Oliver Kamm

Galloway endorses Livingstone, absolves Hiss

On "Comment is Free", George Galloway endorses Ken Livingstone for London Mayor. I assume that the article is part of the feud between Galloway and the Socialist Workers' Party, whose Politbureau member Lindsey German will be running for Mayor on behalf of the continuing Respect "Coalition". But while I can understand Galloway's desire to pretend to be a cat and to dress up in a leotard, I was thrown by his belief that Alger Hiss was framed. Galloway helpfully reminds CiF readers: "[Whittaker] Chambers, you'll recall, was the former communist turned apostate who 'revealed' that celebrated senior US state department official Alger Hiss was a red under the White House bed."

That is indeed what Chambers did: no inverted commas required. Hiss wasn't merely a covert Communist in the State Department when the Communist Party of the USA was formally committed to establishing a one-party state: he was a Soviet agent. This is just a fact. We know it beyond any serious dispute from the VENONA files. These were Soviet cables intercepted and decrypted by the US, which were eventually published half a century later, in the mid-1990s. One intercepted cable (reproduced here) refers to an agent in the State Department codenamed "ALES". The biographical details it contains - specifically the agent's attending the Yalta conference and then travelling to Moscow - match Hiss, and Hiss alone. Hiss was a talented figure, most of whose long life was devoted to protesting his innocence. Why he did this when he knew the truth was anyone's guess, but the truth is a matter of record. Hiss was a perjurer and a spy on behalf of a nightmare-totalitarian state.

The late pragmatist philosopher Sidney Hook, a far more serious socialist than Galloway or Livingstone, wrote in the 1970s (in a review included in his book Philosophy and Public Policy, 1981, pp. 238-52): "It may sound old fashioned to say so but the guilt or innocence of Alger Hiss depends not on one's position towards the Cold War or the degree of one's antipathy to Richard Nixon but solely on the evidence." That is a lesson that the faith-based Left has not imbibed, on this or on much else.

UPDATE: I ought to have mentioned that Ken Livingstone is equally imaginative when it comes to that period of American history. Earlier this week, also on "Comment is Free", he remarked: "One of my heroes is [the broadcaster] Ed Murrow, who had the moral courage to take on Joe McCarthy, and for that reason is remembered when all the journalists who supported the House Un-American Activities Committee are totally forgotten."

Senator McCarthy was nothing to do with the House Un-American Activities Committee. HUAC was, as its name might suggest, a committee of the House. McCarthy, as his title might suggest, was a member of the Senate. And Murrow was by no means especially courageous in opposing McCarthy, either. The President of the United States (Eisenhower) had, after all, already taken personal charge of the campaign to bring down McCarthy when Murrow made his famous anti-McCarthy broadcast in March 1954.

The tide has turned

This post appears on "Comment is Free".

Jonathan Steele's account of the defeat of western intervention in Iraq must have seemed a good idea in conception. Steele now has to make the best of the circumstance that, while his book was in press, events undermined him. Barring a fleeting reference to the multinational force's success in suppressing al-Qaida, his article this week might have been written a year ago for all its acknowledgement of Iraq's recent history.

I supported the Iraq war and would do so again. It was - to invoke Talleyrand's terminology - neither a crime nor a blunder to overthrow a gangster regime that was in breach of the UN security council resolutions (among many others) that marked the conditions for ceasefire in the first Gulf war in 1991. But it was nearly a failure. Culpable negligence by the Bush administration left post-Saddam Iraq without a functioning state. The combined forces of Baathism and jihadism (grotesquely lauded by some columnists on this newspaper as the "resistance") opportunistically filled that vacuum, with unmitigated barbarism and an appalling civilian death toll.

Steele believes defeat was foreordained, and scorns the notion that "a more intelligent and efficient occupation could have worked". It is, in fact, not difficult to see how a better strategy - in particular, one with more troops - might have worked after the fall of Saddam. That strategy has, after all, demonstrably produced results since President Bush changed course a year ago and appointed General David Petraeus as commander of the multinational force. Most important, Iraqis are safer since the surge in US troops reached full strength last June. According to Petraeus, speaking last month: "Every trend we watch is down roughly about 60%: civilian deaths, numbers of attacks, and thankfully our casualties are down as well."

That outcome is not fortuitous. I was fortunate to meet General Petraeus, and listen to his assessment of Iraq's security needs, before he took up his post. He has continually insisted that security is the prerequisite for political progress. To write of the surge's achievements is not to prettify the quality of life in Baghdad and its surrounding areas. But the successes - notably in turning Iraqi Sunnis in Anbar province and elsewhere against al-Qaida - are of the highest importance.

