Oliver Kamm

Wisdom? More like dumbness of the crowds

This article appears in The Times today.

A new web tool was launched this week. The WikiScanner allows users to track changes made to the phenomenally popular online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia. By comparing those changes with blocks of IP addresses, the editors of Wikipedia entries may be identified according to their location and the organisation from which they post.

The removal of unflattering references to particular corporations has been traced back to computers at the relevant companies. Someone at Labour’s headquarters altered a section about the Labour Students organisation to remove a reference to career politicians.

The development of technology that exposes such shenanigans could be taken as evidence of the self-correcting nature of cyberspace. It ought to be seen instead as a lesson in how easily information can be manipulated in a culture that prizes “user-generated content”.

Wikipedia relies on the wisdom of crowds. Knowledge is fluid. A definition contained in a reference work can never be regarded as complete and definitive. More reliable information emerges through continual revision. Consequently, anyone can edit an entry in Wikipedia. Many articles are plainly useless, but owing to the democratic nature of the medium the way is always open to incremental improvement.

Some may find this a seductive vision of the spread of knowledge. I find it alarming. It combines the free-market dogmatism of the libertarian Right with the anti-intellectualism of the populist Left. There is no necessary reason that Wikipedia’s continual revisions enhance knowledge. It is quite as conceivable that an early version of an entry in Wikipedia will be written by someone who knows the subject, and later editors will dissipate whatever value is there. Wikipedia seeks not truth but consensus, and like an interminable political meeting the end result will be dominated by the loudest and most persistent voices.

This is an inherent flaw. The problem is not that there are too few voices in the editorial process, who can skew the result, but the opposite. Participation is prized more than competence. When a prominent Wikipedian who claimed to be a tenured professor of divinity was revealed instead to be a young college dropout, the site’s founder Jimmy Wales responded that he was unconcerned. The notion that a false claim to knowledge is wrong is not part of Wikipedia’s culture.

The WikiScanner is thus an important development in bringing down a pernicious influence on our intellectual life. Critics of the web decry the medium as the cult of the amateur. Wikipedia is worse than that; it is the province of the covert lobby. The most constructive course is to stand on the sidelines and jeer at its pretensions.

Still more on Hiroshima

This is a belated second post dealing with criticisms of my Guardian column last week on Hiroshima Day. The first one dealt with critical comments and letters published in The Guardian. Since I wrote that post, the newspaper has published two more letters on the subject, here. As those letters are a lot wiser than the ones I criticised, I make no comment other than to recommend them.

Also the journalist Phillip Knightley, who wrote one of the original letters criticising my column, has since published an article here. Knightley cites his Guardian letter and then expands his point:

The debate then broadened into discussing why the United States did this. I offered an answer: “By the summer of 1945 General Leslie Groves, who had been in charge of the American atomic bomb programme, headed what was in effect a new branch of the American armed services: a nuclear strike command with 15 aircraft and two atomic bombs. Groves saw it as his duty to have them dropped on two Japanese cities, to try them out so that their future effectiveness as weapons could be judged.” He persuaded President Truman to agree by drafting an order for him to sign suggesting, falsely, that the bombs would be dropped only on “military objectives and sailors and soldiers and not women and children.”

Truman wrote in his diary, “The target will be purely a military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives.” So Hiroshima and Nagasaki were hit with atomic bombs so that the America could learn how many people such bombs could kill and how much property they could destroy, in short, a military experiment. If that was not a war crime, then what is?

Knightley's original letter was nonsense; so is his article. I'm grateful to one of the most distinguished of all historians of the Pacific War, who has checked the relevant memoirs of both men and found no indication that Groves (who did not hold the post Knightley claims) drafted any order for Truman (who was at Potsdam at the time). Groves did draft an order for the bombing to General Carl Spaatz, who was Commander of US Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific, to be signed by Acting Chief of Staff Thomas Handy. The words Knightley quotes don't appear anywhere in it. It is sobering to note that Knightley is an experienced journalist who describes himself as "an acknowledged expert in the dark arts of warfare" (i.e. propaganda and espionage). You might wish to recall Knightley's haplessness on this issue the next time you come across his declared expertise.

