I was both appalled and amused to read the story repeated below from the New York Times about Emma Sky.
Emma and I met in February 2000 when I travelled to Jerusalem to take up the post of Director of the Public Administration Institutional Development Project for the supposedly then emerging state of Palestine. The project was being funded by the British Council. Emma had undertaken the pre-feasibility and stakeholder assessment work.
The project proved to have been very poorly conceived. It did not have the approval of the Palestinian Ministry of Finance. Promises that the team would be located in Jerusalem (or Ramallah) were not honoured and Emma told the team members in peremptory terms that they were being based in Gaza. No cars were available with the diplomatic plates that were required to enter Israel from Gaza. No assistance whatsoever was provided with settling in the team.
Emma, who was based in the Jewish sector of Jerusalem, appeared to have some very strange ideas about the Arabs and the Middle East. When I raised the possibility that I might seek the adoption of an orphaned / refugee Palestinian child, she told me that the Palestinians would kill me. On the other hand, she volunteered the view that 'the Israel - Palestine problem would be solved by inter-marriage'.
As far as I could glean, she had absolutely no knowledge or experience in the fields of public sector reform and financial administration. However, she appeared to regard me as a nuisance and commented that 'I could do everything myself except that the Arabs won't always listen to a woman - unfortunately, that's why we need an old man with grey hair like you'.
At that time I was 56 years old - I note that her current unfortunate collaborator General Odierno is 55 years old.
She is the West at its absolute worst in the Middle East. Armed with selective facts but with little commonsense or common humanity, she sees herself as a Grand Design puppeteer who controls a masque populated by minatures.
For God's sake General Odierno, talk to ordinary people yourself! Surely General, you don't need a 'cat has the cream / daddy's girl' English public school girl to tell you that bombing civilians is counter-productive?
Robert Fisk must be seething - or quietly weeping into his coffee in a cafe on a Hamra sidewalk.
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From New York Times - November 2009
Rarely does the hulking commander of American forces in Iraq meet with Iraqis or go to a news conference without a slight, dark-haired woman standing just a little to one side — as if to give him space, but almost always in his line of sight and within earshot.
The woman is Emma Sky, and she is an unlikely figure in the milieu of the generally strait-laced American military. She is British, 41, a civilian and a onetime opponent of the war, but nevertheless a political adviser, as well as confidante on many policy matters to the American commander, Gen. Ray Odierno.
She is often compared to Gertrude Bell, a celebrated early-20th-century British adventurer who was an architect of modern Iraq. That may be an overstatement, but Ms. Sky is nevertheless, like Ms. Bell, a woman to be reckoned with.
She has provoked her share of controversy, both because of her outspoken criticism of some military policies and because of her influential position in General Odierno’s inner circle.
Conversant in Arabic and Hebrew, Ms. Sky has worked in conflict zones from Israel to Afghanistan, has spent more time on the ground in Iraq than most soldiers and knows tribal leaders from the northern city of Kirkuk to the southern city of Basra.
“Emma was able to give me a completely different perspective: it was from an Iraqi viewpoint,” General Odierno said.
“We didn’t have a lot of experience in doing these things, so someone with her background and knowledge was able to assist us as to how we could best help civilians.”
One senior foreign diplomat said that the very presence of a civilian political adviser at the right hand of a senior American military commander was a sign of the extent to which military strategy now strives to take into account the political and cultural landscape of conflict.
Outsiders’ points of view on Iraq began to be aggressively sought about three years ago, when counterinsurgency strategy began to permeate every aspect of military thinking. According to the new doctrine, operating successfully in hostile places required understanding how local people saw the situation and whom they viewed as friends or enemies.
Ms. Sky sees herself as part aid worker, part political operator, part cultural translator.
“I’m experienced in working in different cultures. The most alien culture I’ve ever worked in is the U.S. military,” she said with characteristic candor. “I was used to working in the humanitarian space, the diplomatic space. I came to Iraq and that space, the military, is all over it.”
Rather than remaining an outsider, however, she decided to try to effect change from within. Initially she worked as a British Foreign Ministry employee detailed to the American command; more recently, she has become an American contractor.
Despite her insider’s post, she prides herself on retaining an outsider’s view of the military, saying things to top brass that others will not. During the troop buildup in 2007 known as the surge, she said that attacks on insurgents that also resulted in civilian casualties were tantamount to “mass murder.”
“When you drop a bomb from the air and it lands on a village and kills all those people and you turn around and say, ‘Oh we didn’t mean to kill the civilians,’ well, who did you think was living in the village?” she said.
That is now conventional wisdom. The first thing Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal did when he took over the command of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan was to prohibit attacks that might harm civilians.
Just as she has tried to help the military pay more attention to civilian points of view, the commanders have given her a new appreciation for the role of force. She came to believe that increasing troop numbers in 2007 and 2008 was the best way to bring Iraqi civilians the security they needed so badly.
Ms. Sky then tried to find ways to persuade insurgents to give up violence, promoting early efforts by scattered military commanders to give jobs to Sunni rebels and to find a way to work with anti-American Shiite militias.
Like General Odierno, she sees the period between now and parliamentary elections tentatively scheduled for January as central to Iraq’s future stability, but she has no illusions that the job will be done when the elections are over.
“There is going to be a certain level of violence in Iraq for years to come; it remains to be seen how much the society can continue to absorb,” she said.
General Odierno turned to Ms. Sky, he said, because he was seeking a broad range of views in his inner circle. “Her views are controversial; they are different from many of the people around me, but that’s O.K.,” he said. “My inner circle team accepted her into the process.”
An only child who was raised in England, Ms. Sky attended a boys boarding school from age 7 to 13; her stepfather was a teacher there and her mother was a house mother.
After high school, she entered Oxford’s Somerville College, one of two formerly all-women’s colleges and the alma mater of such strong-minded characters as Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi.
She earned a degree in oriental studies with the idea of working for peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. “When I still believed I could change the world,” Ms. Sky says dryly.
After school, she went to work for nongovernmental organizations, spending almost 10 years mostly in Israel and the West Bank.
As there was little progress on the Middle East peace process, Ms. Sky moved back to England, and she was working for the British Council, an arm of the Foreign Office, when the war in Iraq began.
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