Oliver Kamm

The PM and Atlanticism

In some excitable and widely reported comments, an American civil servant called W. Kendall Myers has cast doubt on the Anglo-American relationship. The Times expresses good sense on this subject, faulting Myers for, among other things, his cynical assessment of how a prime minister should conduct British foreign policy.

[Myers] appears to be surprised that Mr Blair really seemed to believe in the justice of the war in Iraq and failed to demand, never mind secure, any precise “payback” or specific “reciprocity” before endorsing Saddam Hussein’s removal from power. He also chose to place no value whatsoever on Mr Blair’s personal standing with elite and ordinary Americans alike as a result of having stuck with his principles on Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. This is a curiously narrow cost-benefit analysis.

It's worse than that: it's strikingly ignorant of the development of British foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. The liberal West defeated Communism through collective security, but also by the force of our political principles. A moderate conservativism arose in countries (notably Germany) where right-wing politics had previously been disfigured by nationalism and xenophobia; the democratic Left, not least in the form of the British Labour Party, played a noble and historically vital role in establishing and supporting the alliance of free nations that contained and ultimately defeated totalitarianism. It didn't take long afterwards, however, for it to become clear that forces of aggression and tyranny were still very much with us. The late Slobodan Milosevic pursued a racist and murderous campaign to eliminate the multi-ethnic democracy of Bosnia; the soon-to-be-late Saddam Hussein eliminated a member state of the United Nations when he invaded and annexed Kuwait in 1990.

American policy was generally well intentioned but fatefully belated. The problem with US interventionism was that there was too little of it - in the Balkans, in Iraq, in Rwanda - when more, exercised earlier, might have stymied genocidal campaigns. British policy at the same time was feeble, especially in its amoral acquiescence to the Milosevic's aggression.

Very few people saw the stakes fully and properly at this time. Many neoconservatives (Charles Krauthammer and Adam Garfinkle among them) argued the US should not intervene in the Balkans; many liberals and left-wingers (Christopher Hitchens was one, but honourably has revised his views) opposed the war to expel Saddam's forces from Kuwait. Even among those liberals who strongly supported the Gulf War, many believed Operation Desert Storm was concluded at the right time, when Kuwaiti sovereignty had been restored but without deposing Saddam Hussein. (As a matter of autobiographical interest to me but no interest to anyone else, I should concede that I was in this last camp.) One of very few politicians and statesmen who, as the decade progressed, genuinely did understand the gravity of these issues, and the urgency of constructing a consensus for interventionist policies to protect threatened peoples and defeat dictators, was Tony Blair.

If you seriously maintain the PM supported intervention in Iraq because he slavishly follows the US President, then it's unlikely you've read his speech delivered to the Chicago Economic Club in April 1999, when George W. Bush was Givernor of Texas and shortly to be a Presidential candidate urging the withdrawal of US commitments in the Balkans. It was here that Blair acknowledged the urgency of countering the worst of political leaders, notably Milosevic and Saddam, as part of a moral and strategic obligation to the international community. Of the Kosovo intervention, Blair said:

This is a just war, based not on any territorial ambitions but on values. We cannot let the evil of ethnic cleansing stand. We must not rest until it is reversed. We have learned twice before in this century that appeasement does not work. If we let an evil dictator range unchallenged, we will have to spill infinitely more blood and treasure to stop him later.

Agree with this or not, it is a distinctive approach to foreign policy that derives from the PM's own philosophy and ideals. To suppose that it ought to have been calibrated, then and in the intervention in Iraq, to elicit some supposed payback by the US is to misunderstand both British foreign policy and the transatlantic relationship.

Nonviolence again

I went on Sky News this morning to debate nonviolence with the author Mark Kurlansky, whom I mentioned yesterday and who is publicising his book, Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea, in London this week.

