Oliver Kamm

The Milibands, the Jews and foreign policy

Stephen Pollard, on his Spectator blog, cites an interesting case of "idle and gratuitous mindreading" in a BBC correspondent's analysis of how Tony Blair will be perceived in his new role. The technique is clearly standard among the corporation's journalists: this is from a profile of the new Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, by the BBC World Affairs correspondent Paul Reynolds:

David Miliband's Jewish background will be noted particularly in the Middle East.

Israel will welcome this - but equally it allows him the freedom to criticise Israel, as he has done, without being accused of anti-Semitism.

I find this an extraordinary remark. Reynolds is an experienced correspondent, yet I can't begin to work out what he means. Surely he can't be saying that Israel regards it as relevant to its diplomatic goals whether the foreign minister of a particular democracy is a Jew. If that premise is what Reynolds is insinuating, then the least you can say is that he's plainly wrong. I have had the good fortune to speak in recent years to some of the most senior figures in Israeli politics and diplomacy, and I have never heard such a suggestion, even by implication, from any of them.

Perhaps they just determine on keeping it from me - but even then, such an aim would make no sense. Has Reynolds never heard of, say, Bruno Kreisky, Chancellor of Austria from 1970 to 1983? Kreisky, who died in 1990, was the most ferociously anti-Israel politician to lead any Western democracy since the founding of the Jewish state. Nor did he confine his invective to Israel. In a notorious statement to an Israeli interviewer, Zeev Barth, and reported in Der Spiegel on 17 November 1975, Kreisky described the Jews - not "the Zionists", or some similar equivocation - as "a wretched people" (ein mieses Volk). Kreisky was, of course, a Jew. I know of no evidence that a statesman’s being Jewish – not only incendiary figures such as Kreisky but also urbane politicians such as Sir Malcolm Rifkind - is any predictor of his views on foreign policy. Nor, I surmise, does Reynolds. Nor, I further surmise, does Reynolds have any evidence that Israeli statesmen believe there is. If he does, and he happens to be reading this, I'll be glad to acknowledge my error; but I'm sure he's making it up.

The problem with the sort of unsubstantiated and implausible notion that Reynolds has trailed here is that you don’t have to take it much further before you get into dangerous territory. Why might a Foreign Secretary of Jewish background be expected to favour Israel, not just historically and emotionally, but in current diplomatic disputes? The answer is, of course, that he might if he has some sort of “dual loyalty” – to Israel as well as to the UK. You don't need me to explain why that's an illegitimate and pernicious charge to make in political debate, against anyone. It’s an accusation about someone’s mental states and as such is unfalsifiable; it is thereby not a criticism but always and in all cases a slur. (A few years ago the writer Will Self, on an edition of BBC's Question Time, exemplified this technique by demanding of Melanie Phillips whom she would support if Great Britain were at war with Israel. I have, incidentally, an objection on similar grounds to the charge that someone – say, Norman Finkelstein or Noam Chomsky – is a “self-hating Jew”, and I never use the term.)

I’m certain Reynolds doesn’t have this in mind – I just don’t think he’s examined what he’s saying. I’m none too convinced, either, by his suggestion that mere critics of Israel run a routine danger of being castigated as antisemitic. Some fringe elements do level that charge indiscriminately (and I do mean indiscriminately; this bunch of far-right nutters has me on its list). The notion that this is a standard part of the political debate that a Foreign Secretary would occupy himself with is – again, unless Reynolds can adduce evidence to the contrary - frankly risible.

The question of the Miliband brothers’ Jewish antecedents is interesting in itself, without trying to draw inferences from them about views on foreign policy. Their father, the late Marxist theorist Ralph Miliband, is a man for whom I have a certain intellectual respect leavened with real contempt. See, most particularly, his essay for the annual Socialist Register in 1980 entitled “Military Intervention and Socialist Internationalism” - anticipating an issue that has much exercised the Left more recently.

Miliband argues: “In socialist terms, the overthrow of a regime from outside, by military intervention, and without any measure of popular involvement, must always be an exceedingly doubtful enterprise, of the very last resort.”

