Department of Blithe Assertion

Apologies for my having been away for longer than I’d expected. Normal service now resumes. My thanks for the many comments appended to my post disclaiming any possibility of my concluding the Iraq war was a mistake – I hope to post in the next few days a reply to the criticisms.

Among the things I have noted in the past few days is the identity of the Chump of the Week (indeed this or any other week). His name is Rupert Read, and he signs himself as Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. Last Sunday he had a letter published in the Telegraph:

I was sorry to read the spiteful and misinformed attack on the late Sir Peter Ustinov by my one-time ally (in our student-politics days), Stephen Pollard (Comment, Apr 4).

Mr Pollard appears to think that stringing together a bunch of misleading attacks on Ustinov (eg Mr Pollard repeats the laughable canard that Ustinov's opposition to the Bush-Blair attack on Iraq constitutes his having been a supporter of the barbaric Saddam regime) will make him appear to be a radical and contrarian "intellectual". On the contrary, Ustinov had far the better claim to having been an intellectual.

One of his greatest ever quips was on the eve of the Iraq misadventure when he said: "War is the terrorism of the rich; terrorism is the war of the poor." If Mr Pollard ever produces a sentence as important, true and elegant as that, I will happily work with him again. Sadly, I'm not holding my breath.

If that’s what counts as important, true and elegant, than I’ll settle for banality, falsehood and gracelessness – anything, in fact, so long as no one mistook the sentiment for one of mine. By contrast, Dr Read was so smugly impressed with the aphorism that he cited it again two days later in a letter to The Independent, evidently not having had, on this subject at least, a critical thought in his head in the interim.

If you contend that war is terrorism then you are eliding the distinction between the indiscriminate violence (as between military and civilian targets) characteristic of terrorism and the limited warfare, attempting to avoid civilian casualties, practised in Iraq by Coalition forces. You can argue that that distinction is otiose anyway (though that’s not a view I hold), but to avoid mentioning it altogether is to overlook one of the most influential principles in moral reflection on warfare in western philosophy, namely the Thomist principle of double effect. Targeting civilians in warfare is morally wrong, but warfare that causes civilian deaths is not necessarily wrong where those deaths are an unintended and secondary consequence of an attack on a military target. Whether it is or not depends on other criteria applied in particular cases. I would expect an academic philosopher to be willing to engage in that discussion, or alternatively indicate the nature of his disagreement with that type of moral reasoning, rather than assume the question away.

Conversely, Dr Read’s contention that it is true and important to describe terrorism as the weapon of the poor demonstrates an undoubted capacity for imagination. The instigator of the attack on the World Trade Center is (or at least certain human remains in the Tora Bora mountains are those of) the scion of a billionaire Saudi construction dynasty. What animates Osama bin Laden’s movement is not poverty but ideology: a pitiless and fanatical commitment to kill those it regards as infidels, including all Americans and all Jews.

To point this out is, of course, to have no effect at all. Prejudices are durable, and there is none more so than the conceit that terrorist attacks on the citizens of western democracies must have some [cliché alert] root cause attributable to us. Here, taken almost at random, is yet another example of a dogmatic assertion of a speculative hypothesis presented as self-evident truth: it’s a statement issued by the President of the Methodist Conference, Rev. Dr Neil Richardson, immediately after the Madrid bombings:

The perpetrators of the Madrid bombings, and their particular motivations, have not yet been identified. But what is incontestable is that global terrorism, of which Spain is the most recent victim, is bred by injustice and deprivation. Western nations, therefore, need critically to examine their foreign policy.

It is certainly not incontestable. I have linked before to a study by the Princeton economist Alan B. Krueger and his Czech collaborator Jitka Maleckova, published the US National Bureau of Economic Research, on precisely this question, and do so again now because of its importance and originality. The paper, entitled Education, Poverty, Political Violence and Terrorism: Is There a Causal Connection? is available here for a small fee; a non-technical summary is available here. Finally, a non-technical version of the paper, published in The New Republic, can be read for free here.

Krueger and Maleckova’s research is not easy to reconcile with what the President of the Methodist Conference believes to be incontestable. I quote from the summary.

