At Least They're Not Talking.

Some problems have no solution.

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I don’t follow the traditional media’s coverage of the war in Ukraine very much—I leave that to those with stronger stomachs—but it’s impossible to ignore the two mixed and confused messages they broadcast about the chances of ending that war more-or-less peacefully. On the one hand, “talking to Putin” should be a capital crime, and any move suggesting that the West does so is a form of treason. On the other, newer and better wonder-weapons must be sent to Ukraine to “force Putin to the negotiating table.”

I’m not going to try to reconcile these messages, because I don’t think it’s possible, and anyway it would be a a waste of effort. Rather, I’m going to treat them both—and other things I’ll discuss as well—as examples of the fundamental incoherence, narcissism and superficiality of thinking and expression which typifies today’s Professional and Managerial Caste, (PMC) including political leaders and those who advise them and write about them. Let’s deal with that first, and then we’ll get back to Ukraine and some other places.

In general, ruling classes in history have had their own ideology. Often, it was an ideology of self-preservation and self-justification, based on a conviction of fitness or entitlement to rule, and sometimes supported by religious doctrine. So King Abdullah II of Jordan’s legitimacy, like that of his forty ancestors, is based on being the direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammed and of course Islam has provided the ideology. In more recent times, as Natural Rulers went increasingly out of fashion, ideology as properly understood replaced divine or customary sanction, not just as a sign of legitimacy, but as a common source of values, a point of reference and a guide to behaviour for the ruling class as a whole. Obvious examples include the Revolutionary/Republican tradition in France, the conservative/religious/army influenced regimes of Franco or Pinochet, the Socialist ideology of many states, Communism after 1917 and China today. Of course, such ideologies are never entirely dominant, and rarely unchallenged. They do not preclude factional disputes and even outright conflict, and many of them eventually crumble and die. But they do at least provide a reasonably coherent set of doctrines, and a context for arguments about policy.

In the West as a whole, we haven’t really had that kind of coherent context since the Reformation, but at least it was possible until recently to identify shared patterns of belief, and understand why a party of the Left would generally behave differently from a party of the Right once in power. That’s no longer the case, but neither has there been a blanket replacement with an organised ideology of extreme social and economic liberalism, even though that’s part of it. Rather, the current western ruling class, like the Party in 1984, has no ideology in the traditional sense. It is interested in power and wealth, and it has factions which are obsessed with various social objectives and causes, but it is incapable of thinking in a coherent fashion, and doesn’t really see the need to do so. Today’s ruling class thinks of itself less as Ruling than as Managing, complete with its yellowing MBA textbooks. Party leaders may publicly talk about “our values” in an attempt to justify their actions, but these pronouncements seldom go beyond banalities, and rarely reflect the traditions and ideologies of any particular party or movement. Indeed, most parties of the Notional Left, for example, are embarrassed about their past beliefs and actions, and try to distance themselves from them as far as possible.

What has replaced genuine ideology as a basis for decisions and policies is a kind of collective and often arbitrary set of rules and customs, such as you find in a school playground.These rules and customs do not have to be coherent, but their enforcement is nonetheless ruthless and the penalty for deviation is expulsion: another, more modern, comparison might be a group on social media. Indeed, because the PMC has drifted so far away from the lives and concerns of ordinary people, all that matters is applause and Likes from within the community itself. Politics has become aesthetics: the actual result doesn’t matter, as long as it Looks Good and is appealing to your fellow PMC members. Threats of war, for example, make you look strong and improve your status with the group. They are not intended to be taken seriously. Such a mental framework does not, and cannot, produce any consistency, but since it is essentially an internally-created framework, not depending at all on the outside world, this doesn’t matter. The result (as in the opening example) is not even Orwellian doublethink: it’s just a mess of ideas with no coherence, because coherence is too big an effort and anyway who cares?

