Oliver Kamm

Don't get Carter. He won't do

This article appears in The Times today.

NEXT WEEK the former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami visits the United States. Though he will not meet government officials, the visit is significant and welcome. Khatami is reputedly a reformer. It may be possible, through him, to widen the gulf between Iranian pragmatists and theocratic populists.

But there is a risk. The current Iranian regime menaces Israel and has lied to the EU about its nuclear programme. It must not interpret Khatami’s visit as proof of the value of bellicosity. Khatami must get the message that the West will be receptive to concessions, but will face down belligerence. There lies the problem: Khatami’s host in the US is Jimmy Carter.

Carter’s poor reputation as president reflects a record not so much of incompetence as paralysis. He led his Administration mainly in the sense that its internal disagreements faithfully reflected his own philosophical chaos and administrative ineptitude. In domestic policy Carter zigzagged left and right, baffling equally the environmental activists he patronised and the churchgoers whose social values he claimed to share. His proposed system of federal energy controls failed comprehensively. In 1980 he acknowledged that inflation was near a “crisis stage”.

He proclaimed human rights while lauding the Shah of Iran’s repressive regime. When the Shah’s revolutionary successors held 52 American diplomats hostage for 14 months, Ayatollah Khomeini accurately sneered: “Neither does Carter have the guts for military action, nor would anyone listen to him.”

Carter cancelled the B1 bomber in the hope of gaining Soviet goodwill, later acknowledging bemusedly the Kremlin’s persisting “unfriendly rhetoric”. He earned the contempt of friendly European governments by announcing deployment of the neutron bomb and then cancelling it without consulting them.

Last weekend he impertinently attacked Tony Blair’s closeness to George Bush. Doubtless he prefers the model of transatlantic relations he pioneered with Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of Germany, who observed in exasperation that Carter was “just not big enough for the game”.

Less an elder statesman than a soft cushion who bears the impress of whoever sits on him, the 39th president is the last person Khatami should meet.

Train spotting

Daniel Finkelstein has an excellent column in The Times on the different approaches of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to Labour history, and the political implications of that difference. But I'll quote just the introduction rather than the argument:

I HAVE a confession to make. Last week Stephen Pollard informed Times readers that he shared with a couple of unnamed friends, an unhealthy interest in political minutiae. He had, he said, recently reached the depths. He sent an excited e-mail to his mates to report spotting, out of the window of a London bus, Adrian Slade, the former president of the Liberal Party.

Reader, I confess. I am one of those friends.

Stephen’s alleged (conveniently there were no witnesses) spotting of Slade was a pathetic attempt to top my news that I had received a telephone call from Dom Mintoff, the former Prime Minister of Malta, and that our other friend had been in e-mail correspondence with the great-niece of the long dead left-wing Labour MP Konni Zilliacus.

I was the third person in this exchange, and the originator of the claim to have been contacted by the great-niece of Konni Zilliacus. I know my readers will be impressed, and will wonder why I have kept this Zilliacus connection from them. So let me explain.

Here, again, is my policy on reader comments. Emails from readers of this site or my journalism are treated in confidence; if you write to me, you may be assured that your message will not be reproduced on this site. If I do wish to publish an email, then I always ask permission first, and even then I keep the comments anonymous unless I have further permission to add my correspondent's name. The only exceptions to this rule come with the admittedly large number of crank, racist or otherwise abusive emails. Most of these aren't very interesting and I only skim them if I read them at all. (One correspondent who signs himself 'Jewish American' - probably not his real name - writes at length, mainly in capital letters, that, judging by my support for the defence of Bosnia against Milosevic's aggression, I am probably anti-Israel too. I stopped reading these messages about a quarter of the way through the first one.) But I regard these correspondents as fair game, and reserve the right to publish the emails with (on the precedent reasonably set by Polly Toynbee) their authors' names and email addresses.

My correspondence from Konni Zilliacus's great-niece falls squarely within the second category of emails, but I still hold back from publishing it unless Ms Zilliacus writes again to give me permission. She is, after all, a link with labour history; I'm grateful to her for writing, and extend my respects. I think it's permissible, though, to disclose that she wishes me debilitating afflictions and an early death.

Here, for the record, is what I have said about Konni Zilliacus in my book Anti-Totalitarianism, to which Ms Zilliacus alludes. The context is Labour's immediate postwar disputes over foreign policy:

But a more influential force [than other pro-Soviet Labour MPs] over the longer term was Konni Zilliacus, MP for Gateshead. The reputation of Zilliacus (his unusual name was of Swedo-Finnish origin; he was determinedly cosmopolitan and an accomplished linguist) was restored to some extent by his reinstatement in the party some years later and his service thereafter as Labour MP for Manchester Gorton. But a determined effort at rehabilitation came in 2002 with the publication of a hagiography by a writer who is described as a moderator in history courses for the North East Open College Network.

That author's name is Archie Potts. In his book (which I describe as an unremittingly disgusting volume), he cites Zilliacus’s defence of the 1948 Communist putsch 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.

