Oliver Kamm

Politics, home and abroad

Thomas Ferenczi, an editor at Le Monde, contributes a piece today on the French Socialist Party's stance on the European Union:

"La nouvelle déclaration de principes du Parti socialiste, qui sera la cinquième de son histoire, confirme et accentue l'engagement européen des socialistes français. Pour la première fois, le PS se présente explicitement comme "un parti européen". Pour la première fois, il souligne qu'il agit "dans l'Union européenne". Pour la première fois, il affirme que celle-ci a été non seulement "voulue", mais aussi en partie "conçue et fondée" par lui."

There is an interesting parallel here with shifts in opinion in the British Labour Party in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Labour became very much more pro-European as the party's failures in domestic politics persisted. I am a left-wing integrationist myself, but the variant of this position that you could hear among British social democrats in the 1980s was barely coherent. There was little sense of the disicplines in economic management that membership of the European Monetary System would have required. (The French Socialists had acquired painful experience of that dilemma in government between 1981 and 1983. A massive reflationary programme sucked in imports, which necessitated successive - in the then current euphemism - "realignments" of the franc within the EMS. President Mitterrand prudently reversed course and tightened monetary policy sooner than see further devaluations.) The French Socialists' increasing consensus on "l'entreprise communautaire" as the proper arena for policy is, as much as anything, a testament to the party's weakness in domestic politics. Recalling the party's feeble and bizarre campaign for the presidency last year, I'm neither surprised nor sympathetic.

Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post writes on the tergiversations of the Clintons' undignified and plainly unsuccessful campaign. Hillary's tack to the populist wing of the Democratic Party availed her naught:

"[G]oing left proved disastrous for Clinton. It abolished all significant policy differences between her and Obama, the National Journal's 2007 most liberal senator. On health care, for example, her attempts to turn a minor difference in the definition of universality into a major assault on Obama fell flat. With no important policy differences separating them, the contest became one of character and personality. Matched against this elegant, intellectually nimble, hugely talented newcomer, she had no chance of winning that contest."

On the same subject, Christopher Hitchens in The Mirror notes a peculiar and predictable liability to Hillary's campaign:

"It’s this amazing love of combat for its own sake that has won her so much grudging respect even from many Republicans. However, just take a look at the speech and notice the lugubrious, white-haired, red-faced, scowling and bored figure standing so listlessly just behind her. How can a campaign once renowned for slickness and spin have permitted such a horrid spectre at the feast? And this dreary, resentful and shambolic person was once himself described as the country’s first black president. If his wife loses we shall know why."

Meanwhile, at home, this is a prime minister lacking even the vestiges of authority and respect, with inevitable catastrophic consequences for Labour's support. I'm sorry to bang on about this, but the man was never suited to the highest office. It should not be surprising that he has brought the party to a position where he might reasonably envy the electoral standing of Michael Foot. Labour won't recover from this till Gordon Brown's titular leadership is over.

Hillary and Iran

I commented the other day on Hillary Clinton's answer to a question about a hypothetical Iranian nuclear attack on Israel. Senator Clinton had declared: "If I'm the president, we will attack Iran... we would be able to totally obliterate them."

In my view, Senator Clinton's comments were reasonable and unexceptionable. I trust her position on national security, and I should have been worried if she'd said anything else. But it appears that, in the UK press at least, there are commentators determined to present her comments as "Incendiary talk". I had a brief exchange today with one such objector, a guest contributor to The Independent's "Open House" blog, Anthony Painter. I don't know Painter's writings (a criticism of me, not of him, as he writes for Tribune, which I ought to follow more closely), but his criticism of Senator Clinton's position is familiar to the point of being hackneyed.

When asked on ABC News about what she would do if Iran were to launch a nuclear attack on Israel, Hillary Clinton was explicit, “…we would be able to totally obliterate them and those people who run Iran need to know that.”

Forget the fact that the latest CIA National Intelligence Estimate on Iran concludes that the Iranians have suspended their nuclear weapons programme.

I responded to Painter just in the comments thread of that blog, but because what I said appeared to be new to him, I'll repeat it here. If you're seriously going to cite the NIE conclusions, published last December, as evidence of the non-threatening character of Iran's nuclear programme, then there are two points you are duty-bound to add.

First, as was not widely noted at the time, the NIE's definition of what constituted Iran's nuclear programme was heavily circumscribed. In a footnote, the authors commented: 'For the purposes of this Estimate, by “nuclear weapons program” we mean Iran’s nuclear weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work; we do not mean Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment.'

To draw conclusions about Iran's nuclear programme but explicitly leave out of the discussion Iran's uranium enrichment activities is some caveat. To refer to the enrichment facility at Natanz as "civil work" is question-begging. There is no need for that facility at Natanz or for the heavy-water plant at Arak - before a single reactor has come into service - if Iran's nuclear programme is intended for purely civil purposes. Other countries that have reactors, such as Sweden, don't seek the capability to enrich uranium, but buy fuel more cheaply on the open market.