You might think, with the failures of our intervention in Iraq in mind, that he’s stating a mere truism. But if you read the essay, you’ll see that he’s not. The examples he has in mind, and discusses at length, are the then recent military interventions by Tanzania to overthrow Idi Amin in Uganda and by Vietnam to overthrow the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. Miliband considers them alongside the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, which he objects to on the grounds that it “has obviously provided a very powerful reinforcement to the worst reactionaries in the Western camp”. You have to believe me – and you can check if you don’t – that he treats the overthrow of Pol Pot as analogously objectionable:

No doubt, a pliant regime now exists in Phnom Penh. But it lacks legitimacy and requires the support of a Vietnamese army of occupation. The enterprise has reinforced secular suspicions of Vietnamese designs upon Kampuchea. Like the Russians in Afghanistan, the Vietnamese have been drawn into a permanent struggle with Kampuchean guerillas, with the usual accompaniment of repression and the killing of innocent civilians. The invasion has also weakened Vietnam's international position, and strengthened reactionary forces in the region and beyond. Here too, it does not seem unreasonable to ask 'What kind of security is this?'

A few years ago a highly sympathetic biography entitled Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left, 2002, rose and fell without trace (despite Tony Benn's prediction in the foreword that it would "help a whole new generation of socialists to appreciate the unique role that Ralph played in the progressive politics of the period"). Even the author, Professor Michael Newman of London Metropolitan University, conceded (p. 294) that Miliband's essay "was flawed because it understated the atrocities of the Pol Pot regime and the justification for intervention following its crimes against humanity." And to be fair to him, Newman - daintily but not evasively - identifies the intellectual origins of that "flawed" position (p. 318, n. 124):

... Miliband's judgement in aligning his position so closely to that of Chomsky appears questionable. Without any real expertise on the area, he had understated the enormity of the crimes and endorsed a particular interpretation which appeared to minimise the responsibility of the Pol Pot regime itself. It is not entirely clear why he took this position, but three factors were probably particularly important. The first was the depth of his condemnation of American policy in Indochina: having opposed the war against Vietnam so bitterly, he may have had a predisposition to hold the US responsible for all the crimes in the region. Secondly, there was the perennial problem that the Right was exploiting the crimes of the Khymer [sic] Rouge regime as part of its general anti-communist propaganda and he was probably reacting against this. And, thirdly, he was trying to develop a general theoretical argument against socialist regimes intervening in the way that the Vietnamese had done and his case would have become more difficult to sustain had he accepted that the [sic] Pol Pot had carried out crimes against humanity on a massive scale.

Amazingly enough, Newman goes on to say that (his emphasis) "Miliband's general points [in his essay] were important and have considerable relevance for the post-Cold War interventions by Nato". In my view, a general argument whose practical application involves denying the atrocities of the worst regime since the Third Reich can reasonably be dismissed out of hand. (Recalling this episode, I read with complacence an accusation from the same Noam Chomsky, a quarter-century later, concerning my "standard reaction of tacit acquiescence to horrendous crimes". The stars will burn out and the heavens implode before I manage to match the Professor's own accomplishments in that field.)

But I digress, a long way. This is a post about the Milibands and the Jews. And I am indebted to Newman's biography in that respect, because he does indicate that the late Ralph Miliband took a position on the Middle East that, while not much better informed than his views on Indochina, was incomparably more thoughtful. Writing in May 1967 to the American Marxist Leo Huberman, Miliband set out his views on what was clearly coming, and that came to be known as the Six-Day War. In effect he uses socialist categories to reason himself into a statement of the obvious (pp. 130-31 of Newman's biography):

[T]here would, from a socialist point of view, be a real problem here if it could be shown that Israel, for all its imperialist or rather Western-oriented commitments, was a genuine obstacle to socialist Arab revolutions, in Egypt or anywhere else. But this is nonsense. On the contrary, Israel is an excuse which most of these regimes use for not pushing further their revolutions. It is a bad excuse.

He concluded:

Naturally, I have asked myself many a time whether my views are influenced or shaped by the fact that I am Jewish. One cannot tell, though I would hope that even if I were not, I would still think that the liquidation of two million people, a large number of which are survivors from the camps, would be an appalling catastrophe. And certainly, being Jewish does not mean that one must, to prove one's socialist bona fides, be Nasserite à outrance [to the utmost].

I find this, once you make allowance for Miliband's political premises, not only admirable but also moving. In Miliband's mind's eye must have been the fate of those Jews who, unlike him and his father, had failed to escape from occupied Europe in 1940. I can't imagine - I don't know - how such statements would be received if they were, say, declaimed from the platform of a Respect party rally today. But for all their honesty, they are sentiments of no practical significance in forecasting the views of Ralph Miliband's son as Labour's Foreign Secretary. Of course no British government will be sympathetic to bellicose threats against Israel, and any government will rightly seek in that region a pacific two-state territorial settlement. There is a risk that Gordon Brown's government will not perceive fully, as Tony Blair undoubtedly did, the threats that Israel contends with, or understand that security is a prerequisite - not an outcome - of a lasting peace settlement. We can only judge that in practice.

