Oliver Kamm

More on the ICJ judgement

I wrote yesterday about the content and beneficial likely consequences of the judgement in the case brought by Bosnia to the International Court of Justice. Conversely, the danger with bringing the claim of genocide against Serbia was that the unlikelihood of success would allow malign elements to draw inferences from the judgement that it cannot support. The Guardian today carries a comment piece that ludicrously maintains:

Slobodan Milosevic was posthumously exonerated on Monday when the international court of justice ruled that Serbia was not responsible for the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica. The former president of Serbia had always argued that neither Yugoslavia nor Serbia had command of the Bosnian Serb army, and this has now been upheld by the world court in The Hague. By implication, Serbia cannot be held responsible for any other war crimes attributed to the Bosnian Serbs.

Where do you start, and which is grosser? The false assertion or the illegitimate inference? The Court judgement says no such thing. It states that (paragraph 434):

[D]uring the period under consideration, the FRY was in a position of influence, over the Bosnian Serbs who devised and implemented the genocide in Srebrenica, unlike that of any of the other States parties to the Genocide Convention owing to the strength of the political, military and financial links between the FRY on the one hand and the Republika Srpska and the VRS on the other, which, though somewhat weaker than in the preceding period, nonetheless remained very close.

The extent of that support during that period was not sufficient to demonstrate specific intent to commit genocide. Consequently that very strong charge, requiring conclusive evidence, was rejected - though with a dissenting opinion by the Vice-President of the Court. To claim this observation as an exoneration of Milosevic, though Serbia was indeed in formal command of Bosnian Serb forces when war crimes other than the genocidal massacre at Srebrenica were committed, is an insult to the intelligence of Guardian readers (and indeed of Guardian journalists, who showed great skill and physical courage in reporting from Bosnia). When I tell you that the author of the piece is one John Laughland, all will fall into place. As David Aaronovitch commented in The Guardian in 2004: "[W]hat we seem to have in Laughland and his associates is a group of right-wing anti-state libertarians and isolationists, suspicious of any foreign entanglements, who have somehow morphed into apologists for the worst regimes and most appalling dictators on the planet."

Meanwhile, Martin Bell emails to say: "I think the Guardian got it right. I always thought it unlikely this unprecedented action would succeed. But it increases the pressure on Serbia to hand over Mladic." The article Martin is referring to is the Guardian leader yesterday, "Serbia called to account". (Lest I be accused of withholding relevant information, I should mention that I used to have an indefatigable correspondent called Branka Josilo-Perry. She would send me, in great bulk, cut-and-pasted material "proving" that Bosnian Muslims had staged the massacre at the Sarajevo marketplace in 1994 as a pretext for US intervention against the democratic socialist government of Slobodan Milosevic. One of her additional claims, so far as I recall, was that the lily-livered Martin Bell of the BBC had fabricated his own shooting in Sarajevo in 1992, presumably for similar ulterior motives.)

Finally, on the principle of juridical questions in relations between states, I quoted in my post yesterday an article by an American legal scholar Eric Posner arguing that "nations should encourage the Serbs and Bosnians to overcome their differences" by traditional diplomacy rather than law. For the reasons I stated, this seems to me quite wrong. There is an important argument, and one often heard among American conservatives, that a supranational legal institution lacks either the sovereignty or the legitimacy to pronounce on relations between states. Posner and a co-author Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Professor of Law, have written a book on this subject entitled The Limits of International Law (1995), in which they argue also a pragmatic consideration (p. 215):

The democratic hurdles to cosmopolitan action should give pause to those who believe that individuals possess limited cosmopolitan sentiments but who nonetheless ascribe strong cosmopolitan duties to liberal democratic governments. Individuals act through and limit liberal democratic institutions. If there is reason to doubt that individuals lack powerful cosmopolitan motivations, there is reason to believe that this paucity of motivation will be reflected in the output of liberal democratic institutions.

