Oliver Kamm

Judgement at the ECHR

I wrote at the end of last year about a case at the European Court of Human Rights concerning one of my correspondents, Karl Pfeifer. Mr Pfeifer is a longstanding anti-racist campaigner and journalist in Austria. He writes regularly in English for the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight about the European far Right, and he is Curator of the Documentation Centre of the Austrian Resistance. Mr Pfeifer appealed to the ECHR after the Austrian court system had failed to protect his reputation from libellous accusations made by an extremist newspaper Zur Zeit. This was how I summarised the case:

"In 1995, Mr Pfeifer published an article accurately recounting and aptly commenting on the views of a Nazi apologist, one Dr Werner Pfeifenberger. Pfeifenberger sued Mr Pfeifer for defamation and lost. In 2000 the Vienna Public Prosecutor indicted Pfeifenberger under the law forbidding Nazi activities, the National Socialism Prohibition Act. Pfeifenberger committed suicide shortly before his trial was due. A month later, a far-right weekly, Zur Zeit, accused Mr Pfeifer of having driven the "Catholic" Pfeifenberger to his death. Mr Pfeifer sued. A Viennese court ruled in his favour, but Zur Zeit appealed and won its case. Mr Pfeifer then appealed to the European Court against the Austrian courts and government. The complaint was accepted in December 2005 and the judgement was issued on Thursday this week [15 November 2007]. In the case of Pfeifer v. Austria, Mr Pfeifer won."

The case has important legal implications in which I'm interested but that I'm not competent to discuss. What I will say is that, even if you discount the fact (for the rule of law is disinterested) that Mr Pfeifer is a good man whereas his opponents are racist bigots, it is welcome news that he won, for reasons I stated in my post.

Mr Pfeifer has now written to let me know that on 15 February this ECHR judgement, Pfeifer v. Austria, became final. He is applying to the Austrian High Court to restart proceedings against Zur Zeit and Andreas Mölzer MEP of the Austrian Freedom Party. (I won't give a link, but Mölzer's website - in German only - is headed by a photograph of him in friendly conference with Jean-Marie Le Pen.) I congratulate Mr Pfeifer warmly on - to use a phrase that ought to be rescued and deployed non-ironically - his courage, strength and indefatigability.

UPDATE: There is a useful summary in Press Gazette, which I missed when it was published in November, both of the legal judgement and of its potential impact on UK libel law. The Gazette states:

"The Court reiterated that statements which shocked or offended the public or a particular person were indeed protected by the right to freedom of expression under Article 10 [of the European Convention on Human Rights].

"But the statement here at issue went beyond that, claiming that Pfeifer had caused the professor's death by ultimately driving him to commit suicide. No proof had been offered for the alleged causal link between the applicant's article and the professor's death. By writing that, the chief editor's letter overstepped acceptable limits, because it in fact accused Pfeifer of acts tantamount to criminal behaviour.

"The Court was therefore not convinced that the reasons advanced by the domestic courts for protecting freedom of expression outweighed the right of the applicant to have his reputation safeguarded. There had accordingly been a violation of Article 8 [concerning protection of reputation]."

I'm a near-absolutist on free speech, and strongly defend the right to free expression of racists, antisemites and Holocaust deniers. But the principle behind this Court judgement is surely right.

Not a parody - finis

I fear that the post immediately below this one might have been inadvertently confusing in one respect. A comment underneath the post suggests that there is an issue of free speech involved in Neil Clark's urging the Abingdon Constabulary to crack down on this website. I appreciate the concern, but the issue - really - is more mundane, and I have every sympathy with the desk staff at Abingdon Police Station.

Let me explain. If the Abingdon Constabulary receives a complaint from someone off the street that a serious criminal offence (e.g. harassment) has been committed, then the Abingdon Constabulary has an obligation to treat that complaint seriously until further information becomes available. The relevant further information in this case is that the complaint derives from Mr Neil Clark, whom no one has an obligation to treat seriously.

I wondered how best to explain this point to the public servant in Abingdon who had found himself the unwitting victim of Mr Clark's personal rebellion against the law on wasting police time. It's not difficult. To illustrate Mr Clark's disingenuity requires context; but to demonstrate the workings of Mr Clark's mind does not. Mr Clark is not backward in expressing his conviction that, just as the affairs of state are threatened by a malign conspiracy, so is he. (A nice example may be found here, where Mr Clark - confident that no one would be able to penetrate the online disguise he had adopted - expresses his feelings on the forces that have conspired against him. I have invariably judged Mr Clark's imprecations so deranged that I have never sought their removal from any site where they appear.) Those who work in public service, as I once did, periodically have to deal with people who reason this way, and the hazard is usually recognisable at an early stage of the encounter. I'm sorry that the desk staff at Abingdon Police Station have been put to that trouble, and I'm concerned to relieve them of the irritant in future.