The core of the study entails a comparison of the characteristics of members of Hezbollah (or Party of God), which the U.S. State Department has designated a terrorist organization, with those of the general population of Lebanon. Their analysis indicates that members of Hezbollah's militant wing who were killed in action in the 1980s and early 1990s were at least as likely to come from economically advantaged families and have a relatively high level of education as they were to come from impoverished families without educational opportunities.

The authors, being economists, make no claims about the relevance of their research for matters of politics. But they do make an important point about the potential economic damage of assuming a causal link between poverty and terrorism where none exists. Again, this is from the summary:

The authors are concerned that drawing a connection between poverty and terrorism - if it is not justified - is potentially quite dangerous because the international community may lose interest in providing support to developing nations when the imminent threat of terrorism recedes. That support, they note, waned in the aftermath of the Cold War. Connecting foreign aid with terrorism also risks the possibility of humiliating many in less developed countries, who are implicitly told they only receive foreign aid to prevent them from committing acts of terror. Further, premising aid on the threat of terrorism could create perverse incentives for some groups to engage in terrorism to increase their prospect of receiving aid. "Alleviating poverty is reason enough to pressure economically advanced countries to provide more aid than they are currently giving," Krueger and Maleckova write.

Those who follow debates on economic policy in the US will know Professor Krueger’s earlier highly influential work on the economics of the minimum wage. In a book entitled Myth and Measurement he and his collaborator David Card argued that increases in the minimum wage had not had the adverse effect on employment traditionally hypothesised in economic theory. I make no comment here on that debate; I cite it merely to indicate that Krueger’s approach is empirical: he looks at data, and he is expert in handling them. I have no idea whether Professor Krueger is an admirer of the wisdom of Peter Ustinov, but I suspect that someone of his cast of mind is liable to be a lot less susceptible than Dr Rupert Read to nonsense dressed up as profundity.

UPDATE: A correspondent alerts me to Rupert Read's UEA web site, which includes an article he submitted to a Quaker publication under the title ARE WE TAKING OUR PEACE TESTIMONY SERIOUSLY IF WE DO NOT TAKE NON-HUMAN ANIMALS’ SUFFERING SERIOUSLY? As you can probably tell from the capital letters, the question is rhetorical:

Jenny writes that we can take the issues of animal cruelty and factory farming seriously, while continuing to eat animals. Well maybe. But let me ask you this: could you take the issue of cruel treatment of concentration camp inmates seriously, while continuing to buy shoes made out of human skin?

I don't usually link to things without commenting on them, but in this case I don't know what to say.

Comments

[David Duff]

Reading Oliver's post above, and remembering his recent weakness for list-making, I would like to suggest another list to which all his commenters can contribute - the most stupid and glib aphorism of the last 100 years. Without giving it too much thought may I start it off with "Property is theft"?

[Matty]

Ooh, a bit of smoke & mirrors there, Oliver.

You repeat (for the millionth time) an undeniable truism - poverty is not the cause of terrorism or religious fundamentalism. Osama is, as you say, an extremely wealthy man and it's certainly true that many terrorists come from well-off backgrounds (see also the infamous (and rubbish) "Weathermen").

However, it is also nonsense to claim that poverty has no effect on terrorist recruits. Poverty undoubtably causes resentment and resentment is what extremist ideologues need to draw recruits to their cause. So, yes, we do need to look at ways of dealing with poverty and therefore stifling the support and manpower that extremist causes feed from. It's perfectly correct to chastise idiots who pretend that poverty is the sole reason for terrorism but to pretend it's simply irrelevant (as some far-right ideologues have pretended is also true of crime) goes against common-sense and pandering to it will weaken the fight against islamist terrorism and religious totalitarianism, not strengthen it.

[Steve Kingston]

Re David Duff's challenge: I wrote my thesis on feminist movements of the 1970s and can say without hesitation that the worst political aphorism of the century was 'the personal is political'. If you ever hear that said, start running straightaway.

[Chris]

When I read that letter in the Telegraph, my immediate thought was, 'If he's a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia, what in God's name are the Junior Lecturers like?'

Glib phrase of the century: 'If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.'

[Tommy]

Terrorism is the war of those who claim to speak on behalf of the poor. Sadly they refrain from consulting the poor in advance, taking it for granted that their actions are representative.