The ICJ has delivered a considered judgement holding Serbia, if not strictly to justice for sins of commission by named parties, then at least to account for sins of omission. That is a limited but distinct advance for improving what Posner and Goldsmith term the output of liberal democratic institutions. It is far too late for Bosnia, but important nonetheless for our capacity to aid the intended victims of future genocidal aggression.

Those were the days

I omitted to comment on this yesterday, but I still can't quite credit an article in The Guardian called "Pioneers' spirit" by one Zsuzsanna Clark. It is a lament for the lost world of the Communist youth organisations of the author's native Hungary.

Unlike those brought up in Margaret Thatcher's devil-take-the-hindmost Britain, I was fortunate to be raised in a society where solidarity and togetherness were officially encouraged from an early age. The Pioneer movement, of which I was a member, was not about indoctrinating young people with the tenets of Marxist-Leninism, as many believe, but engendering a sense of community among the nation's youth.

And if you suspect the phrase "officially encouraged" obscures more than it elucidates, you'll enjoy too Mrs Clark's observation that: "Pioneer membership was an integral part of school life, not just in Hungary, but throughout the socialist bloc."

Replace "integral" with "compulsory", and you'll get more of the sense of this. Mrs Clark meanwhile must have been so taken with her smart uniform and hearty jaunts that she overlooked what one (notably fairminded) writer, Ivan Volgyes, remarked upon in his Hungary, 1981, p. 35: "Aside from inculcating in the children the bases of a Communist world view, the Young Pioneers also perform various support functions." The main support function was to wave at visiting dignitaries to flatter their vanity. But note, more seriously, the antecedent task of the organisation: to lecture children (the age range was six to fourteen) on the virtues of Communism. You might reasonably call this indoctrination; I'd call it child abuse.

Fortunately the regime failed in what it intended for the Young Pioneers. According to the Austrian scholar (born in Budapest) Paul Lendvai in the mid-80s, membership of the Communist Youth League (to which young people graduated after the Young Pioneers) was suffering a drastic decline in membership, while unofficial movements such as the Federation of Young Democrats rapidly attracted support. "The general lack of prospects for youth, whose share among leading officials and managers has dropped by 60 per cent since 1970, mounting social tensions and the personal shock of comparisons drawn on trips to the West, primarily Austria, constitute a potentially explosive mixture," he wrote in Hungary: The Art of Survival, p. 123. This turned out to be a prophetic judgement.

The Guardian is a fine newspaper. There is a point beyond which chivalry should no longer restrain judgement, so I will say that it is extraordinary to find there stuff as ahistorical and enervating as Mrs Clark's panegyric. (My friends at Harry's Place have in addition pointed out - a tad ungraciously perhaps - that the author biography she has given to The Guardian has a certain poignancy: "Zsuzsanna Clark is writing a book on her experiences of growing up under communism in Hungary" - as indeed she was in November 2002, also according to The Guardian. I am sure the long gestation period has been fruitfully employed, as we shall find out in due course, or not, as the case may be.)

Genocide at Srebrenica

I've spent some time reading the judgement of the International Court of Justice on the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro (the press release is here and the full judgement, with disssenting opinion, is here). I am no lawyer, but it does appear to me to miss the significance of this judgement to say, as one writer does in The Telegraph, that: "Even by the snail-pace standards of international justice, 14 years is a long time for a case that however worthy had little or no chance of succeeding in its main aim - proving genocide." Having lately commented on the outstanding reporting done during the Balkan Wars by The Guardian - particularly, but not only, by its correspondent Ed Vulliamy - I'll direct you to the newspaper's first leader today. It is a perceptive assessment under an apt title, "Serbia called to account":

But for all [its] flaws, the ruling of the international court of justice was significant. First, it confirmed that a genocide had taken place in Srebrenica. Second, the judges found by a convincing majority (13-2) that Serbia had the power to foresee and prevent the slaughter, and had failed to use it. Third, they found that Serbia failed to comply with its obligations to punish those who carried out the genocide, either by putting the generals on trial themselves or by handing them over to the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Further, Serbia is continuing to fail to live up to its international responsibilities by not handing over the military architect of the massacre, Ratko Mladic, who has long been the most wanted man in Europe. The 64-year-old general has evaded capture for 12 years, mostly with the help of his former troops and elements of the security services who see him as a national hero.

