Oliver Kamm

Johann, on and on

I now close the subject of the Hari-Cohen dispute, save only (as I have indicated) a comment to come on the subject of threats of legal action for defamation, on which I have some experience. This conclusion is partly because I've made the essential points, but also because Johann, in commenting further on the argument (scroll down for his later remarks), has demonstrated my objections. In inveighing against the "aggressive invective" that Nick Cohen and I have deployed, Johann says this:

To be fair to Oliver, at least he admits he is an outright defender of neoconservatism, even if he glosses over the real actions of the neoconservatives and even if he surreally cites Eliot Abrahms - who helped unleash the fascist Contras on Nicaragua - as a witness for his defence. Nick won't even admit to his own fawning descriptions of neconservatism and George Bush, instead posing as some sort of critic of them.

I've never admitted, or even merely stated, any such thing - and note that that's an attributed statement, not a paraphrase. To advance his criticism, Johann has just made up the evidence. He may possibly have been misled by the title of my book Antitotalitarianism: the Left-Wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy. There is no reason Johann should have read this slim volume, and I'm not aware he's ever claimed to have done, but that's hardly a defence of his distortion. The book's concluding argument, so far from being an "outright defence" of neoconservatism, is that neoconservatism is a variegated force; that those of us who support liberal interventionism are going to get called neoconservatives anyway; and that, owing to the apparent rejection of the term by people such as Norman Podhoretz, whose wider political views I reject in almost every particular, we might as well appropriate the term for our own uses, much as the early Methodists (or indeed the original neoconservatives) themselves adopted a label that had originally been intended as an insult. I also referred specifically to the fact that the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, is sceptical of the case for spreading democracy overseas - that is, the original neoconservative opposes precisely the argument I was seeking to advance. My view of neoconservatism is, as I've stated in criticism of Johann, that one part of it - broadly represented by Paul Wolfowitz - holds views on the expansion of democracy, and also on a neogotiated peace in the Middle East, that are different from those of other neoconservatives, and that the Left should acknowledge the congruence of those positions with its own aims.

That is in microcosm how Johann treats Nick Cohen. He doesn't represent the arguments accurately; he advances propositions that he clearly thinks ought to be true but that aren't. Johann goes on to complain: "Oliver talks about the fracture-lines within the American right over what should drive US foreign policy, and suggests I am ignorant of them. I can assure him I'm not: I have interviewed some of the leading figures in these debates, and read extensively about them. (I must admit I find it a bit tedious that he argues as if almost everyone who disagrees with him is ignorant.)"

I don't argue, or believe, that anyone who disagrees with me is ignorant. I argue that Johann is ignorant on this subject. I'm glad he's spent time in interviewing and researching his subject, but his twice referring to "Eliot Abrahms" (the man's name is Elliott Abrams) suggests that Johann's attention might have been elsewhere at the time. And as he's determined to compound his misrepresentations, let me deal briefly with the figure of Abrams. Abrams, like Podhoretz, is not a neoconservative of the school I identify as consistent with the Left's ideals, nor have I ever said he was. Among other episodes in his career, during the Iran-Contra hearings, Abrams denied that the administration had financed the operation in Nicaragua or raised funds in the Middle East - claims that were clearly false. (A revealing exchange took place before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, in which Thomas Eagleton declared to Abrams: "Under oath, my friend, that's perjury. Had you been under oath, that's perjury." The exchange is recorded in a new and excellent biography of Ronald Reagan by John Patrick Diggins, 2007, p. 299.) His strong criticism (in the Kagan & Kristol volume I've previously cited) of those who were "obsessed with the Oslo Accords" is another doctrinaire expression of views clearly not in accord with Wolfowitz's. My reason for citing Abrams's government service at State is that while being far from the version of neoconservatism that I welcome he nonetheless marked a turn in policy from the message of the early Reagan years, when Jeane Kirkpatrick's views held sway. This is clearly true, and why, other than simple obstinacy, Johann finds it difficult to conceive of neoconservatism as other than a monolithic force is beyond me.

Oh, and a brief comment on oil. Here's Johann again:

He says I don't offer evidence that the US is acting in Iraq primarily because of oil. In 1977, Paul Wolfowitz - as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for Regional Programs - wrote: "We... have a vital and growing stake in the Persian Gulf Region because of our need for Persian Gulf oil and because events in the Persian Gulf affect the Arab-Israel conflict." In 1990, Dick Cheney - then Defence Secretary - said of Iraq and Kuwait: "The fact of the matter is, that part of the world controls the world supply of oil." When does Oliver think this stopped being the driver of US foreign policy? How does the presence of Eliot Abrahms change it?

Can Johann not see that "a vital and growing stake" in the Persian Gulf owing to oil, is not the same concept as "acting in Iraq primarily because of oil"? I'd be horrified if I thought the free world had been indifferent to the threat of Saddam's expanding his control of oil in the region. But Johann's reduction of the neoconservatives' advocacy of intervention to that interest is, I'm afraid, Johann all over. He starts not from evidence but from dogmatic assertion, and when challenged on the point casts round for evidence, which then doesn't say what he hopes it says. I have no doubt he will speedily Google for the terms "Kamm" and "neoconservatism" to try and substantiate his most recent manufacture, but the same point holds with me as it does with Nick. Johann has constructed an argument without first assembling the supporting structure. His review of Nick's book exhibited neither accuracy, nor fairness, nor scupulousness, nor competence, and Dissent and The Independent ought to have pressed him on these points before publication.

Cécilia and her predecessors

Agnès Poirier's observations on French politics and culture are acute and often witty:

Half of France has been fuming about the latest Sarko and co's stunt in Libya. Not that it is opposed to flamboyant coups, mind you. The French like their president to have guts, like François Mitterrand defying the bombs of Sarajevo on an impromptu visit in 1992, or even Dominique de Villepin flying to Beirut last year while the city was pounded by Israeli artillery (but no, not like Édouard Daladier going to Munich in 1938, thank you very much). It's just that half of France doesn't like them boasting about it.

