Oliver Kamm

Books for 2007

I recently wrote a short post and a long one taking issue with certain assertions made by the historian Howard Zinn about the Hiroshima bombing. (Zinn is the author of a popular book called A People's History of the United States. The book is reviewed here by another left-wing historian, Michael Kazin. Kazin considers the book "bad history, albeit gilded with virtuous intentions" and "polemic disguised as history", and that "Howard Zinn is an evangelist of little imagination for whom history is one long chain of stark moral dualities". Those sections of Zinn's book that I feel competent to judge - broadly, America's twentieth-century foreign relations; I don't have any particular specialist knowledge of American domestic history - do indeed appear to me light on historical learning, and ill-informed about other countries, notably Germany.)

In my posts, I referred to a number of recent scholarly papers on the conclusion of the Pacific War. I'm very pleased that several of these papers will be included in a single volume, to be published in June 2007, edited by the historian Robert Maddox, of Pennsylvania State University. The book is entitled Hiroshima in History: The Myths of Revisionism, and will be published by the University of Missouri Press. Unfortunately, the Amazon link gives no information about the book as yet, but you can consult the publisher's catalogue here - the book and its contents are listed on page 23. Note in particular that Professor Maddox has contributed an essay (I believe it's a new one, or at least I haven't come across it before) entitled "Gar Alperovitz: Godfather of Hiroshima Revisionism". Alperovitz is the writer who Zinn asserts (see my long post) has never been refuted on the question of America's motives for dropping the A-bomb, but whose treatment of source material has been widely exposed as unscholarly. The publisher's blurb - which I can say is not exaggerated, as I have read most of the essays contained in the book - states:

This anthology exposes revisionist fallacies about Truman’s motives, the cost of an invasion, and the question of Japan’s surrender. Essays by prominent military and diplomatic historians reveal the hollowness of revisionist claims, exposing the degree to which these agenda-driven scholars have manipulated the historical record to support their contentions. They show that, although some Japanese businessmen and minor officials indicated a willingness to negotiate peace, no one in a governmental decisionmaking capacity even suggested surrender. And although casualty estimates for an invasion vary considerably, the more authoritative approximations point to the very bloodbath that Truman sought to avoid.

Also note, on page 22 of the same publisher's catalogue, a new volume of essays by the historian Sadao Asada, of Doshisha University in Kyoto, entitled Culture Shock and Japanese-American Relations: Historical Essays, which will also be published next June. Professor Asada is an outstanding scholar of Japanese-American relations. The blurb for his book states:

In these essays, Sadao Asada examines historical episodes in the interactions between these two countries from 1890 to 2006, focusing on naval strategy, trans-Pacific racism, and the atomic bomb controversy. For each topic, he offers a rigorous analysis of both American and Japanese perceptions, showing how cultural relations and the interchange of ideas have been complex—and occasionally destructive.

Culture Shock and Japanese-American Relations contains insightful essays on the influence of Alfred Mahan on the Japanese navy and on American images of Japan during the 1920s. Other essays consider the progressive breakdown of relations between the two countries and the origins of the Pacific War from the viewpoint of the Japanese navy, then tackle the ultimate shock of the atomic bomb and Japan’s surrender, tracing changing perceptions of the decision to use the bomb on both sides of the Pacific over the course of sixty years. In discussing these subjects, Asada draws on Japanese sources largely inaccessible to English speakers to provide a host of eye-opening insights for non-Japanese readers.

