Oliver Kamm

Precedent and the French Presidency

To say of someone that he is among the best of parliamentarians sounds faint praise, but it's true of the former Europe minister Denis MacShane. He is a lucid advocate of the commensensical but, in British debate at least, rare notion that our interests are served by both the transatlantic alliance and European integration. He has in domestic politics some good enemies, including one, whom I have clashed with, who apparently regards donating money to the racist faker David Irving as "perhaps overly idealistic". Finally, MacShane is one of pitifully few figures in British public life who - gasp - speak French. (Among our European partners, the cause for comment is when a senior politician does not speak English. I recall a quarter of century ago there were misgivings in his own party about Helmut Kohl's ability to represent Germany on the international stage owing to his being a monoglot. He did it pretty well, though.)

MacShane has a thoughtful article in The Observer today about the French presidential election. He concludes:

Royal may still win if all the far left and Bayrou centrist votes come her way next Sunday. But she has disappointed many on the European left with her erratic foreign policy line, especially her embrace of anti-European politicians such as the Tony Benn of the French left, Jean-Pierre Chevenement. Just as Margaret Thatcher found a supporter when Argentina's junta invaded the Falklands in the socialist Mitterrand, Prime Minister Brown will find centre-right President Nicolas Sarkozy a man he can do business with despite their adherence to opposing political families.

This is speculation, of course, about politicians whose views on foreign policy are in the first case opaque and in the second untested. But I suspect it's true. I have heard Sarkozy speak on foreign affairs, and he was well informed. Mme Royal's compulsion to harm herself with ill-judged statements on the outside world is alarming. I fear that as President she might emulate the pitiful populism of Gerhard Schroeder, the worst of all postwar German chancellors and a standing disgrace to the noble traditions of German social democracy. The analogy with Mrs Thatcher and President Mitterrand is, moreover, quite a promising one.

Mitterrand (who served in the Vichy regime) was in many respects a man of no fixed principles. There are, however, worse criticisms to make of a politician than this. It took ideological flexibility - to use a polite term for wholesale retreat - to abandon, in 1982, the Socialist promise of breaking the power of big capital and adopt instead an anti-inflationary plan de rigueur involving cuts in social security and redundancies in a bloated public sector. Much of the credit for this recognition of economic reality should go to Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of Germany, the most important social democratic politician of his generation. At a Franco-German summit in July 1981 he had bluntly rejected a half-baked scheme for a coordinated reduction in interest rates to help the French Socialists. But the French Socialists did learn painfully that policymaking works best by promoting incremental reforms rather than by wishing the world were other than it is. France's progressive financial liberalisation from 1984 was an important impetus in the creation of the single European market - which in turn is a practical expression of the social democratic aim of enhancing workers' living standards.

In foreign affairs, moreover, Mitterrand was a reliable ally who made important interventions in European policy. In the early 1980s, the Labour Party adopted an intellectually disreputable and electorally suicidal policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament, and the German SPD opposed Nato's deployment of Cruise and Pershing II missiles - even though the rationale for the deployment had been initially formulated, in an important speech to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in October 1977, by Helmut Schmidt. The euromissiles were a cause of the Left, which then extraordinarily turned against them. Mitterrand was having none of this oppositional politics. In the middle of the German general election campaign of 1983, he took the opportunity of a speech to the Bundestag, nominally to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Elysée Treaty of German-French cooperation, to defend Nato's position on intermediate-range nuclear forces. It was widely interpreted as, and cannot but have been, a tacit endorsement of Helmut Kohl's coalition of Christian Democrats and Free Democrats.

The last Socialist President of France was, in short, an important figure in fashioning a coherent and reputable stance for European foreign policy on the most important issue of that time. He also knew who were his most reliable allies. (On a more parochial note, I recall attending a Fabian conference on defence policy in 1983, shortly after Labour's electoral humiliation, where one speaker who is now thought of as a moderate Labour MP declared that the French Socialists' position on defence was "disastrous". He was swiftly corrected by Bruce George MP, one of the few Labour MPs of that time to have a genuine interest in defence policy, who pointed to a certain disparity in electoral outcomes for the British and French Left as well.) If Mme Royal is elected, it is unlikely on present form - and I put it no higher than that - that France will play a serious role in international diplomacy or be of help rather than a hindrance to a British Labour PM.

NOTE: I wouldn't normally recommend even a glance at the reader comments appended to a piece on the "Comment is Free" site, but try the ones underneath MacShane's article. They are overwhelmingly crude, insular, ignorant, abusive and racist. As I'm cited correctly in this article, also in today's Observer, among those who criticise the Web's debasement of our culture, I could hardly want for a better example. (I should stress, however, that my views have nothing in common with those of another cited critic, the founder of Wikipedia, whose anti-intellectual venture I regard as emblematic of the wider problem.)

UPDATE: In the original version of this post I said Mitterrand had served in ministerial office in the Vichy regime. His precise involvement in the regime remains a murky business, but Mitterrand's role was more accurately a bureaucratic than a political one, so I have slightly altered this description. Almost at the end of Mitterrand's second presidential term and two years before his death, a biography by Pierre Péan, Une Jeunesse française: François Mitterrand, 1934-1947 (1994), revealed many aspects of this ignoble history. Marshal Pétain had even awarded Mitterrand the highest honour of the Vichy regime, l'ordre de la francisque.