It is thus no great step, I fear, from Knightley to the stridently unlettered right-winger Justin Raimondo. It would take an age to dissect the misconceptions of Raimondo's entire article on Truman and Hiroshima (though I hope and believe he is right to identify Hillary Clinton as a "national security" Democrat), and I will deal merely with his response to mine:

Harry Truman, the author of the single most unjustified act of savagery in American history, is the iconic figure of today's "national security" (i.e., pro-war) Democrats, the hero of Peter Beinart's paean to Cold War liberal interventionism, The Good Fight. And it is not for nothing that the pro-war Left has taken up the cause of Truman's genocide. Oliver Kamm presents the case for mass murder here, in his typically bilious, self-important manner.

According to Comrade Kamm, "New historical research in fact lends powerful support to the traditionalist interpretation of the decision to drop the bomb." Yet, somehow, in all his research, this learned scholar has never come across Gen. Dwight David Eisenhower's dissent from Truman's deadly decision. He likewise ignores the almost unanimous opinion of top military figures at the time – including Adm. William Leahy, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Gen. Curtis LeMay, Gen. Henry Arnold, Brig. Gen. Bonner Fellers, Adm. Ernest King, Gen. Carl Spaatz, Adm. Chester Nimitz, and Adm. William "Bull" Halsey – that using the Bomb twice was not a military necessity.

(I should explain that Raimondo occasionally refers to me as Comrade Kamm because he is amused by the fact that my name is similar to the first syllable of the word "communism". Hence he refers to the views I and other left-wing interventionists espouse as "Kammunism". I'm not sure if he's aware of it, but this ingenious wordplay is even funnier when you take account of the German origin of my name. Communism in German is spelled with a "k", and all German nouns start with a capital letter. Moreover, the German pronunciation of the letter "a" comes somewhere between an English short "a" and an English short "o". Foreign names are a rich seam for humour, as I'm sure my readers will agree.)

First, note that Raimondo is so incompetent a writer that he has misunderstood even his own cited source. That source, by Peter Kuznick, Associate Professor of History at American University, maintains (emphasis added):

Top U.S. military leaders recognized Japan’s growing desperation, prompting several to later insist that the use of atomic bombs was not needed to secure victory. Those who believed that dropping atomic bombs on Japan was morally repugnant and/or militarily unnecessary included Admiral William Leahy, General Dwight Eisenhower, General Douglas MacArthur, General Curtis LeMay, General Henry Arnold, Brigadier General Bonner Fellers, Admiral Ernest King, General Carl Spaatz, Admiral Chester Nimitz, and Admiral William “Bull” Halsey.

Now, there is a great deal wrong with Kuznick's argument, but one thing he is careful to state (inelegantly) is the chronology of military commanders' alleged objections to the Bomb: they were later criticisms, made after the fact. The amount of "dissent from Truman's deadly decision" (to use Raimondo's phrase) among Truman's commanders at the time was, so far as we can tell from current documentary evidence, nil. Robert Maddox, Professor Emeritus of History at Pennsylvania State University, states in his book Weapons for Victory, 1995, p. 124: "Pending the discovery of new material, there is no reliable evidence that any high-ranking officer expressed moral objections about the bomb to Truman or gave him reason to believe that the military situation had changed appreciably - except that Japanese defenses were growing daily more formidable - since he had approved the Kyushu operation [i.e. invasion] during his meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on June 18."

It is true - as Kuznick says - that Eisenhower claimed in 1963 to have opposed use of the A-bomb and to have forcefully argued his case to Secretary of War Henry Stimson. Kuznick does not however disclose (and Raimondo obviously has no idea) that independent evidence shows that Eisenhower's recollection cannot be taken at face value. Parts of it are clearly false and the rest is unconfirmed. (The evidence is set out in Professor Maddox's volume cited above, pp. 121-4, and in Barton J. Bernstein, "Ike and Hiroshima: Did He Oppose It?", Journal of Strategic Studies, 10, 1987.) It is also true that Admiral William Leahy later condemned the use of the Bomb, but there is no reputable evidence that he did so at the time. One could go through a list of these military figures and say the same thing in each case. The chronology matters, and is the reason I carefully stated in my Guardian piece: "Contrary to popular myth, there is no documentary evidence that [Truman's] military commanders advised him the bomb was unnecessary for Japan was about to surrender." So far as I can tell from his conceptual chaos, Raimondo believes that almost all Truman's commanders opposed the A-bomb decision. He's wrong.

