Oliver Kamm

Fallacies of evacuation

Christopher Hitchens, in Slate, states the central fact of modern international politics:

There are many different plans to reconfigure forces within Iraq and to accommodate, in one way or another, its increasingly tribal and sectarian politics. (Former Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith's suggestion, arising from his admirable book The End of Iraq, involves a redeployment to the successful and peaceful north, with the ability to answer requests for assistance from the central government and the right to confront al-Qaida forces without notice.) But all demands for an evacuation are based on the fantasy that there is a distinction between "over there" and "over here." In a world-scale confrontation with jihadism, this distinction is idle and false. It also involves callously forgetting the people who would be the first victims but who would not by any means be the last ones.

There is no serious prospect of maintaining Iraq as a unitary state, but a federal arrangement risks enhancing Iranian influence and disaffecting Sunnis. Gareth Stansfield, an Associate Fellow of Chatham House, argued on these grounds in The Telegraph at the weekend that a five-way division would have more chance of creating a stable federal system than a tripartite arrangement. That will be important in convincing Sunni Iraqis that al-Qaeda is not their protector against perceived Shiite domination. More important than anything, to that end and for our own security, is that the coalition of Baathist former army officers and Islamist terrorism suffer decisive losses and many casualties. The notion that in withdrawing from Iraq we would enhance our security by removing a cause for provocation is the merest superstition.

Media lobbyists

The Readers' Editor of The Guardian, Ian Mayes, writes:

In February this year the Guardian ran two articles by its Jerusalem correspondent, Chris McGreal, exploring possible similarities between Israel and apartheid South Africa. A complaint about them from a pro-Israel professional lobby organisation called Camera, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, has been pursued throughout the past eight months.

The complaint questioned the fundamental accuracy of the articles and has involved the exchange of many thousands of words - greatly exceeding the total length of the two articles. It has been rejected by the Press Complaints Commission in an adjudication ... that makes an important statement about freedom of expression.

Mayes go on to argue - referring to a case with McGreal's successor - that Camera's lobbying efforts amounted to "harassment of a journalist trying to report accurately in a very difficult situation".

I have to say that Mayes – whose judgement I and others have taken issue with in the past - makes a fair point, which is independent of the merits of McGreal's articles. I consider those articles (you can read them here and here) ill-informed and poor journalism. They contain errors that betray a lack of fluency in Israeli politics and society, while the conclusion that Israel is a racist state is inflammatory nonsense. More generally, McGreal's journalism from Jerusalem rarely appeared to depend on personal knowledge of Israel; his reports were tendentious and sometimes incompetent. A lamentable example was an article in 2003 entitled - seriously - "Welsh pensioner turns freedom fighter: Ex-bank manager defends Palestinian suicide bombers". The title is not McGreal's; the sentimental, even reverential, tone about a silly woman certainly is. The Guardian's assessment that McGreal was "exceptionally well placed to assess this explosive comparison" (i.e. of Israel to apartheid South Africa) was not justified by the quality of his output at any time during his Jerusalem posting.

But McGreal's articles were clearly an expression of editorial opinion. To accuse McGreal of bias is beside the point. A journalist ought to have views; the test of his professionalism is that, being aware of the partiality of his information and the assumptions he brings, he nonetheless describes accurately the world as he sees it. The proper response to contentious claims made by a journalist is to refute them, not to charge malpractice. This was never an issue for the Press Complaints Commission, which was right to reject the complaint.

Mayes is right to perceive an issue of free speech here. Even in the field of opinion journalism rather than news reporting, Camera is entitled to point to errors of fact, and it makes some useful observations. (One of the staples of anti-Israel campaigning is the circulation of apparently incriminating quotations from Zionist leaders. Camera has done a service in exposing the spurious character and dubious provenance of some of these.) But orchestrating email campaigns against individual journalists is repugnant. An obvious equivalent is the Media Lens organisation, about which I’ve commented occasionally. Last week I referred, for example, to a letter from Media Lens's co-founder David Cromwell to a film critic, about the military rationale for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Cromwell has no expertise - indeed, is completely clueless - on the Pacific War, and his intervention amounted to harassment of a journalist for doing his job.

What is wrong for Media Lens is wrong for other lobbying organisations. The Guardian was right to stand by its journalists.

Deterring North Korea

Graham Allison, of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, writes in the Washington Post of the risks of a failure of deterrence in the case of North Korea:

Deterrence emerged as a central concept in Cold War strategy. It meant convincing the adversary that the costs of taking an unacceptable action would greatly exceed any benefits it could hope to achieve. How did the United States prevent the Soviets from seizing Berlin? By convincing Soviet leaders that such an attack would trigger a response that would destroy their country.

Effective deterrence required three components: clarity, capability and credibility. Clarity meant bright lines and unacceptable consequences. Credibility was understood to be in the eye of the beholder. How credible was the threat to trade Boston for Berlin? Never 100 percent. But U.S. forces, exercises and communication were crafted to convince Soviet leaders they dare not test it.

To date the Bush administration has demonstrably failed to deter Kim Jong Il.

Allison maintains that for Kim to be deterred he "must feel in his gut the threat that if a nuclear weapon of North Korean origin explodes on American soil or that of a U.S. ally, the United States will retaliate precisely as if North Korea had attacked the United States with a nuclear-armed missile: with an overwhelming response that guarantees this will never happen again." Allison cites a sobering historical precedent:

In 1962, as the Soviet Union was emplacing nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba, some worried that these weapons could be transferred to a young revolutionary named Fidel Castro. Kennedy issued an unambiguous warning to Nikita Khrushchev. "It shall be the policy of this nation," he announced, "to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union." Khrushchev knew that meant a nuclear war.