Potts comments: "Very few people in the Labour Party agreed with Zilliacus on this point…" Let us be thankful for small mercies. By the standards of Archie Potts, this counts as fearless truth-telling, but at least - unlike much of what he writes about foreign policy - it is true. I comment in my book:

Very few people in the Labour Party at that time were willing to associate with Zilliacus’s pro-Sovietism. Zilliacus’s biographer makes the disingenuous argument that what appeared to be a pro-Soviet stance was in fact more heterodox than it appeared, being pro-Tito rather than pro-Stalin. But the language and stance of Zilliacus’s part of the Left mirrored precisely the line of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

Zilliacus wrote to Attlee on 11 February 1946 at inordinate length (and made a virtue of verbosity by terming his remarks a memorandum) to condemn ‘the foreign policy they [the Government] inherited from the Tories’. He concluded: ‘Stop preparations for possible war against the USSR and join with fellow members of the Security Council to form an international police force and joint use of national forces.’ A contemporary Communist tract entitled Mr Bevin’s Record by the Stalinist ideologue R. Palme Dutt said much the same, declaring that ‘the gravest charge of all is the betrayal of peace by Mr Bevin’s policy and the rising menace of a new world war’.

If my new correspondent is reading this, let me repeat that a man whom you describe as "beautiful and highly intelligent" may well have been both in his family life, but he held political views that were very far from the adjectives you have chosen.

Herman's latest

Ed Herman, a sometime collaborator of Noam Chomsky and co-author with him of the book Manufacturing Consent, is best known these days as a propagandist regarding the Balkan wars of the 1990s. He is, in particular, the leading light of an organisation called the Srebrenica Research Group.

The purpose of the Srebrenica Research Group is pretty much the polar opposite of the conduct of disinterested research into the massacre at Srebrenica in 1995. The group airily concludes that witnesses to the greatest mass murder in Europe since 1945 were "very likely describing real and ugly events. But the available evidence indicates hundreds of executions, not 8,000 or anything close to it." (In fact a mass grave containing the remains of 1,150 of the nearly 8,000 Bosniak victims of the massacre was discovered only this month, as Peter Lippman reports on the Open Democracy web site.)

But Herman has now outdone even his own low and shady standards. His latest polemic appears on the far-Left ZNet site (maintained by Z Magazine, which as I found a couple of years ago has been historically none too scrupulous in its choice of contributors). His target is Michael Ignatieff, a writer and political thinker for whom I have a lot of respect, and who is now a Liberal member of the Canadian House of Commons. Never mind what Herman has to say on this, or any other subject; just note a judgement, wedged in amid the characteristic bonehead abuse about Ignatieff's "apologetics for Israeli aggression, ethnic cleansing and structured racism", that exemplifies Herman's contribution to public policy and progressive politics:

[Ignatieff] gets away with this support for supreme crimes and systematic violations of human rights because he does this only as regards crimes and abuses carried out by the United States and its allies and clients. He is quite passionate about the crimes or alleged crimes of target states such as Yugoslavia and Saddam’s Iraq.

You read him right: the crimes or alleged crimes of Yugoslavia (for which, of course, read aggressive Serb nationalism) and Saddam's Iraq. The alleged crimes of Milsoevic and Saddam.

Blaming Truman, part I

The actress Sigourney Weaver gave an interview to The Times on Saturday. She commented on Iraq, the Bush “regime”, and the way “the whole identity of our country is being twisted” by having a President she didn’t vote for. She then disclosed her own radical proposal for dealing with the public policy issues raised by 9/11 and its aftermath: “I think we actually have to make movies about all these things.” Unfortunately it’s clear what type of film she has in mind:

Syriana is a fascinating movie because it deals directly with corporate greed. Perhaps we can illuminate more through art than we can through journalism at this stage. Certainly in America, where the media is very manipulated. There’s a wonderful documentary called Why We Fight, showing it’s really not Bush who got us into Iraq, but the whole corporate arms system. How we change that is a much bigger challenge.

I reviewed George Clooney’s cinematically plodding and intellectually nugatory Syriana on BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves programme earlier this year. It is not a fascinating movie, though it may seem that way to those who believe President Bush is but a cipher for the whole corporate arms system. The phrase I used, with due attribution to its author (Christopher Hitchens, in another context), was “sinister piffle”. I haven’t seen the documentary that Ms Weaver refers to, but I stumble across its director, Eugene Jarecki, in various magazines that I read. I suspect, from what I’ve read, that Ms Weaver has given an accurate account of Jarecki’s message, but I will defer comment on the film till I’ve seen it. What I want to raise in this post is an increasingly common accompanying argument to criticisms of the Blair-Bush approach to foreign policy, and which Jarecki among others is pushing. You can find it in one of his articles this month on the Huffington Post, the site established by Arianna Huffington.

If I were a critic - as opposed to the strong supporter that I am - of the case for regime change as a counter to Islamist terrorism, the last thing I would do would be to associate my case with a wider campaign against Western foreign policy going back to the Pacific War. If only for pragmatic reasons, I would instead concentrate on the shift in US strategic doctrine since the Cold War from deterrence and containment to preventive war. I would argue that, while there are precedents going back to Andrew Jackson for a strategy of preemption, it is a huge step to incorporate preventive war into modern strategic doctrine. A perceived threat, I would argue, may be remote. In the case of Saddam’s presumed WMD, it was purely speculative. The humanitarian and diplomatic costs of war, on the other hand, are certain. I would be particularly anxious to avoid any hint of criticism of Western confrontation with earlier variants of totalitarianism: those of the Axis powers and Soviet Communism. I would distinguish carefully between Western policies to deal with ideologies that directly threatened or attacked us, and wars since 2001 that Bush and Blair have chosen to fight. After all, we Blairites are the ones who compare the struggle against Islamism and Baathism to the campaigns against Nazism and Soviet Communism.

