Oliver Kamm

All Gas and Gaiters

The BBC reports:

Tony Blair has been criticised by two Church of England leaders for his handling of the war in Iraq. Dr David Hope, the Archbishop of York, questioned the legitimacy of the war and warned that the prime minister would have to answer in the end to God.

And the Bishop of Durham, Dr Tom Wright, called Mr Blair a "vigilante".

The established Church is one of the idiosyncrasies of our polity. Though neither an Anglican nor a Christian nor a theist, I don't particularly object to it. The important principle of a liberal democracy in matters of religious belief is that there be no religious test for elected public office, and while I prefer the American principle of separation of Church and state, I do not think an established Church detracts from our democracy and occasionally its bishops and archbishops have contributed thoughtfully to our nation's affairs. (William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1942 to 1944 and author of Christianity and Social Order, was an important influence on the development of the post-war welfare state, while his contemporary George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, made necessary and troubling criticisms of the policy of saturation bombing of German cities.)

But a political role has its responsibilities too. One of the Church of England's better political thinkers, Canon Ronald Preston, Professor of Social and Pastoral Theology at Manchester University, made it his life's task (he died last year) to inform Anglican thinking on politics and economics. A Christian Socialist and a former student of R.H. Tawney, he at least made the effort to understand the ideas of orthodox economists, even if he occasionally retreated to a brusque dismissal of their ideas in advance of considering them. He liked to quote, as an instance of the approach he favoured, this judgement from a lay Christian leader in the ecumenical Church of South India (and did so in his Scott Holland lectures for 1983, published as Church and Society in the Late Twentieth Century):

In the modern world it is impossible to conceive of any particular moral or Christian responsibility in politics, economics or society without involving ourselves in technical problems which are rarely simple and clear. One may go further and say that it is in the technical decisions that one is moral or immoral and Christian or non-Christian. And without an understanding of the technical issues that are involved in the field in which Christians are called to act responsibly, mere goodwill or even piety does not go far.

You can see where this is leading. It doesn't trouble me what a Church of England bishop believes about the Virgin Birth, the Incarnation and the Resurrection, or how many of the 39 Articles he may honestly assent to; it infuriates me, however, when those who sit in House of Lords on account of their spiritual authority exhibit minimal understanding of the technical issues on which they ventilate their opinions.

Here, for example, is the Archbishop of York's considered judgement on the removal from power of Saddam Hussein:

We still have not found any weapons of mass destruction anywhere.

Are we likely to find any? Does that alter the view as to whether we really ought to have mounted the invasion or not?

Undoubtedly a very wicked leader has been removed but there are wicked leaders in other parts of the world.

If I thought the man had given these vapid musings more than a moment's thought I should find them indecent, especially the last sentence. What is he suggesting by this risible non sequitur? That because we do not overthrow all bad rulers we may not overthrow one of them (arguably the very worst of them at that)? This isn't moral reasoning: it's sophistry, of a dispiritingly reflexive and unreflective type that one can hear at most dinner parties. As a much more significant Christian ethicist, Jeane Bethke Elshtain of the University of Chicago, has said in connection with the Iraq war:

Augustine talked about politics as trying to reconcile conflicting human wills, and that's the world out there—where you have conflicting sources of power and of willing agents, some of whom mean you harm. That's what you have to deal with.

I think we need to recognize that if there's an opportunity to stop hideous violence being perpetrated against people, if you have the power to do something about that, and you refrain from doing it, then you're complicit at some level in the continuation of that horror. Now, you may decide if you intervene, it would make things worse, so you may stand down on that regard. There may be prudential reasons that preclude intervention. But to do nothing just because it's bad to use force—that makes you complicit in what's going on. Some people don't want to come to grips with that at all.

For 'some people' read 'the bench of bishops of the Church of England'. (Another lamentable example is the Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries, who fancies himself an Augustinian realist in the tradition of the great Reinhold Niebuhr. In August last year Harries contributed an article to The Observer opposing war in Iraq. In the space of 1000 words, he literally made not a single mention of the character of Saddam Hussein's regime.)

Yet for all my strong support for Professor Elshtain's views, I still believe that the point she makes understates the culpability of the anti-war Church establishment (and in England the anti-war Established Church). I am by no means opposed to the notion of humanitarian interventions by civilised states: I supported Nato's actions in defence of Kosovar Albanians from Serb imperialism, and of course I agree that there was a still more overwhelming case for invading Iraq and overthrowing a despot who consciously modelled his gangster regime on both Hitler and Stalin. But - unlike, say, the Labour MP Ann Clwyd, the political theorist Norman Geras and the journalist Johann Hari, all of whom eloquently supported intervention - I don't consider the central argument for overthrowing Saddam was the humanitarian one. What's wrong with the Archbishop of York's comment is not merely his counsel of indifference among wicked rulers, but his incomprehension that Saddam Hussein was in a different category owing to his demonstrable bellicosity.

Yes, there are numerous dictators in the world and Baathist Iraq was not the only country to be in breach of UN Security Council Resolutions. But Baathist Iraq was unique in having been the only regime in the history of the United Nations to have annexed another UN member state, and whose adherence to UN Security Council Resolutions had been a condition of the west's agreeing to a cease-fire (back in 1991, when Iraq's annexation of Kuwait had been reversed). Those who believe Saddam was susceptible to the rational calculations that are a prerequisite of a stable deterrence should look at his record: three aggressive and near-suicidal wars launched in 16 years (1974, 1980 and 1990 respectively). He was a tyrant with a declared wish to acquire nuclear weapons, longstanding support for terrorism, and a record of the use of weapons of mass destruction. Knowing that there were terrorist groups with the wish to destroy western civilisation and conduct holy war against our civilian populations, and with whom we now know Saddam's regime had links, the US-led Coalition was more than justified in overthrowing by force and with proportionality a dictatorship that was the most likely source by which our enemies would acquire weapons of genocide.