UPDATE II: On the background to Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's thinking on the euromissiles issue and the controversy it engendered in German politics, see Jeffrey Herf's excellent book War by Other Means: Soviet Power, West German Resistance, and the Battle of the Euromissiles, 1991. Herf interviewed Schmidt in 1985, and quotes (p. 54) Schmidt's reasoning behind his IISS speech:

I was fed up with [Zbigniew] Brzezinski and [President Jimmy] Carter who had told me that the Russian SS-20 [intermediate-range missiles] did not matter at all... they didn't understand that the SS-20 was a political threat, political blackmail against Germany most of all and later on against others in Europe.... In the course of 1977, Carter talked a lot of nonsense about deep cuts.... I told him [such an approach] would fail.

It is an extraordinary fact, as I noted in this brief article last summer, that President Carter is these days seen as some sort of elder statesman and an authority on peacemaking. When they were in office, Schmidt far more accurately diagnosed that Carter was “just not big enough for the game”. Given that it was Schmidt's insistence during the Cold War that Nato restore equilibrium in weapons systems at all levels in the European theatre, and that this approach of negotiation from strength demonstrably did produce pacific results, it is plain that entirely the wrong man was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize a quarter-century later.

Conspiracy theorists: there they go again

Around 15 years ago I was talking with a professional colleague about the Oliver Stone film JFK, which had recently been released. I was horrified to discover that my colleague took it on trust that President Kennedy had been assassinated by a grand conspiracy that included, among very many others, Kennedy's successor. There was, and is, no evidence at all for this preposterous notion and overwhelming evidence that the assassin was a lone misfit. I am no great believer in the merits of urging political activism: it's a virtue of deliberative democracy to allow people to choose the good for themselves, including a private life wholly unrelated to civic activity; and it's also a virtue to insulate decision-making from people who dedicate their lives to political activism. But I am fiercely opposed to the cynicism that Oliver Stone represents - maligning and defaming democratic leaders for reasons wholly unconnected with normal debates over policy.

With that in mind, consider this grotesque story last week from my local paper, the Brighton Argus, about a Liberal Democrat MP, Norman Baker:

[Resigning from the Lib Dem front bench] would allow him more time to do what he does best: investigate, challenge, push, probe - specifically into the death of weapons expert Dr David Kelly. He was about to embark on an amazing investigation into the murky world of secret service agents, national security and the death of the man who very nearly halted the start of the war in Iraq.

If he could prove conclusively that members of the Government had conspired to get rid of Dr Kelly, it would have been - and still could be - the biggest single scandal this country has ever known.

The article goes on to quote Baker directly, demonstrating that this is indeed no misrepresentation of his thesis:

There is a world in Westminster and the rest of the world and I think most people in the public world can see that Dr Kelly was murdered. He was the world's foremost expert on weapons of mass destruction who could single-handedly destroy the Government's case for war so it was no wonder he was killed. It may have also been intended as a message to other people out there who speak to the press when the Government doesn't want you to.

If you believe that the Prime Minister and his colleagues murdered a prominent scientist for their own political convenience and pour encourager les autres, you are making a startling claim that demands weighty evidence. If, on the other hand, you're spinning a fantastic charge on supposed circumstantial evidence of a type known and discredited in the endless popular literature about the JFK assassination or 9/11, you are engaging in cynicism and wickedness. The Argus story states that Baker presented his evidence to "a packed community hall in Lewes", but is notably light in expounding what that evidence consisted in. One part of the case, apparently, involves Baker's retrospective attempt at reading Dr Kelly's mind.

I have a suspicion I know where this is taking Norman Baker. Note in particular that his speculations do not end with the death of Dr Kelly:

Mr Baker has signed a book deal to explain in greater detail his findings on Dr Kelly's death and he expects to publish it later this year.But the MP insists he will continue to investigate. He has nagging doubts about the official line taken over the recent Navy hostages taken in Iran and over the death of Robin Cook, the MP who resigned in protest at the Iraq war.

He said: "Robin Cook was on Ministry of Defence land, I believe, when he died and certainly I have doubts over what happened."

I suspect, if she has come across this report, Robin Cook's widow - who was with her husband when he suffered his fatal collapse while hill-walking - might look hard and askance at what Baker is insinuating. In particular, she might look askance at the implication regarding herself.

Or to put it another way, one MP appears to lack the slightest sense of the responsibilities of coherent argument and common decency, let alone public office. I hope that the Liberal Democrat leadership - whose record on containing disreputable utterances is not bad - has noticed this and will before long make plain its attitude.

Misconceptions about offence

Padraig Reidy, who is news editor of Index on Censorship, has a piece on "Comment is Free" about the EU's debates concerning Holocaust denial. He states: "Even if the majority of nations in the EU do not sign up to this [making it a criminal offence to trivilise the Holocaust] (and they have every right not to), damage has been done to the EU's self-image as protector of human rights and free speech, and it is unsurprising who was among the first to point this out."

This is unfortunately true. I am a near-absolutist on freedom of speech, and strongly oppose laws regulating or forbidding Holocaust denial. I oppose them in the UK, where extraordinarily Tony Blair, when Leader of the Opposition, supported such a proposal. I oppose them in Germany, a nation whose political culture I otherwise greatly admire. And I count disgraceful the gaoling of the Holocaust denier David Irving in Austria last year (Irving has since been released).

