Indecent Left

A Level Climate Science

2007-10-25T12:14:00.000Z

Melanie Phillips once claimed that she had, in the old Irving Kristol formulation, been “mugged by reality”. I think she sustained a head injury during the attack. She doesn’t, in any case, seem to be able to face her attacker. I wouldn’t normally write about her bizarre, frothing persona: surely most people, even Daily Mail readers, would view her as a slightly crude parody, as Steven Poole insists she is. But now her Spectator incarnation refuses to publish my comments, and I can’t let even a satiric invention get away with that.

It begins with her enthusiasm for David Bellamy. A while ago he jumped, beard first, into the global warming debate, and immediately made an idiot of himself. In 2004 he wrote a Daily Mail article with the standard discredited points – that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but a fertilizer, that the real greenhouse gas is water vapour, etc. He even touted the absurd “Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine” petition, “signed by over 18,000 scientists”, including, as George Monbiot pointed out, “Ginger Spice and the cast of MASH”. In an exchange with Monbiot, Bellamy's complete lack of knowledge of global warming science became evident. For instance, to make his case on glaciers he had apparently relied on non-existent papers in prestigious journals, existent papers in LaRouchite journals, and, ultimately, his inability to operate a computer keyboard. He then wisely wrote to the Sunday Times announcing that he would “draw back” from this subject of which he knew nothing.

Sadly it didn’t last, and this week he was back with another self-pitying, “heretical” article informing Times readers that “the self-proclaimed consensus among scientists has detached itself from the questioning rigours of hard science”. Truth-tellers like Bellamy are victims of “McCarthyism, witch-hunts and all”. He has switched to a slightly different selection of debating points, but they are familiar enough. Ah, but the climate is cyclical anyway. And didn’t the Romans grow grapes in England? Oh, and Greenland used to be green (cue etymologically dubious assertion). On the strength of these claims we can obviously discard those “complex and often unreliable computer models” with their physics and their matching hindcasting. His points have all been dealt with, even in language a soil-fondling botanist should understand, but Bellamy has simply ignored these responses.

Naturally such a performance did not escape Mel P, forever casting around for abject stupidity to endorse. The Bellamy effusion is “glorious”. “Thank goodness” for him. He “rips into the global warming scam with unrivalled brio”. “Over and over again,” she reports, “he brings forward elementary facts which directly contradict or fatally undermine the misleading claims and sometimes totally bent predictions of man-made global warming catastrophe which masquerade as ‘research’.” So there. Even if a scientific consensus existed “it would prove nothing except the unlimited capacity of people to fall into line when their livelihoods are at stake”:

The ‘scientific consensus’ has been proved wrong over and over again; it was not long ago that it was proclaiming with the same certainty that the planet was about to freeze to extinction.

It is perhaps interesting to ponder Melanie Phillips’s understanding of the scientific method. Because the scientific consensus has been wrong in the past, no scientific consensus can “prove” anything except scientists’ self-interest. It is of course true science cannot absolutely prove anything. But if her statement has any informational content beyond this, it apparently suggests that all scientific consensus – indeed science itself – is meaningless. So what if the scientific consensus promotes certain views about gravity? The consensus has been wrong many times. And scientists do get grants for studying gravity: they’re just promoting their own interests. Who can trust these “complex” models of general relativity when all this talk of curved space-time is obvious nonsense to the ordinary decent folk in the street? (This attitude is held, of course, by the arch defender of truth from filthy pinko relativism.)

There is another scientific issue on which Mel P has historically believed herself to be almost uniquely correct, and it’s instructive because at no point did she ever acknowledge that her brave challenge to the consensus was wrong. It is of course the MMR vaccine. Her last article on the subject was titled “MMR: the façade cracks” – and yet since February 2006, and in spite of Andrew Wakefield coming before the GMC on a disciplinary hearing, she has found nothing at all to say. She no longer cares, it seems, about those poor children developing autism. She no longer cares about Wakefield having his reputation “systematically trashed” as part of a “witch-hunt”. No other conclusion is possible unless, of course, she changed her view on the risks of the vaccine. But surely if she’d changed her view this defender of objective truth would at least have admitted she was wrong? She had, after all, helped encourage dangerously low levels of resistance to serious diseases. But no – we heard nothing. Perhaps the final sign that evidence for anthropogenic global warming is irrefutable, even by the willfully ignorant, will be complete silence from Mel P, after a final tantrum where she insists she was right all along.

Anyhow, I originally started this because I wanted to talk about Mel’s attitude towards education (it’s hard to focus on any one part of her continent-straddling lunacy). Some of what she says has some kind of internal logic. One could, for instance, believe her pronouncements on Israel/Palestine if unable to access the empirical facts. But I cannot fathom how she manages to so blithely, and so loudly, hold logically contradictory positions simultaneously. On the one hand, regarding climate change, she believes that “[w]hat matters is not that very grand people with lots of letters after their names all agree to a proposition, but whether that proposition is actually true”. She holds that, without any relevant qualifications, she is in a position to pronounce on global warming by employing "the judgment of ordinary people". And yet yesterday she moaned that the “gold standard” A Level will be abolished, the “education system [has] imploded”, etc.