We discussed briefly Kurlansky's view that nonviolence is an effective and principled course in foreign policy. I pointed out that passive resistance against colonialism or oppression has been effective only where the protestors have been able to appeal to a common set of moral values with the oppressor. I cited George Orwell to the effect that it's difficult to see how Gandhi's techniques could work against a regime where political opponents disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. I said it was perfectly obvious that against the secular totalitarian states of Hitler and Stalin, or the theocratic totalitarians we fight today, an appeal to conscience will be rebuffed if it is even understood. I added that the only way you can make such a plainly implausible case on historical grounds is by minimising the evil of aggressors and emphasising the sins of omission and commission by our own side. Having read Mr Kurlansky's book, I was very sorry to see that this is what he does; one of his most egregious historical claims, I pointed out, had come straight from David Irving.

That was as much as I had the opportunity to say on air. I will add here that Kurlansky's book goes well beyond the proposition - which is difficult to argue against - that military force has limits to its effectiveness. Plainly there is an orthodox case that even when dealing with bellicose and despotic states such as Baathist Iraq, Iran or North Korea, containment, sanctions and diplomacy may be a a more pragmatic course than military action. But that argument is not a case for nonviolence. Containment of Saddam Hussein (which I believe was doomed to fail, and fail quickly, if we had not overthrown Saddam by force) involved a permanent policing of the no-fly zones and a sanctions regime that caused much suffering. Mark Kurlansky makes a far more extreme argument that WWII was not a just war. (He also believes, and said on air, that nonviolent witness such as that of Vaclav Havel defeated Communism - the policy of containment and nuclear deterrence pursued by Nato for 40 years presumably having nothing to do with it.)

As you may imagine, Kurlansky reaches this conclusion about WWII with a heedlessness of history that makes his book the worst I have read for many years. He gratuitously insults those who fought fascism in Europe and Japanese imperialism in the Far East by mocking the common description of them as "the Greatest Generation" ("post-World War II militarist propaganda", says Kurlansky, p. 138), and putting the word "heroes" ostentatiously in inverted commas. He asserts (p. 130) that "few today would argue ... that Germany had been ill treated by the punitive terms imposed upon it at the end of World War I" - and thereby shows he has not read Margaret MacMillan's prize-winning Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (2002), which does indeed take issue with the common view that the Paris Peace Conference imposed a harsh settlement on Germany. (There is incidentally a plausible historical argument that a post-WWI settlement that had partitioned Germany might have prevented the rise of Nazism. In short, the peace settlement that actually obtained was too weak, not too harsh.)

Kurlansky proclaims (p. 134) the famous Danish rescue of the Jews under Nazi occupation as an instance of the power of nonviolence; recent work by Danish historians using the National Archives demonstrates a far more ambiguous history of Danish relations with Nazi Germany. From 1935, Denmark progressively closed her borders to Jewish refugees, and expelled 21 Jews to Germany between 1940 and 1943. Kurlansky asserts (p. 142) that "Japan had been ready to surrender before the nuclear attacks", but this common claim has been debunked by Sadao Asada ("The Shock of the Atomic Bomb and Japan's Decision to Surrender - A Reconsideration", Pacific Historical Review, November 1998), who showed that the shock of both atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was crucial to the peace party within the Japanese Cabinet in urging surrender. Astonishingly, Kurlansky asserts (p. 141) that "historians estimate that between 100,000 and 130,000 people" died in the Allied bombing of Dresden. Reputable historians of modern Germany in fact estimate that around a fifth of that total perished at Dresden. The seminal source for Kurlansky's claim is not a historian at all: he is the racist faker David Irving, whose work directly on this subject (his book The Destruction of Dresden, published in 1963 and running to numerous later imprints) was exposed by Professor Richard Evans as being founded on "consistent and deliberate falsification of the historical evidence" to serve the end of "achiev[ing] implicit and in the end explicit comparability with the mass murders carried out by the Nazis at Auschwitz and elsewhere" (Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust and the David Irving Trial, 2001, p. 183). Finally, Kurlansky outdoes himself when he declares (p. 135): "Contrary to popular postwar claims, the Holocaust was not stopped by the war. In fact it was started by it."

