convincing manner, we have been
hearing about how Iran is an ‘existential threat’ to Israel.
There are two elements to this preposterous claim:
- An Iranian
nuclear weapons capability is just around the corner, perhaps only months away
- Iran is
run by mad mullahs, irrational and unpredictable people who could do anything,
and who therefore could not be entrusted with nuclear weapons.
Regarding the first element, in 1992 Benyamin Netanyahu told
the Knesset that Iran was 3-5 years away from being able to produce a nuclear
weapon, and on the other side of the political fence, Shimon Peres told French
TV that Iran would have nuclear warheads
by 1999. The Christian Science Monitor recently published a timeline of the
“breathless predictions that the Islamic Republic will soon be at the brink of
nuclear capability” going back to 1979. The
fact that Iran has been “on the brink” of a nuclear capability for almost two
decades speaks to the credibility of that argument.
As for the notion that Iran is run by “mad mullahs”, the
fact is that the Iranian leadership has been quite rational and cautious in the
conduct of its foreign and military policies, and can be expected to continue
to be so.
On the subject of the supposed “existential threat”, no less
an authority than Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak has said
I am not among those who believe Iran is an existential issue for
Israel. Israel is strong, I don't see anyone who could pose an existential
threat.
Before he left office in 2008, former Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert said:
Part of our megalomania and our loss of proportion is the things that
are said here about Iran. We are a country that has lost a sense of proportion
about itself.
Whether anything should be done about Iran’s nuclear
activities, that is partly a function of how serious the threat is, and partly
a function of what the options are.
There are only two options for direct action: sanctions and air strikes
against the Iranian nuclear facilities.
While restrictions on sale of relevant equipment and
technologies make some sense, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has
something else in mind: the “crippling sanctions” that she calls for from time
to time.
This
is a seriously dumb idea, for too many reasons to enumerate here, but here are
some of the main ones:
- It is highly unlikely that the United
States will get sufficient support for such sanctions to gain agreement to
their imposition.
- Even if sanctions are agreed, they
will be almost impossible to enforce – Iran has land borders with too many
countries, plus coastlines on the Gulf, the Arabian Sea and the Caspian Sea. It
is altogether too porous.
- Enforcing sanctions would almost
certainly require patrolling of Iran’s offshore waters, with a high risk of
confrontation and military escalation.
- The sanctions regime would cause all
kinds of grief for the oil companies that need to do business in Iran in order
to supply the West with crude oil.
- Iran demonstrated during the
Iran-Iraq war an immense capacity to endure suffering. It is unlikely to buckle
under any sort of sanctions regime that the West would be prepared to
establish.
- Also, this is a society that is proud
of its long history and possessed of great self-respect – the sort of
self-respect that led Britain to resolve to fight on in the dark days after
Dunkirk; in its own mind there was no alternative, no real question to be
addressed. Iran will not buckle under external economic pressure.
- As explained in my 2009 blog piece Choke
point: the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has the option of retaliating by closing
the Strait of Hormuz. The United States would have to respond, and the ensuing
confrontation would pose a high risk of spiralling out of control.
Aside
from all of the above, there is the morality of imposing “crippling sanctions”
against anyone. As the sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s regime demonstrated,
general economic sanctions (as distinct from export controls on particular
items of military significance) hit hardest the most vulnerable in society –
infants, young children, the ill and the elderly. They do so by reducing access
to electricity, clean water, safe food, emergency transport, spare parts for
imported equipment upon which life or safety depend. Iran’s very poor air safety
record is in part a product of the unavailability of aircraft spares under the
existing sanctions. If the proposed “crippling sanctions” are introduced, the
scarce available supplies of liquid fuels will be reserved for what the regime
considers to be their highest and best use – the uses of the regime itself and
of the Iranian military. For everyone else, life will be just that much
tougher. In a country of 66 million, a 1% impact on whether any given person
will live or die in the next twelve months amounts, across the population as a
whole, to 660,000 avoidable deaths per annum. Sanctions are not a peaceful or
low-harm way of going to war.
As for the pre-emptive strike option, that is dumber
still. Iran has nuclear facilities
scattered across a country the size of Queensland, some of them deep
underground and/or defended by Russian surface to air missiles. Mounting the necessary air raids would be a
stretch for the Israeli Air Force, and afterwards the IAF could never be sure
whether the known facilities had been destroyed or whether there were
alternative unknown facilities that had not even been attacked. And anyone who thinks that the only possible
consequence of an Israeli attack on Iran would be retaliation by Hezbollah from
the Lebanon is dreaming.
