Oliver Kamm

Stuff

Here are some things worth reading (or not, as the case may be).

If there is one cliché worth avoiding in the wars over free thought it is this observation offered by Nigel Hawkes in The Times as a supposed defence of religious faith against the claims of science: "While science answers the 'how' questions, it leaves the 'why' questions hanging in the air."

I have problems with Richard Dawkins's exposition of atheism, but I share his impatience with this sort of apologetic, on the grounds that "if science cannot answer some ultimate question, what makes anybody think religion can?" (The God Delusion, 2006, pp. 56.) Hawkes evidently thinks he's making a telling point with his observation that: "To deny religion is to dismiss most of human history as an error, only now being corrected." I know literally no one who would "deny religion" in the sense of disputing its salience in human history. But whether there exists a personal God with an interest in our affairs is surely a question with a right and a wrong answer. I see no particular reason to demand of religious believers justification for their faith, provided - and it's an important qualification - they leave me alone. But I have little patience with the notion that those of us who reject, in the words of the Apostle Paul, the things which are not seen and are eternal, are somehow being obtuse in taking the question seriously. There is a point of honour here. Religious belief is a body of dogma, not of knowledge.

It's a common belief that Tony Blair's highest point as premier was the Good Friday Agreement and his lowest was the Iraq War. I doubt that this will be the verdict of history, in either respect. In the Sunday Telegraph, Kevin Myers comments on the "grotesque legacies" of the Belfast Agreement, and I have much sympathy with what he says:

The Agreement has turned religion from being just a denominational and theological matter into a permanent political identity. Meanwhile, the compromises made to keep Sinn Fein-IRA in countenance, regardless of all else, have effectively destroyed the centrist parties, the Ulster Unionist Party and the SDLP. Left standing are the two groups that have been the authors of so much misery, bigotry and suffering down the decades: Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party, and of course, the political arm of the IRA, Sinn Fein.

Jonathan Rauch in the National Journal, maintains that Barack Obama has "taken political risks to show moral leadership". But then Rauch offers this chilling qualification:

Lord knows, the public is right to want a change from the bullying hyperpartisanship of Bush-era Republicanism. I'm not saying that Obama should take the low road. But I'm old enough to remember the last time the voters got tired of divisiveness and went shopping for a politician with a purifying personality. We don't need another Jimmy Carter.

Pat Buchanan's American Conservative magazine is home for some hair-raising prejudices. It stakes out a position of isolationism, nativism and domestic reaction (like the Daily Mail, though without, so far as I know, the astrology and junk medicine). The expertise of some of its contributors is difficult to understate. They include Justin Raimondo (of whom I've commented here) and - my readers will be overjoyed to learn - Neil Clark. But the magazine has just posted something worth noting by the historian Andrew Bacevich. His piece is entitled "The Right Choice? The conservative case for Barack Obama".

Some background is in order here. I referred a few days ago to the isolationist movement of the 1930s and early 1940s in the United States. One of its most prominent intellectual influences was the historian Charles Beard, who advanced the Jeffersonian aversion to "entangling alliances". In his book American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy, 2002, Bacevich makes a qualified defence of Beard's approach to foreign policy. Beard's reputation has never recovered from the publication in 1948 of his book President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941, in which he attacked FDR for supposedly provoking the Pacific War. But this perverse and disreputable work does not necessarily invalidate his criticism of the principles of interventionism, and it's this that Bacevich seeks to resurrect.

I have strong objections to Bacevich's case, but will argue them another time. (Note, incidentally, that in 1994 Bacevich was advancing Beard's principles against "the paleo-Wilsonian clamor for intervention in Bosnia where American airpower will presumably untie the knot jerked tight by centuries of animosity". This was a nice instance of Bacevich's incomprehension of the Bosnian war as an intractable communal conflict rather than - as it was - a war of genocidal aggression by one side. When Nato airpower was indeed employed the year after Bacevich wrote his derisive comments, it speedily forced the Bosnian Serbs to the negotiating table.) I note here only what Bacevich concludes about the choices in the Presidential election: "For conservatives, Obama represents a sliver of hope. McCain represents none at all. The choice turns out to be an easy one."