Even so, should we not give weight to the fact that Eisenhower and Leahy at some time, even if not in 1945, expressed forceful objections to use of the Bomb on the grounds that Japan was already a defeated power? Well, no. I'll quote an email I received a couple of years ago on this subject from yet another historian, at London University, who expressed this point so well that I sought and received his permission to post his comments (which are well worth reading in full) on this site:

In fact, [Leahy's memoir] I Was There (written in 1950) is an unreliable source, tainted by hindsight and as partial as many a politician or decision-maker's recollections can be. Leahy's position on atomic weapons was affected by the fact that he simply did not believe that the bomb would work (an opinion discredited by the first test in New Mexico in July 1945). As far as Eisenhower and Montgomery were concerned, both men had fought in North Africa and Europe against the Germans and Italians. Their experiences, and those of the troops they commanded, were radically different from those of the US Army and Marines in the Pacific Island campaigns, or of 14th Army in Burma.

Again and again in the anti-nuclear campaigners' citations of military figures you find a confusion between Japanese defeat and Japanese surrender. Whether and when an enemy will surrender is a political judgement, not a military one. It is accordingly not a subject on which military commanders have any special insight. It would be extraordinary if, after such catastrophic acts of war as the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there had been no second thoughts by military commanders on a subject about which they had no particular competence: could those acts really have been necessary? As I indicated in my article, recent historical research by American and Japanese scholars strongly suggests that the bombs were indeed necessary - both of them, and not just the one at Hiroshima - to secure Japanese surrender.

Let us turn briefly now to two other publications that commented on my article. Cathy Young, a columnist at Reason magazine, makes some thoughtful points about the erroneous belief that "all use of terrible means is equal". She deliberately doesn't get into the historical arguments, and directs her readers for an alternative view to "the revisionist case ... made here by the Hoover Institution's David Henderson".

By all means read Henderson's piece, but be aware that he is no historian. He is an economist (of notably doctrinaire free-market views, though that's not relevant to this debate), whose source is a hoary and massive volume by Gar Alperovitz. Professor Alperovitz is the principal populariser (though not the originator) of the view that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the first acts of the Cold War. He is much cited by anti-nuclear campaigners, but ignored by historians owing to two fundamental weaknesses in his thesis. First, there's no evidence for it; and secondly, his use of source material is a scholarly disgrace. Again, I direct you to Professor Maddox for some gruesome evidence on Alperovitz's techniques (Robert J. Maddox, "Gar Alperovitz: Godfather of Hiroshima Revisionism", Hiroshima in History, ed. Maddox, 2007, pp. 7-23). Alperovitz's characteristic technique, maintained consistently in the 40 years since the first edition of his book Atomic Diplomacy and continued in its successor volume, is to use ellipses in order to alter the meaning of the sources he purports to be examining.

Last, the New Criterion magazine carried a brief controversy among its contributors. The magazine's editor, Roger Kimball, agreed with me, here and here. His colleague Andrew Cusack strongly disagreed. Much of Cusack's case is about ethics, notably a famous argument by the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, and I will address this subject in the next post. But I was taken with this passage from Cusack:

"The so-called revisionist interpretation," Mr. Kamm informs us, "argued that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were less the concluding acts of the Pacific war than the opening acts of the cold war. Japan was already on the verge of surrender; the decision to drop the bomb was taken primarily to gain diplomatic advantage against the Soviet Union." Interesting enough? Well, here comes Mr. Kamm's jaw-dropping insight to debunk the revisionists: "Yet there is no evidence that any American diplomat warned a Soviet counterpart in 1945-46 to watch out because America had the bomb."

To borrow from the popular speech of our time: well, duh! The concept that American diplomats would officially (or even informally) inform the Soviet Union, one of their formal allies, that a given act of war against the Empire of Japan was also partly a warning to the Communists of American power is so ridiculous it can be rejected at first sight.

It's always satisfying to depict an opponent's argument as too stupid to merit a response, but it does carry a risk. If you are not, in fact, a master of the relevant source material you might end up looking dumber even than you believe your adversary to be. Mr Cusack is a case in point. It is not ridiculous to suggest that US diplomats might have issued such a warning to Soviet counterparts. We know, for example (or at least I know: Mr Cusack plainly is not in the same position), that Secretary of State James F. Byrnes told Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy in August 1945 that he intended to go the London Foreign Ministers Conference the next month with the implied threat of the bomb behind him in his dealings with his Soviet counterpart. The crucial point undermining the "atomic diplomacy" thesis is not that such a warning was inconceivable but that that warning was never in fact issued. (On this point, and the evidence of Stimson's diaries, see Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman and the Cold War Revisionists, 2006, pp. 22-3.)