Reidy goes on to identify the figure who pointed out the incongruity in the EU's position - the messianic crank President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran:

Of course, Mr Ahmadinejad has form on this: he is the man who responded to the Mohammed cartoons controversy by sanctioning an exhibition of viciously anti-semitic Holocaust denial cartoons, with the expressed attempt at exposing the west's "hypocrisy" on the portrayal of taboos.

We can agree or disagree on whether he had a point at the time. Personally, I don't think he did: In terms of taste and offence there's a difference, not least of historical distance, between mocking a centuries-dead religious leader and an abysmal event from which many still literally bear the scars.

This is where Reidy goes disastrously wrong. His argument is so misconceived, while the publication he works on is so vital, that it's worth repeating a point I've made several times here before (and state also in an article in the forthcoming edition of Reidy's own magazine). The proper objection to Ahmadinejad's promotion of Holocaust denial is not that it is tasteless and offensive, for there is nothing intrinsically wrong in promoting and publishing ideas that are offensive. What is objectionable about Holocaust denial is that it's false. Holocaust denial is a thesis about history that can be consistently maintained only by ignoring or fabricating the historical sources. It's a demonstrable lie, and those who promote it, such as David Irving and Robert Faurisson, have been found in courts of law to misrepresent deliberately the historical sources.

The moment Reidy starts evaluating Holocaust denial alongside mockery of the Prophet, both being "offensive" but one - owing to the passage of time - being more offensive than the other, he's sold the pass. He is, in effect, accepting the premise of someone such as Inayat Bunglawala, of the Muslim Council of Britain, who said in my hearing (I was also on the platform, and responded with some vehemence) at an absurd conference held in January under the auspices of the Mayor of London, that there had been "no need" for the Iranian congress of Holocaust deniers even in the context of the Danish cartoons affair.

Of course there was "no need" for malevolent fraud: there never is, and Bunglawala's insouciance was not the proper response to it. Don't get into a debate about the gradations of offensiveness, Mr Reidy: just defend freedom of offensive speech.

Jeremiads about the Web, part 2

One other subject I referred to recently was the question of blogging and defamation law, in which context I quoted another Sunday Times columnist, India Knight:

There's nothing pleasurable about being defamed, although it comes with the territory if you're even remotely successful. Even if you aren't, blogs are so plentiful and, for the most part, uncensored that everyone will soon have experience of this, whether they're an A-lister or a plumber....

Both these cases set an interesting precedent - if it's simply not worth suing bloggers, will bloggers become self-moderating, or wilder and wilder in their allegations?

Unsought experience allows me to tackle Ms Knight's question, and my anecdotal evidence may be of interest to others. Wisely, the press has taken the recent claim by Sir Martin Sorrell as the first case of a libel writ concerning a blog. But, as some readers will recall, last year I received an inept attempt at a libel writ for comments that were not wild but merely ones that my interlocutor did not wish to be in the public domain. The purported writ came from the blogger Neil Clark, who I found had given false information about his source material to a newspaper for which he had contributed an article. (Irrelevantly, except that this was the reason I noticed it, the article was a review of two books, of which one was by me.) Rather than recount the issue again, I’ll merely point you to relevant posts that Clark demanded be excised, here and here, and which – because they were factually true and fair comment on a matter of public interest - I declined to remove let alone apologise for. (Looking back with complacence through his numerous emails, I am reminded that Clark also demanded fruitlessly that I pay him damages.)

The outcome was an anticlimax to the threats, which were themselves issued with unfrightening incompetence. (Clark had a perplexing habit of prefacing his legal threats with the words "WITHOUT PREJUDICE" – which of course they weren’t, by definition.) My lawyers drew to the attention of the presiding judge that the action was an abuse of process and a waste of court time, and the judge struck out the claim.

I recount this episode because, though I was a blogging defendant rather than a blogging plaintiff, it is relevant to India Knight's question. When I received threats of legal action, and being certain of my facts, I resolved to stand my ground and consulted two leading libel lawyers. It was obvious to me that I had acted completely properly as a commentator on matters of public interest; it was also obvious to me that, in defending myself against a claim devoid of merit, I would be unlikely even to cover my costs.

That position, in reverse, seems to me the likely state of affairs with the blogosphere. Nobody yet knows how defamation laws will affect the blogosphere, but I suspect they will have minimal constraining effect for the simple reason that the costs for a public figure of pursuing action against a blogger will normally outweigh any conceivable benefit. That may be no bad thing. I am no defender of the libel laws in England, which I consider unreasonably biased towards the claimant. (See for example this spirited call in Spiked - a publication I normally have no time for - for the repeal of libel laws. I don't go all the way with it, but the broad argument about the "ransom factor" in libel cases is surely right.)

But not every accusation against a public figure ought to be allowed to stand: I consider ITN was justified in suing Spiked's predecessor publication, LM magazine, when it libelled honest reporters who were covering the Bosnian war. I predict that, in India Knight's alternative scenarios for the blogosphere, much the more likely one will be wilder and wilder allegations - of which we saw a hint in the disastrous Newsnight performance of the pseudonymous blogger Guido Fawkes in debate with Michael White of The Guardian. I see no effective recourse against this, and suspect that any attempted remedy will do more harm than good: regulations about speech usually do. But to the extent that the blogosphere influences public discourse, there is an additional cost to be placed alongside the others I have written about.