This depressing state of affairs has its origin in two processes. One is the increasingly homogeneous nature of the current ruling class: the PMC. This is pretty much unprecedented in multi-party political systems, or even in oligarchies. In nineteenth century Europe, for example, not only was politics split into competing class-based factions which could come into actual conflict, organised religion was still an actor, and there were bitter disputes about trade policy, the value or otherwise of colonies, social legislation, education, election suffrage and almost everything else you can think of. These conflicts resulted very directly from the different backgrounds of the main actors: aristocratic landlords, trades union leaders, politically powerful missionary societies, reactionary Church leaders, revolutionaries, middle class tradesmen, wealthy bankers …. forming and breaking alliances of convenience depending on the subject. The expansion of the franchise brought about new political parties, and parliamentarians with many different backgrounds. And the mass media of the time—essentially print—came in all shapes and sizes, and many of those who wrote for it were bright school-leavers who had learned what they knew by experience and hard work. Even foreign correspondents had often lived in their region for many years. What we now think of as the All-Purpose Pundit Class scarcely existed. Experts tended to be actual experts: the Royal Africa Society in London, for example, grew out of the work of Mary Kingsley, a writer and explorer who travelled widely in Africa before her untimely death, and wrote a number of polemical books supporting African causes.

In turn, this galloping homogeneity was itself the product of changing educational patterns. It’s common to describe the expansion of university education from the 1980s as an increase in opportunity, but in reality it was often the opposite. It accompanied, and in some cases led directly to, a reduction in professional and technical training, and the fetishisation of three years of ersatz elite education instead of actually learning to do something. It led to a de-skilling of society as a whole, and in due course the arrival of a generalist, credentialed but not-really-educated ruling class. But numbers were important, and quite quickly these educational changes produced a significant narrowing in the origins of the political class and the PMC itself. Those who had been to lesser universities aspired to nothing more than to ape those who had been to greater ones. They socialised, intermarried and worked with and for each other, and shared the same vaguely-articulated sets of values and objectives, happily ignorant for the most part of how the world actually worked. Their career prospects, social lives and even potential romantic relationships accordingly depended on obedience to complex and unwritten codes established by their immediate predecessors.

Thus developed a ruling class and its associated parasites and flunkies that is probably unique in history in its fragility and lack of any real reason for existing, other than power. It was too fragmented to have developed a guiding ideology, and it absorbed, rather than studied, a series of often-unrelated ideological commandments to which formal obeisance was necessary if you wanted to get on in life. But unlike the stern religious and political ideologies of the past, little of the pseudo-ideology of the PMC has ever been synthesised and taught. Indeed, since it really amounts to nothing much more than a kind of vague economic and social Liberalism with special-interest interruptions, it really can’t be. (Liberalism was pretty incoherent itself at the best of times, after all.)

The result is that decisions are taken and influenced today by people who live by sets of vague ideas unpolluted by actual experience. And the traditional “countervailing powers” that in Liberal theory are supposed to counterbalance those in power just turn out to be more of the same people. (Standards in journalism have fallen precipitately in time with the growth of professionalising Journalism Schools. It would be interesting know what the connection is, since there clearly is one.) So if we could send a drone to spy on a PMC dinner party in a fashionable area of a major western city, we would see politicians, journalists, lawyers, NGO workers, tank-thinkers, journalists, consultants, bankers and pundits all mixed together, all repeating the same things to each other. A vision of hell in some respects.

What makes it worse is that this isn’t just an economic ruling class: indeed, wealth by itself doesn’t give admittance. It’s a kind of nomenklatura, as practiced in the old Soviet Union, and within China today. The key point is that this new class crosses and obscures the traditional separation of powers and functions of democratic politics. Thus, politicians, civil servants, judges, journalists, heads of NGOs, even senior policemen and intelligence officers, now constitute, not independent centres of power and influence, but a massive Venn diagram of largely overlapping assumptions and beliefs linked by social and business connections. In turn, this results partly from the breakdown of traditional barriers between public service and private accumulation, and partly from the growth of PMC families, where Christmas lunch may put a judge, a Minister, a journalist, a civil rights lawyer, a wealthy banker and an international consultant next to each other, all related by kinship or marriage. And the banker may once have been a Minister, the consultant may once have been a civil servant, the judge may have political ambitions. (If you read the estimable Naked Capitalism site, you’ll be familiar with the quite terrifying portraits of incestuous power and influence in Britain contributed by the supernaturally well-connected Colonel Smithers.) This is why it’s naive to talk about the media or think tanks being “instructed” to say this or that, about Ukraine, for example. That’s the way such people think anyway: they are all part of the same nomenklatura.