In the circumstances, and grave though the issues be, I was mightily relieved to come across an assertion in Kurlansky's book that repeats - without attribution and clearly without checking - one of the very few popular beliefs about Nazi brutality that is not true. Kurlansky asserts (p. 135) that the Nazis "had death factories that actually did make soap out of human beings". They did not, a fact that is often used for malevolent ends by Holocaust deniers to rubbish historical research into the Holocaust (see this account of their techniques of misrepresentation). Mark Kurlansky, author of bestselling histories of Cod and of Salt, has thus written a book that I initially thought was shady and disgusting, but turns out mainly to be historically illiterate, morally vacuous and professionally incompetent. The publisher of this foul and stupid work is, I regret to record, the respected house of Jonathan Cape. The book carries a preface by the Dalai Lama, who expresses the "hope and prayer that this book should not only attract attention, but have a profound effect on those who read it" - in the gut, presumably.

UPDATE: Historical understanding is, of course, advanced by critical inquiry rather than established by courts of law. But it is worth noting that David Irving's fabrications and inflated claims about the victims of the Dresden bombing were explicitly considered by Mr Justice Gray in his judgement in the Irving versus Lipstadt libel trial in April 2000. The full text of that judgement is available on the invaluable Nizkor website, and the conclusions about Irving's historiography are here. Having considered the expert witness in defence of Professor Lipstadt and her publisher Penguin Books, Mr Justice Gray noted (paragraph 13.124) "the accumulation of evidence that the true death toll [at Dresden] was within the bracket of 25-30,000". He concluded (paragraph 13.126): "In my judgment the estimates of 100,000 and more deaths which Irving continued to put about in the 1990s lacked any evidential basis and were such as no responsible historian would have made."

It is clear that no responsible historian wrote the book Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea. It is moderately scandalous that no responsible historian was commissioned by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of the publishing giant Random House, to check Kurlansky's book before publication.

Threats to Lebanon; threats to peace

In his latest article in Slate, Christopher Hitchens makes the important observation that Syria does not recognise Lebanon as an independent state. This obduracy is a standing threat to the territorial integrity of Lebanon:

Is it really too much to demand that Syria acknowledge the self-determination, or "right to exist," of a fellow member of the Arab League? Without this line of demarcation, for one thing, the "withdrawal" of Syrian soldiers and police is a merely tactical thing; a retreat over the horizon while the Assad dynasty waits for better days. These "better" days may well not be long in coming.

But more than that, Syria's designs on Lebanon make impossible a comprehensive territorial peace agreement in the region, for reasons explained a few months ago by the Israeli political philosopher Shlomo Avineri. (Avineri is a man of great talent and intellect. He is well known as an interpreter of Marx, and is the author of a famous book called The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx. His public service has included being Director-General of Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the first government of Yitzhak Rabin, from 1975 to 1977.)

Avineri points out that Syria's refusal to recognise Lebanon also prevents Syria from formally designating the disputed Shaba farms as Lebanese. Consequently:

DIPLOMATS who are now concerned with a cessation of violence in South Lebanon and northern Israel should be aware of this conundrum, which is no mere formality. If the Shaba Farms appears in any form as part of the deal, this should be accompanied by an unequivocal statement from Syria recognizing that the area belongs to the Republic of Lebanon. It is my guess that the chances of such a statement are minimal. Without it, the international legitimacy of the agreement - and its subsequent implementation - may be extremely problematic.

To put it more directly, accomplishing a pacific territorial settlement in the Middle East as envisaged in UN Security Council Resolutions is not going to be achieved by leaning on Israel. Israel has responsibilities, but she is not the block on political progress that her critics (or are they enemies?) among British politicians believe her to be.

Nonviolence

The Independent reported last week on a bestselling American author, Mark Kurlansky, whose new book is entitled Nonviolence: the History of a Dangerous Idea:

Shaped like his bestselling works of micro-history, Salt and Cod, it culls the past two millennia, examining moments when non-violence flourished. It ends with a list of 25 pithy lessons, from "Practitioners of nonviolence are seen as enemies of the state" to "A propaganda machine promoting hatred always has a war waiting in the wings."

Kurlansky has been on and off the road with the book already in America, where lists and pithy ideas are a good thing, but questioning the idea of a "just war" a bit more complicated. "Europeans are far more anti-war than Americans," Kurlansky observes mildly, "they've had more wars and they really just don't believe in it any more. But Americans do." It doesn't help that Kurlansky has taken on three of the most sacred "just wars" in the pantheon of US history: the Revolutionary War, Civil War, and Second World War.