A finding of genocide is significant in itself given the high burden of proof that the Court explicitly required. In paragraph 190 of its judgement, the Court considers at length the legal content of the phrase "ethnic cleansing", and cautions (emphasis in original):

Neither the intent, as a matter of policy, to render an area “ethnically homogeneous”, nor the operations that may be carried out to implement such policy, can as such be designated as genocide: the intent that characterizes genocide is “to destroy, in whole or in part” a particular group, and deportation or displacement of the members of a group, even if effected by force, is not necessarily equivalent to destruction of that group, nor is such destruction an automatic consequence of the displacement. This is not to say that acts described as “ethnic cleansing” may never constitute genocide, if they are such as to be characterized as, for example, “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”, contrary to Article II, paragraph (c), of the [Genocide] Convention, provided such action is carried out with the necessary specific intent (dolus specialis), that is to say with a view to the destruction of the group, as distinct from its removal from the region.

In summary the Court distinguishes between "physical destruction and mere dissolution of a group". The first is genocide; the second is not sufficient to count as genocide. The crucial phrase, which occurs throughout the judgement, is "specific intent". The massacre at Srebrenica committed by Bosnian Serb forces under the command of General Ratko Mladic was a genocidal act. The burden of evidence in cases of sovereign authority is very high indeed. The Court stresses (paragraph 209, emphasis added) that "claims against a State involving charges of exceptional gravity must be proved by evidence that is fully conclusive". It is unsurprising - in this respect at least, The Telegraph's commentator is right - that the charge of genocide levelled against Serbia should have been rejected, for the evidence is not fully conclusive. It is - I put it mildly, but accurately - formidably circumstantial and suggestive.

The war aims of the Bosnian Serbs were formally to link enormous tracts of Bosnia to link those areas where there was a Serb majority. The intent - an aggressive and genocidal imperialism - was to grab more than two-thirds of the territory of Bosnia, whereas Serbs made up only one-third of the population. To accomplish this, Mladic and his comrades attacked Tuzla, Srebrenica and other areas of Muslim concentration, with - as Misha Glenny puts it in The Balkans: 1804-1999, 1999, p. 644, "logistical support from the army in Serbia, and political support from Milosevic".

This is completely correct, and even understated. A force controlled by Serbia - and specifically by the late Slobodan Milosevic - put Mladic in command of the Second Military District of the Yugoslav People's Army, which in turn provided the nucleus of the Bosnian Serb army that committed an act of genocide at Srebrenica. There is a direct link between Milosevic and the agency of genocide; there is not, by the Court's high standards, fully conclusive proof of specific intent on the part of Serbia, and for that reason the judgement is surely correct. Serbian control of Mladic's forces was not, at the time of the Srebrenica massacre, sufficiently direct and with evidence of specific intent, to sustain that charge. What there is, to the same standards set by the Court, is a finding (paragraph 471) that Serbia "violated the obligation to prevent genocide, under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, in respect of the genocide that occurred in Srebrenica in July 1995".

Legal judgement is not, fortunately, historical judgement. This unprecedented action against Serbia collectively was never likely to succeed, nor ought it to have done. Against individual perpetrators, the charge of genocide with "specific intent" is more reasonably levelled, and more easily done, as a result of this judgement. The direct evidence against Mladic is established. The circumstantial evidence against the late Slobodan Milosevic, as will never now be brought in court but may be judged by historians, is strong, if not fully conclusive on grounds of specific intent. Fully conclusive proof of specific intent to commit genocide (a postwar concept) would have been technically unavailable to the prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials likewise. As the purveyors of the falsehood known as Holocaust denial invariably point out for their own purposes, there is no known documentary evidence of a specific order from Hitler to murder the Jews. The weight of historical evidence makes it possible to argue this course only by means of systematic fakery. In a letter to the Readers' Editor of The Guardian, concerning another matter, in 2005, David Aaronovitch, Francis Wheen and I pointed to the similarity between that "school" of thought and those who deny the facts of Srebrenica:

There is ... a legitimate parallel to be drawn with what has come to be known as “Holocaust Denial”. Most of those who may justly described as “deniers” are, of course, happy to acknowledge that crimes were committed against the Jews. Terrible crimes, even. What they deny, however, is that these were crimes that were out of the ordinary for what was a total war. The numbers were fewer than claimed, the physical evidence is deficient, the photographic evidence is unreliable, the deliberation less overt, the action more of a reaction to wartime exigencies, the comparisons with Allied “atrocities” (e.g. the bombing of Dresden or the attack on Hiroshima) legitimate, the Jews somehow complicit.

What the judgement of the ICJ yesterday points to is the fatuity of the notions propounded by such people. Their names - Ed Herman, Diana Johnstone, the various members of the absurdly named "Srebrenica Research Group" - will probably not be well known to many of my readers. They have been aptly portrayed by the Balkan historian Marko Attila Hoare:

Not a single respectable work of scholarship has been produced by any member of this political category in the West, though they have produced an enormous quantity of what can most charitably be described as extended political tracts, based entirely on English-language sources; indeed, largely on other political tracts by other Balkan genocide deniers. Scholarly laziness, it should be said, is not a charge that can be levelled against actual Serb nationalist historians, many of whom have written excellent books based on serious research; though I disagree with their political views, I respect their scholarship. By contrast, the ‘anti-war’ people in the West write propaganda rather than history about the Balkans; necessarily so, since they believe Yugoslavia was destroyed by a Western or German imperialist conspiracy, and this is not a viewpoint that anyone who actually does research on the subject can sustain. The average MPhil student here at Cambridge would be embarrassed to produce the sort of rubbish churned out by Michael Parenti, Diane Johnstone, Kate Hudson and other ill-informed genocide deniers, whose sole purpose is to confirm other lefties in their anti-Western prejudices. Not one of these people has visited an archive, or consulted the Serbo-Croat-language press, or examined any former-Yugoslav historical documents, or carried out a series of extended interviews with participants in the conflict.

The crass and morally repugnant propaganda of these people ought to be read in conjunction with the ICJ conclusions. The more serious question is what policy conclusions, if any, should be inferred from the legal judgement. This is my view.

There is a plausible and sophisticated case - one that is particularly prevalent among American conservatives - that the notion of international law disregards the importance of state sovereignty. One articulate proponent of this view is Jeremy Rabkin, in his book Law Without Nations?: Why Constitutional Government Requires Sovereign States, 2005. It is a powerful criticism that international law presupposes a sovereign body with the means of implementing that law, yet no such body exists. Other conservative writers have inferred from this that international law is an inevitably politicised notion, which will exacerbate rather than resolve conflict. You can see an argument along these lines in the Bosnia v. Serbia case from the legal scholar Eric Posner here:

Nations should encourage the Serbs and Bosnians to overcome their differences, and for this purpose the traditional carrots and sticks of international relations-trade, aid, diplomatic pressure-can help. But they should not place their confidence in the ICJ. Indeed, if Bosnia were to drop the case against Serbia, this might contribute more to peace and reconciliation than its legal resolution would.

Again, I stress I have no legal training. But from a political standpoint I believe this is an unwarranted inference from the fact that international law, unlike domestic law, has no sovereign enforcer. The creation of a body of law dealing with the affairs of state seems to me a qualified advance for civilisation, even when judged on strictly pragmatic grounds. One outcome of the judgement that bears stressing is that, as The Guardian puts it, "Serbia is continuing to fail to live up to its international responsibilities by not handing over the military architect of the massacre, Ratko Mladic, who has long been the most wanted man in Europe". In a short piece in The Times last year, I commented:

The Hague tribunal secured the first ever genocide conviction [since amended to merely aiding and abetting genocide], that of General Radislav Krstic. By calling “ethnic cleansing” what it really was, the tribunal may have made it more difficult for Western governments to ignore aggressive nationalism. That could only have been accomplished by a juridical route. It is mocked by Mladic’s continued liberty.