Al-Qaida sought to destroy nascent constitutional authority in Iraq. It is being rebuffed on the ground that it chose. Alongside the surge in US troops, there has been a surge in the recruitment of additional Iraqi troops and police. While acknowledging the sectarian character of the Maliki government and its failure to achieve conciliation at national level, Petraeus undemonstratively created facts on the ground.

Government sclerosis is no longer an insuperable obstacle to political advance. Iraq is far from a fully-fledged federal democracy, but neither does it conform to Steele's tendentious depiction of a project that lies in ruins. Two years ago, after the bombing of the Golden Dome mosque in Samarra, Iraq was in a state of incipient civil war. Now the US has belatedly found an effective counterinsurgency strategy, and the war against Baathism and jihadism is winnable. There is a serious prospect, at least, of a decentralised and pluralist Iraq where constitutional authority has something approaching a monopoly of the means of force.

I do not expect Guardian readers to share my admiration for Tony Blair's foreign policies. But it would be perverse for them to accept Steele's caricature of what has been achieved or deny the importance of Iraq's prospects to our security. One point the much-reviled neoconservatives have right is that Islamist terrorism has deep roots in the perpetuation of autocratic states in the Middle East. Denied an outlet in politics, dissent emerges in the only part of society open to it: religious fanaticism. The overthrow of the most bestial of despotisms in that region removes a crucial player and an appalling dynasty from that equation.

We can, moreover, verifiably assert that two of the states in the region that previously held WMD - Iraq and Libya - no longer do so, owing directly to our intervention. If Iran did indeed suspend the more overtly military aspects of its nuclear programme (though not uranium enrichment, for which its civil nuclear programme has no need) in late 2003, that is also suggestive that Saddam's overthrow gave greater impetus to the cause of nuclear non-proliferation than CND cares to acknowledge.

A year after Saddam's overthrow, the Nobel Peace Laureate José Ramos Horta said: "If I were a political leader of any consequence and I was asked a question regarding the options for Iraq, I would say that retreating and conceding victory to the terrorists is not an option - for the consequences are far too high to contemplate." Among the many errors and periodic disasters of post-war policy in Iraq, that one - the most damaging of any course we might take - has been avoided. Our allies in the region facing down the forces of theocratic reaction deserve nothing less than our continued commitment.

Media Lens tries history, yet again

I've written a few times about a curious organisation called Media Lens. ML is a sub-Chomskyite grouping that purports to "correct for the distorted vision of the corporate media". This means urging ML supporters to write to journalists who deviate from the organisation's ideological line. As ML operates in effect as a "care in the community" scheme for numerous species of malcontent on either political extreme, you will see why professional journalists often have trouble treating these campaigns with seriousness.

The former BBC political editor Andrew Marr credited ML with "brutally selective quotation" and being "pernicious and anti-journalistic". The foreign affairs editor of The Observer, Peter Beaumont, describes ML as "a closed and distorting little world that selects and twists its facts to suit its arguments, a curious willy-waving exercise where the regulars brag about the emails they've sent to people like poor Helen Boaden at the BBC - and the replies they have garnered. Think a train spotters' club run by Uncle Joe Stalin." Gavin Esler of Newsnight refers to ML's campaigns as "very sophomoric. The last time I remember a robotic response from people like this was watching film of the nuremberg rallies."

I don't recommend spending time on this, but you can see the type of harangues that ML's regulars send out because they cross-post their emails to the organisation's message board. They do the same (dishonourably, in my view, and certainly not a practice the sainted Professor Chomsky would approve of) with the replies they receive from the unreasonably accommodating journalists they target. It's a peculiarly unpleasant form of spam, as a journalist's reply will typically just elicit further harangues. There is an unsubtle strain of xenophobia among ML's supporters (the last time I looked at the message board, one of its supporters had posted effusive praise of the crank antisemitic conspiracy theorist Gilad Atzmon, who believes that the problem with Holocaust deniers is that there aren't enough of them). Genocide denial is the organisation's orthodoxy: one of its regular contributors is a blogger called David Peterson, a leading light in a disgusting outfit devoted to debunking the supposed "highly inflated casualty figures" of the Srebrenica massacre. (The organisation bears the strikingly inapt name "Srebrenica Research Group".)

You get the idea. Media Lens is an extreme, unsavoury and unrepresentative organisation whose function is the aggressive and often abusive targeting of working journalists. On one of the subjects about which it's been exercised, I've taken ML as a case study in historical illiteracy. This is the debate over the use of the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. I once noticed that ML's co-founder and editor David Cromwell, an oceanographer at Southampton University, had written (and proudly posted on the organisation's message board) a stupefyingly pompous email to a film critic - a film critic - on The Independent on Sunday, David Thomson. Thomson's thought-crime had been to write about the Clint Eastwood film Flag of Our Fathers without referring to, as Cromwell put it, "the propagandistic basis for western leaders' claim of 'half-a-million' allied lives being saved by dropping atomic bombs on Japan". Having read Cromwell's letter, I wrote to Thomson myself to assure him that his unsolicited correspondent was a historical ignoramus who was best ignored. (Cromwell wasn't even familiar with the name of his own cited source, Gar Alperovitz, the principal promoter - though not the originator - of the comprehensively debunked "atomic diplomacy" thesis.) I cited several recent studies to demonstrate my point. I reproduced my letter, and Cromwell's, in this post.

