Oliver Kamm

About Karadzic

Here are some things worth reading about the capture of the man aptly described by Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who brokered the 1995 Dayton peace agreement, as the Osama Bin Laden of Europe.

First, I strongly recommend the recollections of Ed Vulliamy in today's Guardian. Ed is an outstanding foreign correspondent (and a close family friend). No journalist did more to reveal to an English-speaking audience the depravities of the the war conducted by Karadzic under the malign influence of Slobodan Milosevic. In his dogged pursuit of truth, Ed was among the first journalists to expose the Serb detention camps. On a visit to London in July 1992, Karadzic - when confronted with allegations of Serb atrocities - had challenged journalists to "come and see for themselves". He was presumably counting on his ability to erect Potemkin villages, or at least clean up the camps before the journalists got there. Ed, along with the ITN reporters Penny Marshall and Ian Williams, famously got there in time to expose the grotesqueries at Omarska.

But that's far from all. In his piece today, Ed writes:

But Karadzic is charged with ordering so much more during those three years between Omarska and Srebrenica - the latter being iconic of so much atrocity in so many places that Srebrenica's notoriety now tends to distract from, rather than draw attention to. Atrocity in places whose names are barely known and soon forgotten in the world outside. Who talks now about Bosnian Serb massacres at Zvornik, Vlasenica, Brcko or Bijeljina? (Or, indeed, sites of Croatian atrocities, such as Ahmici, or the Bosnian Muslim camp at Celebici.)

On this issue - the character of the Bosnian war as a campaign of genocidal aggression, and not an incomprehensible explosition of ancient ethnic conflicts - The Guardian got it right very early. The quality of its reporting from the region remains a great strength. 

I'd also direct your attention to a leader in The Independent today, which makes an essential point:

What this Byzantine saga [the capture of Karadzic] reveals is the influence of the European Union at its deepest level. The lumbering behemoth, for all its superstructure of political controversy, has a profoundly benign influence on the cultural as well as economic polity of the region. The arrest of Karadzic shows how the EU works as a "soft power". The lure of membership leads those who want to join into changes which are social and legal as well as political. A place in the European family depends on embracing European values of justice and human rights.

I agree with this almost evangelically. I'm pro-European not primarily owing to an economic judgement - I think, for example, the economic and financial arguments for the euro are good but not conclusive - but because of the role of the EU in reforming institutions and making conflicts more tractable. Bosnia's prospects are immeasurably better now that Serbia and Croatia have the same end in view, namely membership of the EU.

Finally, let's recall who was pulling the strings. We know, from records of telephone conversations between Milosevic and Karadzic in July 1991, that Belgrade was making clandestine shipments of arms directly to the Bosnian Serbs. This was in preparation for the adoption by the UN Security Council, at the request of Yugoslavia, on 25 September 1991 of Resolution 713 imposing an arms embargo. The resolution thus left the newly independent states helpless against Serb aggression. It was a terrible moment in international diplomacy. The least that Western governments, working through supranational institutions, can do now is ensure that the perpetrators of genocide are brought to justice.

Some links

Here are some things worth reading. Richard Dawkins is interviewed in The Times about a forthcoming television programme he's made about Darwin. He is very good at conveying the scale, excitement and beauty of Darwin's intellectual achievement. I have problems with Dawkins when, like so many public intellectuals, he imagines his political opinions are of such depth that they merit being aired in public (see this article, half-way down, and the problem will immediately be apparent). But as an advocate of science and its methods against irrationalism he is a public resource.

My colleague Bronwen Maddox writes in the Wall Street Journal about European attitudes to America. She says:

The question is whether, in gratitude that the next U.S. president is not George W. Bush, America's critics will forgive him for decisions that are in the U.S.'s interests and not their own, or whether they will be disappointed and angry, expecting a radical transformation that was never going to happen, whichever candidate wins. In the new mood of worry, about the economy, as well as security, I'd bet on the first: that the America-bashing of the past two decades will seem like a luxury best now discarded.

I hope her wager is right, and I suspect it is. Anti-Americanism is not deep-rooted in the European psyche; it's merely a constant recycled piece of fabric in the reactionary and nativist elements of European left and right. It won't be affected by anything the US president does, because for these intellectual currents anything the US president does is, ex hypothesi, wrong.