Secondly, it isn't just my view that this matters. It's the view of Admiral Michael McConnell, the director of the National Intelligence Council - the body that produced the NIE. On 5 February, only a couple of months after publication of the NIE's conclusions, McConnell testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee. The transcript is here; on page 32, you'll find this exchange between McConnell and Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana (my emphasis):

BAYH: Director, I don't agree with the aspersions that were cast upon the quality of the work of your people in the article that Senator Whitehouse referred to, but I do think there have been -- the work has been mischaracterized in the public domain, as you were pointing out. And it's had some unfortunate consequences. As a matter of fact, it may very well have made it more difficult to achieve the result that our nation was hoping for, which was to find a way to end the Iranian nuclear program without resorting to force. It's made diplomacy much more difficult because of the way this was received around the world, including by the Iranians, the Russians, the Chinese and others. You just mentioned that if you had to do it over again without the heat of the moment, some time to reflect, you would have changed a couple of things. What would you have changed?

MCCONNELL: I think I would change the way that we describe [the] nuclear program; I mean, put it up front, a little diagram, what are the component parts so that the reader could quickly grasp that a portion of it, I would argue, maybe even at [sic] least significant portion, was halted and there are other parts that continue.

That is a remarkably candid admission. What the NIE dealt with was, according to the man who presented it to the Senate Committee, a portion of the programme and "maybe" the least significant such portion at that. It's worth noting that our government saw this commendably quickly last December. In an article in the Financial Times on 10 December, David Miliband wrote:

There are three key elements to a nuclear weapon - the fissile material, the missile itself and the process of weaponising the fissile material for the missile. The US National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear programme published this week suggests that Iran has put work on the last of these elements on hold. If so, good. But Iran is still pursuing the other two elements, in particular an enrichment programme that has no apparent civilian application, but which could produce fissile material for a nuclear weapon, despite demands to stop from the United Nations Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The Foreign Secretary was right on this. Every time you see someone in the press invoking the NIE's conclusions on Iran's nuclear programme, you should bear in mind the two points I've stated. Iran's nuclear programme may just be the most important issue in international politics today. No discussion of it is properly informed without noting what the NIE and the director of National Intelligence have said in full.

Iran is an extremist regime but not a totalitarian one. It responds to pressure. Unlike the unstable leadership of North Korea, the mullahs have tried to give the impression (often deceitfully) of adhering to the NPT regime. It is essential they get the message that there will be severe diplomatic costs to continuing with a uranium enrichment programme unrelated to civil applications. The British government has this right. So does the French government. I have no doubt that Senators McCain and Clinton get it too. I wish others did.

Misremembering Kosovo

Lord Skidelsky is a scholar of accomplishment but also of erratic political judgement. Among many other works, he has written an outstanding biography of Keynes and a distressingly perverse one of the fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley. (Anne de Courcey's 2003 biography of the despicable Diana Mosley astutely notes, p. 331, that Skidelsky's biography of Sir Oswald "was not exactly rehabilitation - but it certainly added a patina of respectability".)

As a Tory front-bencher in the House of Lords, Skidelsky opposed the intervention in Kosovo in 1999. His party leader, William Hague, rightly deprived Skidelsky of his responsibilities as a result. (Skidelsky has since left the Conservative Party, having previously been a member of both Labour and the SDP.) Skidelsky recalls this episode in a piece on "Comment is Free". I want to pick out one assertion only from that article, because it risks becoming a standard part of the mythology of anti-interventionism. Skidelsky states:

Between March and June 1999 - the period of Nato bombing - the number of deaths and expulsions in Kosovo shot up. The "humanitarian disaster" was in fact precipitated by the war itself. Despite this, the term "genocide", freely bandied about by western interventionists, was grotesquely inappropriate at any time.

The humanitarian disaster was certainly not precipitated by the war itself. It is true that Slobodan Milosevic used the intervention as a pretext to intensify his genocidal policies. But the humanitarian catastrophe was not even incipient: it was already there. I quote from the 1999 World Report of Human Rights Watch (emphasis added):

The government offensive [in September 1998] was an apparent attempt to crush civilian support for the rebels. Government forces attacked civilians, systematically destroyed towns, and forced thousands of people to flee their homes. One attack in August near Senik killed seventeen civilians who were hiding in the woods. The police were seen looting homes, destroying already abandoned villages, burning crops, and killing farm animals.

The majority of those killed and injured were civilians. At least 300,000 people were displaced, many of them women and children now living without shelter in the mountains and woods. In October, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) identified an estimated 35,000 of the displaced as particularly at risk of exposure to the elements. Most were too afraid to return to their homes due to the continued police presence.

