Oliver Kamm

Hamas and the Jews

"Comment is Free" publishes an article by Bassem Naeem, of the Hamas administration in Gaza, entitled "Hamas condemns the Holocaust". I think not. Hamas believes the Holocaust is a hoax concocted by international Jewry.

This is a longstanding theme of Hamas's world view, and Naeem is being disingenuous in failing to acknowledge it. The organisation's leader Abdel Aziz Rantissi, whom Israeli forces assassinated in 2004, was not reticent on this point. A few months earlier, he had written in a Hamas publication:

Many thinkers and historians have exposed the lies of the Zionists, thus becoming a target of Zionist persecution. Some have been assassinated, some arrested, and some are prevented from making a living. For example, Jewish associations and organizations have filed lawsuits against famous French philosopher Roger Garaudy, who in 1995 published his book 'The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics' in which he disproves the myth of the 'gas chambers,' saying, 'This idea is not technically possible. So far, no one has clarified how these false gas chambers worked, and what proof there is of their existence. Anyone with proof of their existence must show it.'

A pacific and equitable resolution of the Israeli-Palestine conflict is not going to be advanced by overlooking or obscuring the character of one of the protagonists. Hamas is an antisemitic, theocratic organisation wedded to the annihilation of the Jewish state. It pursues its ends by attacking Israeli civilians. These are just the facts of the matter, unfortunately.

Deterring Iran

The BBC reports Hillary Clinton's answer to a question about a hypothetical nuclear attack by Iran on Israel:

As the candidates appeared on the US talk show circuit on Tuesday morning, a row erupted when Mrs Clinton was asked how she would respond if Iran launched a nuclear attack on Israel.

She replied that: "If I'm the president, we will attack Iran... we would be able to totally obliterate them.

"That's a terrible thing to say, but those people who run Iran need to understand that, because that perhaps will deter them from doing something that would be reckless, foolish and tragic," she told TV channel ABC.

In response, Mr Obama said: "Using words like 'obliterate' - it doesn't actually produce good results, and so I'm not interested in sabre-rattling." He said only that Iran should know he would respond "forcefully" to an attack on any US ally.

It does of course sound a terrible thing to say. But Senator Clinton is right and Obama wrong. For nuclear deterrence to hold, it is essential that Iran - a regime that is autocratic but aware of costs - understand the consequences of nuclear brinkmanship. To say Iran would meet a "forceful" response in the event of a nuclear strike is a feeble comment that would not effectively deter. The only response to a nuclear strike that could prevent military victory by an aggressor is a countervailing nuclear strike. Leaving open the possibility, even implicitly, of a purely conventional or even a diplomatic response is to soften deterrence.

We have been here before. The closest the world has yet come to a nuclear exchange was the Cuba missile crisis in 1962. Several factors combined to resolve that standoff. We now know that the Kennedy administration reached a covert understanding whereby the US would withdraw Jupiter and Thor missiles from Turkey. But it was also crucial, early in the crisis, that Kennedy made clear the consequences of a nuclear strike from Cuban soil on any US ally. "It shall be," declared JFK, "the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union."

Khrushchev was an impetuous leader but not a suicidal one. He understood in his gut the potential cost of persisting with missile deployment. (He was also scared witless by the urging of Castro to launch a nuclear first strike on the American mainland in the event of an invasion of Cuba.) Whatever else you might say about the candidature of Senator Clinton, it is to her credit that she understands that precedent. Iran must know exactly what would happen in the event of a nuclear strike on Israel or any other American ally. This would apply both to an attack by Iran directly and to an attack by a proxy terrorist group armed with a rudimentary "dirty bomb".

Hezbollah threatens

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

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

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

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

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

Israel's strike in Syria

There is an important article in The Spectator by James Forsyth and Douglas Davis about Israel's bombing raid on a Syrian target on 6 September. The authors of the article believe we narrowly escaped World War III. They reconstruct events this way:

According to American sources, Israeli intelligence tracked a North Korean vessel carrying a cargo of nuclear material labelled ‘cement’ as it travelled halfway across the world. On 3 September the ship docked at the Syrian port of Tartous and the Israelis continued following the cargo as it was transported to the small town of Dayr as Zawr, near the Turkish border in north-eastern Syria.