What Allison recommends is the single most important thing the free world can do about the threat from North Korea, and in particular the threat of nuclear terrorism using material of North Korean origin. There is no obvious resolution of this problem. Diplomatic approaches have failed; all that is open to us is to meet Allison's criteria for deterrence, being clear and credible in our countervailing threat of retaliation.

Allison speaks with immense authority. His byline in the newspaper states that he was assistant secretary of defence in the Clinton administration and has written a book on nuclear terrorism. He is also, however, the author of a hugely influential book on the Cuba missile crisis, Essence of Decision (1971). I can't do justice to its thesis in a short description, but the book presents different models for interpreting the crisis. These are: the Rational Actor model, in which contending governments rationally seek to maximise utility; the Organisational Process model; and the Governmental (Bureaucratic) Politics model. Each will yield different interpretations of events in the Cuba missile crisis.

Nuclear deterrence is a much less robust system under the second and third of these models. Under Model II, in which organisations follow certain set procedures rather than rationally assess the highest pay-off, "nuclear crises between machines as large as the United States and Soviet governments are inherently chancy. The information and estimates available to leaders about the situation will reflect organisational goals and routines as well as facts." Under Model III, which takes account of politics within the leadership, the way crises are managed "is obscure and terribly risky". The interaction of different constituencies within government, and the potential for misunderstanding among them, "could indeed yield nuclear war as an outcome". (Quotations are from p. 260.)

Clarity is essential to deterrence. During the Cold War, on at least two occasions the world came close to nuclear disaster. (These were the Cuba missile crisis in 1962, and the misperception of the Sovet leadership in 1983 that Nato exercises were a prelude to a nuclear first strike.) We can be still less confident that deterrence is robust when we are dealing with an irrational political agent such as Kim Jong-il (or Saddam Hussein, who launched three near-suicidal wars in 17 years and will fortunately never be in a position to start another). The assurance of isolationists on both wings of politics (see, for example, more or less any recent issue of the American Conservative magazine of Pat Buchanan) that deterrence and containment will work against a nuclear-armed North Korea or Iran, as they eventually did against the Soviet Union, is a huge assumption and nothing more.

In defence of the Iraq War

This post is a reply to Norman Geras’s comments on the Iraq War. I linked to these comments a week ago. The post is more widely a defence of the position of those of us on the Left who supported military intervention to overthrow Saddam Hussein and who continue to hold that view.

Referring specifically to the civilian death toll in Iraq, Norman wrote: "I am bound to acknowledge that, though I never expected an easy sequel in Iraq, much less a 'cakewalk', I did not anticipate a failure on this scale, and had I done so, I would have withheld support for the war without giving my voice to the opposition to it."

That is not my position. Foreign policy, as Fareed Zakaria has written in the context of the Iraq War, is not theology: it requires that we weigh costs and benefits. But on those grounds I supported the war three years ago, and I support it now with the benefit of hindsight. This post explains why I disagree with Norman, using what I believe are ethical and political premises he would share. (I should also gently correct The Guardian’s Diarist, who describes Norman as my mentor. Norman is a thinker whose scholarship and commentary on the ethical dimensions of politics I regard with respect. I have, however, held interventionist and Atlanticist views on foreign policy for very many years longer than I have known Norman, and we come from different traditions on the Left.)

Norman’s position is coherent, but predictably his reflections have elicited condescending dismissal from some writers who are – I use a euphemism here – not his intellectual equals. More serious, Norman might have been the type of thinker referred to by Matthew Parris in his Times column at the weekend. Naming several prominent supporters of the Iraq War (whom he termed British ‘neocons’, though few of them are neoconservatives), Parris remarked:

Our British neocons have invested heavily in this ill-fated craft, and the wreck is total. How shall they be saved? Never fear. They’ve been working on the elements of a rescue plan. By Christmas all will be singing from the same sheet. All together, now, warrior-columnists and soon-to-be-former Cabinet ministers: one, two three….

“The principle was good but the Americans screwed up the execution.”

Oh diddums, guys. Damned awful luck. You had this fantastic plan for invading a foreign country and harnessing a grateful populace behind your ideas for rebuilding an Arab nation along better lines — and then along come the Americans and make a mess of it. Now why in Heaven’s name would they do a thing that? Vandals.

Funny, because I don’t quite recall most of you saying it at the time….

In fact many who supported the war have been saying this for a long time. In my book Anti-Totalitarianism, which I wrote in the spring of last year, I summarised our criticisms:

To say the Bush Administration has made innumerable errors in its conduct of war and occupation is commonplace but not trivial: it is true and important. But the first error, from which much else has flowed, was to plan for occupation after Saddam’s fall in a fundamentally non-serious manner. Elections were delayed; security was inadequate; the failure to secure Baghdad was a disaster; infrastructure was ignored; abominable tortures were practised at the Abu Ghraib prison, to which there was a shamefully complacent response; and the civilian death toll appears to have been substantially higher than the war’s supporters generally expected.

Parris’s failure to follow the arguments of those he criticises is a secondary issue, though. More important is his assertion that:

The strategy failed because of one big, bad idea at its very root. Your [i.e. our] idea that we kick the door in. Everything has flowed from that. We were not invited. We had no mandate. There were no “good” Iraqis to hand over to. We had nothing to latch on to, no legitimacy.

If Parris is right, then we supporters of the war were wrong from the outset, and wrong in principle. This is a widespread view but is quite an extreme one nonetheless. Norman puts it this way:

Were we therefore wrong to support the war, those of us who did? In terms of what we hoped and what we thought likely, we obviously were - given how things have actually turned out. But on the basis of what could have been reliably foreseen, I think it's harder to say that. Only if the disaster was always foreseeable as the most likely outcome would I be convinced of it.