Cromwell appears to have been hurt by this, because a couple of months later he posted once more on the ML message board. He reproduced an email he had sent to a friend of his, the radical historian Howard Zinn, appealing to be bailed out on the subject of the Truman administration's casualty estimates for a conventional invasion of Japan. It was a cruel thing for Cromwell to do. Zinn is not a historian of the Pacific War. He is a polemical far-left author of a largely worthless popular book on American history, and more recently has been a promoter of crank conspiracy theories about 9/11. In response to Cromwell's plea, he was unable to furnish sensible let alone informed comments. I did Zinn the courtesy of going through his comments at length, in this post in December 2006. I concluded - with, I modestly submit, ample and documented justification - that Zinn was a hapless incompetent and that Cromwell was confirmed as an ignoramus.

To my pleasurable surprise, Cromwell has beavered away for more than a year and now come back for a third attempt on the same subject. Last week he posted on the ML site what he called hopefully if technically inaccurately a "cogitation" on the historiography of the A-bomb decision. You can read it here. The parallel that immediately occurred to me when I read it was one I've mentioned a few times recently. Cromwell has graduated from crude Creationist tracts to the ostensibly more sophisticated but essentially identical reasoning of Intelligent Design. Out go embarrassing evangelists such as Zinn and in come the paraphernalia of footnotes and acknowledgements.

It is in vain. Cromwell's third attempt is a farrago of nonsense. He hasn't understood or even digested the fruits of his superficial and painfully restricted inquiries. He has no conception of the difference between archival research and dogmatic assertion. He desperately gathers citations where he may, regardless of the use to which they're put or the coherence of the resulting assembly. In particular, he has alighted on Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, author of Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan, 2005, to whom he clings as a talisman. He hasn't understood how Hasegawa's argument relates to the historical literature, and is apparently entirely unaware of the criticisms advanced by specialists in Soviet, Japanese and American history about Hasegawa's use of sources.

I wrote a brief comment for The Times a couple of years ago on the controversy engendered by Hasegawa's tendentious and flawed work. The particular objection made by historians is to Hasegawa's handling of source material to generate his conclusion concerning a supposed "race". Michael Kort, author of The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb, 2007, comments in this essay on Hasegawa's "excessive liberty in interpreting his sources". (I'm grateful to Professor Kort for writing to me at length on this question.) Hasegawa appears to have an impressively international problem in this regard. Koshiro Yukiko of Nihon University, writing in The Journal of Japanese Studies 33.1, 2007, notes:

"On the Japanese side of the story, archival research is Hasegawa's most critical weakness. To examine aspects of Japan's decision for surrender, Hasegawa does not seem to have conducted full archival research in Japanese for new information and analysis.... His method of citation from Shūsen shiroku [Historical record on concluding the war] is replete with problems, leading the reader to wonder whether Hasegawa actually examined the sources, particularly in their original forms."

I'm afraid that this post, long as it is, is merely a preamble to my examination of Cromwell's purported "cogitation", which I shall come back to in a few days. But one thing I shall trail here is that Cromwell lamentably gives his readers no hint - and quite possibly doesn't realise - that his third strike on this issue is entirely incompatible with the previous two (and indeed with this preposterous "media alert" issued by his organisation in 2004). The particular example I'll discuss is Media Lens's uncritical second-hand reference to the US Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946 and its counterfactual reasoning about how soon Japan would have surrendered without use of the A-bomb. Cromwell will grasp at anything he thinks can help him, but lacks the interpretative skill or intellectual honesty to understand the price he thereby pays.

The A-bomb decision is obviously an issue of the utmost historical significance. Research in the past 20 years is strongly suggestive that the reason President Truman took the decision he did was the one stated at the time: to avoid a conventional invasion of sickening cost in lives and end the war quickly. There was no ulterior diplomatic motive. That doesn't resolve the ethical questions raised by the A-bomb, but it is the historical question that Cromwell imprudently sought to hector journalists upon. As I have, after each of Cromwell's previous ventures in this subject, concluded that he is an ignoramus, he is probably expecting me to do so a third time. I shall not disappoint him.