I have read only one of these essays before. This is Professor Asada's conclusive demonstration, largely derived from Japanese primary sources, that the dropping of both A-bombs - Nagasaki as well as Hiroshima - was essential to allowing the peace party in the Japanese Cabinet to prevail and persuade the Emperor to surrender. The range of the subject matter in the rest of the book appears to me essential to understanding what went wrong in the foreign policies of the Western democracies in the inter-war period. By way of contrast between scholarship in this field and mere political posturing, consider a deservedly obscure essay by a non-historian, Noam Chomsky, entitled "The Revolutionary Pacifism of A.J. Muste: On the Backgrounds of the Pacific War". American Power and the New Mandarins, 1969 (and reissued in 2003). Chomsky's argument is tortuous, but he appears to believe that Japan in the 1930s was forced into a bellicose posture by US intransigence. I reviewed Chomsky's book, and that argument in particular, in this post, where I pointed out that among other failings Chomsky had misrepresented the terms of the naval provisions of the Washington Conference of 1921-2. More fundamental, Chomsky gives a false account of the nature of Western policy towards Japan. That policy in the inter-war period comprised military weakness and contemptible racism - the exact opposite of what a prudent and principled foreign policy would have been.

On a connected subject, I recommend a new book by Wilson D. Miscamble, of the University of Notre Dame, entitled From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima, and the Cold War (of which the publisher, Cambridge University Press, has kindly sent me an advance copy). I have just finished reading this; it's a lucid account of the early stages of President Truman's foreign policies. It argues that, contrary to a popular misconception that Truman turned American foreign policy towards hostility to the Soviet Union whereas Roosevelt would have maintained a cooperative stance, Truman adopted a policy of containment only after the possibilities of collaboration had been exhausted.

Finally, I would be remiss in speaking of books for 2007 if I failed to mention What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way by Nick Cohen. It will be published in February. It's an outstanding discussion, with which I am in almost total agreement, of some very curious and malign turns in left-wing thinking. You know the type of thing: identity politics, alliances with Islamism and the rest. The book is also - dispiriting though the subject be - very funny. I recommend buying several copies for friends and family.

Saddam and his fate

The late Saddam Hussein was the worst of rulers. Oddly, this unexceptionable observation is sometimes denied, and not always by the obvious fringe elements alone. A contributor to The Guardian's "Comment is Free" site, David Cox, recently went one step beyond the pre-war fatuity that Saddam was a bulwark against Islamist extremism, stating baldly: "As [Saddam] goes to meet the hangman, the world has cause to rue his demise." (I responded to Cox here and here.)

The scope of the catastrophe Saddam inflicted on Iraq is impossible to grasp fully; under the Baathist totalitarian regime, a "new kind of fear drove through all private space", wrote Kanan Makiya in exile. So consider merely what Iraq - a country with a highly educated population and great natural resources - might have become with a better ruler, even of a marginally less despotic character. Iraq's fate under Saddam included economic disaster, the murder of scores of thousands of Kurds and Shi'ah Muslims, the collapse of the country's infrastructure, and combined deaths running into millions owing to Saddam's wars of aggression. Saddam also, incidentally, demonstrated the futility and destructiveness - so the unnecessary suffering - of relying on sanctions as a tool of international diplomacy. The UN Oil for Food programme was destroyed by Saddam first, and other corrupt parties second. Saddam enriched himself while using (or rather, withholding) imported food and medicine as a means of political coercion. As Fred Halliday has succinctly summarised the record: "At the summit of the Iraqi system of power stood an omnipotent individual, who drove the accumulation of military potential and strategic ambition, but who by that very fact destroyed his country through the fantasies and ignorance that lay at the centre of his thinking."

Saddam, it is worth adding, did his level best to destroy other countries in the region too. He had the distinction of annexing - not merely "invading" - Kuwait in 1990, and thereby abolishing by force of arms a member state of the United Nations. Among causes also blighted by Saddam was that of Palestinian statehood - a just national claim sabotaged, politically and morally, by terrorist fanatics sponsored and sheltered by the Baathist tyranny.

Saddam has a fair claim to have been the most destructive, brutal and evil man of the last 30 years. It's difficult to argue against the proposition that he has now met justice. I have no doubt he has; but I'm opposed in principle to capital punishment. Killing enemy combatants in war is one thing, and may well be a just act. I take this view of the deaths of Saddam's appalling sons; they were given an opportunity to surrender, they did not take it, and their consequent deaths in no respect diminish me or - far more important - the quality of Iraq's democracy. Had Saddam been killed - as he nearly was, by the first shot of the Iraq War - the same would have been true. But death inflicted after judicial proceeding and by execution is another matter.