That concludes my discussion of the historical objections to my article about Hiroshima. I find those objections highly unconvincing. My third and final post on the subject will address the ethical objections of Norman Geras and Michael Walzer. Professors Geras and Walzer are - I understate on a grand operatic scale - more formidable political thinkers than Justin Raimondo, but I take strong issue with their arguments too, for reasons I shall explain.

UPDATE: Cathy Young of Reason magazine has published a longer version of her post on her own blog, here. She makes many astute points, and the comments are worth reading too.

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.

More on Hiroshima

I have been away for a few days. There have been many comments in the meantime about my Guardian column on Hiroshima Day. I'll endeavour to recount what has been said, and by whom, and how I reply. As my survey ranges from the American palaeo-libertarian Justin Raimondo to Norman Geras, you might reasonably assume that I have ranked my critics according to ascending order of intellectual weight. In fact this is true only indirectly, in the sense that I deal respectively with arguments about the history of President Truman's decision to use the A-bomb, and then arguments about the moral justification of that decision. The arguments of the first type are, on the available evidence, demonstrably false. Those of the second type are serious and are advanced by heavyweight political philosophers from whose work I have learned much.

In the next day or two I shall post three comments on this subject. This one deals with responses to my column that have appeared in The Guardian. The second will address responses made elsewhere. The third will discuss specifically the ethical arguments of my friend Norman Geras, and of one or two others. You can read Norman's criticisms of my article here. Norman's thinking on war has been much influenced by Michael Walzer, whom he cites; I take strong issue with Walzer's argument about Hiroshima, and by extension also with Norman's criticisms.

First, here are the objections that have appeared in The Guardian. On Tuesday, the newspaper ran an article by two authors from something called the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran, Abbas Edalat and Mehrnaz Shahabi, entitled "Prospects of Armageddon". The authors state:

It is appalling, if unsurprising, to read the neoconservative cheerleader Oliver Kamm arguing in these pages that the atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki 62 years ago saved lives and ended suffering. The subtext is plain. The same camp whose vocal endorsement led to the present catastrophe in Iraq are now hawkishly gazing at Iran. The same absurd and dangerous logic that defends the nuclear atrocities of 1945 can now be used to support the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons against Iran - the threat of which in turn makes the idea of a conventional attack appear more palatable.

In calling me a neoconservative cheerleader, these writers have clearly adopted the school of criticism pioneered by Johann Hari, viz. not troubling to read an argument - in this case, my book Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-Wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy - before affecting to know what's in it. But a still more serious abuse of the conventions of intellectual exchange is their discerning a "subtext" for which there is no evidence at all. As my column neither referred nor alluded to Iran, these authors are engaged in nothing more substantial than speculation about my mental states. Argument about what I might have been thinking, as opposed to what I wrote, is an obviously illegitimate way of conducting debate, not least because a proposition about the contents of my mind is unfalsifiable.

Yesterday, The Guardian ran this crop of letters in response to my column. The lead letter is from Canon Paul Oestreicher, who writes:

Given the prevailing mood in 1945, the launching of the nuclear age on human targets was no huge departure. Had it really ended the war, as Oliver Kamm claims, there was a case for Hiroshima. Not for Nagasaki. The threat should then have sufficed. Kamm dismisses the substantial diplomatic evidence that Japan was already suing for peace. President Truman wanted to get in quickly to show the world that the two bombs - there were only two - really worked. It still seemed within accepted strategic policy and need not be seen as a shot across Soviet bows.

I have commented on Canon Oestreicher's eccentric political interventions before, but in this instance he is making a definite historical claim: the bombing of Nagasaki, at least, was unnecessary, because a mere threat would have been sufficient after the bombing of Hiroshima. Oestreicher is doing here what revisionist historians typically do, and what anti-nuclear non-historians almost invariably do: he advances a hypothesis about Japan's wartime leadership without reference to a single Japanese source on the subject. The answer to his claim is cited in my article, and may be found in the paper "The Shock of the Atomic Bomb and Japan's Decision to Surrender - a Reconsideration", by Sadao Asada, Pacific Historical Review, November 1998 (reprinted in Hiroshima in History, ed. Robert James Maddox, 2007). Contemporary records and ministerial memoirs indicate that both bombs were crucial to Japan's decision to surrender, by enabling the "peace party" within the Cabinet to convince the Emperor that the war had been lost through the Americans' superior science. As Asada puts it:

Japan's peace party made the maximum political use of the atomic bomb to end the war. To them, the bomb was "a gift from Heaven", "a golden opportunity", and a "psychological moment" to end the war; they saw the bomb as "assisting" their peace efforts and as a means for the military to save face.