Kurlansky is in London at the moment expounding the themes of his book. He appeared on Radio 3's NightWaves last night, and is in conversation with the philosopher A.C. Grayling at the South Bank this evening. Tomorrow, unless we are bumped off the schedules, he and I will be on Sky News at 8.30am, debating the philosophy and practicality of nonviolence. Having read Kurlansky's book, I certainly am flabbergasted by some of his historical assertions, so I hope he will have time to explain them.

More on Friedman

The economist Paul Ormerod has a provocative short comment on Prospect magazine's web site entitled 'The Fading of Friedman'. He considers the intellectual influence of Milton Friedman relative to J.M. Keynes and Friedrich Hayek:

Keynes and Friedman are bedfellows. Both believed that suitably empowered clever chaps could work out rules of behaviour that would smooth the fluctuations of the business cycle. Friedman came up with the rule of an independent central bank controlling the expansion of money at a fixed rate. Keynes essentially thought that if he and other old Etonians were put in charge, everything would be fine. At the end of the General Theory, he writes, “I conclude that the duty of ordering the current volume of investment cannot safely be left in private hands." But Hayek sharply disagreed. He believed that there are inherent limits to knowledge in human social and economic systems which no amount of intellect can overcome.

Developments in economics are taking the subject in the direction of Hayek rather than Friedman and Keynes. The burgeoning areas of behavioural and experimental economics confirm that, for the most part, decision-makers reason poorly and act intuitively rather than rationally. Theoretical models in which actors have very limited, or even zero, understanding of how their environment operates are having striking success in explaining a wide range of phenomena.

Hayek's 1974 Nobel lecture, 'The Pretence of Knowledge', is a major statement of his belief in the inherent limits to knowledge in political and economic affairs.

There he goes again

It's been a little while since I wrote about the jazz musician and racist crank Gilad Atzmon, the man who believes the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion accurately depicts the state of modern America. In his latest venture in political commentary he complains: "As soon as anyone identifies the symptoms of Zionism with some fundamental or essential Jewish precepts a smear campaign is launched against that person."

Let me give you the background to this comment. Recall that, for Atzmon, the state of Israel is worse than Nazi Germany, whose war crimes have been much exaggerated. The Nazis for example, never practised "total erasure of populated areas" - such as the Warsaw Ghetto, presumably. (If you imagine I'm misrepresenting Atzmon or quoting him out of context, you should read my post here, and then follow the link that it includes to Atzmon's considered views on the characteristics of Israeli relative to Nazi Germany.) The Jewish state is, in Atzmon's view, "nothing but evilness for the sake of evilness. It is wickedness with no comparison."

Atzmon is now correcting his audience for possibly supposing that "wickedness with no comparison" might not be a "fundamental or essential Jewish precept". Anyone who links evilness for the sake of evilness with the Jews is, poor dear, subjected to a smear campaign - perhaps even accused of being an antisemite.

It's worth noting what the audience was for this toxic bigotry. It was an organisation called the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, meeting yesterday. I note from the same calendar that the Campaign has also organised a meeting under the title: "Oppose Anti-Semitism. Oppose Occupation." Perhaps it's a misprint for: "Propose Antisemitism. Our Pre-Occupation." As you can see from the programme for the annual jamboree of the Socialist Workers' Party (second item down), the Leninist wing of the Respect 'Coalition' (worshippers of the one God meet worshippers of the one-party state, as Christopher Hitchens has put it) is quite keen on Atzmon's message too.

Trident missiles: just say yes

The BBC reports: "The Catholic Bishops of England and Wales have urged the government not to replace Trident nuclear weapons. Bishop of Portsmouth Crispian Hollis said if the UK developed a replacement, the aim of international disarmament would be undermined."