One of my regular correspondents, the military historian D.M. Giangreco, has an interesting article on History News Network entitled "Was Dwindling US Army Manpower a Factor in the Atom Bombing of Hiroshima?" It's a valuable corrective to the notion, so common among anti-nuclear campaigners though which ought to be irrelevant to their case, that estimates of huge casualties in the event of a conventional invasion of Japan in 1945 were a postwar invention to justify President Truman's A-bomb decision. Dennis concludes:

[F]or many years, various individuals critical of Truman's bomb decision regularly maintained that estimates of massive casualties during an invasion of Japan were a post-war creation, and when the copious documentation that they were wrong began to come to light a decade ago, then switched to the line that the estimates must certainly have been developed and seen only by "lowly subordinates" when, in fact, far from being considered by obscure officers tucked away in the recesses of the Pentagon, this vital--and highly secret--matter was being examined by some of the finest minds this country has produced from Henry Stimson to Michael DeBakey. Moreover, Truman had not simply seen the genuinely huge numbers, but reacted decisively to them by calling the June 18, 1945, White House meeting in which the invasion of Japan was given the go-ahead in spite of their frightful dimensions.

Preparing for "betrayals"

Uncanny. John Rentoul in the Independent on Sunday says exactly what I think, before I realised that I think it:

There was a moment last month – it was when Susan Sarandon, the actress, said she might emigrate to Italy or Canada if McCain won – when it seemed essential to the sanity of America that Obama should lose.

 But, no, it is more important that the daydream should be broken. The idea that there is some kind of clean, different, painless, perfect alternative to politics as usual is a distraction from taking difficult, compromised decisions in an imperfect world. If Obama lost, too many people around the world could continue to believe that if only America got out of whatever it is in, everything would be better.

I think McCain is right about Iraq – that the surge has been a success, and that eventual troop withdrawal should depend on that success continuing. But I think it is more important, for America and the world, that Obama should be the one who learns the truth of this the hard way.

In office, he would be forced to use his eloquence and his global popularity to make the case for what is left of the coalition to see its responsibilities to the Iraqis through. Many of his supporters, especially outside the US, would see it as a betrayal. I think it would be a necessary one, by which he could at last heal the suspicion of American power that provides so many around the world with easy excuses.

Obama will receive much adulation on his European trip. It will not be merited, if you consider merely what he has achieved and said. But it will be welcome on two grounds. First, there is the obvious symbolism - which is important and entirely justified - of an articulate black American vying for the leadership of the free world. Secondly, there are few conflicts, crises or social problems in the world that would not benefit from more rather than less American intervention.

The United States performs a unique and essential role in the international order. In the absence of world government, the US provides what the scholar Michael Mandelbaum describes as international public goods. These encompass such diverse goods as a reserve currency; conflict resolution (not an invention of Jimmy Carter, incidentally; it extends at least as far back as President Theodore Roosevelt's mediation to end the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-5, for which he won a Nobel Prize); and collective security through the Nato alliance. It's well past time that we progressive welfarist Europeans acknowledged the point. The pace of candidate Obama's "betrayals" suggests we might have to sooner rather than later, I'm pleased to say.

Chomsky misremembers, as usual

Not everyone will find this item fascinating, but it's worthy of a note for the record. A new interview with Noam Chomsky appears in something called January magazine. As is almost, though not quite, invariable in interviews with the sage of MIT, it is not hard-hitting ("he has provided an ongoing, devastating critique of power, empire and oppression", and so forth). This observation is also typical of Professor Chomsky's adulators: "The opposition Chomsky has engendered ranges from simple vitriol to abject hysteria, including bizarre accusations of Holocaust denial and sympathy for Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge."

See here, comrade. I know of no significant critic of Chomsky's political writings - say, Steven Lukes or Adam Roberts - who who has levelled a charge of Holocaust denial or sympathy for the Khmer Rouge. These accusations are straw men, the construction of which serves to obscure what is genuinely disturbing in Chomsky's political writings. This is that Chomsky does not see what is distinctively heinous in Holocaust denial and the genocidal campaign of the Khmer Rouge.