Western democracies have a moral obligation to represent those who have no one else to represent them against aggressive regimes. That obligation has been obscured by the impeachable diplomatic and political ineptitude of the Bush administration. It would be a terrible thing if the notion of inviolable state sovereignty were to reassert itself as a result. The Court judgement against Serbia - on which the Serbian President has commented admirably - makes it less likely that that will happen. Progressive and humanitarian values, as opposed to the genocidal atavism whose handiwork the Court considered, will be advanced as a result.

Internet follies

The Internet is a fact of journalistic life. But - for reasons I've suggested recently here and here - it is not a fact to be welcomed, while Internet blogging is a significant net liability for the quality of our political culture.

One of the best discussions I've seen, taking a contrary view to mine, is by the Times columnist Ben Macintyre on the phenomenon of Wikipedia. In an article a few months ago he acknowledged many problems with the site: that its editors were a "self-selecting oligarchy", that consensus is not the same as truth, that there is a disproportionate stress on pop culture and technology to the exclusion of genuine fields of knowledge. But he maintained nonetheless:

The internet ha[s] evolved a new form of information, a shallow, broad, fast, patchy and extremely useful reservoir that should be absorbed with caution and used only for specific purposes. Wikipedia has the same relationship with an encyclopaedia that yesterday’s news reporting has with tomorrow’s history book. Wikipedia is a first draft. It is not truth. But so long as it is understood and used in that way, it may prove to be one of the most spectacular inventions of the 21st century.

I don't agree with the analogy. News reporting, for all its partiality of information and comprehension, is an incremental process improving our knowledge of current events. The Internet is not like that. It has checks - anyone can join in - but there is no inherent reason that these would enhance rather than detract from knowledge. It is quite as conceivable that an initial cut of an entry in Wikipedia will be written by someone who knows the subject, whereupon later editors will dissipate whatever value is there. Robert McHenry, a former editor-in-chief of Encyclopædia Britannica, summarised the problem this way in a piece for Open Democracy:

One simple fact that must be accepted as the basis for any intellectual work is that truth – whatever definition of that word you may subscribe to – is not democratically determined. And another is that talent, whether for soccer or for exposition, is not equally distributed across the population, while a robust confidence i[n] one's own views apparently is. If there is a systemic bias in Wikipedia, it is to have ignored so far these inescapable facts.

It is worth pointing these facts out, however forlorn the cause. I was brought up short by two instances of Wikipediana yesterday. As a point of principle, I have never once on this blog linked to a Wikipedia article, and am unlikely to do so again after this post. If I want an explanatory source for a subject, I go to a proper news organisation, or a writer or journal with genuine expertise. Yet when commenting on a piece by Michael White for The Guardian's "Comment is Free" site, I noticed that the editors of CiF had taken a reference in White's article to the Srebrenica massacre and linked it to the Wikipedia entry on that subject. I don't intend to get into a long exposition of what's wrong with that Wikipedia entry; I just note the peculiarity of a Guardian site's going to that source. Whatever one's view of The Guardian (of which I am a longstanding reader and whose values I share), it is a credible and authoritative commentator on foreign affairs. Its coverage of the Balkan wars of the 1990s was, moreover, without peer among news organisations in its assiduity, courage and expertise. The newspaper won deserved awards for that work. Why does CiF, in linking to an exposition of one of the most important and horrific stories of Europe in the 1990s, go to Wikipedia instead of the Guardian correspondent Ed Vulliamy's work? I have no explanation, but I'm alarmed and I'd be interested to know the answer.