Stuff

The stridently unlettered paleo-libertarian polemicist Justin Raimondo wrote an encouragingly worried article in the nativist far-right American Conservative magazine a couple of years ago entitled "Hillary the Hawk". He wrote:

If the Democratic establishment’s stance on the [Iraq] war is at odds with the party’s antiwar activist base, then their outright warmongering on the Iranian issue puts the two factions on a collision course... If Hillary [Clinton] maintains her lead in the Democratic presidential sweepstakes—and with over $21 million in the bank, she’s way ahead of any potential rivals—and the party establishment effectively strangles insurgent antiwar activism at the grassroots level, an increasingly “isolationist” electorate will be faced with a choice between two interventionist candidates....

I don't believe that electorates in the US or the UK are "increasingly isolationist". They are against losing, not against intervention, and the gains made by the Coalition forces under exceptional leadership since the US troop surge peaked last June have altered the dynamics of the US Presidential race. I hope that the election will be fought between Senators McCain and Clinton, either of whom would be welcome from the point of view of European Atlanticists. Meanwhile, the outcome of the Nevada and South Carolina primaries has precipitated what is obviously the top story of the day, which I bring to you far too late.

I wrote last month of an enjoyably ferocious review of a book by a sociologist called Steve Fuller, who was an expert witness in a disastrous defence case for the teaching of the pseudoscience of "Intelligent Design" in schools in Dover, Pennsylvania. Professor Fuller has alerted me to his reply to that review, and I draw it in turn to your attention in turn.

With some apprehension, I turn to a subject that I had undertaken, as a personal favour to a loyal reader, not to touch again. My interlocutor, who is a journalist with much experience and knowledge of the Balkans, begged me to avoid the subject of Mr Neil Clark, who is not. Mr Clark's principal but limited fame rests rather in legal matters, about which I can reasonably claim to have rendered him involuntarily better educated, and periodic fiascos in his encounters with source material. My interlocutor, who is as bemused by Mr Clark's political assertions as the rest of my readers will be, felt that Mr Clark had nonetheless endured disproportionate attention. I agree, and acknowledge my own culpability. Even so, there is one last aspect of Mr Clark's mental furniture that may be worth noting.

Mr Clark is to be found blogging indefatigably at "Comment is Free". Last week he complained that "for his pro-Yugoslav stance, Milosevic was rewarded with over a decade of demonisation in the west's media". Attending to the merits of this proposition would clearly not be a fruitful exercise, but one comment below the article pointed to a characteristic of Mr Clark that I hadn't previously realised. In 2004 Clark wrote a similarly exculpatory piece that included this sentence (emphasis added): "In the case of the worst massacre with which Milosevic has been accused of complicity - of between 2,000 and 4,000 men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995 - Del Ponte's team have produced nothing to challenge the verdict of the five-year inquiry commissioned by the Dutch government - that there was 'no proof that orders for the slaughter came from Serb political leaders in Belgrade'.”

I have caught Mr Clark before in promoting factoids derived from a "Srebrenica denial" outfit (an obscure American organisation called the International Strategic Studies Association) and affecting that this was a reputable source. But it was news to me that he is himself a Srebrenica denier. The true figure of at least 7,000 to 8,000 victims killed in that act of genocide is established and recognised by the Serb government. By analogy, recall that even in his libel suit against Professor Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books in 2000, my reader David Irving maintained that 500,000 to 1.5 million Jews had been murdered on orders from Berlin (The Irving Judgment, 2000, p. 116). He also said more recently that Himmler had had a programme for extermination of the Jews, and that "in 1942-43 alone over 2.5 million Jews were killed in those three camps". Irving remains, despite these qualifications, a Holocaust denier.

Unfit for office

Nick explains in The Observer why Ken Livingstone should be unseated in the London mayoral election. Before I come on to the arguments, let's recall whom we're dealing with.

Livingstone came to public prominence, and some notoriety, in the early 1980s as the far-left but nominally Labour leader of the Greater London Council. The electorate had no say whatever, even indirectly, in his being GLC leader. The leader of the Labour group who had campaigned in the GLC elections was Andrew (now Lord) McIntosh, a moderate. After the election, the Labour caucus within the GLC deposed McIntosh and installed Livingstone in his place. It was flagrant machine politics, and an indication of the undemocratic instincts of Labour at that time. During his leadership, Livingstone's principal contributions to the life of the City were the "Fares Fair" policy on public transport, which was a straight subsidy to tourists and was judged illegal by the Law Lords in 1981; the creation of numerous sinecures at public expense at County Hall; interventions in national politics for which he held no responsibility; and interventions in international politics for which he held no responsibility and about which he knew next to nothing.

