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Something very interesting is happening in Iran. The trouble is, from where I sit, it’s not easy to work out what it is.

Here’s how the Associated Press reported it:

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatened Wednesday his government would expose details of conversations between a former Iranian nuclear negotiator whom the president had labeled a spy, and foreigners he was accused of colluding with.

But an increasing number of conservatives stepped forward to defend negotiator Hossein Mousavian, in a sign the issue was further eroding hardline Ahmadinejad's support.

The president's threat was in response to Mousavian's acquittal Tuesday in a case that has become a centerpiece in the feud between hard-line Ahmadinejad and his more liberal political rivals.

Mousavian is regarded as being close to former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, who’s now once again emerging as an increasingly powerful figure. But even more important, given where the real power lies, are the signals that the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, seems to be backing Mousavian against President Ahmadinejad.

AP quotes the semi-official Mehr news agency as reporting comments by Ali Akbar Nateq Nouri, a top adviser to Khamanei, to the effect that the espionage charges against Mousavian were "not true" — a clear slap, says AP, to Ahmadinejad.

Here’s the context: it’s not the first time there have been signs of tension between the Supreme Leader and the President. There’s widespread dissatisfaction with Ahmadinejad’s handling of the economy, and there are many within the ruling elite who think he has been needlessly provoking the West by his comments on Israel and his dealing with the UN over Iran’s nuclear programme.

A lot depends on how this is all resolved. If Ahmadinejad reasserts his authority and sees off his opponents, he’s likely to press on with the uranium enrichment programme and there’ll be growing pressure from Washington. On the other hand, if Rafsanjani continues to increase his power base, there may be an opportunity for a new opening in negotiations.

Watch this space … and let me know if you have more information than I do.

UPDATE: more interesting stuff on this .

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Further to my comments about Kosovo, former US ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the man who negotiated an end to the war in Bosnia, says the US should consider sending more troops to Kosovo. You can read his piece in today's Washington Post .

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Some fascinating figures, thanks to the , have emerged about who the “foreign insurgents” are in Iraq. They are based on data obtained during a US military raid last September on a camp close to the Syrian border, used apparently as the main clearing point for fighters entering Iraq.

The Americans retrieved detailed biographical date on nearly 750 foreign fighters, from which it emerged that by far the biggest number – more than 40 per cent – were from Saudi Arabia. None, it seems, were from Iran. Here’s the detailed breakdown:

Saudi Arabia 305
Libya 137
Yemen 68
Algeria 64
Syria 56
Morocco 50
Tunisia 38
Jordan 14
Turkey 6
Egypt 2

One other interesting fact from the same Times article: according to US military officials, of the more than 25,000 people being held in American detention centres in Iraq, only about 290, or just over 1 per cent, are foreigners.

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I thought you might be interested to see by Timothy Garton Ash, in , in which he discusses what name to give to Muslims who bomb Western targets. He rejects "Islamo-fascist", and "Islamist", in favour of "jihadist".

I wonder if you agree with his reasoning.

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The word “Kosovo” appeared on the front page of my newspaper this morning – and I can’t remember the last time that happened. Crunch time is approaching in the Balkans, and the diplomats are getting twitchy. They don’t have a deal, and that worries them. A lot.

Back in 1999, when NATO flew to the rescue of Kosovo’s majority ethnic Albanians, the default mindset in pretty much every Western capital was “Serbia bad, Kosovo Albanians good”. Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was an easy man to cast as the villain: ex-Communist party apparatchik, nationalist demagogue, destabiliser of the Balkans for much of the 1990s.

But things have changed in Serbia: Milosevic has long gone, new governments have been elected, shaky to be sure, but with at least some of their leading members anxious to take their place in the European mainstream.

Talk to their Foreign Minister, Vuk Jeremic, as I did last night. (You can hear the interview here.) He says the US-EU determination to recognise an independent Kosovo, against the wishes of Belgrade, risks “devastating consequences” in the region. True, he would say that, wouldn’t he? But in principle, he may well have a point: dismembering a sovereign state, a member of the United Nations, against its will, is not a good precedent to set. Bosnia next? Chechnya? The Basque country? Kurdistan? Abkhazia? The list could be endless.