It is not difficult to conceive of an altogether more benign history of post-intervention Iraq. Two of the weightiest thinkers in the Democratic Party on foreign and military affairs, Kurt M. Campbell of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Michael E. O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, discuss this issue in a new book Hard Power: The New Politics of National Security (2006, pp. 56-7). They strongly criticise the Bush administration’s negligence in postwar planning, which they attribute to “the administration’s desire to rally domestic and international support by portraying the Iraq war as a relatively easy undertaking”, and explain why it need not have been like that:

There are … several powerful counterarguments to the claim that post-Saddam Iraq was destined to be chaotic. First, porous borders and large unprotected weapons caches were to a large extent preventable. A more complete Phase IV [i.e. postwar planning] operational blueprint would have done much to secure them through better planning and, quite probably, more troops. As the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Ambassador Paul Bremer, later argued, “The single most important change . . . would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout.” Bremer claimed to have “raised this issue a number of times with our government” but to have been overruled.

Second, although violent resistance from hard-core Baathists and jihadists was perhaps inevitable, the willingness of Iraqi “fence-sitters” to take up arms against the coalition out of frustration appears to have increased over time. Indeed, while estimates of the strength of insurgencies are never reliable, it is nonetheless striking that the Iraq resistance was estimated to number only 5,000 hardened fighters in mid-late 2003 but later thought by some U.S. officials to approach 20,000 in size by mid-2004. Wasting those precious first weeks and months gave this third group — the fence-sitters — a perceived rationale to take up violence too. It created a dynamic in Iraq in which high levels of street crime combined with the growing insurgency increased the population’s insecurities, which then also impeded economic recovery activities. With the security environment and the economy both stagnant, dissatisfaction grew, and the resistance thus had more potential recruits to draw upon.

Finally, opinion polls in the occupation’s early months showed a general happiness among Iraqis that Saddam was gone. That translated into a certain goodwill towards occupation forces, or at least a willingness to tolerate their presence as a necessary means of ensuring stability. Wasting this moment of Iraqi cooperation was to lose something that could never be recovered thereafter. This was not just a matter of winning a popularity contest. The general population’s willingness to provide intelligence on the resistance, always a key ingredient in any successful counterinsurgency, is also always a function of the perceived risks of doing so. Citizens are more likely to provide information when convinced it will help defeat an insurgency; they are less likely to take such risky steps if they see the tide of battle favoring the rebels. If a major effort had been made to nip the resistance in the bud, that effort could have developed self-perpetuating momentum.

None of these arguments is conclusive, but, especially when taken together, they are highly suggestive: Establishing early momentum would have made a huge difference in the subsequent course of the coalition’s counterinsurgency operation.

Predictions of a ‘cakewalk’ in Iraq were frivolous. But the chaotic state of Iraq today was neither the inevitable nor even the probable outcome of intervention. Norman’s support for intervention three years ago was at minimum (and I would put it much more strongly) a reasonable judgement about the benefits and costs of war compared with containment. Norman understands that we have an obligation to remain in Iraq till certain conditions (on which I set out my views in this post) are met, and that the cost of defeat would be huge. Nonetheless, he considers with hindsight - referring to but not depending on the Johns Hopkins researchers’ conclusions about civilian deaths in Iraq - that on one criterion about which he can be certain our intervention has failed. He would on these grounds have withheld support for the war if he had foreseen that outcome.

This much I agree with. I wish the intervention had been handled with a seriousness that it lacked, and I am outraged at the unwillingness on the part of the Bush administration to acknowledge its failures. I fear that our minimal aim of leaving Iraq with a constitutional government possessing as far as possible a monopoly of the means of force may not be achieved. (For one thing, that depends on the Maliki government’s being able to disarm Shiite militias whose leaders sit in the government.) Like William Shawcross, who writes in The Spectator this week, I acknowledge that “the sectarian chaos and bloodshed are far worse than anyone who supported the overthrow of Saddam (as I did and still do) expected”. But I reject the inference Norman draws. The Iraq War was a just and necessary intervention, which enables - rather than secures - an incomparably better alternative to leaving Saddam Hussein in place.

In the passage from my book that I cited above, there are two things I would write differently now. First, I would state more strongly the fact of the substantial number of civilian deaths. Secondly, I would add – which is not the same point - that Iraq is one of the most violent societies on earth, and Iraqis face significantly greater risk of violent death on the streets than they did three years ago. I stand, however, by every argument I then advanced for supporting the Iraq intervention. One gracious but sceptical reviewer of the book, Steven Poole in The Guardian, wrote: “How many civilian deaths would have been acceptable? No one ever answers that question.” (I have just received, coincidentally, a review from the Journal of Peace Research, September 2006, which makes a similar point. The reviewer, Nicholas Marsh of the Oslo International Peace Research Institute, says my book is thought-provoking but that it “fails to provide any sense of how one should weigh the benefits of democratization against the inevitable costs of warfare”.)

I will respond to the question, even if I can’t answer it in the form in which it’s put. The reason no one answers that question in that form is that it involves values that are incommensurable (i.e. not measurable on the same scale). As the philosopher Michael Walzer – whose thinking has greatly influenced Norman - has put it, in the context of the first Gulf War (“Justice and Injustice in the Gulf War”, in But Was it Just?: Reflections on the Morality of the Persian Gulf War, ed. David Decosse, 1992, p. 7):

Certainly, we want political and military leaders to worry about costs and benefits. But they have to worry. They can’t calculate, for the values at stake are not commensurate – at least they can’t be expressed or compared mathematically, as the idea of proportion suggests. How do we measure the value of a country’s independence against the value of the lives that might be lost in defending it? How do we figure in the value of defeating an aggressive regime (the invasion of Kuwait was not the first, nor was it likely to be the last, of Iraq’s aggressions) or the value of deterring other, similar regimes? All values of this latter sort are likely to lose out to the body count, since it is only bodies that can be counted.