The nadir was reached, for me at least, when Livingstone addressed a demonstration against Israel's war in Lebanon in 1982, and The Observer asked him if he believed the Jews had a right to a state. He answered that they did not. I couldn't believe what I was reading. I opposed the Lebanon War of that year, and have never changed my mind on it. But my reasons were not Livingstone's case. Livingstone's position was - as an SDP member of the GLC and Times columnist, Ann Sofer, pointed out at the time - indistinguishable on that issue from the views of the National Front. It was inflammatory for the leader of municipal government in a great cosmopolitan capital city to utter such views, quite apart from the intrinsic demerits of those opinions.

In bringing the story up to date, Nick doesn't hang about. He writes:

"To understand why Ken Livingstone is unfit to be the Labour candidate for mayor of London, you have to grasp that he has never moved away from the grimy conspirators of the totalitarian left, who have always despised the democratic traditions of the Labour movement. There is a queasiness about dragging them into the light because so many of the baby boomers now in power wasted their youth in Marxist-Leninist politics. But it is better to overcome queasiness than fail to treat a sickness and Ken Livingstone began by travelling with the sickest sect of them all: the Workers' Revolutionary party."

The Workers' Revolutionary Party is essential to understanding Livingstone's politics. I demur from Nick's treatment of it only in that he is in my opinion too kind to the party's leader, the late Gerry Healy. Healy was not "a rapist as near as damn it": he was a rapist, pure and simple. Corrupt, brutal, thuggish, thick, autocratic and (given his unprepossessing physical attributes) astonishingly vain, Healy was a pioneer in extremist politics in soliciting and receiving the support of a man who shared all those qualities but was additionally a genocidal killer, Saddam Hussein.

Nick refers to a documentary on Channel 4's Dispatches series on Monday at 8pm. It's been made by Martin Bright of the New Statesman, and I strongly recommend you stay in for it.

Incidentally, one of the issues the programme will discuss is the deal for cut-price oil for London's buses that Livingstone sought in 2006 with the blustering bigmouth President Chávez of Venezuela. When this story emerged, Stephen Pollard asked me what I thought of it, and he posted my comments on his (since superseded) blog. I asked Stephen not to put my name on it, as there was (and remains) a dearth of information and I wasn't sure my first impressions were right. They may indeed be mistaken, but I haven't seen anything since to cause me to revise my judgement, so here is what I wrote to Stephen:

"It's a long argument, but you need to bear in mind that Chavez uses oil as a means of coercive diplomacy (or buying friendship in international forums). It hurts other nations (Trinidad & Tobago, e.g., is a hydrocarbons producer which loses business because it isn't in a position to sell below market price) and subsidises rich-world consumers at the expense of poor Venezuelans. It's particularly disturbing that the deal is in the form a barter rather than a market transaction, because there's no way of properly comparing the services that Venezuelans will receive.

"The strong suspicion is that Chavez is using the country's oil wealth, which ought to be stored against future fluctuations in the oil price, for securing services of value to him but that are not transparent. The poor financial nature of the deal doesn't affect him, but it's a way of obtaining services that are quite plainly going to be used against his political opponents (see article in Times business section on this today)."

I could go on and on. But read Nick, read Martin (the comments section of whose blog appears to have been hijacked by the Scientologists), and read Agnès, and you will see what I mean. We are all on the Left, and we are concerned. Livingstone's record has never till now been properly examined, and the evidence strongly indicates that he is unfit for the Labour candidature and unfit for public office.

Stuff

I'm sorry there has been nothing from me for a week or so. I hope to catch up with comments on things I have seen. In the meantime, here are one or two articles I've noted.

The Guardian's "Comment is Free" blog is a strange and wonderful place - both for its contributors and for the zoological gardens that make up its comments thread. But there has never been a more deranged article in that forum than one by David Cox entitled "ET stay home". Previously on CiF I have debated with Mr Cox on the rule of Saddam Hussein. I strongly criticised him for his regret at the passing of Saddam's regime, but I hadn't realised he regarded that tyranny as representing a less pressing threat to human welfare than the designs of extraterrestrial beings.

Back on Earth, my friend Agnès Poirier contributes a CiF piece on the notion that Tony Blair might become President of the EU. Agnès, who is an eloquent critic of Le modèle anglais, is not keen. I don't argue against her criticisms of the record of UK diplomacy in Europe. I favour European integration and regret that we are not part of the euro zone. But there is, contrary to Agnès's scepticism, a good reason that Britain has never signed up to the Schengen agreement concerning internal borders. Unlike some of the signatories, we don’t have identity cards. There is a case that British-born terrorists returning from, e.g., jihadist activities in Pakistan, will find it easier to evade detection in the UK if there are not frontier checks. There is the safeguard clause in the agreement that allows spot checks on travellers, but this was designed for rather less pressing matters of state policy, such as the passage of soft drugs by Dutch tourists into France.

