Oliver Kamm

Jackson's legacy

There was a curious item in The Guardian's Diary, written by Hugh Muir, on Friday:

How far will Gordon and his lieutenants go with this "big tent" thing? Everybody's welcome, it seems. Bring a friend, bring a bottle. At next week's Labour conference, ministers Liam Byrne and Shahid Malik are expected to address a meeting called Winning the Battle of Ideas Against Islamism and Terror. Should be a goodie, particularly as it is co-sponsored by the Henry Jackson Society, named after a virulently anti-communist Democrat who lobbied so hard for military spending that he was dubbed the "senator for Boeing". He was also an enthusiastic supporter of the internment camps set up to hold Japanese Americans during the second world war. He died in 1983, but the society is a rallying point for American neocons. Bush adviser Richard Perle, James Woolsey, promoter of the wildest absurdities about WMD in Iraq, and Bill Kristol, the publisher of neocon bible The Weekly Standard, are all on the Henry Jackson Society board. After attending the London launch two years ago, my colleague Ros Taylor described its supporters as "a smattering of spooks, diplomats, Times journalists and grandees whom recent events have treated badly". Ministers can sup with who they like, but if they let these people anywhere near the tent, there'll be trouble. Tell them the marquee is full, the bar's closed.

I read the Diary religiously. It's particularly strong when dealing with funny names and the dangerous activities of squirrels. But now it's ventured into political commentary, it appears less sure of its ground. Regarding the Jackson item, there was a good reply by Alan Johnson, editor of Democratiya, on the letters page yesterday, to which I draw your attention. (There is a small typo in Alan's letter. The legislation linking US trade benefits to the right of emigration of Soviet Jews was the Jackson-Vanik amendment - not Jackson-Vinik.) I sent my own comments directly to Hugh Muir:

I was always sure to express to your immediate predecessor [Jon Henley, who recently left the Diary] my appreciation for his occasional jovially inaccurate references to me. But I fear your comments today about the late Senator Henry Jackson and the society named after him are – being about far more important personalities than I – a more serious business.

I leave to the officers of the society – which I support but on whose behalf I do not speak – the task of correcting your depiction of it. I merely comment that the existence of a board of the HJS is news to me, while the notion that the society is a “rallying point for American neocons” is absurd. If you look down the list of signatories to the society’s declaration of principles, you’ll find a fairly heterogeneous group. Lord Soley, former chairman of the Labour Party, is a politician of notably loyal and mainstream party affiliation. Professor Vernon Bogdanor fits, so far as I’m aware, none of the categories conjured up by your colleague; his public profile derives from the quality of his scholarship in constitution and government. Sir Michael Ancram is hardly a supporter of the policies on Iraq and Trident pursued by Tony Blair.

But I particularly object to your slighting treatment of Senator Jackson. If you describe him as “virulently anti-Communist”, would you by the same token describe him as “virulently anti-fascist”? Or were you intending to insinuate that there is something suspect and disreputable about anti-Communism? If so, then your views are far from those that your newspaper has traditionally championed. Jackson, like other anti-Communist liberals such as Hubert Humphrey and Arthur Schlesinger, both opposed the demagoguery of Senator McCarthy and recognised the genuine security threat that Communism posed.

Nor was Jackson just “a Democrat”: he was one of the most prominent figures in his party in the 1970s, twice seeking the presidential nomination. He was an effective legislator, admired on both sides. His work for civil rights, conservation and welfare was of firmly liberal bent, while his interventionist views on economic policy – he believed Nixon’s wage and price controls were too weak – would put him around the position of Tony Benn in today’s political debates. I have a suspicion that you refer to his support for the shameful injustice of the internment of Japanese Americans in WW2 because it may be one of the few things you know about him. Yes, he was wrong, and he regretted it. If you go back further in his political career, you’ll find he once expressed notably isolationist sentiments in foreign policy; these were also disastrously wrong, and he changed his mind in that respect too. (He visited one of the concentration camps [it was Buchenwald: I couldn't recall this off-hand - OK] in 1945 only a few days after it had been liberated, and this powerfully affected his support for anti-totalitarian politics.)

I realise the Diary is a place for repartee, but – I offer merely my own view, and it may be different from other Guardian readers’ – a light touch, showing fidelity to historical facts, seems to me a better course than a strident reinforcement of stereotype.