Daladier is indeed rarely mentioned these days, yet it's worth distinguishing him from his British counterparts. Neville Chamberlain genuinely believed Munich was a noble venture; Daladier at least had the insight to understand that he had betrayed French national interests along with the Czechs, and he consequently expected to be denounced by French patriots on his return home. The enthusiastic reception he received astonished him. That reception was as nothing, however, with the welcome Chamberlain received when he returned from Munich. In the worst and most blatantly partisan decision of any British monarch in the 20th century, the King invited Chamberlain on to the balcony of Buckingham Palace to acknowledge the cheering crowds.

I'm not certain which statesman was the more culpable, but I suspect it was Daladier for being more intelligent.

Hari and Cohen, continued

Well, now. Since I wrote my criticisms of Johann Hari last week, the debate has run on some way.

Johann initially acknowledged those criticisms, along with comments made by others - some of them not sensible - concerning his review-article in Dissent. I suspect that, quite reasonably, his undertaking to respond to my criticisms has now been superseded, as Nick has published his own critique of the article, and Johann has responded to that. Meanwhile, a discussion of the controversy on the Harry's Place blog has been pulled, apparently after Johann threatened legal action for alleged defamation. With me so far?

My position on the dispute is this. Nick Cohen's What's Left? is a fine book, elegantly written and with an analysis that I am almost entirely in accord with. My extended review of the book is here. Having read Johann's far more critical review of the same book, I make two observations. First, Johann misrepresents the book. Secondly, he renders, to use his own phrase, a shallow and ahistorical reading of recent US foreign policy, particularly with regard to the variegated phenomenon known as neoconservatism.

Take the second point. I made a deliberately restricted claim about neconservatism, to minimise the risk of our getting bogged down in conflicting interpretations. Johann wrote in his review: "The notion that neoconservatism is a vehicle for a global democratic revolution is a 1990s rhetorical creation. On the contrary, for most of its short intellectual life neoconservatism has defended autocracy." Even if you count global democratic revolution as a rhetorical creation rather than anything substantive, this is clearly wrong. It ignores a clear break in the stance - in rhetoric at very least, but in my judgement more important than that - symbolised by a change in personnel at the State Department at high levels, and by a change in voting patterns at the UN. At the outset of the Reagan administration, Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick assured the military leaders in Argentina and Chile that the human rights diplomacy of the Carter administration was dead and would not be repeated. The tenor - I use a deliberately understated term - of the Reagan administration at the end of the first term, and through the second term, was different. If you refuse to recognise this, then you do violence to a record that contemporary memoirs and much scholarship confirm.

In truth, the split in what neoconservatism stood for was substantive, and diverged further with the end of the Cold War. Neoconservatives were divided on the issue of intervention in Bosnia, and later in Kosovo. One of the most prominent neoconservative voices on foreign policy, Charles Krauthammer, opposed intervention on the grounds that in the Balkans no strategic interest was at stake. He has long argued a position that he terms democratic realism, in contrast to the democratic globalism that he has identified more recently in Tony Blair. Building on that theme, two writers associated with neoconservatism, Robert Tucker and David Hendrickson published a book in 1992 called The Imperial Temptation in which they outlined principles by which the US "refrained from intervention in the affairs of other states" but sought to spread democracy by example rather than force. Ironically, Jeane Kirkpatrick did support intervention against the aggression of Slobodan Milosevic, as did Richard Perle, Norman Podhoretz and one of the most zealous neconservative advocates of democratic globalism, Joshua Muravchik. The intellectual debates are well set out, and - bearing in mind the later disputes over Iraq - in quite a prescient way in the last two chapters of John Ehrman's 1995 book The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945-94.

At the same time, there was an increasing split over attitudes to Israel. Neoconservatism has traditionally stressed America's moral and strategic interests in supporting Israel. But a division developed between those, particularly associated with Commentary magazine, who identified the Oslo accord as a snare and a delusion, and those who believed that an Israeli "vital center" needed to coalesce and plan for a negotiated two-state settlement. The volume I mentioned in my earlier post, Present Dangers, eds. Kagan and Kristol, 2000, is outdated and has much material that is strident; but you also find, in this influential collection of neoconservative thoughts at the end of the Clinton years, an intimation of some of these tensions. Paul Wolfowitz has, as it happens, a particularly thoughtful essay in the book, and has been in my view on the right side of both of the splits I've identified. Part of my argument on foreign policy is that the Left should recognise those splits and aim to widen them, for there is a type of neoconservatism that accords with our traditional ideals.

To ignore these developments and fissures altogether and treat them as a homogeneous "rhetorical creation", even allowing for Johann's haziness over dates, is an extreme claim that Johann makes no effort to substantiate. He gives no impression of familiarity with this literature, and I don't think he knows much about it. If you are writing about debates in US foreign policy, uninterest in ideas is a serious handicap.

Unfortunately, that uninterest extends also to Nick Cohen's ideas. Here is Johann's response to me, from his website:

I'll write a proper response soon, but let me give just one example of why he's wrong. He accuses me of deliberately distorting Nick's book, and cites as a prime example my claim that Nick says the West was right to back Saddam in the 1980s. Well, here's what Nick writes in his book 'Pretty Straight Guys' on page 127: "The world had little choice but to support Saddam's unprovoked war on Iran. A victory for the Ayatollahs would have left the Iraqi, Kuwaiti and Saudi oilfields at Iran's mercy." Every claim of "distortion" he makes is easily refuted with a quote like this.