I'm sorry to have taken 1,800 words and various diversions to say this, but David Miliband's antecedents give us no clue whatsoever to his stance as Foreign Secretary.

Transparent solutions to opaque terror problems

This article appears in The Times today.

The struggle against Islamist terrorism will probably extend for decades, and what might have been designed as emergency measures need to last. So we need to find a way for a protective State not to become an intrusive one, a way to keep the public on side. A fascinating approach to the problem comes in a new book called The New Protective State, edited by the historian Peter Hennessy.

It makes the case for an ethical basis for intelligence work just as there are ethical criteria for war: to defend the institutions of a free society, to limit the dangers of restrictions on individual liberty and maintain public confidence.

One proposition is based on the experience of Denmark’s intelligence service, which produces for public consumption an unclassified version of its annual assessment of threats. If the exercise were copied in the UK, then the experience of the British government “dossiers” before the Iraq war might make it hard for the public to trust such an annual intelligence report. But that may come, provided that it was clear who wrote the report and who authorised it.

It would explain to the public the grounds for security policy while distinguishing between political and intelligence judgments. There is also a need for a proper process of authorisation for the gathering of sensitive intelligence, and judicial scrutiny of the activities of the intelligence services.

Gathering intelligence against a loose network of terrorists is different from the intelligence practised in the Cold War. Accurately assessing military capabilities and intentions was integral to denying advantage to the Soviet Union. While the consequence of a miscalculation might have been the destruction of civilisation, the identity and location of the threat were obvious. This is not true with small theocratic terrorist groups, who might kill thousands of civilians but who do not currently represent an existential threat. This inevitably requires a high degree of domestic surveillance.

This is why fresh thinking about a new protective State is necessary. Some sacrifice of privacy is necessary, but – because the threat will be with us for a long time – it needs to be made formal rather than being an unplanned and insidous encroachment on civil liberties.

For those of us who see the struggle against theocratic fanaticism as the antitotalitarianism of our time, there are some principles that cannot be breached: a prohibition on torture at one extreme, and on a more mundane level that the security services are made accountable to outside bodies.

It will be a long struggle; but as we learnt in the Cold War, a liberal society with free institutions is more adaptable than anything available to our totalitarian enemies.

Man of the hour

I have written an article for The New Republic Online entitled "Man of the Hour: Tony Blair will Make a Good Middle East Envoy". The title is self-explanatory, and may be compared with the views of the director of research at Chatham House ("it's a most unfortunate idea") and Robert Fisk ("I simply could not believe my ears"), whom I quote. The link requires registration for the site, which is free.

UPDATE: Sorry; my mistake: the article is in fact behind a subscription barrier. But take it from me: Blair is the man. My more general reflection is that in office, he was a great statesman and radical, above all for holding to the conviction that oppressive regimes are illegitimate rather than facts of political life. I doubt there will be a prime minister in my lifetime more worthy of respect.

Brown's foreign policy

I have written an article for The New Republic Online entitled "Prime Time: Gordon Brown's Foreign Policy", which attempts to predict the bent of Brown's government in foreign relations and in particular the Atlantic alliance. To read the article requires registration for the site, which is free.

Libel law and the digital age, once more

At the risk of appearing obsessive, I am posting for the third time (after these posts) on the vexed question of the state of libel law after the Mumsnet settlement with the childcare author Gina Ford. I do consider that, while laws against defamation are necessary, there is a threat to free speech on the Web from unclear and antiquated libel laws, and that that issue has not been given enough attention by policymakers.

In my previous posts I tried to summarise, so far as my lay knowledge permitted, the grounds for concern about the mess that constitutes libel law relating to the Web. Almost as soon as I'd posted my comments, I came across a much clearer explanation by an author who, unlike me, has academic and professional expertise in the field. He is Michael Geist, a professor of Internet law, writing last year on this subject for the BBC. His brief article is worth reading in full but the relevant section is this:

Given how easily content can be forced off the internet with claims of defamation, the law creates a significant restriction on free speech.

Intermediaries are understandably reluctant to ignore threats of litigation, yet without a legal safe harbour that protects them from liability, it is likely that the number of questionable defamation claims will continue to rise.

Addressing the free speech issue would require legislative change.

For example, the United States enacted a law 10 years ago that provides broad immunity for intermediaries that host third-party content. That provision has since been used dozens of times to immunize ISPs, large companies such as Amazon.com, and small websites who could ill-afford to fight legal challenges.

A similar provision in the Commonwealth countries would protect sites such as P2Pnet, as well as the thousands of ISPs, websites, and bloggers, who are contributing to a robust online dialogue, but today find themselves vulnerable to lawsuits whose primary purpose may be to suppress legitimate speech.