One of the peculiarities of the current debate on British nuclear weapons is that the opponents of renewing (or replacing) Trident are more apt to stress strategic than moral arguments. (I develop this point in an essay in a recent book, Britain's Bomb: What Next?, edited by Brian Wicker.) If you read Church statements from the debates of the early 1980s, you find some remarkably confident (and tendentious) assumptions about the identification of the anti-nuclear cause with Christian doctrine and ethics. The Methodist Conference of 1983 considered a report, Nuclear Disarmament – Some Theological Considerations, that argued: "We reflect on the mixture of unilateralist and multilateralist courses which the Bible, the life and death of Christ and the Christian tradition urge upon us." (I am not a Christian, but I count myself familiar with the Bible and the historical development of Christian doctrine. I find it suggestive if not suspicious that the report's authors should have arrived at this particular inference from the Incarnation and the Atonement at the same time as the Labour Party under Michael Foot urged - in its 1983 "longest suicide note in history" election manifesto - to electorally catastrophic effect: "We must use unilateral steps taken by Britain to secure multilateral solutions on the international level. Unilateralism and multilateralism must go hand in hand if either is to succeed.")

The opponents of British nuclear weapons now seem to argue on political grounds. This, in my view, is an advance in the quality of public debate. Ethics are of central importance in issues of defence policy, but ethical argument is inconclusive, while theological argument is almost random. (The principle of social and political equality, for example, does not follow from St Paul's words in Galatians 3:28: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." Christians have held this principle while supporting almost any social system - slavery, feudalism, and fascism included - since Paul wrote.)

It is striking, therefore, that when the Christian Churches speak on war and peace, their policy arguments turn out to be question-begging. The title of the Bishops' press release is: "Catholic Bishops Call on UK Government to Set the Example by Decommissioning Nuclear Weapons." It's clear from the context that the example presupposed is not a sacrificial one in the manner of the Paschal Lamb, but a political one. British renunciation of nuclear weapons "could give a new impetus to the wider process towards total nuclear disarmament".

What are they talking about? Do they imagine North Korea will be swayed by a decision on Trident? The mentally unhinged puppet-president of Iran? And so long as those states have or pursue nuclear weapons, then they will need to be deterred either directly or by extended deterrence. Israel has independent reason not to consider nuclear disarmament. Pakistan will not disarm if India does not. India will not while China does not. The notion that British decisions are at the centre of world events is a peculiar anachronism. They aren't, and if a British independent nuclear deterrent adds something qualitatively to our defence - as I believe it does - then we should renew it.

Separately, The Times reports that "Peter Hain, the Wales and Northern Ireland Secretary and candidate for the Labour deputy leadership, also voiced public concerns last weekend, telling the BBC One Politics Show that party members must be involved and not have a decision handed down 'from on high'".

This goes back to a long debate within the Labour Party about who exercises sovereignty over party policy. In my view, the role that party members should play in the setting of policy, especially where national security is concerned, is zero. They have no accountability to the electorate, and no responsibility for implementing policy. I am in favour of their having a decision handed down from on high. That decision ought to be a decisive "Yes to Trident".

Journalism of attachment

This interview with Martin Bell is - though I am biased - worth reading:

When, in 1992, he was badly wounded by shrapnel while reporting in Sarajevo, it was a life-changing moment. In his book, The Journalism Of Attachment, Bell wrote about journalism that cares as well as knows a marked difference from the "only time will tell" school that BBC journalists were educated in.

"Bosnia knocked that out of me," Bell says with a chortle. "You can be fair to everybody, but you can't stand neutrally between good and evil. You can't say well, Hitler killed six million Jews, but my word he made the trains run on time, because you are not dealing with moral equivalents."

I have differences with the notion of a journalism of attachment. I would prefer to say that the role of a journalist is to describe the world as accurately as he is able, aware of the partiality of his information and his personal bias, but determined not to abridge the truth so as to avoid offending sensibilities. My criticism of BBC journalism is that it is far too concerned with avoiding offence. Rather than being 'biased', as many critics (including my friend Stephen Pollard) charge, the BBC has the opposite problem of confusing the concepts of objectivity and equidistance. But the notion that describing the parties in the Balkan wars of the 1990s as protagonists of a comparable kind was an offence against the journalism of understanding as well as of attachment.