This wasn't primarily a war for humanitarian purposes, though humanitarian ends were served by it and humanitarian people ought thus to have supported it. It wasn't either a war of pre-emption, though our own security justified a pre-emptive strike against a regime whose determination to wage war is a fact of history. It was a war in defence of the international order of civilised states against the twin threats of apocalyptic terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, and in furtherance of an effective system of international law in which UN Security Council Resolutions are seen to be implemented by the great powers. In short, it was exactly what the Prime Minister always said it was, and to whom immense credit for his judgement and political courage is due.

To the Archbishop's rhetorical question, we can say no, it does not affect the case for war that no stockpiles of WMDs have yet been found in Iraq. We know that Saddam had such weapons; we don't know what has happened to them, for the straightfoward reason that Saddam refused to comply with UN Security Council requirements to give a full accounting of them; we can have a fair degree of assurance, given the character and history of his regime, that western civilisation faced an inevitable if not imminent threat that our governments had not only a right but a duty to anticipate and extinguish.

As for the Bishop of Durham, I had some expectations of this.

The Bishop is in fact one of the outstanding scholars of the Church of England. His field is Biblical Theology, on which I can honestly say that his writings are models of erudition clearly-expounded, and from which I have learnt much. His books deal with what New Testament scholars since at least Albert Schweitzer - yes, that Albert Schweitzer - have termed the Quest of the Historical Jesus. Schweitzer argued in his magnum opus of that (translated) title, published in 1906, that the 19th-century obsession with reconstructing the life of Jesus reflected a misunderstanding of contemporary Judaism. Jesus was an apocalyptic Jew who expected the Kingdom of God to irrupt into human history within, at most, a few years after his death. On this, Schweitzer argued, Jesus was plainly wrong, and the Gospels represented progressively - with Mark first and John last - an attempt of the early Church to come to terms with this brute historical fact. Clearly this conclusion is a conundrum for orthodox Christians, and Schweitzer's account of Jesus' eschatology (doctrine of the last things) is not now generally accepted. The Bishop's close reading of Scripture and knowledge of first-century Judaism yield a fascinating interpretation that once again takes seriously the point that Jesus was a Jew of his time with a sense of the immanence of the Kingdom of God, but without the more questionable aspects of Schweitzer's biblical exegesis.

None of this, of course, has anything at all to do with politics or economics. On these subjects, Bishop Wright's knowledge appears to be minimal. I have some experience of this because a couple of years ago we conducted a long and cordial private correspondence after we both had letters in The Times on the same day almost immediately after the horrors of September 11. I argued that there was no possibility whatever of a political solution to the problem of terrorism, because our terrorist enemies sought the destruction of western civilisation rather than reforms of specific and remediable ills (my letter, should it be of any interest to anyone, is here). Canon Wright, as he then was, argued (under a different subject heading, for which I cannot at the moment find a link, but on the same page), so far as I recall, a variant of the 'root cause' fallacy that afflicts so much Church thinking about political violence. Disappointed by the lack of thought and research in the political judgement of one whose intellect I admire, I wrote to Dr Wright to say where I thought he was wrong, and so we corresponded over some months.

I have to say that, while I much appreciated, and still do, his willingness to discuss these important subjects with one of different views from his, I didn't feel we got anywhere. Dr Wright peppered his letters with judgements that seemed to me so far from what was actually happening - deploring a supposedly ultra-nationalist rhetoric from the White House, for example - that I had to conclude we had little chance of a meeting of minds. I'm thus not surprised at all to find him uttering such absurd and offensive remarks as these:

Dr Wright said he did not think Mr Blair and US President George W Bush had the credibility to deal with the problems in Iraq.

"For Bush and Blair to go into Iraq together was like a bunch of white vigilantes going into Brixton to stop drug-dealing," he told the Independent.

"This is not to deny there's a problem to be sorted, just that they are not credible people to deal with it."

As it happens, I lived in Brixton for many years, and if there had been more people with the public-spirited approach of the President and the Prime Minister I think some problems at least might have been avoided. The first major foreign policy crisis of President Bush's period of office was, of course, September 11; the President did not lash out immediately after those monstrous acts of war against American nationals, but waited to assemble evidence, give time for al-Qaeda's state sponsors to comply with what law and humanity required of them, and assemble international support. Of all world leaders, Tony Blair is on the evidence of recent history the one with the most pronounced sense of an obligation to the international community. When Kofi Annan issued a desperate plea for international forces to restore order in Sierra Leone, scene of marauding gangsters who lopped the hands off civilians when they were not feeling outright murderous, Blair responded - with not the merest possibility of receiving any political credit at home. That's the measure of the man.

And that, I'm afraid, is the measure of the Bishop of Durham as well.

A happy new year to all.

