Logging

Book:  The Secret Pilgrim by John Le Carre

My third favorite of Le Carre after Tinker Tailor and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.  Clever structure, a bit like a book of short stories, divided by chapters, but has a cohesiveness I enjoyed.  My favorite short chapter was about Smiley giving a pair of parents a chance to remember their criminal son fondly.  I got misty.

And now check out what Smiley said in 1990 and think about Crimea and Putin today:

"The first is no, we can never trust the Bear. For one reason, the Bear doesn't trust himself. The Bear is threatened and the Bear is frightened and the Bear is falling apart. The Bear is disgusted with his past, sick of his present and scared stiff of his future. He often was. The Bear is broke, lazy, volatile, incompetent, slippery, dangerously proud, dangerously armed, sometimes brilliant, often ignorant. Without his claws, he'd be just another chaotic member of the Third World. But he isn't without his claws, not by any means. And he can't pull his soldiers back from foreign parts overnight, for the good reason that he can't house them or feed them or employ them, and he doesn't trust them either. And since this Service is the hired keeper of our national mistrust, we'd be neglecting our duty if we relaxed for one second our watch on the Bear, or on any of his unruly cubs. That's the first answer."

There is a second answer as well and Le Carre, as usual, is of two minds.  Maybe our foreign policy establishment should read more fiction.