Less serious, I concede that I did consult Wikipedia briefly myself - which perhaps confirms Ben Macintyre's point - when writing of the former MP for the Militant tendency (sailing under false colours as a Labour supporter) Pat Wall. I wanted to check my recollection of his year of death. If you want an indication of why - in one respect alone, and by no means the most important one - Wikipedia is a dubious source, you should read the entry on this talentless and shady political figure. "This article has been nominated to be checked for its neutrality," says the caption at the top of the page - as well it might. (Connoisseurs of political trivia will wish to note that Wall's successor as Labour MP for Bradford North, Terry Rooney, was the first Mormon to be elected to the House of Commons. I can confirm that this is true even though Wikipedia says so.)

Through the looking-glass

Nick Cohen writes in the Wall Street Journal of a political metamorphosis that much exercises me:

In Europe and North America extreme versions of multiculturalism and identity politics have left a poisonous legacy. Far too many liberal-minded people think that is somehow culturally imperialist to criticize reactionary movements and ideas--as long as they aren't European or American reactionary movements. This delusion is everywhere. Until very recently our Labour government was allowing its dealings with Britain's Muslim minority to be controlled by an unelected group, the Muslim Council of Britain, which stood for everything social democrats were against. In their desperate attempts to ingratiate themselves, ministers gave its leader a knighthood--even though he had said that "death was too good" for Salman Rushdie, who happens to be a British citizen as well as a great novelist.

Beyond the contortions and betrayals of liberal and leftish thinking lies a simple emotion that I don't believe Americans take account of: an insidious fear that has produced the ideal conditions for appeasement. Radical Islam does worry Europeans but we are trying to prevent an explosion by going along with Islamist victimhood. We blame ourselves for the Islamist rage, in the hope that our admission of guilt will pacify our enemies. We are scared, but not scared enough to take a stand.

As I am accused by the Socialist Workers' Party of being Cohen's co-thinker, and by the ludicrous reactionary "Islamophobia Watch" of "back[ing] Cohen on 'Left-Islamist alliance', dismiss[ing] Islamophobia", I should add that these charges are absolutely true and I agree with every word of the article.

BBC does the Cold War

Unlike many observers of the BBC (such as Stephen Pollard), I do not consider the corporation's news output to be politically biased. In many respects, the problem with BBC journalism is the opposite. Editors and journalists are so determined on objectivity that they pursue it with a literalism that supplants sense, confusing detachment with equidistance.

Read this account, by the BBC diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus, of "The politics of missile defence". It is in the main a factual recitation of the issues and argument, whereupon, Marcus concludes:

Some pundits have dubbed the new US system the "son of Star Wars". The reference to the Reagan-era defensive shield that aspired to make nuclear weapons obsolete represents a wild exaggeration. But the label is sticking.

And there is a danger that "son of Star Wars" could provoke something that looks a little like a reprise of the Cold War with Moscow.

A fortnight ago President Putin gave a speech in Munich castigating the US's "very dangerous" approach to the international order. The BBC itself reported the speech in these terms: "BBC defence and security correspondent Rob Watson, in Munich, said Mr Putin's speech was a strident performance which may well be remembered as a turning point in international relations."

If it is a turning point - as I hope it will be - then the reason will be a belated recognition by the Western democracies that Putin is not their ally: witness, among many other obstructive and destructive acts, his encouragement of Iranian intransigence, and his sabotaging the prospects for Middle East peace negotations by unilaterally treating with Hamas.

So just who is being provocative here? Why are BBC correspondents so averse to exercising critical judgement that they treat every event in international relations as discrete and without context? Why - while we're on the subject - are US relations with Iran typically characterised as "The American hostility towards Iran"? It is not the United States that is in breach of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, that has lied systematically to the UN and the IAEA over its nuclear programme, that has smuggled Improvised Explosive Devices into Iraq to be used against a military force whose presence is authorised by UN resolution, and that has used apocalyptic rhetoric anticipating the annihilation of a member state of the United Nations. Who is the bellicose party?

Oh, please...

A gushing BBC correspondent called Barnie Choudhury interviews demonstrators in London opposing Trident missiles:

Of note among the marchers was Dave Nellist, the former Labour MP, expelled from his party and once House of Commons room mate of one Tony Blair. Mr Nellist hopes the prime minister will listen to opposing voices.

