Oliver Kamm

Suicide-terrorism in Israel

Gene Zitver, a former resident of Israel, remarks on Harry's blog:

If anyone needs a reminder of why Israelis overwhelmingly support construction of the West Bank security barrier, and want it completed as soon as possible, consider today's terrorist attacks in the southern city of Be'er Sheva.

A salutary reminder, indeed. Gene notes that these are the first significant terrorist attacks in Israel since March, but also cites a report from the Jerusalem Post:

Even before the dust from the twin Be'er Sheva bombings settled, local leaders and security experts pointed an accusatory finger at Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government for failing to construct the southern route of Israel's security barrier in time for a bombing that most had long expected. Barely 15km from Be'er Sheva, the South Hebron Hills, as the rugged region between the city of Hebron and the Green Line border is known, spill southward into open plains farmed by a few thousand semi-nomadic Palestinians. Only a few kilometers of dusty grasslands and rocky mesas separate the Hebron Area hills from cities like Be'er Sheva and Arad.

In a mid-July interview with the Jerusalem Post, Pini Badash, head of the Omer Regional Council, a Be'er Sheva suburb fretted that "my community is just waiting for the next bombing, and we all know where it will come from [the Hebron Hills]." Few sections of the barrer's southern route near are planned, and Badush then feared, it now seems correctly, that terrorists blocked from entering Israel in the northern parts of the West Bank, will "be funneled towards us in the Be'er Sheva area."

The reports of today's carnage are of course horrifying, and I am conscious of the incongruity of making judgements when I don't face the risks that Israeli civilians do. Nonetheless, even with the gaps in her security barrier that enabled these atrocities to be committed, Israel is winning her war against terrorism. This is evident partly in the drastic reduction in suicide terrorism over the last couple of years. Today's bombings are respectively the fourth and fifth major suicide-terrorist attacks in Israel this year; in total, these five attacks have claimed 44 lives. This is about half the number of attacks and fatalities that Israel suffered in a single month at the height of the Intifada (March 2002; total Israeli civilians fatalities from terrorist attacks that year were 390). But a more important indicator is the number of suicide-terror attacks that are being interdicted by the Israelis - at least 60 this year. The Israeli Defence Forces are intercepting almost everything - not quite everything, unfortunately - that's being thrown at Israel's civilians.

I argued last week that there were two main reasons for Israel's success in curtailing the number of terrorist attacks: the security fence (known by anti-Israel campaigners, with a customary disregard for literalness, as a wall) and the assassination of terrorist leaders. The fence is not a political boundary, and it does not prejudge the outcome of negotiations for a territorial settlement with the Palestinian Authority; it is a demonstrably necessary measure of self-defence. The direct assault on the leadership of Hamas, much-criticised by western diplomats and politicians, seems to me ethically unexceptionable if it makes terrorist attacks more difficult to carry out: the Palestinian Authority either cannot or will not meet its treaty obligations to crack down on terrorism; Israel is entitled to protect her own citizens by literally taking the fight to those who direct a campaign of terror.

On this subject, there is a predictable source of limp verbiage, according to a BBC report:

Palestinian cabinet minister Saeb Erekat said: "The Palestinian Authority condemns any attacks that target civilians, whether Israelis or Palestinian."

But of course the assassinations of Hamas's leadership are not "attacks that target civilians" at all: they are attacks that very specifically target those known to be directing terrorist violence. Israel's critics will be impressed with Hamas's claim that today's atrocities are retaliation for those assassinations; it would be more accurate to say that Hamas is finding it increasingly difficult to realise their goal of forcing Israel into submission. At a minimum, a terrorist leadership that is constantly having to avoid Israeli detection and attack has a problem of command and control. The defeat of that terrorist leadership - which is not the same thing as the total eradication of terrorist activity, an outcome that is immeasurably desirable but unlikely to come about - would enable the emergence of a sovereign Palestine alongside a secure Israel in boundaries approximating the pre-1967 armistice line. I doubt that this will happen soon, but I am confident it will happen.

A concatenation of bleaters

One of the least edifying features of American politics in the 1990s was the collective distraction of the Republicans at the Clinton Presidency. Normal political partisanship transmuted into something near-pathological: a personalised embitterment so intense that it caused Republicans, with honourable exceptions such as John McCain and Bob Dole, to oppose even the exercise of military power in a just cause in Kosovo, on the grounds that it was "Clinton's war".

Something similar is happening in British politics now, and with still less cause. Clinton exercises superlatives as a politician (highly skilled) and a human being (appalling); but as a president he was unremarkable, with a record of moderate success attributable mainly to his Treasury appointments. Tony Blair is a politician of comparable election-winning abilities, without Clinton's character flaws and with a more rounded record of policy achievement. I can understand why some find Blair's manner false and ingratiating, though those are not my responses. Some of the criticisms levelled at his policies are ones I share - inadequate welfare reform, a cultural populism that undermines his proclaimed belief in educational excellence, and a compulsion to regulate and intervene where benign neglect would be preferable - though overall the record, especially on economics and foreign policy, is a pretty good one. But the political opposition is rapidly emulating 1990s Republicanism in extravagant and absurd accusations.

