Oliver Kamm

Iraq commentaries

Sorry for the absence of posts lately. Here are some things I've noticed. Slate asked several writers who had supported the Iraq War to respond to the question "How did I get Iraq wrong?"; Christopher Hitchens comments "I didn't". (I didn't either. This was my summary of the case on the third anniversary of the intervention, when the prospects of success in Iraq appeared bleakest.)

If there is one person whose views I wouldn't take seriously on this subject, it's an international civil servant who, while nominally in charge of the IAEA, failed to perceive that Saddam Hussein had been tricking him. Only after the first Gulf War and the reversal of Saddam's annexation of Kuwait did the IAEA fill in the huge gaps in its understanding, when the German government provided the missing information about Saddam's centrifuge programme. The author of that gross failure, Hans Blix, writes in The Guardian today. He does not explain and he does not apologise.

Also in The Guardian today, Seumas Milne writes: "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'." Last year Nick Cohen - with me in a minor supporting role - received irate but feeble criticism when he pointed out in his book What's Left? that parts of the left had demonstrably crossed sides. Milne writes for what was once the principal voice of British liberalism. If you believe that Saddam Hussein's regime was a lawful authority of non-threatening character whose sovereignty was unjustly violated in actions akin to those of Imperial Japan then, at a minimum, you might want to reflect how easy this makes the argument for us.

Serious though the subject be, a Green Party candidate called Richard Lawson manages to inject levity into the discussion in a letter also in (where else?) today's Guardian. He writes:

"The Green party here and in Europe is pressing for the UN to publish a distillate of its reports into all countries' human rights records in an index, ranking governments' practices from best to worst.

"This will have several positive effects. Many governments will protest that they have been misjudged, and purge jails of political prisoners before UN inspectors arrive. All countries will seek to increase their standing, so it will exert a continuous motivation to improve governance. Importantly, it will become far harder to demonise a regime on whom our leaders intend to wage war if people can easily see there are many worse performers. Most importantly, the worst performers can be legally investigated and taken to the international criminal court. Once this has happened a couple of times, those near the bottom will start to ask for help in improving their governance."

He speaks the truth. This really is Green Party policy. The great Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr observed that pacifism "either tempts us to make no judgements at all, or to give an undue preference to tyranny" (Christianity and Power Politics, 1952, p. 28), and this is a nice example. The notion that a Kim Jong-Il or Saddam Hussein will be vulnerable to the force of moral disapprobation and legal investigation is one that, I fear, doesn't seem quite so out of place as it ought to and once would have been when published in The Guardian - a newspaper whose values I share and occasionally attempt to express in its pages.

McCain's merits

Matthew d'Ancona summarises the merits that our government perceives in John McCain:

In fact, the more closely ministers look at the Republican nominee, the more they are thinking: what's not to like? He is relaxed about the European Union (an area where he disagrees with Mr Cameron). His positions on gay marriage, stem cell research and immigration over the years have been comparatively liberal. On the war on terror, he is more hawkish than Brown. But he believes absolutely in the urgent need for the West to reclaim the moral high ground - no more Guantanamos, no more water-boarding - and the absolute importance of what Brown calls "the battle for hearts and minds". McCain's language on "ideological struggle" in the battle against Islamism is almost identical to the PM's.

With Senator Joe Lieberman - Al Gore's running mate in 2000 and now one of McCain's staunchest supporters, who will accompany him to London - he co-sponsored legislation in 2000 to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and voted against Bush's plan to allow oil drilling in the coastal plain of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. So great, indeed, is his cross-party appeal that in 2004 John Kerry even sounded him out as a potential vice-presidential running mate. A McCain cabinet really would be, to borrow Brown's phrase, a 'ministry of all the talents.'

Two points about McCain stand out. He's not a conservative and he's been right all along about Iraq. These are the reasons I favoured him from the outset for the Republican nomination. Indeed McCain has been more right than anyone on Iraq. He's stuck to that position despite his conviction, (expressed in Seattle just over a year ago) that, like Tony Blair, he might have sacrificed his political career for Iraq. In The Sunday Times today, Sarah Baxter reports a gracious remark of McCain that "I do miss Tony Blair".

It's worth spending time on a long interview McCain gave last April to CBS, when his campaign appeared finished. This exchange in particular gives me confidence that the Western alliance would be well led in the event of a McCain presidency:

[INTERVIEWER]: In all of the polls, the majority of the American people say it's time to begin withdrawing the troops. The House is on record saying it's time to begin withdrawing. The Senate now on the record. You say more troops are the answer. Why?