"This is tens of thousands of people saying don't spend £76bn blowing people up," he argues passionately. "Spend it on public services instead."

Readers above a certain age will recall that Mr Nellist, who was elected on the Labour ticket for Coventry South-East in the 1983 general election, was never "expelled from his party". His party was the Militant tendency, a Trotskyite organisation that instead of running under its own colours chose to infiltrate the Labour Party. It was a mark of Labour's feebleness at the time that adherents of the party's traditions of social democracy and constitutional politics had such difficulty sending these people on their way. (When an activist in the local Labour Party where I was at university, I formally tabled rejecting the membership application of someone who now writes a well-regarded blog on economics, on grounds of my certainty of his membership of the Militant organisation. To my disgust, I managed only a tied vote as the dons present - the students sensibly voted with me - couldn't bring themselves to be so divisive. It was the temper of the times among ostensibly mainstream Labour supporters.)

Eventually Militant's leadership was expelled, and the organisation decided - as Labour was finally perceiving political reality - to organise outside the Labour Party rather than be parasitic upon it. Militant now calls itself the Socialist Party, and its campaign literature makes clear what has plainly never occurred to the BBC's Barnie Choudhury: the three MPs in the 1980s who simultaneously held membership of the Labour Party and the Militant organisation were "our three socialist MPs -- Dave Nellist, Terry Fields and Pat Wall". Not even dual loyalties there: they weren't Labour supporters, but members of another political party with an ideology alien to Labour's democratic values. Pat Wall died many years ago (in 1990, while an MP), but to Messrs Nellist and Fields, I say in recollection of times past: "Yah boo, and good riddance."

Reviewer's peril

I'm slightly late in commenting on an issue aptly summarised a fortnight ago by Roy Greenslade, former editor of The Mirror, in his media blog for The Guardian:

I think we need to put our arms around the Irish News, the Belfast-based daily that has just lost a libel case over a restaurant review. As The Guardian's Maev Kennedy noted, restaurant critics dropped their forks in shock at the news. A jury in Belfast upheld a claim by the Italian restaurant, Goodfellas, that the Irish News's review was "defamatory, damaging and hurtful". Then it awarded the owner £25,000 in damages. Not surprisingly, the newspaper is to appeal against the judgment, arguing that it could set a worrying precedent which raises "profound questions" involving freedom of the press. "If this stands it could be the end of serious restaurant reviews," says Matthew Norman, a newspaper restaurant critic for some 15 years.

Greenslade concludes: "If we ever needed proof that our libel laws need attention then this case surely illustrates the point. It is a disgraceful decision and, almost certainly, will be overturned at appeal. It is a clear denial of freedom of expression."

He's right, of course. It's disgraceful, but it's also bizarre. I am no lawyer and merely have a personal interest in the subject of media law. (I have received three threats of legal action since starting this blog, including one writ - issued, it has to be said, without observable competence - all of which, being certain of my facts, I have declined to accede to.) But The Irish News's appeal must surely be upheld. Details of the review are scarce, but a claim about the quality of a restaurant's food and service is about as clear a case as one can find of fair comment in the public interest. I'm amazed that the restaurant's claim was successful.

The only explanation I can come up with is buried in the report: the claim that the review was "hurtful". If this is the factor that swung the decision, then it is still more worrying a development than Greenslade states. The notion that there is something wrong with causing offence lies behind much recent dilution of the principle of free expression. Claims of opinion that cause mental hurt should be no concern of the law or public policy.

Son of Star Wars

Michael Evans, Defence Editor of The Times, comments aptly on ballistic missile defence:

Putting American interceptors on British territory would be political dynamite and is bound to give renewed life to the antinuclear lobby, which has such strong and bitter memories of the days when this country hosted US cruise missiles at Greenham Common in the Cold War.

However, what is the alternative? Britain cannot afford to go it alone in developing an antimissile system, but if Iran and other countries in the Middle East become nuclear powers, there will have to be an insurance policy, and the only material one on offer at present is Son of Star Wars.