This is an admirably succinct summary of the problem. As I indicated in my earlier posts, I have no specialist knowledge in this field but unsought and apparently unique experience relevant to it. (Last year, I defeated with ease a purported libel claim that was both worthless and stupefyingly inept, but it was still a cost to me in time and money - as well as a waste of the court's time - to despatch it.) I shall be making a fuss on this subject, here and elsewhere, till - I hope - the law is made applicable to a digital age.

The party's over

During the last Conservative leadership election, I was discussing the contenders' prospects with a prominent Tory. It was, my interlocutor said, the first election of any kind that he could recall where it was completely impossible to adduce an argument for one of the principal contenders. I could see what he meant. Even in an election where one side of the argument is obviously incredible and discredited - say, Labour in 1983 or the Tories in 1997 - you can usually at least construct a theoretical argument for voting that way. (For my own purposes I did construct an argument for voting Labour in 1983, and then acted on it - but my case presupposed that Labour had no chance of victory.) Yet in the Tory leadership election there was no obvious, or even ingenious, rational case for supporting David Davis.

I feel much the same way about Labour's Deputy Leader. Harriet Harman's election gives an overriding message to the electorate: Labour is short on talent, and does not penalise its absence. Many useless ministers have come and gone since New Labour took office. Tony Blair's first Cabinet - drawn, under the party's arcane rules, from the previous Shadow Cabinet - was stuffed with them. They included David Clark, Chris Smith, Gavin Strang, Margaret Beckett, Mo Mowlam and Ron Davies. But none was more obviously over-promoted than Harriet Harman. As Social Security Secretary, she began - quite correctly - by emphasising the role of social security in creating incentives to work and save. She proved unable to propose or even effectively defend welfare reforms. Labour failed at the first attempt, with the abolition of lone-parent premia for new claimants. The measure had scant budgetary significance, but symbolism. Ms Harman's incoherent attempt to defend the measure on the Today programme was damaging for her and for the Government. Her inability to stamp authority on her department was symbolised in one of the most intense feuds in politics, between her and Frank Field - ending in his resignation and her sacking.

But the Labour Party prefers its leaders docile (witness Denis Healey's successive failures to secure the top job), and this deputy knows how to ingratiate. Witness this BBC profile (which begins with euphemism and gets wrong the year of Ms Harman's election to Westminster: it was in the 1982 Peckham by-election, not the 1983 general election):

Harriet Harman's victory in the race to be Labour's deputy leader confirms her status as one of the great survivors of modern politics. She has steadily rebuilt her standing in the party after being sacked from Tony Blair's first Cabinet in 1998. She returned to government in 2001 as the first female solicitor general....

Often portrayed as an ardent Brownite, she made much of the fact that she has worked with Mr Brown in the past in her deputy leadership campaign, serving as his deputy when Labour were in opposition. But as the wife of senior Transport and General Workers' Union official - and Labour Party treasurer - Jack Dromey, she has also has strong Old Labour credentials. She also stood out from the other ministers in the six-way deputy contest by saying she regretted voting for the Iraq war and said the party needed to apologise for it.

New Labour was a noble venture in spite of its tortuous attempts to find ways of restating the obvious. Tony Blair has been an outstanding prime minister. But the message from Labour's activists is that the admirers of Blair will form a freemasonry rather than a movement. Like the Church of England abandoning the Cranmer Prayer Book, one of the country's most obtuse institutions has no idea wherein lies its strength.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, the Tories demonstrate that they are far from being the "heirs to Blair". Michael Portillo writes perceptively:

Cameron knows that reassuring the party and widening its electoral support are opposites.... If Cameron really has surrendered, the party is doomed. I had concluded, when I left politics, that the Tories were ungovernable and had a death wish. But Cameron is clever and charismatic; I believed he could succeed where I had failed, especially since even the Conservatives might learn something after three landslide defeats.

Now I am not so sure. Cameron has wobbled. Unless he regains control of his party at once, the project will be lost. It would be much better for him to press on even at the risk of being deposed than to settle into the leadership agony of Hague and Howard.

I have always doubted that the Conservatives could win the next election. Now the question in my mind is different: can the Tories ever win again?

A Conservative Party that takes the path of least resistance to its activists will not win. (This, by the way, is one reason for my horror at the party's enthusiasm for the Tory "blogosphere". The last thing the party's leadership should be doing is taking advice from Tory activists.) The Liberal Democrats are no threat either, with an abysmal leadership and an antediluvian programme. There is, in short, little incentive for Gordon Brown to shake Labour up and tell it hard political truths. That's a shame, because it means the dissipation of Tony Blair's political legacy.