Another comment under my post also raises a matter that weighs on me: "Neil Clark clearly has some serious demons. Why, then, do you delight in taunting him in this distasteful way? If you feel you must respond to his attacks on you, do it like a grown up. If not, ignore him."

It's a serious point, which in more moderate form has been made even by one or two people dear to me. I can't argue against it. It has particular force as Mr Clark's already idiosyncratic opinions - on, e.g., Milosevic, Srebrenica, the Iraqi interpreters, capital punishment, the Bilderbergers - are expressed in increasingly pathological form. But I do maintain that I have protected Mr Clark from the most damaging consequences of his behaviour. After his catastrophically misguided attempt at legal action, I might have landed him with a hefty bill for his abuse of the legal process. Against the advice of professional and journalistic colleagues, I decided instead to bear the cost myself. Further, when I notified the then Readers' Editor of The Guardian (which had posted a brief article on its website reporting Mr Clark's legal threats) of the inevitable outcome of the case, I deliberately withheld one aspect of the affair: Mr Clark had lied directly to the newspaper, in order to present his claim as a serious one. The lie was that Mr Clark was acting after taking legal advice. (It had long been obvious to me and my advisers, from Mr Clark's bizarre behaviour, that his lawyer was an imaginary construct. The Guardian can check this by asking Mr Clark for a copy of the invoice issued by this "lawyer"; none will be forthcoming.) Mr Clark doubtless felt this was a minor embellishment, but advancing a fabricated story to a newspaper is not a trivial matter.

Mr Clark indeed has his demons, and it is no pleasure to me to observe them. It is for that reason, as well as to dissuade him from causing further public nuisance, that I abjure further comment on them and on him. But that is all. When he wrote to me continually to threaten terrible legal consequences, and more recently when ululating to his local constabulary, Mr Clark - rather than refute my observations, which he is unable to do - would invariably complain that I was "jeopardising his career". I don't know whether that is so, but it is not of the highest importance to me. If you make your opinions public, then public scrutiny is what you will get (if you're lucky). If Mr Clark - not in a private capacity but as a public commentator - lacks the ability to get things right and the honesty to put right things he has got wrong, then it is fair comment and in the public interest to point this out. I regret the distress that Mr Clark has been caused (especially as it is self-inflicted), and hope that it will be lessened. But I do not regret having ensured, at some inconvenience and expense to myself, that knowledge of his standards of competence and probity is in the public domain, where it will remain.

Not a parody

"Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment" ran Dorothy Parker's composition for her tombstone. Likewise the diverting narrative that is this post.

Yesterday morning I got a telephone call from a bewildered gentleman at Abingdon Police Station saying he had received a complaint from a Mr Neil Clark. Mr Clark (pictured) is the author of such essays as "Milosevic, Prisoner of Conscience" and (regarding the Iraqi interpreters in fear of their lives) "Keep these Quislings Out". He is also an imaginative theorist of global conspiracy.

But as well as being a fool and a fanatic, Mr Clark is a fabulist, a fantasist, a faker and a fabricator. (For economy's sake, I confine myself to the letter F.) Readers may recall that I once exposed Mr Clark's reliance, in a published article (irrelevantly, a review of a book by me), on a disreputable source that it turned out he had not represented accurately to the relevant editor. The source was a right-wing Srebrenica-denial organisation in the US, whose name Mr Clark had apparently confused with that of the scholarly and impartial International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. As my observation was true, and was easily demonstrated with reference to Mr Clark's own emails to the editor, I was immovable when Mr Clark mounted an impressively inept attempt at libel action. In order to stress the weight of his claim, Mr Clark additionally adopted the imprudent course of lying directly, and in an attributed quotation, to a Guardian journalist, Dominic Timms, and then manufacturing a variety of online female identities in order to remove reference to the inevitable outcome of his complaint. I demur from telling this undignified story further, and revert to the present.

I learned from my interlocutor at Abingdon Police Station that Mr Clark was upset about disobliging references to him on the World Wide Web. Mr Clark had meticulously assembled a file of these, to which presumably this post will be added. Among the cases Mr Clark had collated was an observation from me that, by dint of being unable to read such specialised material as France's leading daily newspaper, he had contributed an erroneous comment to The Guardian last summer concerning the position of the French Foreign Minister on the Iraq War. Mr Clark maintained – as this example surely demonstrates - that he was the victim of a campaign of criminal harassment orchestrated by me.