When Oestreicher refers to the "substantial diplomatic evidence that Japan was already suing for peace", he slightly overstates. The exact amount of evidence that Japan was already suing for peace is nil. The most that can be said is that messages were sent from Tokyo to the Japanese ambassador in Moscow asking that the Emperor be allowed to send an envoy to negotiate with the Soviet leadership. The terms envisaged were not surrender, or anything like it. They were a proposed bargain under which Japan would retain its polity and its Empire. As the historian Richard Frank has written, Japanese diplomatic cables that had been intercepted and decoded by the US yielded an unambiguous conclusion:

The Japanese did not see their situation as catastrophically hopeless. They were not seeking to surrender, but pursuing a negotiated end to the war that preserved the old order in Japan, not just a figurehead emperor. Finally, thanks to radio intelligence, American leaders, far from knowing that peace was at hand, understood--as one analytical piece in the "Magic" [a code word for US diplomatic briefings] Far East Summary stated in July 1945, after a review of both the military and diplomatic intercepts--that "until the Japanese leaders realize that an invasion can not be repelled, there is little likelihood that they will accept any peace terms satisfactory to the Allies." This cannot be improved upon as a succinct and accurate summary of the military and diplomatic realities of the summer of 1945.

Oestreicher goes on to give disembodied quotations from retired military commanders condemning the Hiroshima decision. I shall have more to say in the next post about this common rhetorical practice of anti-nuclear campaigners; I'll say here merely that some of these quotations are genuine, though none is contemporary or, in my view, relevant, and almost all are shorn of important political context.

The second letter is from Phillip Knightley. It reads:

By the summer of 1945 General Leslie Groves, who had been in charge of the American atomic bomb programme, headed what was in effect a new branch of the American armed services: a nuclear strike command with 15 aircraft and two atomic bombs. Groves saw it as his duty to have them dropped on two Japanese cities so that their future effectiveness as weapons could be judged. If that is not a war crime, then what is?

I've quoted this letter in full because I have no idea what it means. I sought the opinion of my adviser on all matters to do with the US military, the historian D.M. Giangreco, who served for 20 years as an editor of the US Army journal Military Review, and I was relieved to find that he too was unable to explain it. Knightley has clearly got his facts wrong. The new organisation to which he alludes was the so-called 509th Composite Group. Groves was a one-star general (roughly equivalent in rank to a British Brigadier) who, so far from being the head of the 509th, wasn't even in the chain of command. His role was in effect to be in charge of a large construction programme, comparable to his previous task, which was to build a large office block (i.e. the Pentagon).

The third letter reads in full:

Oliver Kamm conveniently forgets the 1944 Yalta Conference, which agreed that Stalin would bring his troops into the Pacific war theatre three months after the end of the war in Europe. May 8 1945 was VE Day. August 6, Russian troops were massing in Vladivostock ready to invade northern Japan on August 8. August 6, America dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, effectively stopping any Soviet involvement in the post war carve-up of Japan. QED.

This may be the worst attempt at a formal proof I've ever seen. Its author kindly sent me a copy of the letter before publication, and I replied - with equal courtesy, I hope - that he needed to take account of the clear evidence that the US sought the entry of the Soviet Union into the Pacific War (which did indeed happen between the bombings of Hiroshima and of Nagasaki). Here is just one piece of evidence, in the words of Michael Kort, author of the newly published Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb, in response to a particularly tendentious attempt to refurbish the revisionist case:

[U]pon hearing about the Soviet entry into the war, General Marshall on August 8 sent a personal message to Averell Harriman, the American ambassador to the Soviet Union, which reads as follows: “My congratulations and thanks to you for your great part in bringing about the events of the day.” It is inconceivable that General Marshall would have sent this message had the “events of the day” not been in accord with the president’s wishes.