Memories of Mrs Williams

In the political ructions on the Left in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Shirley Williams spoke for me. As Labour took leave of its collective senses, the then Mrs Williams - having lost her seat in the 1979 general election - told a party meeting in Stevenage on 28 November 1980 (reported in The Times, and quoted in Ivor Crewe and Anthony King, SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party, 1995, p. 81):

[The party] now wants withdrawal from the EEC, without consulting the people through a referendum... Conference's defence resolutions were absurd.... [On] incomes policy the conference faced both ways; on social policy it did not come to grips with priorities; on the Third World the conference had little to say. Added to [which] is the threat to representative democracy implict in the mandatory reselection of Labour MPs, in the proposal to impose control by local parties over elected Labour groups... and in the attempt to create an electoral college to elect the Labour leader, and potential Prime Minister, of which the trade union block vote would be a part - a block vote cast on behalf of some who are neother members nor supporters of our party, but may be Conservatives, Liberals or Communists.

Now look at her. On Question Time on BBC1 last night (which you can watch here) she gave the first answer of the programme, on the decision to award Sir Salman Rushdie his knighthood. You can guess what general grooves her answer about that decision's supposed imprudence ran along. Also on the panel was Christopher Hitchens, who briskly described Baroness Williams's answer as contemptible. And so it was.

There is a superficial plausibility to the claims of political moderates such as Shirley Williams and her old (and current) party. There comes a stage in your political evolution, however - or at least in mine - when, faced with the enemies of free expression and Western civilisation, you realise that only immoderation and intolerance will do. Whatever else you may say about Tony Blair as he steps down, you can have no doubt he understands that point and has done for a long time - since long before President Bush took office. That's the most important reason for regarding him with admiration. It was commonly said, in the early days on new Labour, that Tony Blair was testament to the belated influence of the late SDP. But he wasn't: he was much, much better than that.

"What if we’re both right?"

Daniel Finkelstein draws a gloomy general inference from the internecine conflict in Gaza:

That, then, is the neocon case. There can only be peace between peaceable democracies. Name me a war between two democracies. Name me a truly peace-loving dictatorship.

To all this the critics have a ready response. The West, they say, cannot force a country to be a democracy. We can’t simply march in with guns and tell other countries how to live their lives. Even if this was moral, it wouldn’t work. How many Iraq debacles do you neocons need to have, before you understand? We have to negotiate, say these critics, with the forces that are there.

This poses as a refutation of neocon thinking, but really it isn’t. For there is this frightening possibility – we neocons argue that only democracies make peace, and our critics respond that we can’t easily create democracies. What if we’re both right?

Unlike Daniel, I'm not a neoconservative. There is a substantial body of neoconservative thinking on social issues, grounded in a critique of "moral relativism" and the decline of religion, that I'm highly unsympathetic to. I also distinguish between different currents within neoconservative thinking on foreign affairs. But there is a neoconservative position on foreign policy, stressing the promotion of global democracy, that I identify with and regard as integral to the ideals of the Left. (I stress that this is a neoconservative position, and is associated particularly with Paul Wolfowitz. There are conflicting opinions, probably with better historical warrant to be termed "neoconservatism". The columnist Charles Krauthammer urges what he terms "democratic realism", in contrast to the "democratic globalism" promoted by Tony Blair. The man popularly regarded as the founder of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, has long been a sceptic of interventionist foreign policy and during the Cold War urged American withdrawal from Nato.) It is in that respect that Daniel and I are on the same side, and I'm faced with the same dilemma that he's posed. Here is how I would answer it.

First, I can in fact name a war between two democracies: Lebanon and the nascent state of Israel in 1948. There is a valuable study by Michael C. Hudson of Georgetown University on "Democracy and Foreign Policy in the Arab World", published by the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies in 1992, which argues that foreign policy was itself a destabilising force in Lebanon's democracy.

Secondly, while the term "truly peace-loving dictatorship" is to some extent question-begging (a dictatorship abrogates political and legal rights, and thereby can't be said to be pacific with regard to its own subjects), I can think of dictatorships that, by virtue of their isolationism, were not provocative in foreign policy. The most obvious case is Franco's Spain. This disgustingly repressive despotism wasn't properly a neutral party in WWII, other than in the war's opening and closing stages, but as Stanley Payne points out in his magisterial The Franco Regime, 1936-75, 1987, p. 340: "The Caudillo would go to his grave with the nominal distinction of having been the only European statesman to decisively outmaneuver Hitler in personal negotiations, all others having been dragged to death or destruction (or to massive losses and near destruction, as in the case of Stalin)."