The attentive reader, and probably even some somnolent ones given the blatancy of the manoeuvre, will note that Johann responds to my charge of misrepresenting Nick's book by citing a different book. But only if you have the book to hand will you be able to see that Johann additionally advances his case by excising from its context a quotation from this second book, Nick's earlier volume Pretty Straight Guys. The context is a long passage in which Nick berates the application of Kissingerian realpolitik in US foreign policy in the 1970s, and identifies the lowest point of that policy in the betrayal of the Iraqi Kurds. Here are the two sentences Johann cites (emphasis added), in their proper context:

Even by the standards of the Cold War - even by the standards of Henry Kissinger - the betrayal of an ally stood out. The Congressional select committee on intelligence said: "The president, Dr Kissinger and the Shah hoped that [the Kurds] would not prevail. They preferred instead that the insurgents simply continue a level of hostilities sufficient to sap the resources of [Iraq]. The policy was not imparted to our clients, who were encouraged to continue to fight. Even in the context of covert operations, ours was a cynical exercise."

American backing for the Shah of Iran couldn't save him from the Islamic revolution of 1979. The world had little choice but to support Saddam's unprovoked war on Iran. A victory for the Ayatollahs would have left the Iraqi, Kuwaiti and Saudi oilfields at Iran's mercy. The left poured contempt on the West as Saddam took the opportunity offered by international support to pour poison gas on soldiers and civilians alike. George Galloway and his left wing colleague Jeremy Corbyn led the slating. Corbyn castigated the 'fascist' Saddam and the western governments which supported him.

No one to my knowledge has ever accused Nick Cohen of writing impenetrable prose. His argument here is characteristically clear. He condemns the US for encouraging and then abandoning the Kurds. He contrasts the attitude of Western governments (which, again obviously, is what he means by "the world") with that of left-wing opposition to Saddam's crimes, specifically the use of chemical weapons. He implies that that left-wing opposition was honourable, in contrast to the stance of Western governments. In the rest of the chapter he rues the fact that the Left (he cites Corbyn in particular) resiled from that stance once Saddam annexed Kuwait in 1990 and the US-led coalition went to war.

Johann, in short, doesn't refute my accusation of distortion: he confirms it by perpetrating a new distortion of a different book.

I shall have something to say in a separate post about the issue of alleged defamation and Johann's apparent threat of legal action against Harry's Place. I'm unusual among bloggers in possessing unsolicited but wholly satisfactory experience of a purported legal claim for defamation, and it is relevant to the Hari-Cohen dispute in one particular.

The Bomb: recommended and non-recommended reading

One of the most useful concise works of historical reference on my shelves is a volume called The Columbia Guide to the Cold War by Michael Kort. In just 350 pages it gives an objective account of the principal episodes and the leading personalities of the Cold War, summarises the historians' debate on the subject, and provides an invaluable annotated bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

Professor Kort has just produced a companion volume called The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb. Most valuable is its inclusion and analysis of a large amount of primary source documents. Any journalist or commentator, or anyone else, writing about this terrible historical episode ought to refer to this book. From my observation, there is no issue of recent history that has attracted so much commentary not informed by primary sources. Here, for example, is Greenpeace UK's disarmament campaigner, one Dominick Jenkins, concocting in The Guardian a series of assertions about the A-bomb decision, and alleged objections to it by President Truman's commanders, that have no historical warrant at all.

I notice incidentally that The Guardian, or rather its "Comment is Free" site, has lately taken a contribution from a bizarre figure called Justin Raimondo, expounding the merits of the isolationist presidential campaign of Congressman Ron Paul. On his own palaeo-libertarian anti-war web site in the US, Raimondo has gone a little further than the Greenpeace critique of the A-bomb decision, by openly regretting that the US and its allies won the Pacific War. Here's what he says:

The great horror is that this heinous deed [Hiroshima] was committed against Japan, a civilization as far removed from our own as the streets of New York are from the African savannas. It's at times like these that I tend to believe the wrong side won the war in the Pacific.

Hundreds of thousands of civilians died horrifying deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As a historical and not an ethical judgement, we can say with a very high degree of probability that a conventional assault on Japan would have resulted in a far higher death toll. (One of Japan's principal wartime officials, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Marquis Kido Koichi, later testified that in his view the August surrender prevented 20 million Japanese casualties.) And Imperial Japan, responsible as it was for such atrocities as the Bataan death march and the Rape of Nanking, had to be defeated such that it would pose no threat of resurgent militarism and imperialism a generation or so later. That last sentence seems to me an obvious truth, but my own occasional excursions on "Comment is Free" suggest that in that parallel universe Mr Raimondo may count as a prophet.

UPDATE: I've corrected an error in attribution that I originally made in this post. There were varying estimates within the Japanese leadership of the consequences of fighting on rather than surrendering after Nagasaki. Kido Koichi spoke of 20 million casualties, not - as I had said - 20 million deaths. The estimate of 20 million deaths was stated by Admiral Takijiro Onishi to Soemu Toyoda, Chief of the Naval General Staff, and Yoshijiro Umezu, the Army Chief of Staff.

For gay marriage

The Guardian's third leader yesterday was well chosen, on an anniversary I ought to have noted before now:

Its proponents described homosexuality as a disability, and it allowed for the continuing legal persecution of gay people - the activist Peter Tatchell even claims it was followed by an increase in prosecutions. But the Sexual Offences Act, which received royal assent 40 years ago this weekend, was momentous. It gave a lead to public opinion that was still stuck in the dark days of the 1950s, kick-starting a transformation in attitudes that would become a revolution.

