Oliver Kamm

Renewing Trident

Gordon Brown supports the renewal of Britain's independent nuclear deterrent, according to the BBC:

Mr Brown is expected to use his Mansion House speech to indicate his personal commitment to renewing Trident. Estimates of the cost vary from £10bn to £25bn, depending on what form the new missiles or submarines take. Labour had a manifesto commitment to retain an independent nuclear deterrent but it only applies until the next general election.

Mr Brown, seen as the most likely next prime minister, will speak of retaining the deterrent in the long term. It is thought he wants anti-nuclear campaigners to know that he is just as committed to replacing Trident as Tony Blair.

This will be the right decision, for reasons I argued here. It's also a relief that the argument will be made at, in effect, prime ministerial level. The two most interesting aspects of the debate so far are, first, that the case against renewing the deterrent has been made by mainstream figures on pragmatic grounds (Michael Portillo is of this camp), and secondly, that the case for the deterrent has hardly been made at all, by the Government or anyone else.

I'll place here a plug for a new book to be published in the autumn by SCM Press called Britain's Bomb: What Next?; the book deals principally and from various viewpoints with the ethical issues in this debate, and the contributors are mainly churchmen and theologians. The editors did a valiant job of searching for someone to contribute a chapter on the case for renewing Trident, and came up with me (I am, of course, no theologian or churchman). You can pre-order the book from Amazon here.

Chomsky bamboozles on the Balkans III

I wrote last week of Noam Chomsky's interview in The New Statesman, in which he falsely attributes to an unnamed British parliamentary inquiry "the astonishing conclusion that, until January 1999, most of the crimes committed in Kosovo were attributed to the KLA guerrillas", and omits mention of the Racak massacre of that month. Let us see in this post how he manufactures data about the violence in Kosovo.

First, Chomsky makes the same claim about the unnamed parliamentary inquiry in his new book, Failed States (in which there is also no mention of Racak). He writes (p. 99, emphasis added):

Kosovo was an ugly place before the NATO bombing - though, regrettably, not by international standards. According to Western sources, about 2,000 people were killed on all sides in the year prior to the invasion, many by Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guerillas attacking Serbs from Albania in an effort, as they openly stated, to elicit a harsh Serbian response that could rally Western opinion to their cause. The British government makes the remarkable claim that up until January 1999, most of the 2,000 were killed by the KLA, and Western sources consistently report that there was no significant change until the Nato war was announced and implemented. One of the few serious scholarly studies even to pay attention to these matters estimates that Serbs were responsible for 500 of the 2,000 killed. This is the careful and judicious study by Nicholas Wheeler, who supports the Nato bombing on the grounds that there would have been worse atrocities if Nato had not bombed. The fact that these are the strongest arguments that can be contrived by serious analysts tells us a good deal about the decision to bomb, particularly when we recall that there were diplomatic options.

To this passage, Chomsky adds a footnote:

I cited the British government claim at the time but added that it is not credible because of the balance of forces. However, it has been confirmed by the British parliamentary inquiry, from the highest sources. See Hegemony or Survival, p. 56, for discussion. Nicholas Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention and International Society (Oxford, 2000).

So Chomsky has an additional source for his claims, namely the book Saving Strangers by Nicholas Wheeler. This sounds promising to those of us who wish to pin down Chomsky's sources. And if you follow the reference to Chomsky's earlier book, Hegemony or Survival, you find Wheeler cited in the same context:

Serious scholarship reaches similar conclusions. Nicholas Wheeler, who does not invert the chronology, estimates that Serbs had killed 500 Albanians before the Nato bombing, implying that 1,500 had been killed by the KLA. Nevertheless, he concludes that bombing Serbia was a genuine case of humanitarian intervention because 'though only a few hundred Albanians were killed' prior to the bombing, 'intelligence points to this as a precursor to a major campaign of killing and ethnic cleansing.'"

Chomsky then cites in a footnote p. 34 and pp. 265ff of Wheeler's book. I'm grateful to a reader, Paul Bogdanor, for drawing to my attention the fact that Chomsky has fabricated his account of Wheeler's argument. Wheeler nowhere, as Chomsky has it, "estimates that Serbs had killed 500 Albanians before the Nato bombing, implying that 1,500 had been killed by the KLA". On p. 34 of his book, Wheeler says: "What about a case where only a few hundred have been killed but intelligence points to this being a precursor to a major campaign of killing and ethnic cleansing? This appears to have been the story in Kosovo and the justification for humanitarian intervention was a preventive one." On p. 269 he says: "It is estimated that some 500 Kosovars had been killed and 400,000 displaced in the year leading up to NATO's action, but the justification for intervention was that without it many more Albanians would have been killed and forcibly driven from their homes." Note the term Wheeler uses: he says 500 Kosovars (i.e. residents of Kosovo, both Serb and Albanian) were killed; he does not say or imply there were more Serb than Albanian casualties.