On this point I'm hopeful Bacevich is right. I do not believe McCain represents conservative principles, which is the reason I favoured him from the outset for the Republican nomination.

Preventing nuclear terrorism

In The Washingon Times, Graham Allison of Harvard University writes on "Preventing a nuclear terrorist attack". He gives an assessment in two stages. First is this bleak message: "Based on current trends, a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States is more likely than not in the decade ahead." Secondly, this horrific scenario is preventable: "There is a feasible, affordable checklist of actions that, if taken, would shrink the risk of nuclear terrorism to nearly zero because, as a fact of physics: no HEU [highly enriched uranium] or plutonium, no mushroom cloud, no nuclear terrorism."

My worry is that the strategy Allison proposes is not fully within our power to effect. In particular I'm unconvinced that a grand bargain with Tehran - as Allison proposes - will have the desired outcome of preventing completion of Iran's nuclear infrastructure. The problem ought to be obvious: Iran has consistently lied about its activities, which include the illicit production of a small amount of fissionable material. The evidence is that Iran responds to pressure, as happened after the exposure of its illicit activities in 2002. It wishes to remain within the regime of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. But Iran will cheat if given the opportunity. Thinking on this subject has not been aided by a curious omission in coverage of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, published last December. As David Kay, who led the Iraq Survey Group, commented last month concerning the NIE's confident judgement that Tehran halted its nuclear weapons programme in 2003:

That first line brought me up sharp. There was a footnote to it that a lot of people missed if they were reading just the press reports of it. It turns out what they call a “nuclear weapons program” is just the design work on the actual warhead itself. Actually, the U.S. National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell testified this week that the weapons design work, particularly for an early- generation weapon, is the least important part of a nuclear-weapons program. What’s important is the fissile material and in the case of Tehran, the enriched uranium. That’s the real core of a nuclear-weapons program. And there’s no doubt that activity continues.

The NIE refers to it and so has the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA]. I particularly found it an egregious statement not only because it showed no sensitivity to what a nuclear-weapons program was but the fact was that Tehran by IAEA standards has cheated and tried to hide that program for eighteen years. I have to emphasize I have not read the classified version and I have no idea whether it reflects a more sophisticated understanding of nuclear proliferation than the unclassified version.

(The British government made this point immediately and rightly, by the way - see the Foreign Secretary's article in the Financial Times on 6 December, arguing that pressure should not be taken off Tehran.)

The reason this is so important is implicit in earlier work done by Graham Allison. His newspaper by-line notes that he served as Assistant Secretary of Defence (under President Clinton), but omits mention of a remarkable and influential book he published in 1971, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. It's not an overstatement to say this is among the best books ever written about international relations. I can't do justice to its thesis in a few sentences, but here is the baldest of summaries.

Allison presents different models for interpreting the Cuba Missile Crisis. These are: the Rational Actor model, in which contending governments rationally seek to maximise utility; the Organisational Process model; and the Governmental (Bureaucratic) Politics model. You will interpret the crisis differently according to which model you apply.

Nuclear deterrence is a much less stable system under the second and third of these models. Under the Organisational Process model, the actors follow certain set procedures rather than rationally assess the highest pay-off. As Allison puts it: "Nuclear crises between machines as large as the United States and Soviet governments are inherently chancy. The information and estimates available to leaders about the situation will reflect organisational goals and routines as well as facts." Under the third model, which stresses politics within the leadership, the way crises are managed "is obscure and terribly risky". The interaction of different constituencies within government, and the potential for misunderstanding among them, "could indeed yield nuclear war as an outcome". (Quotations are from p. 260.)

There is a common argument that nuclear deterrence is a stable system because the risks of getting it wrong are so high. (A good example is this piece from Christopher Layne of the antediluvian American Conservative magazine: "while a nuclear-armed Iran is hardly desirable, neither is it 'intolerable,' because it could be contained and deterred successfully by the United States.") Allison's work is an important corrective in showing how nuclear war might come about even with rational political actors.

In the Cold War the world came close to a nuclear exchange on two occasions that we know of: not only the Cuban crisis, but also when the Soviet leadership apparently misunderstood a Nato military exercise (Operation Able Archer) in 1983 as the real thing. We can be less confident still of the robustness of deterrence if nuclear weapons are developed or acquired by North Korea or Iran, especially given Iran's sponsorship of terrorist agents. The fact that we no longer include Iraq in that reckoning of potential threats is, in my view, important in judging the consequences of the Iraq War.