Even in terms of practical politics, the risks are all too evident. There are restive minorities throughout the Balkans … what lesson will they learn from an independent Kosovo? Not for nothing has the word “Balkanisation” come to be whispered with such foreboding down the ages.

So why the rush? For months now, the US, EU and Russia have been trying to stitch up a deal between Serbia and Kosovo. They have failed, and on 10th December, they’ll wind up their mission. The US has assured the Kosovo Albanians that they’ll recognise them as an independent state with or without an agreement, but the UN won’t, because Russia is siding with the Serbs.

Creating states out of conflict is fraught with danger. Eritrea and East Timor are two of the more recent examples – neither is exactly a success story yet. Kosovo has no functioning economy to speak of; organised crime is frighteningly powerful; the Balkans specialist Misha Glenny says if it does become a state it will be a “nightmare state”.

So, what to do? The clock is ticking, the Kosovo Albanians are ready to declare independence, come what may. If there is a light at the end of the tunnel, I fear it may well be the light of an oncoming train. Only Washington can turn the green signal to red, and there’s no sign that they intend to.

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I have been reading on your behalf the full text of the latest report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Iran’s nuclear programme. Yes, I know, my devotion to duty knows no bounds.

It is, as we reported on The World Tonight last week, a report which contains a mixed message. So I thought you might like to see the key passages for yourself (words in brackets have been added by me for the sake of clarification).

Here they are:

“Para. 30: On 3 November 2007, the Agency (IAEA) verified that Iran had finished installing eighteen 164-machine cascades at FEP (the Fuel Enrichment Plant at Natanz) and that UF6 (Uranium hexafluoride, or "hex", which is used to produce fuel for nuclear reactors and for nuclear weapons) had been fed into all 18 cascades. There has been no installation of centrifuges or centrifuge pipework outside the original 18-cascade area. Work to install feed and withdrawal infrastructure and auxiliary systems is continuing.

“Para. 31: Since February 2007, Iran has fed approximately 1240 kg of UF6 into the cascades at [Natanz]. The feed rate has remained below the expected quantity for a facility of this design. While Iran has stated that it has reached enrichment levels up to 4.8% U-235 at [Natanz], the highest U-235 enrichment measured so far from the environmental samples taken by the Agency from cascade components and related equipment is 4.0%.

“Para. 39: The Agency has been able to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran. Iran has provided the Agency with access to declared nuclear material, and has provided the required nuclear material accountancy reports in connection with declared nuclear material and activities … However, it should be noted that, since early 2006, the Agency has not received the type of information that Iran had previously been providing, pursuant to the Additional Protocol and as a transparency measure. As a result, the Agency’s knowledge about Iran’s current nuclear programme is diminishing.

“Para. 40: Contrary to the decisions of the Security Council, Iran has not suspended its enrichment related activities …

“Para. 42: Iran has provided sufficient access to individuals and has responded in a timely manner to questions and provided clarifications and amplifications on issues raised in the context of the work plan. However, its cooperation has been reactive rather than proactive. As previously stated, Iran’s active cooperation and full transparency are indispensable for full and prompt implementation of the work plan.

“Para 43: In addition, Iran needs to continue to build confidence about the scope and nature of its present programme. Confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear programme requires that the Agency be able to provide assurances not only regarding declared nuclear material, but, equally importantly, regarding the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran. Although the Agency has no concrete information, other than that addressed through the work plan, about possible current undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran, the Agency is not in a position to provide credible assurances about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran without full implementation of the Additional Protocol. This is especially important in the light of Iran’s undeclared activities for almost two decades and the need to restore confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of its nuclear programme …”

Which boils down, I think, to this: the IAEA has found no evidence that Iran is working on a nuclear weapons programme, but is still not able to say that no such evidence exists.

This was the reaction from the US envoy to the IAEA, Gregory Schulte: "The key thing from the director general's report is that Iran's cooperation remains selective and incomplete. So Iran has not met the world's expectation that it would disclose information on both its current and past programs.”

Now that you’ve had a chance to read the IAEA’s words for yourself, what’s your reaction?

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(Apologies to those who are subscribers to my newsletter. You will already have received this.)

