Tuesday, August 01, 2006

"How I Loath These New Manners in Foreign Policy"

Overheard at “the second floor of a little restaurant in Mervyn Street:”

Sandy was furious about the muddle in the Near East and the mishandling of Turkey. His view was that we were doing our best to hammer a much-divided Orient into a hostile unanimity.

“Lord!” he cried, “how I loath these new manners in foreign policy. The old English way was to regard all foreigners as slightly childish and rather idiotic, and ourselves as the only grownups in a kindergarten world. That meant that we had a cool detached view and did even-handed unsympathetic justice. But now we have got into the nursery ourselves and are bear-fighting on the floor.

From John Buchan, The Three Hostages (1924) . The speaker is Sandy Arbuthnot, the author’s companion in adventure. I’ll have more to say about this fascinating novel later.

Fn: apparently the Grumpy Old Bookman found it before I did.

2 comments:

The New York Crank said...
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The New York Crank said...

The ability to make unfixable messes is the sign of a statesman who will leave his mark, however, ugly, on history.

It will take centuries to clean up George Bush's various messes, but Iraq can be fixed quickest, if we act fast.

Before Saddam is taken out and hanged, we must rescue him and pay him tons of money if necessary to take his country back. He seems to be the only one in history who was able to manage the otherwise unmanageable entity (created by other "statesmen") called Iraq