Oliver Kamm

Arguments for Bush

Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post has the best argument for wishing for President Bush's re-election, for Americans and for the rest of us whose security depends on the United States:

This election comes down to a choice between one man's evolution and the other man's resolution. With his endlessly repeated Tora Bora charges, Kerry has made Afghanistan a major campaign issue. So be it. Whom do you want as president? The man who conceived the Afghan campaign, carried it through without flinching when it was being called a "quagmire" during its second week and has seen it through to Afghanistan's transition to democracy? Or the retroactive genius, who always knows what needs to be done after it has already happened -- who would have done "everything" differently in Iraq, yet in Afghanistan would have replicated Bush's every correct, courageous, radical and risky decision -- except one. Which, of course, he would have done differently. He says. Now.

But Gerard Baker, US Editor of The Times, has a powerful, almost irresistable, one too:

[A]bove all, in this oppositional sort of age, when it is often easier to be defined by what one is against rather than what one is for, I have to say it is his enemies who most justify Mr Bush’s re-election. The list of those whose world could be truly rocked on Tuesday is just too long and too rich to be ignored. If you think for a moment about those who would really be upset by a second Bush term, it becomes a lot easier to stomach.... Go on America. Make Their Day.

Especially his. And, indeed, his.

Cohen on 'the great liberal betrayal'

Nick Cohen's latest piece for The New Statesman has the Stop the War Coalition spot-on (link via Harry's Place):

The British anti-war movement is falling apart, but for a reason that the most cynical observer of the left in the 20th century could never have imagined. The left, or at least that section of it which always manages to get the whip hand, has swerved to the right - to the far right, in fact - and is actively supporting theocrats and fascists: the oppressors of racial minorities, secularists, women, gays and trade unionists.

One point that I hope will be noted by anti-war campaigners with no time for the totalitarian and anti-Jew politics of the Socialist Workers' Party, for which the Stop the War Coalition is a front, concerns the moral evasions of the party increasingly favoured by The Guardian:

If you think the sell-out is just a local problem confined to a few creeps on the far left who believe that anyone who kills Americans is a freedom fighter, consider the case of the Liberal Democrats. Charles Kennedy managed to get through his entire speech to the Liberal Democrat party conference without once mentioning the liberals and democrats in Iraq who face kidnap or murder for fighting for the rights that he takes for granted. I can't remember a single occasion when the Lib Dems have taken up the cause of Iraqi democracy.

Isolationist realpolitik dolled up as multilateralism is a longstanding stance of British Liberalism. As the Liberal leader Herbert Samuel, than whom no more feckless appeaser could be found in the House of Commons, remarked in July 1934 (quoted in R.A.C. Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement): "The collective system must be really collective, and there is no reason why this country alone, or even with one or two sympathetic allies, should undertake obligations which really devolve upon humanity at large."

I don't know what humanity at large is, but I do know who the victims of Baathist tyranny were, for Coalition forces have been exhuming the bodies from the mass graves for the past 18 months. A professed liberal party with nothing to say to those who lived under - or more properly, survived the violence of - a fascist regime commits a betrayal even greater than marching alongside the totalitarians of the Stop the War Coalition.

Cohen concludes:

No one who considers himself a democrat, liberal or socialist can continue to associate with the Stop the War Coalition.

Or indeed should ever have done so in the first place.

Blessed Union of Souls

Though I shall be voting at the next election for the return of a Labour government, I regard it as a legitimate position for consistent liberals to vote tactically to defeat the Liberal Democrats – and have indeed advocated this course since I started this site 18 months ago. In the 1980s, when the Labour Party adopted extreme positions and poor leadership, the old Social Democratic Party could be held to serve a valuable purpose in British politics (though I never supported it or voted for it). The Liberal Democrats, who absorbed the SDP, have made recent advances – from a very low base – in the quality of their economic thinking, but overall represent reactionary and sometimes ugly sentiments.

I am relieved to have confirmation of this judgement from the fact that The Guardian – which represents some of the most obdurate vested interests in this country – is now considering switching its support from Labour to the Liberal Democrats. According to the BBC:

At a talk in London on Tuesday, [Guardian editor] Alan Rusbridger said the switch from Labour would be "very dramatic" but there was "every chance" it could happen.

It wouldn’t be dramatic at all: it would be predictable and apt, especially for a newspaper so devoid of judgement and proportion as The Guardian. Much attention has been focused on the paper’s ludicrously self-important and counterproductive campaign to get its readers to hector US voters. But note also its sponsorship of a poll, covering ten countries, showing that non-US voters overwhelmingly favour John Kerry in the US presidential election.

Ever liable to dress up its preferences as axioms, The Guardian editorialised hopefully: “It matters a lot what others think about the US.”

It doesn’t, and that is as it should be. Post-war US Presidents have included the good, the bad and the indifferent, but one constant is that the most consequential among them attract the disdain of overseas observers. The Guardian’s advice in turn merits the derision of US electors.

Truman emerged from FDR’s shadow with minimal foreign-policy experience and a personality as unmemorable as Clement Attlee’s; yet he bound America to collective security and the reconstruction of Europe, and countered Communist aggression in Korea. Eisenhower – never an intellectual match for his Democrat opponent, and famously inarticulate in comparison with him – balanced the federal budget three times and avoided the nuclear war that many feared imminent. Lyndon Johnson - vulgar, brutal and dishonest - had the courage to break his own party’s dominance in the South by signing the Civil Rights Act. Gerald Ford is best-remembered for physical and linguistic clumsiness, but ought to be credited with the Helsinki Accord by which the chasm between the Soviet Union’s declared policy and its practice on human rights increasingly came to be judged.