The destination was not a complete surprise. It had already been the subject of intense surveillance by an Israeli Ofek spy satellite, and within hours a band of elite Israeli commandos had secretly crossed into Syria and headed for the town. Soil samples and other material they collected there were returned to Israel. Sure enough, they indicated that the cargo was nuclear.

Three days after the North Korean consignment arrived, the final phase of Operation Orchard was launched. With prior approval from Washington, Israeli F151 jets were scrambled and, minutes later, the installation and its newly arrived contents were destroyed.

I wrote about this raid a fortnight ago and made three immediate observations. Most important, we can be thankful that Israel appears to have successfully interdicted an operation that makes a mockery of international efforts to counter nuclear proliferation. Here's another point.

It's an open secret that Israel's political and diplomatic leadership did not favour the Iraq War. As Israel is a US ally, this was never said in public but it was a widely held position. It is certainly advanced in private by the most senior figures in Israeli politics. The view was that in tackling Saddam Hussein the US-led coalition was going after the wrong regional tyrant. Iran represented the genuine threat. The mistaken focus on Saddam and the failure thus far to establish a stable democratic Iraqi state have rendered more difficult an eventual reckoning with Iran's emerging military power.

I disagree with this view, which is to say I believe the US and its allies were right to overthrow Saddam by force, and ought to have done it much sooner. One of the most important reasons is reinforced by Israel's action in Syria.

The issue of WMD in Iraq became an immense political liability for Tony Blair and President Bush. To a certain extent they brought it on themselves through advancing the case for military intervention by symbol more than exegesis. The genuine grounds for concern were set out pellucidly by Rolf Ekeus, the first chairman of UNSCOM, in the Washington Post in June 2003:

Detractors of Bush and Blair have tried to make political capital of the presumed discrepancy between the top-level assurances about Iraq's possession of chemical weapons (and other WMD) and the inability of invading forces to find such stocks. The criticism is a distortion and trivialization of a major threat to international peace and security.

During its war against Iran, Iraq found that chemical warfare agents, especially nerve agents such as sarin, soman, tabun and later VX, deteriorated after just a couple of weeks' storage in drums or in filled chemical warfare munitions. The reason was that the Iraqi chemists, lacking access to high-quality laboratory and production equipment, were unable to make the agents pure enough. (UNSCOM found in 1991 that the large quantities of nerve agents discovered in storage in Iraq had lost most of their lethal property and were not suitable for warfare.)

Thus the Iraqi policy after the Gulf War was to halt all production of warfare agents and to focus on design and engineering, with the purpose of activating production and shipping of warfare agents and munitions directly to the battlefield in the event of war. Many hundreds of chemical engineers and production and process engineers worked to develop nerve agents, especially VX, with the primary task being to stabilize the warfare agents in order to optimize a lasting lethal property. Such work could be blended into ordinary civilian production facilities and activities, e.g., for agricultural purposes, where batches of nerve agents could be produced during short interruptions of the production of ordinary chemicals.

This combination of researchers, engineers, know-how, precursors, batch production techniques and testing is what constituted Iraq's chemical threat -- its chemical weapon. The rather bizarre political focus on the search for rusting drums and pieces of munitions containing low-quality chemicals has tended to distort the important question of WMD in Iraq and exposed the American and British administrations to unjustified criticism.

In short, the political controversy over the Coalition's failure to find WMD stockpiles in Iraq was hopelessly misconceived. The potential proliferation of WMD (an unhelpfully broad term that is nonetheless in common use) in the Middle East is deeply disturbing. The circumstantial evidence is strong that North Korea has illicitly and covertly been exporting nuclear technology to Syria. Baathist Iraq was not - as US policy once foolishly assumed - a stabilising factor to set against Iran and its clients (whether state actors, such as Syria, or terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah). It was an additional source of the threats that Tony Blair identified better than he articulated: bellicose and lawless tyrannies, allied to terrorist groups, and a transmission of WMD technologies from one to the other.

The Middle East is in a volatile state where autocracies, especially that of Iran and the forces it controls, are undermining constitutional government in Lebanon and Iraq, and threatening Israel with extinction. One factor at least we can count on is that Iraq is now out of that business. That is an important gain.