Equipped with only an English degree, Melanie Phillips has out-thought thousands of highly qualified scientists and doctors, many with those magnificent A Levels of yore. Some of them, I hear, even have degrees. The Melanie Phillips example surely proves we should at the least scrap science and maths A Levels, even if we have to ramp up numbers of English students to replace them. But as far as I can tell it is also an argument against any qualifications at all. Melanie Phillips should welcome the destruction of A Levels, for it will lead to the replacement of study and training with “the judgment of ordinary people”. And how else will we defeat the worldwide global warming conspiracy?

Cohen and Said (and, oh joy, Kamm)

2007-07-31T19:46:00.001Z

You've probably seen that there's been a renewed fuss about Nick Cohen's book, What's Left?, occasioned by Johann Hari's review of it in Dissent. Cohen produced a response, to which Hari responded. While some of their discussion was about "root causes", a surprising amount of it was a largely irrelevant argument about Nick Cohen's alleged Orwellian aspirations.

Oliver Kamm's pompous, voluminous and tedious spew on the subject similarly avoided the larger issues, consisting instead of a self-parodic English lesson and absurd hair-splitting about imperceptible shades of neo-conservative opinion. Some of his bizarre claims were dealt with by Tim Holmes here, although Kamm has continued to tie himself in knots since. The "intellectual sledgehammer" apparently believes that the presence of Elliott Abrams in the Reagan administration demonstrated a new found zeal for democracy. The fact that Abrams was notoriously involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, in which the US sold arms to the Iranian theocracy in order to fund attacks on the elected government of Nicaragua is irrelevant... somehow. Abrams's enthusiasm for the human rights-challenged regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala can also be ignored when assessing whether Abrams's appearance marked a shift from Jeane Kirkpatrick's advocacy of "working with authoritarian regimes".

Not, you understand, that Abrams is someone whom Kamm anoints as "a neoconservative of the school I identify as consistent with the Left's ideals". No. But Abrams "marked a turn in policy" in that he opposed Kirkpatrick on Chile by apparently supporting "democratic political movements" there. (Quite what Kamm means by "democratic political movements" in Chile is unclear, given his peculiar asseveration in 2001 that "any democrat" would be "glad" that the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, had been deposed in a coup.) And that proves neo-conservatism is a "variegated phenomenon", which means Kamm isn't a supporter of all neo-conservatism, even if he did write that book subtitled "The Left-Wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy". Indeed, he isn't a supporter at all, but merely keen to appropriate the label "for [his] own uses". Utterly compelling, as Stephen Pollard says.

Anyhow, upon reading Nick Cohen's retort to Hari, my first thought was of the hypocrisy it displayed. Readers of Hari's review, Cohen said, "were not given an honest account" of his book. Hari "from almost the first paragraph of his piece in your last issue, misleads your readers", he told Dissent. After the Orwell talk, Hari "goes on to misrepresent my book", Cohen said. (Strangely, given the strength of criticism levelled by Cohen, Hari threatened the Harry's Place blog with legal action if they didn't remove apparently related accusations published there. There are few mentions of internet libel law that don't prompt Oliver Kamm to trumpet his glorious victory in that arena. He has already twice promised breathless readers there's more to come.)

Regardless of the accuracy of Hari's review, the accusations Cohen levelled at it could be applied to his own book. The most obvious case was surely his misrepresentation of Edward Said's views of the 9/11 attackers. The book suggests that Said failed to condemn the hijackers:

"Said couldn't manage a word of condemnation of the ideology and methods of the suicide bombers" (p 274)

As I pointed out, Said had a piece in Cohen's own paper with exactly such a condemnation. At the time I wrote to Cohen about it, but received no reply. Trying again recently elicited a reply.

The defence is apparently that Cohen was talking specifically about the LRB roundtable piece mentioned above the quoted remark, not Said's output in general. I don't believe this is a reasonable defence. As I pointed out:

In the LRB piece Said called the attacks "horrible deeds". That would appear to be "a word of condemnation" of at least the methods of the suicide bombers.
The comments in the book about Said's silence are not unambiguously confined to the LRB roundtable. For the book's characterisation of Said's views to have value, a reasonable assumption would be that it provided a fair summary of Said's output at that time, not just what he wrote in a particular issue of a magazine.
An account of intellectuals' reactions to the attacks couldn't be deemed honest if, when criticising one of those intellectuals for what they didn't say, it tacitly restricted its scope to a single issue of the LRB and its unrepresentative content. What's Left? drew attention to what Said supposedly didn't say in the LRB while ignoring what he certainly did say earlier in the Observer.

While it might be more fun to lay into Cohen's hypocrisy, I'm surprised and happy to say he now admits the description in What's Left? is misleading, and will be correcting it in the next edition. In this he stands in contrast to Oliver Kamm, who in my experience simply ignores criticism that he can't at least purport to answer in his favour. Of course, there remain the numerous other problems with What's Left?, documented here and elsewhere.