Thirdly, the fact that I have to strain hard to come up with the first counterexample, and hedge about with so many conditions the second, is indicative of something. Daniel's premise has a lot going for it. (For fairness' sake, I should add that some people also cite, as a case of democracies' waging war on another democracy, Nato's intervention in Kosovo in 1999; but they may be discounted. The same people generally describe that intervention as "Nato's war on Yugoslavia" - a fictitious entity - and are in my experience prone to fiasco in their encounter with source material. It was not the worst of the late and unlamented Slobodan Milosevic's sins to rig elections and control the media, but it's a pertinent one in this context.)

Fourthly, the qualifications I make to Daniel's argument merely underline the intractability of the foreign policy dilemma that Daniel writes about. The interventionist position that some of us have argued in recent years - Christopher Hitchens, John Lloyd, Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch, Daniel himself - has, in our judgement, justice and pragmatism on its side. But there's no necessary reason it will produce a good outcome - witness those Iraq debacles - and it may not even be realisable in theory. As in the domestic polity, so in the international order, not all the things we value are compatible. As the late Isaiah Berlin wrote in his last essay, "My Intellectual Path", The First and the Last, 1999, p. 77:

Liberty and equality, spontaneity and security, happiness and knowledge, mercy and justice - all these are ultimate human values, sought for themselves alone; yet when they are incompatible, they cannot all be attained, choices must be made, sometimes tragic losses accepted in the pursuit of some preferred ultimate end. But if, as I believe, this is not merely empirically but conceptually true - that is, derives from the very conception of these values - then the very idea of the perfect world in which all good things are realized is incomprehensible, is in fact conceptually incoherent.

So what, given all these qualifications, are the grounds for arguing for interventionism and the spread of global democracy? I would make the case on grounds of simplicity. Because the world order is complex and unpredictable, we can have no greater confidence in a supposedly rational policy of pursuing a stable balance of power among sovereign states. Neoconservatives have often dismissed arguments they take exception to as "moral equivalence", and in truth they do thereby blur some genuinely difficult questions in foreign relatons since WWII. (I try to avoid the term, but have been known to employ it.) Was it right to cause suffering on an almost unimaginable scale at Hiroshima and Nagasaki to secure the speedy and unconditional surrender of Japan? Was the CIA justified in subverting Italian elections in 1948 to avoid a repetition of the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia? To what extent was the US domestic protection programme justified in the early Cold War as a balance between liberty and security? Was the distinction made in the early Reagan years between authoritarian regimes, with whom one could work, and totalitarian ones, who posed an existential threat to democracy, a reasonable one?

As it happens, I have strong views on each of these issues, and can justify them. But the issue I'd stress above all is that there is moral ambiguity on both sides, and that those who criticise Western foreign policy don't always squarely face it. In the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example, you will almost always find that critics of President Truman's decisions counterpose an alternative history, in which Japan was close to surrender if only the US had been more accommodating about the position of the Emperor. In the case of the domestic security programme, the notion that there was a genuine threat to the West from espionage, internal subversion and external military expansionism is rubbished. Yet we can say with something close to certainty that these alternative histories are wrong, and they prevent a proper accounting of the consequences of policies not adopted.

The working assumption that I therefore adopt is that pressing for the spread of democracy rather than seeking to live with autocracies is likely to result in less suffering. Had we accepted anything less than unconditional surrender from Imperial Japan, in which decision the A-bomb was crucial, or fought on with only a conventional invasion, then many hundreds of thousands of lives would have been lost in the closing months of the Pacific War alone, while the threat of a resurgent Japanese militarism maybe 20 years later would have been intense. In the Third World struggle in the Cold War, the US did appreciable strategic damage to itself by failing to see that authoritarian regimes were impermanent, and that allying with them was counterproductive as well as unnecessary against what turned out to be a fragile Communist system. Most topical in Daniel's discussion is the question of Iraq; the imprudence of a realist policy in international relations can be gauged from the fact that at one time, in the 1980s, it extended as far as allying with Saddam Hussein himself. Some people maintain that, given the horrors of the Iraq War, that was justifiable. I encountered one a few months ago on "Comment is Free", and pointed out in response to him:

Saddam's aggressive adventurism, and his consistent use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war, did impose a sort of stalemate in the region. But, as the US soon learned, that was very far from being a benign outcome that we and our allies should have welcomed even sotto voce.