In many ways it’s not a surprise. The depoliticisation of politics, which I’ve discussed many times, results in western political systems increasingly resembling those in, say, parts of West Africa, where politics is simply about access to predatory opportunities for power and enrichment, making use of ethnic power-blocs as ammunition. A new President will replace not just judges and chiefs of the security forces, but the Director of the national TV and radio, and the head of the National Bank. Ironically, the West is in many respects in advance of these African countries: the PMC has seized control as much of the elite discourse of the country, as of its wealth. And we presume to give them lessons, as I set out below.

One major difference between the western PMC today and elites in the past is that, whereas in the past the ruling class tried above all to retain its dominance and resist change, today’s ruling class believes in incessant change. Now one of the reasons for this is the professional and financial interests of the PMC—if it’s not broke, there’s no money to be made in fixing it, or arguing about it in law courts, or writing scathing commentaries on it—but much of it also is to be found in the influence of the soggy version of social and economic Liberalism which occupies the space in the PMC mentality where you would normally expect to find an ideology. This is really no more than an obsession with ever more personal freedom for those with the power and money to exercise it, and ever more coercion of those who oppose this ideology. (The paradox that Liberalism requires a massive coercive apparatus to enforce its ideology of freedom is one that has been much noticed over recent generations.)

This ideology is often considered, and even more often described, as “Progress,” especially in its social dimension, but I have coined the rather ugly term “Recentism” to describe what I think is really going on. Essentially, the PMC consists of many uncomfortably coexisting factions whose collective interest is safeguarded by each accepting the objectives and priorities of the others, even at the risk of the kind of incoherence described above. Thus, when one part of the PMC succeeds in forcing through some “change,” then other parts, with greater or lesser enthusiasm, unthinkingly rally behind it. An example would be homosexual marriage: scarcely thought of twenty years ago, it has been adopted as a current PMC touchstone for being “modern,” and thus virtuous. Much of the PMC is at best indifferent to the idea, but as something which is Recent and thus designated “modern,” it has to be supported. Conversely, anything not coded as “modern,” especially if coded as “traditional,” is automatically suspect and negative. In principle, culture not of the present ideological persuasion, religion, patriotism and outdated social structures are all bad, or at least doubtful. Of course, whether some idea or practice is Recent is not a very good heuristic for deciding whether it’s acceptable, but if that’s the only heuristic you have (and it’s all Liberalism has ever had) it’s the one you are stuck with. On the other hand, we’re going to that performance of The Magic Flute, we are interested in Zen Buddhism, we cheer for our national football team and we have a retreat in the country where things are less stressful. Do we contradict ourselves? Very well then, we contradict ourselves. We contain multitudes and We are in control.

Unthinking Recentism is obviously a development of classic teleological Liberal thought, which was based on the idea that whatever is new is of necessity better than what is older. (This requires the kind of rewriting of modern history I have touched on elsewhere.) In its most organised form, this idea is called—or was called anyway—Modernisation Theory, and a vulgarised version of it underpins the PMC’s incoherent approach to the outside world, including the crisis in Ukraine, as well as aspects of domestic policy.

Modernisation Theory had its origins in the 1950s and 1960s, at the height of postwar peace and prosperity, and was indeed the dominant sociological theory of the time. Conceived at both the micro-level of family and workplace, and at the macro level of societies and governments, and drawing on the insights of figures such as Marx, Durkheim and Weber, it saw societies evolving steadily towards a “modern” situation of liberal democracy, personal freedom and economic prosperity. Although battered by experience, the theory held on, to be re-popularised, albeit in caricatured form, by Francis Fukuyama, that End of History man. And if academic acceptance of the theory has long since evaporated, at least in its crude form, it remains a powerful influence on thinking in PMC circles, and underlies a great deal of current western policy.

It was a satisfying theory because it was teleological, as opposed to the static theories of other eras, and because implicitly the West was the point of reference, the advance guard of the future. All that other societies had to do was to copy the West’s political and social innovations. Those who did not were fighting against the tide of history, and even acting against the interests of their people and their country. So in the 1960s every major western government set up a Development Ministry, and sent people out to Develop others. Development was believed to be inevitable, and necessarily in the direction already taken by the West, but it could still be given a helping hand. There was no reason, for example, why Africa could not make the leap from a mainly agricultural society to a western-style industrialised one in a couple of generations, and the documents of the time painted a dazzling picture of the Africa of 2020 as scarcely distinguishable from Europe. African nations were encouraged to move to producing cash crops for export, to generate funds for rapid industrialisation. At the same time, other rapid developments and urbanisation were expected to lead to the rise of a western-style middle class and Liberal parliamentary democracy. It should be added that the first generation of African independence leaders were entirely committed to Modernisation Theory, and they set out to create states and societies along western (and sometimes Soviet) models at top speed.