Conclusively Vindicated

2007-05-30T11:44:00.000Z

Just in case anyone forgot, the Iraq War was not just about bringing democracy to Iraq: it was going to transform the whole Middle East. Oliver Kamm (we can't avoid him, I'm afraid) supplied the standard laundry list of achievements in his rambling Anti-Totalitarianism (p 67). It was, in Fouad Ajami's words, an "Autumn of the Autocrats":

Quite suddenly, in the spring of 2005, demand for political reform coalesced in a part of the world so far resistant to constitutional democracy.

Despite intimidation and murderous incursions by groups inaptly dignified by media commentators with the term 'insurgents', nine million Iraqis voted in the country's first post-Baathist election in January 2005. Protests in Lebanon led to the withdrawal of Syrian troops after a 29-year occupation. Elections in May registered a decisive rejection of Syrian influence. Saudi Arabia conceded municipal elections (though with an all-male franchise). Egypt laid plans for competitive presidential elections.

Yasser Arafat even obliged the Americans by dying, as he did so "precipitat[ing] a warming of relations between the Palestinians and Israel". "The prospects for a negotiated territorial accommodation between Israel and the Palestinians... suddenly looked brighter than at any time since the Oslo Accord." (p 68)

The reality hardly needs pointing out. The Iraqi government is not in control of most of the country, regardless of how many people voted. Lebanon's democratic flowering was promptly trampled by Israel, and the country now stands on the edge of civil war. Saudi Arabia's municipal elections, while a cosmetic step forward for a country without even pretence of democracy, involved no transfer of power from the ruling family. Egypt's "competitive" presidential election was won by the 24-year incumbent, the competition only between carefully selected candidates, amid boycotts and various electoral violations. Needless to say, a new Oslo moment did not dawn for the Palestinians (not that Oslo should serve as a model for anything).

But for real nostalgia let's turn to what Hitchens had to say exactly two years ago, in a cosy chat with Andrew Marr. His prognostications were approvingly quoted by Kamm at the head of his "Regime Change" chapter:

I think Iraq will be remarkable. We're going to live to see great things. We already have Lebanon. We're about to, I think, in Egypt, with the reopening of the Egyptian democracy. The Baath party in Syria, in my judgement, will not be there in two years' time. And there will be extraordinary, are already extraordinary, developments in Iran, which I have just come back from. And so the essential point of the Blair-Bush policy, which is to change the balance of power in the Middle East — that has already been conclusively vindicated."

BBC Radio 4, Start the Week, 30th May 2005.

It's a polemic, don't you know

2007-02-27T05:02:00.000Z

Last month Norman Geras was baffled, as I suspect he often is, by a mysterious new phenomenon. “When the Euston Manifesto was published in April last year,” he said, “something strange happened.” Apparently people mistook it for some kind of pro-war document, even though “[a] paragraph of the manifesto had clearly stated that there were both supporters and opponents of the Iraq war within the group that had produced the document.” They had, in other words, not taken its promoters’ claims at face value – a quite unacceptable practice. Instead they used a “clever-clever” evaluation of its content to show that it was indeed pro-war. Geras utilized a powerful Geoffrey Howe-style cricket analogy to demolish this “nincompoop” approach.

The same unfortunate tendency greeted Cohen’s book. For instance, Stan Crooke of Workers’ Liberty is quite sure that “What’s Left? is not ‘essentially’ about the Iraq war.” We know this because Cohen “spells out what it is about” in the introduction:

“What follows is a critical history of how the symptoms of the malaise [of liberal-minded people making excuses for a totalitarian right] began in obscure groups of Marxists and post-modern theorists; how the sickness manifested itself in the failure to confront genocide in the Middle East and Europe until it grew into the raging fever of our day.”

So there we have it: despite the mention of “genocide in the Middle East” in Crooke’s own quotation from the book, despite the straining efforts to relate Virginia Woolf to Saddam Hussein, even though Iraq was apparently what convinced Cohen the Left were soft on fascism, his book isn’t essentially about the Iraq War. It just mentions it more than anything else. In fact I pointed out that Cohen “invokes Iraq throughout”, but that didn’t make the cut for Crooke’s piece. When quoting me he decided instead to insert sentences from thousands of words later, without an ellipsis, producing a paragraph that appears nowhere in my review.

But let’s turn to Oliver Kamm dealing with another false charge. Apparently, What’s Left? “is not centrally about a pro-totalitarian and anti-American fringe”, even though Kamm is keen to point up “memorable vignettes” of Gerry Healy et al. Geras agrees, in as far as he believes the book “may also be about you”, the presumed non-fringe leftist. He believes “Nick Cohen’s target is a real one wider than the SWP.” Oddly for a book not really about Iraq, the only divisive issue Geras felt worth mentioning was Iraq. He views “the intense hostility there has been, way beyond that organization [the SWP], towards the pro-war left” as confirmation of the Left’s general guilt. So objecting to being tagged as a Galloway clone is now confirmation that you are a Galloway clone – another masterstroke from the professor.