Jeremiads about the Web, part 1

There was a thoughtful piece by Bryan Appleyard in The Sunday Times about the Web. It touches on subjects that I have lately written about too, and Appleyard kindly quotes my criticisms of political blogging from The Guardian. He makes a particularly acute point about the principle of Wikipedia, where anyone may edit entries and whose ubiquity is in my view a threat to the quality of public discourse. (My touchstone for this infiltration is how often The Guardian's "Comment is Free" site introduces links to Wikipedia despite having available an archive of first-rate journalism by Guardian writers that it could use instead. In my latest piece for the site, CIF's editors unerringly linked to Wikipedia when I referred to, respectively, the African Union and Chapter VII of the UN Charter. There doesn't appear anything I can do about this except assure my readers that I didn't and wouldn't put such links in myself, and that I wish no one would do it on my behalf.) Appleyard says, of Wikipedia's philosophy:

It is predicated not just on the wisdom of the crowd, but on its power. So, Wikipedia can be written and rewritten by everybody who uses it. Applying [James] Surowiecki’s argument, this should mean it is the most accurate encyclopedia in the world.

But, of course, it isn’t, because, in this case, the wisdom of the crowd fails utterly. Wikipedia fails because, though the crowd guessed the weight of the ox [in the celebrated example of Francis Galton], it didn’t make the ox weigh that much. Its weight was a fact out there in the world. An elite — scale-makers and compilers of measuring systems — were the judges of this, not the masses.

Wikipedia has a dodgy relationship with any kind of elite. “Ess-jay”, a prolific contributor who was said to be a professor with degrees in theology and canon law, turned out to be Ryan Jordan, a 24-year-old college dropout from Kentucky. Jordan exploited the trust structure of the internet technology to pretend he was somebody else, to steal the authority of academia.

But it's worse than stealing authority. See this interesting comment by one blogger (and be sure to follow the priceless link, invoking a previously unknown principle of public education, immediately before the second block quotation). There is the tacit assumption that editing Wikipedia - "with its arcane language, titles, and rules and its multitude of clans" - yields a different route to authority, shorn of the burden of earning it by more conventional routes. Wikipedia doesn't discriminate between different types of contribution; from the standpoint of a Wikipedia contributor, that's the point and the attraction of it. By design, the most popular reference source on the Web operates by consensus rather than by discriminating between fact and error.

Here is a small example concerning my family, and that I cite because I therefore know the subject and it illustrates what I'm talking about. It would be difficult to name an African country that has suffered war in the last 40 years and whose travails have not been reported by Martin Bell for the BBC. One of those countries, however, is Rwanda. Wikipedia's entry for Martin, sure enough, cites prominently his journalism from that country - a body of work that no one has seen because it doesn't exist. It's the type of small error - something that might have happened, but didn't - that no amateur editor would feel sufficiently strongly about to check, or sure about to delete. Inevitably, given Wikipedia's reach and unwarranted use even by serious newspapers, that factoid will make its way into profiles and, one day, obituaries of the man. It's not important; it doesn't affect his professional reputation one way or the other; it's just wrong. By not discriminating between fact and error, the Web and specifically Wikipedia increasingly blur the distinction between them.

The Mayor and foreign policy

Foreign policy is not normally considered part of the remit of a municipal politician, and some commentators have criticised Ken Livingstone for behaving as if it is. These efforts have not obviously deterred him, so I have sent this email to Joy Johnson, of the Mayor's Press Office, in the hope of finding out more about Mr Livingstone's views.

I recall that last year, at a European Trade Union Solidarity Conference with Cuba and Latin America, the Mayor declared: "If I am lucky enough to be re-elected in 2008, one of the main features of my third term would be a major celebration of the Cuban Revolution on its fiftieth anniversary."

I wonder if the Mayor has noted a report from the BBC this week that a Cuban journalist, Oscar Sanchez Madan, and a lawyer and dissident, Rolando Jimenez Posada, have received long prison sentences for, respectively, "social dangerousness" and writing anti-government slogans. According to the independent Cuban Commission for Human Rights and Reconciliation, the trials were held in secret and without defence lawyers present.

I should be glad to know if, in conjunction with his celebration of the Cuban Revolution, Mr Livingstone plans to make any statement or engage in any private diplomacy about these incarcerations. Given the importance of the subject, I should appreciate it if you or he were able to couch a reply in a form that you would not object to my quoting publicly.

Yeltsin's demons

Here are two articles from expert Western observers that are well worth reading on the political legacy of Boris Yeltsin. John Lloyd, former Moscow correspondent for The Financial Times, writes:

Boris Yeltsin left his successors a constitutional base, the early infrastructure of a market economy and the beginnings of a civil society that he himself had never tried to suppress. He had permitted the flowering of a more or less free media; more or less free travel; and more or less free politics – processes that absorbed many of the energies of active Russians, even if much of this energy was devoted to survival. A man from the people, he rose far above them, appeared often indifferent to them – but probably always wished to improve their lot and broaden their horizons. And he probably did.

He probably did. He showed heroism in opposing the attempted putsch of 1991. He presided over the formal dissolution of the Soviet empire. He was the first political leader in Russia's history to be elected by a popular vote. These were great achievements.

But, as Anne Applebaum writes in Slate:

In truth, he belonged neither to the Soviet Union, which Gorbachev had hoped to revive, nor to the West, which Putin now rejects. Had we ever been realistic about him, we would have both understood his limitations from the beginning and appreciated his strengths. And had we not embraced him uncritically, we would have been less disappointed when things turned out differently from what we, too, had hoped.