Raid on Syria

The most important story of this week and of most others is one on which there is a paucity of public information. We know that Israel made a bombing raid on Syria on 6 September. Everything else is conjecture or the product of unattributable briefing, but The Sunday Times gives a lucid account:

ISRAELI commandos from the elite Sayeret Matkal unit – almost certainly dressed in Syrian uniforms – made their way stealthily towards a secret military compound near Dayr az-Zawr in northern Syria. They were looking for proof that Syria and North Korea were collaborating on a nuclear programme.

Israel had been surveying the site for months, according to Washington and Israeli sources. President George W Bush was told during the summer that Israeli intelligence suggested North Korean personnel and nuclear-related material were at the Syrian site.

Israel was determined not to take any chances with its neighbour. Following the example set by its raid on an Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak 1981, it drew up plans to bomb the Syrian compound.

But Washington was not satisfied. It demanded clear evidence of nuclear-related activities before giving the operation its blessing. The task of the commandos was to provide it.

Today the site near Dayr az-Zawr lies in ruins after it was pounded by Israeli F15Is on September 6. Before the Israelis issued the order to strike, the commandos had secretly seized samples of nuclear material and taken them back into Israel for examination by scientists, the sources say. A laboratory confirmed that the unspecified material was North Korean in origin. America approved an attack.

This is an extraordinary development. And what is most extraordinary about it is what has not happened. Israel, even more than the United States, is a polity where it's very hard to keep things secret. Yet this one hasn't been leaked. (The Opposition leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, revealed publicly and to the consternation of his political opponents that he had given his support to the operation ordered by the PM, Ehud Olmert, but did not give details.) Syria, having sustained a raid on its territory, has been distinctly unforthcoming. On the other hand, the leadership of North Korea - which, to state the blindingly obvious but nonetheless pertinent, is not a country in the Middle East - has been meeting a Syrian delegation in Pyongyang in the last 24 hours.

Being neither politician nor diplomat but a mere pundit, and undeterred by the absence of corroborative evidence, I will say what I think is going on.

After 9/11, the links between rogue states and nuclear technology became a prime security concern. We know that North Korea and Iran have co-operated in missile technology, and it's possible that they've done so in nuclear technology too. We know that Libya and Iran received weapons designs and technology from Pakistan, unofficially, through the A.Q. Khan network. The circumstantial evidence is now strong that two very different autocracies, Syria and North Korea, are co-operating on nuclear technology, in defiance of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The secrecy surrounding the 6 September raid suggests that the target was important. Syria's non-response would confirm this. Syrian air defences proved gratifyingly useless and the covert activity identified by Israel is of the utmost diplomatic gravity. Meanwhile, Iran's mullahs - who in effect pull the strings that operate the intellectually nugatory figure of Syria's dictator, Bashar al-Assad - are doing their best, and with notable success, through deception and brinkmanship to escape the constraints nominally required of them by the EU-3. We know too that they are steering large amounts of weaponry, via Syria, to their client Hezbollah.

This is an ominous conjuncture. I shall have much more to say about it, but three observations are pertinent now.

First, when Tony Blair addressed the House of Commons a few days after 9/11, he saw more clearly than most the security challenges that now face us; I fear he is as prescient a statesman as I have long taken him for:

We know, that they [the terrorists] would, if they could, go further and use chemical, biological, or even nuclear weapons of mass destruction. We know, also, that there are groups of people, occasionally states, who will trade the technology and capability of such weapons. It is time that this trade was exposed, disrupted, and stamped out. We have been warned by the events of 11 September, and we should act on the warning.

Secondly, recall the awful precedent of the UN's dealings with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. One point on which those who supported military intervention against Saddam in 2003 and those who opposed it ought to be able to agree is that the Security Council must, this time, demand compliance. As one authority on WMD, Professor Graham Pearson of the Department of Peace Studies at Bradford University, has written with reference to this appalling history (The Search for Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, 2005, p. 242):

It is indeed a sorry state of affairs when the Permanent Members of the Security Council lose their resolve to address the dangers posed by a state which seeks to maintain a weapons of mass destruction capability and the Secretary-General effectively puts the UN organizations, UNSCOM and the IAEA, in the dock rather than the uncooperative and non-compliant state in Iraq. This led to the problems with Iraq being protracted and, it can be argued, to the eventual war in 2003 as had the Security Council being [sic] resolute and firm throughout and prepared to take military action in the last resort, it is possible that Iraq would have cooperated with the United Nations as it was intended to do throughout.