The most obvious case in point is Michael Howard, whose accession to the Tory leadership was welcomed by many commentators, including me, on the grounds that at last the Opposition would have a grown-up leader. How wrong could we have been? Here is his feeble self-justification at the weekend after The Sun disclosed - obviously getting the story from Downing Street - that President Bush would not receive him at the White House:

A Conservative government would work very closely with President Bush or President Kerry but my job as leader of the Opposition is to say things as I see them in the interests of our country and to hold our Government to account. If some people in the White House, in their desire to protect Mr Blair, think I am too tough on Mr Blair or too critical of him, they are entitled to their opinion. But I shall continue to do my job as I see fit.

Mr Howard's criticism of the Prime Minister over the Iraq war invites contempt not because it's tough or critical, but because it's cynical. He supported the Government's decision to go to war; he now adopts lawyerly evasions to try to associate himself with public disquiet over a necessary war while claiming consistency. In this, he resorts to tactics more reminiscent of the Liberal Democrats, whose opposition to war was combined with disingenuous declarations of support for British troops - statements that stopped short of ever wishing those troops victory on the battlefield.

Next up is Greg Dyke, a man determined, with evangelical zeal, to show his unfitness ever to have been in charge of public-service broadcasting. At the weekend he was oddly eager to proclaim his own gullibility:

We were all duped. History will not be on Blair's side. It will not absolve him, but will show that the whole saga is a great political scandal. What is really frightening is that Blair still doesn't believe or understand that what he did was fundamentally wrong.

Sometimes "Ha!" is the only word.

Here is a man who has only himself to blame for his deserved and overdue departure from the BBC. After Andrew Gilligan broadcast an allegation of government dishonesty that was itself dishonest, Dyke failed to read the transcript of the broadcast for a further three weeks. Instead of acknowledging fair criticism of Gilligan's casual abnegation of competence and professionalism, Dyke chose to fight an untenable position. As John Lloyd notes in his recent book What the Media are Doing to Our Politics (which I promised to review here, and have yet to do so), "the BBC response was ignorant defiance", defending a "report of huge significance, which broke most of the proclaimed rule of journalistic inquiry". And what is really frightening is that Dyke still doesn't believe or understand that what he did was fundamentally wrong.

But the most foolish intervention of the past week is, appropriately, a cross-party campaign. I count myself a reasonably informed observer of British politics, and of the baker's dozen of MPs who have signed up to the "Impeach Blair" campaign I was able to recognise fewer than half. Of the remainder, two are known only for having recently departed their parties' respective front benches in ignominious circumstances. The Liberal Democrat MP Jenny Tonge was sacked for her activities as an ideological apologist for terrorism. The Tory Nigel Evans, having complained bitterly at Tony Blair's decision to combine the post of Welsh Secretary with another Cabinet post ("the Conservatives will continue to fight for a separate voice for Wales around the cabinet table - Wales deserves nothing less"), found last year that his new leader, Michael Howard, wasn't of like mind; Evans had little choice but to resign as the party's spokesman on Wales.

It's tempting to treat as a joke a campaign in which Boris Johnson provides the intellectual ballast, who in turn is advised by the old CND council member Dan Plesch. (Plesch's coverage of the Iraq war for The Guardian was distinguished by his assurance that "reports of total victory may be premature"; a few hours later, Saddam's tyranny fell.) I'm afraid it's worse than that. It illustrates an increasingly stark division between democratic politics and the conduct of Opposition. Having failed to get the results they wanted out of the Hutton and Butler inquiries, the opposition parties are now attempting to supplant politics altogether with quasi-judicial processes (witness the Liberal Democrats' call for an inquiry into the reasons we want to war in Iraq). The impeachment campaign is an extreme manifestation of this fundamentally anti-democratic approach. One Conservative writer, Iain Murray on his blog The Edge of England's Sword, aptly dissects the ramshackle arguments the campaign presents:

The authors (and this is especially evident where they talk about American precedents) regard the office of Prime Minister, presumably because it wields the Royal Prerogative, as an equivalent of Royal or Presidential power. This is not the case. To all meaningful intents and purposes, such power has been abolished. The legislature has accrued the power to itself. As such, it is meaningless to talk about impeachment being the recourse of the legislature to abuse of power, because that power is wielded by, and legitimized by the legislature itself. The course the authors argue for requires Parliament to be a profoundly schizophrenic body. That is not the body we have ended up with, like it or not.

I would expect the Stop the War 'Coalition' to be amenable to by-passing democratic government; it is after all a front organisation for a party that explicitly favoured victory in the Iraq war for Saddam Hussein's tyranny. What Howard, Dyke and the household names of the Impeachment campaign - Adam Price, Simon Thomas, Mike Weir, Pete Wishart and Edward Garnier - are doing in their company doubtless has a rational explanation too, but I suspect it lies more in psychology than in politics.

And an excision...

While adding some links this week, I have also removed the link to the Crooked Timber weblog of assorted academics. This will be a matter of indifference to its authors, who have never linked to this site, so I'm at liberty to explain the excision with no risk of causing the distress that my strictures ought properly to elicit.

Of Kant's observation about "the crooked timber of mankind", Isaiah Berlin, in his book of that title, wrote:

To force people into the neat uniforms demanded by dogmatically believed-in schemes is almost always the road to inhumanity.

