Quote of the Day: In London, "The Foreign Office no longer understood foreign affairs"

The whole piece is interesting, but this bit should give us all pause for thought:

Not the least of the pleasures the North African revolutions are bringing is the look of astonishment on the face of the foreign policy establishment. The world has become a constant source of surprise for diplomats and ministers, as each news bulletins lands a fresh blow on their crumbling certainties. "Tunisia, who knew?" "Egypt? Egypt! WTF?" So lost has Whitehall become, Alistair Burt, the Middle East minister, admits that the Foreign Office no longer understood foreign affairs. "The tide is turning very strongly," he sighed. "It's not for us to sit here in London and work out where that tide is going to go." 

We are witnessing a diplomatic failure as great as the failure to predict the collapse of Soviet communism. Revolts in the Arab world are coming in a manner and from a quarter the experts never expected. 

Add another thought: the experts were wrong, and they thought they knew more than they actually did.  They had built their assumptions on (pardon the expression as we talk of the Middle East) foundations of sand.

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