Every time you hear someone claim that Nato intervention caused the expulsions of Kosovar Albanians, recall that 300,000 people were, in the euphemism, "displaced" in 1998 after Yugoslav forces attacked civilians. Nato's intervention did reverse a humanitarian disaster precipitated by the brutal and xenophobic campaign of Milosevic. Our side's mistake was not in intervening but - even after his aggression in Bosnia - in underestimating the brutality that Milosevic was capable of. Skidelsky denies that Kosovo was the site of genocide, but he omits to mention the factor that prevented it. Nato prevented it, under what was in effect the leadership not of the United States but of Great Britain. I'm proud of it.

Nato has betrayed its great record

This article appears in The Times.

Ernest Bevin described the treaty that established Nato, as “an endeavour to express on paper the underlying determination to preserve our way of life”. The former Foreign Secretary was right. The alliance has proved to be the most successful liberation movement in history.

That record was besmirched yesterday. Nato members, meeting in Bucharest, barred Georgia and Ukraine from the first stages of joining the alliance. It is a huge diplomatic success for President Putin. Ukraine and Georgia received support from the US, Canada and the nations of eastern and central Europe. There is no indication that Bevin's successors have any notion of the defeat inflicted on the cause of liberal democracy.

Defenders of Mr Putin's obduracy point to “legitimate grievances” that Nato's enlargement aggravates. Yet for two decades Nato has emphasised pacific intent, while Russia has become only more aggressive and threatening. On first meeting Mr Putin, President Bush gushed: “I looked the man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul.” Yet since 9/11, no amount of brutality and authoritarianism on Putin's part has dissuaded Western governments from treating him as a valued ally in the struggle against Islamist terrorism.

There is no reason we should accede to Russia's demands and much justification for ostentatiously flouting them. Mr Putin has few talents on the international stage save bluster and obstructionism. Consider his crude meddling in the Ukrainian presidential election; his economic blockade of Georgia, and his posturing over its would-be breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia; his malign encouragement of Iran's nuclear deception; his unilateral overtures to Hamas, nicely designed to sabotage Western efforts at Middle East diplomacy. The hostility is calculated, not reactive.

But the reasons for deploring Nato's decision are not only negative. The coloured revolutions in Georgia in 2003 (Rose) and Ukraine in 2004 (Orange) marked the failure of the Kremlin's dealings with the former Soviet republics. Mr Putin was on the side of the corrupt administrations that popular pressure defeated.

The integration of these states into Nato is not only about security. It symbolises, and consolidates, democratic advance. Mr Putin is a ballot-rigging autocrat whose natural allies are those, such as the Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, for whom the abuse of human rights is an end in itself. Any diplomatic posture adopted by Nato governments will be taken as provocative by Mr Putin. We might as well therefore do the right thing, not least by those who have to live alongside him.

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.

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.

Will Hugo be victor?

This post appears on "Comment is Free".

Amid the threats and military deployments in the Andes of the last few days, one fact may surprise the preconceptions of Cif readers. The United States has been scrupulously trying to lower the temperature and urging a diplomatic resolution. Of the notion of military aid to Colombia, the White House declared on Wednesday: "We do believe that Colombia and Ecuador should be able to work this out between themselves. We don't see any need for a country that wasn't involved to be a part of it."

The country that is volubly and bombastically intervening in the dispute is Venezuela. That intervention is a of a piece with President Hugo Chávez's erratic purchase on reality and generally destructive approach to regional affairs. Chávez - not Ecuador's President Rafael Correa - was the first to condemn Colombia's anti-terrorist incursion a mile inside Ecuadorean territory at the weekend and has deployed 10 army battalions close to the border. His position is far out of line with the diplomatic efforts of the Organization of American States. The OAS has correctly noted that Colombia violated Ecuadorian sovereignty but has stopped short of condemnation of the assault. Chávez by contrast rages against a "war crime".

The OAS position is the sensible one. Colombia's counterinsurgency strategy has been severely compromised by scandals linking state officials to paramilitary groupings. But last weekend's attack by Colombian security forces directly targeted Farc. Richard Gott apparently has difficulties with the notion that Farc is a terrorist organisation, and maintains that the group has "witnessed many changes over the past 40 years". One disturbing constant, however, is Farc's willingness to engage in what Human Rights Watch noted in 2001: the abduction and murder of civilians, attacks on medical facilities, the use of child soldiers, cruel and inhuman treatment of captured combatants, the use of prohibited weapons that cause indiscriminate damage, and other breaches of international humanitarian law.

It is impossible at this stage to judge how much truth there is in Colombia's allegations of links between Farc and Chávez. But it is clear that Chávez is an inflammatory influence in the region. His domestic policies have shown a disturbing indifference to the notion of constitutional opposition, and the distinction between politics and the military. His hemispheric policies are consistent with this authoritarian approach, and include grossly improper declaratory interventions in the domestic politics of Nicaragua, Bolivia and Peru. It would be bizarre that some elements of supposedly progressive opinion find much to admire in his record, but for the fact that blustering strongmen have frequently held such appeal to the impressionable.

