Oliver Kamm

Norman Mailer

I've just seen that Norman Mailer has died. I'll write a proper appreciation later; he was genuinely a fine writer and not merely an interesting figure of cultural history. (The furious dispute between him and the feminist writer Kate Millett - in her book Sexual Politics - about Mailer's macho 1948 novel The Naked and the Dead is one of the great grudge matches of American literary life.) Like Orwell, Mailer was a reporter first and a novelist second. The best of his work - as in Advertisements for Myself, 1959 - combines those callings and is a lasting testament to a great talent.

Poppies and remembrance

In a letter in today's Guardian, the editor of a campaigning political magazine called The Lancet, Richard Horton, lends that journal's imprimatur to lecturing veterans on the proper way for them to mark Remembrance Sunday:

[T]he purpose of poppies needs to be recast if it is to have any lasting meaning. Wearing a poppy should be about remembering civilian lives lost in all wars, not merely military lives sacrificed in British wars. Wearing a poppy should be about a commitment to peace and justice in the future, not only about war and victory in the past. And wearing a poppy should be about our broad global solidarity as a human community, not our narrow expression of national identity.

Horton is a fixture at rallies of the Stop the War Coalition. Normally I would spend only a few seconds debating whether his designation of the act of remembrance as "a narrow expression of national identity" was more ignorant than impertinent or the other way round. But oddly it can be read as a less eloquent echo of an observation by a very important thinker indeed, the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, writing in The Guardian yesterday about a Commonwealth Commission report called "Civil Paths to Peace". Sen states: "Indeed, even the gigantic violence of the first world war, which made so many Europeans act as willing participants in an unnecessary war, drew on singularly prioritising the identity of nationality, ignoring all else."

Sen's judgement is only partly right, and what it leaves out is crucial. It's true that nationalism was foremost in the campaigns of the protagonists in WWI, but it is not true that this factor excluded all else. If you maintain that it does, then you overlook the reason war broke out in the first place. This was that Wilhelmine Germany, unlike the system that Bismarck bequeathed, was not only a militarist state but also an expansionist one. It sought not only the Bismarckian status of a Great Power but also the status of a World Power, Weltmacht. Archival research by the great Hamburg historian Fritz Fischer in the 1960s concluded that German war aims had been established at a War Council in December 1912. Wilhelmine Germany was not an autocracy of the order of Nazi Germany and did not pursue genocidal campaigns in Europe (though it did in Africa). But in its aggressive xenophobia and contempt for democracy it had clear characteristics in common with Nazi Germany, and the failure of Weimar to extirpate those characteristics from Germany's political culture led to their recrudescence in a more virulent form.

Great Britain, on the other hand, was an imperfect constitutional society in which the domination of the aristocracy was at last being attenuated, and where the popular expressions of nationalism served mainly to obscure what the military campaign was about. The war effort was - strange to relate, in a more cynical generation - about the principles enunciated by our political leaders at the time: the defence of small nations against unprovoked aggression by an unstable autocracy. The war, from our standpoint, was not unnecessary at all. It was a just and necessary venture that had tremendous human costs; for Britain, the trauma and bloodshed were far greater than in WWII. When tomorrow I stop for two minutes to recall these dead, I shall not be narrowly expressing my Britishness, but expressing my gratitude to them and their five surviving comrades for having taken up arms.

Horton at least perceives that Remembrance Sunday, as it stands, commemorates what George V's proclamation in 1919 called the "glorious dead". Compare and contrast with the White Poppies campaign of the pacifist Peace Pledge Union, which every year generates some unwarranted publicity. Also in The Guardian today is a letter from one Lucy Craig:

I wholeheartedly support [Channel 4 newsreader] Jon Snow's decision not to wear a red poppy. My only wish is that he would sport a white one. For whereas the red poppy and Remembrance Day signify support for the British service personnel who have given their lives over many decades in many different wars, white poppies remember and honour all those whose lives have been lost - civilians and soldiers; old and young; British, German, Japanese, Russian - and of course, Iraqi and Afghan.