If any reader wishes to accuse me of being a virulent anti-Communist, my response will be "thank you: I certainly hope so". But I fear the term may be intended to evoke different associations when used by Guardian columnists of a particular stripe, and I shall endeavour to establish whether this is so.

Raid on Syria

The most important story of this week and of most others is one on which there is a paucity of public information. We know that Israel made a bombing raid on Syria on 6 September. Everything else is conjecture or the product of unattributable briefing, but The Sunday Times gives a lucid account:

ISRAELI commandos from the elite Sayeret Matkal unit – almost certainly dressed in Syrian uniforms – made their way stealthily towards a secret military compound near Dayr az-Zawr in northern Syria. They were looking for proof that Syria and North Korea were collaborating on a nuclear programme.

Israel had been surveying the site for months, according to Washington and Israeli sources. President George W Bush was told during the summer that Israeli intelligence suggested North Korean personnel and nuclear-related material were at the Syrian site.

Israel was determined not to take any chances with its neighbour. Following the example set by its raid on an Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak 1981, it drew up plans to bomb the Syrian compound.

But Washington was not satisfied. It demanded clear evidence of nuclear-related activities before giving the operation its blessing. The task of the commandos was to provide it.

Today the site near Dayr az-Zawr lies in ruins after it was pounded by Israeli F15Is on September 6. Before the Israelis issued the order to strike, the commandos had secretly seized samples of nuclear material and taken them back into Israel for examination by scientists, the sources say. A laboratory confirmed that the unspecified material was North Korean in origin. America approved an attack.

This is an extraordinary development. And what is most extraordinary about it is what has not happened. Israel, even more than the United States, is a polity where it's very hard to keep things secret. Yet this one hasn't been leaked. (The Opposition leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, revealed publicly and to the consternation of his political opponents that he had given his support to the operation ordered by the PM, Ehud Olmert, but did not give details.) Syria, having sustained a raid on its territory, has been distinctly unforthcoming. On the other hand, the leadership of North Korea - which, to state the blindingly obvious but nonetheless pertinent, is not a country in the Middle East - has been meeting a Syrian delegation in Pyongyang in the last 24 hours.

Being neither politician nor diplomat but a mere pundit, and undeterred by the absence of corroborative evidence, I will say what I think is going on.

After 9/11, the links between rogue states and nuclear technology became a prime security concern. We know that North Korea and Iran have co-operated in missile technology, and it's possible that they've done so in nuclear technology too. We know that Libya and Iran received weapons designs and technology from Pakistan, unofficially, through the A.Q. Khan network. The circumstantial evidence is now strong that two very different autocracies, Syria and North Korea, are co-operating on nuclear technology, in defiance of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The secrecy surrounding the 6 September raid suggests that the target was important. Syria's non-response would confirm this. Syrian air defences proved gratifyingly useless and the covert activity identified by Israel is of the utmost diplomatic gravity. Meanwhile, Iran's mullahs - who in effect pull the strings that operate the intellectually nugatory figure of Syria's dictator, Bashar al-Assad - are doing their best, and with notable success, through deception and brinkmanship to escape the constraints nominally required of them by the EU-3. We know too that they are steering large amounts of weaponry, via Syria, to their client Hezbollah.

This is an ominous conjuncture. I shall have much more to say about it, but three observations are pertinent now.

First, when Tony Blair addressed the House of Commons a few days after 9/11, he saw more clearly than most the security challenges that now face us; I fear he is as prescient a statesman as I have long taken him for:

We know, that they [the terrorists] would, if they could, go further and use chemical, biological, or even nuclear weapons of mass destruction. We know, also, that there are groups of people, occasionally states, who will trade the technology and capability of such weapons. It is time that this trade was exposed, disrupted, and stamped out. We have been warned by the events of 11 September, and we should act on the warning.