Most instructive was the international derision that accompanied the star of Bedtime for Bonzo into the White House. Who can forget the Not the Nine O’Clock News sketch in which the empty-headed Reagan earnestly recites the nonsense a malign aide prompts him with? Yet Reagan’s ideological resolution and unexpected diplomatic opening helped liberate Eastern Europe and defuse the nuclear danger – the opposite of the tension and conflict predicted by hundreds of thousands of demonstrators.

George W. Bush stands in this tradition. He drives detractors to distraction for his supposed Manichaeism in international affairs. Yet his characterisation of theocratic totalitarians as “evildoers” is not an archaism but a literal truth. He has not “squandered” international sympathy for the US after 9/11, as The Guardian claims: he has used it for the right purpose by insisting that the genuine “root cause” of terrorism – the perpetuation of tyranny – no longer be tolerated. Non-Americans clearly find this message discomforting, but on its successful execution – which ought to have been the real focus of John Kerry’s campaign – our own security also depends.

Chomsky and deception

I have received a lot of correspondence about my recent and continuing series on Noam Chomsky, most of it along the lines of – to quote one message in full and as it is written – “BANKER ASSHOLE UNLIKE YOU CHOMSKY DEFENDS THE POOR”. I don’t believe this is true, but in any event it doesn’t deal with the subject of my posts, which concerns Chomsky’s handling of source material. On the evidence of his own writings, Chomsky cannot be trusted to give a reliable or honest account of the sources he cites. Look closely at his voluminous footnotes, and serious doubts occur to the critical reader. Chomsky’s citations rarely cover the scholarly literature; if they did, his methods would be swiftly detected by specialists. (This happened early in his polemical career when the historian Arthur Schlesinger caught him in “scholarly fakery”.) Many are drawn from press articles. Where books are cited, Chomsky is not averse to withholding information that would enable the reader easily to check Chomsky’s account.

Other messages I have received from Chomsky’s admirers generally make two ripostes: first, that out of Chomsky’s output I have concentrated on only a few “dodgy” (not my word – for in my judgement it’s too generous - but a correspondent’s) cases and written about them at length; and secondly, that even supposing I am right in these cases (a point on which my correspondents graciously profess to suspend their disbelief, though apparently have no intention of checking the matter for themselves), any writer as prolific as Chomsky can be expected to make occasional errors. Let me therefore explain why these defences of Chomsky fail.

The reason I have written at length about the cases I have cited is that they require background and context. Chomsky works by removing the context required to make a critical judgement. Putting the context back in is a laborious task to write and, I fear, even more to read, but it has to be done in order to evaluate Chomsky’s claims. Bear in mind too that, while Chomsky has produced many books on politics, they are often strikingly similar: collections of articles or interviews that make identical arguments. I particularly refer interested readers to the example (which I discuss in this post) of Chomsky’s quoting out of context the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, former US Ambassador to the UN and then Democratic Senator for New York, with regard to US diplomacy over the Indonesian invasion of Timor. I stress the example for two reasons. First, it is one of the cases that Chomsky cites most frequently to demonstrate the hypocrisy of US foreign policy. It is his stock response to those who believe that progressives should have supported US military intervention in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. Secondly, while an important part of Chomsky’s case, it has not – so far as I know – been debunked before.

In my earlier post I quoted the appearance of this argument in just two of Chomsky's books, A New Generation Draws the Line and Chronicles of Dissent. In fact you trip across it in most of his books, in more or less flagrantly dishonest versions. Here are three examples that illustrate these gradations of deception.

In Deterring Democracy (1991, p.200), Chomsky appends to the Moynihan quotation:

[Moynihan] adds that within a few weeks some 60,000 people had been killed, “10 per cent of the population, almost the proportion of casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the Second World War.”

In Rogue States (2000, pp. 55-56), he again gives the Moynihan quotation (in which Moynihan speaks of his “no inconsiderable success”) and adds:

Success was indeed considerable. Moynihan cites reports that within two months some 60,000 people had been killed, “10 per cent of the population, almost the proportion of casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the Second World War.” A sign of the success he adds, is that within a year, “the subject disappeared from the press.”

Finally, in a speech in London in 1994 (and reprinted in the magazine Red Pepper), he stated:

Moynihan was particularly honest and, to give him credit, he said in his memoirs that at the time of the Indonesian invasion: "The State Department wanted things to turn out as they did. It was my responsibility to render the United Nations utterly ineffective in any action and I carried that out with no inconsiderable success." And the next sentence of the memoirs says that within the next two months 60,000 people were killed, approximately the proportion of the population that the Nazis killed in Eastern Europe. And then he turns to some other topic. So he's taking credit for having succeeded in killing a proportion of the population comparable to what Nazis did in Eastern Europe...

In Example 1, Chomsky runs together two separate passages in order to insinuate falsely that Moynihan judges success by the number of people killed by Indonesian forces. In Example 2, Chomsky embellishes this by explicitly attributing, rather than merely insinuating, that judgement to Moynihan. In Example 3 he goes further still, identifying this judgement as an explicit statement by Moynihan immediately after the comment about “no inconsiderable success”.

Rather than explicate again the dishonesty involved in Chomsky’s citations, I refer readers to my earlier post. What I find especially disturbing about Chomsky’s methodology is that in every case (forgivable in a speech, but not in a book that’s decked out with the appearance of scholarship) he drops the page references that would enable his readers to check his claims. The reason for this is not hard to fathom: if he were to give page references, it would be obvious that a rather large ellipsis is involved. I have put those page references back in. I invite readers to obtain a library copy of Moynihan's book and check that I have cited it accurately and in context, and verify that Chomsky has not.