Chomsky's notorious defence of the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson in 1981 was far from being an unexceptionable libertarian argument for free speech, as Chomsky liked to present it. On the contrary, Chomsky took issue with the obvious conclusion that Faurisson was an antisemite. Chomsky wrote: "As far as I can determine, [Faurisson] is a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort."

Chomsky was at pains to say that he was unfamiliar with Faurisson's writings, but he certainly knew enough about them from secondary sources to be aware of Faurisson's racism and pro-Nazism. Note that in the second of his pieces that I've linked to, Chomsky acknowledges having read an article by the historian and anti-racist campaigner Pierre Vidal-Naquet dissecting Faurisson's writings  ("I was considerably more surprised to read in Esprit (September 1980) that Pierre Vidal-Naquet...."). The article by Vidal-Naquet is this one (in English here); it is not possible for an honest reader of this masterly exposition to dispute that Faurisson is an antisemitic bigot.

But rather than persist with arguing that the Earth is round, I'll make just this observation. Chomsky makes free use of such accusations as racism and complicity in state crimes. In this interview in 1988, for example, he described Thomas Friedman of the New York Times as an "astonishing racist and megalomaniac". Here is Chomsky, in 2001, accusing the political theorist Jeffrey Isaac of "support for state violence". And here he is, in 2006, accusing, well, me of "tacit acquiesence in horrendous crimes".

You see the pattern here? It is one that runs through Chomsky's output. Friedman, Isaac and I are, in varying ways, advocates of liberalism. We are condemned by Chomsky in the terms I've quoted. But when writing of a man who undeniably is a racist, and who really is guilty of acquiscence in horrendous crimes, Chomsky eschews such language. Robert Faurisson's life's work is the denial, by fraudulent polemical techniques, of the greatest crime of our age. He appears to Chomsky, let us recall, a "relatively apolitical liberal of some sort".

All of this is, however, by way of preamble to the only significant point in the interview with Chomsky. It's well worth quoting. The first paragraph is by the interviewer. The second quotes Chomsky directly:

Mainstream media’s superficial reportage on Cambodia cast the lethal Khmer Rouge as arising without cause. Chomsky and colleague Edward Herman’s postulation was that the Khmer Rouge’s rise and eventual reign of terror -- far from appearing, in essence, out of nowhere -- was firmly a product of the American campaign of mass destruction in southeast Asia.

“The story about the Khmer Rouge ... I suspect must be the best, most careful, accurate” chronicle. “Nobody’s found a thing [that’s inaccurate]. If we were to rewrite it now, we’d do it exactly the same way.”

My word: Chomsky would write of the Khmer Rouge today exactly as he wrote of it in the 1970s. Well, this is what he and his collaborator Ed Herman did actually write about the Khmer Rouge at the time, in an article in The Nation in June 1977. (I have discussed here, with I hope the proper measure of incredulity and revulsion, more recent commentaries by Herman on the genocides at Srebrenica and in Rwanda.) They refer pointedly to "alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities" (emphasis added), and take issue with a comparison of Pol Pot's rule to Nazi Germany. They suggest that it is "more nearly correct" to compare Cambodia to "France after liberation, where many thousands of people were massacred within a few months under far less rigorous conditions than those left by the American war [in Indochina]".

This is so extraordinary that it bears repeating. Chomsky expressed these sentiments in 1977; and, on his own account, he would write exactly the same again today. To invoke a phrase of the master sophist himself: perhaps no more need be said.

That Obama cartoon

There has been a largely synthetic controversy this week about the cover of the New Yorker magazine, which caricatures Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, as America-hating terrorists. The unsubtle point is to mock those conservative neanderthals who perceive in the Obama campaign something, well, unAmerican. The Obama campaign has, however, taken umbrage.

My Times colleague Alice Fishburn sought the views of a number of us on the propriety of this cover. This was my comment: It would take an obtuse reader to miss the laboured irony here - complete with portrait of bin Laden and the flag consigned to the fire. Indeed the lack of subtlety is the reason the cartoon fails. The role of Michelle Obama in the campaign and where she stands politically are matters of public interest, as were the equivalent questions directed at the Clintons in the 1990s. Obama's campaign has no ground for complaint; on the contrary, the cartoon unfairly caricatures the opposition to him.