I doubt there is a rational argument on this point. I feel the same way as the late Bernard Levin, an essayist of humanity and erudition, when he wrote about one of the traditional parliamentary debates on the death penalty (All Things Considered, 1988, p. 144): "Nor is it the horrible barbarity of execution that is the worst thing about it; it is the calm, ordered, impersonal taking of a life, for the astoundingly irrelevant reason that the life in question has taken another."

Levin, of course, was talking of more common murderers than a genodical dictator. But the point still applies. There is justice in the punishment by hanging of Saddam Hussein; there is also a moral argument for clemency. I am convinced by that argument, but it's important to stress the element of justice too, lest we enter dubious areas of reasoning.

There is, for example, a longstanding and pernicious myth argued by the far Right that the Nuremberg trials were a "kangaroo court" (I could give you a link to this argument as expounded by the racist faker David Irving, but will not). They were no such thing. In the words of the critic Clive James: "In extending due process, humane treatment and mercy to men who would have liked to have driven those things from the face of the earth, the Nuremberg judges did us a favour we will be a long time repaying." But it is still possible to recognise and honour the justice, and regret the absence of clemency. (In the case of one executed Nazi, Julius Streicher, it is clear that he was executed not for crimes committed but for being an evil man. This is the one aspect of Nuremberg that I find troubling.) Those who argue in war crimes trials that a capital sentence is excessive are not arguing the same case as those who maintain that the trial and conviction are unjust. The latter are such fanatics as those who regard Slobodan Milosevic as a patriot rather than an orchestrator of genocidal aggression. There are "soft" versions of similar sentiments, and it is important to reject them.

The most difficult case for an absolute rejection of capital punishment is Adolf Eichmann, the only man to have been executed in Israel's history. Reading some of the arguments made at the time by apparently sophisticated people is a sobering experience. The independent scholar Susan Jacoby quoted some of these 20 years after the event in her excellent and unjustly neglected book Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge, 1985, pp. 286-7:

One major newspaper [comments Jacoby] remarked that many people had expected the Israeli judges to sharpen the contrast between Nazism and civilization by a "spectacular gesture of mercy." These arguments induce a queasiness in the stomach, for one wonders why anyone thought it necessary for Israel to demonstrate her superiority to Eichmann or to Nazism. This viewpoint was summarized in a long article decrying the sentence in a Protestant journal: ".... For if Eichmann were spared for an experiment in redemption, it might well spring the lock on our own Pandora's box of guilt and force us to face up to our own sins."

This last quotation embodies all of the errant nonsense associated with the notion that the guilty party is not the criminal but the collective "we." We are all guilty of moral transgressions, and some of us are guilty of legal transgressions, but none of us is guilty of the particular crimes with which Eichmann was charged.

None of us is guilty either of the particular crimes of Saddam Hussein. I regret the sentence and am repelled by the pictures of Saddam with a noose around his neck; and I see nothing improper in saying so, even though I am not one of Saddam's many victims. But I laud the mechanism of justice, impartially administered, that has rightly convicted this monstrous figure of a few of his crimes.

Gerald Ford

It's terribly difficult to make a case that Gerald Ford was anything other than an undistinguished President. I won't attempt it. Ford personally became known - despite being a highly athletic man - for physical clumsiness. Appropriately, his administration was hobbled by three early symbolic disasters. The first and earliest was the pardon granted Richard Nixon. The decision was not stupid - bizarrely, and of all newspapers, The Guardian argues that the "Nixon pardon now looks more like a brave decision that helped America to recover from Watergate" - but it was wrong. Nixon subverted the Constitution while head of state. The Watergate affair was not a partisan political disagreement, but an abuse of power, trust and legality. Ford's failure - born of a wish to bind political disagreements - to treat it as such ironically ensured that the divisions would fester in American public life. Watergate became bound to the Republican Party, and ensured that even with a feeble and feckless Presidential nominee in 1976, the Democrats were able to win a narrow victory.