Recently the authors of the Crooked Timber blog have excelled not only in the neatness of their uniforms, but also in their eagerness to congratulate themselves on how they look. It is an unendearing rhetorical tick to commend one's own uniqueness among bloggers in commenting on a particular subject, and Crooked Timber's authors appear to have caught it from each other. But if it were only their perspicacity, I should still find it tolerable; it's their monopoly of virtue and omniscience that gets me down. Here's one of the authors in a post that deals mainly with a paper by John Mearsheimer, Professor of Political Science at Chicago and a critic of the Bush administration's foreign policy:

I don’t know of any serious I[nternational] R[elations] scholars who are prepared to defend Bush’s foreign policy...

Professor Henry Farrell (for it is he) can't have looked very far in that case. Here is John Lewis Gaddis, Professor of History and Political Science at Yale, and author of Strategies of Containment and other works on post-war US foreign policy, in an interview with the Council on Foreign Relations earlier this year. First Professor Gaddis considers the demerits of administration policy: the needless frictions caused by an assertive unilateralism and "faulty execution i[n] the occupation and administration of Iraq". He then puts these in the wider context:

At the same time, if you back off from these things and simply ask the question, "What is the larger objective of this strategy?" [the answer is,] this is an administration, I believe, which is thinking in global terms. It is thinking in integrated terms, in the sense that the various parts of the strategy interconnect with each other in a fairly impressive way.

And if you ask about the overall objectives of the strategy, it seems to me that the picture is better and a good deal more successful. The logic of the administration's strategy has been to say that pre-emption is necessary to deal with adversaries like the 9/11 terrorists because you not only have to find these people themselves, but you also have to either intimidate or, if necessary, take out those states which might have been supporting such terrorists in the past, the assumption being that terrorism can't succeed without some kind of state support.

This isn't a partisan and uncritical endorsement. That's my point. It's the dispassionate assessment of a "serious scholar" in which the gap between the administration's promise and performance, as Gaddis describes it in a recent short book amplifying his ideas, is fairly assessed.

Owing to the nuanced character of Gaddis's judgements, Professor Farrell will surely be able to grant him absolution from the suspicion of looking favourably on the administration's foreign policy. (Gaddis is particularly concerned in his book with the administration's failure to confront the distinction, argued by Fareed Zakaria in The Future of Freedom, between spreading democracy and speading liberalism.) And if Gaddis at any time were to soften those nuances, Professor Farrell would doubtless then be able to pronounce his disqualification from the ranks of independent scholars.

Crooked timber, indeed.

UPDATE: Matthew Turner writes:

I agree with your post that Gaddis has supported the Bush foreign policy, though I think it would be correct to say no serious IR scholar supports the Bush Administration's execution of that policy.

This seems to me probably right, as both a summary of scholarly opinion and a judgement on the administration's record, and if Crooked Timber had confined itself to that formulation I should have had no complaints. Matthew points to this transcript of a discussion in May between Professor Gaddis and James Lindsay at the Council on Foreign Relations on the subject of Gaddis's recent book, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, which I referred to in the post. It's a thought-provoking exposition that's well worth reading in full, but one observation by Gaddis in particular reinforces his point about the gap between "promise and performance", or strategy and execution:

I think the grand strategy itself still makes sense. But the execution, particularly in Iraq, has been bordering on wretched, really.

James Lindsay has co-authored with Ivo Daalder a recent book that argues a similar case, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy. The authors (both of whom are former Clinton staffers, and have written a scrupulously objective account) dismiss the notion that a covert group of neoconservatives has mounted a coup in the direction of foreign policy, and demonstrate that the President has a coherent approach to the international order that is "a profound strategic innovation". They maintain, however:

Far from demonstrating the triumph of unilateral American power, Bush's wars demonstrated the importance of basing American foreign policy on a blend of power and cooperation.

For what it's worth, that's my view too. I wrote a column a couple of months ago in which I offered my fellow-liberals across the Atlantic the following helpful advice, which they have unaccountably ignored completely:

President Bush’s foreign policy is liberal in conception but it differs from Wilsonianism in execution. That ought to be the Democrats’ line of attack. Woodrow Wilson believed in fostering democracy through international institutions. By contrast, President Bush is dismissive of the United Nations after its prolonged failure to implement its own Security Council resolutions on Iraq. He has a point, but his Administration has pursued it with unseemly slights against nations whose assistance is needed given the lamentable failure of postwar planning for Iraq.

The present prosperity, and party politics

There is a useful debate - in the sense that one side's misconceptions are being refuted - taking place between two Times columnists, Matthew Parris and Anatole Kaletsky, about the decline of manufacturing in Britain and whether this is of economic significance. Parris is a former Tory MP whom I once mistakenly thought of as a sceptical liberal, but who is increasingly displaying the more traditional parochial concerns of British Conservatism. He believes the semblance of prosperity is misleading, largely because he has a superstitious (or perhaps puritan) conviction that imports are a cost and exports a benefit. He has very much the worse of the argument. Kaletsky wrote in his column last week:

[T]he almost universal belief that Britain, as a nation, is living far “beyond its means” is simply untrue. Some individuals may be borrowing too much, but this is not true of Britain as a nation. In this sense, at least, the present prosperity is real and sustainable. But there is another, deeper reason for the sense that Britain’s newfound prosperity is some kind of new Labour conjuring trick or bull-market illusion. Britain’s economic success, especially in relation to other European countries, represents the reversal of a hundred-year trend. For anyone born before the mid-1980s, belief in the country’s continuing prosperity means abandoning a century-old assumption about Britain’s inevitable decline.