I sympathised with my interlocutor on his predicament. I explained that Mr Clark had once had an unfortunate experience with the English legal system, in which he had wasted court time at what would have been his expense if I'd resolved to issue a claim against him for costs. Possibly for this reason, after a sobering encounter with a leading libel lawyer whom I had retained for my defence and who rambunctiously explained to Mr Clark that his conduct represented an abuse of the legal process, he now prefers to waste police time at public expense. My interlocutor ventured wearily that the matter merited no time of his, but it appeared from my business address that I enjoyed a measure of professional success greater than that of a man in Botley; could I not therefore just abstain from interest in Clark's pronouncements? I naturally resolved to do all in my power to make life easier for the Abingdon constabulary than it has been in the very recent past.

And, Reader, I am a man of my word.

In defence of comrade Bright

Martin Bright, political editor of the New Statesman, has a fine post on his blog about the London mayoral election (and note the angry interventions in the comments threads by what appear to be fraternal correspondents from the Church of Scientology). This is what he says:

"Interesting to read the full text of the "Unite for Ken" letter that appeared in the Guardian earlier this week with 100 prominent signatories giving their support to the mayor. I have always thought Boris Johnson was a peculiar candidate for the Conservative Party to choose, but it seems that he really has got City Hall running scared. I must say I find it amusing that Livingstone, who stood against the Labour Party in 2000, is now the darling of tribalists within the party. There was a time when such treachery would not have been tolerated. The letter, sponsored by the think-tank Compass, is emblematic of the muddle-headed "lesser of two evils" argument that has bedevilled the left for so long.

"One apocalyptic phrase I do agree with, however, is this: "This isn't just about the politics of London but a battle between the forces of progress versus reaction in the nation as a whole". For me, this is true whether Johnson or Livingstone wins. The progressive answer to this conundrum would be to find a genuinely progressive candidate to represent Labour."

There are many reasons that Ken Livingstone is unfit for office, but the most fundamental is that he lacks a sense of public service. Few recall that Livingstone became leader of the Greater London Council in the 1980s without any reference to, or consultation with, London's voters. Labour fought the election campaign for the GLC in 1981 under the leadership of the moderate Andrew (now Lord) McIntosh. Immediately after Labour had won that election, a cabal of the Labour group on the GLC replaced McIntosh with Livingstone. As GLC leader, Livingstone dispensed patronage and intervened in national politics without accountability and with much public largesse. As mayor, he has merely resumed these inglorious practices, as - I briefly preen myself - I was one of the first to predict. (The day after Livingstone's election in 2000 I was strolling through the Broadgate Circle at lunchtime when I was accosted by a BBC television crew. Evidently they were seeking reaction from some braying City toff, but for some reason alighted on me instead. I was delighted nonetheless to give them my opinion on Livingstone for a couple of minutes without drawing breath, but I fear that only the initial assertion rather than the supporting evidence was broadcast.)

It is, as Martin says, a matter of shame to many figures of the ostensibly radical wing of politics that they're prepared to sign up to Livingstone's campaign where "anyone who has a progressive bone in their body should have run a mile". (The signatories to the pro-Livingstone letter include, I note, Kate Hudson, chairman of CND and a member of a party that explicitly declares solidarity with the totalitarian nightmare-state of North Korea.) I strongly endorse Martin's view that there should be a progressive candidate against the discredited Mayor and his plainly unserious Tory opponent. I can only repeat: Oona is the obvious candidate. I plead with her to run; I urge you, if you have a vote, to write her name on the ballot paper.

Politics and art

Daniel Finkelstein comments: "I am now going to recommend a book that a large proportion of you wouldn't dream even of picking up in a bookshop to scan its contents. But you should read it anyway. Even you, Oliver Kamm."

I see what he means. The book is Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald. As Daniel describes it: "It is a song by song account of the Beatles' recording career. And on the surface of it, that is all it is. But I think it is really a very profound book indeed." Among its profound characteristics is "the light it sheds on a very old controversy. Is the personal behaviour and political view of an artist relevant when assessing their artistic output? MacDonald answers in the affirmative and goes on to make his case song by song."

Now, there are issues on which my knowledge is minimal; and there are issues on which my ignorance is so expansive that not even the most rudimentary general knowledge may be assumed on my part. Among this second group of issues, football and popular music are prominent. These are particular interests of Daniel's (he writes a weekly football column for The Times), and I'm grateful for his efforts at expanding my reading. And indeed, I haven't read Revolution in the Head.