According to Kamm, Gerry Healy, LM magazine, Stalinist fellow travelling, etc. are not “isolated cases confined to an ideological extreme”. To believe otherwise is to “miss Cohen's thesis”. In my review I mentioned the inadequately explained principle of “fringe magnification”, whereby “trends” are identified via the activities of the “fringe”, which “magnify” them. No explanation was advanced for why or how Gerry Healy was a magnified version of the “liberal-left” – indeed, Cohen was explicit that his Iraq policy was unique – but this is as close as Cohen came to a “thesis”.

Kamm opts for another piece of even flimsier hand-waving:

“In the last century, material betterment and the steady diminution of discrimination against blacks, women and homosexuals have advanced progressive goals. Much of the left has yet to come to terms with this achievement. At the extreme, some who were once thought of as being on the left have adopted the language and outlook of the right.”

In some wholly unexplained way, then, the Left’s success on social policy led to them becoming right-wing. Because they had achieved gay and women’s rights they decided to adopt the views of Muslims who were against these things. How do we know this occurred? Neither Cohen nor Kamm says. Kamm simply skips to the oracular conclusion that “[t]he alliance of Islamists and Leninists that makes up the Respect coalition is not a dalliance born of opportunism”, even though the only evidence, as opposed to speculation, in Cohen’s book suggests the exact opposite. But even if one accepted his unsupported contention, it would not explain how these “Leninists” relate to the anti-war Left in general. None of Cohen’s defenders has filled this gap.

Paul Anderson, whom Cohen commends for dealing with the “myopia” of his critics, has a marginally different take. To him What’s Left? is

“a polemic by a democratic leftist who watched in mounting frustration and disbelief as the democratic left around him screwed up by tolerating the intolerable and excusing the inexcusable.”

Anderson bemoans the Left “banging on about whether invading Iraq was right, oblivious to the actual situation in Iraq.” This is a precise description of what Cohen does in his book. He does not, as I pointed out, mention the state of affairs in Iraq. Instead he laments the millions who marched “against the overthrow of a fascist regime” and complains of the “legalistic” stance among anti-war left-wingers denying his view “a degree of legitimacy”. This sort of talk is surely what the Euston Manifesto dismisses as “picking through the rubble of the arguments over intervention”. But then, pro-war leftists are allowed to do that.

Similarly, pro-war leftists are allowed to ally with reactionaries, whereas their opponents are not. Thus Anderson decries the “at best moronic” acquiescence in Galloway et al. “appointing themselves as the leadership of the anti-war movement in 2002-03”. He steps back, as Cohen did, from spelling out whether joining Stop the War Coalition marches was moronic or worse. Why, if that is what he means? What did he expect those against the war to do? Suddenly the straight-talking stops.

Simultaneous with this argument-dodging has been the almost complete silence on the obvious smears and logical chasms that suggest Cohen delegated his thinking to a handful of unimpressive books and blogs. Anderson’s answer to all this? It doesn’t “pretend to be a piece of cutting-edge original research or scholarship”. Who cares if it’s a feeble recycling job? Who cares if it makes false claims? It’s a polemic, don’t you know.

(In the world of polemics, we learn, “a little exaggeration and a little underplaying are essential tools of the trade”. So forget the “historical truth” promoted by the Euston Manifesto, which Anderson signed. It doesn’t apply to a polemic in a good cause.)

I could return to Stan Crooke, but most of what he says regarding my review rests on the strange idea that I’m responsible for what the SWP says (it’s an organization with which I’m not associated except in Crooke’s head). More relevant is the point, still standing after Cohen’s various apologists’ efforts, that the reason people have not engaged with Cohen’s “thesis” or “arguments” is that these barely exist. No clear argument for the ideological connection between the SWP and the MAB and the mass of anti-war marchers has been made. To the extent that he presents a “thesis”, it is based on innuendo and revealed wisdom. In sum, however much Cohen likes talking about George Galloway’s leotard, he has yet to explain why we should see the future of the Left there.

For more on Cohen’s book, and proof that my review was far from exhaustive in the fatuities it covered, I recommend Tim Holmes’s outstanding, extensively researched review.

What's Left of Cohen

2007-02-08T22:27:00.000Z

The praise Cohen has garnered for his new book is predictable enough – what else would The Spectator say? However, even the unimpressed reviewers don’t come close to cataloguing the full range of factual mistakes, lazy research and muddled arguments. Perhaps the monthlies will do a better job, although I doubt it. Anyhow, in the absence of anything better, here is my review.

For all Cohen’s claims to have diagnosed a general disease among the Left (or “liberals” as he bafflingly calls them), What’s Left? is essentially about the Iraq War. It’s about how Cohen was right to support it, and how his left-wing opponents were wrong, in various ways. He invokes Iraq throughout. That’s not to say he doesn’t cover other things: he suggests opposition to the invasion was the terminus of various other horrors, some of them stretching back well before the Second World War. The problem is that many of these have no obvious relation to the anti-war marchers, and those are the people whom Cohen says so disillusioned him with the Left. Anyone seeking to understand why Cohen’s support for the Bush Doctrine was so unimpeachable must fight through a tangle of historical and social theorizing relating only, on the face of it, to a tiny part of the anti-war movement.