There are some things in life that one just has to learn to
live with, and I think an Iranian nuclear capability, if Iran chooses to go
that way, is one of them.
Note: This item
was first posted on the ABC’s The Drum website
on 14 November 2011. Access it and 298 comments here).
An article in the 25 October 2011 edition of The Age (see Ombudsman
blasts child protection) cites a “scathing” recent Victorian Ombudsman’s
report as saying that managers in Victoria's child protection system failed to
investigate reports of children at risk so they could meet numerical targets.
Acting Victorian Ombudsman John Taylor said his investigations
into the Department of Human Services child protection program in the Loddon
Mallee region revealed serious and significant failures to provide safety and
wellbeing to the state's most vulnerable children.
In his report tabled in the Victorian Parliament on 25
October Taylor said the failures were caused by deliberate policy decisions of
certain managers to reduce the number of child protection reports investigated:
I consider the failure to investigate these reports to be a consequence
of an intentional policy decision by the Bendigo office of the Loddon Mallee
Region of the department to reduce the number of child protection reports that
it investigates.
Despite receiving more reports in 2010-11 than the previous year, the
region conducted less than three quarters of the number of investigations.
I believe a practice has developed where the drive to meet numerical
targets has overshadowed the interest of children despite evidence that they
may be at risk.
The managers deny this, however, I consider that the evidence speaks
for itself.
It is not the first time – indeed, the article says that it
is the fourth Ombudsman's report in two years raising serious concerns about
the performance of Victoria's child protection system. Almost two years ago we
saw Child
protection workers fudging figures: report in the 26 November 2009 edition
of The Age, which begins:
A scathing Ombudsman's report has identified gross deficiencies in
Victoria's child protection service, with workers manipulating figures to cover
up children neglected by the system.
This report was never released to
the public but the then Brumby Government’s Community Services Minister Lisa
Neville said that each of the Ombudsman’s 42 recommendations would be implemented.
If they were, not much seems to have changed.
At a superficial level reports
like this raise the question of what is wrong with the relevant agency, but at
a deeper, more fundamental level they raise the question of whether the
importation into public service of business practices like giving agencies and
individual officers numerical targets (“Key Performance Indicators” – KPIs) is
appropriate to the public policy and service delivery purposes for which public
sector agencies are created.
Key Performance Indicators are a
product of the business maxim, “What gets measured gets done”, which in itself
is a warning to those responsible for leading our public sector agencies, for
the corollary is that what doesn’t get measured doesn’t get done. KPIs tell
staff in no uncertain terms that when it comes to the crunch, certain things
matter and nothing else does. Messages
like that are barely appropriate in business. They have no place in the public
sector.
KPIs work best when the required
results are simple and easy to specify. It is easy to set KPIs for the
distributor of a standardised manufactured retail item like, say, soft drinks
or breakfast cereal, which might specify for example that the goods must be
delivered to a retailer within a specified time of the order being placed, that
the consignments must be accurately made up, that there must be no breakages or
spillages, and perhaps that the quantity or value of goods sold in a particular
distribution zone should increase by a certain percentage over the previous
year.
The Soviet Union discovered a long
time ago that even in as standardised a process as the manufacture of everyday
items, the specification of required outputs requires great care. If you tell a
manager to produce two tonnes of nails you will get two tonnes of 6 inch nails
because they are easier to produce. If
you tell them to produce 10,000 nails you will get 10,000 panel pins, because
they will require less metal.
When it comes to the delivery of
complex services, these Victorian Ombudsman’s reports scream out the message
that KPIs break down completely. They are simply inappropriate to measuring the
performance of complex tasks. What
should be a high resolution colour photograph of a complex job, with all its
nuances and subtleties, gets reduced to six or eight data points.
KPIs are also an open invitation
to game the system. Tell a manager that
what is required for performance pay or for promotion is to meet certain
numerical targets and they will be met, by a combination of concentrating on
the easier cases and fudging the figures. There is money and position at stake,
and people will duck, weave, dissemble and tell outright lies in order to
establish that they have met their KPIs.
“Follow the money trail” is as reliable a guide to human behaviour here
as elsewhere.
The result is that in an
environment infected by KPIs managers at every level will have less knowledge
of what is really going on than they otherwise would, and that in itself
compromises organisational effectiveness.
To understand what is required to manage and measure
performance in a large hierarchical organisation it is necessary to recognise three
key principles.
The first is that a “manager” is by definition a person who
is accountable for the performance of others. In the course of delivering on
that accountability managers at every level are responsible for advising people
of their duties and giving them the authority to act, ensuring that they receive
adequate training to carry out their responsibilities, coaching them in the
finer points, deciding what needs to be done and what doesn’t, allocating tasks
to people who are equipped to carry them out, and allocating the necessary
resources.