Secondly, recall the awful precedent of the UN's dealings with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. One point on which those who supported military intervention against Saddam in 2003 and those who opposed it ought to be able to agree is that the Security Council must, this time, demand compliance. As one authority on WMD, Professor Graham Pearson of the Department of Peace Studies at Bradford University, has written with reference to this appalling history (The Search for Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, 2005, p. 242):

It is indeed a sorry state of affairs when the Permanent Members of the Security Council lose their resolve to address the dangers posed by a state which seeks to maintain a weapons of mass destruction capability and the Secretary-General effectively puts the UN organizations, UNSCOM and the IAEA, in the dock rather than the uncooperative and non-compliant state in Iraq. This led to the problems with Iraq being protracted and, it can be argued, to the eventual war in 2003 as had the Security Council being [sic] resolute and firm throughout and prepared to take military action in the last resort, it is possible that Iraq would have cooperated with the United Nations as it was intended to do throughout.

Thirdly, we may all in future have much cause for gratitude to the Israeli commandos who accomplished this mission, and whom I congratulate.

Resumption

Sorry there has been nothing from me for the past fortnight or so. I have been taken up with both personal and professional matters, but I hope to be resuming normally now.

"Unsparing of reputations"

Martin Bell has a new book out this week. It's called The Truth That Sticks: New Labour's Breach of Trust. In the meantime, Martin has a piece in The Guardian today in which he argues: "We need an inquiry to do for the war in Iraq what the Esher inquiry did for the Boer war - unflinching, far-reaching and unsparing of reputations."

By way of precedent, Martin cites the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Bosnian Serb Commission of Inquiry into the Srebrenica massacre. The example is extraordinary, while the recommendation is far from the principles of open and democratic government that Martin espouses. I suspect this argument will be rehearsed at length in coming months. I state here the grounds of my own dissent from it.

Historical analogies are never exact but sometimes useful. If they are to be useful, then the precedent needs at a minimum to be stated accurately. Martin's analogy is not accurate, because he has confused two different inquiries. The inquiry into the causes of near-defeat in Boer War was the South African War Commission. This was headed not by Lord Esher (though he was a member of the Commission) but by Lord Elgin, the former Viceroy of India. The Esher Committee (more properly, the War Office Reconstitution Committee, established in November 1903) was something different.

Though it too owed its origins to the disastrous experience of relations between the army and the War Office in the Boer War, the Esher Committee was not an inquiry into the war. Whereas the Elgin Committee was an extensive affair, sitting for 55 days and considering 114 separate submissions, the Esher Committee comprised just three members and reported quickly on a specific failure. As Great Britain, unlike other European great powers, lacked a mass conscript army, there were recurring difficulties in deploying troops on any scale far from the home islands. This weakness had been obvious as early as the Crimean War and went unrepaired in the Boer War. Esher recommended the establishment of a general staff, on the Prussian-German model, whose principal task was to prepare the army for war. The recommendation was implemented by the Secretary of State for War, Richard Haldane, in 1906.

The earlier Elgin Committee also proposed sweeping organisational changes to the War Office Council and the War Department, and the abolition of the post of Commander-in-Chief. These were important and necessary reforms to the organisation and control of the armed forces, which had been in no fit state to embark on the Boer War. (On the political background to this, see The Enigmatic Edwardian: The Life of Reginald, 2nd Viscount Esher by James Lee-Milne, 1986. On the military lessons of the Boer War, see "The Impact of the South African War on Imperial Defence" by Keith Jeffrey, in The South African War Reappraised, ed. Donal Lowry, 2000, pp. 188-201.) There is, in short, no parallel whatsoever with the types of issue concerning Iraq that Martin raises in his article:

We need to understand why the warpath was chosen when diplomatic options were not exhausted; why there was a plan for war but not for peace; why the armed forces were sent to kick in the door of a sovereign state on the basis of a whim about regime change and a falsehood about weapons of mass destruction. And what lessons can be learned, so that never again do we park our foreign policy so unconditionally up the Potomac.

These are political questions about the decision to go to war. They are not about the effectiveness of our armed forces once deployed in war. Raising those questions is legitimate in itself without resorting to tendentious analogies.