The second was the economic programme submitted to Congress in October 1974. The measures were anodyne, but they were supplemented by an exhortation to the public for voluntary co-operation in fighting inflation. This would be symbolised by a badge declaring "WIN" - for "Whip Inflation Now" - and which members of the public would be encouraged to wear. As the departing chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, Herbert Stein, later wrote (Presidential Economics, 1994, p. 214): "The button immediately became an object of ridicule and a symbol of vacuity in economic policy."

The third was an anticipation in foreign affairs of Ford's immediate sucessor, Jimmy Carter, in projecting an image of weakness to America's adversaries and - more worrying - her friends. In May 1975, Cambodia seized an American trawler, the USS Mayaguez, that had inadvertently entered her waters. Ford ordered a rescue, which initial reports suggested had been successful. In fact there were heavy casualties - 38 marines died and more than 50 were wounded; in a terrible augury of the botched rescue mission of the hostages in Iran, 23 died in a helicopter crash in Thailand before the mission began. As one conservative writer, David Frum, later put it in his excellent thematic history How We Got Here: The 70s, 2000, p. 89: "If the US military could suffer such losses in an attack on Cambodians, it made you wonder how the country would fare in a fight against the Russians. And if it had not learned from Vietnam the imperative of confessing to bad news, when would it learn?"

But for all this, there are two abiding characteristics of President Ford that should be recalled with respect and gratitude. First, he was a committed Atlanticist and a friend of the United Kingdom when this country did not carry great weight in foreign affairs. Ford worked with two Prime Ministers, one of them appalling (Harold Wilson) and one, in my minority view, good and underrated (James Callaghan). Wilson - a man of colossal vanity who was convinced he was held in high regard in Washington - wrote to Ford in October 1974 in effect giving an ultimatum that Britain would make defence cuts regardless of the damage to Nato's capabilities. Ford responded with a measured statement of fact, worrying about the effect on US allies and expressing the hope that the US would not be the only power capable of international intervention. When Callaghan sought Ford's assistance in the sterling crisis of 1976 - a long story, much recounted, in which I consider that Callaghan and his Chancellor, Denis Healey, performed with credit and to the lasting benefit of the country - the President immediately offered to help. His precondition was only that the Labour government should not impose import controls, as two members of the Cabinet - Tony Crosland and, with much less intellectual weight, Tony Benn - were then proposing. Had Ford been in a stronger political position, relative both to the Federal Reserve and to the electoral challenge of Jimmy Carter, British policymaking might have been easier.

Secondly, the Ford administration did one important thing in foreign affairs. I am strongly critical of the realist premises that informed US policy in the 1970s, but in my book Anti-Totalitarianism I said this in favour:

It is easy to overstate the degree of realpolitik in American foreign policy in this period. The pursuit of a stable balance of power had some horrendous casualties, as when the Ford Administration acquiesced in Indonesia’s invasion (and subsequent annexation) of East Timor in 1975. But it was also consistent with, in the same year, the signing of the Helsinki Final Act, which served to undermine the legitimacy of Soviet Communism by focusing attention on human rights

What were then known as neoconservatives were generally hostile to the Helsinki Final Act, preferring to avoid rhetorical statements on human rights that they were certain the Soviets would violate. Much has changed in the ideological landscape since then, including the character of neoconservatism itself. The much maligned President Ford deserves credit for Helsinki, however. He was right and his domestic critics were wrong. As one senior British diplomat involved in the negotiations, Michael Alexander, said in his posthumous memoir Managing the Cold War (London: RUSI, 2005, p. 62):

These texts [the Helsinki Final Agreement] provided a crucial and perhaps decisive encouragement to the dissident movements in Eastern Europe. Leading Soviet dissidents, including the Sakharovs, Yuri Orlov and Anatoly Scharansky based their Helsinki monitoring activities on their duty to play their part in ensuring that the Soviet government complied with the obligations it had undertaken at Helsinki.