MCCAIN: Well, I think the surge is a new strategy. It's not just more troops. It's a new strategy. The second thing is, polls are interesting. If you ask the American people, "If we can show you a path to success, a way that you can have a government that's functioning and the military situation under control," of course they'll support it. They're frustrated, and understandably, by the lack of progress in Iraq. And that's because of the terrible mismanagement of this war that went on for nearly four years.

When I had a rather less elevated exchange last week with Tony Benn, he kept on about the anti-war views of the British people. But the British electorate, like the American electorate, is not opposed to war: it's opposed to defeat. McCain has been clear on the Bush administration's grotesque incompetence and mismanagement of the war, and its abrasive and gratuitous unilateralism. He's also been clear on the means and necessity of turning round our side's strategy in Iraq. An important task remains to him in turning now to his left and not to his right in selecting a running mate: Lieberman for Vice-President, not the Creationist and foreign policy naïf Huckabee. In any event, McCain's nomination is an asset for the transatlantic alliance, on which Europe's security depends.

Talks and al-Qaeda

Tony Blair's former aide Jonathan Powell has a new book out, which will be serialised next week in The Guardian. The newspaper gives a taster today of Powell's conclusions. Not all are counterintuitive, and especially not this one: "He said that Labour's first term in office had also been hampered by the poor calibre of many ministers, including the health secretary Frank Dobson, whom he described as 'a disaster', and the environment minister Michael Meacher." (I was a constituent of Dobbo's in Holborn & St Pancras. He was useless and idle at anything he set his mind to.) But The Guardian is right to lead on this, which is more surprising:

"Western governments must talk to terror groups including al-Qaida and the Taliban if they hope to secure a long-term halt to their campaigns of violence, according to the man who for more than a decade was Tony Blair's most influential aide and adviser. Jonathan Powell, who served as Blair's chief of staff from 1995 to 2007 and is widely regarded as having been instrumental in negotiating a settlement in Northern Ireland, said his experience in the province convinced him that it was essential to keep a line of communication open even with one's most bitter enemies.

"Powell said: 'There's nothing to say to al-Qaida and they've got nothing to say to us at the moment, but at some stage you're going to have to come to a political solution as well as a security solution. And that means you need the ability to talk.'"

He's not calling for talks with al-Qaeda (as the late Mo Mowlam absurdly did), and rightly perceives that the organisation stands for something other than negotiable political demands. But his view is still terribly mistaken. I went on Radio 4's PM programme this afternoon to argue the point with Gabrielle Rifkind, a psychotherapist and specialist in conflict resolution with the Oxford Research Group and the Conflicts Forum. Our debate is here (till Monday's PM replaces it); we're on about 15 minutes into the programme.

For me, the single most interesting part of the discussion was Ms Rifkind's final comment (she rightly had the last word, as I had had the first, so I wasn't able to remark on this in the programme). I had cited the successes of General Petraeus in inflicting huge damage on the morale and operational effectiveness of al-Qaeda in Iraq. The task that General Petraeus had set himself was to establish security as a prerequisite to political progress. (I had the privilege of meeting General Petraeus and listening to him expound his strategy immediately before he took up his post.) He and his forces have turned a war that our side was losing into one that is winnable, by securing Sunni support and isolating al-Qaeda. With greater opportunism than logic, Ms Rifkind apparently wishes to cite this experience as an argument in favour of her case.

I'm unfazed - but the gains in Iraq are not an instance of "conflict resolution". They are the outcome of effective counterinsurgency, planned and implemented by a remarkable military mind. It's crucial to Iraq and to western security that there be no resolution of our conflict with al-Qaeda. They declared war on us; their principles and not only their methods are barbarous; the conflict will end with their defeat. If the critics of Anglo-American strategy are now trying to claim our successes in the struggle as vindication, then that may be significant and is certainly pleasing.

Meeting of minds

A few months ago I took part in a debate on Trident. I support government policy on this. One of the speakers on the opposing side was the defence spokesman (and Westminster leader) of the Scottish National Party, Angus Robertson. The SNP wants an independent Scotland to withdraw from Nato. Last November the Scottish First Minister, Alex Salmond, wrote to representatives of all state signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, soliciting support for Scotland to be given observer status at future NPT negotiations. So we can assume that the foreign and security policy of an independent Scotland would be decided in consultation with the rulers of Iran, Burma and Zimbabwe. I said in the debate that the Entertainments Officer & Bar Manager of the Premillennial Dispensationalist Exclusive Brethren would have fewer problems of intellectual consistency than the defence spokesman of the Scottish National Party.