You can sometimes wait several months for a decent foreign policy speech from a government minister, and then, blow me, two come along in less than a week.

First, we get Gordon Brown talking about “hard-headed internationalism”. I wrote about his speech on this blog earlier in the week. And then, yesterday afternoon, David Miliband popped up in Bruges of all places (remember Mrs T back in 1988, when, according to her supporters, she “reinvented Euroscepticism as an intellectually powerful and popular movement”?), to talk about the EU as a model state rather than a super state.

There are several ways to read these speeches … my preferred option is to look at them as a way of gaining an insight into how this post-Blair government proposes to order Britain’s affairs in the big wide world.

David Miliband began in Bruges by claiming impeccable personal Euro-credentials: “My father was born in Brussels, my mother in Poland.” Beat that. His key argument, hardly original, admittedly, was that “nation-states, for all their continuing strengths, are too small to deal on their own with these big problems (religious extremism, energy insecurity and climate change), but global governance is too weak.”

The Miliband vision is of a Europe that reaches out to its poorer neighbours – not only Turkey, but also the countries of the Middle East and north Africa. It must, he said, be “open to trade, open to ideas and open to people.”

It must also be prepared to use both “hard power” and “soft power” – in other words, military and non-military means -- not just to resolve conflict, but to prevent it. He spoke not only of past action in Kosovo and Macedonia, but also of current or potential future action in Congo, Darfur, Zimbabwe and Burma.

So what did it all add up to? More fine-sounding words, more Blairite good intentions? Well, yes, the basic approach is little different from Blair’s: we have responsibilities to our fellow-citizens; the EU can be a power for good; in the era of a globalised economy, isolationism is not an option.

But I think I detect a subtle change of tone. Gone are the certainties, the fervour, the sometimes Messianic-sounding zeal of the former Prime Minister. In their place, yes, many of the same ideas, but wrapped up in a less religious packaging. This, it seems to me, is very much foreign policy post-Iraq. Lessons have been learned.

Of course, both Brown and Miliband recognise that the US is still the sole dominant world power, at least until such time as either China or India – or both – match its overwhelming economic and military strength. But there’s no attempt to argue that the world’s problems can be solved by simple means: both men are proud to be known as intellectuals, and they are happy to engage with complexity.

I am well aware that two speeches do not make a New World. Sounding good is easy. We’ll have to wait to see how they respond to deepening crises in Iran or Pakistan. But for those of us who take an interest in how Britain interacts with the rest of the world, it’s certainly been a fascinating few days.

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This is the sad, sad story of a Foreign Minister who got a bit of a shock when she started her new job.

First, she discovered that her office was on the 6th floor. Worse, she discovered that the elevator didn’t work. Indeed, it hadn’t worked for the past 10 years. Bad.

Then she discovered that if she wanted any stationery for her office, she’d have to buy it herself, with her own money. Bad again.

And then, she discovered that in the ministerial bathroom there was no water in the taps and the toilet didn’t flush. There was a lightbulb, but the only electricity came from a generator. And there was no money to pay for fuel for the generator. Very bad.

The Minister’s name is Zainab Bangura, and she’s just been appointed Foreign Minister in the newly-elected government of Sierra Leone. She told this story herself to the ±«Óătv’s redoubtable correspondent , who knows a thing or two about Africa, and who used it to illustrate the effects of endemic corruption. If the government’s coffers hadn’t been so comprehensively pilfered, perhaps the Foreign Ministry would have some cash to pay for Ms Bangura’s office supplies.

You can hear the minister telling him her tale of woe here. It is both desperately sad, and desperately funny.

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In Chicago in 1999, Tony Blair spoke of developing a new doctrine of "humanitarian interventionism". Tonight, in London, his successor, Gordon Brown, threw that to one side and replaced it with "hard-headed internationalism".

Which is in part the same thing, and in part, not the same at all. Like Blair, Brown accepts the new UN doctrine of a "responsibility to protect". If people are at risk of genocide, never mind if the threat comes from their own government, the rest of the world has a duty to intervene.

But to Brown, sending in the troops isn't enough. Kosovo and Sierra Leone may have looked like triumphs for the Blair doctrine, but he sees life more in shades of grey than in the stark Blairite contrasts of right and wrong.