Finally, note the trickery involved in Chomsky’s remark, “A sign of the success [Moynihan] adds, is that within a year, ‘the subject disappeared from the press.’” Moynihan says nothing at all about a disappearance of press coverage being “a sign of success”. Chomsky has taken a genuine quotation, wrenched it out of context, and provided a new context that clearly conveys to the reader that the words “a sign of success” are an accurate paraphrase of what is to be found in the book. They are not: Chomsky is lying.

I cannot stress enough that as well as being a standard Chomsky argument this is a characteristic technique. When 20 years ago I began to read Chomsky and first noticed his failure to adhere to scholarly standards, I assumed that I was finding errors born of his writing in a discipline that he didn’t know. I have only become more convinced over the years that Chomsky is ignorant of history, politics and - especially - economics (he uses the term ‘political economy’ a lot, for no obvious reason), but I no longer believe that these are errors alone. When the “errors” are all in the same direction - namely a determination to prove that the United States is morally equal or inferior to Nazi Germany – then something more is involved.

The revolutionary cause

Christopher Hitchens makes what is presumably a temporary return to The Nation to outline his thinking on the US election. After expounding a slight preference for Bush, he writes, with evident feeling:

One of the editors of this magazine asked me if I would also say something about my personal evolution. I took him to mean: How do you like your new right-wing friends? In the space I have, I can only return the question. I prefer them to Pat Buchanan and Vladimir Putin and the cretinized British Conservative Party, or to the degraded, mendacious populism of Michael Moore, who compares the psychopathic murderers of Iraqis to the Minutemen. I am glad to have seen the day when a British Tory leader is repudiated by the White House. An irony of history, in the positive sense, is when Republicans are willing to risk a dangerous confrontation with an untenable and indefensible status quo. I am proud of what little I have done to forward this revolutionary cause.

I endorse these sentiments warmly. Hitchens has been a lucid – one might almost say indefatigable – advocate for the international “regime-change” cause, and he is right to be proud. I am hardly in the same league for effectiveness, notoriety and breadth of readership, but I am also proud of having written, in the week of the Labour Party Conference:

Tony Blair’s support for the Iraq war was far from being, as Lib Dems claimed last week, the biggest foreign policy blunder since Suez. It was the most strategically far-sighted and noble British stance since the founding of Nato.

I selected the precedent with deliberation. For all its flaws, errors, defeats and disasters, the Labour Party has done important and admirable things in foreign policy. The most historically significant was its role in the early Cold War. Labour came to office in 1945 believing that it was well-placed to cultivate good relations with the Soviet Union - “Left can talk to Left,” as the new Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin put it. Bevin was wrong, and it was to his enormous credit that he realised this almost immediately. Soviet Communism was irrevocably hostile to the institutions of liberal democracy, and especially to parties of the democratic Left. Labour – which was the strongest such party in Europe at the time - gave historically-vital support to other social democratic parties and free trade unions on both sides of the Iron Curtain to resist Communist infiltration and expansionism. (It’s worth recording that the author of this policy was Bevin’s protégé Denis Healey – not yet an MP but International Secretary of the Labour Party.) It was a natural development of that policy for Labour to be instrumental in the founding of Nato in 1949 – a voluntary alliance establishing collective security and deterrence, which 40 years later, with the collapse of Communism is Eastern Europe, became the most successful liberation movement in history.

The Labour Government then was assailed by parliamentary critics of its policy, as Tony Blair is now. It’s difficult at this distance to credit, but there was a caucus among Labour MPs that was unabashedly pro-Soviet, and that the Labour Party rightly (but unfortunately only temporarily) expelled from membership in the late 1940s. One of them, John Platts-Mills QC, died only three years ago, aged 95. He was so shameless an apologist for Stalin that even an obsequious Guardian obituary noted coyly:

After the war, he was unable to concede that our next main ally had to be the United States, and that Stalin should be in disgrace.

I'll say.

Another was Konni Zilliacus, MP for Gateshead. Now almost-forgotten, Zilliacus was the subject of a recent fawning biography entitled Zilliacus: A Life for Peace and Socialism, by an unknown academic who is described as a moderator in history courses for the North-East Open College Network. This useless and disgusting hagiography is distinguished only by its judicious omission of the one fact about its subject’s life that is worth recording: he was the rhetorical peg on which George Orwell hung his criticism of the Tribune Left in the late 1940s for its failure to acknowledge the futility of pressing for an independent Socialist foreign policy for Europe. Orwell’s essay is entitled, with heavy irony, “In Defence of Comrade Zilliacus” – his point being that Zilliacus was at least openly pro-Soviet, whereas the Tribune Left knew that that was a disreputable position but was reluctant to say so publicly.

Appropriately for an intellectually nugatory biography of a Labour MP with no shame, it has a preface by Tony Benn. Benn declares the book “ a brilliant biography of a brilliant man”, but more significant is his judgement of the Government that Old Labour often compares Tony Blair unfavourably to. Benn’s words are unintentionally quite funny, and ought to be better-known (punctuation, or rather the absence of it, is Benn’s):

Unfortunately the post-war Labour government whose record is now widely recognised as having been a brilliant story of progressive reform was marred by its subservience to Washington and its deep hostility to the USSR for which Ernie Bevin must take some responsibility, and criticism of this policy in the House of Commons led to Zilly’s own expulsion.