It is far from the worst of epitaphs, for a President who does not merit the best of them.

Pedant's corner

This one, from the BBC News magazine, does irritate me, and not only for the author's forced joviality:

The Christmas rush to buy gadgets and techno-toy televisions is in full swing. But is there any chance of a translation from all those annoying acronyms?

Oh yes. It's compatible with "BD-Video, DVD-Audio, DVD-Video, DVD-RAM, DVD-RW, DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD+RW, CD, CD-R/RW, MP3, JPEG".

This isn't made up - it's the list of formats that function with one of the big-selling DVD recorders of the moment.

You can make a plausible case that JPEG is an acronym. DVD-RAM is half an acronym. None of the rest is an acronym; they are abbreviations. MP3 is an abbreviation of an abbreviation. An acronym is a word formed from the initial letter or letters of a group of words. Unicef is an acronym; UNHCR is not an acronym, but an abbreviation. Acronym is a useful word, with no convenient synonym. I fear that its indiscriminate use by journalists who think it sounds modish may be irreversible.

Charles J. Haughey: an apology

I wrote a post six months ago on the death of Charles Haughey, the former Irish Prime Minister. In it I stated:

Haughey turned out to be as financially corrupt as he was politically sinister. He received secret payments of more than €10 million from businessmen while he was in office, and was eventually forced to pay tax on them only in 2003 after a fierce legal battle. He was a disgrace to his office and his nation.

I apologise to my readers for the unthinking and unreasonable generosity of this judgement. Yesterday the Moriarty tribunal, established to investigate "payments to politicians and related matters", issued its report (available here). As The Times summarises the findings:

The report confirmed what Ireland had already suspected, explaining the yawning chasm between Haughey’s relatively modest state salary and his acquisition of racehorses, yachts, handmade French shirts and a well-stocked wine cellar in his Georgian country mansion.

Haughey claimed to have “done the State some service” when he retired from politics. However, the tribunal concluded that Haughey had generated for himself an undeclared income of nearly £8 million, equivalent to about £30 million today. That amount represented 171 times the value of his prime ministerial salary and pension between 1979 and 1996.

It included a sum of £42,000 paid in 1985 to one of his private bank accounts by a Saudi diplomat in connection with the granting of Irish passports to relatives.

The tribunal also found that Haughey had plundered funds raised for an operation for Brian Lenihan, a friend and Cabinet colleague, who was suffering from cancer. A total of £226,000 was raised for a liver transplant in the United States but only £60,000 was spent on the treatment.

The last paragraph quoted is something I would not have believed in advance, even of the gun-running, lying, corrupt demagogue. As the journalist Ruth Dudley Edwards said in her obituary for the old fraud, published in the Irish Independent:

Charles Haughey did the state little service and a great deal of damage. But at least the voters refused him an absolute majority. Otherwise, we would have a catastrophic rather than a shameful period to look back on. May we not see his like again.

Amen to that.

Jeane Kirkpatrick remembered

The 'Lives Remembered' column of The Times today carries this recollection of Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former US Ambassador to the UN, who died on 7 December. The writer is Anthony Aust, a law academic who served as legal adviser to the UK Mission to the UN in the late 1980s (so after Mrs Kirkpatrick's period of office).

The abrasive character of Mrs Kirkpatrick (obituary, December 9) was well demonstrated by the critical letters she sent personally to Third World ambassadors to the UN. She used a machine to sign them, which was obvious to the recipients, and seen by them as a slight, confirming their belief that she had no interest in their countries. It was not the way to influence people.

Now, I have strong political differences with the positions Mrs Kirkpatrick stood for, and in particular deplored her attempt to tilt US policy towards Argentina during the Falklands War. But I find Professor Aust's recollection quite funny, and certainly can't see how the episode generates his conclusion.

The UN in the 1970s and (when Mrs Kirkpatrick was Ambassador) early 1980s was a place where irresponsible and sometimes contemptible resolutions were regularly adopted by the General Assembly. The most notorious of these was a resolution in 1975 equating Zionism with racism. (The political background to its adoption - in which the Soviet Union played an essential role - was well depicted by David Greenberg in an article in Slate after the calamitous UN World Conference on Racism at Durban in 2001.)