What I find most dispiriting in Yeltsin's record is its inglorious final year, the fruits of which remain potent and destructive. He resumed a brutal offensive against Chechnya. He did everything possible - moving forward the date of elections and enabling Vladimir Putin to serve as acting head of state - to ensure that a thuggish mediocrity would be his successor. Putin was very far from being any sort of democratic leader, and his destructiveness has become ever more obvious. When you consider Putin's meddling in Ukraine's presidential election, crass diplomacy with regard to the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and encouragement of Iran's nuclear deceptions and of Hamas, you find a man who has shown essential consistency in his career. It's a shame, to say the least, that Western governments gave insufficient credit to Yeltsin when they were enamoured of Gorbachev. But they have been far too tolerant of Yeltsin's chosen successor.

Defeat of the fringe

Agnès Poirier, on The Guardian's "Comment is Free" site, makes an interesting observation about the first round of voting in the French presidential election:

In a historic rate of participation, 86% of the electorate went voting. Friends and colleagues all over the country, and in London, reported queuing for up to an hour in order to cast their vote. Then, the reaction turned to one of surprise: the French, after all, feel more comfortable when issues are neatly ideologised - left or right. Forget the third way, they are not ready for it yet. What they want is a clear choice. Then came the dreaded realisation that May 6 would reopen France's wounds by, whatever the result, antagonising half of the population. If Sarkozy is elected, expect months of protest, police repression and riots.

An interesting moment came when Arlette Laguiller, la Trotskyite chérie of the French, called her voters to support Royal on the second round against Sarkozy. In 2002, she didn't want to choose between Chirac and Le Pen. For her, Sarkozy is more dangerous for France than Le Pen. Revealing.

Revealing, indeed, but also quite a heartening outcome in one respect. With a remarkable voter turnout, the political extremes have done particularly badly. One could tell from his graceless castigation of the electorate that Jean-Marie Le Pen was stricken with disappointment at his poor fourth place. The change in Mme Laguiller's approach to second-round voting suggests that the far Left also understands the weakness of its position. She urges a Socialist vote "sans réserve et sans illusion", which is what Trotskyites usually say when they've been badly beaten.

Le Monde gives a run-down of the candidates to the left of the Socialists, and it makes encouraging reading. It also makes the point about the Trotskyites' earlier refusal to back Chirac against Le Pen in 2002, and notes that yesterday the Communist Party received the lowest vote in its history, at less than 2%. (Recall that in an earlier Republic, in the November 1946 elections, the Communists came first in the popular vote.) One can say many things in criticism of President Mitterrand, but his handling of relations with the PCF was, if unprincipled, highly successful in banishing the party to the political fringe.

I am firmly of the view that the least bad political system for a reasonably homogeneous constitutional democracy is one where large parties of the moderate Left and moderate Right dominate the political system, and between whom political office can alternate. (This is one reason that I never supported the old SDP in the 1980s.) In those circumstances, there is an electoral incentive - if not necessity - for them to form a coalition of those who broadly subscribe to the parties' respective sets of principles, with the more publicly appealing elements of those coalitions forming the parties' leadership. This sort of arrangement makes, on balance, for better public administration, because it reduces the influence of small parties, which have no incentive to appeal to a broad section of public opinion. It is a good thing that the French fringes have been defeated and that the electoral choice is as clear as it is.

UPDATE: Reading this back, I see one phrase that might be misinterpreted and that I ought therefore to explain. By "reasonably homogeneous", I mean with regard to shared values. I emphatically don't mean the phrase to refer to ethnicity, being a strong believer in the merits of a diverse and cosmopolitan society, and in the cultural and other benefits of immigration.

Debating Darfur

On the Guardian's "Comment is Free" site there is a debate between the aid worker Conor Foley and me on intervention, with particular reference to Darfur. Here it is.

Oliver to Conor:

Non-intervention is a costly policy. Those costs have become clearer with a right-wing Republican administration in Washington that has proved notably diffident at projecting force.

This week President Bush threatened Sudan with tighter economic sanctions if it continued to obstruct the UN in sending attack helicopters and a peacekeeping force to Darfur. He also intimated possible constraints on the Sudanese government from flying military aircraft in the region.

It is a belated response to escalating violence. The African Union's peacekeeping force has shown conspicuous courage, but is inadequate to the task. The US has unfortunately displayed a pattern of firm declaratory policy followed by a failure to implement it. The hope of securing Khartoum's cooperation is, on present evidence, vain. UN security council resolution 1706, authorising a Chapter VII peacekeeping mission, has in effect been diluted by the very body that passed it.

The weaker hybrid force of the AU and UN looks like an expedient to get round Khartoum's objections to significant UN deployment. I fear it won't work; capitulation to malign governments rarely does. Intervention has risks. Without it, there is the certainty of continuing genocide and the undermining of neighbouring states.

Conor to Oliver:

Over the last few years British and American political leaders seem to have been conducting two battles, one against "rogue regimes" and the other against the United Nations, and its charter. We need to learn the lessons from the failures of previous unilateral interventions and some of the arguments that have been mounted by well-intentioned but ill-informed commentators to justify them.

In his speech on April 18, at the US Holocaust Museum, President Bush said he would give the UN more time but that Sudan had one "last chance" to stop the violence in Darfur. Otherwise, what he describes as "the international community" will take action against it. his chimes with earlier proposals floated by Washington and Downing Street to enforce a "no-fly zone" over Darfur by bombing the Sudanese air force.