So tonight, we heard of the need for "a new framework to assist reconstruction". Traditional emergency aid and peacekeeping must be combined with stabilisation, reconstruction and development. Look at Afghanistan and Iraq, the Prime Minister seemed to be saying. How much better might we have done if we'd paid more attention there to reconstruction and development, as well as to a quick military victory?

The Brown vision of what "hard-headed internationalism" means goes like this:

"I propose that in future, Security Council peacekeeping resolutions and UN Envoys should make stabilisation, reconstruction and development an equal priority; that the international community should be ready to act with a standby civilian force including police and judiciary who can be deployed to rebuild civic societies; and that to repair damaged economies we sponsor local economic development agencies ---- in each area the international community able to offer a practical route map from failure to stability."

Brown believes in international cooperation - "The new frontier," he said tonight, "is that there is no frontier." And yes, he also believes in that good old special relationship with Washington. "I have no truck with anti-Americanism in Britain or elsewhere in Europe and I believe that our ties with America - founded on values we share - constitute our most important bilateral relationship."

Tonight was Gordon Brown trying to map out a global vision. He had tough words for Iran - although not a hint of a threat of military action - and equally tough words for President Musharraf of Pakistan. And what he said about international terrorism could equally have been said by George W Bush or Tony Blair: "International efforts against terrorism are not a short-term struggle where we get by through ad-hoc improvisation: this is a generational challenge. Global terrorist networks demand a global response."

In a nutshell: I'm not a naĂŻve softie, nor am I a go-it-alone cowboy. And just to make sure that none of us got the wrong idea, there were warm words for both Bush and Blair in the passage about searching for a way to make progress in the Middle East. They used to say that Gordon Brown doesn't do foreign; he did tonight.

The full text of his speech is

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Thanks to the Chicago Tribune blog for the following:

A website called asked 1,006 parents which presidential candidate they would most trust to babysit their child.

Hillary Clinton came top, with 26 per cent.

She also came top of the list of candidates whom voters would least trust, with 25 per cent,

As they say across the Pond: Go figure.

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For a different take on what's been going on in Pakistan, I recommend by the respected analyst Anatol Lieven in today's International Herald Tribune. He writes; "There is no point in being too high-minded about these things. Pakistan is a hard country to govern, and the United States gives equal support to far more oppressive regimes elsewhere in the Muslim world." I wonder if you agree?

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A rare, and fascinating, opportunity to hear two English-speaking Iranian ayatollahs with very different views of the correct relationship between Islam and politics. Amid all the concerns about current developments in Iran, I strongly recommend you listen to this report from the ±«Óătv's correspondent in Tehran, Jon Leyne. Click here to listen to it, and then add your comments.

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Daniel Levy of Prospects for Peace seems to have the latest on the much-anticipated Middle East peace "meeting" that the Bush administration has been putting together. It will happen later this month, he says, but nothing of substance will come of it.

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I am indebted to Fred Kaplan of for reminding me in the a couple of days ago what Condoleezza Rice said about US foreign policy just shortly after the start of George Bush’s second term in 2005. “For 60 years,” she said, “my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region . . . and we achieved neither. Now we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.”

Hmm. Here’s what the US defence secretary Robert Gates said after what Pakistanis are calling Pervez Mursharraf’s “second coup”, his declaration of a state of emergency at the weekend. “Pakistan is a country of great strategic importance to the United States and a key partner in the war on terror ... The actions of the past 72 hours have been disturbing ... [but] we are mindful not to do anything that would undermine ongoing counter-terrorism efforts.”

Pakistan is one of Washington’s most important allies in Asia. After the attacks in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, General Musharraf quickly decided that it would be in his best interests to join the US in its “war on terror”. It brought him billions of dollars in aid, but increasing unpopularity at home. The Taliban in Afghanistan have now been joined by the Taliban in Pakistan. Musharraf has sent the army in to deal with them, much to the army’s disquiet.