Also on CiF, Andrew Murray, chairman of the Stop the War Coalition, writes on - what else? - the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in Berlin in the Spartacist uprising of 1919. It is of course possible to have human sympathy for these leaders without supposing, as Murray does, that: "Had the revolution succeeded, then the Bolsheviks in Russia would have been sprung from the isolation that led to such immense difficulties, the whole of continental Europe might have turned to socialism, the rise of Hitler would have been entirely averted, even the British bourgeoisie might have realised the game was up...." The man is a fantasist. The Spartacists were entirely preoccupied with internal fights within their own party (the German Communists, the KPD, had been set up only a fortnight previously). The murder of Liebknecht and Luxemburg created a myth that was far more potent than their political demands during their lifetimes. But more significant for attentive readers of Murray's article is his reference to the "immense difficulties" that afflicted Soviet Communism. That's quite some euphemism.

Bear in mind that Murray is the author of a short book entitled The Communist Party of Great Britain: A Historical Analysis to 1941, published in the mid-90s. In it, he says (p. 74): "That things happened in the USSR which were inexcusable and which ultimately prejudiced Socialism's whole prospect is today undeniable. Whether Communists in the capitalist world could or should have done more than they did is much more contentious."

In short, Communists in Britain and other Western democracies did everything they reasonably could in opposing the Great Terror and the Moscow Trials. I've corresponded with Murray cordially in the past, but this is not a judgement that belongs in civilised debate.

I (heart) creationism?

This post appears on "Comment is Free".

Conservative commentators have not been universally impressed with the ostentatious piety of governor Mike Huckabee. After Huckabee explained his increased support in the Republican caucuses in Iowa in terms of the workings of divine providence, the columnist George Will asked: "Should someone so delusional control nuclear weapons?"

Yet the most distinctive feature of Huckabee's religiosity is, ironically, one that he skirts around. Huckabee is a creationist. At a debate last May he raised his hand when Republican candidates were asked if they disbelieved in evolution. He now insists that his personal beliefs on the issue are unimportant. At a news conference last month, when asked about his anti-evolutionism, he said: "That's an irrelevant question to ask me - I'm happy to answer what I believe, but what I believe is not what's going to be taught in 50 different states."

Does Huckabee's creationism matter for his claims to the presidency? It matters a lot, but it is important to be clear why. The problem is not that Huckabee is a fundamentalist who believes in the inerrancy of scripture. One of the defining principles of the US polity, and the single most important document of the enlightenment, is the Virginia statute for religious freedom of 1786, drafted by Thomas Jefferson. It stipulates that there be no religious test for public office. Religious adherence, or the lack of it, is a matter of personal conscience in which the state has no business. The corollary is that we secularists should be politically indifferent to those who are religiously observant, even while we resist those who claim to know the will of God and wish to hasten it by legislation or by force.

But Huckabee's assertions are not that kind of conscientious belief. Whether couched as an explicit assertion of divine intervention, or as the ostensibly more sophisticated argument of intelligent design, creationism is a claim about the natural world. As such, it is flat-out false. Evolution is a demonstrated fact substantiated by mountains of data. As a claim to knowledge the rejection of evolution bears the equivalent relation to science as Holocaust denial has to the study of history. These are examples of what the journalist Damian Thompson, in an excellent new book on a perverse phenomenon, terms counterknowledge. They are impossible to reconcile with critical inquiry. The only way to argue consistently for that type of proposition is either to ignore the body of evidence or to fake it.

I see no grounds for respecting religious beliefs and make no pretence to do so. But what a political leader holds to be true concerning, say, the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary is a matter of personal belief that I have no political quarrel with. We do not have confessional political parties, and neither am I bound as an atheist to sympathise with the wacky political doctrines of Ayn Rand. Huckabee, on the other hand, holds religiously inspired doctrines that are demonstrably untrue. So does his Republican rival Mitt Romney, who believes things about American pre-history that no non-Mormon scholar would take seriously. It is the claim to knowledge that makes Huckabee's creationism and Romney's Mormonism relevant to their claims to office. At candidates' debates from now till the Republican convention, Huckabee and his fellow creationist Ron Paul should be asked one question before anything else: what did Noah do with all the animal dung?

At the same time, secularists should acknowledge that there is a clear and recent counterexample where a belief in nonsense had benign political consequences. No recent President has held more absurd spiritual beliefs than Ronald Reagan. His personal philosophy was a curious melange of the evangelical and the new age. The former White House chief of staff Donald Regan explosively claimed that the first lady, Nancy Reagan, had used an astrologer to determine the best time for various presidential decisions. Ronald Reagan's belief in a literal and imminent Armageddon was often cited by anti-nuclear campaigners as a danger to world peace. That scriptural belief did indeed affect Reagan's policies, but the influence was in a pacific and not a bellicose direction. Reagan was not the resolute cold war warrior either his liberal critics or his conservative adulators still believe.

