But democracy is a messy process when the result does not come out the way you want it and the defeated parties now want to re-open the question decided at Cambridge. Fourteen nations have written to the U.S. State Department (the U.S. being the depository nation of the International Convention on the Regulation of Whaling) protesting Iceland’s IWC membership. U.S. State and Commerce Department officials disavow any interest in re-opening the matter of Iceland’s membership. However, the 14 authors are, presumably, not writing solely to show off their penmanship and they intend some form of anti-Iceland initiative when the IWC convenes in Berlin June 15.

Evidently, the authors have no interest in the standing of the IWC itself, whose reputation now stands in shreds after numerous rounds of similar NGO-inspired "the end justifies the means" rule-breaking. The delicious irony is that fully 10 of the nations attacking Iceland’s membership have signed on to a resolution radically to expand the IWC’s conservation agenda and enable it to accept external funding. In short, having besmirched the IWC and dragged it through the mud in order to further their own domestic agendas (and distract attention from their environmental failures at home), these 10 now propose to give the IWC a whole new range of authority. The fact of the matter is that, through initiatives such as its anti-Iceland campaign, the anti-whaling bloc has all but destroyed the IWC and it is no longer a question of whether the institution will win a broader mandate but whether it will survive in any form whatsoever.