Even so, it cannot have escaped Martin's notice that those of us who identify with the foreign policies of Tony Blair have no particular diffidence in answering those questions (apart from the one about postwar planning, on which the principal failure is not British). There is never an obvious point at which diplomacy is exhausted, but there is a point at which you can reasonably say that diplomacy is futile and counterproductive. The government concluded that that point had been reached in our relations with Saddam Hussein. American security strategy can be faulted at immense length for its execution, but a strategy of pre-emption against hostile regimes is far from being a whim: it has historical precedent and academic weight. As the historian John Lewis Gaddis has argued:

I think we are actually back to a kind of situation which 19 th-century strategists had to deal with: the danger of non-state actors who, with state support or taking advantage of the failure of states, might gain locations from which they could threaten American interests. There was a sense that these dangers had to be pre-empted or prevented by taking over Florida, for example, from Spain, or taking over Texas from Mexico, or, according to many historians, provoking a war with Mexico so [the United States] could take California to prevent the French or British from taking it later.

[Another example is] our interventions in Central America at the beginning of the 20th century, which were intended to prevent so-called failed states from providing excuses that might lead European powers like imperial Germany, for instance, to intervene. There is a long tradition behind this, and I think it obscures more than it illuminates to try to provide this pre-emption/prevention distinction from the nuclear debates in the 1950s and 1960s and try to make them work in this new situation.

The government was indeed at fault in its assessment of Saddam's arsenal, but that issue has already been considered by the Butler inquiry. Martin complains:

The inquiries we have had, led by Lords Hutton and Butler, were certainly no substitute for the inquiry that we haven't. Lord Hutton's investigation, whatever its quality, was limited to the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly, and Lord Butler's to the accuracy and use of the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction.

But of course they were. The decision to go to war was a political decision. Martin is not satisfied with the inquiries that have taken place because he disagrees fundamentally with that political decision. The place to manage - not resolve - fundamental political disagreements is in the political process. Martin is instead proposing a quasi-judicial arrangement to supplant the political process; in short, his proposals are not a reform to make good a weakness in our political system, but a challenge to cabinet government and the principles of representative democracy.

Martin's campaigns in British politics began a decade ago when he noted a malfunction in the party system. A particular parliamentarian (among others) had behaved in a way that damaged the reputation of his office, yet he appeared likely to escape electoral retribution. Supposedly that MP, the former minister Neil Hamilton, had a safe seat. Martin's intervention changed that. In the case Martin is now campaigning about, the political system works well enough. The government adopted an unpopular policy and has suffered political damage as a result. To my regret, Tony Blair has left office earlier than he would have done otherwise and with a tarnished public image. (It will not do, however, to engage in Martin's hyperbole about Tony Blair's vanishing from public view on the model of disgraced members of the Soviet Politbureau. Blair, by design, has tasks abroad, and the public perception of him is more favourable than Martin acknowledges, as I argued here.) Those who believe, as I do, that the former PM has been a powerful influence for good at home and in the international order are usually depicted - at least in my experience of debating these issues - as a minority on the defensive. That isn't "serious wrongdoing, on a scale from the discreditable to the shameful": it's politics. Martin's campaign, which he styles as a complaint about New Labour, is in fact an assault on democratic politics.

I have saved till last that remarkable comment about South Africa's historical reckoning and the Srebrenica massacre. Martin avers: "The cases are different [from our intervention in Iraq], but the principle is the same." When you examine that qualification, you realise it's meaningless. What is the purpose of invoking the atrocities practised by despicable, murderous, racist regimes unless to insinuate that Tony Blair is a criminal on the level of apartheid's practitioners or the genocidal forces orchestrated by Slobodan Milosevic? I am as disturbed by this argument as I am by Martin's complaint that by intervening in Iraq we "kick[ed] in the door of a sovereign state". I can understand the objection that our intervention was wrong because of the suffering that has ensued in Iraq. But the argument that Saddam's bellicose, genocidal, lawless gangster regime - note that Martin specifically says "state" and not "country" - had rights that we violated is something else again.

As I take down my field-glasses and look out to the Chomskyite fringe of political debate, I seem to perceive a familiar and splendid figure making haste in that direction. Come home, Martin.

Chomsky recollects

This is an old one, but I have acquired new readers since. It's worth the telling.

I have once taken part in an exchange with Professor Chomsky. I wrote an article for Prospect magazine in November 2005 taking issue with the proposition, which was the magazine's cover story, that Chomsky was "the world's top public intellectual". Among my reasons for dissent was his dishonest handling of source material. I also noted, in my account of his political thinking:

Chomsky's first book on politics, American Power and the New Mandarins (1969) grew from protest against the Vietnam war. But Chomsky went beyond the standard left critique of US imperialism to the belief that "what is needed [in the US] is a kind of denazification."