Strangest of all is the chapter focused on Gerry Healy, a cultish, unpleasant leader of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, which took Iraqi and Libyan money in return for favourable propaganda. The relevance to today’s Left? Apparently none, because “the WRP’s support for Baathism was a one-off, which no other left-wing group imitated” (p 68).

Not much easier to understand is the inclusion of chapters on post-modernism, “Tories Against the War” (in Bosnia) and conspiracy theories. Post-modernism, for Cohen, marks a denial of objective reality, a retreat from genuine political action to pseudo-radical verbalizing. “The story of how political defeat took the radical Sixties left into the wilderness of post-modernism has been told many times,” he announces (p 106). And he’s right: the bulk of his choice absurdities appeared in either Francis Wheen’s How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the World or a blog called Butterflies and Wheels. Both receive a mention as sources, but it’s hard to see his research as better than lazy. Did he even read Afzar Hussain’s review, about which he says so much? Everything he quotes appears on Butterflies and Wheels, including the missing italics (as Aaronovitch Watch pointed out).

By contrast, we can be sure he read Francis Wheen’s book. Cohen’s accounts of the Sokal hoax and Luce Irigaray’s claims regarding relativity both supply no details beyond it. His quote from Foucault regarding the Iranian revolution is also given there. As is his quotation of Michael Moore. In a similar way, much of what Cohen has to say on 1930s appeasement, in particular on pacifist Labour leader George Lansbury, bears a haunting similarity to Oliver Kamm’s Anti-Totalitarianism. The impression of second-hand scholarship is inescapable by the time one finds Cohen retailing an account of collaborationist French Socialists from Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism.

***

Like so many muscular liberals before him, Cohen feels obliged to attack Noam Chomsky. Where does he turn for material? Why, Francis Wheen and Oliver Kamm of course (maybe Terror and Liberalism wasn’t handy when he wrote this section). And what about an introductory quotation, ideally bespeaking of literary breadth? Well, one suspects he consulted Christopher Hitchens’s 1985 essay defending Chomsky, The Chorus and Cassandra. At least, he probably read the introductory paragraph and quotation, which are nearly identical – the rest seems to have passed him by.

Two of his mouldering allegations – regarding Faurisson and the Khmer Rouge – were dealt with twenty years ago, in Hitchens’s essay, although Oliver Kamm has given them a regular outing in recent years, and Wheen included the second in his book. It is hard to see what Cohen believes he is adding. It is also hard to know why he felt able to so blithely ignore Hitchens’s case for the defence.

A third accusation is not new either. It was aired first by Oliver Kamm, who was at the time in contact with Cohen about related material. Back then, Cohen supplied Kamm with a selection of media cuttings that supposedly showed Chomsky had misrepresented an expert witness, Philip Knightley, speaking at the LM vs. ITN libel trial about a photograph of the Trnopolje camp. Kamm, and one assumes Cohen, have since been made aware that Chomsky did not in fact substantively misrepresent Knightley. Kamm had either not read, or had simply ignored, what Knightley had said at the trial. Nevertheless, he refused to correct what he’d written. (Kamm is credited, hilariously in the circumstances, with “clear[ing] away many misconceptions” and “advice on the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts”.)

The absence of the Knightley claim in Cohen’s book is probably the closest we’ll come to an admission of error from the Kamm-Cohen party. But that does not stop Cohen mentioning the camp, or the interview in which Kamm said Chomsky had been so dishonest. He has all the background material; it’s just that the case is now reduced to malign insinuation. Cohen leaves the implication hanging in the air that Chomsky was denying the proven reality of the Trnopolje photograph, even though he doesn’t dispute Knightley’s testimony, or mention what the trial judge said on the matter. Rather, he appeals to the authority of a geography professor, David Campbell, to show that LM “didn’t fight” because it had “no honest evidence”. It is certainly true that ITN won their case against LM, and the Guardian journalist Ed Vulliamy duly celebrated this apparent vindication of his reporting, but anyone acquainted with Britain’s libel laws would know the connection was weak at best.

As a side note, one might consider Cohen et al.’s fitful commitment to free speech. Cohen, for instance, avers that “[f]reedom of speech includes the freedom to lie and defame” (p 164). But he has nothing to say on LM’s lack of freedom to say what they thought about Trnopolje. Kamm (“a near-absolutist on matters of free speech”) went as far as approvingly quoting Vulliamy saying “history… is thankfully built not upon public relations or melodrama but upon truth; if necessary, truth established by law”. One wonders, as Cohen thunders about Said Qutb or Michael Aflaq’s hatred of free society, just where he really stands.

And so it goes on. Chomsky went on about East Timor when a Western-backed Indonesian government was massacring the inhabitants. So Cohen complains that Chomsky “had nothing to say to the East Timorese on what they should do after Australian and British troops infuriated Osama bin Laden by ending the terror in 1999” (p 161). Was he obliged to send a congratulatory telegram? Hail the West for stepping in 24 years after the slaughter began? For it isn’t as if Chomsky had nothing to say about East Timor after the intervention. A cursory Internet search reveals, among other things, an article titled “East Timor Is Not Yesterday's Story”, written after INTERFET arrived. But then, at times Cohen’s approach to facts is hardly different from what he detests in post-modern theorists.