Stuff on foreign policy

One of my regular correspondents points out that not only the Stop the War Coalition will be turning up to Tony Blair's lecture at Westminster Cathedral next Thursday. Independent Catholic News reports:

The Catholic peace movement Pax Christi is planning to hold a silent vigil in the Piazza in front of the Cathedral from 6.30 that evening (the talk is at 7pm) to call to mind and to public attention, Tony Blair's involvement in the Iraq War and ongoing occupation, in his involvement in the decision to replace Trident, as well as other aspects of his premiership that have created global polarity rather than global solidarity between peoples.

This is good of Pax Christi. I too endeavour to draw to public attention Tony Blair's role in the Iraq War and the decision to replace Trident; it appears I no longer need conduct a vigil about it but can do something more convivial that evening.

The author Geoffrey Wheatcroft, writing in The Guardian about the now concluded presidential campaign of Ron Paul, comes up with non sequitur of the day: "Anyone dismissing him as rightwing should look at his unflinching opposition to the Iraq war, and more generally to the foreign policy of George Bush and previous presidents."

And anyone dismissing Charles Lindbergh as rightwing should look at his unflinching opposition to ... well, you can fill in the rest. The historical analogy between those personalities, in their views on America's role in the world, is close. One of Paul's cheerleaders, the stridently unlettered Justin Raimondo, knows little history but is voluble nonetheless in his commendation of the isolationism of an earlier era. He pointedly refers to "the myth of Japanese war guilt" and laments "the ceaseless smearing of the so-called 'isolationists' who dared to question Roosevelt's relentless drive to war".

Of course Paul unflinchingly opposed the Iraq War. He unflinchingly opposes US foreign policy tout court, because he is an isolationist - and also (as we now know from the researches of Jamie Kirchick at The New Republic) a product of an unsavoury nativist tradition on the American Right. I can understand the criticism that the Iraq War has ruptured America's alliances. But that is not Paul's concern. He is opposed to the transatlantic alliance, believing that Nato "should be disbanded, the sooner the better". He stands in a foreign policy tradition that did enormous damage to the United States and to world peace before Presidents F.D. Roosevelt and Truman managed to shift American policy towards liberal-democratic internationalism. Had the US concerned itself with the European balance of power, and allied early enough with Britain and France, then WWI - a catastrophic conflict driven by German militarism and imperialism - might have been prevented. The victory of American isolationism over Wilsonian internationalism in the inter-war years crippled the system of collective security that the League of Nations was supposed to represent. That isolationist tradition, not excluding its xenophobic elements, is where Paul stands. And that's before we consider his preposterous notions on economic and social policy (return to the Gold Standard, indeed).

The runner-up for non sequitur of the day, incidentally, also comes from Geoffrey Wheatcroft, in the same article: "Unlike some of our own 'Dr' MPs, Paul is a real physician, serving as a US air force doctor before delivering more than 5,000 babies as an obstetrician."

Let's turn to more substantial matters. John McCain's foreign policy speech yesterday to the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles can be read here. I have to say I'm impressed. Unlike much of what presidential aspirants say about the world, it has meat - such as his belief that what is now the G8 should be a club of leading market democracies, so including Brazil and India but excluding Russia. What he says on, respectively, mending the breaches in the Atlantic alliance and standing by our obligations to constitutional authority in Iraq is welcome.

When writing about foreign policy, I'm sometimes accused - especially, indeed monotonously, by the people who post comments at "Comment is Free" - of being a mouthpiece of the US State Department. This is obviously absurd as well as false: I'm far more hawkish than the State Department. If you can imagine me writing something like this about the Danish cartoons affair, then you misjudge where I stand. (To remind you of the contemptible official US response to a campaign of violence, arson and intimidation: "The State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, reading the government's statement on the controversy, said, 'Anti-Muslim images are as unacceptable as anti-Semitic images,' which are routinely published in the Arab press, "as anti-Christian images, or any other religious belief.'")

