Oliver Kamm

Anti-totalitarianism and the peace movement

The Bulletin of the Centre for the Study of Democracy, at the University of Westminster in London, carries in its Summer 2006 issue a review of my book Anti-Totalitarianism. The review also discusses a recent book by Kate Hudson, Chairman of the Campaign of Nuclear Disarmament (CND), entitled CND - Now More Than Ever: The Story of a Peace Movement. The current issue is not online, but the Bulletin's home page is here.

I don't know the reviewer, Patrick Burke, who is editor of the Bulletin, but he states in his review that he is "a former CND and END [European Nuclear Disarmament] activist ... who still agrees with CND's basic demand, unilateral nuclear disarmament for Britain". Especially given his background, I find Dr Burke's comments on my book gracious and on Ms Hudson's book apposite. He takes issue with some my historical discussion of the British peace movement, and is sceptical of my defence of the Iraq war, but concludes:

But opposing the war in Iraq is not an argument in principle against military interventions whose aim is to stop mass murder. The merit of Kamm's book is that he presents, clearly and coherently, an 'anti-totalitarian' argument for such interventions which, even if in a specific case it may not finally be persuasive, should not be ignored.

On Kate Hudson, Dr Burke has her bang to rights. I wrote a few months ago in this post about her book's extraordinary treatment of the Kosovo war. Dr Burke goes further, and observes that the book "downplays the culpability of the Soviet Union for the Cold War and its role in the nuclear arms race", gives "an extremely narrow, or simply distorted and misleading, account of the causes and nature" of the conflicts the US has been involved in since the Cold War, "leaves out anything inconvenient in her argument", is "largely silent about the depravities of the Saddam [Hussein] regime", and "has nothing - not one word - to say about the nationalist Serb programme's key responsibility ... for the breakup of Yugoslavia".

Having read Ms Hudson's book, I find these criticisms entirely justified. That they are made by a supporter of CND's central demand is suggestive of what I hope may prove an enduring alignment on the British Left. The need for a progressive consensus on the justified use of military intervention has been argued by many others apart from me, and is the principal reason I have added my name to the Euston Manifesto. At the same time, as Nick Cohen pointed out in The Observer last month, so far as the traditional peace movement is concerned, "the friends of George Galloway and Ken Livingstone have taken it over and when those charmers move in, basic principles fly out of the window". CND has gone so far in this direction that it now even opposes the UN's multilateral mechanism for countering nuclear proliferation to Iran. It is not fanciful to conceive of a convergence of progressive opinion on the need to advance global democracy as the mainstay of our foreign policy. I hope this end will be hastened by the transparently reactionary character of the arguments of Ms Hudson, a leading member of the Communist Party of Britain, and those of the Leninist/Islamist front organisation known as the Stop the War Coalition.

Israel and Lebanon

In my book Anti-Totalitarianism I wrote: "For all its flaws, errors, defeats and disasters, the Labour Party has done important and admirable things in foreign policy."

The Independent does a public service today by inadvertently reminding us of the truth of this, with (if you think the role of a newspaper is to exhort rather than report) quite an effective front page condemning the government for its stance on the crisis in Lebanon.

For my part, I agree with the view of Tony Blair that "If [the violence] is to stop, it has to stop by undoing how it started. And it started with the kidnap of Israeli soldiers and the bombardment of northern Israel. If we want this to stop, that has to stop." For those who recall the 1982 Labour Party conference's call for "a democratic secular state of Palestine" (code of that time for the abolition of the Jewish state), there is irony now in a Labour government's apparently being criticised by the Tories for being muted in its criticisms of Israel. As a Labour sympathiser of long standing, I'm pleased to see it.