Again, give her credit for one thing. She understands that Remembrance Sunday isn't merely about commemorating the victims of war. It's about expressing gratitude to British servicemen. The partisans of the White Poppies campaign can't do that, because they believe the servicemen who have fought against our autocratic and totalitarian enemies have all been wrong. For the political origins of that campaign, I modestly refer you to what I have previously said about them at this time of year.

UPDATE: The First World War is suprisingly little discussed in popular culture and the media, other than as a metaphor invoking the supposed incompetence (not a strictly fair picture) of British generals. There is a small gem of a book giving a factual and objective account of the war's origins, course and conduct, rather than the historiographical debates, by Sir Michael Howard, The First World War, 2002. I read quite recently Sir Michael's memoirs, Captain Professor, 2006, which among other things include a brief and dignified comment about one aspect of his life I was unaware of, his being a homosexual of a generation that faced much prejudice and legal persecution. The book has a touching dedication to his partner of many years.

More from the comrades

One must have a heart of stone to read the death of the Respect "Coalition" without laughing. For some reason, I particularly enjoyed this observation:

Speaking on Mr Galloway's behalf, John McKay told Guardian Unlimited: "It's not true [that Galloway has left the party]. The truth is that John Rees [Respect's national secretary] and crew, the SWP faction, are the ones that have split."

Incidentally, the Guardian report states that Galloway "was expelled from the Labour party in 2003 after making a series of anti-war comments". That is literally true but misleading. Galloway was expelled after, but not because of, his opposition to the Iraq War. The reasons for his expulsion were specific and stated. They comprised: inciting foreign troops to fight British troops; inciting British troops to disobey orders; threatening to stand against Labour; and supporting a candidate for the Respect "Coalition" in Preston. No other Labour MP of anti-war views did any of these things, and I could wish that The Guardian were more careful in its description of the man's political history.

The comrades

I regret that I've given nothing like enough - or indeed any - attention to a story that The Observer reported on a week ago:

George Galloway's anti-Iraq war Respect party yesterday appeared to be descending into bloody political warfare reminiscent of Labour in the 1980s. Galloway, the expelled former Labour member who is Respect's only MP, fired the opening salvo in a letter to its ruling national council last month, claiming that weaknesses in local organisation and central leadership risked the party's future.

Within days, the coalition of Muslim and far-left groups that formed Respect at the height of anti-war feeling in 2004 began to show signs of unravelling. Last week, a statement from Galloway and some of the top Muslim figures in Respect declared: 'The actions of the SWP leadership imperil the very existence of Respect as a broad, pluralistic and democratic left alternative to New Labour.'

I cede the privilege of commenting on this story to my comrades at Harry's Place, who appear to have a well-placed informant and a satisfyingly endless stream of party documents. From that source, I learn of an anguished response to Galloway that has been published by the Politbureau of the SWP. Entitled "The SWP and Respect", the statement is a very lengthy document but one that can be read purely for pleasure. I particularly enjoyed this section:

[Galloway] dealt a blow to everyone who was preparing to campaign for Respect in the 2006 local elections: he absented himself from politics for weeks to appear in the despicable “reality TV” show Celebrity Big Brother. Every active supporter of Respect was faced at work with people on the left saying they would never vote for us again and taunts from our enemies about cats.

Socialists in the SWP had to come to a decision as to how to react to such things. The pressure was particularly acute during the Big Brother weeks, with leading Respect members like Ken Loach and Salma Yaqoob wanting to denounce him.

Fortunately, as a “Leninist” organisation of “Russian dolls” we had our annual conference just as Big Brother started and were able to agree on a general reaction, which every one of our members tried to argue in their workplaces, colleges and schools. It was that appearing on Big Brother was stupid and an insult to those who had worked to get him elected. But we also said that it was not in the same league as dropping bombs to kill thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We had for this reason to continue to defend him against witch hunts from New Labour and the media. And defend him we did, at meetings of the Respect leadership, in an article putting the case in Socialist Worker and through statements on television by John Rees and others. We never, of course, got any thanks from Galloway for this, nor did the many thousands of Respect activists who were persuaded to stand firm because of our arguments. Yet it is probably fair to say that if the SWP had not chosen, as a matter of principle, to defend him, then Respect would have suffered a disastrous split.