A notable diplomatic rift opened up at this time between the US and the UK. The US Ambassador, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, made clear that states that voted for such resolutions would find that there were consequences and costs. Those who followed the foreign policies of the Soviet Union should in future seek economic support from the same source rather than from the US. The British Ambassador, Ivor (now Lord) Richard, preferred a more emollient approach, and described Moynihan as "the Wyatt Earp of international politics". (These episodes are described in Moynihan's excellent memoir of his UN service, A Dangerous Place. The book is long out of print and unfortunately is now known mainly for being the object of a fairly shameless piece of misrepresentation by Noam Chomsky, as I described here.)

I have little doubt that Moynihan's approach was the better, and that Mrs Kirkpatrick's methods a few years later were justified. Diplomacy is not about getting on with people; it's about getting people to do what you want them to do. Sometimes the most effective influence is to describe the world as it is rather than to use blandishments. Impressing upon certain nations a sense of their diplomatic unimportance is a reasonable way of going about this, if it convinces them that siding with autocracies against small nations does not serve their interests. A small cheer for the late Jeane Kirkpatrick is in order.

Dictators and their future

I went on the BBC Radio 3 Nightwaves programme last night, to discuss with the former UK diplomat Carne Ross whether dictators are a declining force in world affairs. In the stylised way of such debates, I was presenting the hopeful view and he was arguing against it. You can hear the programme here till next week.

This briefly is my case for the decline of the dictators.

1. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has become more conspicuous than ever that the most successful states on any conventional criteria - power, wealth, military might, diplomatic and cultural influence - are not dictatorships.

2. The principal ideological challengers to democracy in the last century, fascism and communism, are discredited forces (though admittedly another variant of totalitarianism, militant Islamism, is a potent threat).

3. The peculiar social conditions of the late 20th and early 21st century are not conducive to the maintenance of dictatorship. The fax machine, satellite dish and the Internet make it more difficult for despotic regimes to control the flow of information. Information has a galvanising effect in political reform. The ousting of Milosevic in Serbia in 2000, the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003, and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004 were all sparked by the rigging of elections, news of which rapidly spread.

4. Despite the controversies of the Iraq intervention, the doctrine of state sovereignty is gradually being eroded as a barrier to the notion that dictators may be held to account for the way they treat captive peoples. The development of intermediate institutions - news channels, transnational human rights groups and common legal standards - is an important factor in this highly desirable shift. All of these may be politicised to some degree (Amnesty International, for example, is no longer the politically disinterested and morally weighty organisation it once was), but the trend is there even if the outcome is often flawed. The fact that Milosevic, an orchestrator of genocide, and Pinochet, the destroyer of Chilean due process and democracy, cheated justice is less important in the end than that the mechanisms for trying them were established. These will be used against the deposed despot of Liberia, Charles Taylor, and I hope others in due course.

There are qualifications to a simple narrrative of the spread of democracy. For a start, the factors I've identified as tending to the demise of dictators don't apply where a tyrant is sufficiently ruthless. Saddam Hussein and Kim Il-Sung & Kim Jong-Il are examples of despots without political limit. In these cases, political reform is impossible without direct external intervention. But autocracies where there is a significant and growing civil society, such as Iran, are different and more vulnerable.

Overall, the state of international politics is one where there are strong and successful constitutional democracies, and a large intermediate area of what the foreign affairs analyst Fareed Zakaria referred to some years ago as the rise of illiberal democracy - broadly, but not limited to, majoritarian rule without checks and balances. (The authoritarian-populist regime of President Chavez in Venezuela is of this type.) The numbers and virulence of outright dictatorships are, in my view, likely to decline, and the pursuit of that outcome should be a central part of Western foreign policy.