The Scotsman reports today:

IRAN sought to ally itself with Scotland last night, praising Alex Salmond's administration for its anti-war stance and suggesting Tehran has more in common with Holyrood than Westminster. Rasoul Movahedian, the ambassador of the Islamic Republic of Iran, told The Scotsman that Scotland and Iran shared "similar views" on many issues, such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and nuclear non-proliferation.

And he said there was "fertile ground" for a stronger relationship with the controversial government of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"I think that Iran and Scotland enjoy similar views on many regional and international topics and issues," he said. "The views and the position of this present government of Scotland pleased many people in Iran and enabled us to make a distinction between Scotland and England.

Benn and the peace movement

I went on Press TV's Forum programme this evening. It's pre-recorded and will be on the programme's website after it's been broadcast (sometime next week, I expect). The format is that of the BBC's Question Time; Andrew Gilligan is the moderator. The subject of this debate was the anti-war movement and what it had achieved. Tony Benn, two other anti-war campaigners and I were the guests.

My thesis on this is similar to my view of CND's opposition to Nato strategy in the 1980s. I think the movement is wrong, but there's an important place in principle for a peace movement in British politics. Before the Iraq War, it might have played a useful role in arguing whether there were pacific means of compelling Saddam Hussein to adhere to UNSC resolutions. But in practice the organised anti-war movement - and specifically the Stop the War Coalition, of which Benn is President - is not that type of questioning campaign, nor is it part of the political mainstream. Benn's plain speaking to the tyrant Saddam Hussein is well known ("I wonder whether you could say something yourself directly through this interview to the peace movement of the world that might help to advance the cause they have in mind?"). It's Tony Blair whom Benn regards as the war criminal, while the fatuously named Coalition (so broad a movement that it brings together secular and theocratic advocates of totalitarianism) is opposed not to war but to our side.

Recalling a television debate he did with Benn during the European referendum campaign in 1975, the late Roy Jenkins wrote in his memoirs (A Life at the Centre, 1991, p. 410): "His methods were to my mind illegitimate in that he never replied to any argument, but merely moved on to a still more extravagant statement when the previous one was challenged." I cited this remark during my own debate with Benn because here he was exemplifying the identical technique before my very eyes. One reviewer of the latest volume of his diaries - a trivial, vainglorious and astonishingly sentimental work - described Benn as the nearest thing British politics has to a national treasure: "Most of the hostility of 25 years ago is clearly pointless and gone." Not on my part, it isn't.

After the programme Andrew Gilligan genially suggested that I appeared to get a buzz from being the most hated person in the room. This is not strictly true, but there are audiences you try to win and audiences you try to rile. I'm moderately pleased to say that no one has ever expressed scepticism, or at least not to me, at my ability to do the second.

Debating the peace movement

I don't know when this will be broadcast, but I'm due to have a debate with Tony Benn tomorrow evening about the achievements of the peace movement. Our hosts are Press TV, the Iranian state-run English-language broadcaster. So far as I'm aware, nothing I say on these programmes is edited, so I'm glad to take part.

Incidentally, in his latest volume of Diaries (in his entry for 4 November 2005), Mr Benn remarks of the 9/11 truth campaigners (emphasis added): "Probably, in their heart of hearts, most people think the attack was genuine, but I don't rule anything out."

My readers will recall that Mr Benn is a former long-serving Cabinet minister, was twice a candidate for the Labour leadership, and was once almost a victorious candidate for Labour's deputy leadership.

The weakest Chancellor

John Rentoul comments on a "dull, intellectually soft Budget, in which the main interest lay in the secondary cast of characters". That's true. The oddity of this Budget is that one of those secondary characters was the man delivering the Budget speech.

Alastair Darling is not the worst Chancellor since the war - that would be Anthony Barber, who in the words of the late Edmund Dell held the post "in little more than name [and] bequeathed to his successor a total breakdown in economic management". But he is the weakest. No Chancellor that I can think of was more obviously lacking his own authority and dependent on the Prime Minister's.