Now, I recall when John Rees, as National Secretary of Respect and a member of the SWP Politbureau, went on television to defend George Galloway's impersonation of a cat, because I debated this very question with him on Sky News in January 2006. In that debate, I even defended Galloway on this point myself, on the grounds that the Big Brother appearance was hardly the least creditable thing he had done in his political career. Moreover, after he travelled to Damascus in July 2005 to lecture the Syrian people on how fortunate they were to have Bashar al-Assad as their ruler, Galloway had few opportunities remaining to him to lose his dignity further; those who witnessed his subsequent appearance on reality television ought at least to credit him with imagination and initiative for having alighted on one of them.

Such was my argument, in any event. I confess I didn't pay a lot of attention to what John Rees was saying in response, because I was entranced by the defensiveness of his body language. But I am perfectly certain that Rees did not at any stage in our discussion state that Galloway's appearance on Big Brother was "stupid and an insult to those who had worked to get him elected". It would appear, then, that Rees uttered sentiments that he did not himself believe, and withheld information that he knew to be true.

I'm going to have to end the post here in order to compose myself after the shock of discovery.

Blogging and libel redux

There was an odd and confused article in the New Statesman last week by Becky Hogge, who is billed as "Executive Director of the Open Rights Group, a grassroots digital civil liberties campaigning organisation". The article seemed to be arguing that the medium of blogging had already made incursions against the privileged position of traditional media, but that at the same time it faced unfair constraints:

Laws and their associated procedures that moderate freedom of expression - libel, intellectual property and, to a lesser extent, decency and hate-speech laws - are too punitive for individuals who lack the ready access to legal expertise of a newspaper or broadcaster. Worse still, online, compliance with these laws is maintained by disinterested internet service providers, and not editors and publishers.

This is badly written (I don't know what the word "disinterested" is doing there), but if it means what I think it means - that bloggers are penalised in their navigation of the law compared with commerical interests - then it's largely mistaken. Take the one area Ms Hogge describes that I have personal experience of and am particularly interested in. I'm no admirer of English libel law, which is too onerous for defendants, but there need to be laws on defamation, and I don't consider the main problem with the law as it stands is that it favours large corporations as against individual bloggers. On the contrary, the advent of Conditional Fee Arrangements (CFAs) in libel cases frequently puts newspapers and broadcasters in an invidious position. Note, for example, the views expressed in this recent Guardian report:

Chief among the critics is Alastair Brett, the legal manager of Times Newspapers. "The chilling effect isn't felt pre-publication but at the moment you receive a claim for libel, stating that the claimant is represented on a CFA," says Brett. "There is undoubtedly a real chill when contemplating the huge cost of CFA litigation and it is a very brave editor who fights on in this worst of all Catch 22 situations."

Under a CFA, if a claimant lawyer loses a claim, he does not get paid, but if he wins, he is paid a bonus, known as a "success fee" or "uplift" on his costs. Success fees are tied to the level of risk - to the lawyer - in bringing the claim; the greater the risk, the bigger the success fee. It all adds up to a system in which a London lawyer charging £400 per hour can double his or her money. To contemplate such a vast potential costs exposure is not merely "grotesque" but, says Brett, it is also "inherently unfair and a clear breach of a defendant's right to a fair trial without penalty under Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights".

His is not a voice in the wilderness. Louise Hayman, head of legal services for the Independent, puts it thus: "It's not uncommon to hear of claims against the media made on a CFA basis where the damages might be £5,000 and the costs £90,000. "You have to ask yourself - is this right? Are the lawyers serving their own interests or those of their clients?"

These observations are entirely justified. Faced with a CFA-funded claim, there is an incentive on newspapers to settle even when they are confident of their case, because they will have great difficulty in covering their costs. That is a challenge to a free press.

Bloggers might easily in principle face libel actions, and it is notable (at least it is to me, when I read blogs) how much material is published in the "blogosphere" that I know would be impossible to defend in court. But bloggers generally aren't sued, partly because blogs are not widely read and partly because a claimant is unlikely to cover his costs. But there will surely come a case at some point where a blogger is successfully sued. The only advice I can proffer, if you are a blogger, is that if your statements about a point of fact have justification (i.e. are true and can be shown to be true) then you can't be intimidated out of saying them.