Non-declarations of interest

Earlier this year I commented on a review published in The New Statesman of John Lewis Gaddis's excellent general history The Cold War. The reviewer was Richard Gott. There was, I noted, a notable omission from both Gott's review and his byline:

Nowhere in the review do you find the slightest hint or allusion - other than his claim that "the much-derided [Berlin] wall brought a measure of stability to the European scene" - that Gott was scarcely a disinterested party remote from the partisans of both camps. He in fact received covert payments from the KGB. When this was revealed in 1994, Gott resigned as Literary Editor of The Guardian and penned an apologia for the newspaper in which he claimed no harm had come from his activities. It was all a bit of a giggle, in fact: "I enjoyed it."

The fact that Gott received secret payments from an intelligence agency on one side (the wrong one) in the Cold War was directly relevant to the subject of his review. He ought to have mentioned it, and if he preferred to shirk the subject then his editor ought to have included it in the byline.

Recall this episode when reading today's Guardian, which prints the following letter:

I was in the Soviet Union at the end of 1988, travelling from Moscow to Moldova in the west, visiting factories and meeting trade union and local party activists along the way. I witnessed how Gorbachev's reforms were galvanising rank-and-file activity. I had a long association with the Soviet Union, and for the first time I saw ordinary workers openly criticising the party and the bureaucracy of the trade union movement. In the elections for factory executives both the party and official trade union nominees were being rejected.

A further development, often ridiculed in the west, was the increasing importance of the "comrades courts" that were composed of ordinary people and responsible for the initial administration of justice in local communities.

The problem was that the changes were proceeding at such a pace that they could get out of hand and could be relatively easily destabilised. None the less, it is my view that they would have been consolidated had it not been for the treachery of Yeltsin and the greed of intellectuals and senior party functionaries. As [Stephen] Cohen argues, the break-up of the Soviet Union was indeed a crime against ordinary Russian people and the end of an experiment that could have had a positive influence on democracy in the west.
Professor Vic Allen
Keighley, West Yorkshire

Allen did indeed have an "association" with the Soviet Union, a one-party state whose demise he so regrets. He was a spy for the secret police of one of the Soviet Union's satellite states, East Germany. When his activities became publicly known in 1999, he told the BBC: "I have no shame. I feel no regrets about that at all. My only regret is that we didn't succeed."

Allen was a member of the National Council of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in the 1980s. In that capacity, he regularly passed to the Stasi information on his fellow campaigners. (While Western peace movements were clearly not a conscious arm of foreign intelligence, the East German secret police did see anti-nuclear activists as a source of potential recruits.) CND issued a singular press release in September 1999, when Allen was exposed as a spy. That press release is no longer available on CND's web site but I quoted it in my book Anti-Totalitarianism last year. The then CND Chairman, Dave Knight, said:

We all knew where Vic stood – he was entitled to his views and we were entitled to ours. He most certainly did not 'swing CND behind the Soviets' and nor did anyone else. CND was and remains independent of all governments and neither the Stasi, the KGB, the CIA nor our own MI5 have [sic] ever managed to change that.

So on CND's own admission, it considered that open support for the Soviet Union and East Germany was a legitimate position to hold within the organisation. I don't take the view that support for totalitarianism is a mere idiosyncrasy; I consider that stance morally reprehensible. When its adherent turns out to be an agent of totalitarianism as well as well as an advocate for it, I should expect this fact to be remarked upon whenever his views on the Cold War and the former Communist states are given a public airing. If Professor Allen is diffident about providing the information, and the letters editor of The Guardian considers it impolite to mention correspondents' past indiscretions, then the rest of us will have to fill in the missing words ourselves.

Nightwaves

The former British diplomat Carne Ross has been in the news in the last few days for - as The Independent puts it - his "previously suppressed evidence that Tony Blair lied over Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction".

Mr Ross and I will be on BBC Radio 3's Nightwaves programme tomorrow (Monday) at 10.00pm London time. (The programme can also be heard on the Nightwaves website for up to a week after the broadcast.) The issue we shall be debating is not specifically the well-worn Iraq controversy, though I expect the name of Saddam Hussein, whose forcible overthrow by the US-led coalition I support, will arise in the discussion. Our subject will be whether dictators are a declining force in world politics. I believe they are, and that it should be an integral part of our foreign policy to make them so.