Recognise that central hierarchical accountability point and
you are well on the way to understanding how a public service department in a
Westminster system (and indeed any well run large organisation) is meant to
work. The Department Secretary is accountable to the Minister for the
performance of the Department as a whole. In turn, the Division Heads are
accountable to the Secretary for the performance of their Divisions, the Branch
Heads are accountable to the Division Heads for the performance of their
Branches and so on. In a very real sense only the individuals at each level and
their immediate supervisors have a full understanding of what the work in their
local workplace is: what the current and emerging issues are, the workload
pressures, how easy or difficult the people with whom they must interact are, and
the priorities determined in the light of guidance from above.
There is not space to develop this line of thinking fully
here, but what emerges from it is that the only KPI that has any meaning is
that individuals at each level, whether they be managers or front-line staff,
perform to the satisfaction of their immediate supervisor. Supervisors being by definition responsible
and accountable for the work of everyone below them, it matters not to people
further up the line how the work gets
done or who does it; what matters is whether
it gets done, and to what quality.
The second is that performance at any level – the
performance of managers and the performance of individuals – can only reasonably
be measured in the light of the resources made available, a fact which is
notoriously lost from sight when meeting KPIs is the order of the day. It is not under-performance for an individual
to be unable to carry out a task, or a series of tasks, or a volume of tasks,
for which they have not been given the necessary resources, the necessary
guidance or the necessary training. The November 2009 Ombudsman’s Report blamed
lack of resources for poor service quality and said the failures it reported
were not a reflection on the staff.
Child Safety Commissioner Bernie Geary said that the report reflected an
overwhelmed department where beleaguered workers were often vilified for
shortfalls in the system. No doubt they
are both correct. Governments are notorious for under-resourcing functions that
they see as necessary but politically unglamorous, and then blaming the hapless
staff and/or senior management when things go wrong.
The third essential principle is that senior people in any
large organisation are paid to make judgements, and the performance of staff is
quintessentially a matter for judgement, not something that can be reduced to a
series of numbers that would enable a chimpanzee to assess performance. Priorities change, resources that were meant
to be available are delayed or unavailable, things beyond the control of the
individual go wrong, other matters intervene.
Only someone in a position to observe closely – the immediate supervisor
– can make a fully informed judgement about the performance of a subordinate
unit or an individual, and making those judgements is a key part of their job.
Consequent upon this, another key responsibility of
organisational leadership is to speak truth to power – to advise people up the
command chain what resources are required in order to carry out the unit’s
functions to an acceptable standard, and not allow themselves to be fobbed off
with bromides about having to learn “to do more with less”. Everyone should be striving to improve their
personal effectiveness and that of their organisations, but there are limits to
what any one human being can do.
So I say it is time to throw the whole silly business of
public sector KPIs overboard. Statistics can inform management decisions but should
not be allowed to substitute for them.
It is time to get back to the holding our politicians accountable for
providing their agencies with the resources they need to carry out what is
expected of them, for appointing mangers who have the skills and the authority
to lead the organisation and ensure that it delivers, and holding those
authorised managers accountable for their performance.
In conclusion it is worth noting that, aside from the
business of giving everyone Stakhanovite KPIs, I fear we have learned another
bad habit from the deservedly defunct Soviet Union – the selective enforcement
of requirements, to the disadvantage of those who are out of favour. When the Soviet Union began to become
sensitive to international criticism of its nasty habit of locking up
dissidents, it for the most part ceased locking them up for their dissident
behaviour but pinged them for the sorts of economic sins that were endemic,
part of making life tolerable in the centrally planned economy – crimes like
acquiring a bit of foreign currency to buy small consumer items like jeans and
Beatles records, or paying someone to give you their place on the waiting list
for a fridge, a television set or a car. There were no political prisoners
anymore, only people who had violated the foreign currency or other economic
regulations.
KPIs are a marvellous vehicle for selective enforcement, a
marvellous cover for favouritism or covert discrimination. It is so easy to be understanding about all
the extenuating circumstances that explain why the chosen ones didn’t meet
their KPIs, but the advancement of those who are not favoured is easily
explained – “they didn’t meet their KPIs”.
If you disagree with the above analysis, ask yourself
whether you think that a quarter of a century of managerialism in our public
sector has improved the quality of policy making or service delivery. I do not think so.
Note: A slightly shorter version of this piece was
posted on the ABC’s The Drum on 3
November 2011 (see here).