This is more than a truism. There was an interesting retrospective in The Observer last month about the campaign for decriminalising gay sex between men. The argument advanced by reformers such as the Labour MP Leo Abse was one of compassion for those - as the mores of the time had it - thus afflicted. That was by no means an ignoble argument: it is obvious that lifting the legal persecution of gay men, and rendering unnecessary their subterfuge, removed a cause of much unnecessary suffering. But as Peter Tatchell is quoted as saying in the article, there was a notable lack of reference to such issues as love or justice. I have long objected to Tatchell's campaigning tactics on this issue - his 'outing' of undeclared homosexuals in public life is in my view despicable - but his criticism here is apt. What he does not say, or at least not in this article, but I am certain is true, is that legislation precipitated change in public attitudes.

The change, in legislation and in culture, from decriminalising homosexual acts between men through to the introduction of civil partnerships for same-sex couples is clearly immense. Halfway between then and now, the late Times columnist Bernard Levin wrote a piece that nicely illustrates this. (The column was published in The Times on 28 December 1987, and is reproduced in Levin's book All Things Considered, 1988, pp. 45-9.) Levin is commenting on the tawdry and populist introduction by the then government of a clause tacked on to a bill about local government, prohibiting local authorities from the "promotion" of homosexuality. This was the notorious Section 28 of the Local Government Act, 1988, which was repealed in England only four years ago. Levin states:

[T]he legislation is not the worst or the most important item in the rising temperature of hate, except in so far as it will inevitably turn up the flame. And the tragedy of it all is that, after the 1967 Act, there had been a slow but real advance in understanding - which, in these matters, is much more important than an Act of Parliament. More and more people had come to see that homosexuality is not evil in itself, nor a threat to heterosexuals, nor disgusting, nor a chosen way of life, nor more likely than heterosexuality to include paedophiliac tendencies, nor necessarily accompanied by a lisp, a flapping of limp hands or the wearing of women's underclothes.

Levin is of course mocking the attitudes he describes, and his voice on homosexual law reform was one of reason and principle. But it's striking just how far the attitudes he derides have retreated from public life - not, obviously, in all quarters, and certainly not from private life, but from our civic discourse. Matthew Parris noted in The Times last week that "in the whole history of mankind there has been no better, luckier, time or place to be gay than Britain in 2007".

I can't prove this, but I believe that part of the explanation for this advance is that, contrary to Levin's argument, legislative changes have preceded rather than followed the growth in public understanding. There was, from my recollection, no huge public pressure for civil partnerships, compared even with the campaign a decade ago for a common age of consent; it was just the right thing to do. The effect of the Civil Partnership Act of 2004, in giving civic recognition to same-sex relationships, has been so marked, however, that, despite other welcome legislation, we may now be in a new stage where public attitudes risk outstripping political life on a central issue.

In so far as I reflected at all on the subject, I believed even a few years ago that full equality before the law between heterosexual couples and same-sex couples would definitely come, and would be right, but that it would be a matter of time before cultural shifts enabled that outcome. I now believe the issue is more urgent than that. Equality under the law is the social contract that binds us. As one particularly thoughtful writer, Jonathan Rauch, has argued in his book Gay Marriage: Why it is Good for Gays, Good for Straights and Good for America, 2004, p. 97-8, that implicit contract challenges exclusion from civic institutions:

When it became obvious that blacks were not children and that women could think for themselves, the country had to make a choice: expand the franchise or see it lose its legitimacy. Marriage's position today is similar. As gay couples (and their children) weave themselves into their neighborhoods and communities, new facts are arising on the ground. To say, "Well, that may be, but marriage simply cannot accommodate those facts and still be marriage," is no answer at all. It assures that other, nonmarital arrangements will arise and gain legitimacy. Worse, nonmarriage - civil unions, domestic partnerships, cohabitation - may acquire greater legitimacy than marriage. After all, isn't a nondiscriminatory institution better?

If - per impossible - I were the Leo Abse of our time, an MP with a private member's bill to bring, I should propose legislation to make marriage open to couples of the same sex, with equal rights and responsibilities in every respect to those of heterosexual couples. It would be the fulfilment of an important legislative process that Abse initiated.

Assessing What's Left?

I have already criticised Johann Hari's column in The Independent this week. Johann is entitled to change his views and apologise for what he formerly argued; but in his indictment of those of us he terms the pro-war Left, he is duty bound to give an accurate account of our position. If he seeks to depict the malign influence of neoconservatism on our thinking, then he is duty bound also to give an accurate account of that movement and its role in US foreign policy.

I concentrated on the second of those requirements, which Johann signally failed to fulfil. It was particularly ironic that he accused us on the interventionist Left of a "shallow and ahistorical reading of neoconservatism", because - as I trust I have shown - his own reading of that phenomenon is trivial and unlettered. There is a substantial difference between the views of Wolfowitz and Kirkpatrick, never mind Wolfowitz and Kissinger; to suppose that "the invasion of Iraq was motivated not by Enlightenment values, but by a desire to achieve US control over Middle East oil" requires evidence of a type and strength that Johann never produces. (Famously The Guardian once did claim evidence for that proposition, and then rapidly and with good reason withdrew it.)

I didn't notice till after I had posted my comments, however, that Johann's column was a much abbreviated version of a piece published elsewhere. That piece is a review-article, from Dissent magazine, about Nick Cohen's book What's Left?; my comments in this post are about Johann's treatment of that book.

I am not Nick Cohen's plenipotentiary, nor should Nick be assumed to agree with anything I say. But I am familiar with and sympathetic to the thesis of his book, on which I gave some very minor assistance. (There is a Raymond Williams quotation in the book that comes from me; and I persuaded Nick to moderate his criticisms of Noam Chomsky, which - strange but true - I felt were too harsh.) In my judgement Johann's article is a shoddy piece of work, and Johann fails in the first task of any reviewer. In evaluating a book, a reviewer has no responsibility to the author but an inviolable one to the reader, namely to represent accurately the argument of the book under discussion. Johann omits altogether the argument of Nick's book - a task of précis that I modestly submit I accomplished with complete accuracy in three sentences, here:

In the last century, material betterment and the steady diminution of discrimination against blacks, women and homosexuals have advanced progressive goals. Much of the left has yet to come to terms with this achievement. At the extreme, some who were once thought of as being on the left have adopted the language and outlook of the right.