But read Christopher Hitchens in the Mirror. He expresses more witheringly the point I was groping for:

"If reassurance is what was wanted, it would have been nice to hear Barack Obama agreeing with the New Yorker’s people that the cover was (a) a joke and (b) a pro-Obama joke and then adding (c) that he and his wife "got" the said joke. No such luck. A statement of extreme lugubriousness from Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton announced that "most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive – and we agree". So in other words, the Obama team disagrees strongly with those readers who don’t see it as tasteless and inoffensive, as well as those who interpret it as an attempt to draw the sting from a whispering campaign against Obama. Take that, you broad-minded and humorous rabble! Satire can do no more."

I suspect that the Obama campaign sought the mantel of those who are offended, because there is a fashion for according sympathy to those who declare themselves mentally anguished. It would be nice if they were met with less understanding and appreciably more derision.

Stuff

July has been an arid month for this blog, as you may have noticed and for which I apologise. I joined The Times this week, but am continuing to update this site, about which we'll be making an announcement at some point. Here are some things I've noticed in the last few days.

One of the interesting but less surprising things about the economic malaise of the UK and the euro area is the emerging criticism of the notion of inflation targeting. This has been compounded by the surge in inflation in the UK in June. There must be a temptation for the government to do one of two things: either change the inflation target, or change the inflation measure that is being targeted (for example, to core inflation, which excludes the volatile components of food and energy prices). Either of those courses would undermine not just the government's economic achievements but also the entire concept of New Labour.

The point of the monetary framework that was literally the first decision of Tony Blair's government was to replace discretionary intervention with a framework of rules. I'll have more to say about the value of inflation targeting in public policy. (I recommend a highly informative volume about the theory and practice, published in 1999, which retains its relevance, called Inflation Targeting: Lessons from the International Experience, by Ben Bernanke, Thomas Laubach, Frederic Mishkin and Adam Posen.) But there were particular historical reasons for Labour to adopt this policy, namely that some economic interventions by previous Labour governments had had serious inflationary consequences. The Wilson government of 1974-76 indeed has some claim to being the worst period of economic management since 1945, though my choice would be the entire Heath government of 1970-74 and its disastrous "dash for growth".

Nick Cohen has an excellent post at Harry's Place on the issues at stake in liberals' tolerance of Islamist reaction. I've previously argued that Nick has identified a disturbing phenomenon that is far more extensive than his critics allow for.

I try not to be needlessly sectarian, but this sort of flannel about science and religion never fails to irk: "They may be separate disciplines. And yet, as Lord Robert Winston recently put it: 'In reality, both religion and science are expressions of man's uncertainty.' To put it another way, through greater knowledge, we can deepen the mystery of life."

Science and religion are not separate "disciplines", because religion is not a discipline. It is a set of dogmatic beliefs. That is not to dismiss religion: it is merely to insist that it's an exactly different approach from that of science, which has no dogmata. Religious doctrines change when scientific findings, such as the age of the Earth, or our moral understanding, such as acknowledging the rights of homosexuals, make them untenable as they stand. I don't regard religion as an inherent enemy of social and intellectual advance; I do consider that it contributes literally nothing to that cause.

A reader has posted a comment below this post cordially asking me to leave alone "the tired old business of Neil and Christine [Hamilton]". Fair point.

Hamiltonian revisionism

In a darned odd piece in The Spectator, the cartoonist Martin Rowson declares his love for Christine Hamilton. I certainly won't criticise him for this, and will tread softly sooner than tread on his dreams. But this is something else:

I got the impression that Neil relishes the showbiz life less than his wife. He was once a serious politician, albeit with some pretty unsavoury views, whose behaviour may or may not have contributed to his own political destruction. Either way (and though I contributed gleefully to his harrying) he never started any illegal wars, and the bile that was heaped on him was out of proportion to what he was alleged to have done.

I need not even dispute Rowson's allusion to the Iraq War and legality - an issue of greater complexity than he appears to realise - to describe this as baloney. I played a minuscule supporting role in the political defeat of Neil Hamilton by Martin Bell more than a decade ago, and I have not the slightest doubt that Hamilton's humiliation was self-inflicted and unsought by his electoral opponent. Given that Hamilton was determined to defend his seat rather than stand down, it was also necessary for the health of British politics.