If reality trumped rhetoric he wouldn’t malignantly distort the case of the Guardian’s October 31^st 2005 interview with Chomsky, conducted by Emma Brockes. The interview alleged, among other things, that Chomsky liked to put the word “massacre” in quotation marks when talking of Srebrenica, as if to say there had been no massacre. He hadn’t done this, which the Guardian Readers’ Editor, Ian Mayes, recognised. A correction was printed and the interview was withdrawn from the Guardian website.

For post-modernist Cohen, unanchored to facts, the interview became a “piece on leftist denial of crimes against humanity” (p 179). It didn’t damagingly misrepresent what Chomsky had said; it was just “poorly subbed”. A flood of “[j]ournalists, survivors of the camps, UN workers in the Balkans and Britain’s foremost academic authorities were appalled” and apparently urged Mayes to reconsider, but he cruelly “slapped down the survivors and their allies” by recognising Chomsky’s right not to be misrepresented. Oddly, the only complainants Mayes thought worthy of mention in his piece on the correction, among all those UN workers and academics, were Oliver Kamm, Francis Wheen and David Aaronovitch. The substance of their complaint? Hammer of post-modernism Wheen, upholder of objective truth Kamm, both put their names to a letter that didn’t dispute that Chomsky had not said what Brockes said he’d said; it just lamely concluded she was “certainly entitled” to her “interpretation”.

Why might Mayes have acted so unfeelingly towards Emma Brockes’s “interpretative validity”? Ah, that would be down, not to the substance of the complaint – that doesn’t interest Cohen – but Mayes’s middle class orthodoxy. It’s all tied up with Virginia Woolf and Bernard Shaw and H.G.Wells and eugenics and bien pensant Bloomsbury dinner parties, you see. For here we reach the title page of the “What Do We Do Now?” chapter. Give up, would be my answer to any reader lucky enough not to have already wasted their time on that thirty-three page collage of pseudo-populist clichés.

Having alerted us to the iniquitous snobbery of the Bloomsbury set (p 192), having treated us to not “wholly wrong” Daily Mail attitudes on the social collapse betokened by vanishing work ethics and “common decency” (p 197), having implied but never said that maybe mothers should stay at home after all (p 200), he comes out and says, “the intellectuals weren’t interested in the working class” (p 208). Cohen isn’t an intellectual, of course, just as Melanie Phillips isn’t part of the hated “elite” – it just looks that way. But if he were, one might ask just how much interest he has in the working class. He’s fascinated by certain unionised workers in Iraq and Iran being tyrannised by George Bush’s enemies. But when did he, for instance, ever mention the Gate Gourmet dispute in the UK? As far as I can tell, he did so once – offhandedly comparing their plight favourably to impoverished lawyers.

It’s the kind of chapter that one can read, and re-read, and yet never understand what it says or why it was written. The stumbling efforts to link it to Iraq are reminiscent of the last minutes of a drunken anecdote from someone who’s trying to remember the punch-line. For instance, Cohen apparently suggests liberals opposed the war because some Virginia Woolf-like contempt for the “common man” meant they didn’t care if Saddam tortured him (p 193-194). And that in turn is because these Balsamic-fixated Bloomsbury ponces wrinkle their noses at East End council estate residents who spend their days picking up bankers’ sandwiches in Canary Wharf – a job forced on them when their matriarchal coping systems were atomised by the welfare state and interfering social workers (p 199-200), or Guardianista gay rights programmes, or identity politics (p 196). As a consequence, these disaffected workers voted in Thatcher and Reagan (p 196), further irritating the liberal elites, now itching to revenge themselves by leaving Iraqis under tyranny. Or something. Does it even matter? Even to Cohen?

***

Cohen’s book is, generally, a combination of elliptical, impenetrable speculation and definite, wrong, claims. The evidence of the latter is endless – I simply can’t include it all – but since Cohen is so persistent on the subject it would be remiss not to consider yet more of his farcical smear campaign against the “far left”. Dull as this may be, the book is duller, believe me.

Cohen quotes Edward Said (LRB, April 2003) on the 1981 bombing of the Iraqi Osirak reactor: “Iraq ‘was the one Arab country with the human and natural resources, as well as the infrastructure, to take on Israel's arrogant brutality. That is why Begin bombed Iraq pre-emptively in 1981, supplying a model for the US in its own pre-emptive war.’” (p 76)

Cohen’s interpretation? “Because Said believed Saddam could one day have the men and munitions to take on Israel, the war against him had to be the result of a sinister plot by Jewish puppet masters who pulled the strings of American policy.” (p 77)

Too bad the sentence before the one quoted says “Iraq might once have been a potential challenge to Israel.” Never mind that it follows a paragraph saying, “[T]hat after 12 years of sanctions it [Iraq] is a threat of any kind to any other state is a laughable notion.” For Cohen’s nodding donkey supporters, he’s done enough, even if it does mean ignoring swathes of his source material and instead relying on arbitrary conspiracist aspersions. Said thinks Israel influenced US policy? Oh, that must imply “a sinister plot by Jewish puppet masters” then. (An “excellent” book,” says Kamm. A “mordant and instructive polemic,” says Hitchens.)