But oddly, I do recognise the argument and I have views on it, for I have read another book by the same author. The late Ian MacDonald was a music journalist of eclectic taste and range, and he wrote an influential biography nearly twenty years ago entitled The New Shostakovich. MacDonald was much infuenced by the picture of Dmitri Shostakovich that emerged from what purported to be the great Soviet composer's memoirs, published under the title Testimony and edited by Solomon Volkov. The controversy over these memoirs is long and convoluted. They show a man deeply disaffected with the regime, and expressing his protest in his music. (There is also an impressive film based on these memoirs, in which Ben Kingsley takes the part of Shostakovich.) Yet the evidence is now beyond serious dispute that the work is spurious. The musicologist Laurel Fay has demonstrated that large sections of the work were lifted from previously published articles.

MacDonald's book starts from the premise that, whatever the problems of authenticity of Volkov's document, the picture of the tormented composer is essentially true. MacDonald then goes on to find evidence substantiating this picture of Shostakovich in the music itself (such as the bombastic Fifth Symphony, which MacDonald interprets as intentional irony). It is a misconceived way of approaching the subject, and the book is a failure as a result. As one reviewer put it (Malcolm Hamrick Brown, "Ian MacDonald's The New Shostakovich", Notes, March 1993, and republished in A Shostakovich Casebook, edited by the same author, 2004, pp. 257-64): "MacDonald seems not to know that creative artists like common folk wear masks appropriate to the occasion, disguising parts of a 'whole' personality, not always with the intention to deceive so much as to facilitate."

The connection between an artist's political views and his output is indeed a vexed question. I have had exactly this argument with Daniel's and my common friend Stephen Pollard, who cited Shostakovich as an example of a composer whose work is illuminated by what we can infer from his biography. It is a bad example and a flawed case - a fallacy, in fact, because we can't gain direct knowledge of an artist's intentions, and even if we could then it still wouldn't necessarily be a reliable guide to the art. Art is independent of politics; we can make sense of a work of art only in its own terms, and not by inferring from it the intentions of the composer, author or artist.

Iraqi interpreters - once more

I've commented before about the urgent issue of asylum for Iraqi interpreters (on which, see this comment by Deborah Haynes, Baghdad correspondent for The Times). The issue has nothing to do with the political arguments over the Iraq War. It is a humanitarian case for granting asylum to people who have served British forces (which operate in Iraq under a UN mandate) and who face the prospect of vicious and murderous reprisals for their courage. Dan Hardie, who initiated this campaign, has written to me with further news, and I'm reproducing his post below.

Iraqi Employees: fine words, shabby deeds

Do you like reading fine words? Here is the Prime Minister on the subject of Iraqi ex-employees of the British Government, speaking in the House of Commons on October 9th, 2007: 'I would also like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the work of our civilian and locally employed staff in Iraq, many of whom have worked in extremely difficult circumstances, exposing themselves and their families to danger. I am pleased therefore to announce today a new policy which more fully recognises the contribution made by our local Iraqi staff, who work for our armed forces and civilian missions in what we know are uniquely difficult circumstances.'

Fine words. What about deeds?

A small number of Iraqis - fewer than a dozen, according to people close to the operation who are in contact with me- were removed from Iraq in the early autumn of 2007. Since the Prime Minister's admirable declaration of October, how many Iraqi ex-employees have been evacuated from Iraq? According to all the Iraqis that I am in contact with: none.

Here are the words of an Iraqi employee in Iraq, emailing me, today: 'I am still in Iraq...I hear nothing from your Governmet yet!'

Here is what this man was told on February 3 by a conscientious British Civil Servant, out in Iraq to arrange the evacuation of Iraqi ex-employees and clearly shocked by the lack of progress: ''I'm sorry that everything is taking so long to complete. Please note that we are waiting to hear what happens next from London and I can assure you all that I will personally contact you as soon as I receive instructions from London to confirm the next arrangements.'

Here is why he is hiding: 'They (the militia) keep asking my relatives and my family's neighbors about me and they keep moving in my family's street and keep their eyes on our home... they told them: anyone know anything about A__ he should tell us immediately and also they said: we will never give up until we catch A__ .'

And here is what the Right Honourable Bob Ainsworth, Minister of State for Defence, wrote to David Lidington, MP, about this same man on 16th January: 'Mr Hardie expresses concern over the handling of a claim for assistance by a former employee of British Forces, Mr A_ ... Mr A_ is eligible for the assistance scheme, and we have passed his details on to the Border and Immigration Agency who will take forward his request for resettlement in the UK via the Gateway programme. Assuming that there are no problems with Mr A__'s immigration checks he should be able to leave Iraq by the end of January...' I added the emphasis, and I can also say that I have it in writing from the MoD that there were no problems with Mr A__'s immigration checks.