Thirdly, we may all in future have much cause for gratitude to the Israeli commandos who accomplished this mission, and whom I congratulate.

Dealing with Hamas

Several readers have referred me to a remarkable recent article in the London Review of Books by Alastair Crooke, a former British intelligence officer who also spent several years in the Middle East as security adviser to the EU High Representative Javier Solana. Crooke's argument, in essence, is that the West should deal with Hamas and Hizbollah lest more extreme groups take their place:

This prospect may not disturb the slumbers of the Europeans, who will dismiss it as alarmist, even if their record of reading events in the area has been less than inspired. But these are the scenarios that are being taken seriously by thoughtful Islamists in the region. We should hope – that may be all we can now do – that moderate Islamist movements manage to navigate these turbulent times, in spite of European attempts to prevent Islamism, which is clearly now the dominant regional current, from reshaping Middle Eastern societies. These attempts are opening space, not for the moderate pro-Western secularists whom Europeans seek to empower, but for those who believe that to build a new society you must first burn down the old one.

The idiosyncrasy of Crooke's terminology - those "moderate Islamist movements" - is noted succinctly by Norman Geras. I have but one point to make about the substantive argument.

You can construct a case for talking to Hamas. It has been made in the past week by the senior Conservative Michael Ancram. The notion that you deal with terrorist groups by police action and political dialogue is also widespread in scholarly discussions of security policy. (See, for example, Diego Gambetta, "Can we make sense of suicide missions?", in Diego Gambetta (ed.), Making Sense of Suicide Missions, 2005 p. 299: "The future of SMs [suicide missions, i.e. bombings] will largely depend on whether, rather than a crude policy of war and intensifying the clangour of the clash of civilizations, opportunities for astute policing and genuine political processes will be taken up in earnest.")

That view should, however, properly be called a faith-based initiative, because it has scant evidence in its favour. I grant that it's plausible politics to seek to sublimate political violence in dialogue, but the more fruitful way to do that is to impress upon the practitioners of violence that they'll be defeated. They must therefore give up or face the consequences.

This is what nearly happened to Hamas in the late 1990s after Israel detained many terrorist suspects and the Palestinian Authority belatedly starting cracking down on the organisation. Between 1997 and 1999 there were only two suicide bombings by Hamas (both in Jerusalem), and the reason for the lull in activity appears to have been logistical: the leadership was in prison or in exile. That experience confounded two sets of mutually exclusive premises. First, those who maintained that it was not within Yassir Arafat's power to stop terrorism were shown to be wrong: he was able to deliver on his obligations under the Oslo accords, all right; he just chose not to for most of the time. Secondly, those who believed Oslo was a snare and a delusion for Israel were also refuted. There was a period when Oslo was clearly delivering. The Israeli Defence Force had withdrawn from all the major Palestinian areas in the territories; a clean Palestinian election took place in January 1996; and pressure was then applied by Israel and the PA on Hamas, with some effect. This was how Oslo was supposed to work. It might have succeeded, too. The block, as was always likely but was not inevitable, was the duplicitous and corrupt character of Yassir Arafat, who alone bears responsibility for the fact that there is not today a sovereign and independent state of Palestine.

It's possible to go through this history minutely, and Crooke doesn't go through it at all. What he does instead is invoke a spurious historical analogy without examining it:

When all parties begin to see conflict as inevitable, then the ‘inevitable’ becomes self-fulfilling. Americans are fond of comparing the situation in the region to the 1930s and the rise of totalitarianism; but perhaps Europe in 1914 is a better metaphor: the situation is such that some small, unexpected autonomous event might trigger a sequence of events that even the great powers of the region could find it beyond their ability to control.