(The cases I've experienced of legal threats have all taken that form, and I've chosen in each of them to be represented by a leading libel lawyer in order to convey a message to the prospective claimants that I will not back down. Only one of those claimants, the pro-Milosevic blogger Neil Clark, unwisely failed to get that message. Last year he purported to issue a "writ" - of startling ineptitude, in a small-claims court without even jurisdiction to hear the case - against me for comments about his competence and veracity whose accuracy he did not dispute but which he wished, unavailingly, to be removed from this site. I've indicated that I will publish the correspondence concerning that purported claim, and I will do so; it's just that there are a lot of Mr Clark's threatening messages from that time, and I always seem to have more pressing business than to disinter them. In any event, Mr Clark's tone neatly reversed itself - from bluster to whimper, as it were - when he received a terse communication from my lawyer pointing out that the purported writ was an abuse of the legal process, and mercifully Mr Clark ceased to write to me altogether once his "writ" had been struck out by the presiding judge.)

Where Ms Hogge is right is that the law as it stands creates an incentive for ISPs to delete comments from their sites as soon as they receive a complaint. This certainly is a threat to free speech on the Web. An ISP is not in a position to distinguish fair comment from defamatory comment, and will therefore act prudently in removing anything it receives a complaint about. That is the issue at stake in threats made to the former diplomat Craig Murray for comments on his blog, and is the reason I support Mr Murray in this case.

That important but distinct issue about bloggers and libel law is the one that worries me. One day, probably soon, some of the obviously defamatory material that gets published on blogs will be tested in court, by a claimant for whom reputation is more important than the pragmatic arguments for not responding. That in itself is not a libertarian issue. If there is a case for a law on defamation, then it must apply to blogs as it does to newspapers, and it is not necessarily true that defending a case is more punitive for bloggers than it is for newspapers. The proper grounds for concern about blogs and libel, in England at least, is that bulletin boards and blogs can be shut down on self-interested but entirely rational grounds by an ISP at the merest hint of a complaint. That thoroughly illiberal position is a threat to free speech and must be tackled.

Powellism and the Tories

I once wrote a strongly critical article about the late campaigning journalist Paul Foot in which I nonetheless quoted approvingly Foot's judgement, in his book The Rise of Enoch Powell (1969) that, on immigration, Enoch Powell “had embarked on one of the most dangerous and opportunist escapades in the history of British politics”.

Foot's book was in truth very good indeed. It made clear what many interpreters of Powell and his political career have since missed. Powell was an opportunist, whose demagoguery was tailored to, though scarcely attained, his political advancement. His eccentric interventions thereafter - his call to support Labour in 1974, owing to his hostility to the Common Market; his anti-nuclear stand in the 1980s - derived not from free-thinking heterodoxy but from a vain (in both senses) wish to be seen as a decisive influence on political outcomes. Powell's genuine influence on public life was toxic. The comments last week of a prospective Conservative parliamentary candidate, one Nigel Hastilow, that Powell had been right on immigration are a disgrace and - it seems redundant to add - untrue as well. I'm glad the man has stepped down, and I acknowledge that the Conservative Party probably has legal reasons to approach the issue strictly according to its rule book. That latter consideration, I infer, makes it better from the party's standpoint that Hastilow resigned sooner than be sacked.

But I can't understand why a Conservative spokesman concluded: "We have accepted Mr Hastilow's resignation and wish him well for the future." Politically speaking, I wish Mr Hastilow ill and hope he never resurfaces. I assume without argument that a rational and tolerant Conservative Party would feel the same way, and ought to have curtailed at the sixth word the statement I have quoted.

Tibbets: the cranks emerge

This is, I expect and hope, my final post on the death last Thursday of Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the plane that dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima. One of my principal themes since I started this site has been the identity - not merely the equivalence - of arguments on the nativist Right and the anti-American Left. I was certain this would arise in commentary on Gen Tibbet's death, and so it proves.