But let me even so direct you to the State Department blog, because it has an entry on "public diplomacy" - a subject of great importance to the US in sustaining the transatlantic alliance, and thus of great importance to us too. The author is a friend of mine, Colleen Graffy, who is Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs. Before she joined the administration, Colleen held an academic post in London, and was a frequent guest in broadcast discussions about US foreign policy. She took part in a CNN debate on this subject with me on one occasion, which is how we met; the programme's editor reasonably assumed that a panel including an American conservative and a European liberal was as balanced a spread of opinion as anyone could wish for.

On free speech

I'm a near absolutist on free speech. I wrote a piece last year for the estimable Index on Censorship in which I argued my case. While free speech hurts and offends, there is nothing wrong in this. In almost no case is anyone entitled to restitution or protection. (The strictly limited exceptions are where there is 'clear and present danger'; incitement to crime; or defamation. By defamation, I naturally mean a statement that is damaging and false. I do not mean - as one reader of this blog has rueful cause to recollect - a statement that is damaging and true; and I have gone to some trouble and expense to assert that distinction.)

There is a case - argued by my correspondent Karl Pfeifer, a Holocaust survivor who has done great work in opposing racism - for laws forbidding the expression of National Socialist ideology in countries where it has caused such catastrophe. But it's not a view I share, and I condemned without reservation the gaoling of my reader David Irving by the Austrian courts in 2006. There is no speech more disreputable and fraudulent than Holocaust denial; but the reason it's objectionable is that it's false, not that it's offensive. The only proper recourse to it is the discipline of historical scholarship and critical inquiry, as opposed to the fakery practised by Irving.

I say all this by way of preamble to something not important in itself but suggestive of wider issues nonetheless. I receive at one remove the newsletter of the Stop the War Coalition, which - as my readers know - is a coalition only in the technical sense of binding Islamists and Leninists. I quote from the lastest issue:

Stop the War Coalition is asking as many people as possible to help create a wall of sound to accompany Tony Blair as he gives a lecture on Faith and Globalisation at Westminster Cathedral in London on Thursday 3 April. (See http://www.rcdow.org.uk/lectures/)....

We want people to bring musical instruments and sound making implements of every kind -- drums, trumpets, saxophones,violins, cymbals, whistles, sirens, horns, rattles, saucepans and cans to bang; we want every type of band, choir and musical group to join us, all with the aim of drowning out the speech of a man who should not be in a cathedral pulpit but in the dock of a criminal court.

Please come at 6.30pm. Blair will speak at 7pm. Spread the word among as many people as you can and encourage them to join us on the night we aim to drown out Blair's shameless lecture.

The Stop the War Coalition is a totalitarian organisation for whom the principles of free speech are as inconceivable as Darwin's natural selection was to the late Rev. Billy James Hargis. But I hope the import of this sort of campaigning is not lost on those who might otherwise sympathise with what they take to be the Coalition's purported (though bogus) anti-war message.

The master of conspiracy theory

In December 2001, Slate magazine published a nicely researched article by Seth Stevenson dissecting a conspiracy theory that had suddenly grown up around the US-led intervention in Afghanistan. You're bound to have heard this theory: the war was really about oil, and specifically an oil pipeline that the West wished to build through Afghanistan.

Stevenson did what a careful writer would do with an unsubstantiated and bizarre speculation. He traced its origins and assessed the "evidence" cited in its support. He noted that it was compatible with any evidence. Before 9/11, the West was accused of supporting the Taliban in order to secure an oil pipeline. After 9/11, the West was accused of seeking to overthrow the Taliban in order to secure an oil pipeline. In short, as is characteristic of conspiracy theories, the oil pipeline theory is unfalsifiable. Stevenson concluded:

Why does the bombing-for-pipelines theory hold such appeal? For the same reason the supporting-the-Taliban-for-pipelines theory attracted so many: There's evidence that points in that direction. Unocal did want to build a pipeline through Afghanistan and did cozy up to the Taliban. Bush and Cheney do have ties to big oil. But theories like these are ridiculously reductionist. Their authors don't try to argue conclusions from evidence—they decide on conclusions first, then hunt for justification. Also, many thinkers are comfortable with the conditioned response that dates back to Ida Tarbell vs. Standard Oil: When in Doubt, Blame Oil First.