The case that Jarecki and others, variously of the Right and Left but not obviously of the Leninist/Islamist political fringe that characterises the organised anti-war movement in the UK, advance is quite different from what I take to be a rational strategy on behalf of their cause. The title of Jarecki’s piece is “Truman haunts us”, the argument being that in President Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “America sent a message to the world that resonates to this day”. Jarecki states:

In my movie, Why We Fight, I've been criticized for allowing Gore Vidal to suggest onscreen that the bombings were intended as much to send a message of American nuclear primacy to Stalin as to compel unconditional Japanese surrender. No claim in the film has generated more controversy than Vidal's assertion that "the Japanese were trying to surrender all that summer, but Truman wouldn't listen, because Truman wanted to drop the bombs." I left this bold claim in the film because it is supported by a tragic mountain of evidence that Truman indeed acted against the advice of a chorus of voices among his military advisors arguing that the use of weapons of mass destruction against Japanese civilians was an unwarranted, immoral, and gratuitous act.

Jarecki, in short, wishes to suggest an unbroken tradition in American statecraft, from the Pacific War to the Iraq War and Israel’s intervention in Lebanon, of immoral and wanton destruction of civilian life. His argument has an exact counterpart on the political Right. Take, for example, a well-known free-market economist from the Hoover Institution called David R. Henderson, who writes a regular column for the Antiwar.com web site. He has also lately written of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

I grew up in Canada thinking that, horrible as it was, dropping the atomic bombs on those two cities was justified. Although I never believed that the people those bombs killed were mainly guilty people, I could at least tell myself that many more innocent people, including American military conscripts, would have been killed had the bombs not been dropped. But then I started to investigate. On the basis of that investigation, I have concluded that dropping the bomb was not necessary and caused, on net, tens of thousands, and possibly more than a hundred thousand, more deaths than were necessary.

Henderson is often confused with the former OECD economist David Henderson. They are different people. The second David Henderson contributed a splendid phrase to public debate when, as the BBC’s Reith Lecturer in 1986, he referred to ‘Do It Yourself Economics’ – broadly, a set of beliefs about economics that supposedly reflect commonsense notions but are actually misunderstandings of how a self-regulating economic order works by means of markets and prices. The first David Henderson would certainly reject DIY economic ideas, such as that an increase in exports and reduction in imports must be to a country’s advantage, but for some reason he has no scruples about engaging in ‘DIY History’.

The first Henderson bases his view on Hiroshima and Nagasaki overwhelmingly on the work of a radical historian called Gar Alperovitz. In 1965 Alperovitz advanced the thesis (in a book called Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, the Use of the Atomic Bomb and American Confrontation with Soviet Power) that Truman’s decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki reflected a wish to cow the Soviet Union rather than defeat Japan (which on this reading had already decided to surrender). The A-bomb thus represented not the conclusion of the Pacific War so much as the opening of the Cold War. Henderson concludes his own article with the extremely broad reference “if you want the facts, read pp. 448-497 of Alperovitz” (i.e. a 1995 work by the same author, arguing the same case, called The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth).

Jarecki doesn’t affect to get to grips with the scholarship of the Pacific War, and indeed his main source appears to be a web site with a list of quotations from contemporary military figures condemning the bombings. His aim is explicitly political:

But if such an elite group of advisors objected, why did Truman do it? And more importantly, what message does it send to us today? Truman's bombs indeed send two messages at once - one that undervalues civilians on the ground by making them a morally defensible target in war and the other that overvalues civilian decision-makers in Washington by presuming that their voices should dominate the formulation of foreign and defense policy.

President Truman left office in much the way that Tony Blair will – with sharply diminished popularity and much media barracking. But Truman is now widely if not universally regarded as a very good President. In my view he is the finest President of the last century save only for F.D. Roosevelt, because he contended courageously with different totalitarian threats. In my book Anti-Totalitarianism I argue that the Truman Doctrine, set out in an address to Congress in March 1947, “still stands as a model for progressive thinking … grounded in the conviction that totalitarianism [is] a threat to peace as well as a moral abomination”. Truman's momentous decision 18 months earlier to drop the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with an immense civilian death toll, was grounded in a similar conviction. He believed the bombings were necessary, not as a means of gaining advantage against the Soviet Union, but for the reason he said at the time. That reason was to defeat an aggressive totalitarianism and end a horrific war as quickly as possible, thereby avoiding the certainty of immense casualties arising from a ground invasion and blockade.

It seems odd to me, for the reasons I’ve stated, that today’s campaigners against an interventionist foreign policy should wish to argue their case from a historical precedent where the US and its allies fought an unequivocally expansionist and brutal totalitarianism. But so they do - the libertarian Right allied to the radical Left. And as they wish to fight on that terrain, they should be exposed, because their historical claims are bogus. In the next week or so, I shall write a post explaining why.

On German literature

Boyd Tonkin in The Independent remarks that "German literature above all faces an uphill battle" in the UK, and notes that "Günter Grass's teenage fling with the Waffen SS in 1944 secured more mainstream coverage for a German writer in the British media than we have seen - well, since the Hitler Diaries fiasco".