The utterly barking far-right cranks who make up the John Birch Society are still in operation, half a century after the group came to prominence by claiming that Eisenhower and Dulles were conscious agents of a Communist conspiracy to take over the US government. They use Tibbets's death as an opportunity to promote a conspiracy theory of equal thoughtfulness and justification, concerning a supposed Japanese offer of surrender that was spurned by Roosevelt in the interests of keeping populations in fear and promoting world government. Seriously. The Society's President, John F. McManus, concludes:

The real winners of the [Pacific] war were the enemies of national sovereignty who were also promoters of the United Nations. Once the bombs were dropped, it became fashionable for internationalists everywhere to claim that nations can no longer be truly independent and peoples can no longer expect to exercise God-given freedoms.... The combination of assuring that the bloody war in the Pacific would continue for seven more months, and the decision, made at the top levels of our government, to use frightfully horrific nuclear weapons on non-combatant Japanese, has to be considered one of the most horrible crimes in all history.

Meanwhile, The Progressive magazine ("since 1909") has published a piece by its managing editor, one Amitabh Pal, entitled "Hiroshima Bomber Unrepentant till Death". One of the magazine's regular columnists is the radical historian Howard Zinn, whose haplessness and incompetence on this very subject I exposed some months ago. (To my complacence, neither Professor Zinn nor his friend who got him into that mess, the founder of Media Lens David Cromwell, has attempted to defend any of the propositions that I modestly submit I destroyed beyond hope of reconstruction in that post.)

Whereas Zinn is a gullible ignoramus, I fear I cannot be so generous to Pal, who begins his piece sententiously, "I’m making a partial exception to my self-imposed rule of not speaking ill of the dead." Pal quotes Tibbets saying that using the Bomb saved more lives than it took. I stress again that that consideration doesn't resolve (though it should inform) the ethical debates over use of the Bomb, but Tibbets's remark is true. When you take account of the American servicemen and POWs, the Japanese civilians and the captive peoples of the Japanese Empire whose lives would have been lost in a conventional invasion and blockade of Japan, even a delay of a few weeks in the Japanese surrender would have cost many more lives than the death toll at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The historical evidence from Japanese sources is overwhelming that it was the shock of the Bomb and no other consideration that forced Japanese surrender in August 1945. That evidence is entirely unknown to Pal, who remarks:

There was only one problem with [Tibbets's] analysis: He was just plain wrong. In the last few decades, there has been a whole slew of studies showing that the dropping of the bomb was—militarily and strategically—completely unnecessary. (Here, I am setting aside the moral arguments, convincing as they are.)

Perhaps the dean among this group of scholars is Professor Gar Alperovitz, who has written a number of books on the subject, including the magisterial “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” which in 1995 demolished once and for all the arguments for obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And you know what's coming. Alperovitz is the principal populariser of the notion that Truman's decision to use the A-bomb was an exercise of "atomic diplomacy", to intimidate the Soviet Union. On this view, the Pacific War had already been won because Japan was trying to surrender. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were less the concluding acts of the Pacific War than the first acts of the Cold War, as presaged by supposed US anti-Soviet hostility at Potsdam.

Every stage in this argument is false. As Michael Kort of Boston University observes in his recent Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb, 2007, p. 111: "Despite the difficulties that arose with the Soviets at Potsdam, most historians agree that the United States did not practice atomic diplomacy at the conference." You'll often find in the writings of anti-nuclear campaigners some reference to Alperovitz prefaced (as in Pal's article) by an obsequious honorific. Likewise, in her book CND: Now More than Ever, 2005, the CND chairman and supporter of North Korea, Kate Hudson, introduces (p. 19) Alperovitz as an "eminent US historian" (and spells his name wrong several times, which makes me wonder how familiar she is with his writings). You can take this as evidence of the campaigners' intellectual insecurity. Alperovitz is not a historian at all: he is a professor of political economy. His Cambridge thesis, which when published in 1965 became the principal text of the Atomic Diplomacy case, was supervised by P.M.S. Blackett and Joan Robinson. Both of these scholars were outstanding in their fields - which were not history either, but, respectively, physics and economics. (Blackett, a Nobel laureate and a shameless pro-Soviet apologist, was the first writer to put forward the idea that the A-bomb was intended as a signal to Stalin, in his book Fear, War and the Bomb: Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy, 1949.)