What's absurd about the pipeline theory is how thoroughly it discounts the obvious reason the United States set the bombers loose on Afghanistan: Terrorists headquartered in Afghanistan attacked America's financial and military centers, killing 4,000 people, and then took credit for it. Nope—must be the pipeline.

Here, on the other hand, is what a non-careful writer does with an unsubstantiated and bizarre speculation - John Pilger, in his latest commentary posted on ZNet (though I think published elsewhere earlier this year):

The truth about the "good war" is to be found in compelling evidence that the 2001 invasion, widely supported in the west as a justifiable response to the 11 September attacks, was actually planned two months prior to 9/11 and that the most pressing problem for Washington was not the Taliban's links with Osama Bin Laden, but the prospect of the Taliban mullahs losing control of Afghanistan to less reliable mujahedin factions, led by warlords who had been funded and armed by the CIA to fight America's proxy war against the Soviet occupiers in the 1980s.

And you know what's coming: "a secret memorandum of understanding the mullahs had signed with the Clinton administration on the pipeline deal". So the US supported the Taliban for the oil; and it overthrew the Taliban for the oil. And this is advanced without evidence, "compelling" or otherwise, and in prose that is functionally illiterate ("the Taliban, whom, as a result, were deemed in Washington..."). Some people consider Pilger a voice of conscience and a master of campaigning journalism. I'm afraid he's something worse than - as I described him here - the voice of brutishness.

The army and their opponents

There is a good piece by Magnus Linklater in The Times entitled "The Army must go into schools" (i.e. to talk to pupils about careers). It's prompted by a perverse vote condeming such visits by - who else? - the National Union of Teachers at their annual conference. Linklater comments:

If teachers cannot understand the difference between political opposition to the war in Iraq and the role of the Army in the defence of the realm, then pity the pupils they claim to teach. It is one thing to grandstand at an NUT conference about the so-called iniquity of an illegal invasion. It is quite another to undermine a profession, which is an essential pillar of the State, in front of a class of impressionable youngsters.

And that, you might think, is all that need be said on the matter. But there is one thing more. Take another look at the Times report, which I've linked to, about the NUT's vote:

Paul McGarr, a delegate from East London, said that the union did not want to undermine servicemen and women but that the Forces were turning to schools to fill a recruitment shortage.

Mr McGarr said: “Let’s just try and imagine what recruitment material would have to say were it not to be misleading. We would have material saying, ‘Join the Army and we will send you to carry out the imperialist occupation of other people’s countries. Join the Army and we will send you to bomb, shoot and possibly torture fellow human beings. Join the Army and we will send you probably poorly equipped into situations where people will try to shoot or kill you because you are occupying other people’s countries. Join the Army, and if you come home, possibly injured or mentally damaged, you and your family will be shabbily treated.'”

McGarr is a maths teacher from Tower Hamlets and a former council candidate in Millwall for the Respect party. He is not being entirely open in disclaiming a wish to undermine our armed forces. In fact, he's lying. This is what he wrote in Socialist Worker, 23 March 2003, just before the military campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein:

Socialists have done and continue to do all in our power to build the movement to prevent war and to stop war when it starts. But if war starts the very worst outcome would be a quick victory for the US and Britain.

The best response to war would be protests across the globe which make it impossible for Bush and Blair to continue. But while war lasts by far the lesser evil would be reverses, or defeat, for the US and British forces. That may be unlikely, given the overwhelming military superiority they enjoy. But it would be the best outcome in military terms.

In short, and given the fact of the Iraq War, Paul McGarr and Socialist Worker wanted Saddam Hussein to win and our armed forces to be defeated. This is not what I say: it's what they say.

Christopher Hitchens typically refers to such people as not anti-war but pro-war on the other side. I do too, and I think I started doing it before Christopher. (John Rees, National Secretary of Respect - the non-Galloway part of it - and a member of the Politbureau of the SWP is someone I've described this way in debate.) It's not a figure of speech: it's the literal truth.

The emptiness of authoritarian populism

I wrote recently about the experience of Latin America in the past generation. Much of the continent (Chile is an oustanding example, but far from the only one) has gone from brutal military dictatorship to stable, well-governed constitutional democracy. Parties of the Left have played an important role in that transition. That type of Left is sharply to be distinguished, however, from a stubborn and atavistic political force exemplified in the rule of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Chávez is an authoritarian populist who is much closer to the traditions of corrupt military rule than left-of-centre reform.

