CHIANG MAI, Thailand -- While I fully endorse the spirit and the letter of a recent article in The Japan Times by former British Ambassador Sir Hugh Cortazzi on civil servants and politicians, I am conscious that what follows may be dismissed as an instance of the well-known bureaucratic tendency to defend "the fraternity." Nevertheless, this is a delicate and important topic that is often ignored or misunderstood by the public.

It is not only in the diplomatic sphere, but in the bureaucracy in general, that relations with those wielding political power often become strained and difficult. But let us focus on diplomacy.

One fundamental cause of this uneasy relationship is a misconception about specific terminology. It is one thing to talk about "diplomacy," i.e., policy, and quite another to talk about "diplomatic machinery," i.e., the corpus of diplomatic agents at the service of the government. This basic distinction was promulgated during the Conference of Vienna in 1815 and it remains valid. In every country, much criticism is directed toward "erroneous national diplomacy" and so on. But in fact the target of such criticism should be the main political "line" on foreign affairs and not the eventual errors perpetrated by the diplomatic agents. Not that the latter are infallible; far from it. Diplomacy itself is the art of the possible, the skill of human negotiation, and there are no magic recipes for success. But while it is attributing blame, public opinion should draw a line between the process of political decision-making and the execution of those decisions.