But Johann is more culpable still on what he does discuss: his review distorts the book, and not by accident. Let me give a few examples only. The conceit in the review is that Nick is an "ostentatious claimer of George Orwell's mantle [who] has forgotten the quality that made Orwell great - the power to face inconvenient truths". The claim, so far from being ostentatious, is nowhere asserted or even insinuated (in which case it wouldn't be ostentatious) in anything Nick has written. So far as I can see, the only evidence Johann adduces, or can possibly adduce, for this characterisation is Nick's family upbringing: "He was raised to see Orwell in Catalonia as his moral archetype - the socialist bearing a pack and going abroad to fight fascists."

There is nothing in the book to substantiate that remark. On the contrary, so we are told, Nick's grandfather worked for the Communist Party, his great-uncle emigrated to Moscow when Stalin was consolidating power, and his parents, while ex-Communists, were far from being anti-Communists. In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell wrote scathingly of the "Left intelligentsia [who] made their swing-over from 'War is hell' to 'War is glorious' not only with no sense of incongruity but almost without any intervening stage." He urged readers to "dig out the files of New Masses or the Daily Worker, and just have a look at the romantic warmongering muck that our left-wingers were spilling at the time". Almost a decade later, in 1947, Orwell wrote of the Labour MP and crypto-Communist Konni Zilliacus: "Is he under the impression that he can frighten me into silence? Let him be sure that I shall continue my efforts to counter totalitarian propaganda in this country." The notion that the young Nick Cohen was brought up on this sort of thing is pure invention.

Nick's biographical details are of less moment for his book than the issues of war, totalitarianism and terrorism. But those details are important in this discussion, nonetheless, for this reason. Johann seeks to argue that Nick, while vaingloriously affecting to be Orwell's heir, has in fact abandoned his ideological roots; and in order to generate that argument, Johann just makes up the evidence. Nor is this an isolated instance. Here he goes again:

Cohen is enraged by people who simplistically ascribe jihadism to the "root cause" of the Israel/Palestine conflict, which he says is "to make a very large assumption about a very small war." That's true enough: getting justice for the Palestinians is morally essential, but the idea it will stem jihadism other than in Palestine itself was always fanciful. However, Cohen then extends this argument - in a bizarre leap - to claim that jihadism has no root causes at all, and that anybody who suggests it does is "appeasing fascists".

This is what Nick really says about "root causes" of jihadism:

Once you have exhausted all comprehensible reasons for a great crime there remains a gap. The "root causes" take you to its edge, but then wave goodbye and leave you peering into an unfathomable abyss. The famines Stalin, Mao and the Ethiopian colonels unleashed, Pol Pot's extermination of anyone who could read or write or Hitler's annihilation of the Jews, gypsies, gays and Slavs, Saddam's regime of torture and genocide and the Islamist cult of death aren't rationally explicable. You can cross over to the other side of the abyss only if you shrug off your reasonable liberal belief that every consequence has an understandable cause and accept that enthusiasm for the ideologies of absolute power isn't always rationally explicable.

Many people criticise Nick for his views. I've never come across anyone - not a single critic - who accuses him of obscurity in expounding them. It is impossible for any careful or honest reviewer to infer, from the passage I've just quoted, that jihadism "has no root causes at all". The argument is rather that invoking "root causes" takes you only so far when explaining a cult of death. I am also fairly certain, without reading Nick's book for a third time from cover to cover, that the phrase "appeasing fascists" appears nowhere in it but is a straight fabrication by Johann - and a particularly serious one given that the convention with quotation marks is, as the name suggests, that they denote a direct quotation rather than a paraphrase.

Further, I know of no writer of the school Johann attacks who would fit his caricature of believing that "jihadism is ... a spontaneous theological psychosis sprouting in the void". Take, well, me. In my book Antitotalitarianism I argued: "Granted that the foreign policies of Western nations generate hatred that in turn stimulates terrorism - and I see little purpose in denying it in order to present a sanitised assessment of the consequences of an interventionist foreign policy - it is almost impossible to conceive of a foreign policy we could pursue that would not have that outcome." In reference to the 7/7 bombings and the notion that they were a protest against Western foreign policy, I wrote: "Even allowing for the broadest possible interpretation of 'foreign occupation' to include the objection of young Western Islamists to the occupation of Iraq, we are still left with an inadequate account of the motivations of the terrorists.... Even 'religious fanaticism' is too weak a term for this destructive nihilism." The obvious unfortunately appears to need stating here: an account of terrorism that is inadequate is not the same as an account that is baseless.

In fact, I'm being too kind to Johann. His rhetorical techniques don't reach the level of caricature, for a caricature at least incorporates, in order to exaggerate, some authentic and identifiable characteristic of what is being depicted. Charles de Gaulle really did have a big nose, and John Prescott is indeed fat. But Johann Hari's arguments are, to coin a phrase, a spontaneous psychosis sprouting in the void.

Try another. Here's Johann:

[Cohen] accuses the left of supporting Saddam Hussein - and then, in his most shocking claim, says the US was right to support Saddam in the 1980s anyway because it was the only way to stop the 'Islamic revolution'.

And here is what Nick says in his book:

Instead of fighting the Islamic revolution themselves, Britain and America were happy for a fascistic despot to do its fighting for them. There was no complaint when Saddam acquired between 2,000 and 4,000 tons of chemical agents; no real protest beyond mealy-mouthed mutterings when he used them to kill about 50,000 Iranian soldiers. Donald Rumsfeld went to Baghdad in 1984 to assure the Baathists that what condemnations there had been were for form's sake and should not be taken personally. To stop the Islamic revolution spreading, the West was prepared to hold its tongue.

