As only a hundred million people in the world speak Persian it is perhaps a little surprising to find that Persian is the Number Four blogging language in the world. In China four hundred million are actively using or learning the Number One blogging language English...though not for blogging. English is compulsory for the 150 million children in China’s primary schools. So my instincts are right in wanting to take the Magpie Sagas to China.

The Beijing International Book Fair should be my first port of call…with a stop-off in Seoul on the way as the magpie is the national bird of South Korea. Any Business Plan will need to reflect Chinese Business reality where half the books sold in China are Pirate Editions…with seventy rogue editions for every official one. I should be so lucky.

A strange incident in the smoke and mirrors world of Iraq Operations took place a few months ago when two British undercover soldiers wearing Arab dress were cornered in a car laden with explosives. The British Army went in with all guns blazing and got them out. What were they up to? One theory is that they were blowing up the Hajjis to set Sunnis against Shias.

Supposedly this would create the chaos the Neoconservatives needed to go ahead with their plan to divide Iraq into ethnographic bantustans. Based on this sort of black ops and false flags reasoning this means that the escalating bloodshed in Iraq is a measure of the success…not the failure…of US policy.

This gained some credence this week when the Bush Family’s Chief Operating Officer James Baker III followed up the media offensive of the British General Sir Richard Dannatt and his Government Minders with his own report on Iraq Coalition Forces’ Exit Strategy Options. The Coalition could Stay The Course meaning more of the same. This was rejected…as was the Cut & Run strategy which would lead to loss of face and involve heavy casualties.

James Baker’s other options were Redeploy & Contain…doublespeak for minimising US casualties and withdrawing Coalition Troops to bases outside Iraq; Stability First…giving up on democracy, stabilising Baghdad, finding a political solution to The Insurgency by enlisting the help of Syria and Iran; and…well, well, well…Partition defined as splitting the country into a Shia South, a Sunni Centre and a Kurdish North. Oh dear. Ever heard of Kurdistan?

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) was founded by Abdullah Ocalan in 1974 and in 1984 began fighting for a separate Kurdish homeland in areas straddling Turkey’s borders with Iran, Iraq and Syria. After Ocalan’s capture in 1999 the PKK continued their struggle politically. From 1999 to 2004 a ceasefire was in place. Partitioning Iraq is first and foremost a Persian and a Turkish problem and only secondly an EU Enlargement and Global Oil problem. Syria’s and Israel’s legitimate security concerns, NATO’s borders and US commercial interests are way down the list.

The best argument for Big Empires…like the European Union or the pre-1918 Austro-Hungarian Empire…is their potential ability to dissolve border disputes. The counter-argument is that they exchange little frontier disputes for big ones. Diplomatic Theorists like Leopold Kohr…and Montesquieu in the 18th Century…squared the circle by paying meticulous attention to the small print. In their tool bag were two principles: Cantonisation and Relative Power.

Cantonisation means dividing above and below any potentially unstable aggregations…defined by the Relative Power Principle. The potential flashpoint for the Swiss Confederation is the top-heavy German linguistic presence. This is dissolved by the Relative Autonomy of the Cantons. Your Nation is your Canton…not your Germanity.

It is often believed that Leopold Kohr was an advocate of smallness for its own sake because he wrote much about scale and pace in human affairs. But in The Breakdown of Nations Kohr’s crucial measure is Relative Size as a surrogate for Relative Power. He is an old-style English Balance of Power man…a Montesquieu man.

Ivan Illich drew attention to Kohr’s love of the German word ‘gewiss’ that translates into English as ‘right’ or ‘certain’…as in ‘a certain size’ or ‘the right pace’. Kohr knew his Classics. He thought in terms of Good, Beauty and Truth. Man as the measure of all things…to use Aristotle’s phrasing. Ivan Illich labelled Kohr’s intellectual domain Social Morphology. Other things being equal, structure determines behaviour. By the end of the 21st Century our diplomats will once again be schooled in the ancient arts of Structural Sociology. Herein lies Peace & Permanence.