Having contributed part of that coverage myself, I certainly endorse Tonkin's championing of German and other European literature beyond the Nobel laureates. (I should disclose an interest in that Tonkin refers to "the work of our remarkably gifted translators, such as Anthea Bell and Michael Hofmann", of whom the first named is my mother. If any of my regular crop of extremely frequent and - in the absence of any reply from me - surprisingly indefatigible correspondents wishes to write in to observe that familial giftedness plainly came to be severely diluted as it traversed a single generation, they should be aware that I have anticipated their contribution.)

The great name in recent German literature is Max Sebald, who tragically died in a road accident five years ago, and who would surely otherwise have gone on to a Nobel Prize himself. As a perceptive reviewer in the New York Times remarked of the novel Austerlitz, whose central character is sent to England in 1939 on one of the Kindertransports, Sebald "stands with Primo Levi as the prime speaker of the Holocaust and, with him, the prime contradiction of Adorno's dictum that after it, there can be no art". One of the many reasons I defend the reputation of the late critic Susan Sontag from a certain type of conservative commentator is her work in making European literature, and specifically the work of Sebald, better known among English-speaking readers.

Of the current authors whom Tonkin mentions, I have read only the oldest, Martin Walser, who is the same age as Grass and has likewise written about what the Nazi past implies for the new Germany. That generation and its successor are usefully summarised (in English) in this survey of post-1945 German writers on the site of the Goethe Institute. (Ignore what the site says about the hack writer Christa Wolf, whose reputation deservedly collapsed along with the East German tyranny whose values she advanced.)

Tonkin refers to Walser's "gnomic and sometimes provocative statements about the Germans' connection - or lack of connection - with the Nazi past [that] have led some enemies to denounce him as a fellow-traveller of the history-denying right". Unless (as is entirely possible) I'm missing something important, the enemies' accusations are distinctly unfair. Walser remarked in the 1970s on his sense of loss at the division of Germany, and his no longer "belong[ing] to an organism that embraces Leipzig, Dresden and Weimar". This is surely an unexceptionable observation that is unrelated to the more sinister connotations of German nationalism. The fact that Germany was reunified within the wider alliance of free nations and while posing a threat to none of them is the greatest feat of statecraft of my lifetime.

One of the admirable consequences is a flourishing cultural life no longer dominated by the notion of the artist as public conscience. Considering that, as we have lately seen, the artist is typically no more effective a vehicle of public conscience than the next person you pass in the street (and in Grass's case much less so), that's probably just as well.

The Rushdie link

This is worth reading. James Forsyth of Foreign Policy magazine recalls British policymakers' feebleness in defence of the safety and liberty of the author Salman Rushdie, and reflects on more recent developments:

The British government must constantly explain why it takes the positions that it does. For instance, when Muslim leaders request Islamic law for Muslim family disputes, the request should be rejected with an explanation as to why the idea of a parallel legal system is totally alien to the British tradition. Leaders such as Sacranie who boycott Holocaust Memorial Day should not be rewarded with knighthoods. Indeed, the British state should interact with its citizens directly rather than through Islamic groups and councils often run by extremists. Parliament should show that it respects the rights of every citizen by banning forced marriage, regardless of the position of Islamic groups.

Having recently encountered one such dubious organisation that purports to represent the interests of British Muslims, I certainly agree.

Tories on terrorism

There is a stupefying piece in today's Independent by the senior Conservative and former Shadow Foreign Secretary Michael Ancram. Ancram criticises the Prime Minister for referring to an 'arc of extremism', and argues against the notion that terrorism can be defeated militarily:

As we learned in Northern Ireland, terrorism can be contained by military action, but it cannot be defeated by it. In the end, you have to start talking, not necessarily with fanatical leaders who are beyond dialogue, but with those who support them and the communities that give them shelter.

It is not easy. For a short time in 1995 I was ostracised by the Ulster Unionists as "contaminated" when I opened discussions with Sinn Fein/IRA. Such dialogue can never be even remotely seen to condone terrorism, but it can begin to explore ways out of it. We talked and so did the IRA, because after 30 years of "troubles" there could be no military winners.

The ubiquity of this sentiment does not mitigate the mindlessness of its historical revisionism. The decision to open talks with Sinn Fein/IRA was a political choice, not a historical inevitability. The alternative would have been to treat terrorism not as a political issue but purely as a security issue. The second course is the one that I favour, as a pragmatic strategy for dealing with political violence. Rather than match a suspension of violence with political concessions, my strategy would make no concessions at all till an organisation had definitively abandoned violence and accepted constitutional politics (much as the old Official IRA became the Workers' Party). Holding this strategy and never deviating from it is the best way to convince terrorists to abandon their struggle and deter others from joining the cause, because we thereby convince them that they will lose and that their liberty will be short-lived.

Ancram is similarly historically illiterate in claiming the Irish experience as evidence for the efficacy of his approach. When Roy Mason, one of the finest ministers in postwar British political history, became Northern Ireland Secretary in 1976, he explicitly ruled out political measures to try to resolve the conflict, and promised to roll up the IRA "like a tube of toothpaste". There is no question but that his approach was effective. As the writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft noted in The Telegraph on Mason's 80th birthday in 2004:

Stating that there is no political solution in Ulster has been called "really a Unionist position in disguise", and in some senses the truth of that should be acknowledged - as long as those who say so accept that, logically and by the same token, what is called "the search for a political solution" is really a Sinn Fein position in disguise.