As distortions go, Johann's rendering is beyond conventional categories of the disgraceful. It is completely obvious what Nick is arguing here, and it is the polar opposite of the view Johann attributes to him. Again, Nick is far from being an elliptical writer, and nor is his view unusual. I've heard Christopher Hitchens expound the same point, and I've written it too: the bankruptcy and sheer imprudence of a foreign policy that sought a stable balance of power sooner than the expansion of democracy may be gauged by the fact that that policy once extended as far as allying with Saddam Hussein himself.

There is much else in Johann's review that is worthy of comment - or perhaps, unworthy of comment but deserving of notice. The review is dishonest and it's incompetent, and it frequently evinces an intellectual certainty unsupported by anything the reviewer has to say. Johann, for example (in a discussion about "root causes"), cites Keynes's criticisms of the Versailles Treaty and refers to "a near-total consensus among historians that the Versailles Treaty helped to create the trough of national humiliation and grievance in which the fungus of Nazism could grow". There is a trivial sense in which this is and cannot but be true, but I assume Johann means it in a non-trivial sense that there was a rational basis to complaints that Versailles imposed, in Keynes's phrase, a "Carthaginian peace [that] is not practically right or possible". I wonder (and it's not a rhetorical question) just how many historians, in how many languages, Johann has consulted to determine the existence of near-unanimity on this point. I can tell, without waiting to hear his answer, that he has not consulted all the competent authorities.

The editor of Dissent, the political philosopher Michael Walzer, wrote some years ago a study of social criticism in the twentieth century, entitled The Company of Critics (2nd edition, 2002). Concluding a chapter on "Julien Benda and Intellectual Treason", Walzer wrote of "what may well be the most attractive picture of the true intellectual: not as the inhabitant of a separate world, the knower of esoteric truths, but as a fellow member of this world who devotes himself, but with a passion, to the truths we all know".

If the current issue of Dissent is any indication, then the gap between that picture of intellectual engagement and what the magazine will accept for publication is wide indeed.

Wikipedia's evangelism

You can listen here to a moderately interesting Radio 4 programme, broadcast yesterday, under the self-explanatory title "The Wikipedia Story". The presenter, Clive Anderson, speaks to a fair range of people, including Andrew Keen, whose book The Cult of the Amateur I've commended on this blog. But I don't feel the programme properly identified the objection of us sceptics to the Wikipedia venture and to the culture of user-generated content. Andrew has a nice quotation in his book (p. 45):

So what do we get in exchange for free amateur content? We get, of course, what we pay for. We get what the great thinker and writer Lewis Mumford called "a state of intellectual enervation and depletion hardly to be distinguished from massive ignorance".

(Mumford is little read now, which is surprising given the popularity of anti-capitalist sentiment. His principal subject was architecture, which he taught in the 1920s at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. His critiques of market forces and in particular of their effect on the environment are far more prescient than those of more recent Green theorists.)

Occasionally I've commented here on an especially gross error or tendentious political message I've come across on Wikipedia, but none of these is an important point and my objection to Wikipedia is not that it gets things wrong. Errors can be corrected; political grandstanding is not hard to spot. (Mind you, here's an example of the latter – and bear in mind that Wikipedia is intended as a reference source. I recently, on the anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, turned to Wikipedia to see what it made of that terrible subject. I have to acknowledge that, other than its final section, the article isn't bad. I then turned to a linked Wikipedia article on Genocide denial, and was stupefied by what I found. There, reasonably enough, were the names of David Irving and - someone not widely known now, but a deceased pro-Nazi fraud masquerading as a historian - David Hoggan. And alongside them was Shimon Peres. The cited source for the Israeli President's entry into this unworthy pantheon was, of all things, an op-ed article by Robert Fisk. But at least the Wikipedia editor making that transparently polemical interpolation had thought to provide some sort of source. Elsewhere in the article, there is a long passage studded throughout with the label "citation needed" – which is to understate the problem, because the passage is unalloyed fabrication.)

My objection is rather that Wikipedia is by design an anti-intellectual exercise. Anyone can be an editor, and consequently the Wikipedia "community" recognises no intrinsic value in competence and knowledge. If you listen to Clive Anderson's programme, you'll notice a striking omission in this respect. There is no reference to the "Essjay scandal", revealed earlier this year. A prominent member of the Wikipedia "community" and of its arbitration committee turned out to be not, as he had claimed, a tenured professor of religion but a 24 year-old college drop-out called Ryan Jordan. More notable than the young man's fraud was Wikipedia's response, quoted in this article:

On his own Wikipedia "user talk" page, Mr. Jordan apologized, but said he created the false identity to protect him from critics who make a point to publicize the names of Wikipedia contributors. Some Wikipedians were quick to offer support to Essjay, but others were harshly critical. A few people even suggested Mr. Jordan be banned from posting to the encyclopedia.

But Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedian whose opinion matters the most, strongly defended the beleaguered editor. "EssJay has always been, and still is, a fantastic editor and trusted member of the community," wrote Wikipedia's chief. "He has been thoughtful and contrite about the entire matter, and I consider it settled."

So Jordan claimed expertise he did not possess; and according to Wikipedia's founder and intellectual progenitor, that didn't matter. Wikipedia's absence of standards could scarcely be more blatant. It has consequences too. Consider this item by the Tory blogger Iain Dale (whom ironically I debated recently on television about the merits of the "blogosphere") a few months ago:

Conservative MP James Duddridge has discovered that Robert Mugabe's daughter Bona is studying at the LSE. He asked Ian McCartney about it in the House of Commons earlier having alerted him to the issue this morning. Bearing in mind McCartney had several hours to look into the issue, his responses were less than illuminating. When asked if the British taxpayer was paying any of the cost of her education he said "I don't know". James Duddridge has now written to McCartney asking five key questions...