Labour in 1982 was scarcely a politically informed or responsible cause; innocent of the incendiary language of Middle East politics, the party drew an illegitimate political inference from the Lebanon war of that year. For many reasons, I opposed that war, which incidentally failed in its goal of excising a PLO mini-state in southern Lebanon, by creating a vacuum that was speedily filled by Hizbullah. Israel's actions now are not comparable to that war, nor - except in one indirect sense - is the issue to do with Palestinians' just demand for an independent state. This is argued in a good letter in today's Guardian by Colin Shindler of SOAS:

An outright victory over Hizbullah, as David Grossman argues (Comment, July 20), is impossible, but it may be considerably weakened militarily. The Israelis have learned the lesson of 1982 by not mounting a ground invasion of Lebanon. At that time, Sharon disobeyed cabinet orders to clear a 40km swathe of territory of Palestinian fighters and marched on Beirut instead. The war in 1982 was marked by duplicity from the outset, when Begin used the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador in London to remove PLO military forces from southern Lebanon. Unlike the current situation, a ceasefire had been in place, which the PLO honoured, and the organisation was not in possession of long-range missiles. In 1982, Israel did attempt regime change through a tacit alliance with the new Lebanese president, Bashir Gemayel. In this case, the Israelis are fearful of toppling the Lebanese government.

Unlike 1982, the political consensus in Israel has not been broken and is reflected by the miniscule [sic] turnout for anti-war demonstrations. The broad peace camp differentiates between the Palestinian issue and the evacuation of settlements - and military initiatives by Hizbullah, which they see as an Islamist appendage of Iranian imperialism which has little interest in locating a just solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

I would add that the violence in Lebanon is connected indirectly to the cause of an independent Palestinian state in the sense, and only in the sense, that that goal will be well served by the weakening of rejectionist groups in Lebanon and Gaza that do not wish for a pacific two-state settlement between a secure Israel and an independent Palestine.

As I am largely not blogging till next month, I haven't written anything on this subject as yet. I recommend, though, the Guardian article by the novelist David Grossman (the title of which is a little misleading), cited in the letter above, and an article by the philosopher Michael Walzer in The New Republic (link requires free registration). Walzer discusses the dilemma that Israel must strive to minimise (not avoid entirely) civilian casualties while fighting an enemy that hides behind civilians, and concludes:

It will probably take the international community--the United States, Europe, the United Nations, some Arab states--to bring the Lebanese army into the south of the country and make it an effective force once it is there. And it will take a similar coalition to sponsor and support a Palestinian government that is committed to two states with one permanent and peaceful border and that is prepared to repress the religious militants who oppose that commitment. Until there is an effective Lebanese army and a Palestinian government that believes in co-existence, Israel is entitled to act, within the dialectical limits, on its own behalf.

This is my view too. For an alternative opinion see Mary Ann Sieghart's column in today's Times. I cite this because it's criticism from a thoughtful commentator as opposed to much that is written in the British press at the moment. (For the record, I very much disagree with the judgement of my friend Stephen Pollard on the BBC's coverage. I have many criticisms of BBC journalism as it's currently practised, but I do not consider the BBC's news output is politically biased either in general or specifically on this issue.) The kicker is in Mrs Sieghart's conclusion:

Mr Blair has moved too swiftly from defending Israel’s right to exist to supporting Israel right or wrong. It is bad for the Middle East and it is dangerous for Britain. He ought to know better.

This is a false dichotomy of extraordinary blatancy. I would be concerned, as any liberal or progressive ought to be, if the PM's stance were one of "defending Israel's right to exist". Israel has a right to sovereignty and independence; in order to exercise sovereignty it needs to protect its civilians from rocket attacks from a private army backed by a theocratic tyranny. When I assert the need for an eventual settlement (I do not see it happening any time soon) encompassing two states, I do not write of Palestine's "right to exist"; I wish to see a sovereign and independent Palestinian state. As I understand the PM's position - and I believe I understand it perfectly, because it's stated clearly - the PM does not "support Israel right or wrong": he defends Israel's ability to act as a democratic and sovereign state must. He is right.

Justice means Sir Ian must go

This article appears in The Times.

YESTERDAY’s verdict of the Crown Prosecution Service on the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes “shows the level of institutional Islamophobia in Britain today,” declared a demagogue called Massoud Shadjareh.