I cannot see how this will do anything to protect the lives of civilians in Darfur, who are mainly threatened by militia on horseback and starvation and disease. It seems to simply be a rhetorical attempt by Bush and Blair to look tougher than the UN. No-fly zones were a disastrous failure in the Balkans and the policy contributed to the scale of the slaughter in Srebrenica.

The problem with these empty threats is they disrupt the relief effort and put back attempts to resolve the crisis in Darfur by political means. They may also lead to an escalation of the crisis. In Kosovo the rebels deliberately set out to provoke an international intervention, which cost far more lives than it saved.

I am in favour of political intervention in Darfur. We need to get both sides to the table and keep them talking until an agreement has been reached, as it nearly was last year. We also need to ensure that both sides guarantee access for relief supplies and respect international humanitarian law. A package of economic sanctions could help this, but what sort of intervention did you have in mind?

Oliver to Conor:

I take issue with your depiction of the British government's supposed hostility to the UN and its charter. Tony Blair in my opinion is unusual among international statesmen in respecting both the importance and the obligations of international institutions. But I agree on one point.

No-fly zones have proved an inadequate palliative in earlier crises. To the extent that they are seen as a way of resolving rather than temporarily containing a nascent or actual humanitarian disaster, they may merely compound it. But Nato's campaign in Kosovo, which relied on airpower, was more effective than you give credit for. Tragically, a slow start to Nato's campaign - numerous strikes were cancelled owing to bad weather - allowed Serb forces to intensify their atrocities. But the eventual outcome, so far from costing more lives than it saved, prevented a brutal regime from committing further mayhem.

This is not an exact precedent for intervention in Darfur, and I don't cite it as such. Serbia had a substantial concentration of armoured forces and a vulnerable economic infrastructure. Against genocidaires in Rwanda, air strikes would have been less effective. But I reject your suggestion that Kosovo (which was not, by the way, a unilateral intervention) augurs badly for intervention in Darfur.

I agree that economic pressure is necessary, but to a large extent that will depend on the attitude of governments other than the UK and US (notably China). Imposing a ban on travel by Sudanese officials would have symbolic impact. But the Sudanese government is likely to respond most readily to the credible threat of force. There should now be a successor to security council resolution 1706, authorising strikes against Sudanese military installations and a naval blockade, as urged by former Clinton administration officials Susan Rice and Anthony Lake. These measures won't work on their own, but I fear they are a prerequisite to the political resolution that you envisage.

Conor to Oliver:

Your strategy for Darfur seems to be bomb first and ask questions later.

Maybe this will provoke some positive political changes inside Sudan. My fear is that it will have the opposite effect, increase the suffering of civilians and also weaken the chances of maintaining a multi-lateral approach.

You think that this worked in Kosovo, but, on a simple crude body count you are wrong. The death toll in Kosovo was in the hundreds before the start of the bombing campaign. It was around 5,000 by the end. Not quite the "genocide" that some people claimed, incidentally, but not a good precedent either.

I was working at Amnesty International during the Kosovo crisis. I first visited refugee camps in Albania and Macedonia during the conflict and then spent a year in Pristina seconded into the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Tony Blair says that we "reversed ethnic cleansing" there, but I would not count the expulsion of over 100,000 Serbs and Roma from a province guarded by 40,000 Nato troops as a success.

I have also worked in Afghanistan and about a dozen other conflict and post-conflict zones. I have seen the consequences of the mistakes up close and lost friends and colleagues, in Iraq and Afghanistan, who have paid the penalty for them.

Although Iraq was not a humanitarian intervention, the continuing attempts to justify it on human rights grounds have, ironically, made it much more difficult to persuade people to support military action in situations when it could be used to prevent mass murder.

I do not believe that the west will go to war for Darfur and neither does anyone else. Sabre-rattling in these circumstances is worse than pointless.

Oliver to Conor:

The argument of those who supported the Kosovo intervention was not that genocide was committed, but that it was prevented. There were thousands of civilian deaths (more than you estimate). The death toll amounted to around a tenth of that in the Bosnian war, and less than one per cent of those driven out of their homes by Milosevic.

What you call a crude body count might have been lower without Nato intervention - but probably would not have been. Milosevic had incited or otherwise procured the deaths of tens of thousands of Bosniaks and Croats, and had expelled hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians. Failure to repel his aggression would have made us complicit in a gross injustice. There were many mistakes in the intervention, but its outcome was indeed the protection of a threatened population and the reversal of aggression. It was an alloyed success, in contrast to the unalloyed failure of British policy in Bosnia.

Darfur has received a less timely response, with bloody consequences. Bomb first? This has been going on since 2003, when the rebels initiated their campaign. The response from western governments has been dilatory and even quiescent. (This may have been partly for reasons of securing Khartoum's cooperation in countering terrorism.) The Bush administration has been diplomatically active, and its efforts were evident in the signing of the Darfur peace agreement last May, to which you allude.

But diplomacy has not worked. Khartoum has been obstructive with regard both to political concessions and to allowing a peacekeeping force to operate. So it will continue to be unless pressure is exerted. Your assertion that we need to get both sides to respect international humanitarian law is, in the circumstances, a notably unspecific direction. The reason for the humanitarian catastrophe going on is that international humanitarian law is not so respected, and there is no sovereign supranational body capable of implementing it.