The Iran-Iraq war did immense damage to both countries' economies, with attacks on each other's oil terminals. In February 1986, Iran captured a substantial portion of the Fao Peninsula. It was at that point that the Reagan administration began openly intervening on Saddam's side. As a policy for containing malign forces in the region, that was a catastrophic misjudgement.

The very circumstance of Iraq's suffering huge losses to its infrastructure and in its oil income provoked further imperialist ventures. (I ignore the massive human cost in this assessment not because it is unimportant, but because it was immaterial to Saddam.) The annexation of Kuwait - that is, the complete abolition of a member state of the United Nations - was Saddam's expedient for dealing with economic devastation. In holding power, he was a force for terror and destruction, rather than being [a] "fortress of stability"...

That terror and destruction was Iraq's fate, come what may. It would have happened under Saddam's appalling dynasty or the implosion of that state under Qusay/Uday; and it would have done so without any countervailing Western power.

What, then, if we are both right? I think it more likely that we are both wrong; but that over the long term we interventionists, Blairites, liberal-internationalists - or, if you prefer, neocons - run less risk of prolonging or creating unnecessary suffering.

Supporting Sir Salman

This, of course, is an outrage and must be met with militancy rather than understanding:

Sir Salman Rushdie, the author, was facing fresh threats to his life yesterday following his knighthood.

A senior minister in the Pakistani government said that the decision was a justification for suicide bombing, after the parliament in Islamabad condemned the honour as "blasphemous and insulting" to the world's Muslims.

As Pakistani MPs issued a demand for the award to be immediately withdrawn, the religious affairs minister, Mohammad Ejaz-ul-Haq, said: "The West always wonders about the root cause of terrorism. Such actions [giving Sir Salman a knighthood] are the root cause of it. If someone commits suicide bombing to protect the honour of the Prophet Mohammad, his act is justified."

The least of the observations to be made about these remarks is that Pakistan's religious affairs minister has nicely demonstrated the hypocrisy of maintaining that "explanation" of the urge to terrorism - the weaselling that finds extenuating circumstances for terrorists' anger - is neatly to be distinguished from incitement. But I'm less concerned about this rabble-rousing, bonehead bigot than I am about a notion more insidious and quite ubiquitous. Note that the report continues:

The parliament passed a unanimous resolution deploring the honour as an open insult to the feelings of the world's 1.5 billion Muslims. Sher Afgan Khan Niazi, the minister for parliamentary affairs who tabled the motion, said that the knighthood was "a source of hurt for Muslims" and would encourage people to "commit blasphemy against the Prophet Mohammad".

It is astonishing how easily, and how loudly, those who claim to be offended make the illegitimate further claim that their mental state entitles them to restitution. Yesterday I watched on Channel 4 News an interview with the Labour peer Lord Ahmed; exhibiting analytical feebleness combined with blustering inarticulacy, he proffered the same assumption. In the current issue of Index on Censorship I have a piece (reproduced here) on why respecting the beliefs and feelings of others is a lethal affectation in public policy. Legislating to protect people's feelings is pernicious in principle and dangerous in practice - I take the idle course of quoting myself:

The notion that free speech, while important, needs to be held in balance with the avoidance of offence is question-begging, because it assumes that offence is something to be avoided. Free speech does indeed cause hurt – but there is nothing wrong in this. Knowledge advances through the destruction of bad ideas. Mockery and derision are among the most powerful tools in that process. Consider Voltaire’s Candide, or H L Mencken’s reports – saturated in contempt for religious obscurantists who opposed the teaching of evolution in schools – on the Scopes ‘Monkey’ Trial.

It is inevitable that those who find their deepest convictions mocked will be offended, and it is possible (though not mandatory, and is incidentally not felt by me) to extend sympathy and compassion to them. But they are not entitled to protection, still less restitution, in the public sphere, even for crass and gross sentiments. A free society does not legislate in the realm of beliefs; by extension, it must not concern itself either with the state of its citizens’ sensibilities. If it did, there would in principle be no limit to the powers of the state, even into the private realm of thought and feeling.

The proper response to those who find themselves offended by the expression of ideas is: "That's tough. You'll live. Get over it." This would be true even if the ideas were stupid and their utterer crass. It would apply to Sir Salman Rushdie if he were a hack writer with the sensibilities of the late Bernard Manning. But he is in fact a writer of outstanding literary gifts and also a heroic (I don't use the term lightly) defender of freedom of expression. The resolution of the Pakistani legislature is an ignorant and inflammatory intrusion into our civic affairs. I am not impressed with the response to it to date.