In his column yesterday, Kaletsky explained his point about the reversal of Britain's relative decline. He identified "three separate tributaries" of economic change that had joined. These were the deregulatory reforms of the Thatcher years; the change in macroeceonomic policy that had been initiated, ironically, by the failure of policy in the ERM crisis; and a shift in relative prices whereby the things that we import (especially mass-produced manufactured goods) have got cheaper while knowledge-intensive goods have risen in price.

Kaletsky's exposition of economic policy and the benefits of an open, trading economy is particularly good. But he doesn't get the political background right. It's that detail that I comment on here, rather than the much grosser fallacies that Matthew Parris advances. Inadvertently - for he is always a fair commentator - he gives too much credit to the Conservatives in the 1990s, and correspondingly not enough to Labour since 1997. There's an understandable reason for this, in that the Treasury's own exposition of Reforming Britain's Economic and Financial Policy, published in 2001, is a hectoring and self-congratulatory document that epitomises New Labour at its most sanctimonious - but it really does have a point in noting the things that Labour has done that ought to have been done earlier.

After sterling's forced departure from the ERM in 1992, the much-derided Norman Lamont introduced a good policy framework at exactly the time the Conservatives' reputation for economic competence had imploded. Instead of seeking exchange-rate stability as the overriding goal of economic policy, it rightly stressed the control of inflation as the single target instead. Lamont's introduction of an inflation target was an important reform, and one that he ought to have received greater credit for. But typically, economic policy was complicated by the incompetence and incoherence of the Prime Minister, John Major. The logic of Lamont's policy was that the other traditional goals of economic policy - on output, employment and the trade balance - would be subordinated to the inflation target. Major immediately undermined this by stressing, a month after the ERM crisis: "A strategy for growth is what we need, a strategy for growth is what we are going to have." The Major government then compounded its reputation for indecision by pursuing direct tax cuts at the same time as making additional spending commitments, and increasing indirect taxes to compensate.

Kaletsky understates the importance of Labour's decision to grant operational independence to the Bank of England in setting interest rates. It wasn't just a "small, though significant, technocratic advance": it was part of a wider strategy to make economic policy less discretionary and more rules-based. It had its counterpart in the introduction of a Code of Fiscal Stability - the so-called Golden Rule, under which the government would borrow only for investment and not for current spending, and the debt rule controlling the debt-to-GDP ratio. In commending the "expansionary demand management" that has capitalised on the reforms of the 1980s, Kaletsky fails to mention that it's a different approach in principle from the discretionary demand management practised by governments of both parties in the 1960s and 1970s. Those governments' attempts to exploit a short-term trade-off between inflation and unemployment resulted in higher inflationary expectations with no lasting effect on output or employment. Policy now is designed to be ''time-consistent" (e.g. resisting inflationary spending programmes in the budget before an election).

I am a confirmed advocate of tactical voting to defeat the Liberal Democrats at the next election. It embarrasses me not at all to observe that the only sensible critique of government economic policy at the moment comes from that party's Treasury team (far the most impressive spokesmen the Lib Dems have), and not from the Conservatives. Whereas the Tories are reprising their internal obsessions with tax-cuts (and focusing, bizarrely, on the ratio of public spending to GDP), the Lib Dems' line of attack is that the Chancellor's fiscal regime lacks the type of independent scrutiny that monetary policy has. It's an important criticism, not least because it recognises what's changed in economic management in the past dozen years. What's changed is much to the good, however disturbing that must be to the more reactionary strains of Right and Left.

Comments policy

For various reasons, only one of which is to screen out some of the more animated contributions that were seeping into this space, I'm continuing for the time being with the policy of not having a comments section. Where there's a lot of correspondence, I'll try to post it (or at least summarise it) underneath the post that it relates to. My including a reader's comments obviously doesn't mean that I necessarily agree with them (e.g. one contributor on the subject of Fascism and the Left makes a comment about the Nazis and Israel which I strongly reject).

New links

I have added a few new links, in addition to philosopher Jonathan Derbyshire's blog, which I particularly recommend.

For a long time I linked to a blog by a Liberal Democrat activist, James Graham, whom I corresponded with and who to my regret has discontinued his site. I have replaced it with the weblog of Peter Black, Welsh Lib Dem spokesman on education. The split in the Liberal Democrats between the parliamentary leadership and the activists is potentially one of the more significant unremarked-upon stories in British politics; so far as I can tell, Peter Black is on the side of the leadership. He has sportingly defended his party's cause on this blog.

Some time ago an American reader wrote to me asking, with extraordinarily unnecessary courtesy and great charm, if she might link to this site on her own blog. I have been tardy in returning the favour, and am now shamed into doing so by the fact that the biggest blog on the whole Internet has got there before me. The site is called bebere.com, and its author explained to me that it covers gardening and knitting. I explained that these were subjects in which I have zero knowledge and experience, and she took the trouble to recount the essential principles of both disciplines to me in a way that I could understand. I strongly recommend her site.