In truth, as one commentator in the Times Literary Supplement, David Gallagher, observed last week: "Chávez gets away with selling himself as a man of the left. Yet his authoritarian populism is closer to fascism." There is a background to this radical discontinuity in image and reality in the hemisphere's politics. Its most cogent interpreter is the former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castañeda. He argues that Latin America is best governed from the left of centre owing to the extreme inequalities that bedevil the region. But there is a left that has learned from past mistakes, and one that epitomises a different set of mistakes. As Castañeda puts it:

"One [left] is modern, open-minded, reformist, and internationalist, and it springs, paradoxically, from the hard-core left of the past. The other, born of the great tradition of Latin American populism, is nationalist, strident, and close-minded. The first is well aware of its past mistakes (as well as those of its erstwhile role models in Cuba and the Soviet Union) and has changed accordingly. The second, unfortunately, has not."

Much of Latin America has in the past generation made a transition from brutal military dictatorship to stable, well-governed democracy. Parties of the left have been and remain important actors in that highly desirable political change. President Chávez is not part of that movement, but instead recalls a more atavistic political tradition. His reckless threats and accusations of the past few days make a certain perverse sense in that context, and should be recognised for the damaging forces they are.

Russia and its "election"

Western foreign policy since the end of the Cold War has been characterised by numerous inconsistencies and some outright disasters. Contrary to the common view that the greatest of these disasters was the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein, I believe Western policy has been more at fault in the last 19 years in failing to confront the worst of rulers than in intervening militarily against them. To this day, I consider the best assessment both of the failures of policy in the 1990s and of the challenges of the next decade is Tony Blair's speech setting out his "Doctrine of the International community" in Chicago in April 1999. In that speech, Blair remarked percipiently: "Many of our problems have been caused by two dangerous and ruthless men - Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic."

(I attended a speech given by Blair two years ago on the principles of his government's foreign policy. In questions afterwards, he was roundly criticised by the former Foreign Secretary Lord Hurd - one of the principal authors of what is genuinely the greatest failure in British foreign policy of the last two decades, namely our failure to rebuff the genocidal aggression of Milosevic in Bosnia. Yet Hurd at the same time impertinently praised Blair's Chicago speech - as well he might have done.)

The greatest single failure in our foreign policy this decade has, in my view, been simultaneously to advocate a grand strategy of democratic transformation and treat Russia as a reliable ally. I support the first policy; it is undermined by the second. In foreign affairs, Vladimir Putin has a consistent record of obstructionism and brutality: meddling in Ukraine's elections; sabotaging the prospects for a negotiated Israel-Palestinian settlement by making unilateral overtures to Hamas; encouraging Iran in its serial nuclear deceptions; and - why be polite about this? - murdering his political opponents by unspeakable means, and in our capital.

I refer you, against this background, to Anne Applebaum's column in the Washington Post about the rigged election of Dmitry Medvedev as Russian President:

"Though the denizens of the Kremlin do not, cannot, seriously fear Western military attack, they do still seem to fear Western-inspired popular discontent: public questioning of their personal wealth, public opposition to their power, political demonstrations of the sort that created the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. To stave off these things, they maintain the democratic rituals that give them a semblance of legitimacy.

"The need for legitimacy also helps explain the string of vitriolic, aggressive attacks on Western democracies that presaged yesterday's election. In the past couple of years, Putin has openly compared America to Nazi Germany, set up an institution designed to monitor America's supposedly dubious democracy and frequently accused both Americans and Western Europeans, especially the British, of hypocrisy and human rights violations. This rhetoric serves several purposes, but above all it is designed to inoculate the Russian public against the example of more open societies. The message is simple: Russia is not merely a democracy, it is a better democracy than Western democracies."

It's long past time that we accepted the inevitability of a new Cold War, which we did not seek, have not called and do not welcome. Western-inspired popular discontent is what we should be looking to achieve.

"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.

Debating Castro's legacy

The lead item on Newsnight last night was Castro's departure. I was one of the studio guests debating the issue. The others were a Cuban-American activist, Frank Calzone; a pro-Castro Cuban journalist, Pedro Perez-Sarduy; and, inevitably, George Galloway. You can watch the programme on the Newsnight website till tomorrow's edition replaces it, though I'm not sure I'd recommend it. At one point Galloway advanced an unusually labyrinthine "Bush-Hitler" analogy, and I regret that my sniggering off-camera was clearly caught by the microphone. In the circumstances, I asked Mr Galloway not to make me laugh as he was the one with a record as long as my arm of justifying autocracy across the globe.