The last thing we should do is accept the terms in which religious obscurantists seek to frame this issue. I was appalled to see on the News not only the bonehead Lord Ahmed's insults against Sir Salman and the government that rightly recommended the honour, but emollient remarks by the British High Commissioner in Pakistan, Robert Brinkley (who has this morning been summoned by Pakistan’s government). The honour was not, the High Commissioner said, an insult to Islam, for we respect Islam.

The first part of that answer was correct but strictly irrelevant. The second was improper. I take fierce exception to (I am - if you will - offended by) a British diplomat's speaking on behalf of my country and my government in taking a position on matters of religion. I do not respect Islam (or any religious faith). All I will insist upon as a matter of right for Muslims (or Christians, Jews and Seventh-Day Adventists) is religious liberty. Beyond that, they have no claim. They are not entitled to my respect. As a mere lobby group, they have no right to be listened to, let alone taken seriously, on matters of public policy.

In the meantime, our side - those who defend the values of a free society - will make ourselves heard, and because our ideas are worthy of respect we won't be cowed by religious bigotry. A stiffer diplomatic response is called for. At a minimal and trivial level, it is also time for democratic political parties to take a stand. In the original Rushdie affair, the Labour Party - which I mention specifically because I am on the Left - failed as abjectly as Mrs Thatcher's government and the first President Bush. Some Labour MPs called for Sir Salman's novel The Satanic Verses to be banned (the ridiculous Keith Vaz, MP for Leicester East, was the most prominent). I suggest that Lord Ahmed - who had the audacity and stupidity to compare Sir Salman's knighthood to support for suicide terrorism, both responses being, in his phrase, "uncalled for" - be informed retrospectively of his unamicable divorce from the Labour whip. It's a small gesture, but even those were lacking when Sir Salman was threatened by a foreign tyrant. He merits our support and admiration.

Libel law and the digital age, again

I wrote last month about the settlement of the libel case brought by the childcare writer Gina Ford against the Mumsnet website. In my view, there are disturbing implications for free speech if the publisher of a bulletin board is liable for the content of user comments that it cannot check.

While I count myself a near absolutist on free speech, I don't complain about the existence of laws against defamation or the applicability of those laws to the Internet. I say this too with personal experience of those laws, having successfully defended myself last year against one attempted libel writ. (I concede that it was not a daunting experience, and it is related in the earlier post I have linked to. Apart from being worthless, the purported claim, by the blogger Neil Clark, had the additional drawback that it was issued with such ineptitude that it was struck out by the presiding judge without even reaching court.)

I'm not worried either about the regulation of user comments posted on a web site, which I don't regard as a free speech issue at all: your freedom of speech is not abridged if you are prevented from leaving comments on a blog, any more than it is if the manuscript of your book is rejected by a publisher. But I am concerned about a situation where the proprietor of a website is held liable for comments posted by readers of that site, even where the proprietor acts on a complaint (i.e. takes down an offending comment). I am not a lawyer, but from the standpoint strictly of public policy the law of libel as it stands is a mess when applied to new media.

Let me therefore draw your attention to two things I've read since the Mumsnet case that are relevant. The first is a piece from The Times by two lawyers who detect "a herd of libel actions fast approaching" the world of blogs and message boards. They point out:

Generally, journalists and authors take a great deal of care in the articles they prepare for newspapers or news websites. Their work is checked over by an editorial team, and then, if there are any legal doubts, run past an inhouse media lawyer before publication. In contrast, bloggers typically work alone, writing as fast as they think. A posting is seldom checked before it goes online. Yet bloggers are subject to the same English libel laws: the burden of proof, if a claim is brought, is on the blogger to prove what he has written is true. If he can't justify his allegations, he could be in trouble.

This will happen, and bloggers will need to get used to it (which is why I mention the report). But the remedy here is in the hands of the individual blogger. What is much more difficult is the case of the blog or message board proprietor, such as Mumsnet, who is not responsible for the comments left on a site. And in this case I'll draw your attention to a possible recourse that some readers may be aware of but that is new to me.

A company called coComment - with which I have no connection, and of which I had never heard till a week or so ago - has contacted me regarding the Mumsnet case. The company's marketing prose is, ahem, not felicitous ("coComment's service provides an integrated solution enabling users to freely comment") but the principle strikes me as interesting, so I pass it on. The idea is that bloggers or proprietors of message boards need not post reader comments on their own sites, but can have coComment publish them instead. As I understand it, there would be a link on the blog or message board to where the comments could be posted and read. The relevant legislation is Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act (in the US), under which: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

That legislation raises other issues of principle, and I'm wary of some of its consequences. But if you run a web site, invite user comments, yet are concerned about liability, you may want to look into this.