A humanitarian campaign, and unpleasant business

For reasons my friends are aware of, a number of things have regrettably escaped my attention recently, and I have been especially remiss in failing to comment on an important campaign initiated by my longstanding correspondent Dan Hardie (this post of his in particular). This cause was advocated in a Times column this week by the author Adam LeBor:

Of course, Britain cannot save every victim of the Iraq war. But it does have a moral responsibility to save those (and their families) who risked their lives to assist British troops, and who will almost certainly be targeted for death and torture once the soldiers leave. And let’s not overlook a practical military issue here: who will ever work for the British Army in a warzone if they know that later they will be tossed aside like a spent cartridge?

The people Adam is referring to are 91 Iraqi interpreters and their families. How we respond to their plight has nothing to do with the merits and demerits of the US-led coalition's intervention in Iraq; it's a straightforward humanitarian issue of protecting people whose lives are threatened. (For what it's worth, and obviously - as would be grievously false and tasteless - implying no comparison between the two cases, I would have said the same thing about Saddam Hussein, whose judicial murder I opposed.)

I'm afraid that, once you've followed the links I've given (as I hope you will do), you should then read posts on The Spectator's blog by James Forsyth and Stephen Pollard. It is a trivial consideration in this context, but I recall with disquiet that only a week ago I wrote on this site, in opposition to Johann Hari's opinion of the man: "I do not consider Mr [Neil] Clark to be depraved, but he is, from my experience, deficient in wisdom and prudence." That remains my view, in spite of conflicting evidence.

There is another minor consideration, which I add because it involves correcting a slight inaccuracy in Stephen's comments. When last year - with chronic ineptitude and total failure - Clark attempted to issue a libel writ against me, it wasn't just that he was seeking to silence my free expression. It was worse than that. I had exposed Clark's reliance, in an article he published in The Daily Telegraph, on a factoid that he had taken from a pro-Serb nationalist organisation that promotes "Srebrenica denial". I found further that Clark had - through an extraordinary confusion with the famous and reputable International Institute for Strategic Studies - misrepresented that source to his editor in answer to a direct question before and after publication. Clark has never denied that my comments were true, and if he did deny it I would immediately publish the emails proving my point. (I don't publish that evidence only because it involves third-party correspondence, and I am strict on not publishing private correspondence without permission.) In short, Clark wasn't just trying to suppress free speech: he was trying to cover up his reliance on a disreputable source and his misrepresentation of that source to The Daily Telegraph. I considered it was a matter of public interest to point this out, and - at some financial expense to myself - to decline to accede to Mr Clark's demands to suppress the information.

Since then, I have, with one partial exception, scrupulously avoided commenting on anything said by Mr Clark about anything. The reason is straightforward: he's obviously clueless. (This, incidentally, was also the reason his aggressive emails threatening me with legal action were undaunting. He would typically write at the top of them, in capital letters, "Without prejudice". Lawyers among my readers will see the unintended humour in this. He might just as well have written "I have no idea what I'm doing", for it would have conveyed the identical message. When the purported writ finally arrived - written in a childlike hand, with crossings out, without its even stating what the supposed "defamation" was, and from a small-claims court without jurisdiction to hear the complaint - I presented it with no little embarrassment to one of the leading libel lawyers in London to respond to.)

I have, however, watched what Mr Clark has said in case he repeats the factoid that I exposed. His opportunities appear in truth to have been limited, and I believe that just a few weeks ago he was deleted from Wikipedia - reportedly a site with 7.5 million entries, and of entirely indiscriminate quality - on the grounds that he wasn't notable enough for inclusion. In the past 18 months he has, so far as I can see, written two articles for The Telegraph - about, respectively, the Edwardian comic writer Saki, and horseracing - and a 200-word contribution for The Times about the World Pipe-Smoking Championships in Poland. I have no doubt that he is competent to write on two of those three non-political subjects. His contributions to The Guardian have been more numerous, and commendably haven't included the relevant factoid. Indeed, the only time I've since commented on Mr Clark's writing has been a quizzical note about The Guardian's publishing, with predictably infelicitous results, a comment on French politics from someone who literally can't read a French newspaper. Finally, Mr Clark has been quite prolific in writing for the Comment is Free blog, in which he has presented such judgements as: "Allowing Blair and his fellow warmongers to get off scot-free for the illegal, murderous attack on Iraq would put us - the British people - in the same moral category as the Germans who stood by and watched as Jews were herded on to trains bound for the concentration camps."

Mr Clark has now gone one better, in that forum where he is most prominent. With regard to the Iraqi interpreters and their families, he maintains:

Let's do all we can to keep self-centred mercenaries who betrayed their fellow countrymen and women for financial gain out of Britain.

If that means some of them may lose their lives, then the responsibility lies with those who planned and supported this wicked, deceitful and catastrophic war, and not those of us who tried all we could to stop it.

I am strongly in favour (argued here) of there being no restriction on the expression of odious and offensive opinions that fall short of incitement to crime. There was no libertarian obligation for CIF to publish Mr Clark's most recent sentiments - in effect, a demand for the death of those Iraqi interpreters, but not a direct incitement to that end - but I'm glad that it did so and I hope it continues to provide Mr Clark with a platform. The corollary, however, is that speech, while unrestricted in a free society, is not costless. Mr Clark is, I repeat, not depraved; but it will prove difficult for him to shake off a reputation for aggressive stupidity.

Please, again, go to Dan Hardie's site, and read this. It matters.