Britain - the new banana republic

This article appears in The Times today.

Justifying the forced closure of the Serious Fraud Office’s inquiry into corruption in a Saudi arms deal to buy 72 Eurofighter jets from BAE Systems, Tony Blair spoke as an old-fashioned realist. Nations have interests; those strategic interests are paramount. “Our relationship with Saudi Arabia is vitally important for our country.”

So what price now for foreign policy with an ethical dimension? I wrote a short book last year in which I argued for the PM’s interventionist foreign policies. The principal flaw in them seemed to me not the challenge to autocratic states, but the absence of a sense of priorities in making that challenge. Promoting democratic change in Syria, for instance, is more urgent than in North Korea, which is totalitarian and bellicose but not expansionist.

Our overriding foreign policy goal is the defeat of aggressive terrorism. So pursuing an inquiry into corruption in an arms deal worth billions of pounds would risk disrupting a relationship with Saudi Arabia crucial to achieving those goals. Mr Blair placed emphasis on the national interest in vague terms so we have no idea what the interests are, because he did not say. The tacit assumption must be that the Saudis might withhold intelligence co-operation, and withdraw from the arms deal. Our security interests would suffer; so would British commercial interests.

This is not only the best defence but also the only conceivable one for a decision taken directly by the Prime Minister. Unfortunately, it is pitiful. The lamentable closure of the SFO inquiry encapsulates the method and reasoning of the banana republic. It jettisons the central principle of democratic government. The SFO said this week that: “It has been necessary to balance the need to maintain the rule of law against the wider public interest.” To say that this is illiberal scarcely covers it. It is the lowest point in Mr Blair’s Government, and will be a defining one. It gives cynicism a bad name.

Over the past quarter century democratic governments have generally sought to subordinate discretionary policy to a framework of rules. This is the way monetary policy now works. Interest rates are no longer set by politicians. There is a stated inflation target, and an independent body is charged with meeting it. Likewise,the international system of trade and payments operates increasingly on similar principles. The World Trade Organisation is widely seen by anti-globalisers as a means of entrenching the privileges of the rich world. The opposite is true: a system of rules applying to all member states means that economically stronger countries cannot discriminate against foreign producers and in favour of their own vested interests. It is a way of subordinating potential conflict to the rule of law.

A rules-based system ought, over the long run, to be a more efficient form of governance, as well as a freer one, because it makes policy more predictable and allows private citizens to get on with their lives without an overbearing government. The principal lacuna in the creation of a rules-based system is, however, that in relations between states there is no ultimate sovereign authority that can implement the decisions of the international community. It is possible that Mr Blair has this in mind when he elevates the national interest to a principle higher than the rule of law. It is certainly the justification of his belief in humanitarian intervention against oppressive states.

But that reservation has no place in the practice of domestic government. The rule of law must run because it serves our interests best over the long run, even if in particular cases — say, the workers of BAE — there are individual losers. A society in which the rule of law may be dispensed with if it runs counter to government objectives is a terrible precedent. Worse governments than Mr Blair’s will turn to it.

The irony is that it runs counter also to Mr Blair’s stated foreign policy aims. Saudi Arabia is not so much a state as a fiefdom. Single-family rule is a bizarre anachronism, but this ruling family largely owns the country as well as governing it. The family has stolen vast sums from the country’s wealth. The spending habits of the House of Saud are an inevitable source of popular discontent.

The Saudis therefore clearly encourage an aggressive Islamist ideology, Wahhabism, to divert political dissent into the mosque and then outward to the world. There could scarcely be a more effective way of incubating the forces of fanaticism that threaten us, and the Saudis too. Pressing for political reform in Saudi Arabia is urgent. Mr Blair is not pursuing that course, but instead is acquiescing in corruption for reasons of state. It is an unprincipled decision, but worse, it is a stupid one.