In a perfect symbiosis of prefacer, author and subject, the whole book is as stupid as this. It quotes (p. 112) Zilliacus’s defence – yes, his defence, in a letter to Tribune – of the coup in Czechoslovakia:

The Czechoslovak workers acting pretty much unanimously through the trade unions and the Social Democratic as well as the Communist Party made a bloodless semi-revolution rather than allow the Right and centre to get away with their avowed object in bringing down the Government and forcing an anti-Communist coalition on the model of what has happened in France and Italy.

All that his biographer can say of Zilliacus’s support for the overthrow of parliamentary government is:

Very few people in the Labour Party agreed with Zilliacus on this point ….

And by the standards of this worthless book, that’s as far as indictment goes.

Historical parallels are rarely exact, but there are discernible similarities here. In 1945 Labour understood that the liberal democracies faced a totalitarian threat that would exist regardless of whatever foreign or domestic policies a Left-wing government put in place. That was the nature of Soviet Communism, and Labour made a correct and courageous decision to abandon romantic illusions and to ally with the United States. It also expelled from membership a parliamentary caucus that not only disagreed with that approach but also explicitly defended tyranny.

The Labour Government now – driven by the Prime Minister rather than, as was the case with the Attlee Government, the Foreign Secretary – has also rightly discerned a totalitarian threat to Western civilization, and allied with the United States against it. With a neat historical symmetry it has expelled from membership an MP who declares:

Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life.

The Left is a notoriously fissiparous force and the Labour Party a deeply imperfect instrument of it (recall its appalling conduct and policies in the 1980s). The British Left has, however, done nothing more important and principled in its life than to stand for genuine progressive values by opposing totalitarianism, secular (Nazi, Communist and the fusion of the two that was Saddam Hussein’s regime) and theocratic.

And while we’re on historical parallels, let us note the analogy drawn by many - including ardent detractors of both men - between Christopher Hitchens and the bane of the pro-totalitarian Left George Orwell. It is one I also consider apt, and pay Hitchens due tribute for his efforts and his courage in advancing the revolutionary cause.

"Whatever means they find necessary"

The Independent reports on a stupefying development in the anti-war movement:

The Stop the War Coalition was accused yesterday of supporting the killers of the British hostage Ken Bigley after it drew up a draft statement saying the Iraqi people should use "whatever means they find necessary" to end the occupation by coalition forces.

Two Labour MPs attacked the anti-war group, claiming that it sent a "scurrilous" e-mail to its supporters that would strongly imply "support for the so-called resistance and thereby acquiesce in the murders of more people such as Ken Bigley, as well as hundreds of ordinary Iraqis". The group responded by accusing the MPs of making an unfounded accusation because the draft statement was not sent out.

If your vision of the international order doesn’t extend beyond the iniquities of the United States and Israel, you will get into a mess like this. There are forces a good deal more iniquitous than western constitutional democracies even at our worst; dignifying them with the heroic term ‘Iraqi resistance’ – the noun evoking a genuinely heroic movement, in occupied Europe, against a genuine tyranny – is an initial step towards abandoning a capacity for making critical judgement. Next one has the position of John Pilger, who believes:

We cannot afford to be choosy. While we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq, we have no choice now but to support the resistance, for if the resistance fails, the “Bush gang” will attack another country. If they succeed, a grievous blow will be suffered by the Bush gang.

The Stop the War ‘Coalition’ can’t be accused of shirking the implications of that premise. How predictable, and how feeble, that it should now maintain the fiction that its repugnant position was articulated in a “draft statement” that “was not sent out”. For fiction it is. Harry’s blog points out:

Firstly, the email was sent out to Stop the War supporters. Who do they think they are kidding? How else do they think the rest of us found out about it? Secondly, the email was clearly labelled as a statement and not a 'draft statement'. Indeed the preamble to the statement explicitly states that it had been agreed by the Coalition's officers. The preamble was signed by Stop the War Chairman Andrew Murray and Convenor Lindsey German.

Let me give a quick reminder of the political complexion of the Coalition. Its Chairman, Andrew Murray, sits on the politburo of the Communist Party of Britain. The party is a declared supporter of what is now, after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, almost certainly the most horrific tyranny on the planet. In his political report to the party’s politburo in March last year, Murray noted:

Our Party has already made its basic position of solidarity with People’s [i.e. North] Korea clear.

The Coalition’s Convenor, Lindsey German, is a leading member of the Socialist Workers’ Party (and was, till she became the London Mayoral candidate for the Respect ‘Coalition’ – the electoral front organisation for the SWP – editor of the party’s journal). In the Iraq war, the SWP urged victory for Saddam Hussein. In Socialist Worker, 23 March 2003, party ideologue Paul McGarr stated:

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.

The SWP has a distinctive approach also to Jewish matters. At its Marxism 2004 festival in the summer, its invited speaker on the subject 'How can Palestine be free?' was the jazz musician Gilad Atzmon. Atzmon, once an Israeli reservist, believes that the antisemitic Tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion accurately depicts the state of modern America. On his web site, Atzmon declares:

[W]e must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously. It is beyond doubt that Zionists, the most radical, racist and nationalistic Jews around, have already managed to turn America into an Israeli mission force. The world's number one super power is there to support the Jewish state's wealth and security matters. The one-sided pro-Zionist take on the Israeli¬ Palestinian conflict, the American veto against every 'anti-Israeli' UN resolution, the war against Iraq and now the militant intentions against Syria, all prove beyond doubt that it is Zionist interests that America is serving. American Jewry makes any debate on whether the 'Protocols of the elder of Zion' are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews do try to control the world, by proxy. So far they are doing pretty well for themselves at least. Whether the Americans enjoy the deterioration of their state's affairs will no doubt be revealed soon.