The fourth letter argues: "One great challenge in eliminating terrorism is to convince those who have what they consider to be legitimate grievances that deliberately targeting civilians is never justified." It's by no means a foolish argument that the bombings had serious diplomatic costs in addition to the obviously immense human suffering, nor have I ever disputed that Western foreign policy in some respects provides impetus for terrorism directed against us. My argument, however, is that it's impossible to conceive of a foreign policy stance we might adopt that would not generates such grievances by our totalitarian enemies. I argue this case in greater detail in the book whose title Johann Hari, Abbas Edalat and Mehrnaz Shahabi have read.

The fifth and final letter maintains: "What we should be asking is what can we learn from 1945." I do not dissent, but I fear that the inferences the letter's author draws do not follow from the historical episode in question. I particularly do not agree with the claim that "use of the atom bomb led to a costly arms race because the Soviet Union saw it as a threat". In reality, the US in 1945-6 went to some lengths to give away its nuclear monopoly by establishing international control of atomic energy (these were the Acheson-Lilienthal and Baruch plans). The Cold War and misnamed "arms race" arose from Stalin's foreign policy, not from Truman's.

Those are criticisms carried by The Guardian. My next post will deal with criticisms made in other publications, beginning with those of the unredoubtable Justin Raimondo of antiwar.com.

Terrible, but not a crime

This article appears in The Guardian today.

Today is Hiroshima day, the anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb. As the wartime generation passes on, our sense of gratitude is increasingly mixed with unease regarding one theatre of the second world war. There is a widespread conviction that, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, America committed acts that were not only terrible but also wrong.

Disarmament campaigners are not slow to advance further charges. Greenpeace maintains that a different American approach might have prevented the cold war, and argues that new research on the Hiroshima decision "should give us pause for thought about the wisdom of current US and UK nuclear weapons developments, strategies, operational policies and deployments".

This alternative history is devoid of merit. New historical research in fact lends powerful support to the traditionalist interpretation of the decision to drop the bomb. This conclusion may surprise Guardian readers. The so-called revisionist interpretation of the bomb made headway from the 1960s to the 1990s. It argued that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were less the concluding acts of the Pacific war than the opening acts of the cold war. Japan was already on the verge of surrender; the decision to drop the bomb was taken primarily to gain diplomatic advantage against the Soviet Union.

Yet there is no evidence that any American diplomat warned a Soviet counterpart in 1945-46 to watch out because America had the bomb. The decision to drop the bomb was founded on the conviction that a blockade and invasion of Japan would cause massive casualties. Estimates derived from intelligence about Japan's military deployments projected hundreds of thousands of American casualties.

Truman had to take account of this, and dropped the bomb for the reasons he said at the time. Contrary to popular myth, there is no documentary evidence that his military commanders advised him the bomb was unnecessary for Japan was about to surrender. As the historian Wilson Miscamble puts it, Truman "hoped that the bombs would end the war and secure peace with the fewest American casualties, and so they did. Surely he took the action any American president would have undertaken." Recent Japanese scholarship provides support for this position. Sadao Asada, of Doshisha University, Kyoto, has concluded from analysis of Japanese primary sources that the two bombs enabled the "peace party" within Japan's cabinet to prevail.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are often used as a shorthand term for war crimes. That is not how they were judged at the time. Our side did terrible things to avoid a more terrible outcome. The bomb was a deliverance for American troops, for prisoners and slave labourers, for those dying of hunger and maltreatment throughout the Japanese empire - and for Japan itself. One of Japan's highest wartime officials, Kido Koichi, later testified that in his view the August surrender prevented 20 million Japanese casualties. The destruction of two cities, and the suffering it caused for decades afterwards, cannot but temper our view of the Pacific war. Yet we can conclude with a high degree of probability that abjuring the bomb would have caused greater suffering still.

Commemoration of war is part of our civic culture, and campaigners against Trident and the US missile defence system have every right to state their case. But those things must not be confused. The campaigners must advance independent grounds for their policy views. Dubious historical claims are not a legitimate way to advance them.

Johann and legal claims

Regarding the longrunning Hari-Cohen-Hari-Hari dispute, I did warn that there would be an additional comment from me on one issue. Here it is.

Johann has gone on and on, adding some comments to his defence and removing others. In two respects these relate partly to me. What he has added is a postscript that is largely fanciful but contains one notable, if ungracious, statement. So far as I can work it out - and I'm fairly certain I've understood him correctly - Johann confirms that when he described me as "an outright defender of neoconservatism", he was indeed deriving this judgement entirely from the title of my book, Antitotalitarianism: The Left-Wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy.