At times it seems as if a Cohen pronouncement defines reality for him. It becomes hard to distinguish slack writing from deliberate smear. On the 9/11 hijackers he says:

“[Edward] Said couldn’t manage a word of condemnation of the ideology and the methods of the suicide bombers.” (p 274)

Cohen’s first Observer column after that event appeared alongside one by Edward Said. Said’s piece referred to the “spectacular horror” of “terror missions without political message, senseless destruction.” It spoke of “the genuine sorrow and affliction that so much carnage has so cruelly imposed on so many.” “No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents,” he went on. Their “quick bloody solutions” were “wrapped in lying religious claptrap.” Evidently Cohen doesn’t read his own paper – that or he’s just relying on the inability of a dead man to defend himself.

The Makiya connection is strange, too. For Cohen, Kenan Makiya was “An Iraqi Solzhenitsyn”, who warranted our support, so Said’s “vilification” of him was unconscionable in 2003. In the intervening years, Makiya’s claim that a pacific federal Iraq would emerge from the invasion has been definitively shown to be wrong. Whether or not Makiya’s battle against anti-democratic planning for Iraq was hampered by missing liberal-left support, his speculations about a post-Saddam Iraq were plainly unrealistic. Many of Said’s objections were valid, as is now obvious. Contrary to Makiya’s wish, the US was bound to initiate the invasion with a bombing campaign. Contrary to Makiya’s assertion, there was no evidence that Iraqis were broadly committed to federalism. Makiya’s vision of a “non-Arab” Iraqi state was a mirage.

Given Makiya’s disconnection from the Arab world, and his basic inexperience of Arab politics – both pointed out by Said – why did anybody take his claims so seriously, even in 2003? Presumably because, as Said also suggested, he was saying what the US war party wanted to hear. This has since been confirmed by George Packer’s Assassins’ Gate, which Cohen himself cites. Far more baffling is that anybody now would defend Makiya’s predictions for Iraq, after all that followed the invasion, and after the publication of Packer’s book. Why does Cohen devote so much space to him when even he admits the “hard-headed” Makiya ludicrously believed that the invaders would be greeted by “sweets and flowers” (p 286)? Why does Cohen still write off Said’s accurate critique as “incontinent abuse” (p 75)?

Perhaps it’s because Cohen’s favourite source, aside from friends’ books and congenial blogs, is his old newspaper columns. As if determined to include all the material from his outdated Said attack piece, Cohen goes on to include the next point, about Harold Pinter. In 2003 he felt Harold Pinter had abandoned the concern shown for the Kurds in his 1988 play Mountain Language, about a people whose language had been banned, just as Kurdish had been banned in Turkey. Pinter “refused to hear the mountain tongue he had once defended” when… well, when Iraqi Kurds, who hadn’t had their language banned, and weren’t culturally persecuted in their autonomous zone, pushed for the invasion. The same point, with the same quotation, is regurgitated in the book, except with Iraqis now also motivating the play. But Cohen does not explain why Pinter’s behaviour is so suspect. Iraqi Kurds in 2003 weren’t in the same position as they were in 1988, or in the same position as Turkish Kurds under government repression. Even given their enthusiasm for the invasion, their voice was hardly the only one within Iraq.

***

So we have the Chomsky-Said-Pinter axis disgraced. We’ve ridiculed the post-modernists. We’ve talked about the splinter-of-a-splinter group, the Workers Revolutionary Party. We’ve wheeled out the Daily Mail theory of political alienation. Where next? Ah yes, the awfulness of the anti-war marchers.

Since publication, Cohen has insisted that he isn’t simply tarring all protesters with the antics of George Galloway (he devotes a page and a half to Galloway’s appearance on Celebrity Big Brother). He initially suggests the million marchers were led astray: “They were good people on the whole, who hadn’t thought about the Baath Party.” (p 282)

The masses’ simple-mindedness was their reason for protesting the war, Cohen implies; but their unhealthily jolly protests did not, it would seem, necessarily discredit them:

“The anti-war movement disgraced itself not because it was against the war in Iraq, but because it could not oppose the counter-revolution once the war was over.” (p 288)

If they had counter-posed a protest at their own government – a protest that at least theoretically might have led to a change in policy – with a protest aimed at Islamists and Baathists slaughtering Iraqis and foreign troops then they would have avoided Cohen’s displeasure, or at least his outright contempt. How such a protest would have been anything but pointless, given the killers’ contempt for free speech and democracy documented by Cohen on page 287, is not explained. But somehow, if the poor deluded marchers had taken on Zarqawi with their placards, everything would have been alright.

Or perhaps not; perhaps they had to avoid any association with Galloway and the Muslim Association of Britain as well. After all, Cohen sternly reminds us they “had joined marches led by a saluter of a genocidal tyrant” (p 291). “Needs must when the Devil drives”, Cohen says of Makiya’s alliance with the neo-cons (p 85). But the principle doesn’t seem to apply to those against the war – at least not when Cohen has used the remarkable phenomenon of fringe magnification to detect “trends”. “A theme of this book,” he intones on page 294, “is that ideas on the fringe are worth examining.” “[T]he extreme parties magnify trends in wider society,” he goes on. What trend might the SWP be magnifying? “Opportunism and control-freakery”, apparently (p 295). The mechanism isn’t clear, but it probably involves yuppie sandwiches.