There are many ways in which one could describe Atzmon’s views, but the last term I would reach for when doing so is the one applied by Socialist Worker. In a cloying puff-piece to promote Atzmon’s appearance on an SWP platform, the paper commended the man’s political writings as:

… Gilad’s fearless tirades against Zionism.

It’s also worth noting that Atzmon takes seriously the SWP’s recent discovery that Islamic particularism is a progressive force. At the moment the SWP has gone as far only as describing the consciousness-raising effects on Muslim women of wearing the hijab: as Respect apparatchik Salma Yaqoob argued in the party's 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.

Atzmon, however, goes somewhat further: he looks forward to the day that totalitarian Islamist theocracies are armed with nuclear weapons. Really. This is what he said on the list of another Israeli crank, Israel Shamir (who has been condemned for neo-Nazi sympathies even by other anti-Israel campaigners):

Balance of power is the only key to peace. Islamic militants, when equipped with the right weaponry, would concentrate on Anglo-American military targets. They would never kill civilians or attack what the Americans call 'soft targets'. The Islamic struggle is about liberation not about bloodthirstiness.… If Islamic militants could practically endanger our existence we would have to listen to them with great respect. We would then have to look for a genuine means towards reconciliation. I suggest that we allow the Iranians to be as nuclear as we are, we leave Syria alone, we must help the Palestinians become as armed as their Israeli enemy.

I merely report the facts about the Stop the War Coalition’s ideological make-up. My readers may make their own value judgements on the matter.

Culpable and whingeing

The BBC reports:

Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy has reacted furiously to suggestions by Jack Straw that his policies would have strengthened Saddam Hussein. Mr Kennedy branded the foreign secretary's comments a "scandalous" insult to the millions of people who had opposed the war in Iraq. He accused the government of trying to rewrite the history of the conflict. Mr Straw said the Lib Dems "dare not admit" their policy would ultimately have created a stronger Saddam.

It took the Government enough time to go on the attack against the Liberal Democrats, and I’m pleased to note Charles Kennedy’s flush of recognition of the damage that the truth poses to his party’s reputation. It is of course entirely accurate to say that Liberal Democrat policy would have strengthened the regime of Saddam Hussein. Before the war, Kennedy argued for the “better alternative” of containment of Saddam. Containment of a regime means leaving it in power. In the Cold War, there was no alternative to the West’s policy of containment of the Soviet Union, for direct confrontation would have risked nuclear war. No such risk attended the war in Iraq, because – and I fear the point must have escaped the Liberal Democrats – Saddam Hussein possessed no weapons of mass destruction.

Containment would have meant persisting with UN sanctions. Yet we now know that those sanctions were porous, ineffective and so incompetently administered that Saddam was able to profit from them directly through bribery. As Con Coughlin observed in The Telegraph earlier this month, after the publication of the ISG report:

Saddam skilfully worked the system so that the profits were diverted to fund his regime rather than feed his people. An important element of this fraud was that a significant percentage of the funds was diverted to set up a voucher system that could be used to bribe a wide network of international politicians who could be counted upon to do Saddam's bidding.

Between them, France and Russia received 45 per cent of the vouchers, with China coming third. In late 2002 and early 2003, France, Russia and China led the anti-war movement at the UN. In France, the vouchers were given to a number of politicians with close links to Mr Chirac, while in Russia they were paid directly to Mr Putin's private office, providing him with his own ready-made slush fund.

Saddam's clever manipulation of the voucher system was a brilliant success: it not only caused a deep split within the security council, it helped him to make irrelevant the much-vaunted policy of containment that was supposed to prevent him from re-emerging as a dominant force the the Middle East. It also enabled him to fund illicit imports of weapons and the technology needed to resume production of weapons of mass destruction, which was his declared aim once the sanctions had been lifted.

This is the system of “containment” that Liberal Democrat leaders and spokesmen – Kennedy, Baroness Williams, Menzies Campbell – continue to insist was a great success. Their anti-war argument has coagulated into dogma, against which no amount of evidence can prevail.

Let us suppose, however, that UN sanctions had been applied consistently and with solidarity among UN Security Council members. I believe there were important reasons to impose sanctions on Saddam’s regime, as there were to impose sanctions on apartheid South Africa – partly as moral symbolism to indicate the depravity of the regime, and partly for practical purposes of stymieing the regime’s ambitions. But I don’t imagine that on their own they could have brought down Saddam’s regime; their effectiveness was inherently limited. (The corollary is, of course, that the anti-sanctions campaign in the West was at best misdirected, and in fact quite fraudulent - as the investigative journalist John Sweeney brilliantly demonstrated in a BBC documentary in 2002.)

Saddam Hussein cared nothing for the condition of Iraqis; he could have allowed Iraq’s economy to run down indefinitely without being swayed from his policies. And indeed, those policies never did alter. They comprised throughout his rule a determination to acquire weapons of mass destruction if he could, territorial aggrandisement and support for terrorism. Had the Liberal Democrats had their way, Saddam’s ability to realise his goals would indeed have been enhanced. That is the fact of the matter, and Charles Kennedy would be better-advised to apologise to the British people – and more particularly to Iraqis – for his party’s stand than whinge when its consequences are fairly and accurately pointed out.