I'd recommend in this context an interesting article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs entitled "An Empty Revolution: The Unfulfilled Promises of Hugo Chávez" by Francisco Rodríguez, formerly chief economist of the Venezuelan National Assembly. Rodríguez maintains that "Chávez's social policies are inadequate and ineffective", and locates this misrule in a historical context: the populist mismanagement through much of the continent in the 1970s and 1980s. His diagnosis is discouraging:

"Simón Bolívar, Venezuela's independence leader and Chávez's hero, once said that in order to evaluate revolutions and revolutionaries, one needs to observe them close up but judge them at a distance. Having had the opportunity to do both with Chávez, I have seen to what extent he has failed to live up to his own promises and Venezuelans' expectations. Now, voters are making the same realization -- a realization that will ultimately lead to Chávez's demise. The problems of ensuring a peaceful political transition will be compounded by the fact that over the past nine years Venezuela has become an increasingly violent society. This violence is not only reflected in skyrocketing crime rates; it also affects the way Venezuelans resolve their political conflicts. Whether Chávez is responsible for this or not is beside the point. What is vital is for Venezuelans to find a way to prevent the coming economic crisis from igniting violent political conflict. As Chávez's popularity begins to wane, the opposition will feel increasingly emboldened to take up initiatives to weaken Chávez's movement. The government may become increasingly authoritarian as it starts to understand the very high costs it will pay if it loses power. Unless a framework is forged through which the government and the opposition can reach a settlement, there is a significant risk that one or both sides will resort to force."

I hope that a moderate, constitutional Left can make its influence felt. One thing the moderate Left might do in Europe is to make it clear that Hugo Chávez is no hero of ours.

Obama and his pastor

So far as I'm aware, Christopher Hitchens perceived earlier than anyone that Barack Obama might have problems owing to his religious affiliation with a rabble-rousing nutter:

"All this easy talk about being a "uniter" and not a "divider" is piffle if people are talking out of both sides of their mouths. I have been droning on for months about how Mitt Romney needs to answer questions about the flat-out racist background of his own church, and about how Huckabee has shown in public that he does not even understand the first thing about a theory—the crucial theory of evolution by natural selection—in which he claims not to believe. Many Democrats are with me on this, but they go completely quiet when Sen. Obama chooses to give his allegiance to a crackpot church with a decidedly ethnic character."

Jamie Kirchick at The New Republic - who earlier in the campaign exposed the past association of Ron Paul with racist bigotry - has a good post on this. He writes:

"[W]hat concerns me most about the Wright controversy isn't the Pastor's racist statements or even his unhinged views of Israel. I don't think Obama agrees with any of that nonsense. What concerns me is the sort of comment that Wright made about Harry Truman's ending World War II, that "We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye." This smacks of the Howard Zinn/Noam Chomsky/Nation magazine wing of the American left that Democrats serious about this country's security (and winning in November) should not want within 100 miles of the next administration.... While I know that Obama doesn't think the government created AIDS, I'm less assured that he shares a vision of American power that understands our singular role in the world. In sum: does Obama believe Harry Truman was right to end the war with Japan the way that he did? Why is no one in the media asking him this question? That seems to me an entirely fair query of man who wants to become Commander-in-Chief."

It seems to me also a fair question, which relates directly to the Democrats' historic record on national security, and it's not clear how Obama would answer it. I hope it will be taken up. If Obama believes Truman was wrong, then that isn't an illegitimate position; but it is one that would cost him the presidency, and with justification.

UPDATE: Christopher returns to the subject in his Slate column this week, with an open-and-shut case that Obama has long understood the character and ministry of his huckstering pastor:

"To have accepted Obama's smooth apologetics is to have lowered one's own pre-existing standards for what might constitute a post-racial or a post-racist future. It is to have put that quite sober and realistic hope, meanwhile, into untrustworthy and unscrupulous hands. And it is to have done this, furthermore, in the service of blind faith. Mark my words: This disappointment is only the first of many that are still to come."

Stuff

Here are some things worth reading.