The besetting difficulties with Alperovitz's work are, first, that there's no evidence for his thesis, and secondly - unsurprisingly, given the first point - that his handling of source material is consistently dishonest. He often uses ellipses to remove material from quotations that, when read in full, clearly give a different message from the one Alperovitz infers. These misrepresentations have been catalogued by the historian Robert Maddox, in his essay "Gar Alperovitz: Godfather of Hiroshima Revisionism", in a volume he edited recently, Hiroshima in History, 2007, pp. 7-23. In that essay, and also in his earlier book Weapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision, 1995, Professor Maddox also deals with the frequent and - so far as we can tell from all available primary sources - false claims that Truman's close military advisors counselled him against use of the Bomb. I referred briefly to his conclusions, and those of other scholars, in this post. As you - or at least I - would expect, Pal has no idea that this literature exists; he just retails Alperovitz's mantra on the subject.

I am not sentimental about the death of public figures, and recently argued against the mild hypocrisy of not speaking ill of the recently deceased. It's because of my scepticism about that convention that I am particularly anxious to remark on the heroism, in the European theatre and the Pacific War in WWII, of Paul Tibbets, and to extend my respects to his family. I shall be more than happy to debate the matter publicly with any "progressives" who wish to dispute the point, whereupon I shall be less polite about them than I have been in this post.

Pakistan's "state of emergency"

It would be a mistake to regard General Musharraf's emergency rule as anything more than a transparently self-interested attack on Pakistan's constitution. I have read the Foreign Secretary's observations, and without finding any discrete part of them exceptionable I consider the overall message feeble. It is not useful to urge a common message of restraint on the opposition politicians who are being arrested and the military ruler who issued the order for the arrest. (As you might expect, the Tories are no more a model of leadership on the issue. When asked by Andrew Rawnsley on ITV's Sunday Edition this morning what the government ought to be doing, David Davis replied: "Well I think they can express their views pretty strongly to [Musharraf] and I think they’re doing that to be fair to them. I think Mr Miliband’s done it already. I think the Americans have also expressed [in] pretty strong terms their disappointment.")

I may be wrong on this, but I suspect that if Tony Blair were still PM the message would have been stronger. Blair is often criticised for his "democratic globalism", and while I militantly identify with the thrust of his foreign policies I do regard it as a weakness of Blairism that it fails to distinguish among different orders of threat. (The example I usually give is that Iran's nuclear adventurism and support for terrorism are a more immediate threat than North Korea's, even though North Korea is unquestionably the more repressive state. There is a genuine axis of Islamist terror, whereas there is no axis of Juche terror - merely a psychopathic despot who is personally responsible for numerous terrorist acts, such as the bombing of KAL flight 857 in 1987.) Nonetheless, judged against the foreign policy quiescence of his predecessor, John Major, and foreign counterparts Clinton, Chirac and Schroeder, Blair's was a weakness in the right direction. Above all, Tony Blair was right in identifying the perpetuation of autocracy as a stimulus for Islamist terrorism. As he said, in an excellent speech (which I attended) to the Foreign Policy Centre last year, our counter-terrorist stand is "a struggle between democracy and violence".

Pakistan is a prime case of the truth of Blair's analysis. Islamist extremism was given impetus not by any inherent attractions to the populace but by the actions of military rulers and corrupt politicians. Not till the 1970s did religious parties become prominent in Pakistan, when prime minister Zulkifar Ali Bhutto, in a shameless search for political allies, pushed through various measures to increase the influence of the parties Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam and Jamiat-i-Islami in civil society. When the military ruler General Zia ul Haq deposed Bhutto in 1977, the precedent had been established, and monstrous acts of sharia "justice", including amputation of limbs, became commonplace. When democracy returned a decade later, nothing was done to arrest the growth of militant Islamic influence into politics and civil society: Benazir Bhutto even formed a coalition government with one of those extremist parties. And under all of these governments, the place of Islamist ideology in the education system has increased.