I agree that the failures in Iraq have made it more difficult to press the case for humanitarian intervention, and I do not doubt your personal courage. My experience of brave people who have spent much time in war zones and humanitarian emergencies is that their political judgement is not always and in the highest degree reliable, and it is on that point that I wish to press you.

Conor to Oliver:

I followed the Kosovo crisis very closely, and from very close up, and spent a long time trying to find accurate figures.

Two years after the war had ended Human Rights Watch documented 3,453 killings by Serbian or Yugoslav government forces while the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) had exhumed approximately 4,300 bodies. Kosovo is a small place and was very thoroughly investigated. I have spoken to dozens of human rights and war crimes investigators and most use 5,000 as a working figure. Are you sure that we are all wrong?

However, your claim that "hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians" were expelled from their homes before the start of NATO air strikes is most definitely incorrect. This happened after the start of the bombing campaign, which is more than a minor detail, given the rest of your argument. Sorry to repeat myself, but the death toll was in the hundreds before Nato intervened.

Neither of us would be human if we were not appalled by the bloody consequences of the conflict in Darfur, but it does have to be placed in context. I spent the last few months of last year in Northern Uganda where 90% of the population have been displaced from their homes and are dying at the rate of 1,000 a week in displacement camps. A conflict that caused up to four million deaths has just come to an end in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Both of these countries border Sudan and, like Chad, what happens in them can have consequences in neighbouring countries, and vice versa. What we need is a series of peace agreements that can bring stability to the whole region.

The Darfur peace agreement was rejected by the rebel forces, not the government. Perhaps if the negotiations had been given a bit more time agreement could have been reached. These negotiations took place under African Union (AU), and not US auspices, and it could have been the sudden arrival of western diplomats that forced the final pace too fast. I agree with Alex de Waal, who attended as part of the AU delegation, that some in the west seem to be suffering from a "salvation delusion" when it comes to Darfur.

Oliver to Conor:

On the question of deaths in the Kosovo crisis: no, we're looking at the same figures. Ivo Daalder, who coordinated US policy for Bosnia in the first Clinton administration, says with his co-author Michael O'Hanlon in their Brookings study of the Kosovo crisis that death toll estimates for Kosovar Albanians range from 5,000 to 11,000, suggesting that the widespread initial estimates - by Nato and the UN - of 10,000 deaths were probably not far wrong, if possibly slightly high. I don't think your interlocutors are wrong; I think they're scrupulously using a figure that can be directly verified by the physical evidence.

In fact 300,000 Kosovar Albanians fled in 1998 after Yugoslav forces attacked civilians and began expelling people from their homes. I agree that Milosevic intensified his xenophobic and murderous campaign after Nato intervened, and the major mistake made by Nato governments was to underestimate his capacity for violence. But all the evidence suggests that Milosevic's campaign was a continuation of what he intended to do, and was actually doing, rather than a provocation that forced him into uncharacteristic behaviour.

I share your wish for a negotiated peace that brings stability to the region, and admire the humanitarian efforts of those working in the field. I'd take the opportunity in particular of commending the work of Unicef in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But it was not an excess of intervention by western powers that caused the persistence of that horrific civil war. A few thousand UN peacekeepers performed nobly, but with no prospect of having the mandate or the numbers to stabilise the country.

There is a dispiriting parallel in Darfur. The Darfur peace agreement was inherently flawed because it omitted two rebel groups and the one that signed did so in effect under threat. A lasting agreement is not going to come about, on this precedent, without some prospect of pressure on Khartoum. That is a crucial impediment that needs to be cleared away.

Conor to Oliver:

I know Brookings well and I respect their work, but their figures are inflated and do not accord with anyone who was on the ground. It is more revealing that some of the key policy-makers remain in denial.

The point that you have not disputed is that the death toll was in the hundreds before Nato's intervention and jumped to the thousands as a direct result of the bombing. As a humanitarian aid worker, that is the reality that I have to deal with. An ill-thought-out intervention can get a lot more people killed.

Fifteen years ago there were 20 wars raging in Africa. Today there are fewer than five. There are a number of reasons for this, but one is that the UN has got a lot better at peace-keeping operations and has learned the lessons from some of its previous mistakes. I wish the same could be said for western commentators.

I think that we share the same wish for peace in Darfur and agree that this crisis should not be turned into a proxy for ideological battles elsewhere. I hope that the investigation by the International Criminal Court will continue and bring those responsible for war crimes to justice, but my priority for the region is peace - and you rarely get that by bombing.

Oliver to Conor:

I don't have the firsthand experience of the Kosovo crisis that you do, but those journalists I know who did cover it accord with the range I've cited from the Brookings authors concerning civilian deaths among Kosovar Albanians. The difference between 5,000 deaths and a range of 5,0000-11,000 deaths is of great humanitarian importance but doesn't greatly affect our debate over policy. Indeed, I'm surprised you think the policymakers I've cited are "in denial". You, after all, are arguing that Nato's intervention precipitated a sharp increase in civilian deaths. I'm agreeing with you that there was a sharp increase in killings, though I draw different conclusions.

I agree also that there were serious errors in that intervention. But the most serious error was not an excess of force applied too early. Milosevic was able to expel one-sixth of the Kosovar Albanian population from their homes in a steady escalation of attacks before Nato intervened. After the Racak massacre Nato even depleted its airpower in the region. It was a case of declaratory policy rendered incredible by action.