Marching with Stalinists

The Independent political commentator Johann Hari gives a sobering account of responses on the Internet to a column he wrote recently about an incomparably odious regime:

North Korea is the one foreign policy issue upon which I thought we could achieve a total consensus on the left. It is “the worst tyranny on earth” (Noam Chomsky’s words, not mine) – a Stalinist hell-hole whose starving people are denied, according to Amnesty, “all freedom of thought.” I do not believe in invasion: I simply propose that along with the food aid we offer, we should also try to undermine the regime by flooding the country (as some brave human rights activists currently do) with transistor radios and information, to let the North Koreans who have been locked away from the world for fifty years know that there is still a world out here and that we give a toss about them.

I can understand why conservatives would oppose this. Why should we give a toss about a bunch of yellow people, they ask, when we have so many problems of our own? But it didn’t even occur to me that anybody on the left – which by definition is universalist and concerned with human equality – would disagree.

I use understatement on a grand operatic scale to say his expectations were confounded. One of those he doesn't mention and who is worth recalling is a Stalinist called Andrew Murray. In an earlier post I gave a link to a report given by Murray to the executive of the Communist Party of Britain in March this year. That link has since been taken down, but I quoted Murray thus:

Our Party has already made its basic position of solidarity with People[']s Korea clear.

Why cite the judgement of a man so morally bankrupt that he declares support for a regime that uses starvation as a tool of political control and that pursues the development of nuclear weapons? Because, of course, Murray is chairman of a supposedly broad movement of mass protest called the Stop the War Coalition. Nick Cohen aptly observed of Murray in The New Statesman last April:

Andrew Murray, the coalition's chairman, wrote an article in the Morning Star to celebrate the 120th anniversary of Stalin's birth. He acknowledged that the tyrant had used "harsh measures" but asked why "hack propagandists abominate the name of Stalin beyond all others". That there were 20 million reasons didn't seem to occur to him. Murray is on the politburo of the Communist Party of Britain (which must never be confused with the Communist Party of Great Britain). In a report to his comrades in March, he said the coalition should have two slogans: "Stop the war" and "Blair must go".... Thus, a living fossil from the age of European dictators was heading the biggest protest of the new century.

I keep banging on about the political complexion of the Stop the War Coalition - both its leadership and its policies - because I think it's worth doing, and hasn't been done enough. Consider, for example, the Government's response when the role of Andrew Murray was raised in the House of Commons last March by the Tory defence spokesman Julian Lewis, who asked:

May we have a statement from the Home Secretary on the curious case of Mr. Andrew Murray, a former worker for the Soviet Novosti news agency, currently a member of the Communist party of Britain—it still exists, believe it or not—and an avowed supporter of nuclear North Korea, who has promised, in a report to the Communist party of Britain, that next weekend's great anti-war demonstration will have two slogans: not just "stop the war" but also "Blair must go"? Curiously, Mr. Murray is able to make that promise because he, of all men, is the chair of the Stop the War Coalition, which organises the huge demonstrations to which so many people, perhaps unwittingly, subscribe.

To which the minister he was addressing, Ben Bradshaw, replied thus:

Those of us who have taken part in demonstrations or been involved in protest organisations—and, yes, even I have—will have sometimes had strange bedfellows. However, I am sure that the Home Secretary, and those who are involved in the anti-war movement—most of them for good reasons—will be very interested in what the hon. Gentleman has told the House.

How feeble can a ministerial reply be? The point about the Coalition is not merely that it throws together 'strange bedfellows' but that it is a front organisation for parties of the totalitarian fringe. The Government, whose policy on Iraq I have unreservedly supported, did a miserable job of selling its case, and its unwillingness to confront the anti-war movement directly was a strategic blunder. Being apprehensive about alienating middle Britain is one thing, but the Government ought to have made more of the obvious point expressed to the BBC by a Labour MP concerning the Coalition's April demonstration in London:

Labour MP David Winnick accused organisers of "hijacking" public feeling against the war for their own ends.

"I don't doubt the sincerity of most of the peace marchers who marched before and those who, for some reason, march today," he said.

"But the fact remains that there are a number of the leading organisers whose commitment to parliamentary democracy is very remote indeed."

There's a kind of consistency in the approach of Andrew Murray to the Iraq war: he opposed the overthrow of a tyrant because, of course, he is a declared supporter of tyranny. Those others who marched with the admirers of Stalin and uttered not a word of criticism of them from the platform did themselves no credit, the quality of public debate in this country no good and the people of Iraq appreciable harm. Such moral obtuseness should not be forgotten and ought to be described for what it is.

Disarming dictators

Here is the voice of reason:

The hawks are quite plainly right to say that this sudden tribute by vice to virtue is a direct consequence of Operation Iraqi Freedom. So is the new readiness by the mullahs of Iran to accept international inspections. It might even be true to say that the supposed failure to find WMDs in Iraq is a factor in this welcome surrender. I know I am having it both ways here because I actually believe that Saddam Hussein was concealing illegal weapons and was trying to buy them off the shelf from Kim Jong-il, but look at it from the point of view of a rattled and ramshackle despotism like the Libyan or Iranian one. (Wow—look what happened to Saddam when he was accused of fooling around with weapons and inspections and U.N. resolutions. And we know that we do have undeclared stocks. Is it worth the risk?) One can only be impressed at this triumph of reasoning over ideology. If riff-raff like this can be so convinced of our resolve, then we really must make sure that our resolve is as steely as they think it is.

'Qaddafi does a deal', Christopher Hitchens, Slate 22 December

Here, on the other hand, is the voice of Menzies Campbell MP, Liberal Democrat spokesman on foreign affairs:

This [Gaddafi's deal] is a success for diplomacy. It is one gained through multilateral negotiation and doesn’t depend on the use of force of arms.