For a succinct, if complex, outline of what’s been happening in the area of Pakistan that borders Afghanistan, I recommend by the American academic Barnett Rubin of the Center on International Cooperation of New York University. He writes:

"According to sources in the Northwest Frontier Province, the Taliban (Afghan and Pakistani) have established an Islamic Emirate centered in Mirali, North Waziristan, the home base of Commander Jalaluddin Haqqani (Afghan Jadran from Khost) and his son Sirajuddin. This Emirate acknowledges Mullah Muhammad Umar as Amir, but it is mainly run by the Haqqanis, with the Pakistani Mehsud leader, Baitulah Mehsud of South Waziristan, as its main public face. The Emirate has established structures in all seven Tribal Agencies, though it is strongest in North and South Waziristan and has not penetrated the Shi'a areas of upper Kurram. Besides Pakistani and Afghan Pashtuns, its forces include the Uzbeks displaced from South Waziristan and others from the former USSR (collectively if not accurately called "Chechens"), whom the local people accuse of the greatest brutalities, such as the beheading of prisoners.

"From these bases, the Emirate has launched its offensive in Swat and has infiltrated around Peshawar from several directions. Recently Taliban appeared in Qisakhani Bazaar in the old city of Peshawar and ordered traders to remove "un-Islamic" posters. There was no reaction from the police or administration. There are dozens of Taliban FM stations broadcasting calls to jihad in both the tribal agencies and the "settled" (administered) areas of NWFP.”

General Musharraf knew that Washington wouldn’t be happy if he declared a state of emergency. But it seems he calculated that he was in greater danger from an independent-minded judiciary than from the wrath of the US. If the Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan decides similarly to ignore Washington’s entreaties and embark on a military adventure against Kurdish guerrillas in northern Iraq, he too will have calculated that there are worse things in the world than upsetting the US.

Add to that the ever-diminishing expectations of progress at an international Middle East meeting – they’re no longer calling it a conference – that Condoleezza Rice is still hoping to stitch together for later this month, and you begin to see what happens globally when a US administration is perceived to be running out of influence.

My dictionary gives as one of its definitions of “lame duck”: a person or thing that is disabled, helpless, or ineffective.

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is what bloggers in Pakistan are saying about President Musharraf's decision to impose a state of emergency.

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It has been something of a truism for several years now that oil and democracy do not tend to make happy bed-fellows. It’s more than a decade since Dick Cheney, who at the time was CEO of Halliburton, remarked on what a shame it was that “the good Lord didn’t see fit to put oil and gas reserves where there are democratic governments”.

But you can, of course, look at it another way. Perhaps it’s the very existence of the black sticky stuff beneath the ground that makes it so difficult for democracy to thrive. (There are, as always exceptions: the UK, Norway and Canada all seem to manage, but it’s probably significant that in these countries democratic traditions were already pretty well established by the time the oil men started drilling.)

Earlier this year, I was in Nigeria to report on the near-farcical presidential election. There was fraud and malpractice on a massive scale: for the first time in my career, I was able to interview, on the record, a man who told me exactly how you go about buying votes at the polling station.

And it was a Nigerian political analyst who made the point that if a government gets the bulk of its revenues from taxes levied on oil companies, it has little need to listen to its own voters. It has plenty of cash, whether or not they support it, and it can always use some of that cash to bribe them. It puts a bit of a different spin on the old American anti-colonial slogan “No taxation without representation”. If it's the oil companies who pay most of the taxes, maybe it’s the interests of the oil companies that the government mostly represents.

So why do I raise all this now? Well, look at what’s been happening to oil prices. The cost of crude is up by 40 per cent since August and could soon be nudging $100 a barrel. (To me, it seems only yesterday that we were worrying about it getting as high as $50. But that’s progress for you.) And where do you think all that extra dosh going?

Here’s the list of the world’s top 10 oil exporters last year: Saudi Arabia, Russia, Norway, Iran, United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, Kuwait, Nigeria, Algeria, Mexico. You don’t need too many fingers to count the democracies, do you?

So when you look at what’s happening in Russia, and you ask yourself why President Putin is so confident of winning the parliamentary elections in December – or in Saudi Arabia, and you ask yourself why there isn’t more pressure for democratic reform – or Nigeria, and you ask why such vibrant entrepreneurial people are so appallingly governed, you may be very tempted to come up with the same one word answer.

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Eight people were killed this week in a bus bombing in the southern Russian town of Togliatti. is what Russian bloggers are saying about it.

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