Walzer, who supported the first Gulf War and opposed the second, maintains that the notion of proportionality in warfare has value and truth, but it is a “gross truth” that does not enable us to make useful discrimination in most cases. In recent British political debate, it has in my view had little utility. For example, in July the Shadow Foreign Secretary, William Hague, argued in the same article that Israel’s intervention in Lebanon was disproportionate and that a protracted conflict would be tragic for the region – when the speediest way to end the conflict was presumably for Israel to win it quickly by using superior force. I realise that not everyone will agree that Israel’s aims were justified, but my point is that proportionality does not precede the issue of the justice of war aims. Our judgement of proportionality depends on an estimate of the justice of a cause and the costs of not taking military action.

Norman clearly has similar premises. He says: “Sometimes there is a justification for opposing tyranny and barbarism whatever the cost. Had I been of mature years during that time, I hope I would have supported the war against Nazism come what may, and not been one of the others, the nay-sayers. The same impulse was at work in my support for the Iraq war.” But in citing the war against Nazism, on which almost everyone bar the politically naïve and the politically malevolent agrees, he blunts the force of the point. The war against Nazism was a case sui generis, for Nazism was barbarism without limit and there can be no serious debate about the consequences had we failed to defeat it. Moreover, the evil of allowing it to prevail was so great that fighting it was morally required even though in 1940 our defeat seemed certain. (There is a plausible historical counterfactual. Lord Halifax might have succeeded Chamberlain as prime minister and negotiated a deal with Hitler whereby British neutrality was rewarded with our keeping intact the empire.)

The proportionality of means can only be judged properly with reference to the character of the enemy we face and the threat that it poses. In 1940, the evil and the threat were such that even the principle of non-combatant immunity was superseded by the moral requirement to defeat Nazism. Walzer believes obliteration bombing of German cities would have been justified in 1940 and 1941, though not later, on grounds of what he calls supreme emergency (“Emergency Ethics”, in Arguing About War, 2004, p. 46).

Yet supreme emergency is too restrictive a criterion for assessing the justice of warfare. I say this not on ethical grounds but on historical ones. Let me take another example that Walzer cites, in which the military means employed were horrific, and on which I fiercely reject his conclusions: the defeat of Japan in WWII.

Walzer states: “The Japanese case is sufficiently different from the German so that unconditional surrender should never have been asked. Japan’s rulers were engaged in a more ordinary sort of military expansion, and all that was required was that they be defeated, not that they be conquered and totally overthrown” (Just and Unjust Wars, 1977, pp. 267-8).

The outcome of this principle, if it had been applied by Roosevelt, Churchill and Truman, would have been disastrous: emboldening of the ‘war party’ within the Japanese Cabinet; continuation of Japan’s imperial subjugation of Asia, which was in itself a humanitarian catastrophe; and the likelihood of having to contend with future Japanese expansionist ventures. We can, even on a shorter timescale, say with a high degree of probability that the strategy of the Allies - including the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – caused fewer deaths than any realistic alternative course. One of the most important of Japan’s wartime officials and Emperor Hirohito’s closest adviser, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Marquis Kido Koichi, later assessed that surrender in August 1945 saved “twenty million of my innocent compatriots” (cited in Robert J. Maddox, Weapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision, 1995, p. xi).

Those considerations do not resolve ethical argument about the conduct of war (which at Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki involved our side's violating the principle of non-combatant immunity). But that is the point. Civilian deaths in warfare have immense bearing upon, but do not answer, the question of the justice of any particular war. We must have regard to historical considerations as well. Underestimating the costs of a pacific policy – as Walzer does in the discussion I’ve cited – can be at least as disastrous as overestimating the benefits of war. Underestimating the costs of failing to topple Saddam Hussein is what we interventionists have consistently identified as the weakness of the anti-war case. It is a weakness also in the position that Norman now holds.

Presumably because our argument involves a counterfactual – what would have happened if the West had pursued containment and deterrence rather than force – it is rarely discussed in public debate (and I do look for it). I stated the point very briefly in a Guardian article on the third anniversary of the war:

Mistaken ideas have consequences, even when the inference drawn from them is a counsel of inaction. Had we not overthrown Saddam, Iraq today would be far from tranquil. Many argue that the absence of WMD shows that western policy had been working. It was in reality unravelling fast, and few opponents of war treated the problem seriously.

Saddam allowed intrusive inspections only because of the threat of force. Containment of his regime would have meant continuous military deployment in neighbouring states and the no-fly zones; intensified economic sanctions; inspections coercive enough to withstand Saddam's intimidation and fraud; and the support of France and Russia. Even with personalities of greater competence than Hans Blix and higher morals than Jacques Chirac, that commitment would have been inconceivable. Of the permanent members of the security council, only the US and UK could have been relied on.

Containment was not working. This matters greatly to the justification of the war, at the time and in hindsight. The alliance of Leninists and Islamists who make up the misnamed Stop the War Coalition was of course unfazed by the approaching failure of containment, because it saw in those policies evidence of Western imperialist designs. But many critics of the war sincerely wished for the downfall of the Baathist regime and made no excuse for its brutality. Let us leave aside for the moment the question of how that might have been achieved through non-military means, and consider the circumstances in which it would have had to come about.

In an article in The Times this week, the columnist Tim Hames, a supporter of the war, reasoned this way about the outcome:

The problem has not been the Bush Administration underestimating how much Iraqis might come to loathe the West for the “occupation” but a failure to grasp the extent to which, thanks to Saddam, Iraqis had come to fear and hate each other.

That inter-communal hatred is the present cause of Iraq’s troubles. American soldiers have died in tragic numbers this month not because of any so-called insurgency that wants to drive the US out of Iraq but because they have been attempting to prevent rival religious and sectarian militias from killing their enemies. The effort to hold together a central government in Baghdad (a drive, ironically, designed to reassure the defeated Sunnis) does not command sufficient consensus to sustain it.