Chomsky has spun a narrative about greater violence on the part of the KLA from a source that says nothing of the kind. The phrase "though only a few hundred Albanians were killed", which Chomsky apparently quotes from Wheeler, has been made up. (If you doubt me on this question of Chomsky's polemical crudity and dishonesty, you can read page 269 of Wheeler's book on Amazon.com's "Search Inside" function; Wheeler's actual words are: "It is estimated that some 500 Kosovars had been killed..." You'll see there is also a footnote citing a Foreign Office memorandum to the effect that there was good reason to anticipate that Milosevic would accelerate repression in Kosovo - clearly the suggestion that the British government was acting for cynical reasons doesn't stand up to scrutiny.)

Let us state the dispiriting but ineluctable conclusion once more. Noam Chomsky, "the world's top public intellectual", distorts his source material in order to generate a predetermined conclusion about the iniquities and cynicism of Western policy. His fabrications and elisions are an intellectual scandal. His political writings are an affront to the notion of scholarship.

Review in Democratiya

The latest issue of the online magazine Democratiya has just been published. It includes a very interesting interview with the writer Paul Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism. There is also a review by Michael Allen of my book Anti-Totalitarianism among others.

Chomsky bamboozles on the Balkans II

You will recall the storm some months ago over an interview with Noam Chomsky by Emma Brockes in The Guardian, which the newspaper withdrew and apologised for after Chomsky complained about the characterisation of his vews. The Guardian was wrong to apologise, for reasons I and others have argued at length. As Stephen Glover of The Independent commented, of a long but superficial inquiry by an external ombudsman, John Willis: "If The Guardian really had been interested in establishing the truth, it would have encouraged Mr Willis to reconsider Professor Chomsky's original complaint in the light of the evidence adduced by Messrs Aaronovitch, Kamm and Wheen in their letter. Not for the first time, the paper is not as high-minded as it may seem."

One of the points that the interview raised was Chomsky's attitude to the libel case brought by ITN against Living Marxism (LM) magazine. LM had claimed that pictures of a Serb-run concentration camp at Trnopolje were faked. According to the interview, "Chomsky insists that 'LM was probably correct'". Moreover, Chomsky is quoted as saying that “Ed Vulliamy [of The Guardian, who also reported on Trnopolje] is a very good journalist, but he happened to be caught up in a story which is probably not true."

So far as I am aware, neither Chomsky nor anyone else (apart from, inevitably, the semiliterate conspiracy theorists who post at Media Lens) has disputed the accuracy of these quotations. They are grotesque, for reasons set out by Vulliamy in The Guardian six years ago, on the conclusion of the libel case.

Some will say that Living Marxism won the "public relations battle", whatever that is. Others will cling to the puerile melodrama that ITN's victory in the high court yesterday was that of Goliath over some plucky little David who only wanted to challenge the media establishment. But history - the history of genocide in particular - is thankfully built not upon public relations or melodrama but upon truth; if necessary, truth established by law. And history will record this: that ITN reported the truth when, in August 1992, it revealed the gulag of horrific concentration camps run by the Serbs for their Muslim and Croatian quarry in Bosnia.

The law now records that Penny Marshall and Ian Williams (and myself, for that matter) did not lie but told the truth when they exposed this crime to the world, and that the lie was that of Living Marxism and its dilettante supporters who sought, in the time-honoured traditions of revisionism, to deny those camps existed.

Quite. Yet it appears that Chomsky really is a subscriber to such revisionism. A reader draws my attention to an interview Chomsky did a couple of months ago with Radio Television of Serbia, former mouthpiece of the genocidal tyrant Slobodan Milosevic. The interview is published on the hagiographic 'Chomsky info' site here. During the interview, this exchange takes place:

Chomsky: [I]f you look at the coverage [i.e. media coverage of earlier phases of the Balkan wars], for example there was one famous incident which has completely reshaped the Western opinion and that was the photograph of the thin man behind the barb-wire.

Interviewer: A fraudulent photograph, as it turned out.

Chomsky: You remember. The thin men behind the barb-wire so that was Auschwitz and 'we can't have Auschwitz again.'