In The Sunday Times, Martin Ivens comments on Gordon Brown's uncomfortable embrace of Ken Livingstone:

"London’s election day, May 1, is [Brown's] opportunity to stop the rot. But the prime minister can help his new friend Livingstone only so much. Ken is Ken, a maverick whose fortunes go up or down according to his erratic behaviour and the antics of his wild friends. He is only semidetached Labour at best. It’s an odd twist of fate that puts Gordon’s future in his hands."

It's odd, but it's not the workings of fate. I regret to say it's the workings of Tony Blair, who welcomed Livingstone back into membership of the Labour Party for the transparently opportunistic reason that he wanted a Labour victory in London in 2004 to soften the headlines about Labour losses in municipal elections elsewhere. It was a bad and unprincipled decision, and it's appropriate that it should cause the party indignity now.

In The Observer, Agnès writes sympathetically of Cécilia Ciganer-Albéniz, former wife of President Sarkozy.

"Finally marrying the man for whom she twice left President Sarkozy, just weeks after his high-profile betrothal to the celebrated beauty Carla Bruni, may be seen as astute revenge. But it may also be the triumph of true love over Sarkozy's meretricious style."

It is at least a choice of personal fulfilment against a certain concept of duty, and you have to have some sympathy for this. Consider, by contrast, the stoicism of Claude Pompidou, who died last year at the age of 94. Through no fault of her husband's, but especially owing to the unfounded smears known as l'affaire Markovic, the glamorous and cultured Mme Pompidou was deeply unhappy as the first lady, later stating: "L'Elysée, c'est pour moi la maison du malheur." But she was convinced that her "absolute destiny" was by her husband's side.

The Telegraph carries a profile of General Petraeus. He is not a man given to overstatement or bombast:

'"We don't talk turning points, there are no lights at the end of the tunnel, we don't do victory dances, and we've moved the champagne to the back of the fridge," he tells me over a mid-morning coffee, his fourth in a day that typically starts with a five-mile dawn run. Neither he nor his close colleague, US Ambassador Ryan Crocker, are either optimists or pessimists, he says. In a way it makes sense. The former, after all, have tried before out here and failed. The latter, presumably, would never set foot in post-Saddam Iraq in the first place.'

I wrote recently about the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in favour of my correspondent Karl Pfeifer, who had been defamed by right-wing extremists and then deserted by the Austrian courts when he tried to defend his reputation. Last month, Mr Pfeifer gave a lecture to the Wiener Library in London about his experience; the transcript is here, and I urge you to read it. He is a brave and determined man. Mr Pfeifer has also sent me a link to an article of his (in German) in the Viennese newspaper Der Standard. It discusses the disturbing possibility of coalition between Austria's Social Democrats (SPÖ) and the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ). Extraordinarily, some leading Social Democrats decline to rule out such a prospect. I shall have more to say about this in due course.

Here is an interesting blog post about one of the hoarier stories of the weekend: of all things, an attempt to claim historical veracity for the forgery known as the Shroud of Turin. I do not respect religious believers' convictions, but neither do I go out of my way to confront them. When religious apologetic is disguised as something else, however, then it's worth taking a blunderbuss to a mite. The superstitious fascination for religious relics is, like the Shroud itself, literally mediaeval. It is moderately scandalous that the BBC should have screened an alleged documentary on a "mystery" that is not mysterious, and to have filed a breathless write-up of this mumbo-jumbo under - so help me - "Science & Nature". The presenter of the programme and author of the associated promotional tract is Rageh Omaar, of whom I have had cause before to remark that he is no thinker and no writer.

One of the things I find perplexing about the cultists of the Shroud is how they reconcile their position with faith in the divine inspiration of Scripture. The Gospel accounts (e.g. John 19:40) suggest that Jesus's body was washed and anointed, in accord with Jewish burial custom. Yet the cultists believe the Shroud bears stains of Jesus's blood. If you have an answer to this conundrum, please don't post it here; I'm content to live without it.

Not blowback, but turnaround

This post appears on "Comment is Free".

It has been said periodically on Comment is Free, but bears remorseless recapitulation. Since 9/11, some parts of the left have crossed over to the reactionary right, and the Guardian, till recently the voice of British liberalism, has become their sounding board.