Chomsky replied in the magazine's issue for January 2006. Wedged among flattering charges of my "tacit acquiescence to horrendous crimes", Chomsky wrote:

Proceeding further to demonstrate my "central" doctrine, Kamm misquotes my statement that "We have to ask ourselves whether what is needed in the United States is dissent - or denazification."

The full passage from American Power runs as follows (p. 17, emphasis added):

We have to ask ourselves whether what is needed in the United States is dissent – or denazification. The question is a debatable one. Reasonable people may differ. The fact that the question is even debatable is a terrifying thing. To me it seems that what is needed is a kind of denazification.

So in his article for Prospect, Chomsky quoted just the first sentence of this passage, to imply he had thought it an open question whether the US needed "denazification". He ignored the sentence 20-odd words later that expressed exactly the sentiment, in exactly the words, that I attributed to him. He then had the gall to complain that I had misquoted his statement.

Note that the quotation Chomsky gives is accurate, so far as it goes - it's just the wrong sentence. The wording (including spelling out "United States" instead of abbreviating it) and the punctuation are as he wrote them nearly 40 years earlier. It is a reasonable inference that he must have had the book open in front of him when he composed his reply to me. What the man can possibly have been thinking is a mystery. Perhaps he thought I wouldn't have the book, or that he'd have the last word and no one would check it. As it was, the editor of Prospect graciously allowed me to conclude the exchange with a 250-word letter in the next issue to state my central objection to Chomsky's reply. My central objection was, naturally, that in responding to a piece charging him with dishonesty in citing source material, it was singular for Chomsky to prove my point by distorting source material that he had himself written.

"Tendentious whimsy"

Jonathan Rauch is a commentator whose writings I first came across 15 years ago in the wake of the Rushdie affair and have valued since. He wrote a fine book called Kindly Inquisitors, 1992, on the threats to free speech arising from claims to compassion and the avoidance of hurt. I drew on this book's argument and quoted from it in a piece I wrote recently for the magazine Index on Censorship. Rauch has also written a book advancing a compelling case for gay marriage; I cited that book too in a recent post.

Rauch has now written a review for the Washington Post of a new book by Noam Chomsky, Interventions. I have just read the book myself and was thinking of reviewing it somewhere. I cannot express my feelings on it more accurately than in Rauch's words, however:

To be sure, Chomsky's trademark barbs and provocations are here, but so are his flights to a separate reality. In Chomsky's universe, the 2001 U.S. attack on Afghanistan's Taliban "was undertaken with the expectation that it might drive several million people over the edge of starvation." And North Korea's counterfeiting racket may actually be a CIA operation. And the Clinton administration intervened militarily in Kosovo not in order to prevent ethnic cleansing but to impose Washington's neoliberal economic agenda. And President Bush -- the first and only U.S. president to declare formal American support for a Palestinian state -- is the obstacle to a two-state solution that Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran are all prepared to accept. (I am not making that up.)

This kind of tendentious whimsy is more peculiar than interesting; as the pages turn, one becomes inured to it and begins to yawn. Also working against readability is that some columns ramble, some repeat, and some are compilations of news clippings. None of those flaws, however, would condemn Chomsky's collection to instant forgettability if it offered fresh analysis or supple argument. Instead the reader gets the sneaking suspicion that the author has not felt the need to adjust an opinion in 30 or so years.

The last sentence I've quoted is especially apt. (I would add that the format as well as the thesis of the book is characteristic of Chomsky's output over at least the past two decades.) Chomsky's appeal is directed to a generation with a short attention span, limited historical appreciation and a susceptibility to conspiracy theory. In the circumstances he is under no pressure to adjust or even reconsider an opinion from a generation ago. Let me give an example that was in my mind when I referred to him last week in the context of conspiracy theory.

In his book Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians, 1983, Chomsky is at pains to argue (and as he argues still) that the obdurate and rejectionist parties in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are the US and Israel. He acknowledges, in a peculiarly bizarre attribution of equivalence, that (p. 64): "In the immediate post-1967 period, the Arab states and the PLO took a rejectionist position comparable to the stand that has been consistently maintained by Israel and the US." But that, apparently, soon changed.