Chomsky is referring to the famous pictures of an emaciated victim (his name was Fikret Alic) of the camp at Trnopolje. And he immediately assents to the notion that the picture was faked. Knowing Chomsky's tendency to obfuscate, I am not surprised that he leaves it to the interviewer to make a charge of fraud; there is no question, however, but that this is the case Chomsky is arguing, for he goes on to claim support for LM's charge:

The intellectuals went crazy and the French were posturing on television and the usual antics. Well, you know, it was investigated and carefully investigated. In fact it was investigated by the leading Western specialist on the topic, Philip Knightl[e]y, who is a highly respected media analyst and his specialty is photo journalism, probably the most famous Western and most respected Western analyst in this. He did a detailed analysis of it. And he determined that it was probably the reporters who were behind the barb-wire, and the place was ugly, but it was a refugee camp, I mean, people could leave if they wanted and, near the thin man was a fat man and so on, well and there was one tiny newspaper in England, probably three people, called LM which ran a critique of this, and the British (who haven't a slightest concept of freedom of speech, that is a total fraud)…a major corporation, ITN, a big media corporation had publicized this, so the corporation sued the tiny newspaper for [libel].

Let's take a look at what Knightley really said about the case. Here (from Nick Cohen) is a collection of contemporary newspaper reports of the trial, including one from The Guardian (which doesn't appear to be in the newspaper's own archive). I quote from that report at length:

One defence witness will be Phillip Knightley, author of The First Casualty, a book about how truth has been distorted through wars throughout the ages. He believes Deichmann [the LM writer who alleged the pictures were fake] may have gone too far but did raise a legitimate concern: 'The case shows the problems of war journalism. It's too easy to take one single incident and use that as a base to generalise about what's happening everywhere.

'In television journalism, it's risky to allow one seductive image to drive the story and to mould the story around that seductive image.'

For those with no direct experience of the wars that stained the last century, it is the defining image that conveys the suffering and emotion far better and with greater ease than reading thousands of words.

The defining image of the Spanish civil war was taken by Robert Capa in 1936, and was portrayed as showing a Republican soldier at the exact moment he was shot.

Knightley says the way this image was portrayed was misleading and illustrates the dangers of war reporting: 'I spent six months looking into it and no one wanted to talk about it. I was told the negatives had been lost.'

Capa's picture appeared in Life magazine a year after he sent it back from the battlefield, and only then did the caption contextualise it as showing the death of a soldier: 'It could be a Republican soldier slipping over in a field,' says Knightley.

Knightley argued, in short, that it's dangerous for people to form their opinions about a war from a single image. According to Chomsky's telling of this case for the defence, Knightley argued something rather different: that "it was probably the reporters who were behind the barb-wire", and not Fikret Alic and the other victims. From being a defence witness for LM in a libel case brought by ITN, Knightley has been miraculously transmuted into a supporter of precisely the revisionist case that LM mounted in accusing ITN of trickery. It is a reasonable bet that viewers of Serbian television, still less readers of the 'Chomsky info' site, will not trouble to check Chomsky's empirical claims, which is why it's important that others do.

Two conclusions follow from this. First, yet again, Chomsky is revealed as a man whose handling of source material is fundamentally untrustworthy. Every claim he makes, every reference he cites, needs to be checked independently. The further you penetrate, the greater are the evasions, short cuts and falsehoods, which form an interlocking structure. That a man who is allegedly the world's leading public intellectual abuses the practice of research in this way is scandalous.

Secondly, recall, that Chomsky habitually refers to his critics as apologists for state crimes, racists and so forth. Here he is calling the political philosopher Steven Lukes "an apologist for the worst slaughter relative to population since the Holocaust". Here he is accusing another political philosopher, Jeffrey Isaac, of "cold savagery with which he views his own passive acquiescence in what he knows -- or can easily discover -- to be perhaps the worst slaughter relative to population since the Holocaust". Here he is accusing, er, me of "tacit acquiescence to horrendous crimes". Coming from a man who obfuscates and denies the crimes at Trnopolje, who believes the barbed wire enclosing the camp was a piece of Western media trickery, this type of accusation is quite some compliment.

Smoking bans

The House of Lords defeats a proposal to exempt private clubs from a smoking ban:

The ban on smoking in public places is due to begin next year and will cover pubs, clubs and enclosed work places. Peers also rejected calls for pubs and restaurants serving food to be exempt from the ban....

The Lords accepted a plan to allow smoking on theatre stages and film sets "on the basis of artistic integrity" where it was needed in the script. Health Minister Lord Warner said the new laws could also give ministers powers to ban smoking in sporting stadiums, bus shelters and the entrances to public buildings and work places.