The "discovery" was no such thing. The story was rubbish, and the LSE denied that any relative of Mugabe was registered as a student there. There is strong circumstantial evidence, set out by one editor of the site, that the bogus claim in fact originated with Wikipedia, and that the Tory MP James Duddridge had taken this “information” directly from the site. (I have taken the link from a useful "Wikipedia Watch" site.) Owing to the unfortunate accident that the minister in question, Ian McCartney, is not a man noted for mastery of any brief, this factoid was then confirmed in Parliament – giving a straight propaganda victory to Robert Mugabe, who habitually claims that he is the victim of lies told by the British government. It’s almost incredible to relate, but even after the story had been debunked, the Tory MP James Duddridge – having been grievously at fault in the first place by acting on what he’d read in Wikipedia – returned to the subject. He issued a statement declaring:

James has received confirmation from the Foreign Affairs Minister that Robert Mugabe's daughter is not currently studying at the London School of Economics. However, James remains concerned that Bona Mugabe and other members of the family are legally able to study in the UK and will be meeting the Minister on Monday 16th April to get to the bottom of the link between the dictator's family and the UK education system.

There was no link. The direct fault here was with a preternaturally dim Tory MP and an incompetent minister, but we shouldn’t lose sight of their inspiration. When false stories are not merely retailed and fanned by Wikipedia but also created by it, with no inherent check on its accuracy, and where "user-generated content" is treated as just another form of information, then our civic culture is in difficulty.

Only the lowest

Hitch:

Just look at the gang that strove to prevent the United Nations from enforcing its library of resolutions on Saddam Hussein. Where are they now? Gerhard Schroeder, ex-chancellor of Germany, has gone straight to work for a Russian oil-and-gas consortium. Vladimir Putin, master of such consortia and their manipulation, is undisguised in his thirst to re-establish a one-party state. Jacques Chirac, who only avoided prosecution for corruption by getting himself immunized by re-election (and who had Saddam's sons as his personal guests while in office, and built Saddam Hussein a nuclear reactor while knowing what he wanted it for), is now undergoing some unpleasant interviews with the Paris police. So is his cynical understudy Dominique de Villepin, once the glamour-boy of the "European" school of diplomacy without force. What a crew! Galloway is the most sordid of this group because he managed to be a pimp for, as well as a prostitute of, one of the foulest dictatorships of modern times. But the taint of collusion and corruption extends much further than his pathetic figure, and one day, slowly but surely, we shall find out the whole disgusting thing.

Higher illiteracy

I know that the floods in and around Gloucestershire have caused much damage and hardship, but I get worked up mainly by this BBC round-up of the newspapers:

Extraordinary scenes of the floods command many of the front pages of Monday's newspapers.

"Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink," is the headline in the Daily Mail.

There is a journalists' version of Coleridge, and there is what the poet wrote. Can you, without looking it up, render accurately the couplet that The Daily Mail imagines it's quoting (it comes from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner")? Few can - which makes it all the more unprofessional that the newspaper's editor let the headline through without checking it.

Johann Hari on the "pro-war left"

In his Independent column yesterday, Johann Hari indicted a small group for "catastophic misjudgement":

The pro-invasion left was always a small battallion, comprised almost entirely of journalists and intellectuals who believed that toppling the Taliban and Saddam Hussein was a good idea - even if the only President available to lead the charge was George Bush. Yet almost since the first statue of Saddam was smashed to the ground, it has been losing troops - to the anti-war side, or to a sullen AWOL silence, or to despair.

It's now a year since the Euston Manifesto, an attempt by the pro-war left to hone its position into a coherent set of principles, was issued. So this is a good time to ask: did this strange niche in Anglo-American politics - of which I was a part, for a time - produce any enduring insights?

Johann's answer is clear:

It is clear that the invasion of Iraq was motivated not by Enlightenment values, but by a desire to achieve US control over Middle East oil. Yet the only time people like [Nick] Cohen mention oil is to mock the madness of the left for bringing it up. Is his explanation - that Rumsfeld and Cheney were suddenly gripped by Wilsonian idealism - more plausible?

I have a lot of respect for Johann, but this article is conceptually chaotic from the first sentence. (There is, Johann, no construction of the form "to be comprised of" in English: a quantity comprises its parts, or is composed of them; the parts do not comprise the whole. I know it will appear pedantic to raise the point, but as I criticise you for not examining the intellectual case that you're depicting, it's relevant that you weren't visualising clearly your target before attempting to characterise it.) Having written a short book two years ago to expound the case for the "strange niche" that Johann castigates, I can confirm that I never once raised the possibility that military intervention in Iraq might have been prompted by a desire to achieve US control of Middle East oil. I regret that omission only in the sense that Saddam's control of Iraq's oil reserves and his threat to neighbouring countries' oil reserves were also justifiable grounds for removing him from power. They merely were not my reasons for favouring military intervention, on which my views - set out here, among other places - have not changed, unlike Johann's.

But my objection to Johann's argument is not that he has changed his position on the Iraq War: it is that he accuses us, his targets, of a "shallow and ahistorical reading of neoconservativism. The notion that neoconservatism is a vehicle for a global democratic revolution is a 1990s rhetorical creation. On the contrary, for most of its short intellectual life neoconservatism has defended autocracy."