The Guardian, 21 December

Having got so much wrong in the past 27 months, the Liberal Democrats and the wider anti-war critics are unlikely to concede to having been wrong-footed on Libya's abject retreat. But if they seriously believe that Gaddafi's apprehensions have nothing to do with the demonstrated resolve of the world's leading democracy and its principal ally in overthrowing dictators who dissemble over weapons of mass destruction, then they are the equivalent - and I choose the analogy carefully - of the Liberal leadership in the 1930s that insisted international aggression and the abrogation of treaty commitments by dictators were nothing to do with us.

Those international actors who have truly stood for the cause of multilateral agreement are, of course, President Bush and the Prime Minister, because they took the unfashionable view that when Iraq agreed to the terms of the cease-fire in the first Gulf War, that agreement had to mean something. When the UN Security Council carried 16 further resolutions demanding Iraqi compliance with those terms (codified in Resolution 687), it landed itself with the obligation to implement those resolutions. Had the US and UK been content to overlook Saddam Hussein's serial violations of those resolutions, the tyrant would be in power today, the documented links between his regime and al-Qaeda would remain intact, and the west would face an inevitable if not imminent threat from the combination of Iraqi weapons of genocide and terrorists determined to use them. As Christopher Hitchens concludes:

Not to end on too festive or seasonal a note, but the disarming of three rogue regimes in under one year isn't bad. If Howard Dean really believes that we are no safer than we were on Sept. 11 (and I presume he can't literally mean that the removal of the Taliban made no difference), then it's time he said what he would have done differently.

The question could usefully be deployed in British political debate as well. Supposing that in place of Tony Blair we had a government made up of any (or indeed all) of Kenneth Clarke, Charles Kennedy, Menzies Campbell, Robin Cook and Clare Short, we should be relying on the good faith and trustworthiness of Saddam Hussein (and his sons), the mullahs and Colonel Gaddafi not to pursue the development of nuclear weapons. Astonishingly, those same British politicians (Campbell in particular) argued before the Iraq war that we should rely on deterrence and containment of Saddam, thereby clearly indicating that they were unfazed by the prospect of a nuclear-armed Baathist dictatorship. (Anyone who believes that Saddam was indeed susceptible to rational calculations on which deterrence depends should recall that he launched three aggressive and near-suicidal wars between 1974 and 1990.)

How wrong, reactionary and irresponsible could these paragons of enlightened opinion have been? To the immeasurable benefit of everyone in the civilised world (and indeed the benighted subjects of the now smaller number of thoroughly uncivilised states), the chances are slimmer than they were a year ago that we shall ever find out.

UPDATE: In a characteristically pithy assertion of common sense, Charles Krauthammer asks rhetorically in the Washington Post:

What kind of naif thinks that this is a triumph for "diplomacy," as if, say, Bill Clinton had sent Warren Christopher to Tripoli, and he chatted Gaddafi into surrendering his WMDs?

Well, in British politics at least, the foreign affairs spokesman for a party that describes itself as 'liberal' - bizarrely enough. As Krauthammer rightly says:

Imagine this kind of thinking 58 years ago: "Japan Surrenders -- Years of War Deprivation Proved Too Much."

Dateline Tokyo, Aug. 14, 1945. Japan capitulated yesterday to the allies, worn down by the accumulation of hardships from the war begun with the sudden outbreak of violence in Hawaii in December 1941. The housing shortage in Tokyo had become particularly acute, especially since the nights of March 9 and 10. And there also has appeared to be an abrupt downturn in recent economic activity in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I am an admirer of the United States, but I'm by no means an uncritical supporter of all aspects of US foreign policy. I also was sceptical of George W. Bush, and in particular his caution about 'nation-building', in his election campaign and the earliest stages of his presidency. But I note that since the horrors of 9/11, US military power has been exercised - with restraint and allied with patient diplomacy - for admirable progressive ends: the toppling of a medieval theocracy in Afghanistan, the routing of a terrorist network that aims at the destruction of western civilisation, and the overthrow of a Baathist tyranny in Iraq that was consciously modelled on both National Socialism and Stalinism. I am proud of British support in those endeavours, as anyone of genuinely liberal sentiments must surely be.

Books of the year

In no particular order, these are ten books of 2003 that I particularly enjoyed. I have cheated slightly in counting among them some books that were published either at the end of last year or in paperback this year. Their common characteristic is that I read them in 2003.

1. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag-Montefiore. Not a conventional biography, but an original, scrupulously-researched and horrifying study of the pathology of an absolute ruler and his hangers-on. Could almost be entitled Everyday Life with a Despot and his Coterie.

2. Regime Change by Christopher Hitchens. Uncompromising, unanswerable and – despite the gravity of the subject – often witty advocacy of the Anglo-American liberation of Iraq. Also well worth reading is William Shawcross’s Allies, a powerful defence of Bush and Blair’s Iraq diplomacy and a suitably contemptuous dismissal of a venal French President.

3. Brian Moore: A Biography by Patricia Craig. Impeccable biography of the excellent and underrated favourite modern novelist of Graham Greene. An Irishman who took Canadian citizenship and lived in California, Moore never quite achieved in his lifetime the readership that he deserved. His lapsed Catholicism is a continual but never obtrusive theme. I particularly recommend his first and most celebrated novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (avoid the unsatisfactory film version with Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins), about an alcoholic Belfast spinster, and The Colour of Blood.