He said these were examples of non-enclosed public places where there was "a risk of harm from second-hand smoke". But there were no plans to prevent people from smoking in their own home, he told peers.

This all sounds like an example of New Labour's least appealing characteristic, its puritanism. But it happens to be right, and to avoid the obvious absurdity of banning smoking as a theatrical prop. This is my argument for a ban on smoking in public places, in which category I would include all pubs and clubs.

Observer review of Failed States

I have just finished reading Noam Chomsky's new book, Failed States. I urge you to read Peter Beaumont's review of the book in today's Observer. Beaumont, who is the newspaper's foreign affairs editor, gets Chomsky's style of argument exactly right, as few reviewers do. Even those who are in principle sympathetic to Chomsky's conclusions, as Beaumont is, need to recognise that Chomsky's methods are a scholarly disgrace. Beaumont says it well:

Reading Failed States, I had an epiphany: that by applying a Chomskian analysis to his own writing, you discover exactly the same subtle textual biases, evasions and elisions of meaning as used by those he calls 'the doctrinal managers' of the 'powerful elites'. The mighty Chomsky, the world's greatest public intellectual, is prone to playing fast and loose.

Among these "rhetorical stunts" are "long riffs on ideas extracted out of single sentences from journalistic articles or academic papers, sometimes by now-discredited figures, employed to explain whole policies and strands of history to his satisfaction".

What I most cheered, however, was Beaumont's noting what I modestly remind my readers I have also diagnosed as characteristic of Chomsky's writing, and which the great man dismissed (by means of perplexingly incompetent rhetorical trickery) as "too ridiculous for comment":

But what I find most noxious about Chomsky's argument is his desire to create a moral - or rather immoral - equivalence between the US and the greatest criminals in history. Thus on page 129, comparing a somewhat belated US conversion to the case for democracy in Iraq after the failure to find WMD, Chomsky claims: 'Professions of benign intent by leaders should be dismissed by any rational observer. They are near universal and predictable, and hence carry virtually no information. The worst monsters - Hitler, Stalin, Japanese fascists, Suharto, Saddam Hussein and many others - have produced moving flights of rhetoric about their nobility of purpose.'

Beaumont has, for good measure, written a few apt words about the Media Lens organisation, whose dishonest and abusive campaigns I wrote about recently.

Chomsky bamboozles on the Balkans

The New Statesman this week carries an interview with Noam Chomsky. The interviewer is one Andrew Stephen. I don't blame Chomsky for having plainly taken advantage of a soft, credulous and entirely incapable interlocutor.

Stephen shows how ill-equipped he is immediately by observing that "critics exult in dismissing [Chomsky] as (take your pick) a fraud, a Zionist, an anti-Semite (he is Jewish), an off-the-chart commie, an agent of the CIA, Mossad, the KGB, MI6 and so on". It makes you wonder whom Stephen has spoken to. We critics charge Chomsky with a few, broad and serious charges. He is not an antisemite or an "off-the-chart Commie". He is politically a sophist, a nihilist and a quietist, whose writings are a parody of scholarly inquiry and whose handling of source material is an intellectual scandal. Stephen at least has the prudence to introduce a crucial weasel-word in his encomium (emphasis added): "Chomsky's unremitting clarity and his seeming mastery of detail somehow defy interruption or argument, but they are wondrous to behold."

Let's take a look at that semblance of mastery. Here's Chomsky explaining to Stephen the iniquities of Nato intervention in Kosovo in 1999:

The bombing was undertaken with the anticipation explicit [that] it was going to lead to large-scale atrocities in response. As it did. Now there were terrible atrocities, but they were after the bombings. In fact, if you look at the British parliamentary inquiry, they actually reached the astonishing conclusion that, until January 1999, most of the crimes committed in Kosovo were attributed to the KLA guerrillas.

Chomsky makes this assertion about an unnamed British parliamentary inquiry quite often. Both the Foreign Affairs and the Defence select committees of the House of Commons issued reports on the Kosovo engagement. You'll find that furious critics of that war, such as Isabel Hilton in The Guardian, read the Foreign Affairs Committee's report (published on 23 May 2000) closely, yet oddly made no reference to the "astonishing conclusion" that Chomsky refers to. That's because it isn't there. The report (paragraph 55) says the exact opposite of what Chomsky claims: "[T]he Kosovo Albanian population ... were suffering greater atrocities than the Serb population (and KLA attacks were mostly focussed on Serb policemen, while Serb action often focussed on unarmed civilians)..." (In a spirit of disclosure that is alien to Chomsky's political writings, I should add that there is a footnote appended to the sentence I have just quoted, referring by way of counterexample to a case of the murder of six Serb teenagers.)