The Border and Immigration Agency is the Home Office Agency handling the last phase of the operation to resettle Iraqi ex-employees. And it is the BIA, according to every source of information that I have, that is delaying the evacuation of the Iraqis.

It is also supposed to be the Home Office that is co-ordinating the provision of housing to those Iraqis who do get resettled in the UK. In the House of Lords last month there was a debate on Iraq at the request of Lord Fowler, whom I had briefed on Iraqi ex-employees. Lord Chidgey, later backed by the Earl of Sandwich, asked a very pertinent question of the Foreign Office Minister Lord Malloch Brown, and he did not get a good answer: '...on the resettlement of Iraqis at risk under the Gateway Protection Programme, the Minister will be aware that its success is dependent on a sufficient number of local authorities participating. There is considerable concern that this is not the case at present. Will he advise what steps the Government are taking to ensure that local authorities will come forward?'

There are many operational and logistical difficulties in the way of an operation: I know that. But the Government has known about these people for at least six months, and has been publicly committed to helping them for over four months. That is enough time to plan for the difficulties- far more time than you usually get in a war.

The Home Office is dawdling while people are threatened with death.This is either incompetence in the face of a crisis, or it is a deliberate policy of putting bureaucratic obstacles in the face of fugitives. Neither is acceptable.

And beyond that, the policy itself is being used to keep out Iraqis who can prove that they worked for British forces, and who can prove that their lives are at risk as a result. One man, Hamed, worked for British forces on Shaibah Logistics Base for over two years, as the Government accepts. He was threatened by the militias, and gunmen went to his house, so he moved his family to Syria and slept on the base's floor. He continued to work for the British. Hamed finally was given 'notice to quit' Shaibah when the base closed, and fled to Syria, where he cannot legally work and where he and his family are safe (so far) but hungry. The British Government knows who Hamed is. A British Army NCO who knew him has confirmed every detail of his story to me, saying that he knew that Hamed had reported the threats against him to the military authorities. The Government has written to Hamed to reject any claim for help, since he was 'not directly employed' by the military.

Another man, Waleed, was directly employed by the military, in 2005 and 2006. He worked as an interpreter for one Army unit for its six month tour, during which time he was fired upon and chased by militiamen as he made his way to the base; he started work for a second unit, after which he received a threat on his mobile phone detailing where he lived, what he did, and what would happen to him if he 'collaborated' any more. He was also hunted in Iraq, and has also fled to Syria. A British Government letter, which I have seen, informed him that he would not be assisted since he had not worked for the twelve-month period specified by the Government's policy- which, alas, the militias do not seem to respect.

We got the Government to admit to its moral responsibilities. Now we have to get them to match their deeds to their words.

Please write a letter to your MP. His or her address is The House of Commons, Westminster, London, SW1A 0AA. If you don't know who your constituency MP is, go here and type your postcode in. When you've sent a letter, follow it up with an email: his or her address will normally be SURNAMEINITIAL@parliament.uk - for example BROWNG@parliament.uk

Two or three days after you have written the letter, call the Parliamentary switchboard on 0207 219 3000 and ask for your MP's office. Repeat your concerns to the secretary or research assistant you speak to (and be nice: most of these people work damn hard for little reward), check that your letter has been received, and politely request that the MP ask questions of Ministers and reply to you. In your email, your letter, and your phone calls, you must be courteous: insulting an MP or a research assistant will discredit this cause. Talking points for the letter are below:

1. The Prime Minister announced a review of British policy towards its Iraqi ex-employees, due to the threats of murder they faced, on August 8th 2007, and he announced a change in that policy on October 9th, 2007. The Foreign Secretary made a more detailed policy statement on October 30th, 2007.

2. Nearly four months later no Iraqis who have applied under the scheme have been evacuated from Iraq.
Not one Iraqi ex-employee living as an illegal immigrant in Syria or Jordan has been resettled under the scheme.

3. A debate in the House of Lords on 24 January 2008 contained several references to resettlement being blocked by the failure of the Home Office to provide housing in the UK. The Home Office has had between four and six months to plan for this eventuality: it is inexcusable that they have not done so.

4. Would the MP please put down written Questions to the Home Secretary asking why the Home Office is unable to live up to the Prime Minister's publicy expressed commitment to rehouse Iraqi ex-employees whose lives are at risk for having worked for British forces?