The fact that this didn’t work is only partly because of the deregulation of commodity prices in the 1980s which did such damage to African economies. The reality is that Modernisation Theory was hopelessly flawed as a concept, and failed repeatedly in execution. Yet like a lot of failed ideas, it led a ghost existence for some decades afterwards, and the corpse received a brief electroshock after the end of the Cold War. In academia, of course, bad ideas never entirely die: they are just repackaged as new ones, often, indeed, with the prefix “neo” added. There was too much intellectual and political capital invested in Modernisation Theory for it to be allowed to fade quietly away, and in any event, the West, in all its manifestations, was not prepared to accept that there were other routes to creating “modern” societies. Moreover, as good Liberals, western thinkers prized correct ideas and beliefs above all: a society is “modern” if it has embraced homosexual marriage, even if its people are starving in the streets. The success of China in lifting its people out of poverty, for example, should never have happened according to Modernisation Theory, or at least not in the way it did. Thus the grinding of teeth you hear from the development lobby.

Thus also the continuing existence and power of Development Ministries. Undeterred by decades of failure, they continue to push out contracts for what these days are primarily projects to spread “modern” Liberal social and political ideas, as you can see from their websites. I’ve written at some length about Aid and Development issues elsewhere, and I won’t repeat that here. I just want to emphasise the degree to which not only the Aid agencies, but the westernised lobbies that access them, take a banalised form of Modernisation Theory as their basic assumption. This orientation comes from the very top, as recipient governments, in-between crowd-pleasing speeches about neo-imperialism, strive to imitate western governments in every way. (The African Union, for example, is essentially just a faint carbon copy of the EU, without the resources or the capacity to do a similar job.)

In many ways this continuity is not surprising, because Modernisation Theory was just the second-last incarnation of a long-standing western messianic impulse to improve other societies. It can be argued that this started with the Spanish and Portuguese missionaries in Latin America, but it received its real impetus from the rise of Liberalism, with its normative and progressive ideas, in the nineteenth century. Once the idea that things could change and improve began to be accepted, then the obvious corollary was a duty to spread these potential benefits more widely to the less fortunate. Unlike traditional Empires such as the Ottomans, which were by design static, and indeed violently repressed attempts at change, the short-lived European Empires in Africa and the Middle East were powerful agents of change, both deliberately and incidentally. Deliberately, because the British and French abolished slavery and polygamy, established written legal codes and formal justice systems and introduced education and literacy. Incidentally, because western political and social ideas began to spread by osmosis, through translations of western books, diffusion of western films, and the effects of locals being educated in Europe or by Europeans. Especially in the Middle East this produced profound social changes, in the social status of women, for example, as well as political developments (the Iraqi Communist Party was founded as early as 1934.) By the time of the flowering of Modernisation Theory, independent Arab nations were largely run by secular, progressive technocrats, religion was a fading force, modern political parties were being established, and Syria, for example, would clearly quite quickly come to resemble France. Africa lagged a little, but was busy industrialising and developing modern state structures. Of course these very developments contained the seeds of their own destruction, but that wasn’t appreciated at the time, and its consequences still aren’t really taken into account today.

The belief that there was a single, inescapable, road to progress, and that the West had mapped it and was already far advanced, ran into three massive obstacles, which still have profound implications today. The first is that it entirely neglected politics in its most fundamental, ground-level sense. Urbanisation, it was believed, would automatically produce a professional middle class which in turn would demand a modern and effective state and would form modern western-style political parties, free of religious or ethnic affiliation. Whilst this could happen, and did to a degree in countries like Syria and Lebanon, it soon turned out not to be automatic, or even probable. The theory skipped over the generations, and sometimes centuries, of social and economic conflict in the West to replace extractive economies with productive ones, and the power of the aristocracy with the power of the middle class. In too many countries, politics became—and often remains—just a struggle to attach oneself to an income stream, as was the case in the Europe of the eighteenth century. And countries that did become aggressively modern—Singapore and South Korea come to mind—did so in their own way and with their own resources, ignoring Modernisation Theory entirely. More recently, the success of China has been an inspiration to all those countries seeking a non-ideological route to a better society, rather than just “modernisation” in the banal western sense.

