The challenge of the Chairman
I am trying to work out whether I feel sorry for the IWC Chairman Bill Hogarth. As AFP report ‘After three years as the man in the middle of global passions on whaling, Bill Hogarth has reached a conclusion he concedes won't be popular -- everyone must compromise.’
The problem is of course is that Mr. Hogarth is a diplomat, and diplomacy is based on compromise. History of course, indicates that compromise can be misplaced, if not downright wrong. As a Virginian Hogarth maybe should know that compromises such as ‘The Missouri Compromise’, a classic historical example, prove that just trying to resolve a dispute that was fundamentally flawed at its core, will never succeed.
Maybe Mr. Hogarth is a student of game theory, but if he is, then he finds new steely-eyed opponents in the persons of the whalers such as Havlur’s Kristján Loftsson who don’t believe in lose, lose scenarios. They only believe in winning, at all costs, - and they will use any negotiations to force conservation countries to give them more and more.
As AFP reports 'Japan has already publicly rejected the contours of his grand compromise and at home, a top US congressman has sought to sack Hogarth.'
"There's an old Southern expression, hold your nose and then move forward," Hogarth told AFP. "If everybody wins, of course you have no solution," he said. "Everybody will have to suffer some pain, although I hope the whales don't."
It’s that ‘hope’, that I think is a risk too far. In seeking to please everyone and no one, Hogarth has fallen foul of the promise that human greed can be moderated by reason. If history tells us one thing, it’s that humans and whales don’t mix, unless it’s across the bows of a whale watching boat – and that’s a lesson a real diplomat for the whales (Robbins Barstow) taught me a long time ago.
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