This is not quite right. It absolves the Bush administration of blame that it merits. One of the most illuminating discussions of postwar Coalition strategy I have seen is by a young lawyer, Noah Feldman, who served as Constitutional Adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in 2003. He argues, in his book What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building (2004, pp. 78-9) that Iraqi associations formed around denominational identity arose after the overthrow of Saddam because the Coalition failed to establish collective security for Iraqis:

It would be perfectly correct … to blame the invasion for creating a situation in which a pervasive sense of insecurity quickly descended upon Iraqi life, necessitating in short order the formation of protection associations other than the state. In that indirect but nonetheless decisive sense, the Coalition, specifically the United States, played a major role in the rapid emergence of denominational identities in the immediate postwar period. The United States did not invent those identities, nor did it intentionally reify them; but it produced an environment in which it was necessary for Iraqis to invent them. Had there been half a million US troops on the ground, it is highly likely that there would have been little looting, no comparable sense of insecurity, and therefore a reduced need for denominational identities to become as dominant as they quickly did.

Tim is wrong to identify “the problem” without reference to US failure to establish order, and to the murderous coalition of Baathists and Islamists lauded by some commentators as the “resistance”. But he is right in one important respect. The bloodshed in Iraq reflects the absence of a functioning state. That is a terrible indictment of Coalition strategy. But it is also a challenge to those who opposed our intervention, or – as in Norman’s case - retrospectively withhold their support for it. Regime change in Iraq without Western intervention would have ensured the burgeoning of forces of theocratic barbarism and no countervailing authority. Some commentators attribute the violence of these groups to the presence of Coalition forces in Iraq. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s declaration of ‘total war’ on Iraq’s Shiites presumably will not disabuse them of that view – but it ought to. In these circumstances, we would have found it a short transition, chronologically and qualitatively, from a rogue state to a failed state, with appalling consequences for Iraqis and for the region.

I carefully said that “many” critics of the Iraq War sincerely favoured the downfall of Saddam. Not all of them did, even outside the totalitarian fringe occupied by the Stop the War Coalition. I mean this not as an insult but as a description of a particular and politically mainstream position regarding Iraq. Some of the most prominent critics of the war, such as Brent Scowcroft, come from the realist school of foreign policy. They would argue that a strong state, even a grossly oppressive one such as Baathist Iraq, would be preferable to an anarchic non-state. The intervention in Afghanistan would be supported on this view, because it replaced a weak state with at least the prospect of a stronger and constitutional order. But in Iraq we have created a situation in which no one has a monopoly of the means of violence. This is a severely destabilising influence on the region, and has given an opening to our direct enemies, Islamist fanatics of the type that planned and executed the attacks of 9/11.

This is an influential argument, and a superficially plausible one in that everyone can see that Iraq is now on the verge of civil war. It is not a position shared by Norman Geras, and for good reason. The reason that Norman would certainly cite is the scarcely imaginable human cost of treating a gangster regime such as Saddam’s as a state actor comparable to other states. Notoriously and disastrously, the Reagan administration aided Iraq in the 1980s on this premise as a counterweight to Iran. But there is another reason, which is that a declared policy of realism often has scant grasp of political reality. One point the much-reviled neoconservatives have correctly identified is the association of Islamist terrorism with the perpetuation of autocratic states in the Middle East. Denied an outlet in politics, dissent emerges in the only part of society open to it: religious fanaticism. Opposing autocratic states – allowing that some are more malign and pose greater risks than others, but opposing them nonetheless – is essential to our security.

In the case of Baathist Iraq there was another important consideration. It was one that the US and British governments comprehensively mishandled: the question of the missing WMDs. Out of appalling intelligence and political ineptitude, the issue has been relegated to a question of the veracity of our political leaders. It is a lot more important than that. In 2004 Rolf Ekeus, the first chairman of UNSCOM, wrote in Survival, the journal of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, an important assessment of a highly influential IISS report on Iraq’s WMD programmes (link requires fee).

Ekeus had previously argued that: "My feeling is very clearly that the Iraqi policy long before the war was to build capability to develop its capabilities to produce weapons for the situation, for the conflict situation, not to produce for storage and create a problem of storage management." In the IISS article he drew a further inference that gives a different complexion to the issue of WMD from the one usually presented in British political debate:

[T]he Iraqi policy, as reported by UNSCOM to the Security Council, [was] that after its WMD arsenals had been destroyed in the mid-1990s, Iraq was not interested in producing biological and chemical weapons for storage. Iraq viewed these weapons as tactical rather than strategic assets – only the latter would have required long-term storage. Instead, Iraq was aiming to keep the capability to start up production immediately, should the need arise.

Ekeus added:

[T]he continued inspections [i.e. after the war, by the Iraq Survey Group], especially as they are led by an experienced UNSCOM expert, may shed light on what Iraq’s sizeable teams of weapons scientists and experts had been doing from 1998 up to the war. Could the ramshackle civil agriculture and health industries have contained capabilities for production of fresh biological and chemical warfare agents to be brought out “just in time” in case of a renewed conflict with Iran or the need for repression of internal opposition?