A few months ago, the author of a forthcoming book on independent politicians contacted me to ask what I thought was the significance of the defeat of Mr Hamilton by an independent candidate. I speak for no one but myself on this (and Martin takes public issue with my view that the British polity is far from corrupt), but this was my reply:

Martin will occupy an enduring significance in British politics in one specific but far from trivial respect. I don’t see him as the progenitor of a movement of independents eroding the party system, nor do I think it would be a good thing if he were. But he played a central role in remedying a blemish on that system when it was needed. The British polity is far from corrupt, but at the end of a long period of single-party dominance in the mid-1990s, some MPs had confused public service with personal interest. Martin’s intervention demonstrated that no MP could rely on the notional safety of a large parliamentary majority, but that a politician had to earn public respect.

If there is anyone who deserves sympathy in the Hamilton affair it is the national Conservative Party, which suffered severe damage to its reputation by Neil Hamilton's behaviour. Hamilton plainly did not represent the difference between electoral defeat and victory for the Tories nationally; but he may have been the difference between heavy defeat and total catastrophe, and John Major's perceived weakness in the affair compounded the damage.

But it needed to be done, and I fear that Martin Rowson has allowed the state of his emotions to overwhelm his judgement. It happens to all of us from time to time, though not - I hope - necessarily in print.

The Rosenberg case misremembered

The Telegraph carries an obituary for Ruth Greenglass, whose death last month at the age of 84 has only now become public knowledge. The name may not be familiar to many readers. Mrs Greenglass was an important figure in the trial of the atomic spy Julius Rosenberg and his wife Ethel in 1953. The Rosenbergs were found guilty and were executed.

The obituary gives a workmanlike account of the facts of the case. Mrs Greenglass's husband, David, was Ethel's brother, and gave crucial evidence for the prosecution. But it's odd that you would not learn from the article the central fact of the case. Julius Rosenberg was guilty as charged.

This is no longer a matter for historical dispute. In 1995 the so-called Venona project was declassified by the US government. This comprised transcripts of intercepted and decoded Soviet diplomatic cables from 1946. Julius appears in the decrypted traffic under the code name ANTENNA (later changed to LIBERAL), as the head of a Soviet espionage ring. (The significance of Venona is usefully summarised here.)

Here is what the Telegraph says:

The case generated a great deal of controversy, especially in Europe, where it was argued that the Rosenbergs were victims of anti-Semitism and McCarthyism and had been framed solely on account of their politics. The couple had never confessed and went to their deaths protesting their innocence.

Well, yes. The Rosenbergs did protest their innocence. They were lying. There were indeed accusations that the couple had been framed in an act of murderous antisemitism by the US government - but the claim was (a) preposterous and (b) a product of Soviet propaganda, consciously designed to divert international attention from a genuine antisemitic show trial, that of Rudolf Slansky and thirteen other defendants in Czechoslovakia (later depicted in an excellent film, A Trial in Prague).

Of the Rosenbergs' trial, we can say, more than half a century later, all of the following with reasonable certainty. Ethel's conviction was based on tainted evidence (that of her brother, Ruth Greenglass's husband, David Greenglass). That evidence should have been ruled inadmissible. The prosection case, as it was conducted and regardless of what we now know of the historical facts, was flawed. The prosecutor, Roy Cohn, was a corrupt and unscrupulous man. The capital sentence was unjust and ought never to have been imposed. But the one thing we cannot say is that there is any doubt of the Rosenbergs' guilt. Julius was a spy, and Ethel was his accomplice.

Julius passed information to his Soviet handler, Aleksandr Feklisov, on no fewer than 100 US programmes, including the A-bomb. Stalin would have broken the US nuclear monopoly at some point regardless of the Rosenbergs' efforts. But the Rosenbergs allowed Stalin to be bold when it was important that he be confronted - especially over the direct Communist aggression in Korea.