The issue is indeed politically contentious, but it's hard to see why, for reasons Evans explains in his article. President Reagan's vision of a ballistic missile defence - the Strategic Defence Initiative - was too ambitious a plan, which would almost certainly have foundered on counter-measures taken by the Soviet Union. But many of his critics - I'd say almost all of them - misunderstood the reasons for Reagan's proposals. Reagan believed, as his entire administration did not and as no other President has, in a world without nuclear weapons. His views were misguided, as a state of supposed nuclear disarmament would be highly unstable. In diplomatic crises, there would be an incentive and urgency for a protagonist to develop weapons rapidly and launch them. But Reagan was in principle on the side of the anti-nuclear campaigners, as against the position of all member-states of Nato since 1949. It was in that context that Reagan's SDI proposals were advanced. As Henry Kissinger put it in his massive book Diplomacy, 1994, pp. 780-1:

Reagan was impervious to much of the technical criticism [of his Strategic Defence Initiative] because he had not advocated SDI in strategic terms in the first place. Instead, he had presented it in terms of the 'liberal' cause of bringing about the abolition of nuclear war. The postwar president most committed to building up America's military strength, including its nuclear capacity, stood at the same time for a pacifist vision of a world from which all nuclear weapons were banished. Reagan's overused epigram that 'a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought' was indistinguishable from the stated objectives of his radical critics.

The far more limited proposals now current for an antimissile system make strategic sense in a way that Reagan's utopianism did not. The prospect of a few rudimentary ballistic missiles - not the massive strategic arsenal of the Soviet Union - held by bellicose states such as North Korea and Iran, whose word is demonstrably worth nothing, makes a defence system practical and desirable.

As you would expect, CND has no idea what to say about a manifestly defensive system, so it says the first thing that comes into its collective head, regardless of consistency. Regular readers will know that the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is not a campaign for nuclear disarmament. Sarah Baxter commented a few months ago on this peculiarity in The Sunday Times:

Recently Kate Hudson, chairwoman of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, wrote a breathtaking apologia for the Iranian nuclear energy programme, which took at face value Ahmadinejad’s claims to be developing it for “strictly peaceful” purposes. (Since when, by the way, has CND regarded Britain’s nuclear power plants so benignly?) Never mind the preposterous dancing with enriched uranium around the doves of peace nor the missiles marked “Tel Aviv” paraded in the streets.

About a defensive antimissile system, CND apparently yearns for the old deterrent threat of mutual annihilation, with no complications or ambiguity. According to today's Telegraph: "The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament also warned of an arms race saying the system would enable the US to attack other countries without fear of retaliation." You might wish to compare this with CND's simultaneous objection to Britain's replacing (with a reduced capability) its current independent nuclear deterrent - but you know what it's going to be already.

Sauce for the Tory gander

Michael White, on The Guardian's "Comment is Free" site, accurately locates responsibility for Iraq's sectarian violence - it lies with those committing the violence - and then makes pertinent comment about criticism of the Prime Minister this week by the former Foreign Secretaries Lord Hurd and Sir Malcolm Rifkind:

Yet, surely, here are two politicians who might do well to lie low. One handed the FCO over to the other a week before the massacre of Bosnian Muslims in the Dutch EU/UN protected enclave at Srebrenica in 1995. European inaction on their watch contributed substantially to the circumstances in which many died. As in Iraq the numbers in Yugoslavia are disputed, but they are large.

In Kosovo, as elsewhere, it is the liberal interventionism of Blair (bringing US military muscle to bear) which saved lives, without UN sanction too, but let that pass. It was the wash-our-hands refusal to do so that allowed bad things to happen in ex-Yugoslavia - though, as in Iraq, the men who kill women and children are the guilty men....

British diplomacy and British military capacity are in need of fresh examination and review if the Hurdite view is not to reassert itself at the expense of a future Kuwait, Bosnia or Congo. But what is sauce for the New Labour goose is sauce too for the Tory gander.

I don't usually link without comment, but I can't think of anything to add. This is exactly right and well said.