5. Would the MP please write in private to the Home Secretary, and to the Immigration Minister, Liam Byrne MP, asking what provision their department has made to implement a policy decided in early October, and further asking them if they are aware that lives are at risk and that rapid action needs to be taken?

6. Would the MP also please write to the Foreign Secretary and the Defence Secretary asking how many Iraqis who are ex-Employees of their departments have been resettled, and asking why Iraqis who are at risk for having worked for British forces are being abandoned for having 'worked for less than 12 months'?

7. Can the MP please forward these letters to the Prime Minister, who personally approved the change in policy.

8. And finally, can the MP please reply to you with details of any Government response.

If you want: you can give your MP my name and email address (danhardie.blog@gmail.com ) and tell them that I am in contact with a number of Iraqi ex-employees inside and outside Iraq, none of whom have received help from the Government, and that I would be happy to brief them with confidential details of these cases, either by telephone, email or in person at their Parliamentary offices. They should feel free to contact me.

When you get a reply to your letter, email me (again, at danhardie.blog@gmail.com ) -it's very important that I know which MPs are sympathetic and what the Government is telling them. And email me if you have anything else that needs saying. Thank you.

"Is this crazy...?"

On her Spectator blog, Melanie Phillips asks rhetorically, "Is this crazy, or is this crazy?":

"Russia’s President Putin has warned that recognising Kosovo will rebound very badly upon the countries who have blundered into endorsing it. The fact that this outcome is merely the inevitable consequence of the war so unwisely prosecuted by those countries against Serbia does not soften its deeply alarming implications. Putin is warning only too correctly of the dangers to the west of this development and the supreme folly of endorsing it.

"For once, Putin is on the right side and Britain and America are utterly wrong. That is the measure of this debacle."

You were right the first time, Melanie: this is crazy. Your complaint of "a breach of a country's right to maintain its own integrity" is, ahem, light on the recent history of the region. The author of Kosovo's independence was Russia's ally Slobodan Milosevic. As President of Serbia, Milosevic stripped Kosovo of its autonomy in 1989, thereby denying it the status within the Yugoslav Federation that it had been assured under the 1974 constitution. Serb designs on Kosovo were and remain - whatever euphemisms you care to employ for them - devices for crushing popular demands. Almost literally every single Kosovar Albanian supported separation from Serbia under Milosevic. A survey in 1995 (cited in Ivo H. Daadler and Michael E. O'Hanlon, Winning Ugly: Nato's War to Save Kosovo, 2000, pp. 8-9) found that 43 per cent of Kosovar Albanians favoured joining Albania, while 57 per cent favoured outright independence.

This, incidentally, was the context for what Melanie calls "the war so unwisely prosecuted... against Serbia" - or to put it more accurately, Nato's intervention to rebuff Milosevic's genocidal campaign against Kosovar Albanians. In pursuit of a Greater Serbia, Milosevic had already caused mayhem. By September 1998, some 300,000 people had fled their homes, the great majority of them Kosovar Albanians, in response to Milosevic's scorched-earth policy of destroying entire villages. Nato's intervention prevented a humanitarian catastrophe. Contrary to those who feared that it would reinforce Milosevic's popularity in Serbia, the genocidal butcher fell from power shortly afterwards when one ballot-rigging exercise too many caused his downfall. There are many failures that can be attributed to Western policies in the region in the past decade, and Kosovo is an unhappy and unstable place. But independence and eventual EU membership are the right and inevitable course for Kosovo. I would direct Melanie to a wise judgement by Timothy Garton Ash:

"I do not know the way to draw up a historical balance-sheet that determines whether this result is just. And who, under what circumstances, has the right to self-determination is a conundrum that liberals have spent 160 years failing to resolve. But two things I will assert with confidence. First, the single human being most responsible for this Serbian loss is Slobodan Milosevic - may he rot in hell - aided and abetted by two war criminals still at large, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic.... The second thing I assert with confidence is that this will be the least worst outcome, not just for Kosovo but also for Serbia itself."

Amen to that - and, I might add, a sense of historical vindication to the British prime minister who ensured that Milosevic's genocidal aggression was thwarted and a new political arrangement for the region made possible.

Democrats and foreign policy

A couple of years ago, Peter Beinart, a former editor of The New Republic, wrote a book entitled The Good Fight: Why Liberals - and Only Liberals - Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again. It was a better book than the unfortunate title would suggest. What I took from it was Beinart's insistence that "antitotalitarianism should sit at the heart of the liberal project". Beinart maintains that the Bush administration, in prosecuting the war in Iraq, has failed to understand the limits of American power, and that liberals need to rescue the cause of the war on terror (a term he uses correctly and without irony) from conservatism. He considers it an irony that he himself failed to understand this point when extending (as he now believes) disastrously mistaken support to the Iraq intervention.