For Bush

In a recent television discussion between Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens, the protagonists were asked whom they would vote for if they had a ballot in front of them. Sullivan gave an agonised answer:

I'd probably write in McCain-Lieberman. Because I want this war to succeed, I want it to be a bi-partisan war, I want the Democrats to support it; I do not want this war to be fought in order to get Karl Rove a super-majority in various states, and I am appalled by the way in which someone like Karl Rove is using the war for partisan political purposes. It just shows such a low level of civic imagination, put it that way.

Hitchens gave a direct one:

I favour the reelection of the president. But I am, as it seems we've all discovered judging by this discussion anyway, a single-issue voter. I am. And I think we're talking about a single-issue campaign. I don't like John Ashcroft at all, and I think Andrew should have the right to get married.

If I were an American voter and there were a McCain-Lieberman ticket, I should look favourably upon it. But there isn’t, and given the choices that do exist I share Christopher Hitchens’s view in every respect.

I wrote this article in the summer on why a European liberal would wish to see Bush returned to the White House, and have occasionally wondered since then if I had been too harsh on John Kerry in doubting his resolve to fight Islamist totalitarianism with sufficient immoderation. My doubts were allayed this week when considering the views of his running-mate, as reported by Reuters:

Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards on Sunday disputed a White House assertion that it was right to topple Saddam Hussein even if he had no illegal weapons because he posed a future threat.. The North Carolina senator, appearing on several television news programs, said Saddam's intention to eventually gather weapons of mass destruction was one of dozens of such threats. "There are lots of threats waiting to happen all over the world," Edwards said. "That doesn't mean that that justifies invading a country."

Because Edwards doesn’t spell out his objection to regime change (or if he did, the report does not quote it), we have to interpolate it. It appears from that extraordinary phrase about “invading a country” that he is making a point about the sovereignty of states. I can understand why a rational conservative would elevate that principle in his foreign policy, but would expect a different view on the liberal side of the argument. Saddam Hussein’s regime was not Iraq: it was the oppressor of Iraq. When Coalition forces overthrew that regime, they were doing something entirely admirable: protecting a people (or rather, peoples) from arbitrary violence and despotism. Iraqis could not rely on their own government for that protection, because of course their own government was the wielder of that violence. A professed liberal who, in considering that task, is more exercised by the violation of sovereignty or – as Charles Kennedy protested about in the Independent yesterday – the illegality of regime change than the liberty of an oppressed people is a perplexing phenomenon.

Still more perplexing in those complaints is the absence of context. There is no mention by Edwards – or Kennedy – of the fact that the Coalition did not launch war on Saddam Hussein’s regime: Saddam Hussein was the initiator of hostilities. The Gulf War of 1991 was never formally concluded: a ceasefire was put in place contingent on Saddam’s accepting the terms of UN Security Council Resolution 687. He never complied – and compliance, rather than an absence of weaponry, was the explicit requirement – and thereby was in breach of the terms of the ceasefire. This was what made Iraq under Saddam’s despotism a different case from other countries who are in breach of UNSC resolutions and different from other tyrannies. Saddam’s compliance with UNSC resolutions was a prerequisite of his not facing renewed hostilities. After 9/11 no responsible government could allow this continued flouting of international law by a despot with a longstanding record of launching war (three between 1974 and 1990) and supporting terrorism.

Edwards’s definition of responsible government is clearly different:

The first-term senator also noted that of the three countries singled out by Bush as part of an "axis of evil" -- Iraq, North Korea and Iran -- "you know, we invaded the one of those three that doesn't have nuclear weapons."

I assume the aspirant Vice-President is accusing the Bush administration of inconsistency rather than complaining that it has not invaded Iran and North Korea. It is a staggeringly stupid remark, nonetheless. The reason we do not overthrow tyranny in those countries as we did in Iraq is precisely that one possesses nuclear weapons while the other has a substantial military capability that will shortly become nuclear (Iran has been caught with illegally-enriched uranium, in defiance of 'multilateral' and diplomatic approaches): we are too late to stop those developments. [In the preceding sentence as I initially wrote it, I stated Edwards's premise without comment, which caused one reader to assume that I was agreeing with his - presumably rhetorical - assessment of Iran's capabilities; I don't, and have amplified the sentence to make that clear - though Iran is much closer to being a nuclear-armed power than anyone imagined even a few months ago.] We must now practise containment, as we did with the Soviet Union, and hope for the eventual crumbling of those regimes if we demonstrate sufficient resolve. (I believe there are good reasons for expecting that to happen in Iran at least.) In the case of Saddam Hussein, we were not too late; we got to him first, to the immeasurable benefit of the people of Iraq, and us as well.

Because President Bush understands this - indeed because he entertains no doubts about it at all - I hope for his return to the White House.

UPDATE: On an issue about which I know next to nothing but in which he has expertise and many years' personal experience, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer (a former speech-writer to Vice-President Walter Mondale) is also indignant about Edwards:

After the second presidential debate, in which John Kerry used the word "plan" 24 times, I said on television that Kerry has a plan for everything except curing psoriasis. I should have known there is no parodying Kerry's pandering. It turned out days later that the Kerry campaign has a plan -- nay, a promise -- to cure paralysis. What is the plan? Vote for Kerry.

This is John Edwards on Monday at a rally in Newton, Iowa: "If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again."

In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a more loathsome display of demagoguery. Hope is good. False hope is bad. Deliberately, for personal gain, raising false hope in the catastrophically afflicted is despicable....