The Rosenberg case is not merely a matter of historical interest. It's important to recall that the Western democracies faced a genuine threat in the Cold War, and that our adversaries operated with agents in place. Our governments made many mistakes in containing Communism; the execution of the Rosenbergs, which President Eisenhower never expected to be carried out, was notable among them. But acknowledging mistakes is one thing. Succumbing to the myth of an oppressive US state inflamed by McCarthyite demagoguery is quite another. There's no room for agnosticism when you're considering historical truth against arrant falsehood.

Cognitive dissonance and crime

In his column today, Daniel writes of "the tension that arises when a person holds two attitudes that are psychologically inconsistent". The examples he gives include some terrible miscarriages of justice, such as the execution of Timothy Evans in 1953. There is an example on the other side - a determined refusal to acknowledge the guilt of a man who certainly was a murderer - that occurred to me.

James Hanratty was hanged in 1962 for the A6 murder in Bedfordshire. The campaigning journalist Paul Foot, who died in 2004, took up Hanratty's cause, even after DNA evidence 40 years later proved Hanratty's guilt. A Horizon documentary in 2002 contained this testimony from the Forensic Science Service:

NARRATOR: [Scientists'] confidence stems from a simple act of logic. If James Hanratty is not the killer then where is the killer's DNA? For scientists can only find one male profile on the exhibits.

ROGER MANN: We only have one profile. That profile matches James Hanratty. If that was a contaminant, if that was due to contamination we would expect two profiles, one from James Hanratty due to the contamination and one from the original killer.

And this is how Paul Foot responded in the same programme:

I'm a complete illiterate in relation to the science of DNA, physics and so on. I know nothing about it at all. My doubts stem solely from my, a very, very clear belief that this man did not commit this murder, so if the science is saying he did commit the murder I say well that clashes with my belief that he didn't commit the murder and there must be something wrong with the science.

I'm no less opposed to capital punishment than Foot was. I believe that the executions of Adolf Eichmann and Saddam Hussein, never mind the innocent Timothy Evans, were wrong. Foot also did immense good in exposing genuine miscarriages of justice. But Hanratty was not a victim of injustice: he was a brutal murderer who merely ought not to have been hanged. Foot's protestation on this point is an indication - as I argued in this piece - of where absolutist positions may lead you: irrationalism and a political philosophy that had no conception of the virtues of constitutional government.

Iran's mixed message

Sorry once more for the delay in posting. As stated in the post below, I'll be joining The Times on Monday and there will be an announcement in due course about this blog.

Robert Fox has an astute and worrying piece on "Comment is Free" about Iran's imprudent ambiguity on its nuclear programme. The important point is this, it seems to me:

This week Professor Peter Zimmerman, former scientific adviser to the Senate foreign relations committee and emeritus professor of science and security at King's College London, has spelled out just how dangerous the game of strategic ambiguity can be. In an article in the International Herald Tribune, Zimmerman points out that there are such peculiarities about the Iranian nuclear programme, particularly at Natanz, that suggest they can only be aimed at acquiring nuclear weapons, and this is happening in very short order.

The plant at Natanz, he points out, is too small to be the cornerstone of a nationwide nuclear civil power programme. There are aspects of the known work, such as the use of high explosive to implode a hemispherical shell of heavy metal, which can only be for lightweight nuclear projectiles. Continuing work on nuclear detonators points to the same conclusion. Natanz could produce enough high-grade material for some 100 small nuclear warheads (roughly the power of the Hiroshima bomb) within two years.

That enrichment facility at Natanz, which the Iranian regime initially concealed, is seriously worrying. There is no reason that the regime should seek to enrich uranium for a civil nuclear programme rather than buy it on the open market. My fear is that the ambiguous diplomatic stance that Iran has adopted reflects uncertainty about the purpose of the programme. If the mullahs see an opportunity for military applications, then they will take it.

The task of western diplomacy is to impress upon the regime that there will in that case be very heavy costs. I have confidence that the EU-3 under the present political leaderships of the UK, France and Germany will give that message. I have no such confidence in the case of Russia. It need hardly be added, but I'll add it anyway, that the self-proclaimed anti-war movement is an obstacle to a pacific resolution of this crisis, to the extent that it portrays Iran as behaving reasonably. The regime is not behaving reasonably: it is deceitful, it is fiercely antisemitic, and it explicitly anticipates the extinction of a member state of the UN. We can't and mustn't accommodate this.