The shallow and ahistorical reading is Johann's alone; I once noted an earlier case where, in choosing his enemies (many of whom I share), he caricatured and seriously misrepresented them as a monolithic force. He's done the same here. I'm not a neoconservative: on issues as various as welfare policy, race, homosexual equality, separation of church and state, and numerous others, I'm very much out of sympathy with the neoconservative case. But I don't regard it as an insult to be termed a neoconservative, and there is a particular type of neoconservative stance in foreign affairs that I regard as the natural ally of the Left. Johann's insistence that this stance is a "1990s rhetorical creation" shows that he hasn't been following the intellectual debate within and about an important influence in foreign policy.

The villain of Johann's piece, whom he takes to be the representative neoconservative, is the late Jeane Kirkpatrick, who served as President Reagan's first ambassador to the UN. I have scant sympathy with Ambassador Kirkpatrick's political views, but Johann manages both to misrepresent those views and then illegitimately to elide any distinction between them and other currents among neoconservatives.

I gave my views on Jeane Kirkpatrick's political legacy here, on her death last December. The main point I would make in her favour is that she was far from being the realist in foreign policy that Johann imagines: there is nothing in her academic analysis that corresponds to the pessimism about democracy that one finds in, for example, the work of the late George Kennan. She was a liberal Democrat who favoured democratic change but who believed in working with authoritarian regimes in order to contain a larger threat. Where she was fundamentally in error was in holding to that principle while having no means of assessing democratic potential in particular countries. This omission was particularly clear in policy towards Latin America, which ironically was her area of academic specialism. She had no conception of the fragility of military rule in Argentina, or of the coherence of democratic forces in Chile. Accordingly, she failed to see the issues at stake in the Falklands conflict, gave unjustified succour to the vile military regime that launched the invasion of British territory, and spurned the movement for human rights and constitutional government in Chile.

But - and this is the point Johann doesn't appear to understand - Ambassador Kirkpatrick's views were an impermanent feature of US policy. When she left government service, US policy shifted; and those who effected that shift were no less neoconservative in their inspiration. Elliot Abrams, who is literally part of the family of neoconservatism (he is the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz, Editor-in-Chief of Commentary), had been appointed assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, and was a strong proponent of siding with democratic political movements in Chile. Tony Smith, of Tufts University, in America's Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century, 1994, p. 290, notes: "From March 1986 to March 1988, the United States endorsed five UN resolutions critical of human rights in Chile and abstained on three others, while voting against only one." This was a distinct shift in US policy.

Johann is free to say that this was merely declaratory policy, and that the Reagan administration was scarcely at the forefront of democratic change in Latin America - and of course he would be right. But he would still thereby undermine his argument. It is demonstrably false that the neoconservative stress on democracy was merely a rhetorical creation of the 1990s: it has a clear lineage in theory and practice. It became clearer still when Ambassador Kirkpatrick's taxonomy of regimes failed to anticipate the real choice in the Philippines in 1986: between a corrupt autocrat, Ferdinand Marcos, and popular democratic change. Some neoconservatives did see the issue clearly. Paul Wolfowitz, then assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific Affairs, wrote some years later (in Present Dangers, eds. Robert Kagan and William Kristol, 2000, p. 320): "Although political change might jeopardize military bases in the Philippines, it was more important to have a healthy ally without American bases than a sick ally with them."

What is most flawed in Johann's argument is not, however, his indifference to history so much as his reliance on what Richard Dawkins, in quite another context, has termed the argument from personal incredulity. There is no connection between Johann's incredulity that neoconservatives genuinely favour the promotion of democracy and his inference that the Iraq intervention was about oil. And - I repeat - the shallow reading here is Johann's alone. Jeane Kirkpatrick's last and posthumous book, Making War to Keep Peace, has recently been published. It is, as you would expect, a thoughtful discussion of international affairs, in which there is much valuable detail. (There are particularly good chapters on the Bosnia and Kosovo conflicts, where Ambassador Kirkpatrick understood well the issues at stake in rebuffing the genocidal aggression of Slobodan Milosevic.) But the issue of particular relevance to this discussion is that Ambassador Kirkpatrick's insistence that security was the prerequisite of democracy caused her to be sceptical of the arguments for military intervention in Iraq (p. 281): "I had grave reservations when George W. Bush made the decision to invade Iraq, and I was privately critical of the Bush administration's argument for the use of military force for pre-emptive self-defense."

There is no question but that Ambassador Kirkpatrick is giving a truthful account of her views here. She was at the time of the invasion the US delegation to the UN Human Rights Commission, having been called out of retirement by President Bush. If she had argued different views privately, then these would be recalled by members of the administration, and she would have anticipated this when writing her book. More to the point, her reservations were perfectly consistent with her overall philosophy and with what came to be known as the Reagan Doctrine, in contrast to a belief in direct intervention. The position that came to prevail over her scepticism was another variant of neoconservatism, most obviously associated with Paul Wolfowitz, which does favour intervention to promote democracy.

Now, we can have a vigorous debate about the wisdom and morality of the Wolfowitz position. I support that stance, despite the failures of the Iraq occupation and the clearly flawed judgement by the administration about the ease of establishing a constitutional order. My reason is that the distinction between security and democracy is a false dichotomy. Ultimately, our security requires the spread of democratic values, as democracies are less belligerent than autocracies. (This is a big argument, but I have my reasons for advancing it.) Of all people, certain neoconservatives understand that better than anyone apart from the small group of left-wingers and liberals that Johann castigates: Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen and, by extension, a few others of us. We can have that argument, Johann; but one thing I will insist on, if you accuse us of an ahistorical reading of US foreign policy, is that you exhibit greater standards of accuracy yourself in recounting those debates.

UPDATE: I hadn't noticed this when I wrote the post, but Johann's column is extracted from a longer review-article he has written for the American magazine Dissent. You can read the article in full on Johann's site here. Johann is primarily addressing Nick Cohen's book What's Left?, which I reviewed here.

UPDATE II: The autumn issue of Dissent will carry Nick's extremely telling response to the review.