In common with Stephen Pollard, I have linked to a stirring American site called 'Thank You, Tony'. Recalling the Iraq war, it declares:

The American people extend their heartfelt thanks to Prime Minister Tony Blair for his courage and leadership; and extend their deep appreciation to the United Kingdom and the men and women of its armed forces.

Quite right too. The correspondent who recommended this site to Stephen and me is a member of the Conservative Party, but that is no reflection on him or us, or indeed Tony Blair, I'm sure.

Finally, I have added another Liberal Democrat blog. I know nothing about its author except that his name is Barry Stamp, and his site - which is called 'Barry Stamp's Political Diary' - discloses that he is Councillor for Gnosall, Haughton, and Church Eaton, and a member of Stafford Borough and Staffordshire County Council. He expresses the hope that his blog "will give the reader an insight into his life as a local councillor". I am hooked on it; I only wish it were updated more often. Here is the entry for 21 July:

I’m beginning to dread planning meetings! Tonight I attended because I had called in the plan to build a new stable block at Little Onn, Church Eaton. Little seemed to have changed since I last went. One member of the committee again made a spectacle of himself, by shouting across the room, interrupting other members when they were speaking, and laughing at his own jokes, which by the way were far from funny. Once again I sat there wishing the floor would open up and swallow me up so at least I’d be away from the embarrassing situation!

The planning application I’d called in also left me in a tight spot. I’d been approached by both the applicant and the objectors to speak on their behalf and this is exactly what I did. However it was difficult going especially as the officers report was very negative, even though their final recommendation was to approve the plan. I wasn’t happy with this stance and neither were the Planning Committee who have instructed the officers to report to the next meeting with an explanation as to how they can say one thing but recommend another! At least I got the committee to visit the site before they make their decision. However given the comments and the general mood of the meeting I would certainly not put my money on the scheme being approved!

I urge you to visit Cllr Stamp's blog.

Sharon's strategy is working, to his critics' disgust

The following article appears in The Times today.

THE Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, suffered a little local difficulty last week. The central committee of his Likud party voted against allowing the opposition Labour Party into his governing coalition.

Mr Sharon wishes to broaden his coalition in order to implement his plan to withdraw from Gaza. For some reason this strategy elicits outrage among the same British observers who two years ago decried him for the “massacre” at Jenin in Gaza that turned out never to have taken place — and who ought to have been pleased to discover the extent of their own unreliability.

Yet The Guardian, The Independent and the Labour MP Gerald Kaufman are finding it difficult to give up the stereotype of Mr Sharon as an obdurate warmonger. Rather than analyse his options after the vote, they have reverted to cliché. Mr Sharon is an “old and discredited warhorse” whose “aggressive brand of politics . . . has done so much to ratchet up the Palestinian crisis”, and whose blandishments the Israeli Labour Party should abjure.

Mr Sharon has been underestimated many times in his career; his critics do so again now. As Prime Minister, he has patiently instructed the Israeli Right on the need to end the occupation and negotiate a two-state settlement. He has also set about protecting Israelis from terrorism. The notion that countering terrorism is futile without attending to its supposed “root causes” has been proved wrong. The number of suicide bombings has fallen by three quarters in a year. Terrorist groups have been confounded by the building of a security fence (not a wall and not a political boundary, as anti-Israel campaigners claim) and the assassination of their leaders, whom the Palestinian Authority had failed to apprehend.

A SUCCESSFUL security policy has transformed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. European governments and diplomats talk continually of a two-state solution, as if the problem were a mere boundary dispute. But the coexistence of a secure Israel and a sovereign Palestine in boundaries that approximate the pre-1967 armistice line is not a solution to the conflict: it is an outcome of the end of the conflict. To end the conflict requires redressing the imbalance in which Israel is desperate to reach a settlement, while Palestinian terrorists are thereby encouraged to continue bombing buses and restaurants in the hope of demoralising Israel into bloody submission.

Mr Sharon’s strategy accepts that peace requires diplomacy, but also recognises that diplomacy has a limit. The limit was tested by his predecessors in negotiations from Oslo to Camp David and Taba. Mr Sharon came to office as a direct consequence of Yassir Arafat’s decision to turn down the offer of an independent Palestinian state, encompassing Gaza and almost the entire West Bank, with Jerusalem as its capital. Mr Arafat insisted instead on a “right of return” for all Palestinian refugees — code for the abolition of Israel as a Jewish state — and a renewed intifada.

A negotiated two-state territorial accommodation, as envisaged in the US “road map”, is the aim, but it will not be realised soon. In the meantime, a cold peace is attainable, in which Israel abandons strategically unnecessary and politically indefensible settlements while making clear to its enemies that it does so from a position of strength.

Mr Sharon knows the importance of securing national consensus and US support for his plans. So far from being a reflexive hawk, he has devised a strategy that advances Israel’s goals, protects its citizens’ lives and establishes the preconditions for a lasting settlement. No wonder Israel’s ill-wishers are complaining.

Fascism and the Left: the last word

Or at least the last word on this blog. It properly goes to Nick Cohen, whose original article in The New Statesman started the argument, here and elsewhere. He writes:

You do seem to rather concede my case when you say that the SWP's position is unprecedented for a Marxist party. As indeed is the position of many of the fellow travellers who are stumbling blindly into the wilds of unreason. Let's see how unprecedented the situation is not, just on the far Left but across the world's liberal left.