Secondly, and as might have been expected, the result of western influence was to create a westernised neo-colonial elite that thought “like us,” that spoke English or French and told us what we wanted to hear in exchange for our money. This would have been manageable if western thinking had not been so teleological and normative. But because we were right it followed that anyone who agreed with us was also right, and looking towards the future, and that their opponents were objectively wrong and could be disregarded or even opposed by the West. In many parts of the world, it soon became recognised that the way to power was to say the correct things to western governments and funders. In turn, the West would recognise you as the voice of the future, and the champion of the (assumed) aspirations of the people to societies which were “modern” and western. Because the process of Modernisation was considered inevitable as well as desirable, entire categories of society, traditional social and government systems, traditional legal codes, religion, traditional social structures and much else could simply be disregarded, since they were clearly relics of the past. This produced in many countries a westernised elite essentially dependent on foreign funding and foreign support for its survival. Yet that elite, often wealthy and privileged, frequently had little support in society as a whole, and was often actively resented. So with monotonous regularity, the West has been “surprised” by some completely unexpected election result, and “reactionaries” and “extremists” have won elections, in spite of the assurances give by the “pro-western,” English-speaking leaders always being invited to Embassies. (Of course, if the wrong side won there must be a conspiracy somewhere.)

Thirdly and most importantly, the idea that everyone wants to be “modern” as we define it turns out to be a massive over-simplification. It’s not just that some societies approach issues of modernisation and development differently from the West—I’ve already mentioned a couple of cases—it’s also that others don’t want to be “modern” in our sense at all. The latter point is something that is completely impossible for the fragmented and facile PMC ideology to even imagine, but it’s fundamental nonetheless. The first time the West was slapped round the face with the wet fish of reality on this subject was the Iranian Revolution and the installation of the Islamic Republic in 1979. By chance, I was looking at some studies of this episode recently, and it’s fair to say that few subjects have both been as much studied as the western failure to anticipate Khomeini’s regime, and yet few episodes had so little subsequent influence on western understanding and behaviour. Political Islam—whose origins, ironically can be traced to opposition to the liberalising and modernising influence of Britain and France in the Egypt of the 1920s—was pretty much unknown at the time. Now it is understood, at least if you count the shelves-full of books and studies, but that understanding is confined to experts and regional specialists, and doesn’t seem to influence official thinking at all. This is not surprising, because in short, Political Islam says there is no need for “modernisation,” and indeed it’s sinful, because everything you might need to run a society is in the Koran and the Hadiths. There is no progress, there is no teleology, except in the apocalyptic fantasies of some militants, and diabolical western influence is to be resisted by all means including violence. And there has been a lot of violence.

This creates enormous problems for the PMC ideology. On the one hand, this is an explicit assault on every last component of their diffuse world-view, yet on the other hand many of its exponents and practitioners come from countries that were once, if briefly, western possessions, and portray themselves, or can be portrayed, as somehow involved in an “anti-western” struggle. The PMC deals with this contradiction, as with all others, by pretending it doesn’t exist. Violent acts by Islamists are neatly wrapped up as “tragedies,” and the real issue is not the dead but their potential “exploitation” by “the extreme Right.” Meanwhile, it’s cool for some to parade around dressed as Hamas fighters, and to think that anyone launching missiles at American ships must have something to recommend them, surely? And so the ironic result is that the enemies that the West identifies and tries to overthrow are actually secular regimes, such as those in Iraq, Syria and Libya, where there can be no suspicion of targeting Islam.

My point is not whether these views are right or wrong, but rather the crippling effect they have on western policy, and the disastrous effect that have on countries they are applied to. The tragicomic naivety of the US expectations for a post-war “democratic” Iraq rapidly coming to resemble the US itself, turned to pure tragedy with a subsequent civil war that was sickeningly violent even by US standards. Often, foreigners were involved too. On one occasion,I arrived in Afghanistan just after the slaughter of a NGO team working on projects for women who had been ambushed and killed, together with their escort of ex-Gurkhas provided by a Private Military Company (hiss! boo!). Quite what the women NGOists had proposed to do for Afghan women that made them worthy of death I never discovered, but in reality it could have been almost anything.