I doubt Crooke is familiar with German scholarship on the origins of WWI. The Hamburg historian Fritz Fischer demonstrated from archival research in the 1960s that German war planning had been developed at a War Council called by Kaiser Wilhelm in December 1912. It wasn't an accident: it was an intention. And while Wilhelmine Germany was not Nazi Germany (it didn't commit genocide in Europe, though Africa was a different matter), it was a deeply militaristic and autocratic society whose right-wing leadership sought the status of a World Power, Weltmacht. Crooke's analogy is far closer to the model of the rise of totalitarianism than he thinks it is. And if a writer is invoking a historical precedent for a policy prescription, it's not a pedantic objection to say he hasn't thought it through.

One last point about Crooke is worth noting, and I ought to have said it on this site before. Last January, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, notoriously held a day-long "conference" on the theme "A World Civilisation or a Clash of Civilisations". I was a panel speaker at two of the sessions at this jamboree, and gave an account here of what I said. I commented that one of those sessions, which was nominally supposed to be on the subject (an absurdly grandiloquent title, but I tried to be faithful to it) of "Democratic solutions for the Middle East", turned out to be not a discussion of the Middle East but only of one country within it. I didn't comment, however, that Alastair Crooke was another member of that panel.

I welcome the opportunity to have a public debate with Crooke, or with another panel speaker whom I did mention by name, Karma Nabulsi, a former PLO representative and now an Oxford academic. Both are weighty and experienced commentators. But bear in mind their premises - respectively, dialogue with Hamas and an absolute Palestinian "right of return" that would ensure Israel ceased to be a Jewish state. Consider also that the fourth and last member of the same panel was a lady called Susan Nathan, who moved from the UK to Israel a few years ago and became an evangelist for, as she puts it here, "unavoidably the end of the Jewish state". (Ms Nathan was, however, not a weighty and experienced commentator, but a dim monomaniac who in a debate lasting nearly two hours managed to mention not a single country other than Israel. I did point this out - her singlemindedness, I mean, not her dimness - in my concluding remarks, and was glad to learn afterwards that the chairman of our session had commiserated with Ms Nathan on my discourtesy.) In short, the panel, like the whole event, was a farce. As another speaker at the occasion, Martin Bright of the New Statesman, pointed out afterwards to Livingstone's spin doctor: "The conference was a disgrace. It was a set-up for panellists who didn't parrot the Ken line on radical Islam."

I've noticed both Crooke and Ms Nathan being given a notably easy ride by media outlets (including the BBC - here and here) for what are, to say the least, heterodox opinions. (I'm not aware that the same is true of Karma Nabulsi.) In my experience, they merit rougher handling than that, and certainly ought not to be presented at council taxpayers' expense as voices of sagacity and moderation.

Hamas and Israel

Con Coughlin writes in the Telegraph:

Welcome to the new Islamic Republic of Hamas-stan, where every Palestinian woman is obliged to wear the veil and all traces of corrupting Western influences, from pop music to internet cafés, are strictly banned.

The creation of a mini Islamic state in Gaza now appears the most likely outcome as the militant Palestinian group Hamas strikes against the more secular-minded government of President Mahmoud Abbas.... The Gaza Strip, the 20-mile stretch of desert scrub wedged between Israel and the Sinai Desert, has never been a happy place. The majority of the 1.4 million Palestinians who live there are mainly refugees from Israel's 1948 war of independence and have rarely seen their living standards rise above subsistence level. But the addition of religious fanaticism to economic privation has severely worsened their plight.

That last sentence is the immediate and most important point about Hamas's drive for power. A mini-state founded on theocratic fanaticism will be a catastrophe for those who have to live under it - for their liberties, their livelihoods and their physical safety from the faithful. (A minor point of terminology: Coughlin refers to Hamas and Hizbollah as "two Iranian-backed, Islamic fundamentalist organisations dedicated to [Israel's] destruction camped on its northern and southern borders". Technically, fundamentalism is a current within Protestantism and not any other faith. Hamas, being a genuinely totalitarian and terrorist organisation, is a lot more dangerous than the demagogic conspiracy theorist Pat Robertson or the late and unlamented Jerry Falwell.) It was, moreover, predictable - it was indeed predicted, by western analysts familiar with the region rather than newspaper editorialists prone to wishful thinking - that the experience of political office was most unlikely to moderate Hamas in its demands or its methods.