Massoud Shadjareh is chairman of a pressure group calling itself the Islamic Human Rights Commission. His intervention in public debate would still have been ridiculous had his hustling been less brazen. Whether there is a civil rights issue of “Islamophobia” is a hotly disputed issue. The notion that the fate of Mr de Menezes, a Roman Catholic, has any bearing on it is risible.

Mr de Menezes was shot because police mistook him for a suicide bomber. The CPS has decided against prosecutions for murder or manslaughter because there is insufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction. That would require proving beyond reasonable doubt that the officers did not in fact believe Mr de Menezes was a terrorist. It is surpassingly unlikely that the police would have killed Mr de Menezes at Stockwell Tube station had they not believed there was an imminent threat. Yet the more you examine this line of reasoning that no one is to blame, the more threadbare and less convincing a narrative it appears.

It is easy but wrong to be swayed by the rhetorical absurdity of antiwar campaigners (Bianca Jagger has likened the death of Mr de Menezes to that of Christ). Appeal to commonsense judgment is inadequate. Sympathy with police officers on whose split-second decisions many lives might depend is beside the point. The de Menezes family are entirely justified in feeling that atonement has not been made for a terrible injustice. His death was not premeditated murder, but neither was it an accident. It was a case of mistaken identity about which the answers are as obscure today as they were a year ago.

Leaks of a report, as yet unpublished, by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) suggest there will be criticism of the police surveillance operation and of the way the control room operated. The CPS has resolved that the operational errors “indicate that there had been a breach of the duties owed to non employees under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974”. Failing to provide for the health and safety of Mr de Menezes is a singular way to describe pumping seven rounds of ammunition into his head. The possibility that it will nonetheless prove legally accurate is a sure route to bringing the law into disrepute. Had the CPS ruled that no one bore culpability apart from Mr de Menezes himself, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, it could scarcely have demonstrated greater official insouciance at the negligence involved.

No fair critic would dispute that the threat of suicide terrorism requires in extremis a readiness to shoot to kill. But there is as yet no convincing account of why the police came to believe that public safety required Mr de Menezes’s death. It is almost literally incredible that armed officers could have trailed him and not realised he was harmless.

The questions that would allay the need for a leap of faith remain unanswered. If the police followed Mr de Menezes from his flat, did they have any grounds for regarding his behaviour as potentially threatening, and if so why did they not apprehend him before he boarded a bus or a train? Did they hear Mr de Menezes speak? If so, were their suspicions in any way allayed, or heightened? Or were the officers unable to tell, so they shot anyway? (I lived in Stockwell for a dozen years, and probably heard Portuguese spoken on every single occasion I walked to or from the Tube. It would be nice to have confidence that the police knew local conditions well enough to be able to distinguish a Hispanic language from, say, a Semitic one.)

There is a point of international comparison. Israel has a policy of finding and killing terrorists who have murdered Israeli nationals. In 1973 Mossad agents killed a Moroccan waiter, Ahmed Bouchiki, in Norway, having mistaken him for one of the terrorists from the Munich Olympics massacre in 1972. It was a catastrophe for Mossad’s counter-terrorist operations, its reputation for being militarily efficient and Israel’s moral standing. Only in 1996 did Israel agree to a financial settlement with the victim’s family; its tardiness and unwillingness to acknowledge responsibility for an act of gross negligence still rankle.

I am, as it happens, a strong supporter of “regime change” in Afghanistan and Iraq, and of Tony Blair’s foreign policies generally. I have little problem with supposedly draconian restrictions on civil liberties that reflect a rebalancing of the system of law against a real terrorist danger. In the case of Israel’s war on Islamist militancy, I believe targeting terrorist leaders for assassination is, in the absence of an effective supranational system of law enforcement, defensible if it deters future terrorist acts.

But these policies need to be allied with a recognition of the extreme fallibility of human judgment, and an ostentatious willingness to acknowledge culpability and make possible restitution for it. From the outset of the de Menezes inquiry — literally from the day of Mr de Menezes’s death — the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, has given an unmistakable impression of a lack of seriousness. Sir Ian wrote to the Home Office immediately after the killing to say he would not allow access to Stockwell station for IPCC staff. It is not a witch-hunt, but a response to a man lacking a sense of public duty, to demand that restitution to the de Menezes family start with Sir Ian’s dismissal.