This is odd, because an outright defence of neoconservatism is not, in fact, what my book advances; instead, my book is an outright defence of the left-wing tradition of antitotalitarianism, exemplified by Ernest Bevin among others, with a concluding observation that part of the movement that has come to be known as neoconservatism now accords with those leftist ideals. I wouldn't expect my readers necessarily to be interested in that rather esoteric history, and I raise it in this post only to indicate a mode of argument that I fear Johann is prone to. If I were to submit an article to one of my editors in which I summarised someone's argument entirely from the title of a book that that person had written, and especially if I managed thereby to get the argument wrong, I believe my editors would have something to say about the diligence with which I had approached my commission. A blog post is not on the same plane as a commissioned and edited article, and I do not regard Johann's lapse as particularly serious.

But what is more serious is that Johann has behaved this way too with a published article - namely his review of Nick Cohen's book, What's Left? - which is how this whole dispute arose. I do not doubt that Johann read Nick's book before commenting on it, but beyond that, he has failed in the first task of a reviewer. He hasn't given an honest or competent account of Nick's argument, or of the foreign policy debates - particularly those relating to the influence of neoconservative ideas on US foreign policy - that he presents as background. In the case of the latter, notably in presenting neoconservatism as a device for the advance of big oil interests, his article might just as well have been in comic-book format for all the seriousness with which he has approached his subject.

What Johann has (so far as I can see) excised from his response is a justification of his legal threat against Harry's Place for a post about the Hari-Cohen dispute. Johann used as an example that I had once considered a similar course myself, as described in this post. Johann's analogy is not accurate or careful. False and defamatory material on the Web is the writer's occupational hazard - Johann is almost certainly more a victim of it than I, but I get it too. The difference between us is that I have never required anyone to remove material about me that has been posted on the Internet. (As Johann knows, I did on one occasion - on my initiative and not at Johann's request - go to some lengths to rebuff a crank who was outrageously stalking Johann on the Web.)

Here is my disclosure. I have used lawyers on four occasions since I started writing. Unlike Johann, I have done so from my own resources. One was nothing to do with defamation, and involved no communications with a third party, but was simply a request for legal advice on an issue of privacy. The other three involved threats of legal action against me. In each case I concluded, after taking advice from a leading libel lawyer (I retained one on either side of the Atlantic), that the complaints were devoid of merit, and I declined to remove from this blog the material that had generated the compaint. Two of the complainants fell silent immediately on hearing from my lawyers, and I have consequently never written about them. The third is the gentleman whom Johann has described in his response to his critics as "the depraved pro-Milosevic writer Neil Clark".

I do not consider Mr Clark to be depraved, but he is, from my experience, deficient in wisdom and prudence. I don't propose to rehearse my legal encounter with him once more, as I've described it in detail in the past. I merely point out that my accusations against Mr Clark were unquestionably covered by a defence of fair comment and justification (i.e. what I had said about him was true). My comments were also on a matter of public interest. Mr Clark had published in a national newspaper a factoid concerning the Balkan wars that I discovered had come directly from an organisation that promoted the appalling cause of "Srebrenica denial", and that Mr Clark had not represented that source accurately to his editor. (The poor fellow had apparently got confused between an obscure American organisation, which I was certain was his real source, and the well known International Institute for Strategic Studies, based in London.) I could prove this with Mr Clark's own emails to the newspaper. I therefore declined to remove from this blog the material Mr Clark objected to, or (as he demanded) to apologise to him and pay him damages. Mr Clark's attempts to issue a writ against me were not a model of competence, and the presiding judge of the court where he issued his purported writ (which didn't even have jurisdiction to hear the case) struck out his claim immediately on application from my lawyers.

Here is the singular analogy. Johann is a writer as different from Neil Clark as can be imagined. He is highly intelligent and I have long admired his commentaries. I do not always share his choice of allies, but there is a large overlap in our list of enemies: europhobes, xenophobes, religious fundamentalists, social authoritarians and so on. But Clark's threatening letters to me began when I queried a book review (irrelevantly, the book was by me) that was patently incompetent. Clark's purported review attributed to me arguments that were not contained in the book, and advanced a particular dubious and unresearched assertion about Balkan politics. It would be inconceivable for Johann to laud a figure such as Slobodan Milosevic, or use similar material to Clark's sources. But he has written a review that falls short of the standards his editor should have required, and he has made an imprudent threat of legal action that I do not consider redounds to his credit.