One thing that the Bush administration has apparently not realised, and has certainly not given sufficient weight to, is that since his seizure of power in 1999, General Musharraf has been far from a reliable opponent of terrorism. His regime has got far more out of its alliance with the US - in aid, debt relief and, most important and unprincipled, a softening of the accurate perception of Pakistan as a terrorist-supporting state - than the western alliance has got out of him. There have admittedly been successes in police operations against Islamist terrorist cells and our own police have benefited from these actions. Those terrorists have in almost every case been foreign cells: transplanted Islamists, rather than Pakistanis, which is where the real problem lies.

Back to the question of priorities. After 9/11, to have seen Musharraf as an autocrat whose removal was as urgent as Saddam Hussein's or the Taliban's would plainly have been unrealistic (if not entirely perverse). But to have invested faith - which seems the right term - in him as an ally against Islamist fanaticism is reminiscent of earlier American treatment of the Shah of Iran. (The feckless President Carter is often recalled in this context, but Ronald Reagan - a man of far greater ideological chaos than his conservative adulators acknowledge - was no more perceptive. When visiting Tehran in April 1978, then Governor Reagan remarked that "above all we should know that Iran has been and is a staunch friend and ally of the US". The remark is quoted in The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980 by Steven Hayward, 2001, p. 555; Hayward, I should add, is a Reagan partisan and doesn't appear to see anything wrong in the sentiment.) It was neither principled nor prudent, and has done no favours to our real and reliable ally in the region, the multi-ethnic democracy of India, which is - as we are - a target of Islamist terrorism because of what she represents. We need to change policy unmistakably and decisively; changing declaratory policy, by describing accurately what Musharraf is doing, would be a place to start.

UPDATE: James Forsyth, on The Spectator's "Coffee House" blog, maintains: "The Bush administration’s decision to put so much stock in Musharraf, a dictator who by his own admission only offered support for the war on terror when he realised that Pakistan could not 'confront [the United States] and withstand the onslaught', could turn out to be the biggest strategic mistake of the war on terror to date."

Yes, unfortunately.

Immoral reasoning

Left-wingers who are not backward at expressing their contempt for the anti-war movement are often - so often - accused of operating by caricature and smear. I have done my best to point out that the attitudes Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen and Norman Geras find outrageous are not, in fact, fringe opinions. Those views are an unexceptional, and highly exceptionable, part of the conversation that our wing of politics has conducted since 9/11. When Amnesty International, purportedly not a partisan organisation at all, famously compared Guantanamo to the Gulag, Christopher remarked:

[I]f an organization that ostensibly protects the rights of prisoners is unaware of the nature of a colossal system of forced labor and arbitrary detention—replete with physical torture, starvation, and brutal execution—then the moral compass has become disordered beyond repair. This is not even neutrality between the fireman and the fire. It surely expresses a covert sympathy with the aims and objectives of jihad and an overt, if witless and sinister, hatred of the United States. If only this were the only symptom of that tendency.

Indeed; if only. I have read this week a new book called Philosophers without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life, edited by Louise Antony. It's a collection of original essays by twenty leading philosophers in the UK and US, all of whom reject religious faith, expounding their own intellectual journeys on that subject.

One essay, by Kenneth Taylor of Stanford University, concerns the achievement of moral order in the absence of religious faith. The essay is not felicitously written, but I did take notice when Professor Taylor said this (p. 163):

If all-encompassing normative community is neither historically inevitable nor rationally mandatory, with what right do we seek to impose that vision on a reluctant world? Down the path of forceful imposition lie Stalin's gulag, Mao's Cultural Revolution, George Bush's misbegotten invasion of Iraq, and the dark dreams of al-Qaeda.

I will not insult my readers' intelligence by challenging you to spot the odd one out. Professor Taylor's inability to distinguish an "invasion of Iraq" - as if a state's legitimate sovereignty had been violated by the removal of a bestial and kleptocratic regime - from an intervention in Iraq is merely the least of the many components in the evidence of his stupidity. According to Professor Taylor's biography, "his main areas of research are the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind". I could already tell that those main areas of research incorporated no expertise in politics, but I'm relieved to find that they do not appear to include ethics either.

More on Tibbets's mission

The obituaries of Paul Tibbets that I've seen in the British and American press have generally given a better measure of his life and public service than the tendentious account I cited yesterday from the BBC. The final paragraph of this obituary in the Los Angeles Times I found dispiriting, however: "Because he feared giving protesters a place to demonstrate, Tibbets did not want a funeral or headstone.... He requested that his ashes be scattered over the North Atlantic Ocean."