1. People who call themselves Marxists are rejecting Marx in their rush to oppose America at any cost. Marx had a progressive theory of history, as I'm sure you know. To prefer feudalism to capitalism was not merely morally wrong -- Marx wasn't that interested in morals -- but absurd. And in this the old boy was surely right. Islamism can't create a sustainable or good society: it can only kill and oppress.

2. I said in my NS piece that socialism was dead as a force across the globe. This isn't quite true. Iraq has a strong communist party and a part of the Kurdish leadership is socialist. Notice how these facts have been
ignored. When hacks from everywhere from the BBC to the Morning Star want to talk to Iraqi left-wingers they talk to a tiny group the Workers Communist Party. Why? Why not talk to the actual Communist Party? Because the Communist had learned from bitter experience that capitalism was preferable to fascism and cooperated with the occupation although they opposed the war. Meanwhile the Kurdish socialists, sell outs that they are, acutally welcomed the war because the cowards didn't want to be the victims another genocidal campaign. Sorry to do this to you again, but as I say in my book the left has 'broken the first commandment of the socialist religion and betrayed its comrades.'

3. The same betrayal has been magnified 100 fold by the liberals. They don't support Iraqi democrats. They don't lobby for a secular society. They display a kind of racism which dare not speak its name when they imply without ever quite coming out and saying so that Arabs and Kurds aren't fit to receive such luxuries from the West.

On Nick's third point, I should merely point out that his own newspaper doesn't fall into the category of liberal opinion that has disdained Iraqi democrats. The Observer's editorial after the murder by Saddam of its journalist Farzad Bazoft in 1990 presciently asked:

Does it really serve our long-term purposes in the Nineties to side with Saddam Hussein and lend him our money when so much of the world is crying out for help in achieving nobler aims? And is it not patronising, if not shameful, to dismiss the desires of not the people of Iraq, many of whom have died and been tortured in protest at Saddam Hussein?

John Sweeney (now at the BBC, where he made an outstanding documentary exposing the fraud behind Saddam's anti-sanctions campaign) spent much of the next decade asking the same question in the paper's columns. He and Nick Cohen have shown indefatigability in that cause, which has brought them a certain amount of discontent among large numbers of correspondents who (at least in Sweeney's case) for some reason almost all use near-identical phrasing.

Fascism and the Left, part III

Jonathan Derbyshire, a philosopher whose excellent new blog I have added to my links, takes issue with the notion that there is no precedent for an alliance between Marxism and theocracy:

There seems to me to be an essential continuity between the stance adopted towards radical Islam by the intellectual left broadly conceived (and not just the SWP), and certain of the attitudes that characterised the so-called 'New Left' in the 1960s, and which were brilliantly diagnosed by Irving Howe in a wonderful 1965 essay entitled 'New Styles in "Leftism"'.

Another philosopher, Jeffrey Ketland of Edinburgh University, also maintains that there are precedents for this peculiar alliance. He has written to me to point out:

One can find examples in the postmodernist literature, and the most obvious example is Michel Foucault, once a member of the French communist party and main source of much recent postmodernist and social constructivist philosophy. Foucault visited Iran around the time of the revolution. He enthusiastically described the revolution as a new kind of "political spirituality", and was very impressed with its characteristically anti-Enlightenment aspects. According to Foucault, the suppression in Iran represented a new kind of "regime of truth", one he approved of. There's a brief discussion of Foucault's view of the Iranian Revolution in Francis Wheen's new book, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World (pp 84-5).

On the broader topic, it's hard to say to what extent the anti-Enlightenment features of postmodernism and social constructivism animate the views of current far left groups, including SWP and Respect, and the occasional letter to Guardian. To some extent, there is an undercurrent of relativism and sneering towards allegedly Western notions of truth and objectivity. Alan Sokal described this undercurrent as a "weird zeitgeist" in modern academia and beyond. But I would argue that they are predominantly motivated by simple-minded hatred of the US, rather than direct sympathy for Islamic theocracy. For example, I've never seen political leftists directly defending Sharia law, stonings, beheadings, etc., but there's sometimes a disturbing whiff of apologetics.

There is one last (except it probably won't be) point that I would make on this subject. There can be little argument that the totalitarian-Left has mutated in a bizarre direction given its attitudes to clerical fascism. My argument is that this reflects an underlying affinity with fascism that has characterised the far-Left at various times. I believe that coincidence of interest and ideology is becoming more sharply-defined, because at the same time the far-Right has changed too. There is an illuminating discussion of this shift in fascist ideology in a new book by Richard Wolin entitled The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzche to Postmodernism. Wolin argues, specifically in the context of the French extreme Right, that there is a clver strategy to move from the terrain of biological racism and orthodox fascism to the more 'respectable' guise of cultural racism:

For the sake of making its claims palatable to a wider audience, [the French New Right] cynically appropriated the universalistic values of tolerance and the 'right to difference' for its own xenophobic agenda. Thus, argued [Alain] de Benoist and company, it was the cosmopolitans who were the true racists, insofar as it was they who forced immigrants to submit to the brutal rites of assimilation.... Sounding like a liberal's liberal, de Benoist embraced what might best be described as a nonhierarchical 'diferentialist racism'. No culture was intrinsically better than any other. Instead they were all 'different', and these differences should be respected and preserved.