I believe I have found what Chomsky is referring to, in the Defence Select Committee report (published on 23 October 2000). It is not a conclusion, but a direct quotation from the then Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook (paragraph 35):

The Foreign Secretary told the House on 18 January 1999 that— "On its part, the Kosovo Liberation Army has committed more breaches of the ceasefire, and until this weekend was responsible for more deaths than the [Yugoslav] security forces."

This is not at all the same statement as that "most of the crimes committed in Kosovo were attributed to the KLA guerrillas". For a start (paragraph 34), it refers to a specific and brief period - the three months after the agreement secured by Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, on 16 October 1998, in which Belgrade would withdraw its military and police forces to "pre-crisis levels". But what makes Chomsky's use of this quotation disgraceful and dishonest is that, as well as attributing it to the inquiry rather than the Foreign Secretary, he omits what it refers to and why it was said. The significance of Cook's reference to "this weekend" is clear from the parliamentary debate in which he said it. The debate was held on a Monday. That weekend, reports had emerged of the massacre at Racak, in which at least 45 unarmed civilians were murdered by Serb paramilitaries. The victims included women, several elderly, and a child. One of the victims was decapitated.

Chomsky knows this (he delicately alludes to the massacre as as "a single exception" in the charge sheet against Milosevic at the Hague, in predating the Kosovo war). It is, to say the least, highly relevant to what he falsely describes as a "conclusion" to the inquiry (but is in fact a contemporary statement by the Foreign Secretary), to the reckoning of moral culpability by the protagonists in the conflict, and to the reasons that Nato resolved upon a bombing campaign to repulse Serb aggression. So Chomsky leaves it out, the better to misrepresent his material and prettify his political record.

The next time you hear someone proclaim Chomsky's disinterested support for human rights and opposition to oppression, recall that, so far as the Balkan wars of the 1990s are concerned, this is not his position at all.

The next time you find a journalist impressed by Chomsky's "seeming" mastery of detail, remember this. Every time Chomsky makes a claim or a reference, you need to check it independently. Again and again, you will come up against the conundrum that the man who is allegedly the world's top public intellectual cannot be trusted to give an honest and reliable account of his sources.

Moral Maze debates patriotism

If you're at a very loose end this evening, you could listen to The Moral Maze on Radio 4 at 8.00pm London time (or on the programme's web site for the next week). The subject - it says here - is "football - or, to be accurate, patriotism". I hope it isn't football, as I'm one of the guests, along with - I think - George Monbiot and Sir Peregrine Worsthorne.

My words are cheap

A US reader told me a while back that he "wouldn't pay a dime" to read my book, Anti-Totalitarianism. I post this to alert him, and others who may think like him, that he now need pay very few dimes, as Amazon's UK site is selling the book at £5.99, which is less than half price. Do not be alarmed or distraught that I might be shortchanged by this arrangement: it makes no difference to me or the publisher.

GUBU

The leader of the Ulster Unionists, Sir Reg Empey, struggled hard to find anything good to say about the late Charles Haughey, and came up with this:

Most unionists will remember Mr Haughey from his early days when he was implicated in the arms scandal. Many also believed that he and others were involved in the setting up of the Provisional IRA. He will also be remembered for his statement that Northern Ireland was a 'failed political entity'. He made good decisions for the Republic's economy, particularly the setting up of the financial services centre. His death will mark the passing of the last of the old Fianna Fail bosses.

He probably shouldn't have bothered, but it is, to be fair, a blow for plain speaking and against hypocrisy. In 1986, Conor Cruise O'Brien, who served in the coalition government of Labour and Fine Gael in the mid-1970s, wrote: "I felt from the Arms Trial period on, that Fianna Fail with Haughey in it was very dangerous to the whole country and eventually to democracy itself, and I have not changed that view since." It's worth recalling that, in the arms trial, in which Haughey and Neil Blaney were acquitted, the attorney general defined the charge as illegally importing arms into the Republic. The central charge of smuggling arms to Northern Ireland was never actually tested.

Unfortunately - or fortunately, if belated public acknowledgement of politicians' failings is desirable - Haughey turned out to be as financially corrupt as he was politically sinister. He received secret payments of more than €10 million from businessmen while he was in office, and was eventually forced to pay tax on them only in 2003 after a fierce legal battle. He was a disgrace to his office and his nation.