The PMC mindset, unable to imagine that there are groups that actually want to kill them for who they are, takes refuge in denial, often with strong cultural and racialist overtones. In 1998, the US Ambassador in Nairobi made herself unpopular with the State Department for asking for more security from suspected Al-Qaida attacks. Nothing was done, her fears were dismissed as exaggerated, and an attack beyond AQ’s capabilities. About 220 people died in a huge truck-bomb explosion, nearly all Kenyans, passers-by or workers in adjacent buildings. And of course the PMC refused point-blank to take reports of attacks being planned in Europe by the Islamic State, and even after the slaughter it tried to bury the incidents along with the victims. After all, what’s important is Likes, and what looks good. It mostly wasn’t Our Children who died, and the important thing is to display to each other how virtuous and tolerant we all are. Particularly sad was the response of the parent of a victim of the 2015 massacres in Paris, who wrote a book entitled You Will Not Have My Hatred. Very laudable, and a very pure expression of western moral superiority. But the attackers don’t want your hate, they just want you dead.

So suffocating is the normative framework of the PMC’s pseudo-ideology, that it refuses to understand or recognise that for societies and groups all over the world that ideology is their Enemy, to be fought with guns and bombs. We should be talking, they say, to find out what these people want. That’s easy: they want to kill us. Just ask the people of their own countries, who have been the principal victims. For all that de-radicalisation might work in certain contexts, these organisations, increasing in number and ferocity, cannot be negotiated with, and certainly cannot be brought round to our “modern” way of thinking. Indeed, by a bitter irony, interviews with many young Europeans who left to fight in Syria show that it was precisely the “modern” society in which they lived that had driven them to terminal despair, and the desire to find a cause for which they could fight, and perhaps die. Such organisations can only be destroyed, for all that such ideas make the PMC spit out their Chai Tea Lattes with indignation.

As always, the PMC wants to take refuge in the famous Underlying Causes I’ve covered elsewhere. I was discussing the crisis in the Sahel not long ago, and one student had made a presentation concluding with the conventional judgement that the “underlying causes” had to be addressed. These causes include huge areas with low population density, ethnic divisions, widespread poverty and insecurity, weak and corrupt governments and ineffective security forces, to name just the first that come to mind. OK, I said, I’ll give you any reasonable amount of money. When can you solve the underlying problems? End of the year? next year? Five years? Of course, the problems are insoluble, as any rational person would concede, and the reference to them is just the PMCs way of not doing anything, and continuing to make performative gestures to show how virtuous they are. Meanwhile, people are dying.

The PMC cannot cope with the idea that there are problems that have no solution, and can at best only be managed. Their ethos is that of the Law and financial negotiations, where a solution is by definition possible. Of course, there are “extremists” and “nationalists” and “human rights violators” who must be removed from power first, but once Saddam, Milosevic, Gaddafi, Assad, and now of course Putin, have been disposed of, all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well. Modernisation Theory will triumph, and all of these states will be on their way to looking Just Like Us. And when a state ostentatiously turns its back on Modernisation Theory and decides to make its own way, and what is worse succeeds, then the hatred of the PMC knows no bounds. Thus Ukraine, which for the PMC is a holy war between those who want to be like us (we think) and those who don’t.

So Russia is the convenient repository for a great deal of blind anger directed against nations around the world who don’t want to be Like Us. Because the Russians are white, and few are Muslim, they are acceptable targets, and the PMC can indulge itself with an orgy of hatred, bigotry and prejudice in a way that it would be difficult to do against most other targets. But the real target of all this hatred is not the Russians, who seem to be taking little notice. It’s not even the populations of western countries, for the most part. No, the war-cries, the statements of uncompromising support for Ukraine forever, the assertions of imminent conflict with Russia, are essentially aimed at each other, to get Likes, and to avoid being expelled from the group for being insufficiently radical. The fact that much of this communication is actually by social media is almost too caricatural to be true.

And then, once “Putin is gone,” normal service will be restored, and negotiations can start. The PMC will be happy again. But as far as I can see the Russians aren’t having any of that. They are not interested in negotiations at this stage, and from their point of view they are right not to be. This is not a problem with a negotiated solution, but one which can only be settled by a military victory. When that happens, the PMC’s corporate head will explode.