In the sterling crisis of 1976, Denis Healey depended on the support of James Callaghan to secure Cabinet approval of the terms of the IMF standby loan. But he also plainly won the argument in Cabinet against the protectionist proposals of Tony Benn and (less absurdly) Tony Crosland. He was a strong Chancellor with a weak hand, and dealt it skilfully. Norman Lamont's pursuit of a doomed exchange rate target destroyed his own credibility and that of John Major's government. But Lamont was in this with the rest of the government. After the ERM debacle, he in fact followed a sensible and successful course. Lamont's political views are extreme and objectionable, but the monetary framework he put in place was one that Labour rightly built on and ought to have pursued before. (In the inter-war years, and especially the early 1930s, price stability as an alternative to the Gold Standard was a view with some influence in the Labour Party. This was, for example, the view of Ernest Bevin, who had served with Keynes on the Macmillan Committee on Currency and Finance.)

Darling is unlike anyone else. He's a weak Chancellor dominated by the PM and the PM's record. He holds office in a dysfunctional government that contains few people of real talent. (This has been a problem throughout Labour's term of office. Outside the highest offices of state, there have been not many ministerial successes and very many who were plainly not competent. I have nothing against the man, but recall Gavin Strang - if you can.) The future is not bright.

Mayoral choices

I don't often disagree with David Aaronovitch's political judgement, but on the London mayoral election I do. In his column today, David says: "Far from alienating the bankers and industrialists, Ken wooed them when necessary. Ken, wrong on all the things that don't matter in a London mayor, has been right on almost all the things that do."

Let's take first just a couple of things on which Livingstone is plainly wrong. His judgement on foreign affairs in general is ridiculous. His literal embrace of the reactionary Islamist cleric Yusef al-Qaradawi is repugnant. These things matter in a London mayor because he represents a huge, cosmopolitan capital city. Many of the contentious international and communal issues on which he intervenes are replicated in tensions within London. A civic leader, especially in London of all places, ought to exemplify the principle that there is a single category of citizenship that transcends national and religious divisions. Ken Livingstone does not do that.

My greater worry about David's argument is, however, that I also consider Livingstone to have got wrong some of the issues that are central to the mayor's responsibilities. Yes, Livingstone has wooed the bankers and industrialists. As a result, London's landscape is being deformed. I agree with Simon Jenkins as rarely as I disagree with David, but on this he is right:

"Livingstone's towers answer to his curious edifice complex. They are for the rich and he knows it. He just cannot kick the habit, familiar to lapsed leftwingers, of loving those with money. I suspect that even the rich, when they see what he has done to their city, will hate him for it."

Business and the City are sectional interests. It is not the role of the mayor to court them, and this mayor is too close to them. I do not believe he is a sensible choice for progressive voters, and I hope that Oona King can be prevailed upon to run against him.

More on rendition

I direct you to a sober and characteristically thoughtful critique of my position on rendition from Norman Geras. Norman argues:

"Oliver makes it clear that he is not defending the use of rendition for purposes of torture; that he envisages it as a preliminary to due process indeed. What he is defending, in other words, is a 'cleaned-up' version of the institutional practice that - there is evidence for concluding - has actually been countenanced by the Bush administration. But this is not a purely philosophical discussion; the weight of political emphasis is very important. If the real practice of extraordinary rendition has been to accommodate or encourage the use of torture, that emphasis ought to be on condemning what's wrong with it, rather than on defending it in a purified version."

I agree with Norman that this is not a purely philosophical debate, and so I'll respond with a practical example. When the terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal was brought to justice by France, the European Commission of Human Rights specifically rejected the defence claim that his rendition from Sudan was illegal. Norman might counter that French justice is a case apart from states where human rights violations and even torture occur. But that surely supports my argument: the proper objection is to abuses of rendition, and the role of European governments is to anticipate and prevent them.

Norman is a political philosopher of weight and erudition. So it's fortunate for me that my critics also include numerous contributors to the discussion threads at "Comment is Free". Here's one:

"I have just finished reading your article in the paper edition of the Guardian. Kamm, after reading the garbage, I am filled with hate and despise towards you. You are despicable. You are simply detestable. Your articles are deplorable. Your articles are garbage and rubbish, always..... You have a twisted mind which needs to be examined.

"But for your information, CIA was behind 911. That was such a complex operation to be planned from a cave in remote area of Afghanistan!! There are a lot more evidence of the former than the latter! I am beginning to believe OBL is a fictitious character created by the likes of you to carry out their War of Aggression against nations."