We don’t know the answer to this. We do know that the international inspection regime, even under a porous system of containment that I have argued was failing, would never have found out. UNSCOM itself reported that Iraq in December 1997 would not volunteer information to the inspectors, but would only verify information held by the Commission. Astonishingly, the UN Secretary-General – a civil servant, not a policymaker – responded with a review of the activities of UNSCOM and the IAEA, rather than an unwavering insistence on Iraq’s adhering to the terms of UN Security Council Resolutions. As one authority on WMD, Professor Graham Pearson of the Department of Peace Studies at Bradford University, has written after recounting this sorry record, in The Search for Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (2005, p. 242):

It is indeed a sorry state of affairs when the Permanent Members of the Security Council lose their resolve to address the dangers posed by a state which seeks to maintain a weapons of mass destruction capability and the Secretary-General effectively puts the UN organizations, UNSCOM and the IAEA, in the dock rather than the uncooperative and non-compliant state in Iraq. This led to the problems with Iraq being protracted and, it can be argued, to the eventual war in 2003 as had the Security Council being [sic] resolute and firm throughout and prepared to take military action in the last resort, it is possible that Iraq would have cooperated with the United Nations as it was intended to do throughout.

The system of containment and inspections could not cope with a despot of Saddam Hussein's turpitude and duplicity. If Saddam had remained in power, our knowledge of and influence over his regime would have been nugatory. The regime would in all probability have endured, first because of its unspeakable brutality – in the aftermath of the first Gulf War the Kurdish and Shiite rebellions were snuffed out with the loss of some 50,000 lives in the single month of March 1991 – and secondly because of the dynastic succession of Saddam’s monstrous sons. We cannot make a reliable judgement on the consequences of allowing a state like this to persist in its internal repression, external aggression and flouting of UN requirements. But there is one thing we can say with certainty. In the last few weeks we have gained an insight into the probable future military capabilities of North Korea and Iran. The fact that we no longer have to worry about the military capabilities of Saddam Hussein and his family – not just now but maybe thirty years into the future – is a gain that may be greater than any of us can now conceive of. For that reason, among others, I insist that regime change in Iraq was right and immensely important.

In the last fortnight or so I have received quite a large number of invitations to appear on radio and television to argue the case for the Iraq War. I realise this is no reflection on my cogency; the programmes’ researchers state frankly that they have severe difficulty finding anyone willing to represent the pro-war view. I have appeared on some of these programmes debating, respectively, allegedly progressive and also High Tory opponents of the Government’s foreign policies. One thing on which my fellow interviewees and I, and everyone reading this, will be able to agree is that if the defence in the broadcast media of Tony Blair’s foreign policies is left to me, then Tony Blair is in trouble. I appeal to anyone reading this who may have influence in government circles to take this issue seriously. The case needs to be made. If we lose the argument at home, we shall fail to sustain our obligations in Iraq.

The "Islamophobia" scam

A week ago The Observer columnist Henry Porter wrote of the fashionable cause of censoring speech:

Censorship is in the air. Last week, I was asked to join a Dispatches debate for Channel 4. I explained to the editor that I had my doubts about casting the issues of free speech simply in terms of Islam. After last week's column on the veil, I received a lot of emails that showed the enormous diversity of Muslim opinion. Muslims are as capable of advocating the ideals of free speech as anyone; it's just that we hear more from those who do not.

I was dropped from the programme, either because of this strongly held opinion or because Channel 4 took the view that I would be useless in live debate (a not untenable position). But it is a shame that we do not see that the issue of free expression is wider than any single religious or political interest.

I entirely agree that free speech is an indivisible cause, and it is a shame that its universality is not sufficiently stressed in current debate. But there it is. The most immediate threat to free expression in Western societies does not come from Christian fundamentalists protesting at the teaching of Darwinism or 'blasphemous' works of art, or from the unjust incarceration of the antisemitic pseudo-historian David Irving. It comes from the increasing self-censorship in the communications media and the performing arts for fear of offending Muslim sensibilities.

I watched this evening the Channel 4 debate that Porter refers to, and a predictably lamentable affair it was. But one statement stood out. One of the Danish Imams who led the initial protests against the Jyllands-Posten cartoons declared under cross-examination (from the writer Kenan Malik) that he was entitled to respect. He was, and is, entitled to no such thing. He is entitled in a democratic society to no more and no less than religious and political liberty. Whether he enjoys respect as well is entirely up to him; it is not up to our political and juridical system. The notion that in suffering offence he is done an injustice is false and pernicious. It's also dangerous, because it places no limit on how far the state should regulate people's lives.

There were a few references in the debate to "Islamophobia". This term is a fabricated and question-begging linguistic manoeuvre designed to present the protection of religious sensibilities as a civil liberty issue. Those of us who are disinclined to allow claims of injured sensibilities to moderate our criticism of ideas ought to respond appropriately. To that end, I note from Harry's Place that my comrades have been nominated by an absurd lobby calling itself the Islamic Human Rights Commission for an "Islamophobia" award (according to its organisers, "an annual event to acknowledge - through satire, revue and comedy - the worst Islamophobes of the year"). Other nominees in the UK include Tony Blair and Sky News. Sky's citation reads: "For being a prominent vehicle for anti Muslim propaganda, harboring [sic] bias in the [sic] every report and every question asked". I went on Sky News not long ago to debate a man called Asghar Bukhari of another grandiloquently named lobby group, the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, and can confirm that the presenter, Kay Burley, insisted on posing him loaded questions such as "what's your reply to that, Asghar?"

I was mildly surprised that the nominees did not include the political editor of the New Statesman, Martin Bright, for his important work in detailing the remarkably uncritical dialogue going on between the Foreign Office and Islamist groups. So I nominated him myself. I cannot claim to have done anything like the exhaustive work and analysis that he has done on this subject, but if any reader wishes to nominate me and I am successful, you can be sure I'll turn up to collect the award and express my reasons for pride in it.

Hungary, 1956

The writer Adam LeBor in The Times describes the political controversy in Hungary over the fiftieth anniversary today of the uprising against Soviet oppression.

“Hungary is a divided nation, based on the question of which side of the barricades was your father on in 1956,” Sebestyen Gorka, of the Institute for Transitional Democracy and International Security, said. “Was he fighting for independence and democracy or to maintain the dictatorship and communism?