All of that was intuitively grasped by Mason when he turned away from a "political solution" and set out to govern Northern Ireland with justice for all; with equality before the law; and, crucially, with republican terrorism treated as a security problem, and nothing else. Instead of the later conventional wisdom that IRA was the answer rather than the problem and that violence could be contained by propitiating it (which would be tried and experimentally falsified), and instead of any particularly new military tactics, Mason merely applied existing means for the resolute pursuit of terrorism. As a result he could soon record that, "We were without question hurting the IRA."

His years in Ulster saw more terrible atrocities, among them the IRA's special achievement in burning to death 12 party-goers at La Mon House Hotel. And yet terrorist violence was contained and diminished. In 1976 there were 297 deaths in the province; in the next three years the figures were 112, 81, 113 and it was an IRA man who acknowledged that "we were almost beaten by Mason".

Ancram remarks sententiously that "there can be no secure Israel without a permanent cessation of violence by Hizbollah", and appears to believe this requires negotiations on the part of others with Hizbollah. He might have referred to the fact that Hizbollah was forced to reassess its strategy of suicide terrorism - a technique that it had initiated in the early 1980s - on realising that it wasn't working: Israel kept inflicting heavy losses in response.

In locating an "arc of extremism", Tony Blair understands better than any other statesman, at home or abroad, the issues in combating terrorism. To stymie terrorism, those who sponsor and support it must be confronted. In the background, we have the voice of the Conservative Party: soft on crime and soft on the ideological causes of crime.

UPDATE: One of my regular correspondents, Dan Hardie, knows a lot about a lot of things, including the politics of Northern Ireland. He makes a point that I very largely agree with, and thus ought to have said myself, especially in the context of this post:

If you're going to laud the firmness, dedication to democratic principles, vision etc of Tony Blair, Northern Ireland is probably the worst place to start. (Sierra Leone or Kosovo seem to me to make rather better examples.) Sinn Fein/IRA wanted a peace deal in the mid-90s: they had been worn down militarily everywhere, including even South Armagh. The arrival of Trimble as Unionist leader in '96 was the best thing that had happened to constitutional unionism in a very long time - he had long outgrown his Vanguard period and was clearly democratic and non-sectarian.

Dan refers to several characteristics of Labour's policy in Northern Ireland that exemplify the worst aspects of Blairism: failure to observe the principle of equality before the law (e.g. an exhaustive inquiry into Bloody Sunday, but nothing about unpunished IRA killings such as Enniskillen); an economy dependent on state employment schemes; frivolous ministerial appointments (notably Mo Mowlam); ingratiation with local 'community leaders' (recall her continually addressing Martin McGuinness, in a bugged telephone conversation, as 'babe'); failure to work with constitutional parties, thereby assisting their eclipse by extremists; unwillingness to confront the US in requesting extradition of terrorist suspects and requiring an end to the practice whereby Sinn Fein solicits contributions from US citizens; and "an addiction to unpleasant and potentially dangerous politics-as-aesthetics gestures (the operationally justified decision to knock down the Maze being ruined by the decision to preserve the hospital block where a number of killers starved themselves to death, which will mean that Sinn Fein and their American supporters will have a standing memorial to their warped picture of themselves as hopeless victims of the British state)".

Dan concludes:

Of course I don't want to be the only man on earth proclaiming that Northern Ireland now is in a worse state than it was in 1972 or 1981. It's not. But the settlement that has taken shape under Tony Blair is so much worse than the settlement that could have been achieved, and would have been achieved by a man like Roy Mason. The 'peace' in Northern Ireland was real, but distinctly vulnerable, in 1967 or 1924, and the same is true now. The reasons for Blair's failure are not limited to Northern Ireland, but have their roots in some pretty well-established failings of his.

Why Grass deserves to have his writing hurled back in his face

This article appears in The Times today.

“THIRTY-FIVE years after Auschwitz,” wrote the novelist Günter Grass in 1979, “the problem confronting Germans is once more: what shall we tell our children?” The answer, in the case of his own war record, turns out to have been “an artfully filleted account”. Grass caused a storm this week after belatedly disclosing that in 1944 he had joined the Waffen SS.

Grass is a significant writer, best known for his novels depicting the effects of Nazism on individual lives. His Danzig trilogy, starting with The Tin Drum (1959), secured his reputation. With the novelists Heinrich Böll and Uwe Johnson, he represented a German cultural rebirth, escaping the mediocrity of the early postwar years and reflecting caustically but subtly on the country’s recent past. His work is far from unremittingly serious, however. The Flounder (1977), alluding to the Grimm fable The Fisherman and his Wife, incorporates the Absurd style in depicting the trial of a talking fish.

Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. There have been calls this week for it to be revoked. That is unlikely to happen. Grass is, on literary merit, unquestionably a more deserving recipient than many laureates living or dead. The 2004 winner, an orthodox communist of meagre talent called Elfriede Jelinek, is not even a leading writer in her native Austria. Who now has heard of, let alone read, the forgettable novels of China by Pearl S. Buck, winner in 1938? Nor are meretricious political acts a disbarment to literary fame. Pablo Neruda, the 1971 Nobel laureate, was so obsequious an admirer of Stalin that, as Chile’s Consul-General in Mexico in 1940, he conspired in the murder of Trotsky.