The evidence is circumstantial but difficult to gainsay. It is set out compellingly by Beth Fischer in her 1997 book The Reagan Reversal. Fifteen months before Mikhail Gorbachev took office, Reagan purposely cooled down the tension of the cold war, with his saccharine "Ivan and Anya" speech in January 1984. It appears that Reagan was motivated by his eschatological notions and, among other political factors, the closeness of nuclear conflagration after the Soviet gerontocracy apparently mistook a Nato exercise (Operation Able Archer) for the real thing.

If Reagan's spiritual beliefs were ludicrous, his belief in worldwide nuclear disarmament combined with impermeable ballistic missile defences was scarcely less so. A world in which nuclear weapons had been "disinvented" would be highly unstable. In diplomatic crises, there would be a positive incentive for the protagonists to develop weapons rapidly and launch them.

Loaded with fanciful notions both theological and political, Reagan nonetheless evinced the right mix of pressure and then compromise with the USSR that worked for that time. The example ought to be better known. Reagan, however, was a case sui generis in geopolitical circumstances that are long past. There is no wider implication that a president holding crank notions is a tolerable outcome, still less a desirable one.

Their man in Havana

The Guardian posted this item this afternoon:

"Philip Agee, a former CIA agent who became a bitter critic of Washington's Cuba policy, has died aged 72, Cuban state media reported today. Agee quit the CIA in 1969 after 12 years in which he mainly worked in Latin America. He was later denounced as a traitor by George Bush Sr and was threatened with death by his former colleagues. His famous 1975 book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, cited alleged CIA misdeeds against leftwingers in the region and included a 22-page list of people he claimed were agency operatives.

"Granma, Cuba's communist party newspaper, said Agee died on Monday night and described him as 'a loyal friend of Cuba and fervent defender of the peoples' fight for a better world'."

It is extraordinary that the report makes no mention of the fact that George Bush Snr's description of Agee was a simple statement of the literal truth. Agee was no mere political dissenter from CIA misdeeds. His affiliation was confirmed by documents smuggled to the West by the late Vasili Mitrokhin, the KGB's chief archivist from 1972 to 1984. These were made public in The Mitrokhin Archive, 1999, by Mitrokhin and the Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew. The authors state (p. 300): "Agee became in effect the CIA's first defector. In 1973 he approached the KGB residency in Mexico City and offered what the head of the FCD's Counter-Intelligence Directorate, Oleg Kalugin, called 'reams of information about CIA operations'."

With self-defeating circumspection, the suspicious KGB resident turned Agee away. So Agee turned to the Cubans, who unsurprisingly welcomed him enthusiastically and shared the information that he brought. How many Western agents died as a result of Agee's treachery is, so far as I'm aware, not public knowledge. We can but retrospectively congratulate the Labour Government of James Callaghan, and particularly the Home Secretary Merlyn Rees, for having disregarded protests and deported Agee in 1976. (The Labour Party organised a national demonstration against racism later that year - a pressing issue given the support then being gained by parties of the extreme Right - which saw Rees being shouted down by what was then the International Socialists and is now the Socialist Workers' Party, itself an organisation of the racist Right. Agee's deportation was the complaint.)

The Morning Star (in a notably generous review of my book Anti-Totalitarianism, by Andrew Murray of the Communist Party of Britain and the Stop War Coalition) once described my politics as "those of an unmodified cold war warrior". I take this as high praise, and confirm that I regard Agee's service on behalf of totalitarianism with unalloyed hostility. His was an ignoble life, and I do not mourn his passing.

Livingstone on Cuba

In my piece today about Fidel Castro, I comment on a widespread and misplaced romanticism on the part of many foreign observers of Cuba. The politician I particularly have in mind is the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. I noted on this blog last April that I had written to Joy Johnson, of the Mayor's Press Office, with this question:

"I recall that last year, at a European Trade Union Solidarity Conference with Cuba and Latin America, the Mayor declared: 'If I am lucky enough to be re-elected in 2008, one of the main features of my third term would be a major celebration of the Cuban Revolution on its fiftieth anniversary.'

"I wonder if the Mayor has noted a report from the BBC this week that a Cuban journalist, Oscar Sanchez Madan, and a lawyer and dissident, Rolando Jimenez Posada, have received long prison sentences for, respectively, "social dangerousness" and writing anti-government slogans. According to the independent Cuban Commission for Human Rights and Reconciliation, the trials were held in secret and without defence lawyers present.

"I should be glad to know if, in conjunction with his celebration of the Cuban Revolution, Mr Livingstone plans to make any statement or engage in any private diplomacy about these incarcerations. Given the importance of the subject, I should appreciate it if you or he were able to couch a reply in a form that you would not object to my quoting publicly."