Trident debate

Chatham House held a conference today (on the record) on Britain's nuclear weapons debate, and specifically the options when Trident comes to the end of its natural life at the end of the next decade. The politicians speaking were the former minister Clare Short, the Tory defence spokesman Julian Lewis, and the Liberal Democrat defence spokesman Lord Garden.

I spoke, alongside Paul Rogers, Professor of Peace Studies at Bradford University, on the strategic rationale of maintaining Britain's independent nuclear deterrent (he thought there wasn't one and I thought there was). This is a summary of what I said.

1. There is a widespread view that the rationale for maintaining Britain's nuclear deterrent is weak or obscure, while the political dynamic is strong. Gordon Brown's recent comments about Trident (which were strongly condemned by Clare Short at the conference) reflect an aversion to Labour's being thought soft on defence, rather than any strong strategic case.

2. I don't agree with this view. There are certainly domestic political pressures on Labour, reflecting the party's disastrous anti-nuclear stance of the 1980s and its wish not to be associated with those policies again. But I don't regard this as an ignoble motivation. Indeed, as a Labour supporter myself I'm delighted that Gordon Brown has indicated his support for the continuation of Britain's deterrent in the long term. I'm pleased first because Brown's view is consistent with Labour's postwar traditions (in which the anti-nuclear stance of the 1980s is aberrant), and secondly because there is a good strategic case for it.

3. There is indeed a better case for the independent deterrent now than there was during the Cold War. The argument then was that deterrence benefited from a second centre of decision-making within Nato. Conceivably the Soviet leadership might recklessly assume that the US would not risk Chicago to defend London or Paris, and that collective security was a myth. A British independent deterrent would reinforce to the Soviets the risks of nuclear adventurism. This argument was not wrong, but the effect on the deterrent relationship was always marginal.

4. In our 'second nuclear age', the threats are less predictable than the reasonably stable deterrent relationship between Nato and a brutal but risk-averse Soviet leadership. The US and its allies have a common interest with Russia in countering Islamist terrorism, and with China in containing North Korea, but beyond is an anarchic world order in which our intelligence about the military capabilities of malevolent regimes (c.f. the WMD fiasco in Iraq) is limited. In certain circumstances, the possession of an independent nuclear deterrent might provide an irreducible political counterweight persuading such a regime to think again before mounting aggression.

5. Is that enough of a rationale to justify a new generation of British nuclear weapons? One can't say definitively, because defence policy is not a branch of theology: it's about costs and benefits. But I believe it is. Defence policy must anticipate remote contingencies, and the case for Trident is that we can't foresee the nature of threats to us in thirty years' time, just as - even under the reasonably stable Cold War relationship - we did not foresee that Argentina would invade the Falklands in 1982 and Saddam Hussein would annex Kuwait in 1990.

6. The diplomatic benefits of a British renunciation of nuclear weapons are greatly overstated by anti-nuclear campaigners. Such a decision would have scant effect on the plans of Iran and North Korea. Among nuclear weapons states, Israel has independent reasons for not forgoing its capability; Pakistan will agree to disarmament only if India does; India will not if China does not.

7. It is very unlikely that a decision to replace or upgrade Britain's deterrent will cause political ructions remotely comparable to those of the 1980s. For one thing, the decision to deploy Trident then was bound up with a campaign erroneously but potently depicting nuclear deployments (the euromissiles, Cruise and Pershing) as evidence of aggressive designs by the US. There is little reason to believe a campaign against a British bomb specifically will have anything like as much political traction a quarter-century on. For another, the anti-nuclear movement in the UK has undermined its own credibility by taking a position indistinguishable from that of the loud and ludicrous figure of George Galloway. (If you doubt me, look at this CND press release from last February: "The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament today expressed regret at the IAEA’s decision to report Iran to the UN Security Council over its nuclear programme." Clearly this is not a peace campaign in any recognised sense of the term.)