UPDATE II: In a fine article in The Sunday Times, Sarah Baxter - former political editor of The New Statesman during Labour's period of extended silliness in the early 1980s, a Labour voter in the UK and a registered Democrat - explains her intention to vote for President Bush. Her observations about the challenger are sharp and apt:

Kerry’s comment that Saddam would “not necessarily” be in power today if Bush had not gone to war made me think back to 1991, when I was at the New Statesman. I was virtually the only person there who thought that the ruler of Iraq’s “republic of fear” should be kicked out of Kuwait. Kerry voted against the 1991 Gulf war, despite his present blather about the United Nations, global tests and international alliances. There could not have been a broader coalition then. Had Kerry been president, Saddam would not only be in power today; he would be richer, more powerful and running Kuwait.

I never imagined that a suave, millionaire candidate for American president, with a realistic prospect of winning, would be at one with the New Statesman in one of its more grungy, ultra-left periods. I thought that era was over — I have changed countries only to find I have stepped through the looking glass.

The things they say

A few weeks ago on the Crooked Timber weblog an academic called Henry Farrell wrote:

I don’t know of any serious IR [International Relations] scholars who are prepared to defend Bush’s foreign policy. (I’m not counting policy wonks in AEI [the American Enterprise Institute] etc, who face what we may politely describe as a different incentive structure.) There have to be some out there – but as best as I can tell, they’re keeping very quiet.

I commented at the time, as politely as I am capable of, that Professor Farrell had plainly not looked very far in that case. I pointed to John Lewis Gaddis, Professor of History and Political Science at Yale, and author of such seminal studies of post-war American foreign policy as Strategies of Containment, who had commented favourably on the strategic vision behind the administration's thinking. Had Professor Farrell confined himself to a judgement about the administration's execution of that vision (a point on which Professor Gaddis is highly critical) he would have had a point; but that is not what he said.

If the forum in which Professor Gaddis made his remarks was too esoteric for Professor Farrell, he could have found it referenced in this blog last February. Perhaps he has now stumbled across it, for there is a prudent moderation in his tone this week. He writes, under the tendentious title "IR Scholars Unite":

Two months ago, I noted the paucity of international relations scholars who were prepared to defend the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq.

So "I don't know of any" is deftly transmuted to "the paucity of", which is a rather different matter. Having demonstrated what was at the very least - and this is being charitable - a lack of intellectual curiosity and a disinclination to read, Professor Farrell has come up with a linguistic expedient (let us call it assonantly the "Farrell Straddle", and mentally store it for future reference) to make out that his initial characterisation was right all along.

When pronouncing "Crooked Timber", recall that it is the first word that is stressed.

Fellow-travellers with a cause

In my column about Paul Foot, I deliberately recounted his views only in his own words rather than in the stated positions of the Socialist Workers’ Party, of which he was a leading member for 40 years. My reasoning was that, whereas many observers have drawn a distinction between his journalism and his eccentric support for a party of the totalitarian Left, Foot’s political output contained much of disrepute on his own account and not merely his party’s.

Nonetheless, it would have been justifiable to cite the SWP’s views in this context, because it is a democratic centralist party, whose line Foot will have been bound by at all times. (A Leninist party governed by democratic centralism is a different type of organisation from a democratic political party. No one is expelled from the Labour Party for opposing the Iraq war, for instance. Those of us who were Labour Party members in the 1980s and vehemently opposed to its then policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament were not threatened with expulsion either.) That line is worth examining, not for any intrinsic importance but because the SWP has had one notable success since 9/11 in establishing a front organisation – the Stop the War Coalition. (It has also established a front organisation for fighting elections – the Respect ‘Coalition’. But despite isolated results in areas with a high concentration of Muslim voters, and some shameless attempts to talk up their support by means of demonstrable falsehood and omission of relevant data, Respect’s overall results have been poor. In the European elections, in the whole of Wales the party received just 5000 votes.)

Anti-war campaigners were generally indignant at the suggestion that they served the interests of Saddam Hussein. Whether or not one accepts their objection – and I do not: it seems to me beyond argument that those who supported ‘containment’ of Saddam’s regime when we had the power to overthrow him were, by definition, favouring the perpetuation of that regime – it is patently false to apply it to the SWP and its fronts. Socialist Worker openly called for military victory for Saddam Hussein in the Iraq war. Baathism derives inspiration from the ideology of fascism; those who wish it military victory merit Christopher Hitchens’s charge of being fellow-travellers with fascism. It was the type of fascism, moreover, that – the BBC reports today - included babies and toddlers among its victims:

A mass grave being excavated in a north Iraqi village has yielded evidence that Iraqi forces executed women and children under Saddam Hussein. US-led investigators have located nine trenches in Hatra containing hundreds of bodies believed to be Kurds killed during the repression of the 1980s. The skeletons of unborn babies and toddlers clutching toys are being unearthed, the investigators said. They are seeking evidence to try Saddam Hussein for crimes against humanity. It is believed to be the first time investigators working for the Iraqi Special Tribunal (IST) have conducted a full scientific exhumation of a mass grave. "It is my personal opinion that this is a killing field," Greg Kehoe, an American working with the IST, told reporters in Hatra, south of the city of Mosul. "Someone used this field on significant occasions over time to take bodies up there, and to take people up there and execute them."

Those (perhaps some of my readers among them) who took part in the million-strong Hyde Park demonstration against war 18 months ago might perhaps reflect on the affiliations of those under whose auspices they marched.

Not for the first time, I commend the authors of Harry’s blog for their public service in exposing similar debasement of the ideals of the progressive Left. They have lately come up with this scarcely-credible instance:

[T]he Stop the War Coalition are furious that British trade unionists have chosen solidarity with Iraqi workers ahead of support for the 'resistance' and they are particularly angry that Iraqi trade unionists had the cheek to come over to the UK and win support of fellow trade unionists and Labour Party members.