4. The Murder Room by P.D. James. A couple of months ago The Independent columnist Johann Hari advanced the singularly unconvincing case that Agatha Christie was a sophisticated theorist of conservatism (I criticised it here). He picked the wrong detective novelist. Whereas Christie’s novels are rarely anything more than dreary and pedestrian puzzle books, Baroness James’s have an appropriately conservative sense of sin – the notion that once the murder has been solved and the criminal caught, the society the novel depicts nonetheless can’t be as it was before. The latest novel about Commander Adam Dalgliesh is not her best – the identity of the murderer is surprising, but the rationale for the murder seems a bit flat to me – but it’s still detective fiction of the highest class.

5. Selected Works of Merton H. Miller: A Celebration of Markets (two volumes: one on finance, one on economics). These volumes comprise articles and academic papers by the late Chicago economist, who won the Nobel Economics Prize in 1990 for his work on the capital structure of corporation. Not everyone will thrill to ‘Decreasing Average Cost and the Theory of Railroad Rates’, but there are some apt and elegantly-written non-technical pieces as well. In ‘How Much University Research is Enough?’, Miller states:

Economic theory predicts that in a world with no permanent technological secrets, all market-driven economies will converge to the same standard of living eventually, though it may take decades, and perhaps even centuries for those starting furthest back. But since we in the United States start at the front of the pack, the rest of the converging world must always be gaining on us.

Much dangerous nonsense about declining national competitiveness (whatever that is) and supposed unfair trading practices by other countries is uttered in American political debate (see the campaign web site of the ridiculous Richard Gephardt). It could be avoided through an acquaintance with the economic wisdom of Merton Miller.

6. Arafat's war by Efraim Karsh. Definitive and depressing indictment of a corrupt and brutal man who bears responsibility for the fact that there is no independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. See also the same author’s Rethinking the Middle East, arguing that the peoples of the region must be the authors of their own fate.

7. Selected Poems of James Clarence Mangan. Handsome selection of poems from the prolific output of Ireland's greatest poet before Yeats, marking his bicentenary. Mangan is now little read and indeed scarcely known; the young James Joyce said of him 100 years ago:

But the best of what he has written makes its appeal surely, because it was conceived by the imagination which he called, I think, the mother of things, whose dream are we, who imageth us to herself, and to ourselves, and imageth herself in us - the power before whose breath the mind in creation is (to use Shelley's image) as a fading coal.

8. Friends and Rivals: Crosland, Jenkins and Healey by Giles Radice. A triple biography ought not to work, but this one is first-rate. Giles Radice, a former Labour MP, argues persuasively that the moderate Left lost a historic opportunity by failing to alight on a single leader among the trio of Anthony Crosland, Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey. I agree, though I don’t think it could have been Crosland, whose social democratic economic philosophy was shown to be inadequate in the IMF crisis of 1976. Nor did Jenkins have the bite to be an effective Prime Minister (and his record as Chancellor was nothing like as distinguished as he believed, though he was an admirable reforming Home Secretary). Denis Healey, on the other hand, was an outstanding Chancellor (though I admit this is a minority opinion) and a skilled if not especially genteel politician. I believe that had he been Prime Minister he would have undertaken the industrial relations reforms and economic restructuring that Britain needed in the 1980s, but perhaps without some of the social dislocations that accompanied Mrs Thatcher’s premiership.

9. Free at Last! Diaries 1991-2001 by Tony Benn. I read this volume – much of which is Pooterish, and some of it absurd – having altered my opinion of Benn after his television ‘interview’ with Saddam Hussein. I’d previously thought of Benn as an unimaginative politician but a decent man. His flights of political fantasy (e.g. that Britain's far-Left groupuscules are unfairly-maligned idealists) can be attributed to many things, but I don’t believe malevolence is the explanation. His disgusting genuflection before the Butcher of Baghdad does, however, merit a more severe indictment than merely that he’s incorrigibly silly. Yet this most recent volume of diaries shows – once you strip away the politics – a man of touching family loyalty, love of his late wife, and vulnerability and loneliness on his bereavement. There is also a priceless vignette of unintended humour in which John Pilger and Noam Chomsky earnestly lament to each other the media censorship of their opinions.

10. Adenauer: The Father of the New Germany by Charles Williams. Outstanding biography of Germany’s first post-war Chancellor, who navigated that country’s passage from deserved obloquy and crushing defeat to a civilised, pro-western constitutional democracy. Adenauer was a man of many imperfections. He was hectoring and politically sectarian. As a Christian Democrat, he failed to see that his Social Democratic opponents were as reliably anti-Communist as he was (though it has to be said that it took some years before the SPD leadership understood, as Attlee and Bevin did, that a democratic socialist Europe was unattainable and that the democratic Left had to ally with the United States). But for all that, he transformed his nation and purged German conservatism of its traditional authoritarianism and nationalism.

Syria next

The Telegraph notes:

Tony Blair will seek to use the diplomatic breakthrough with Libya to secure similar concessions on weapons of mass destruction from Iran and Syria. Ministers believe that his New Year offensive will restore his fortunes.

Secret "back channel" talks, which have been going on for months with both countries, will be stepped up as London and Washington try to capitalise on the surprise U-turn by Col Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator.

The capture of Saddam Hussein and Libya's announcement on Friday that it would dismantle its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programmes were being seen in Downing Street as vindication of the Prime Minister's strategy for tackling the threat of WMD.

So they should be (and The Telegraph, to its credit, gives a notably generous editorial assessment of the Prime Minister's record on these matters).