And another:

"Kamm will be charged with war crimes because his articles have encouraged the act of aggression against a sovereign nation, the ultimate war crime. But don't worry he'll have plenty of company with nick cohen and his charming wife mel phillips, con coughlin, david aaranovitch to name just a few that will be sharing a rather large cell."

Nick and Melanie, eh? I had no idea.

In my view, the most powerful argument against renditions is that, because they require a lower standard of evidence than a criminal court, then abuses - against the guilty, never mind the innocent - are much more likely to occur. The human costs as well as the diplomatic opprobrium that a policy of rendition risks are high. Given the importance and moral gravity of that objection, it is extraordinary - and not in my view a good thing - that we militants in the war on terror instead get quite so many 9/11 truth campaigners, Media Lens supporters and others of a Gallowayesque persuasion to contend with, at least so far as my normal debating forums are concerned.

UPDATE: I've made a correction to this post. Originally I said that "the European Court of Human Rights specifically rejected the defence claim that his rendition from Sudan was illegal". For Court, read Commission. (Till 1998, individual plaintiffs did not have direct access to Court, but applied indirectly through the Commission.) This doesn't affect my point about Carlos's rendition. The Commission ruled that there was no violation of the European Convention of Human Rights in the rendition, and rejected Carlos's application.

Ordinary rendition

This article appears in The Guardian.

Members of parliament and human rights groups are pressing the government on the issue of rendition (or what this newspaper yesterday tendentiously termed, without the quotation marks, "torture flights"). Rendition does not mean torture. It means moving someone from one country to another without reference to a formal extradition treaty.

The most prominent rendition to date was that of Ricardo Klement. He was abducted, put on trial and hanged, despite strong opposition in his adopted country to what one newspaper called such "censurable methods". I am opposed to capital punishment on principle, just as I am opposed to torture on principle. But I do not consider that any injustice was committed in the seizing and execution of the man known to history as Adolf Eichmann.

Eichmann's abduction would now be euphemised as "extraordinary rendition". Most renditions are not like that. They involve the detention of a suspect in one country and their transfer to another by the CIA. There are good reasons that the first country might wish to take this course. It might not have a legal system capable of disinterestedly dispensing justice, owing to the threat of intimidation. There might be domestic political reasons for the government to be reluctant to cooperate too closely with the United States.

These are facts of international diplomacy. In the meantime the US and its allies have the duty of protecting citizens from international terrorists. The principled objection to rendition is that it stands outside legal process, and the rule of law is the best means we have of constraining arbitrary authority by our own governments. But there is no supranational sovereign authority that can effectively implement the body of international law. After 9/11, peace campaigners urged a judicial approach to bring the perpetrators to justice. What they would have advised if Osama bin Laden had unaccountably declined to turn himself in was never put to the test. Had the CIA abducted Bin Laden from Afghanistan in the late 1990s (a course whose feasibility the agency investigated), some great crimes might have been averted.

The hypothetical kidnapping of Bin Laden illustrates two problems with the absolutist rejection of rendition. First, the Taliban regime in Kabul would no more have handed over Bin Laden in response to an international summons than it would have handed over Lord Lucan. Second, the evidence against a terrorist suspect might be circumstantial or partial. It might not be of a type admissible in court. I do not know if this is true of Bin Laden and the destruction of the twin towers. But I know he did it, and I want him stopped.

Rendition is justifiable because it interdicts terrorists, and terrorism is not merely a problem of law enforcement. The particular controversy over rendition concerns torture, and on this point European objections are on firmer ground. The US is a signatory to the Geneva conventions against torture, yet terrorist suspects have been sent to countries that are guilty of human rights violations and have used torture.

Torture is wrong and does not work. As Christopher Hitchens has put it, torture is practised by those "whose whole outlook is based on stupidity and coercion, and you can bet that even with a ticking bomb nearby they would be busily gang-raping the wrong guy".

There is an important role for Britain, whose commitment to the war on terror (a phrase I use without irony because it is accurate) is beyond dispute, to intercede with the US administration. There should be no rendition to autocracies whose word on the issue of torture is untrustworthy, such as Syria. Renditions should be used only in extreme cases, against those suspected of directly plotting terrorist acts. The country to which they are transferred must exercise due process under its own laws.

But Europeans have a responsibility too. We are the beneficiaries of American efforts to disrupt terrorism. Diplomacy on the issue of rendition should deal with anticipating and preventing abuses. It should not be an opportunity for hyperventilation on the identity of the hated Bush-Cheney regime and our declared theocratic enemies.