Christopher Hitchens wrote a fairly uncomplimentary review of the book for The Atlantic in which he took issue both with Beinart's historical parallel with the Truman Doctrine and with "Beinart’s wishful and halfhearted belief that Saddam Hussein could have been contained". My position is more sympathetic than Christopher's to the postwar liberal and social democratic tradition in foreign policy, and my own short book Antitotalitarianism, published in 2005, advances a similar argument to Beinart's but from British politics. I firmly agree, though, with Christopher's stance on the Iraq War and share his view that: "If American liberalism had seriously wanted to regain its moral standing after the Cold War ended, the re-emergence of the one-party, one-leader aggressive state, in the forms of Greater Serbia and Greater Iraq, should have provided the ideal opportunity." British liberalism has greater perspicacity on this point, at least in the form of a prime minister, Tony Blair, whose influence on international affairs I consider to have been powerfully to the good.

All of this is by way of background to an interesting piece on TNR's website by the historian Jeffrey Herf on the foreign policy positions of the contenders for the Democratic nomination. He comments:

"This year’s Democratic primaries raise the following question: Is the Democratic Party any longer the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that is, the Roosevelt of the New Deal as well as the Roosevelt whose leadership and decisions were absolutely indispensable to defeating Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan in World War II? Cass Sunstein, among others, rightly evokes Roosevelt’s legacy of domestic social and economic reform. Today, in the form of the now familiar varieties of radical Islamism, we face an enemy that bears more similarities to fascism and Nazism than any other ideological movement of similar dimensions since World War II. The radical Islamists celebrate the murder of innocent civilians, proudly declare their hatred for the Enlightenment, liberal democracy, capitalism, communism and socialism, feminism, wage war on black Africans in Darfur, despise the United States and yes, also revive radical anti-Semitism in ideology and practice. To point this out is not “neoconservative ideology.” It is the unpleasant truth. These ideas and actions call for an American counter-offensive, one animated by a liberalism with deep and abiding memories of Roosevelt."

Professor Herf is concerned that this unpleasant truth is largely absent from Democratic debates on foreign policy. This is a dispiriting conclusion for us European liberals. I believe it is true, as Herf says, that the difference between Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama, "especially in foreign policy, [is] that she is a centrist Democrat whose ideas are far 'newer' than his while he is a left-liberal Democrat whose ideas are largely those of the Democratic orthodoxy of the pre-Bill Clinton Democratic Party." It is for this reason that I wish for a Clinton candidature. But Beinart's message is clearly a minority opinion within American liberalism, and I wish this were not so.

NOTE: Jeffrey Herf is the author of, among many other works, one of the best books I have read concerning the end of the Cold War in Europe. It is War by Other Means: Soviet Power, West German Resistance, and the Battle of the Euromissiles, 1991. A scholar of German history, Professor Herf traces the debate within the FRG in the 1980s over Nato's deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles as a counter to Soviet intermediate-range nuclear forces. I am very much in agreement with Professor Herf's view (p. x), as relevant now as when he wrote it, that: "A redefined Atlanticism with a united Germany still firmly anchored in the West, continued European economic integration, and a United States still engaged in Europe are all key to a peaceful Europe composed of free democratic states."

Hezbollah threatens

While we're on the subject of Lebanon, consider the message of Hassan Nasrallah yesterday, as reported by the BBC: "Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has told thousands of supporters at a rally in Lebanon that the disappearance of Israel is inevitable. 'The presence of Israel is but temporary and cannot go on in the region,' he told the Beirut rally."

I make no more expansive claim than that Israel has strong geographical and historical warrant for treating this as a statement of intent rather than of aspiration, and that the latter would in any event be a threatening intervention in the affairs of the region. I'm a friend and supporter of Israel, not because she is a Jewish state but primarily because she is a democracy in a part of the world where constitutional government is rare. (I have no concern with the fortunes of Judaism, but plenty with those of the Jews.) Hezbollah threatens Israel in a sense I wrote about in the wake of Israel's intervention in Lebanon 18 months ago:

"UN security council resolution 1559, adopted in 2004, calls for the disbanding and disarmament of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias. That resolution, clearly covering Hizbullah, has not been implemented. In those circumstances Israel is entitled to defend its citizens and its sovereignty.