The case of Syria seems to me urgent and practicable. Before the overthrow of Saddam there was strong evidence of Syria's possessing chemical weapons, holding Iraqi weapons for safe keeping, facilitating the smuggling of weapons from Russia and promoting terrorism.

The reactionary critics of the Prime Minister - Tony Benn, Robin Cook, Kenneth Clarke and the rest - will complain about the indelicacy of pressing for political change in the Middle East (last April The Independent revealingly referred to President Bush's 'unseemly' desire to reorder the region). They should be ignored once more. We liberal internationalists are, on current evidence, entitled to hope that the overthrow of Saddam and economic pressure resulting from coalition forces’ destruction of the oil pipeline from Iraq will, without our resorting to war, impress upon Syria the imperative of abandoning its belligerent foreign policy. Without the outlet of anti-American and anti-Israel populism, the edifice of Baathist totalitarianism may then prove as fragile as it did in Iraq.

Charles Kennedy and Iraq

While I'm on the subject of the Liberal Democrat leader and his association with the Stop the War Coalition, I reproduce a letter I sent him on 11 February, four days before he addressed the Coalition's Hyde Park rally. I apologise unreservedly for the polite tone: I merely thought it worth a try to dissuade him from marching with admirers of Stalin and supporters of Saddam. I was wrong, obviously.

Dear Mr Kennedy,

I am perplexed by your stated intention to join and speak at next Saturday’s anti-war demonstration.

I support and admire the Prime Minister’s stance on Iraq: a consistent multilateralist cannot but insist that the UN implement its own Security Council Resolutions, which Saddam is demonstrably violating. But I acknowledge there is a legitimate opposing view that we ought instead to pursue containment of Saddam in preference to war. The sponsor of Saturday’s demonstration, the Stop the War Coalition, has nothing in common with that position; rather, it regards Iraq as a wronged party.

The Coalition’s ‘convenor’, Lindsey German, and national organiser, John Rees, sit on the central committee of the Socialist Workers’ Party. The Coalition’s steering committee of 37 comprises, almost to a man, identified representatives of far-Left organisations, including the pro-Milosevic and pro-Saddam Socialist Labour Party. One of the few who is not a member of a Trotskyite or Stalinist party is George Galloway, who declared in The Guardian last September, “Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life.” Galloway also describes my friend John Sweeney as “the cheerleader in chief for imperialist wars everywhere on the globe” on the grounds that Sweeney’s BBC reports from Iraq have unanswerably exposed the brutality and mendacity of that martyred country’s dictator.

The Coalition’s political complexion is confirmed by its policy stance. Its web site contains no reference to, let alone criticism of, the repressive character of Saddam’s regime. It promulgates the portentously-named ‘Cairo Declaration’ of the international group of which the Coalition is a constituent part. The declaration’s aims include expelling the US from any Arab territory (so goodbye to democratic Iraqi Kurdistan, which exists solely because our troops patrol the no-fly zone established to protect Kurdish refugees fleeing above the 36th Parallel), and the ‘Right of Return’ for Palestinians (i.e. not a two-state territorial compromise but the abolition of Israel). The web site also carries recordings of speeches made at the last such national demonstration, where the loudest cheers were reserved for a Mirror columnist who described the Prime Minister as a war criminal and who has since compared the Bush administration to the Third Reich.

I understand the case for tactical alliances in practical politics, and acknowledge that demonstrations on most causes will inevitably attract a parasitic fringe element. The Stop the War Coalition is distinctive, however, in that – unlike the Countryside Alliance, which you compared it to – it is itself a fringe organisation. It is not merely antithetical to liberal values: it comprises some of the most toxic elements anywhere on the political spectrum. I tell you this on the presumption that you do have some principled objection to sharing a platform with apologists for tyranny.

Yours sincerely,

Oliver Kamm

Saddam's capture and the anti-war movement

Norman Geras makes a pertinent observation in his blog:

Maybe it's that I'm tired and I missed it, but so far as I can see, in the week when Saddam Hussein finally met his political end the Socialist Worker (stop and think about this if, like me, you're of the left: Socialist and Worker) have not one single solitary syllable marking that end as something to welcome, to be relieved about - to rejoice over.

I can explain. Socialist Worker does not welcome the capture of Saddam Hussein, for it explicitly desired a military victory for Saddam over British and American forces. In its 23 March edition it maintained:

The best response to war would be protests across the globe which make it impossible for Bush and Blair to continue. But while war lasts by far the lesser evil would be reverses, or defeat, for the US and British forces.

That may be unlikely, given the overwhelming military superiority they enjoy. But it would be the best outcome in military terms. It would make it more likely that Blair would not survive, and Bush would be in trouble too.

The Socialist Workers' Party is of course a fringe organisation of at most a few thousand members, but it has a particular characteristic that is insufficiently remarked upon in polite company: it is the founding and driving force behind the Stop the War Coalition in the UK. The Coalition's 'Convenor', Lindsey German, is editor of the SWP's monthly journal. Another member of the SWP's central committee, John Rees, is a founder and serving office of the Coalition, though he is listed merely as one member among 37 of the Coalition's Steering Commitee. The Steering Committee itself is a body comprising almost entirely members of organisations of the extreme Left; ironically, one of the few exceptions is George Galloway MP, admirer of the strength and indefatigability of a man most recently seen emerging from a fox hole in some haste to give himself up. Indeed, Rees has been refreshingly open about the character of the Coalition in the pages of Socialist Worker:

[T]here is the left that built the Stop the War Coalition. This was easily the biggest section of the left. It included the SWP, the Communist Party, the Socialist Alliance, the Socialist Party, the Green Party, the Labour left, most major trade unions and Globalise Resistance, and was supported by large sections of the Muslim community and CND. It is on this foundation that a truly spectacular movement stands.