What this means in the short term, and probably for much longer, is that Israel's strategy since the failure of the Oslo accord is the only feasible one. I tried to summarise this strategy in a piece I wrote in 2005 setting out the rationale for the Sharon government's disengagement from Gaza:

Mr Sharon, meanwhile, has taken the Right an important stage on from merely accepting the need for negotiations with the Palestinians, and has acknowledged that what he explicitly terms the “occupation of the West Bank” is untenable for Israel and for the Palestinians. His security measures have reinforced a consensus among Israelis for a strategy of defensive deterrence, withdrawal from settlements in Gaza, and direct negotiations for a Palestinian state. The prerequisites for a final settlement include Israelis’ confidence in the ability of the Palestinian leadership to crack down on terrorism and to make their administration of Gaza a success. Israel will feel secure enough to withdraw to the pre-1967 boundaries only when it no longer believes they are continuously threatened. On any realistic assessment, this will take time.

It should be obvious that Israel is nowhere near a position where it may have confidence in the pacific intentions of its adversaries, given the conditions that Coughlin refers to. The idea of a two-state arrangement between a secure Israel and a sovereign Palestine is the only equitable arrangement for the longer term, but it is a misnomer to talk of a two-state solution. A negotiated territorial settlement between a secure Israel and a sovereign Palestine is not a solution to the conflict but an outcome of the end of the conflict. Whatever your judgement of the historic rights and wrongs of the conflict, it is very difficult to see what diplomatic options Israel has other than the course it is actually pursuing: unilateral disengagement in recognition of the fact that there is no prospect of a negotiated settlement. Israel cannot deal with a Hamas-led state, because Hamas's ambitions are not limited, and Israel's allies (as Western nations should certainly think of themselves) should acknowledge this.

In principle this course should lead to Israeli withdrawal from the populated centre of the West Bank as well as the now-evacuated Gaza, while retaining certain territories (notably a strip along the Jordan and the Dead Sea) necessary for defence. Most of the settlers - who are way outside the consensus in Israeli politics - will thereby remain under Israeli jurisdiction, while most of the settlements will be dismantled or relocated (mainly to Galilee and the Negev). But central to this outcome is the recognition that a permanent settlement, including a territorially contiguous Palestinian state, depends on Israel's being secure against Iranian-backed Islamist groups who aim for its destruction. Disengagement and deterrence are two sides of the same policy. It will be a long haul, and the place of Western nations is on the side of those who are directly threatened by Islamist fanaticism: respectively, the Palestinians in Gaza and the democratic nation of Israel.

Saddam and his fate

The late Saddam Hussein was the worst of rulers. Oddly, this unexceptionable observation is sometimes denied, and not always by the obvious fringe elements alone. A contributor to The Guardian's "Comment is Free" site, David Cox, recently went one step beyond the pre-war fatuity that Saddam was a bulwark against Islamist extremism, stating baldly: "As [Saddam] goes to meet the hangman, the world has cause to rue his demise." (I responded to Cox here and here.)

The scope of the catastrophe Saddam inflicted on Iraq is impossible to grasp fully; under the Baathist totalitarian regime, a "new kind of fear drove through all private space", wrote Kanan Makiya in exile. So consider merely what Iraq - a country with a highly educated population and great natural resources - might have become with a better ruler, even of a marginally less despotic character. Iraq's fate under Saddam included economic disaster, the murder of scores of thousands of Kurds and Shi'ah Muslims, the collapse of the country's infrastructure, and combined deaths running into millions owing to Saddam's wars of aggression. Saddam also, incidentally, demonstrated the futility and destructiveness - so the unnecessary suffering - of relying on sanctions as a tool of international diplomacy. The UN Oil for Food programme was destroyed by Saddam first, and other corrupt parties second. Saddam enriched himself while using (or rather, withholding) imported food and medicine as a means of political coercion. As Fred Halliday has succinctly summarised the record: "At the summit of the Iraqi system of power stood an omnipotent individual, who drove the accumulation of military potential and strategic ambition, but who by that very fact destroyed his country through the fantasies and ignorance that lay at the centre of his thinking."