"Salvation delusion" is a weighty criticism. Barack Obama, in a baffling comment alluding to the Virginia Tech massacre, lamented a foreign policy conducted "as if the children in Darfur are somehow less than the children here, and so we tolerate violence there". That is demagoguery. But Obama's Democratic colleagues have made practical proposals for applying pressure on Khartoum and mitigating the risks to civilians. Former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Susan Rice has urged air strikes combined with a rapid reaction force based in Chad. Unfortunately the lesson of earlier interventions in Kosovo and in Sierra Leone is that little will be achieved while bad people think they can get away with doing bad things.

Let me conclude my side of this exchange with admiration for the work that you and other aid workers have done on behalf of victims of war and persecution. But governments need to make strategic judgements about whether, and if so how, conflicts can be foreshortened by diplomatic and economic pressure, and sometimes military force. I will defend Tony Blair's foreign policy on most issues, and I hope he will not under-react on this one.

Conor to Oliver:

My point about policy-makers in denial was actually more aimed at Clare Short, and other politicians, whose retrospective accounts of the Kosovo conflict have reversed the order in which events occurred so that it looks like Nato's intervention was in response to the mass expulsion of Kosovar Albanians from their homes, rather than the other way around. If you read her book, an Honourable Deception, you will see what I mean.

I agree with you that it is not the specific numbers that matter, but the policy conclusions that we draw. I think that if people had been more honest about Kosovo we could have avoided some of the mistakes that were made in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The consequences of external military intervention are always going to be hard to predict. I think that they are justified where they will directly help save people's lives, either by stopping massacres or safeguarding the passage of relief supplies. Beyond that, in the absence of a peace agreement, troops inevitably end up supporting one side or another in a civil war.

The proposals being put forward for Darfur will not directly protect civilians. They are based on a calculation that certain military strikes will have certain political consequences. My fear is that they could have the opposite effect.

The main lesson that I draw from the Balkans is that half-hearted interventions do more harm than good. The "no-fly zone"/"safe haven" policy contributed to the disaster in Srebrenica, so why should we think that it will work in Darfur?

There are two possible solutions to conflict: a political one, where the two sides negotiate an agreement, or a military one, where the outcome is determined by force of arms. If the military strikes that you are proposing merely entrench Khartoum's intransigence, and encourage the rebels to continue their campaign, then the west needs to be prepared to escalate its response, including the deployment of ground troops. Is it your honest assessment, given the current military commitments which you support elsewhere, that this is a serious practical policy?

Speech and apologies

This story appears in the Cambridge Evening News:

A CAMBRIDGE University student who sparked a huge row when he published anti- Islamic material has issued a grovelling apology. The 19-year-old second-year Clare College student went into hiding after he printed a cartoon and material satirising religion in college magazine Clareification. For his own safety and that of others, the student, who is British, has not been named. During the initial furore surrounding the publication he was taken out of his accommodation and put in a secure place. Cartoons which had sparked worldwide protests in the Muslim community were reprinted in the edition. The college has promised to take action to prevent a similar incident occurring.

Part of the student's apology read: "I understand that this edition has caused deep offence and hurt to very many people, both inside and outside Clare, through its derogatory references to individuals and also to various groups, including women, Jews, Christians and Muslims."

A Clare College spokesman said:

"Because of the gravity of the situation and the diversity of views expressed about the best way of handling it, the Dean of Students set in train procedures for convening the Court of Discipline. As events unfolded, however, a collective decision was taken to pursue instead a course of restorative justice and reconciliation. The general and the guest editor were both formally reprimanded by the Dean of Students, and were also interviewed by the Master. The guest editor was required to publish an apology, and also to meet any students who asked to see him as well as senior representatives of Cambridge religious communities."

A note of apology was distributed to all college members.

The college is now arranging a meeting for next term to discuss the problem of maintaining free speech while avoiding offence. Guidelines for student publications are to be drawn up.

I haven't seen the magazine and am just talking on the level of general principles. It's worth being clear on what is and is not wrong in the college's response. My view is analogous to the issues surrounding civiity codes, which I wrote about last week. (Those comments are reproduced here, along with the views of other bloggers.) I am a near-absolutist on free speech - so including blasphemy and Holocaust denial, but excluding incitement to crime. My belief in free speech does not, however, require me to extend a platform of my own to anyone who wants it. I don't have a monopoly of the print and broadcasting media, and still less do I have a monopoly of force; if you ask me to display in my window an election poster for your party and I decline, I am not abridging your freedom of expression.

This magazine is, as I understand it, produced under the auspices of Clare College and substantially paid for by the college. I could wish that the college would stand by the republication of the Danish cartoons, but it isn't obliged to do so and is entitled to take a judgement on an editor who does publish them. If - much to my regret, and unlike the principled stand taken by newspaper editors in France, Germany and Italy - the British press collectively has not published the cartoons, then it is a little hard to expect a Cambridge College to take a stand on the issue.

What is unconscionable about the college's position is its espousal of the entirely spurious notion that free speech needs to be kept in balance with the avoidance of offence, and specifically the avoidance of offence to religious "communities". If a constituent college of a great and ancient university doesn't want something published under its auspices, then so be it. For the college to manufacture a pernicious and anti-intellectual principle justifying that choice is a betrayal of its calling.

In the next issue of the quarterly magazine Index on Censorship, to be published next month, I have an article entitled "The Tyranny of Moderation: Respect and Civility are the Enemies of Free Speech", in which I argue what's wrong with subordinating speech to the cause of civility. I'll return to the subject here in due course.