I try to keep non-political autobiographical or family material to a minimum on this site, but I should add that Martin was a great journalist, and I am ever grateful for having learned from him how to speak in public. Never use notes; never begin a sentence if you don't know how it's going to end.

Death-squad despotism

The BBC reports, of the murder of the Lebanese politician Pierre Gemayal: 'US President George W Bush called for a full investigation to identify "those people and those forces" behind the killing.'

I certainly agree, but I have a strong suspicion I know already who is behind the killing. To adapt slightly a phrase of Charles Krauthammer: the dimmest ophthalmologist ever to come out of British medical school is your man. A little over a year ago I wrote a 'Thunderer' column for The Times entitled 'Isolate Syria's tyranny'. Here it is again, I'm afraid - because nothing has been done about Syria's death-squad despotism.

Isolate Syria's tyranny

“SYRIA IS LUCKY to have Bashar Assad as its President,” declared George Galloway, the indefatigable MP, on a trip to Damascus this summer. Now a UN report has found strong evidence of Syrian complicity in the assassination of the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February. None but a dedicated apologist for tyranny should demur at a strategy of confrontation.

Tony Blair has declined to rule out sanctions against Syria, but they would be a minimal step. Against Baathist Iraq, sanctions were porous, ineffectual, corruptly administered and a public relations disaster. Against Syria, they need to be more than symbols of disapproval. Political, diplomatic and economic pressure should be exerted with the declared aim of regime change. Forcing that outcome now is right and timely, and may obviate the need to pursue it militarily later.

After 9/11, President Bush declared that Syria had to “decide which side of the war against terror it is on”. There is little doubt of the answer. Under its dynastic despotism, Syria supports terrorists and grants them sanctuary. Islamic Jihad has its headquarters in Damascus, and Syria is known to have channelled arms from Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, Syria also has “an active chemical weapons programme, including significant reserves of the deadly nerve agent sarin”.

Whereas Western leaders have invested faith in Syria to support a Middle East peace settlement, those hopes have never been repaid. Successive Israeli leaders have been ready to return the entire Golan Heights to Syria, but Syria has stymied agreement by insisting also on a small parcel of land that safeguards Israel’s access to the Sea of Galilee. No Israeli Government would risk its principal water supply by ceding land on its own side of the international border. Syria’s fiercely anti-Semitic leadership is clearly determined to sabotage territorial compromise.

Protests in Lebanon after Hariri’s assassination led to the withdrawal of Syrian troops, and Lebanese elections in May decisively rejected Syrian influence. Assad felt the diplomatic pressure so keenly that he fruitlessly sought support from Saudi Arabia. Beyond Iran, his international support is scant. Enforcing the isolation of this callow and callous ruler is the least that a humane and pacific foreign policy must aim for.

Neil Clark

Last March I posted a comment about the blogger Neil Clark. Mr Clark writes a monthly column for the Communist Morning Star and contributes periodically to other publications. A distinctive theme is his defence of the reputation of the late Slobodan Milosevic, who, in Mr Clark’s view, “had little option but to use military means to try to prevent the break-up of his country”, and whose death - again in Mr Clark's view - was a case of murder.

Earlier this year Mr Clark objected to comments I had made about him on this blog. He sent me several emails threatening legal action if I did not remove those comments and publicly apologise. After considering his complaints carefully, I declined to do as Mr Clark requested. In my opinion, the remarks in question were fair comment on a matter of public interest. I told Mr Clark that if he initiated legal proceedings then I would defend myself to assert the right to fair comment within appropriate bounds. In these responses to Mr Clark I took advice from a specialist in defamation law at the Toronto firm of Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP, whom I had had cause to consult on another matter.

This is where my post in March left the issue, and I have not mentioned it since. I am now putting on record what happened next. So that this post can be a self-contained account of the case, I first restate the issues in the dispute.

The first issue had arisen from a review that Mr Clark published in The Daily Telegraph of a book by me on issues of public interest. On this blog, I stated accurately certain characteristics of the review and questioned whether Mr Clark had even read the book. Having taken legal advice, I concluded that this statement was clearly within the scope of fair comment at common law, and also arguably privileged on the basis that it was a reply to public criticism. In any event, when Mr Clark took issue with my comment and said he had indeed read the book, I promptly stated on this site that I believed him.