Saddam, it is worth adding, did his level best to destroy other countries in the region too. He had the distinction of annexing - not merely "invading" - Kuwait in 1990, and thereby abolishing by force of arms a member state of the United Nations. Among causes also blighted by Saddam was that of Palestinian statehood - a just national claim sabotaged, politically and morally, by terrorist fanatics sponsored and sheltered by the Baathist tyranny.

Saddam has a fair claim to have been the most destructive, brutal and evil man of the last 30 years. It's difficult to argue against the proposition that he has now met justice. I have no doubt he has; but I'm opposed in principle to capital punishment. Killing enemy combatants in war is one thing, and may well be a just act. I take this view of the deaths of Saddam's appalling sons; they were given an opportunity to surrender, they did not take it, and their consequent deaths in no respect diminish me or - far more important - the quality of Iraq's democracy. Had Saddam been killed - as he nearly was, by the first shot of the Iraq War - the same would have been true. But death inflicted after judicial proceeding and by execution is another matter.

I doubt there is a rational argument on this point. I feel the same way as the late Bernard Levin, an essayist of humanity and erudition, when he wrote about one of the traditional parliamentary debates on the death penalty (All Things Considered, 1988, p. 144): "Nor is it the horrible barbarity of execution that is the worst thing about it; it is the calm, ordered, impersonal taking of a life, for the astoundingly irrelevant reason that the life in question has taken another."

Levin, of course, was talking of more common murderers than a genodical dictator. But the point still applies. There is justice in the punishment by hanging of Saddam Hussein; there is also a moral argument for clemency. I am convinced by that argument, but it's important to stress the element of justice too, lest we enter dubious areas of reasoning.

There is, for example, a longstanding and pernicious myth argued by the far Right that the Nuremberg trials were a "kangaroo court" (I could give you a link to this argument as expounded by the racist faker David Irving, but will not). They were no such thing. In the words of the critic Clive James: "In extending due process, humane treatment and mercy to men who would have liked to have driven those things from the face of the earth, the Nuremberg judges did us a favour we will be a long time repaying." But it is still possible to recognise and honour the justice, and regret the absence of clemency. (In the case of one executed Nazi, Julius Streicher, it is clear that he was executed not for crimes committed but for being an evil man. This is the one aspect of Nuremberg that I find troubling.) Those who argue in war crimes trials that a capital sentence is excessive are not arguing the same case as those who maintain that the trial and conviction are unjust. The latter are such fanatics as those who regard Slobodan Milosevic as a patriot rather than an orchestrator of genocidal aggression. There are "soft" versions of similar sentiments, and it is important to reject them.

The most difficult case for an absolute rejection of capital punishment is Adolf Eichmann, the only man to have been executed in Israel's history. Reading some of the arguments made at the time by apparently sophisticated people is a sobering experience. The independent scholar Susan Jacoby quoted some of these 20 years after the event in her excellent and unjustly neglected book Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge, 1985, pp. 286-7:

One major newspaper [comments Jacoby] remarked that many people had expected the Israeli judges to sharpen the contrast between Nazism and civilization by a "spectacular gesture of mercy." These arguments induce a queasiness in the stomach, for one wonders why anyone thought it necessary for Israel to demonstrate her superiority to Eichmann or to Nazism. This viewpoint was summarized in a long article decrying the sentence in a Protestant journal: ".... For if Eichmann were spared for an experiment in redemption, it might well spring the lock on our own Pandora's box of guilt and force us to face up to our own sins."

This last quotation embodies all of the errant nonsense associated with the notion that the guilty party is not the criminal but the collective "we." We are all guilty of moral transgressions, and some of us are guilty of legal transgressions, but none of us is guilty of the particular crimes with which Eichmann was charged.

None of us is guilty either of the particular crimes of Saddam Hussein. I regret the sentence and am repelled by the pictures of Saddam with a noose around his neck; and I see nothing improper in saying so, even though I am not one of Saddam's many victims. But I laud the mechanism of justice, impartially administered, that has rightly convicted this monstrous figure of a few of his crimes.