Yet for all this, Grass’s fall from grace is a case apart that tells us much about modern Germany. He made his revelation in an interview timed for the release of his memoirs. He has since explained: “I sensed this stigma, and I saw it as a stigma for 60 years and tried to draw the proper consequences. That shaped my later behaviour as an author and a citizen.”

Perhaps Grass believed that this would be taken as dignified contrition. If so, he will have been disappointed. Even his biographer declared his dismay. Lech Walesa, another famous son of Gdansk (known as Danzig when Grass was born there in 1927), called on him to give up his honorary citizenship of the city.

It is not just the fact of SS membership. Grass was a very young recruit, and most who joined the SS at that stage of the war were conscripts rather than ideologues. What was culpable in his confession was the date of it. It has taken more than 60 years for Grass to tell the truth. It will not do to say that his voice of conscience and literary stature transcend his tarnished authority. As a writer and commentator, Grass has spent his adult life calling his countrymen to account and atone for Germany’s past. The charge of hypocrisy sticks.

Even that is not the worst of it. Grass has deployed his themes of guilt and moral reckoning for partisan political causes. To be sure, he never expounded the nonsense that saw in Germany’s response to leftist terrorism in the 1960s and 1970s an intimation of Nazi repression. When the New Left concluded that anti-fascism implied opposition to the state of Israel, Grass cautioned presciently that a historically rootless “anti-imperialism” might become a force for “ anti-Judaism”. But he has never shrunk from drawing tendentious analogies between Germany’s Nazi past and its postwar policies.

During the controversy over Nato’s deployment of cruise and Pershing missiles to counter Soviet intermediate-range nuclear forces in the early 1980s, Grass asserted a “right to resist” born of the memory of German acquiescence to Hitler’s legal seizure of power. The resistance he envisaged was not violent, but it included a general strike: industrial militancy to thwart the policies of a democratic government. There is no great difference, he declared, “ between the cynical disregard of the basic ethical values by the ill-famed Wannsee Conference, which decreed the ‘final solution’, and the cynicism that in our own day produces war games simulating nuclear combat with projections of here fifty, there eighty million dead”.

Here is the reason Grass’s discourse on the Nazi past — “to keep the wound open”, as he put it — should be thrown back in his face. Modern Germany was created out of Roosevelt and Churchill’s insistence on “unconditional surrender”. From the ruins of barbarism emerged a state that, for all its flaws, approaches a modern miracle. German conservatism abandoned authoritarianism and nationalism. German social democracy recognised the threat to freedom from Soviet communism. Both wings of politics fashioned a “militant democracy” resolved to defend itself from extremism. Anchored in the liberal West and the transatlantic alliance, Germany has faced and confounded totalitarianism rather than, as it once did, exemplifying it.

Grass’s voice of conscience has increasingly been less about “keeping the wound open” than deploying it as a rhetorical device to denounce the foreign policy and alliances that have preserved postwar Germany as a free and civilised nation. The voice will remain, bombastic and querulous — but deservedly and definitively discredited.

UPDATE: The novelist John Irving laments in The Guardian "all this bitching in Germany about when Grass chose to reveal his Waffen SS enlistment as a teenager!", and declares: "Grass remains a hero to me, both as a writer and as a moral compass; his courage, both as a writer and as a citizen of Germany, is exemplary - a courage heightened, not lessened, by his most recent revelation." Irving's vapid article thereby rather spectacularly misses the point of the criticisms. Friendship may be a virtue, but obtuseness is not.

On "Comment is Free"

Last March The Guardian established its Comment is Free site, and I've read the site's content and watched its progress with interest. The site, edited by the newspaper's deputy editor Georgina Henry, was intended as a group blog representing a wide variety of views and engaging the newspaper's online readers in debate. Here are my observations about it after six months.

I'm a fan of The Guardian newspaper, share its values and admire the relaunch of the print version earlier this year. Launching CiF seems to me to have been a good and imaginative idea, and I enjoy reading it. (A few of its contributors are listed in the links section of this blog.) I think that in general it works, and adds something valuable to public debate. I particularly like the way that regular Guardian writers (e.g. the political editor Michael White, whose subject I am interested in) post comments that are a little more immediate and impressionistic than their newspaper journalism.

But there are serious drawbacks to the site also. Some of those weaknesses are to do with the blogging medium itself, of which I am broadly sceptical (as I've written here). Others are to do with the heavy bias of its contributors towards some subjects but not others (e.g. not much on the elections in Congo). But there is one characteristic specific to CiF that I doubt Ms Henry and her colleagues can have foreseen. The intention of drawing readers into the conversation has had consistently appalling consequences, at least in the posts that I have followed. The threads below the posts have been skewed, and in some cases dominated, by contributors who hold exceptionally peculiar ideas and appear susceptible to anti-Jewish notions. The site invites readers to alert the editors to offensive or otherwise unsuitable comments, but this appears to work only partially, owing to the volume of material. In general, as well as being inadequately moderated (which is not a criticism of the newspaper: I don't see how it's possible even in principle for the editors to keep up with the constant flow of bile), the threads contain much personal abuse and poor English. Full marks to The Guardian for providing the facility, and all sympathy to it for trying to resolve the problem. But there definitely is a problem, and it's one that other newspapers will have to consider carefully before expanding into the blogging medium.