Ms Johnson kindly did reply promptly, with permission to quote her. I have waited till I wrote about Cuba in the press before publishing her comments, but in the end it would have taken a disproportionate amount of space if I had included her statement in today's Times article. I'm thus reproducing her comment here. This is what she said:

"A spokesperson for the Mayor said: 'The Mayor is opposed to every violation of human rights from any quarter. He therefore rejects the highly selective approach of those who highlight one or two allegations of abuses by the Cuban authorities but ignores the torture and illegal detention without trial of hundreds of inmates of the US illegal prison at Guantanamo Bay and the impact of the US illegal blockade on the lives of millions of ordinary Cubans. Such double standards debase those who hold to them.'"

Now, there is much you could say about the Mayor's views on Cuba, but one thing stands out in Ms Johnson's statement. It is not about Cuba: it's about the Mayor's domestic political enemies (of whom I am cordially one). Given that the Mayor invites judgement on his views on foreign affairs, spends a good deal of council taxpayers' money on promoting those views, and explicitly draws support from certain interest groups on account of those views, I find this a discreditably insouciant attitude to a pressing instance of the abuse of human rights.

At wit's end

You haven't turned to me for analysis of the New Hampshire primaries. I'll direct you instead to an excellent piece about one of the Republican candidates, Congressman Ron Paul. The article is by one of my regular correspondents, Jamie Kirchick of The New Republic, and can be read here. You will immediately infer from the many hundreds of comments it has already attracted that the candidate's supporters are exercised by it.

The peculiarly American phenomenon of libertarianism was once described as "liberalism at wit's end". The phrase was coined by a political scientist called Stephen Newman, in an excellent book of that title. Newman's intention was to defend liberal politics from what he termed "a caricature of the Lockean original". Invoking Hannah Arendt's writings, Newman argued that the libertarian stress on private interests overlooked our common interest in equal liberty. It's from that omission that the appalling consequences of libertarian doctrine, consistently applied, would arise.

But the libertarian movement has heterogeneous constituents. These include the reasonable and often (on social issues) astute libertarians of Reason magazine, as well as the doctrinaire free-market and anti-interventionist Cato Institute. But at the furthest end of libertarianism are some very murky currents indeed. Jamie has done well not only to identify these but also to locate Ron Paul's position within "a strain of right-wing libertarianism that views the Civil War as a catastrophic turning point in American history--the moment when a tyrannical federal government established its supremacy over the states".

Do read the whole thing. When I first came across Paul around a decade ago, I thought of him as merely a crank and an anachronism. His politics are worse than that, and he merits the coverage that TNR has given him.

UPDATE: Nick Gillespie of Reason magazine is clearly shaken by this material and his response is to the credit of the "soft" wing of the libertarian movement:

"As someone who has written and commented widely and generally sympathetically about Ron Paul, I've got to say that The New Republic article detailing tons of racist and homophobic comments from Paul newsletters is really stunning. As former reason intern Dan Koffler documents here, there is no shortage of truly odious material that is simply jaw-dropping.

"I don't think that Ron Paul wrote this stuff but that really doesn't matter--the newsletters carried his name after all.... It is hugely disappointing that he produced a cache of such garbage."

Gillespie also reproduces Congressman Paul's response to Jamie Kirchick's TNR article. You can read it here, on Paul's official site. You may disagree, but I consider that a statement concluding "for over a decade, I have publicly taken moral responsibility for not paying closer attention to what went out under my name" is both damning and evasive.

UPDATE II: Andrew Sullivan, whose support for what he sees as Congressman Paul's honourable non-conformism has astonished me, rightly describes the old newsletters issued in Paul's name as "full of truly appalling bigotry". But Andrew is too generous in allowing Paul an escape route by "clearly explain[ing] and disown[ing] these ugly, vile, despicable tracts from the past". For what it's worth, I accept Paul's explanation that the ugly sentiments in his publications were penned by hands other than his own. What is culpable is that Paul has plainly never been exercised by those views' having been issued in his name. The best construction you can put on this is that he felt there were more important issues at stake. (There is a revealing remark in Paul's feeble statement today that the story is "being resurrected for obvious political reasons on the day of the New Hampshire primary". So he distances himself from the sentiments issued in his name over decades in order to neutralise those "political reasons" and not on any more principled grounds.)

I'm a strong believer in the freedom to express bigoted opinions. But those who take advantage of that democratic right have no business complaining when their comments are taken seriously. Ron Paul's campaign has been mortally wounded; like so many politicians before him, he blames the messenger. The problem is in the candidate, who never merited Andrew's support and whose protracted political demise I anticipate with unseemly enthusiasm.