Well, almost open: two of these named bodies (the Socialist Alliance and Globalise Resistance) are themselves front organisations for the SWP.

Incidentally, just before the Coalition's Hyde Park rally last February, the BBC reported:

A spokesman for the Stop the War coalition welcomed Mr [Charles] Kennedy's willingness to join the march and said an invitation had been issued to the Liberal Democrats.

That invitation was accepted. The outcome was that a party calling itself 'Liberal Democrat' marched with and at the invitation of an organisation that may be described, without doing rhetorical violence to the plain meaning of words, as a pressure group desiring victory for fascism and dictatorship.

Those peace movement prognostications

Blair and Bush claim that they are trying to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), but the US and Britain are doing more to undermine the treaties that control WMD than to strengthen them.

'No War on Iraq', Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, March 2003

Libya is ready to sign a protocol allowing surprise UN inspections of its nuclear sites, Prime Minister Shukri Ghanem has said. Mr Ghanem told the BBC's Today programme Libya was willing to abide by the rules of the UN nuclear watchdog.

Talks with the IAEA came at the weekend, after Libya announced it was scrapping its weapons of mass destruction programme. The move followed secret negotiations with the US and the UK.

'Libya to allow snap inspections', BBC News, 22 December 2003

CND's trope was one of many dogmatic assertions, often posed as rhetorical questions, made before the Anglo-American intervention in Iraq concerning its supposed disastrous consequences. Liberal Democrat MP and poet Paul Marsden, of whom I have written before, was so proud of his perspicacity that he demanded to know of the Foreign Secretary last January (scroll down to the entry for 22 January 2003):

The Foreign Secretary has said that 'The most aggressive rogue state is Iraq' and that, to make it comply with UN resolutions, force may be required. Is he seriously suggesting to the House that by bombing Iraq and killing the innocent, that somehow Israel, which is in flagrant breach of various UN resolutions, will comply with those resolutions or that North Korea, which is now throwing out UN inspectors and developing a Nuclear bomb, will somehow be frightened into complying with the international community?

Leave aside Marsden's tendentious account of Israel's compliance with UN [Security Council] Resolutions, and note that North Korea's tone did indeed shift markedly after the fall of Saddam Hussein. As the BBC reported almost immediately on conclusion of the war:

Hopes are rising for a peaceful solution to the North Korean nuclear stand-off, after both Seoul and Washington responded positively to an indication by Pyongyang that it was ready for talks.... Previously North Korea - branded by the United States as part of an "axis of evil" along with Iraq and Iran - had insisted it would only hold direct talks with Washington to resolve the crisis.

South Korean security chief Ra Jong-yil said he thought the war in Iraq had played a part in Pyongyang's change of policy.

"North Korea's softening position seems to have mainly come because it wasn't in an advantageous position internationally," Mr Ra said.

It would appear that the anti-war campaigners were acting on flawed intelligence, and we may hope they will mount an urgent inquiry into the matter.

Those Liberal Democrat geo-strategic analysts

Panelist Shirley Williams, a member of [and leader of the Liberal Democrats in] the British House of Lords, brought her European perspective to the discussion....

Although some people might desire revenge, Williams said that retaliation is not a long-term solution to terrorism. Instead, Williams encouraged Americans to ask themselves, "What did we do wrong?"

"I would plead with you not only to think of retaliation," she said. "But to address the difficult part: how one deals with the sources of terrorism."

In part, Americans must recognize that most of the world is not as well off as the U.S. A long-term response to Tuesday's violence would therefore involve dealing with the causes of enmity in the world.

"Let us admit, if we can bring ourselves to do so, that we live a world of excessive inequalities," said Williams, citing the AIDS epidemic in Africa, the crisis in Indonesia and the hatred in the Middle East as examples. Furthermore, she added, the income of the poorest 20 percent of the world is 1/60 of that of the wealthiest 10 percent.

"Such a world feeds terrorism. People have nothing to lose," Williams said.

'Panelists address terrorism', Notre Dame and St Mary's Observer, 14 September 2001

The stereotype that terrorists are driven to extremes by economic deprivation may never have held anywhere, least of all in the Middle East. New research by Claude Berrebi, a graduate student at Princeton, has found that 13 percent of Palestinian suicide bombers are from impoverished families, while about a third of the Palestinian population is in poverty. A remarkable 57 percent of suicide bombers have some education beyond high school, compared with just 15 percent of the population of comparable age.

This evidence corroborates findings for other Middle Eastern and Latin American terrorist groups. There should be little doubt that terrorists are drawn from society's elites, not the dispossessed.

'Poverty doesn't create terrorists', Alan B. Krueger, Professor of Economics at Princeton, New York Times, 29 May 2003

Professor Krueger's own empirical research and his exhaustive discussion of the literature on the supposed links between poverty and terrorism were published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in July 2002. The paper may be downloaded here for a nominal fee.

Those Liberal Democrat economic principles

The Liberal Democrats issued the following press release yesterday after the publication of the latest employment data (which showed a decline in unemployment to a 28-year low):

759,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost since Labour came to power according to House of Commons library figures commissioned by the Liberal Democrats.