To mark the anniversary of the Iraq war, the newspaper carried an article by Seumas Milne, declaring: "The unprovoked aggression launched by the US and Britain against Iraq five years ago today has already gone down across the world as, to borrow the words of President Roosevelt, 'a day which will live in infamy'." If you believe Saddam Hussein's regime was a lawful authority of pacific character, the violation of whose sovereignty was comparable to the attack on Pearl Harbour by a xenophobic imperialism, then you might reflect on how easily you confirm the case advanced by Nick Cohen, Christopher Hitchens and me. Your cast of mind is not anti-war, but anti-American and anti-British.

Milne is hardly disinterested in complaining about "a renewed barrage of spin about the success of the US surge". But the state and prospects of Iraq stand independently of the wishes of its observers. The evidence suggests that, not by accident but owing primarily to a remarkable military command, the US-led coalition has belatedly devised a counterinsurgency strategy that works. The surge in US troops - the most visible sign of that strategy - has not turned the country round: the political process is dysfunctional; public services are inadequate. But Iraqis are dramatically safer.

That is a direct outcome of President Bush's having ignored the recommendations of James Baker's Iraq Study Group to wind down combat operations and parley with Iran and Syria. The Petraeus doctrine stresses: "The cornerstone of any COIN [counterinsurgency] effort is establishing security for the civilian populace. Without a secure environment, no permanent reforms can be implemented and disorder spreads." The surge is intended to provide that secure environment. The most recent quarterly report "Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq", presented to Congress this month, estimates that monthly levels of civilian deaths across the country have fallen by more than 70% since the surge reached its peak last summer. If you are reluctant to credit official figures, then consider the impressions of an independent observer, Angelina Jolie, writing last month in her capacity as UNHCR goodwill ambassador: "As for the question of whether the surge is working, I can only state what I witnessed: UN staff and those of non-governmental organisations seem to feel they have the right set of circumstances to attempt to scale up their programs."

If there is one person spinning here, it is not General Petraeus. It's Milne. In another article last week, he brandished "evidence ... that the US-sponsored Sunni militias that have been at the heart of the surge strategy - the so-called 'awakening councils' - are already showing signs of falling apart." His claimed large numbers that were quitting the councils amounted to 1,300 in Abu Ghraib and Tikrit. He did not mention that the total strength of the councils is over 90,000. It may be no bad thing if the numbers of these militiamen are reduced. There are too many to be integrated into Iraq's police and army - the US plan envisages about a fifth of them, with the rest being given civilian jobs and vocational training. (The US military, incidentally, does not arm these groups: they are already armed, and everyone who joins them has to provide biometric information and register their weaponry.)

Recruiting Sunni volunteer forces is a calculated risk, especially as the programme spreads beyond Anbar province. But the counterinsurgency strategy has produced results that are a prerequisite for national reconciliation and political advance. Take Fallujah, the scene of two major battles in 2004 as well as the horrific image of the charred bodies of four American civilians strung from a bridge. That city, according to its council leader, is alive again. Its population now approaches its pre-assault level of 300,000. Consider also the damage Coalition forces have inflicted on al-Qaida in Iraq. Al-Qaida has lost sanctuaries in Baghdad and Anbar province, and an increasing number of foreign jihadists are trying to flee the country.

Regardless of your position on the Iraq war, there are two developments that are undeniable. First, Iraq's prospects no longer appear bleak to the people who matter. Yesterday, Channel 4 News released a poll of Iraqi opinion that showed misgivings about the war (a plurality, 48% to 29%, believed the invasion had not been in Iraq's best interests), but hopefulness about the future. Most (55%) felt that "at the moment things in Iraq are generally going in the right direction". More (68%) were either "very optimistic" or "fairly optimistic" about Iraq's future. Still more (80%) considered security in their locality was either "very peaceful and stable" or "fairly peaceful and stable".

The second development is more parochial, and is where we came in. No British institution in recent decades has conveyed a more authoritative and creditable voice in foreign affairs than the Guardian - on the transatlantic alliance, European integration, the Balkan wars and much else. But most recently, where Iraq is concerned, the newspaper - in what passes for news reporting and not only comment - has taken a stand alongside the scum of this earth. That is some aberration. Let us hope it is short-lived.