Tibbets served in Europe as well as the Pacific War with skill and bravery. It is appalling that he had such apprehensions about his final resting place. In addition, in the post below and in the newspaper article it links to, I perhaps understated the historical importance of his mission. It isn't merely that the A-bombs (both of them) forced an unexpectedly early Japanese surrender and thereby saved very many lives. It is that the decisive conclusion of the Pacific War ended Japanese totalitarianism. The point is crucial in making a proper accounting of the Allied war effort.

Had President Truman not used the A-bomb, or if it had not been available, a conventional invasion and blockade would have cost the lives of - in all probability - many hundreds of thousands of American servicemen and POWs, millions of Japanese civilians, and millions of starving and maltreated people in the captive nations of the Japanese Empire. But that is not all. If the war had dragged on in such punishing and bloody conditions, it might never have been successfully concluded at all. Japan was already a defeated nation at the beginning of August 1945, but (a point frequently overlooked by critics of President Truman) defeat and surrender are different things. The first was a military fact; the second was a political decision that, before the A-bombs were dropped, showed no signs of coming.

The costs of the war for the US, especially against a background of domestic discontent and declining service morale, were enormous anyway. A Pacific War that lasted long after the conclusion of the war in Europe might have been politically impossible to sustain. An inconclusive settlement, perhaps in which Japan lost her Empire but retained her political system, would have been a plausible outcome. One writer whose political reasoning I admire and philosophy I'm close to, but whose views on this subject I find extraordinary, Michael Walzer, articulates approvingly exactly that counterfactual (Just and Unjust Wars, 1977, pp. 267-8): “The Japanese case is sufficiently different from the German so that unconditional surrender should never have been asked. Japan’s rulers were engaged in a more ordinary sort of military expansion, and all that was required was that they be defeated, not that they be conquered and totally overthrown.”

On the contrary, the Japanese case - an aggressive, expansionist racist totalitarianism - was sufficiently similar to Nazi Germany to make unconditional surrender essential. There could be no possibility of a myth of betrayal arising in post-war Japan. Japan's rulers had to be not only defeated but deposed and tried. The alternative would have been a continuing risk of resurgent and brutal imperialism - maybe in the mid-1960s, just as Germany became a racist aggressor two decades after its "betrayal" at Versailles.

I recommend, in this context, a new book called Reaping the Whirlwind: The German and Japanese Experiences of World War II by Nigel Cawthorne. It's a work of oral history, which, as the author puts it, uses "the authentic voices of German and Japanese people caught up in the conflict to relate their experiences". The result told me many things I didn't know and is often very moving. I should stress that the author has no doubts, and states clearly and immediately, that Germany and Japan were heinous aggressors and that the Allies had no choice but to fight back. The justice of our cause did not make any less the suffering on the other side, and the book faithfully conveys something of that suffering. The final chapter deals with the "Unimaginable End", namely the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The first-hand accounts by Japanese children of the devastation the A-bomb caused make harrowing reading for anyone with a trace of sensitivity. And then, right at the end of the book (p. 279), comes an account from a Japanese soldier, George Kukui, who fought US troops on Cebi Island in the Philippines. After the war, he said this:

My parents expected me to become a Japanese citizen with the proper Japanese spirit... in a militaristic and totalitarian country such as Japan was back in those days, you would naturally be forced to make a drastic change in thinking. That's what happened to me. I became almost more American than an American because I was able to compare values. To this day I root for America in the Olympic games, believe it or not. I prefer the sight of Old Glory to the flag of Japan. The sound of your national anthem is real music to my ears. The Japanese national anthem, which is not even recognized as such, lauds the emperor and every time it is played I plug my ears. I thought I was about the only guy to do so in our veterans' association but to my surprise I found that there are other guys like me. I am not a very loyal Japanese, I'm afraid. You might regard me as a misplaced American.

The Pacific War was just and necessary, and our side's victory did incalculable good. Gen Tibbets should be remembered as a hero of that war, as he was a hero in the war against Nazi Germany.