Also in this week's New Statesman, see a superb piece by Nick Cohen on the curious case of CND and the Iranian nuclear programme:
Anyone who now believes CND is as much against proliferation as for unilateral disarmament would have been surprised by this autumn's annual conference. Among the guests was the startling figure of Dr Seyed Mohammad Hossein Adeli, the then Iranian ambassador. Iran is building the nuclear power stations CND once protested against - an odd project for a country with one of the largest reserves of oil in the world. Not only the US government but the United Nations and the European Union suspect the Islamic Republic wants the bomb. The obvious course for those sincere about nuclear disarmament is to oppose Tehran as vigorously as they oppose a replacement for Trident. But there's the rub. Standing by its principles would, if only for a moment, have put CND on the same side as George W Bush and Tony Blair, and that would never do.
I rarely link to articles without comment, but this one defies summary and should be savoured as a whole. Nick quotes Kate Hudson of CND (author of a new book, which I shall comment on shortly, giving a highly selective history of the organisation) expressing her opposition to proliferation; but she is ominously reserved in doing so. In fact, Ms Hudson has quite a history herself of discreditable apologetics for the indefensible. As a minor academic in Eastern European politics, she argued fiercely not only for non-intervention in Kosovo but that Serbia was a wronged party. See this article in The Guardian from 2003, where she maintains that the massacre at Racak (what she terms "an alleged massacre of 45 Kosovan Albanians by Yugoslav government forces") was "seized on by the US to justify acceleration towards war".
I am not here going to give a detailed recitation of the preposterousness of regarding Milosevic as more aggressed-against than aggressing; just note the tone. As Ms Hudson is guilty of what Nick calls "throat-clearing" with regard to Iran, so she refers to Serb atrocities with - how can I put this with the most extreme and studied understatement? - an indifference to the demands of socialist or liberal internationalism. As Nick observes:
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, we believe there is only so much rubbish the human race can swallow.