I am not a CiF blogger (my blog is the personal site you are reading now), but I have contributed two Comment pieces for the newspaper in the last few months, and these have appeared on the CiF site also. The first was published when CiF had just begun, and comments from readers were not at that time added to articles in the newspaper's Comment section. The second was my article today on Israel's intervention in Lebanon.

The first article, defending the Iraq War, elicited a large volume of reader emails directly to me. Almost all of them were hostile, many were abusive (not just about me; some were crudely racist and sexist about the US Secretary of State), and some of them were borderline deranged. I doubt that the authors of these messages were traditional Guardian readers.

Interestingly, the second article, also giving a view that many readers of the Guardian website would find controversial, has produced fewer emails sent directly to me. They are almost evenly balanced between those who agree with me and those who don't. Most of the critical comments are reasonable; the exceptions include those from 'RchFitzgera@aol.com' ('Undoubtedly as a Zionist Jew you vetted this piece through the Israeli embassy. Did they pay you to write it as well') and Stanley Tann ('The western powers have a duty to disarm the Jews and put them back to the 1967 line. Unfortunately there is too much finacial influence by them in America and in this country. Remember Kieth Joseph - Thatchers guru and the damage by greed he caused here'). There is a lone American academic who over several emails has expressed his anger and perplexity that I avoided criticising Tony Blair's foreign policies, so I have endeavoured to explain that my reason for that omission is that I support the PM's foreign policies. It is customary (and I know for a fact that this is true of US newspapers as well as British ones) that opinion columnists use the space given to them to express their opinions.

The great mass of emails expressing more animated disagreement, such as I received in March, now appears to have been deposited on the Comment is Free site instead of in my in-box. I'm happy about this, but it does seem to me to compound the problem the newspaper has with the integrity of its site. The site's contributors - who include many informed commentators and talented writers - offer a wide range of views, if not necessarily on a wide range of subjects. The comments threads contain much that is disturbing. Let me just illustrate this with a few comments from the thread attached to my own article, and a post partly responding to me by Brian Whitaker, the Guardian's Middle East editor. As I write, there are 166 comments attached to my article, though at least three others (one of which began 'Hey it's oliver kamm the Hitler fan!', and another of which disputed the historicity of the Holocaust) have been removed from the site (though not at my request). Brian Whitaker's post has 30 comments attached. Let me give one or two quotations from these:

1. 'As a worshiper of power Kamm approvingly swallows Israeli hawks' simplistic take on Hez - that they are SIMPLY Iran's advance army. But that's far too simplistic. Kamm's reheated neo-con drivel reeks of Bushite bloodsoaked failure.'

2. 'What a load of cobblers the article is, straight from Mossad.'

3. 'So, what do you think to decent people having their own label for the nasty, pernicious mush that excretes from the new Nazis? Is neofantasy a suitable label? Can anyone help with a definition for Wikipedia?'

4. 'Oliver "Mein" Kampf cant answer the same question that Israel itself cant answer... Kampf thinks that Israel should not have stopped massacring civilians when it did; he evidently thirsts for more masscres, for thousands more dead Arabs. He is a 'socialist' in the manner Hitler was a 'socialist' - a bloodthirsty monster by any other name. '

5. 'Blair is the greatest war criminal this country has ever produced. . He brings shame on Britons everywhere. Brown-skinned human life has no value for him whatsoever. May he rot in hell. And you as well, Kamm.'

6. 'In relative terms, I think even the Nazi would have been a little embarrassed to be given such a licence to continue the unnecessary slaughter and wanton destruction we’ve seen on our screen... So you did your bit in the Zionist plot to demonise the Muslims (German press vs. Jews in 1930s??), hence democratic Hamas/liberation movement Hezbollah being tarnished and the Muslim world set up as a bogeyman, no wonder you get paid back from a Zionist run paper [this is the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten] with a ‘nice‘ review. What will you get for this article, I wonder?'

7. 'I wonder if people are truly aware how much Israel controls the USA. This is from one article from the NY times that gives some indication of how thoroughly jewish people control America.... As anyone can see, what they have in the United States is jewish people in the media discussing what the jewish people in politcs should do so that the USA, the country these men are supposed to be elected oficials of, can do whatever is best for the jewish people in Isreal. If the media or politicians are not jewish themselves, their websites and actions show that they fawn over jewish people for approval. The only non jewish politicians are the ones that are sychophants to the jewish politicians. It is all facts. It is all right there in front of your face. You can scream about hate or anti this or that. Nothing detracts from the facts that are listed above.' [The oddest thing about this comment, variants of which you can find all over the Internet, is the author's use of the genteelism 'Jewish people' in preference to 'Jews'. Perhaps he fears that using the blunter term might be taken as prejudiced.]

8. 'Dear Anti-Zionists, To learn how criminal-minded Jews influence US foreign policy, please read "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy" [the controversial recent paper by the academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt]... This paper is the best piece of work written in recent times, where two top academics have been branded 'anti-Semites' by sick-minded Jews who can't accept TRUTH, as they never did with Moses or Jesus!'

9. 'Maybe, just maybe, popular outrage, and the tattered remnants of Labour's conscience, will stop Blair from taking Britain into Bush's next war. If not, the horrific consequences of the course they are steering may make us wish one day, as has often been wished by decent people about Hitler, that they had been assassinated.'