The merits of the case were minuscule in 1983, and his argument in 2007 has ended up in the bizarre taxonomy of the protagonists' positions referred to by Rauch. But look in particular at how Chomsky deals with the hard facts of threats to Israeli civilians. In a footnoote on p. 78 of Fateful Triangle, Chomsky writes of the terrorist Abu Nidal:

The PLO has charged that he is an Israeli agent, noting that his operations "frequently serve Israeli interests indirectly," a charge that is "one of the assumptions you bear in mind" according to a French secret service specialist. It is generally assumed that he is supported by Iraq, sometimes Syria, where his offices are located and where he appears to have access to considerable funding.

This is an extraordinary passage and is typical of Chomsky's technique. He doesn't come straight out and commit himself to an the charge that Mossad controls anti-Jewish terrorists. Instead, he neatly infiltrates a crank notion alongside what is known about Abu Nidal in order to imply that they are statements of comparable standing and reliability. In his book The Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism, 1986, the Irish historian and diplomat Conor Cruise O'Brien quoted the first of the sentences in that passage by Chomsky (I've added the second, because it amplifies O'Brien's point) and commented (p. 622):

This "assumption" would require me to believe that Israeli intelligence organized, among other things, a murderous attack on a synagogue in Vienna (at the end of August 1981) as well as the attempted murder of Ambassador Argov [i.e. the Israeli Ambassador to London, Shlomo Argov, who was shot in the head the following year]. If anyone is to believe that charge, those who insinuate its credibility should be prepared to produce some kind of evidence for it, other than statements by PLO spokesmen. Abu Nidal's supposed "Israeli connection" is an unsubstantiated theory of the PLO and its admirers. But Abu Nidal's complex connections with Arab leaders are a matter of record.

To O'Brien's observation of Abu Nidal's murder of Jews we can add the attacks on El Al counters at Rome and Vienna airports in December 1985, which killed 18 people, and the shooting at a synagogue in Istanbul in September 1986, which killed 22. Saddam Hussein also resumed his support for Abu Nidal after the Iran-Iraq War. The notion that Abu Nidal was a Mossad agent is morally and intellectually akin to the supposition that 9/11 was an "inside job". So far as I'm aware, Chomsky has never explained to his readers in later years that the "assumption" he floated so disingenuously in the early 1980s remains devoid of evidence and is unfalsifiable. Tendentious whimsy, indeed.

Culture spot

Here are one or two cultural items I've seen today.

Agnès is blogging for The Guardian from the Venice Film Festival. She is unimpressed with Kenneth Branagh's offering:

It wasn't quite as bad as the screening of Christopher Hampton's Imagining Argentina, which, in 2003, had the Venice Film Festival audience laughing hysterically when it should have been crying. However, the screening of Sleuth, directed by Kenneth Branagh, must have provoked embarrassment for its producers when it left both public and critics sneering. Despite what Martin Wainwright writes in The Guardian today, the feeling, at least among European film critics, was of huge disappointment if not scorn: why on earth remake a masterpiece by Mankiewicz, which already was a big screen remake of an award-winning theatre play by Anthony Shaffer?

The Telegraph reveals that Juliette Binoche is a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. I didn't know, and am disheartened. Who would have conceived of the acting profession as a home for the politically credulous and simple-minded?

The Observer runs a survey on "a forgotten world of literary treasures - brilliant but underrated novels that deserve a second chance to shine. We asked 50 celebrated writers to nominate their favourites."

Many of the choices are gems, though surely not forgotten ones - notably Samuel Johnson's The History of Rasselas, Thackeray's Pendennis and Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find. The painfully earnest young novelist Hari Kunzru recommends the dissident Bolshevik Victor Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev, a "portrait of the terror of the Stalinist purges [that] is superior, in my opinion, to Koestler's Darkness at Noon". I certainly agree. The novel dramatises the assassination of Kirov, which marked the start of Stalin's Great Terror.