“People cannot understand how the Government today is made of supporters of the old regime.” Government supporters argue that the communist party of the 1980s was very different from that of the 1950s, the terror having long since ended.

Yet Hungary has not had a reckoning. Many communist-era officials and former secret police officers remain in their luxury villas in the Buda hills. “We need to come to terms with the fact that Hungarians willingly killed Hungarians after 1956,” said Mr Gorka.

That absence of reckoning is an important and often overlooked issue not only in postwar Hungarian history but also in the the character of Communist rule in Europe more widely. Surprisingly there are still some serious writers for whom Communism after 1956 was a reasonably stable system held together more by ideological concord than by oppression. A couple of years ago I wrote a short piece for The Times about Eric Hobsbawm - a very noted scholar indeed of 19th-century history - in which I quoted a judgement that ought on its own to destroy his reputation as an observer of more recent political history:

Hobsbawm remarks in On History (1997): “Fragile as the communist systems turned out to be, only a limited, even nominal, use of armed coercion was necessary to maintain them from 1957 until 1989.” He means the 27 Soviet divisions, 6,300 tanks and 400,000 troops sent into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to snuff out political reform.

Moreover, and even allowing for Hobsbawm's dating this state of affairs from a year after the Uprising, it is a gross misreading of Hungarian politics (not to speak of Poland, but that will be a subject for another time). The man whom the Soviet Union installed as party chief after the Uprising, János Kádár, came to be seen in the West as a liberalising influence. In economics, this had some limited truth to it (though several other Eastern European countries had larger private sectors). In politics, the man was an unreconstructed practitioner of terror and tyranny.

On coming to power Kádár immediately became known as Hungary's Quisling. He gave a pledge not to arrest the deposed leader Imre Nagy, who had taken refuge in the Yugoslav embassy; and of course he was lying. Nagy decided not to seek asylum, emerged, and was promptly arrested. He and his comrades were imprisoned in Romania for 18 months, before being repatriated to Hungary in June 1958, tried in secret, executed, and buried in an unmarked grave. Nagy thereby joined the fate of thousands of freedom fighters who were murdered by Kádár's regime, thousands more who were imprisoned or exiled, and scores of thousands more who were transported to the Soviet Union.

I got to know one of those freedom fighters, Péter Mandoki, who fled Hungary and settled in - of all places - the East Midlands city of Leicester, where I grew up. He married a local girl, and their daughter, Anna, was and still is one of my dearest friends. Though her father insisted on speaking only in broken English after he left Hungary, Anna learned Hungarian, settled in Budapest and worked there as an accountant in the early 1990s. I used to go to see her there, which is my only direct experience of Hungary. Now living in Melbourne, Anna wrote a book this year that comprised the recollections of Hungarian émigrés who had fled to Australia. To my regret and surprise - as it is a good book and she is a published writer - she found it impossible to interest a mainstream publisher in taking the book on, and so she very properly self-published it. There is a passage in which Anna describes the games of a young boy playing with his toy soldiers; those in best condition are (uniquely in the history of wargaming, I would imagine) UN forces, and those in the ugliest condition are Soviet troops. "Itt vannak ENSZek!" cries the boy: "The UN troops are here!" Except they never came, of course.

The Hungarian Uprising lasted for twelve days. The Soviet ambassador to Budapest, Yuri Andropov, urged unrelenting bombardment of the city, after which Soviet troops turned artillery fire not only on the barricades but on residential areas. To those who resisted, I extend my admiration and respect.

UPDATE: I initially stated in this post that the Uprising lasted for nine days. I was thinking of the sniper resistance, under the command of General Béla Király, which did last for nine days before Soviet troops defeated them. But the length of the Uprising from beginning to end was actually twelve days. I have therefore changed this in the text.

Clare Short

Whatever your view of the government's political record, it's difficult to avoid cynicism about Clare Short's grounds for resigning the Labour whip: "There is so much now that's gone wrong and that is so unprincipled and un-Labour.... I think the Government has lost its way."

Many would say the same about Clare Short. She suffered badly from the perception that her resignation from the government over the Iraq war was less timely and less honourable than the late Robin Cook's, and since then she has progressively lost her political bearings. Her call last month for a hung parliament was clearly incompatible with holding the Labour whip, but more important was a plainly incoherent political position. There is no mechanism in British politics for voting for a hung parliament, and Ms Short's stated reason for wishing for that outcome was untenable as well. She declared that our political system was in trouble, and that: "The only answer is to get a Parliament that's more reflective of opinion in the country."

That strain again. Voting systems in most parliamentary democracies serve multiple and conflicting purposes. Proportional voting systems are good at allocating parliamentary representation according to popular votes cast; they are less good, and may be very bad indeed, at establishing a link between the voters and their representatives, and providing for the election of a stable and effective executive. In polities strongly marked by communal divisions, proportional voting systems are the only sensible option, as otherwise there would be one-party rule in favour of the largest ethnic or religious group (as in the old Stormont). In more cohesive polities, where religion and nationality do not dominate voting behaviour, this argument for proportional voting systems carries much less weight. PR is certainly not a moral issue about "fairness". In the UK, a proportional voting system would damage the quality of democracy by entrenching in government the Liberal Democrats without reference to shifts in public opinion. The current voting system works well in the limited but important sense that it is sensitive to broad trends in opinion, even though it exaggerates them. The Left in the 1980s was divided and its main party was unfit for government; the electoral system magnified these characteristics and produced successive Conservative landslides. When the Left became credible and the Conservatives became a rabble, the electoral system produced successive Labour landslides.

But for all my scepticism about Clare Short's half-baked criticisms of New Labour, I'm surprised to see an unsourced report in a tabloid newspaper today associating her with George Galloway:

LABOUR turncoat Clare Short is tipped to join the anti-war Respect party - alongside its only MP, George Galloway.