[Alina]

The problem with the links drawn by people like Neil Richardson is that they go so glibly from "terrorism caused by poverty" to "poverty caused by foreign policy." They totally neglect the thoroughly corrupt, repressive, authoritarian regimes that hog their countries' resource wealth (usually oil) while creating vast numbers of terrorized people. (Terrorism looks a lot like the exportation of the means used inside all too many of these places.) As Herbert Kitschelt demonstrates in a fantastic recent paper, "Origins of International Terrorism in the Middle East," available on the web at , the creation of these conditions has less (though not nothing) to do with foreign policy -- and its bugbear, colonialism -- towards these countries than with the groteseque disorders within them.

[Alina]

It looks like hte URL for the Kitschelt paper didn't go through, so let me try again, in English: fesportal(dot)fes(dot)de(slash)pls(slash)portal30(slash)docs(slash)FOLDER(slash)IPG(slash)IPG1(single underscore)2004(slash)ARTKITSCHELT(dot)PDF

[Canadian Headhunter]

Oliver, a rich man can be the tribune of the poor.

[Phil Jackson]

"a rich man can be the tribune of the poor"

Not in this instance. For it would imply the emotional drive of altruism on the part of The Thug and his followers, and altruists do not fly plane-loads of innocents into tower blocks of innocents.

In fact the good faith of any "rich man" playing the tribune role can be measured by the degree to which he shifts power or, at least, political leverage directly into the hands of those he professes to care about. Such men are remarkably few in history.

"Poverty undoubtably causes resentment and resentment is what extremist ideologues need to draw recruits to their cause"

That poverty causes resentment is a truism - after all, people are hardly likely to celebrate their poverty or even be indifferent to it. However, whether or not the poor externalise their resentfulness and, if so, in which direction ("who’s to blame?") is determined by the dominant ideology of their time and place. That ideology, in turn, is not generated by the poor themselves but springs from the aspirations of some or other elite vying for ascendancy with other elites. It is ideology therefore, not poverty, that is the ‘root cause’ for the West-haters, and even if the poor did not exist it would be unlikely to cause serious impediment: they could easily be invented in some relative or ‘virtual’ form if it was thought necessary.

The terrorist ideologies - together with their self-romanticising martyr complex - must therefore be attacked head on; precisely what the Israeli government is doing now, to tut-tuttings from the GrauniBeebs. Poverty is a real but separate issue; the West can help to eradicate it by prompting the growth of free market capitalism and democratic norms throughout the Middle East. It is important that the Arab nations should learn how to generate their own Margaret Thatchers. Dr Richardson would agree, I’m sure.

[PooterGeek]

Given the frequent parallels between our respective 'Blogs, Oliver, the few visitors to mine might get the idea I am trying to be jester to your scribe. My defence is that I've usually thumped one of our common enemies with a pig's bladder before you've got round to running him through with a pen. This time I'm late to court, and I've, er, brought a quill. Here's another "true and elegant" saying for Rupert Read: "You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends."

[Oliver Kamm]

Matty - I'm not aware that any serious commentator has ever claimed 'poverty has no effect on terrorist recruits'. I can think of at least one particularly vicious terrorist group whose members (though not leaders) are largely from the poor - Shining Path in Peru - while the IRA is predominantly a movement of the lower-middle and working classes. Support for al-Qaeda is strong among the rural poor in Pakistan. The point is not that no terrorist recruit is ever swayed by poverty, but that, first, there is no causal connection between poverty and terrorism, and secondly, even the correlation between poverty and terrorism is low. There are at least as many terrorist movements that have no connection with poverty at all - the Red Army Fraction in Germany, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka etc. More to the point, there is no terrorist threat to the West from countries in sub-Saharan Africa, which are desperately poor.

Your analogy with thinking about the causes of crime is question-begging, because it's precisely one of the questions that Krueger & Maleckova raise whether terrorism is in fact analogous to crime. They argue, from the empirical evidence, that terrorism is in fact less like crimes against property, where an economic motive can reasonably be inferred, than it is like political activism, which is much more commonly practised by the educated and affluent.

[Canadian Headhunter]

>the good faith of any "rich man" playing the tribune role can be measured by the degree to which he shifts power or political leverage directly into the hands of those he professes to care about. Such men are remarkably few in history

Mass democracy is a fairly recent invention. Usually, experts don't think that the poor and uneducated can run their own affairs. That's why they need leaders and activists from the upper classes. We might think this leads to corruption of the cause, but not in principle.