This, it seems to me, is the key to the convergence of the far-Right and the totalitarian-Left. In place of obviously crude biological racism, modern fascism (in the form Wolin calls 'designer fascism') has adopted a cultural racism that decries the achievements and principles of the Enlightenment. The astonishing spectacle of the far-Left around the Respect coalition defending the progressive character of - among other aspects of Muslim particularism - the hijab is the 'left' variant of the same phenomenon. I stress that we are not talking here of Muslims' right to adopt the practices and observances of their faith, for religious liberty is an essential principle of the Enlightenment tradition. I mean instead the insistence that the character of those observances is itself a principle to be defended. As Salma Yaqoob maintained in the article she contributed to the Socialist Workers' Party's theoretical journal last autumn (emphasis added):

It is notable that the majority of the Muslims playing a leading role in the Birmingham Stop the War Coalition were women, confident in their Islamic identity and increasingly confident in their ability to present themselves as leaders of this broad movement. Contingents of young Muslim women, well organised and often more forthcoming than Muslim men, were a striking feature of all our demonstrations and protests. I would attribute this effect to the fact that, by wearing the hijab (headscarf), many of these women are constantly conscious of their Muslim identity when interacting in public.

COMMENTS: A couple of correspondents comment on Foucault. My brother, Richard, says:

Foucault's relationship to the Enlightenment is a bit more complex than your correspondent suggests. Foucault went through a number of fairly tortured and tortuous chains of reasoning in respect of different intellectual traditions that fed into it and developed from it. By the end of his career he tended to concentrate on criticising the French republican tradition, chiefly the collectivism that looks back to Rousseau, and contrasted it unfavourably with Anglo-American liberalism, advising his students to read Hayek. But there is a fundamental ambivalence about the Enlightenment in him which led other writers on the left, like Habermas, to attack him vociferously. Unlike Foucault, Habermas does have a strong attachment to western secular values and argues for their general validity, even if he needs large tracts of print and theory in which to do it.

Mark Bowles writes:

Regarding your recent posts on Fascism and the Left, would you care to define, briefly, what definitions of 'Fascism'/ 'Fascist' and 'Totalitarian' you are working with? Could I also just add (to a point made not by you but someone you cite) that Michel Foucault was an idiosyncratic thinker and hardly representative of the 'Left' in France or anywhere else. What attracted him to the Iranian revolution was a putative 'spriit of revolt', a throwing off of authority, rather than the Islamic content.

The definition of fascism I am working with is the one from Roger Eatwell that I quoted in the second post in this series: "a form of thought which preaches the need for social rebirth in order to forge a holistic-national radical Third Way." The value of this definition lies in its stress on the radical character of fascism. It is a broad definition that even so is able to distinguish between clerical reaction (e.g. Franco) and fascism - a point that I consider was missed by Johann Hari in his recent Independent column (which I have been meaning to comment on and will do so) expressing foreboding about a resurgence of Catholic fascism.

A totalitarian order is one characterised by a totalist ideology, a one-party state, a fully-developed secret police, and that possesses a monopoly of weaponry, communications and economic control. A totalitarian party advances that order, and already possesses a totalist ideology and a fundamentally anti-democratic system of internal organisation. This definition accords with the early work - they later revised it - of Brzezinski and Friedrich in Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1957).

On the question of cultural racism, an anonymous correspondent writes:

[F]ascism defends particularism against universalism for "ourselves alone" and the New Left defends particularism against universalism for "the Other", making space for exactly the common ground you point to with de Benoist - mutual belief in "difference". Just like the fascists, the New Left also work on the basis of assertion and resolution - there is no truth, so we must allow people to define their own and follow through the results. It's Mill's experiments in living without either his noticing that you needed a civilised people and the rule of law to respect a person's right not to take part.

FURTHER COMMENTS: From John Green:

This idea of cultural racism has indeed been around for a while. I recall while studying for a master's in cultural studies at Salford in the early 1990s that Celia Lurie had coined the phrase "cultural essentialism" to identify this way of defending exclusionist practices. At the time, I think the preferred example was the Loyalist community in Northern Ireland who were trying to defend their way of life as intrinsically valuable, a sort of 'Ulsterism' in such a way as to counter the nationalist version. Arguably it's been around a lot longer, in various forms of 'national sovereignty' and claims of a particular people's 'right to self-determination', both of which advance the specificity of a culture ahead of universalist human rights.

From Bill Martin:

I'm not so sure that the change you note in the right is all that new. Racists have used cultural relativism and particularism before. In the Southern US states 'Separate but equal' was the watch word, respecting the two distinct cultures of 'black' and 'white'. I also recall Botha (I think) defending apartheid, saying how they had given the blacks their own homelands, the Bantustans. After all, the essence of racism is that 'they' don't belong 'here', and no-one would deny 'them' the right to their own homeland, which happens not to be this one. Lincoln advocated colonisation of the blacks, Hitler had the Madagascar plan (to be honest, I think the Nazis would have loved Israel, it would have made ethnically cleansing Eastern Europe so much easier, 90% of the anti-semitic anxiety was precisely the non-location of a Jewish homeland). The biological has moved in and out of vogue, but the separateness is the key to all racist ideology.

From Charles Magoffin:

Your exchange with Nick Cohen has been interesting. I was particularly struck by Cohen's comment: "Marx saw himself as a part of the Enlightenment tradition. What's left of the far left is embracing the Counter Enlightenment. This is new."