But I can top it. Here’s what Socialist Worker had to say last week about the plea of an Iraqi Kurd at the Labour Party Conference to reject the disgraceful proposal that British troops should leave the country to the ministrations of the suicide bombers and head-loppers:

SHANAZ RASHID was another Iraqi trotted out by Labour’s leadership to swing the conference vote. Rashid won a standing ovation when she said, “For the great majority of Iraqis, WMD was never the issue. “We don’t understand the criticism of your prime minister. All we wanted was to be free.” Shanaz Rashid is not an “ordinary Iraqi”. She is a high-ranking member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which has close links with the US and supported the invasion of Iraq. She has attended the Socialist International, which includes the Labour Party, congress several times for the PUK.

There are many different political groups organising among the Kurds. Shanaz Rashid is associated with a pro-US faction. One of her relatives is married to the Iraqi deputy prime minister. Her husband, Latif Rashid, is a minister in the Iraqi government. Kurdish activist Sait Akgul told Socialist Worker, “Her appearance at the Labour Party conference is another example of Blair’s double standards. No Kurds were allowed to go to the Labour Party conference to plead the case of our leader Abdullah Ocalan, who was captured by Turkey, or for our political prisoners. Why is this woman a hero and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) group, which has millions of supporters, described as ‘terrorist’?”

So Socialist Worker is now touting Abdullah Ocalan and the PKK as the progressive and Kurdish national cause. To appreciate the full moral import of this, consider two items. First, recall that chilling video footage - broadcast recently in a BBC2 biography of Saddam Hussein - showing the Baath Party congress shortly after Saddam’s assumption of power. Christopher Hitchens, again, describes it:

The members of the central committee are abruptly confronted by a broken and tortured man, who stutters through a zombie confession that implicates about half of those present. As each name is announced, guards appear and drag off the begging, shrieking victim. Those whose names haven't yet been called begin to yell hysterical professions of loyalty to the Leader. The Leader smokes a calm cigar. Scene 2 of this horror show was even more impressive. Those who had been spared were ordered to form a firing squad for those who had been "named."

Recall it moreover, when considering the second item: a long article about the PKK in the foreign policy journal Orbis in 2001, by Michael Radu. This description will remind you of something:

The PKK itself was founded in 1978, and Ocalan's continuous control over it was only obtained by ruthlessly eliminating potential challengers to his absolute authority. Those who threatened his leadership or simply disagreed with him faced demotion, expulsion, or death. As he euphemistically described the fate of those unfortunates at his own trial, despite "comprehensive educational and organisational efforts against them, . . .the most deviated ones of them could only be neutralised by internal struggles." According to Chris Kutschera, one of Europe's most active, sympathetic, and knowledgeable analysts of the PKK, "Five or six of the [PKK's] original central committee have been physically eliminated, three others committed suicide, [and] eight are still alive, acting semi-clandestinely. . . . Others have been driven underground." Moreover, the purges continued for years. Kutschera goes on to quote Selahattin Celik, the founder and first commander of the PKK's armed wing, the People's Liberation Army of Kurdistan (Artesa Rizgariya Gele Kurdistan--ARGK): "There were between 50 and 60 executions just after the 1986 Congress. In the end there was no more room to bury them!" Among those "arrested" at that time was Duran Kalkan, who was later released and is now still a member of the PKK Presidential Council. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Kalkan is now rumored to have offered Ankara his surrender in exchange for amnesty. Another reminder of the Stalinist purges of the 1930s is found in the career of Ali Omer Can, a Central Committee member who was arrested and tortured in the PKK's Beka'a jails in 1986 and then released and rehabilitated. After he again broke with the party and tried to establish a rival organization, the "PKK Refoundation," he was assassinated in November 1991.

Radu also notes the PKK’s singular approach to the Kurdish national cause:

The PKK's disregard for human life has also carried over into its collaborative arrangements with governments waging violent campaigns against their own Kurdish populations, most notably in Syria and Iraq, but also to a lesser extent in Iran. The incentive for such collusion is not immediately apparent. One PKK analysis of the general Kurdish situation acknowledges that large numbers of Kurds in Syria "play an active role" in the Kurdish struggle, and Ocalan himself admitted that during the late 1980s Syrian Kurds were an essential part of the PKK's recruitment base.(n19) And yet Ocalan has not only refused to provide assistance to Kurds in Syria, he cooperated with the government in Damascus that brutally oppressed them. Similarly, for more than a decade he supported Saddam Hussein's offensives against Kurdish nationalists in northern Iraq (or "South Kurdistan," in PKK parlance). The PKK's machinations have left Kurds throughout the region, who were never united to begin with, more divided than ever.

So Socialist Worker’s idea of an authentic representative of Iraqi sentiment is a non-Iraqi supporter of Saddam Hussein’s genocidal campaigns against the Kurds. The SWP is, I repeat, the organisation behind the Respect 'Coalition' and the Stop the War 'Coalition'. As the phrase goes, go figure.

Incidentally, the reason the PKK is appropriately described as “terrorist” would be obvious to anyone genuinely concerned with progressive ideals of democratic politics and women’s rights. The PKK carried out 16 suicide bombings between 1994 and 1998 (see Walter Laqueur’s No End to War: Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century, p. 91); fortunately few lives were lost, as the bombers were not well-trained. There was a reason for that lack of preparation: the bombers were mainly (eleven in total) young women without quasi-military or political experience. And get this: all but one of them were not volunteers; they had been personally selected by Abdullah Ocalan to go to their deaths.