10. 'Come on Brian no need to react to Oliver Kamm, he's been widely discredited and proven to be a pawn and mouthpiece for the pro-zionist movement and pulls a healthy wage pack from AIPAC [the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee] to boot.'

As you can see, these go from legitimate if unfalsifiable criticism, through charges of racism and Nazism, thence to overt prejudice, on to approving anticipation of the assassination of the Prime Minister, and finally to a claim that its pseudonymous author cannot possibly substantiate about my supposed undeclared financial interests. I have enormous sympathy with Georgina Henry and her colleagues. I have given examples just from two posts today that I followed because I wrote the first and was referred to in the second. At the very minimum, the comments threads on CiF compromise The Guardian's standards, merely by being there and being of the character that they are. At the extreme, they get more problematic than that; they may encompass xenophobia, and in the case of the last two comments I've quoted they extend arguably to incitement to crime and certainly to defamation. (I should add that of course I would never dream of taking legal action because of a comment on CiF, and can't imagine realistic circumstances in which I would seek to initiate proceedings against any blogger.)

These are my observations as a reader and fan of CiF. There is a problem. The site in one important respect does not work as it must have been intended to. Other newspapers need to be aware of this experience if they form similar plans.

Diplomacy has a limit

This article appears in The Guardian today.

British political debate about Israel's intervention in Lebanon has, with rare exceptions, run the gamut of opinion from A to C, but with a unifying theme that Israel's actions have been disproportionate to the provocation. In reality, the principal ethical question concerning Israel's military campaign is whether it has been curtailed too soon. The answer lies with the strengthened UN Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil), and the interpretation given to its mandate to "take all necessary action ... to ensure that its area of operations is not utilised for hostile activities of any kind".

There is a substantial risk, on historical precedent, that not all necessary action will be taken. Continued failure will be damaging - for Israel, for the government of Lebanon, and for the prospects of a Palestinian state. This was why Tony Blair was right to resist calls at the start of the conflict for an immediate ceasefire, on the grounds 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."

An immediate ceasefire at that stage would have been equivalent to an enduring threat to Israeli civilians from a private army, Hizbullah, aided by a theocratic tyranny, Iran. Much of the anti-war criticism of Blair's position has come from those who condemn his closeness to President Bush and his participation in the Iraq war. But the principle the prime minister was insisting on was fundamental to democratic politics and the integrity of the United Nations. UN security council resolution 1559, adopted in 2004, calls for the disbanding and disarmament of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias. That resolution, clearly covering Hizbullah, has not been implemented. In those circumstances Israel is entitled to defend its citizens and its sovereignty.

Israel can't be defeated by Hizbullah, but an existential threat to the Jewish state is not the proper measure of a terrorist group's capacities. So long as Hizbullah remains in southern Lebanon, Israeli civilians face a continuous threat of rocket attacks or periodic incursions. The aim and effect are comparable to those of the suicide bomber in Israeli towns. Death may strike at any time. No democratic government can long survive, or ought to tolerate, a position in which civilians need reserves of courage merely to live within its boundaries.

Israel's acceptance of security council resolution 1701 is comparable in aim to its acceptance of the Oslo accords 13 years ago. It knows that lasting peace requires diplomacy. While pursuing negotiations, however, it must trust to the goodwill of others to support its need for security. Oslo was a noble venture, and had Yitzhak Rabin not been murdered by a religious fanatic, it might have achieved more. But it failed - above all because Israel's Palestinian interlocutor was a duplicitous autocrat more interested in personal aggrandisement than giving Palestinians good government on the road to statehood.

Israel's foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, declared this week: "It was necessary to move on and focus on the political phase, which was in motion from the onset of the conflict." She is right, and her insistence that political negotiation must resolve the conflict on Israel's northern border marks a welcome contrast with Israel's disastrous invasion of Lebanon, and attempted regime change within it, in 1982. But diplomacy, it turned out at Oslo, has a limit as well as a role. That limit will be tested and reached if the enemies of peace draw comfort from the curtailment of Israel's actions against Hizbullah.

On that point, the auguries are not encouraging. President Assad of Syria made an inflammatory speech on Tuesday directed not only at Israel but also at Lebanese political leaders, whom he accused of collaborating with Israel. Most significantly, if Hizbullah is perceived to have been strengthened in a struggle with Israel, the prospects for a pacific southern Lebanon, or a two-state territorial accommodation between Israel and Palestine, are bleak.

Israel's critics will claim that military action has strengthened Islamist militancy in Lebanon and the region. But this is question-begging. Hizbullah and its state supporters also claimed vindication from Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon under the dovish government of Ehud Barak. The bombings of Israeli civilians are a function not of Israeli provocation but of Hizbullah's ideological conviction - that Israel is an illegitimate state - and its capabilities.

Western powers have a particular responsibility. Hopes that the theocratic regime in Iran would moderate over the years have been thwarted. The mere fact that the Khomeini revolution has not spread has apparently made Iran's leaders more determined to operate by proxy, through Shia militias such as Hizbullah. Unifil must now disarm Hizbullah, and be seen to do so. If it does not, then Iran's ambitions in the region, and its transfer of arms, will only burgeon. The prospect that a revolutionary regime headed by a Holocaust-denier and seeking a nuclear capability will enhance its position from an unresolved conflict is the business of all of us.