"Israel can't be defeated by Hizbullah, but an existential threat to the Jewish state is not the proper measure of a terrorist group's capacities. So long as Hizbullah remains in southern Lebanon, Israeli civilians face a continuous threat of rocket attacks or periodic incursions. The aim and effect are comparable to those of the suicide bomber in Israeli towns. Death may strike at any time. No democratic government can long survive, or ought to tolerate, a position in which civilians need reserves of courage merely to live within its boundaries."

Completely contrary to the spirit and the letter of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, marking the end of Israel's campaign in 2006, that threat has grown stronger. Nasrallah acknowledges receiving weaponry from Iran, via Syria. In the post immediately below this one, I recalled Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982. That was a disastrous enterprise fought for illegitimate ends. Israel had neither justice nor prudence on its side in seeking to install the Maronite Christians as victors in Lebanon's civil war; or in pursuing an eventual annexation of the West Bank; or in undermining King Hussein of Jordan with a view to an east bank "settlement" of Palestinian national claims. But the rationale of Israel's intervention in 2006 was nothing like this: it was to defend Israeli civilians against a force whose very existence as an armed militia is in explicit defiance of international law. Standing with Israel is, in these circumstances, an imperative of progressive politics.

Chomsky and power

There is a review in the New Statesman of a new book called What We Say Goes: Conversations on US Power in a Changing World by Noam Chomsky. The book - like so many others that have been published under Chomsky's name in the past decade and a half - comprises interviews with Chomsky by his Boswell, a radio producer called David Barsamian. (It has to be said that in previous volumes in this format - one of which I reviewed here, alongside an incomparably better volume by Paul Berman - Barsamian's questions have scarcely been searching. "Are you looking forward to the summer at Wellfleet, on the Cape?" asks Barsamian in Class Warfare, 1996. On receiving the answer "yes", Barsamian continues: "And you get a little sailing and swimming in on the side?" This supplementary question floors Chomsky, who expresses a fumbling agnosticism on the matter.)

Now, I haven't yet read this latest volume, and my comment concerns the ease with which Chomsky's admirers can be satisfied more than with Chomsky. The reviewer is one Matthew Taunton, who ventures grandiloquently: "Will there ever again be a public intellectual who commands the attention of so many across the planet? During the Vietnam War, Chomsky’s arguments helped define the responsibilities of the intellectual to society." I could modestly direct Taunton to my own judgement on this matter:

"If Chomsky's political writings expressed merely an idée fixe, they would be a footnote in his career as a public intellectual. But Chomsky has a dedicated following among those of university education, and especially of university age, for judgements that have the veneer of scholarship and reason yet verge on the pathological. He once described the task of the media as "to select the facts, or to invent them, in such a way as to render the required conclusions not too transparently absurd—at least for properly disciplined minds." There could scarcely be a nicer encapsulation of his own practice."

But in fact Taunton demonstrates my point better than I can articulate it. For here is his conclusion:

"The argument against Chomsky is that, in his eagerness to condemn actions of the US, he lets its enemies off too lightly. His explanation for the rise of Hezbollah in the Middle East suggests this objection can be discounted: Lebanon lacks a deterrent against invasion, and the behaviour of Israel and the US reinforces the notion that such a deterrent is necessary. Chomsky is essentially an anarchist, and his distrust of power is general."

That isn't strictly the argument against Chomsky, which is rather that (in the words of Christopher Hitchens, which I feel are generous) "his regard for the underdog has mutated into support for mad dogs", and that his methods are analytically unscrupulous. I have direct experience of that unscrupulousness. In countering my observation about (ironically enough) his dishonest handling of source material, Chomsky fibbed, presumably either not believing or not caring that anyone would check his remarks.

But the more novel part of Taunton's formulation is that "Lebanon lacks a deterrent against invasion". Now, for many reasons I opposed the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, whose aims I considered illegitimate and whose conduct was a bloody disaster. But how can you talk of threats to the sovereignty of Lebanon (I leave aside for now the question of the security of Israel) and make no reference, nor even an allusion, to a neighbouring state that does not recognise Lebanon, that dominated Lebanon from the mid-1970s by means of a 30,000-soldier expeditionary force, that is currently engaged in a murder campaign against Lebanese politicians, that has an active chemical weapons programme, and that begins with the letter 'S'? Chomsky's "distrust of power" is patently not general but specific. It applies to the United States and its allies. And here is one reviewer so credulous that he will accept Hezbollah - the recipient of arms from Iran via Syria, and the destabiliser of Lebanese government - as some sort of Lebanese national liberation movement, if only Noam Chomsky, conscience of a generation, will tell him so.