The second issue had arisen from a statement by me that, on his website and in communicating with the Books Editor of The Daily Telegraph, Mr Clark had claimed that assertions made in his review were supported by a report of the “Institute of Strategic Studies Organisation”. I pointed out that a reasonable person might readily take this as a reference to the well known International Institute for Strategic Studies. I had positively identified Mr Clark’s source, however, as a less well known and far more controversial body called, confusingly, the International Strategic Studies Association. My statement was true, and Mr Clark did not deny it even though I specifically invited him to do this if appropriate. I stated on this website that I did not believe Mr Clark had intentionally sought to mislead. His description of his source material was, however, certainly inaccurate, and properly a subject for public comment. It was obvious to me, having taken legal advice, that I had acted entirely properly as a commentator on matters of public interest.

Mr Clark posed several deadlines that passed. In April, however, I received notification from his local County Court of a claim against me by Mr Clark. (The County Court deals with most minor civil law matters.) The claim sought damages, removal of allegedly defamatory material and an apology. It did not state what the alleged defamatory comments were. At this point, Fasken Martineau, being unable to represent me in an English court, referred my case to the London law firm of Charles Russell LLP.

Charles Russell wrote to Mr Clark on 24 April. The letter informed Mr Clark that his purported claim had clearly been invalidly issued. A claim for damages or other remedy for libel may not be started in the County Court unless both parties have agreed in writing. I had not given my agreement, and did not agree. Mr Clark’s action was thus an abuse of process. The letter added that my rights against Mr Clark were reserved, in particular with regard to costs wasted as a result of his behaviour. A copy of the letter was sent to the County Court.

Immediately on receiving this letter, Mr Clark wrote to me. He said that if his claim was not to be heard at the County Court, he would take action against me in the High Court. He requested, however, that I tell my solicitor I had reconsidered and no longer objected to the case being heard at the County Court, which Mr Clark considered the most convenient forum.

Charles Russell replied to Mr Clark on 27 April, strongly rejecting the contention that the County Court was the most convenient forum for his complaint. The letter explained the reason for the rule we had brought to Mr Clark’s attention. The experience of the High Court in libel cases meant the interests of justice were most likely to be served by proceeding there.

Mr Clark’s claim was struck out by the County Court on 3 May, with the forfeiture of his court fee. No action was subsequently initiated by Mr Clark in the High Court.

As the issue did not arise, I cannot say for certain what form my defence would have taken in a High Court hearing. It is likely that my counsel would have issued an immediate counterclaim against Mr Clark for defamation, owing to comments made in a very long series of posts about me on his blog. (I consider it wrong in principle and self-defeating for a writer to threaten legal action against a blogger, and cannot imagine realistic circumstances in which I would do so. But were I in the High Court anyway as a defendant, all bets would be off.)

Mr Clark’s claim was, in short, an abuse of the legal process, and a waste of my time, my lawyers’ time, and court time. I thought very hard about whether, in the circumstances, to pursue Mr Clark for my legal costs. Eventually, against advice from professional colleagues, I decided not to do so. Partly this was a pragmatic decision. I do not know whether Mr Clark would have been able to pay, and it would have cost me more time and money to pursue a claim for legal costs. But I also wanted Mr Clark to understand that my concern in this matter has been not to cause him hardship but to assert a principle. Mr Clark had complained that my critical remarks were an attempt to ‘silence’ him. This was the opposite of the truth. My posts were fair comment about a writer’s statements on matters of public interest.

Blogger disputes are usually trivial affairs, conducted at high volume but with low stakes and few readers. The issues in this dispute were important. According to an article on the Guardian web site, this was believed to be the first case in the UK of a libel action against a blogger. I defended the case, and have voluntarily borne costs that are not trivial, because an action that would have had the effect of restricting free comment would otherwise have succeeded by default. Blogging would be a less free medium than it is, and than I hope it will continue to be, if I had acceded to Mr Clark’s demands.

I am indebted to my legal advisers at Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP and Charles Russell LLP, whose service to me in this case has extended to reviewing this post before publication.