My choice of an overlooked literary treasure would be Greenmantle by John Buchan. It's the second of Buchan's five adventure stories of Richard Hannay. Many of my readers will know the celebrated first Hannay story, The Thirty-Nine Steps, at least in its faithless and inferior film version by Alfred Hitchcock. That story ends three weeks before the onset of the Great War. Greenmantle appeared in 1916, and records Hannay's wartime intelligence mission to discover and thwart a German plan to spark an uprising in the Islamic world.

By no means is the book great art, but it is great popular literature. It's also a surprisingly informative account of the politics of the early part of WWI, and - as the reference to political Islam suggests - eerily topical. Its treatment of Turkey's wartime turmoil is brilliant. Among its high points, the book includes a description of a malevolent German officer, Colonel Stumm, that might have come from P.G. Wodehouse: "My anger [says Hannay, after knocking out Stumm] had completely gone and I had no particular ill-will left against Stumm. He was a man of remarkable qualities, which would have brought him to the highest distinction in the Stone Age."

Ever since I started keeping this blog, and then writing for publication, I have sought an opportunity to deploy this matchless line against someone, somewhere, but it's too good to be used without discrimination. It ought properly to be said of someone brutish but not stupid - so not a Chávez or Milosevic figure. I keep it in reserve still.

UPDATE: Also see John Lloyd's review, from The Observer, of Andrew Anthony's book The Fall-Out: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence. John thinks well of the book, as do I.

"It was the atom bomb that saved my life"

Last month, on the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, I wrote a column in The Guardian (which published letters in response here and here) recounting the conclusions of recent historical research:

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.

The Guardian has published today a remarkable testimony on an aspect of the Pacific War that I ought also to have referred to. The author is a gentleman called Charles Cleal. Now nearly 90, Mr Cleal is an RAF veteran who was held from 1942 to 1945 as a Japanese prisoner of war. I urge you to read his article. He is clearly a man of great personal resources and courage, whose life has been marked ever after by his wartime experiences. One passage bears on the conclusion of the Pacific War:

There was horrendous disease in the camp and vast, excruciating ulcers. Prisoners were given three floorboards' living space each - at one point I had a dead body on each side. I'd been talking to the chap next to me one night; when I woke up in the morning he was dead.

After three years as a prisoner, it was the atom bomb at Hiroshima that saved my life. The Japanese soldiers had been ordered to retreat into the mountains, killing all but a handful of their prisoners, but after Hiroshima the Japanese emperor sent out orders that they should surrender. Planes flying overhead dropped food parcels - and the news that our ordeal was over.

Mr Cleal is stating here not a subjective impression born of terrible circumstances, but a straightforward point of fact. Hundreds of thousands of Western prisoners were held under the responsibility of Field Marshal Terauchi Hisaichi. We know that Terauchi had given orders that all those prisoners be executed once the Allied attack on Southeast Asia began. That invasion was planned for 6 September 1945. It did not take place, because Japan surrendered after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This historical consideration does not resolve the ethical debates over use of the A-bomb. It ought in my view powerfully to inform those debates, however. So should the hundreds of thousands of deaths, from maltreatment and malnutrition, directly attributable to Japanese actions in the territories of the Japanese Empire every month that the war continued. The salience of those issues may be the reason that anti-Truman campaigners have for decades resorted to bogus history - claims that Japan was in any event on the point of surrender, or that America's principal motivation for using the A-bomb was to intimidate the Soviet Union - sooner than acknowledge the momentous implications of their position.

Exiled nations

There is a fine piece by Howard Jacobson in The Independent today:

Why the rhetoric of sympathy for Palestinian homelessness – "When we lost our country, we lost respect," Pilger has a Palestinian refugee lament – but no answering sympathy for the lost respect and homelessness that found expression in Zionism? I am one of those who believe that Jewish experience of exile obliges Israel actively to comprehend the sorrows of Palestinian exile. But I also believe this must cut both ways. If it is terrible to lose your home today, then it was terrible to lose your home yesterday, whoever you are. For Pilger, there are no such competing claims on his understanding. There are the forgotten, disrespected Palestinians on the one hand, and the "fanatics of Zion" on the other.

The issue of justice and nationhood is intractable, and not only when two peoples have national claims to the same territory. But the Jews' claim to nationhood is as just as any, even without taking account of its particular urgency in the 1940s. It is a perplexing omission in much modern discussion of nationalism; as Jacobson says, that dismissal is the rhetoric of bias.