Far from it. By coincidence, only yesterday (on a train journey to London from Birmingham) I was reading Isaiah Berlin's "Political Ideas in the 20th Century" from Four Essays on Liberty (an essay I'm sure you're familiar with, given your frequent references to Berlin's thought). Like Cohen, Berlin characterises Marx as part of the Enlightenment tradition, but sees "a somewhat sinister element dimly discernible from the very beginning in Marxism - in the main a highly rationalistic system - which seemed hostile to this entire outlook, denying the primacy of the individual's reason in the choice of ends and in effective government alike". Berlin traces how, from this starting-point, Lenin and others would build their great argument justifying the suppression of intellectual enquiry, unlimited power for the Party and its total control of all human affairs. Berlin draws out the uncanny resemblance with the thought of (for example) Joseph de Maistre and with the Communists' close cousins, the Fascists....

Far from this alliance being unprecedented, the totalitarian Left is staying true to its origins. The key difference is that the extremist Muslims are an explicitly religious movement. But otherwise the radical Left is very familiar with - is a pillar of - the Counter-Enlightenment. To be fair, Cohen would be aware of this history and no apologist for Communism. His point was the "wilful determination of many on the left to abandon what was for better or for worse their basic world view and go through a shameful and laughable inversion of their principles". But the more decisive abandonment of principle took place a long time ago; Berlin sees the turning point as taking place in 1903, when at the Russian Social Democratic Party congress the argument was put forward that 'the safety of the revolution is the highest law', taking precedence over fundamental individual liberties and democracy. The Bolsheviks embraced this position, and put it into effect as soon as they seized power.

Once this choice was made, it was a much shorter step to form tactical alliances with like-minded totalitarians (such as the Nazis), even ones whose ultimate aims are radically different. In the absence of a more influential secular basis for "resistance" the SWP are embracing the strongest anti-liberal and anti-democratic force in the world today. The intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the Left has not been as starkly revealed since the Hitler-Stalin pact.

I've also received a couple of anonymous and dense protestations that fascism cannot be sensibly discussed independent of the material forces of production. They defy my attempt at precis, but I'll at least try to put their thesis in my own words.

Even the most antediluvian Trotskyite these days has caught on that it's not possible to explain fascism as the paid agent of capitalism in crisis. (Though there's always one who's slow off the mark: a pseudonymous SWP member did post a comment here not long ago proclaiming that scholarly studies confirm that German big business was responsible for the rise of the Nazis. He was clearly alluding to the thesis of an American Marxist, David Abraham, in a book called The Collapse of the Weimar Republic. Abraham's research was so bad that it was cited in the David Irving libel case as a possible precedent - which it wasn't, because Abraham (not a German speaker) admitted his mistakes when confronted with them - to Irving's conduct as a pseudo-historian. As the historian Richard Evans comments in his account of the Irving case, Lying About Hitler, "Abraham was driven out of the historical profession, unable to find a job because of the flaws detected in his work.") The current fashion, attributable to the Marxist theorist Nicos Poulantzaz (whose book Fascism and Dictatorship the following quotation comes from), is to explain fascism with the following propositions. First, it is "a development of capitalist forces of production.... It represented industrial development, technological innovation, and an increase in the productivity of labour." Secondly, it represents the triumph of a politics of class struggle, and Poulantzaz and his imitators expend much effort in identifying the class interests, the "hegemonic capital" and so on, that fascism served.

Once you start asking for empirical evidence - especially economic data - for this, you pretty soon find there are more profitable ways of spending the time than continuing to press for it. One of my correspondents appended a remark from Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School on the significance of capitalism for fascism, which I assume was intended to serve in lieu of that empirical evidence, except that it doesn't. As Horkheimer said in his essay on Traditional and Critical Theory, "In the general historical upheaval truth may reside with numerically small groups of men" - and presumably that's reassurance enough for the totalitarian Left.

Pilgerisms

There is a cracking article by John Pilger in this week's New Statesman (link requires subscription, which I don't recommend). It comes from the same stable as his earlier description of the Bush administration as the new Third Reich. Norman Geras comments of this and another piece by Pilger:

The hysterical and, frankly, delusionary [use of the terms] 'pre-fascist' and 'crypto-fascist' here, as well as the phrase 'claiming to be democracies', coming from someone who avails himself of all the benefits of the fact that these polities are indeed democracies, makes a striking contrast with Pilger's indulgent attitude towards political forces whose democratic credentials are rather dubious, to put it no more strongly than that.

And that, really, is all you need to know. Except for one thing: Pilger's by-line at the end of the article discloses that he has a new book out entitled Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs. I haven't read it, but presumably it covers such triumphs as the time in 1982 when the author imagined he was 'buying' a five-year old girl in Thailand to illustrate a documentary on child labour, only to find he'd been duped by a hoaxer; his film The Truth Game (1983), which supposedly exposed official deceit about nuclear weapons but which contained so many factual errors and misapprehensions that it took one of Pilger's interviewees, Lawrence Freedman, Professor of War Studies at King's College London, two articles in New Society merely to list them; and his documentary Cambodia - The Betrayal (1990), which necessitated substantial damages being paid to two former British army officers whom the programme had libelled.