Short, 60, quit the Cabinet over No.10's Iraq policy - and switching parties would be a further protest if she's expelled from the party altogether.

But one minister said: "Clare and George deserve each other. What they have in common is that neither are [sic] of any importance whatsoever."

I do not believe Clare Short deserves Galloway. Galloway has been plausibly described as "a man who is not just a pimp for fascism but one of its prostitutes as well". Whatever else you can say about Clare Short, she was an effective minister in a government that outside the most senior posts has been short on talent. As international development secretary she did tangible good both in raising the profile of the post and in being prepared to say unpopular things in the cause of third world development. She rightly stressed the importance of trade, and infuriated anti-globalisation campaigners by stating:

Child labour is a development problem, not a trade problem. It exists in all poor countries. Only five per cent of child labourers worldwide work in the export sector. Trade sanctions against countries where child labour is prevalent would simply harm the poorest countries and force children into still worse forms of employment.

Not all of her criticisms of the Prime Minister have been unfair either. In 2002 she described as "silly and morally repugnant" a proposal before an EU summit to withhold aid from countries that refused to take back illegal immigrants. It was, too. As a Cabinet minister she was broadly a force for good in representing the interests of the most impoverished people on the planet. I am, as it happens, opposing her from the platform at a Reuters event where she is speaking next month, and I shall be sure to preface my remarks by saying this.

A bad argument for a bad argument

Stephen Pollard relates, from a contributor to a radio phone-in programme, this argument for legalising euthanasia: "Would these pro-life campaigners allow their pet to carry on suffering, or would they go to the vet to have it put down?"

As Stephen observes, this is a hardly an argument calculated to win support for the proposition. It's not entirely remote, though, from ostensibly more respectable arguments. It makes the fact of suffering the central issue, regardless of the character of the suffering or the sufferer. I am hostile in principle to the organised 'pro-life' movement, but in practice unfazed by its efforts; I'm confident that proposals sharply to curtail availability of legal abortion will not win majority support in Parliament or the country. It would complicate the issue, however, if those who defend liberal abortion legislation were to confuse that campaign - as the 'pro-life' movement itself does - with the entirely separate controversy over assisted suicide.

Euthanasia must remain illegal, because doctor-assisted suicide is a contravention of what the medical profession exists for. I have heard professional ethicists scorn the notion of a supposed 'slippery slope' from voluntary to involuntary euthanasia, but I'm not convinced. Presumably legalising voluntary euthanasia would apply only to those suffering from terminal illness, but there would be no inherent reason - only the contingent circumstance of the character of the doctors concerned - that those suffering from debilitating non-terminal illnesses might also voluntarily be put to death. Certainly there are tragic and harrowing cases of the desperately ill who wish for death, and whose loved ones compassionately believe that wish should be met. In those cases, the exercise of the law ought to be sparing and lenient; but those cases must not make the principle of the law.

My only real contact with these public policy debates was when I took part in the Independent campaign of Martin Bell in the Tatton constituency in the 1997 general election, and was deputed to respond to inquirers about the candidate's policies. One of these inquirers was a hectoring lady called Phyllis Bowman, founder of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children. I stated to her as the candidate's position on 'pro-life' issues what I have just written, and she was pretty contemptuous. The candidate her organisation supported for the Tatton constituency did not do well, however.

The Thinker

The Demos think tank announces: "Madeleine Bunting has decided to resign as Director of Demos. Since it has emerged that her vision for Demos is incompatible with that of the trustees, she has decided to focus on her interests as a writer and a thinker at this point in her career."

Judged by length of service, this makes her the Ossie O'Brien of the think-tank world. (I should add, for the benefit of those who share my aversion to Ms Bunting's tendentious campaigns against 'Islamophobia', that the word for intellectual is very commonly used in German as a generic rather than descriptive term, and I assume the word 'thinker' is being used in this context as an English equivalent.)

Crank of the week

This email, with the subject heading "Atomic Bombings Not Justified", is from Kris Martinsen:

See "Assault On A Beaten Foe" by Dr. Harry Elmer Barnes in the May 10, 1958 National Review. Then read Atomic Diplomacy by Gar Alperowitz. The Japanese had been trying to settle for close to a year. FDR's Communist advisers wanted to get the USSR finally into the war with Japan so the Russians could get the spoils of war in Manchuria to turn over to Mao, a then protege of Stalin. We were never going to invade Japan, we could have embargoed the island if necessary. The wildly disparate figures ranging from 10,000 to two million alleged US casualties are sheer rubbish, much like the six million holohoax bunk we hear endlessly. Military men ranging from Eisenhower to MacArthur opposed the dropping of the bomb. Truman, a former Klansman, surrounded by CFR and Commie types, just did as he was told. He never gave it a second thought. But I wouldn't expect a smarmy, oily looking neocon dunce like you to know any history. Sometime we could talk about the 50 million killed under Stalin largely by one particular ethnic group. Or the 80 million done in by Mao (different villains this time) or the millions killed by US policies since 1945 and really since 1898. The unnecessary World Wars, the Clinton fake genocide claims in Kosovo, Bush's lies in Iraq, ad nauseum.

Glad every day that Stinky Scoop Jackson is no longer with us, a leftist Israel First bum and demagogue as Ayn Rand noted. Have a bad life, Ollie.

Kris Martinsen

Harry Elmer Barnes, cited in the first sentence, was a fervent isolationist who wrote in 1952 that Roosevelt's foreign policies were "the greatest public crime in human history". He speedily adopted outright Holocaust denial, maintaining in an encomium [warning: the link takes you to a Holocaust-denial website] to the founder of that perverse movement, Paul Rassinier, that: "It is abominable enough that from a million to a million and a half Jews perished between 1940 and 1945, without having to add vast imaginary slaughter."