Threats to Lebanon; threats to peace

In his latest article in Slate, Christopher Hitchens makes the important observation that Syria does not recognise Lebanon as an independent state. This obduracy is a standing threat to the territorial integrity of Lebanon:

Is it really too much to demand that Syria acknowledge the self-determination, or "right to exist," of a fellow member of the Arab League? Without this line of demarcation, for one thing, the "withdrawal" of Syrian soldiers and police is a merely tactical thing; a retreat over the horizon while the Assad dynasty waits for better days. These "better" days may well not be long in coming.

But more than that, Syria's designs on Lebanon make impossible a comprehensive territorial peace agreement in the region, for reasons explained a few months ago by the Israeli political philosopher Shlomo Avineri. (Avineri is a man of great talent and intellect. He is well known as an interpreter of Marx, and is the author of a famous book called The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx. His public service has included being Director-General of Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the first government of Yitzhak Rabin, from 1975 to 1977.)

Avineri points out that Syria's refusal to recognise Lebanon also prevents Syria from formally designating the disputed Shaba farms as Lebanese. Consequently:

DIPLOMATS who are now concerned with a cessation of violence in South Lebanon and northern Israel should be aware of this conundrum, which is no mere formality. If the Shaba Farms appears in any form as part of the deal, this should be accompanied by an unequivocal statement from Syria recognizing that the area belongs to the Republic of Lebanon. It is my guess that the chances of such a statement are minimal. Without it, the international legitimacy of the agreement - and its subsequent implementation - may be extremely problematic.

To put it more directly, accomplishing a pacific territorial settlement in the Middle East as envisaged in UN Security Council Resolutions is not going to be achieved by leaning on Israel. Israel has responsibilities, but she is not the block on political progress that her critics (or are they enemies?) among British politicians believe her to be.

Death-squad despotism

The BBC reports, of the murder of the Lebanese politician Pierre Gemayal: 'US President George W Bush called for a full investigation to identify "those people and those forces" behind the killing.'

I certainly agree, but I have a strong suspicion I know already who is behind the killing. To adapt slightly a phrase of Charles Krauthammer: the dimmest ophthalmologist ever to come out of British medical school is your man. A little over a year ago I wrote a 'Thunderer' column for The Times entitled 'Isolate Syria's tyranny'. Here it is again, I'm afraid - because nothing has been done about Syria's death-squad despotism.

Isolate Syria's tyranny

“SYRIA IS LUCKY to have Bashar Assad as its President,” declared George Galloway, the indefatigable MP, on a trip to Damascus this summer. Now a UN report has found strong evidence of Syrian complicity in the assassination of the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February. None but a dedicated apologist for tyranny should demur at a strategy of confrontation.

Tony Blair has declined to rule out sanctions against Syria, but they would be a minimal step. Against Baathist Iraq, sanctions were porous, ineffectual, corruptly administered and a public relations disaster. Against Syria, they need to be more than symbols of disapproval. Political, diplomatic and economic pressure should be exerted with the declared aim of regime change. Forcing that outcome now is right and timely, and may obviate the need to pursue it militarily later.

After 9/11, President Bush declared that Syria had to “decide which side of the war against terror it is on”. There is little doubt of the answer. Under its dynastic despotism, Syria supports terrorists and grants them sanctuary. Islamic Jihad has its headquarters in Damascus, and Syria is known to have channelled arms from Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, Syria also has “an active chemical weapons programme, including significant reserves of the deadly nerve agent sarin”.

Whereas Western leaders have invested faith in Syria to support a Middle East peace settlement, those hopes have never been repaid. Successive Israeli leaders have been ready to return the entire Golan Heights to Syria, but Syria has stymied agreement by insisting also on a small parcel of land that safeguards Israel’s access to the Sea of Galilee. No Israeli Government would risk its principal water supply by ceding land on its own side of the international border. Syria’s fiercely anti-Semitic leadership is clearly determined to sabotage territorial compromise.

Protests in Lebanon after Hariri’s assassination led to the withdrawal of Syrian troops, and Lebanese elections in May decisively rejected Syrian influence. Assad felt the diplomatic pressure so keenly that he fruitlessly sought support from Saudi Arabia. Beyond Iran, his international support is scant. Enforcing the isolation of this callow and callous ruler is the least that a humane and pacific foreign policy must aim for.