Eric Hoffer said that activists are often well-to-do people whose ambitions are blocked so they adopt some needy group as an alternate means to power. (He included Herzl among them).

Even so, it doesn't mean that they are not dedicated to their "charges". For instance, people might become doctors to have good jobs but that doesn't mean they have no sense of responsibility toward their patients.

[Oliben]

Concerning the (presumed) connection between poverty and terrorism, where does that leave ETA, whose members hail from one of the richest parts of Spain?

[herzl]

The same Dr Rupert Read, giving UEA as his address, writes this to the letters page of last Saturday's Financial Times (17 April):
"...Violence is violence. Why is the murder of hundreds of women and children by gangs of American soldiers in Falluja or the murder of Rachel Corrie (an unarmed American peace activist)in Palestine morally superior to the murder of hundreds of Spaniards by an al-Qaeda cell or the murder of an Italian mercenary held hostage by a gang of Iraqi militiamen?
If Bin Laden is a terrorist, then so is Sharon. The main differences between them are that Sharon has been far more militarily successful, and that he has even more blood on his hands across the years. The 'war on terror' is a deeply dangerous vacuity that George Orwell would well understand".
Evidently, Dr Read is a deeply dangerous vacuity but it's a shame the FT gives space to opinions so inane that even the students at UEA must find them embarrassing.

[John Turnbull]

Whenever the causes of (Islamist) terrorism are discussed here, there seems to be an unwillingness to examine role of the US (and the UK) in helping to create the conditions in which fundamentalism thrives.

Today's Asia Times summarises fifty years of US meddling in the Middle East:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FD20Aa03.html

"The primary reason for September 11 is the product of US policy and actions in the Middle East since the end of World War II - a policy based on exercising control over the world's greatest known reserves of petroleum. This has led Washington to continuously intervene in the region to support backward feudal monarchies and repressive, undemocratic regimes at the expense of social and political progress. The three secondary reasons involve the Afghan civil war (1978-1995), the first US-Iraq war (1990-2003), and one-sided US support for Israel (mainly 1967-2004)."

P.S. This is emphatically NOT an argument that the US 'deserved' September 11th

[Alina]

I suppose nothing internal to these regimes matters at all to you? Is the whole world merely a creation of the US? And who's to blame for making the US or "the west" what it is? I've come to think of this as a form of pathological narcissism in political analysis: the whole world is just an extension of the US/west/Israel.

[John Turnbull]

Surely the real narcissism lies in believing that whatever action the west takes is always for the most benign of reasons?

[maor]

I'm pretty sure the most repressive Arab regimes were Soviet-backed and modeled on the USSR.
Also, the US fed Nasser's Egypt for a few years without getting anything in return. It must be remembered that selfishness leads to some pretty generous policies some of the time.

[PooterGeek]

A correction: In an earlier version of a post of mine linked to from this site, I confused Rupert Read with another politico at Balliol in the 80s. Just for the record: Rupert Read was never Balliol JCR President and I should be more careful with my use of Google.

[Holyworrier]

"f you contend that war is terrorism then you are eliding the distinction between the indiscriminate violence (as between military and civilian targets) characteristic of terrorism and the limited warfare, attempting to avoid civilian casualties, practised in Iraq by Coalition forces. You can argue that that distinction is otiose anyway (though that’s not a view I hold), but to avoid mentioning it altogether is to overlook one of the most influential principles in moral reflection on warfare in western philosophy, namely the Thomist principle of double effect. Targeting civilians in warfare is morally wrong, but warfare that causes civilian deaths is not necessarily wrong where those deaths are an unintended and secondary consequence of an attack on a military target. Whether it is or not depends on other criteria applied in particular cases..."

Here's a particular case: The US Military drops two bunkerbusters on a restaurant in Baghdad in the presumption that Saddam is in the house. Fourteen people are killed. Saddam isn't one of them. He wasn't there, as we now know.

I assume you would say that if Saddam were using the people in the room as a shield, the people were fair game, so to speak (see Ralph Peters, Frances Kamm). Am I correct in my assumption?

The first part of my question is, is there an ethical limit to how many (presumed?) innocents can be killed in the pursuit of this legitimate military target?

The second part of my question is, if Saddam was not in the room, is the killing of these people a crime?