Paul Holmes MP, Liberal Democrat Shadow Minister for Work, said: "The manufacturing sector is sinking fast while the Government sits idly by.

"The Government has given up the fight to save manufacturing jobs and has left in the lurch the families dependent on those jobs to survive.

"Claims of record employment levels cannot mask the continuing decline in the manufacturing sector."

You have to admire the man’s willingness to brave derision for the number of cliches employed in making his point (‘sinking fast … sits idly by … given up the fight … left in the lurch … cannot mask’). Unfortunately I have no idea what point it is he’s making.

There is a serious economic critique that can be made of the Government’s record on employment, and it’s alluded to in The Telegraph’s report of the employment release:

But commentators said the headline figures masked the fact that, of the 200,000 jobs created during the year, 65pc had been in the public sector. In his pre-Budget report last week Gordon Brown raised his borrowing projections for the current year by £10billion - largely to fund extra jobs in education and the NHS.

The argument would be that such an expansion of government borrowing ‘crowds out’ private sector investment instead of having a multiplier effect on economic activity. But this reputable economic argument (which I’ll write about in another post) clearly isn’t the one being advanced by the Liberal Democrat spokesman Paul Holmes, of whom I’ve never heard. Holmes’s complaint consists instead in the belief that some sectors – specifically, manufacturing – are innately superior to others. The economic fallacy in this type of thinking has been aptly dissected (in another context) by Sir Samuel Brittan, economics columnist of the Financial Times:

Adam Smith might have lived in vain. For one of the key ideas of economics is that of the circular flow of income. There is a circular continuing flow between purchasers who desire to buy products, the income received from supplying their needs and still further purchases. Unfortunately public discussion is dominated by the opposite idea, the myth of irreplaceable sectors. It is assumed that if Britain loses, say an arms order, then the displaced workers will simply waste away in idleness. It is not asked whether there will be other purchasers at home or abroad to make up the difference….

If you do not like Adam Smith, examine what a supposedly more interventionist economist, namely John Maynard Keynes, taught. It was that the government has a role in maintaining the total flow of spending sufficient to maintain growth and employment. He did not say that it was the government’s duty to maintain people in the same specific employment for ever and ever.

Economists often term the notion of irreplaceable sectors the ‘lump of labour fallacy’ – the premise that there is a fixed amount of labour engaged in producing particular goods or providing particular services, and that if jobs are lost in those activities then they cannot be made up elsewhere. Yet this Liberal Democrat spokesman doesn’t even manage to articulate a coherent fallacy, for he advances his complaint about the decline in manufacturing employment specifically in the context of a decline in the overall unemployment rate. The only inference I can draw is that the man is a snob: whereas some people believe the law or investment banking is superior to, say, teaching or nursing, Holmes believes manufacturing jobs are somehow more elevated and proper than jobs in other parts of the economy.

Holmes’s predilections are an instance of the curious phenomenon of Liberal Democrat economic policy. He is ill-informed, inarticulate, incoherent and economically under-educated. Lacking a philosophy, he gets by on gut prejudice, in a party that manages to combine incompatible prejudices and indeed to alternate them according to whim. For example, and funnily enough (though in fact not funny at all) the Liberal-SDP Alliance manifesto in the 1983 general election explicitly advocated the policy of spending tax receipts to create administrative (not medical) jobs in the National Health Service and the social services:

There is a great need for extra support staff in the NHS and the personal social services. These services are highly labour-intensive and their greatest need for extra people is in regions of high unemployment. We propose the establishment of a special £500 million Fund for the health and social services in order to create an additional 100,000 jobs of this kind over two years.

(The same manifesto incidentally, also advocated directly subsidising jobs in the private sector, a statutory incomes policy, a substantial increase in public borrowing, active management of the exchange rate in order to boost exports, and membership of the European Monetary System. The notion that the last-named policy was incompatible with the others clearly didn’t occur to the manifesto’s authors – though the point was not lost on the former Labour minister, Edmund Dell, who was involved in SDP policy-making and much later commented that its economic deliberations were not the most glorious aspect of the new party’s activities.)

There has been on balance a shift in economic thinking among left-of-centre parties in most industrial democracies in recent years in favour of openness and deregulation. Labour governments in Australia and New Zealand in the 1980s were pioneers in this, and managed their respective national economies well. (The New Zealand Labour government also established the model of central bank independence that was later adopted in this country by Gordon Brown.) The process has been halting in some countries (such as Germany and France), but the trend is unmistakable.

I mention this because in the case of the Liberal Democrats, successor organisation to the Liberal-SDP Alliance, it doesn’t appear to have happened at all. The party is the principal exponent in this country of adopting the policies of the 1970s. It advocates increases in marginal tax rates without regard to how these will affect taxpayer behaviour, with assumed revenues allocated to different purposes at different times, and the choices foregone as a result of those allocations never made explicit. It is wedded to producer interests in the public services and advocates a taxpayer subsidy to the middle classes through the abolition of university tuition fees.

As I have commented before, the party’s Treasury spokesman, Vincent Cable, is an intelligent and able economist who has spent decades espousing sensible views. (As a Labour Party member and adviser to the late John Smith, Cable wrote an excellent Fabian pamphlet in the late 1970s opposing the then fashionable nostrum of import controls.) But his party, as evidenced by such nonentities as Paul Holmes, is exactly opposed to his approach. Watch this space, for I shall certainly be watching the Liberal Democrats’ bitter internal ructions over economics.