Is the Left generally keen to endorse Islamism? If so, Cohen provides only counter-evidence. The story goes that the Left, tired of their faltering grasp on the masses, seized on Islamist antipathy towards America and globalisation to reinvigorate the march toward revolution. Cohen cites a 1994 article in the International Socialism Journal suggesting the SWP were hoping to win young Islamists to “a different, independent, revolutionary socialist perspective”. This “daydream”, we are told, might not be what they were really after. Perhaps, speculates Cohen, they “just wanted to ally with the real threat to the established order.” (p 309) Well, perhaps not, if he means they wanted to promote Islamist ideology. What Cohen cites, after all, points in the opposite direction – but there he goes again with his textual deconstruction.

In any case, all the talk of the “communalist” SWP and George Galloway was, one finds in Cohen’s hysterically-named chapter, “The Liberals Go Beserk”, not the worst stain on the Left’s credibility. Even if the dumb marchers hadn’t tolerated SWP/MAB fanatics in their midst, Cohen wouldn’t have been satisfied. “[L]iberals,” he announces, “were in danger of becoming ridiculous.” (p 312) This danger arose primarily from campaigners’ “legalistic” approach to the Iraq War.

The threat was raised in Robert Kagan’s paean to American militarism, Paradise and Power, which Cohen approvingly quotes. Wimpish European liberals had no credible force of their own, but they could hurt America by denying its military adventurism their imprimatur. This they did, apparently, by declaring the Iraq war was “illegal”. The Iraq war’s illegality was not a fact of international law, endorsed by the majority of qualified lawyers, but a construct from a “postmodern” Europe cowering hypocritically under the American umbrella (p 316). Horrifyingly, this “play[ing] at judges and lawyers” might, in Kagan’s words, “become debilitating and perhaps even paralyzing”. Cohen is clear that things are worse even than this, reaching a conclusion perhaps “too scandalous” for Kagan’s imagination. The scarcely imaginable harvest from “pretending that it was illegal to overthrow a genocidal regime”? “The insurgents were able to use the liberal’s slogans.” (p 317) He has an image of suicide bombers crashing through the streets of Baghdad, screaming, “it’s illegal!” No really, he does.

While it wasn’t a “disgrace” to oppose the war, one couldn’t go as far as denying the war had “a degree of legitimacy” (p 315). That was, in the White House formulation that Cohen echoes, giving “aid and comfort” to the enemy (in his Chomsky essay, Hitchens refers to “the old Stalinist ‘aid and comfort’ ruse”, but one assumes he’s discarded that view). Cohen’s analysis has him pushing aside the bruschetta sissies and stepping outside: “[T]he mainstream European left didn’t want to participate in a war to overthrow Saddam themselves, as was their right, but they also wanted to deny the legitimacy of others who were prepared to fight.” This was apparently not their right. The thought that the Left opposed the war because they viewed it as illegitimate and dangerous is seemingly beyond even the imagination of Cohen. They had to be motivated by cowardice.

After all the filler and flimflam, one finally discovers what actually seems to be Cohen’s main point. It’s the simple idea that technocratic fault-finding applied to Western wars is acceptable, while fundamental criticism isn’t. Chomsky wrote about this notion among liberals long ago in American Power and the New Mandarins, which Cohen cites. Of course, whether he read it, or understood it, is another matter.

Aside from this, there is only the related accusation of anti-American bad faith. For instance, Cohen complains of the Left’s fixation on Israel, at their unwillingness to extend the same criticism to other regimes. But, as elsewhere when lamenting the lack of anti-Saddam banners at the anti-war marches, and in his attacks on Chomsky’s selective criticism, he misses the obvious point: people are likely to, and indeed have a greater obligation to, criticise their own regime and its allies. Not only do they bear some responsibility for their actions, but they have some chance of changing them. Cohen could of course criticise this argument, but he doesn’t even acknowledge it.

Underlying all he says on the Iraq War is a basic refusal to address anything happening there beyond what involves his favoured pro-occupation trade unionists (he ignores anti-occupation trade unionists). He rants that millions marched against the “overthrow of a fascist regime” (p 280), but he never suggests they marched against 600000 deaths. In fact he contrives to suggest those horrors are partly the fault of those who opposed ever setting them in train, because they allegedly refused “solidarity” to people in Iraq. He accepts the standard narrative that the WMD intelligence was flawed, that the Bush administration made “mistakes”, but was Cohen wrong on anything? We hear nothing of it. Someone unacquainted with the Iraq War would come away with no idea of what has happened there in the last four years. This crashing silence is the only way Cohen can pursue what is on the face of it an absurd project: an attack on the Left based on their rejection of a disastrous war.

***

So, is there anything good or promising about the Left? Not much. Cohen’s OK with some environmental campaigning, even if he is dismissive of Green parties’ supposedly utopian fantasies (see p 294). The campaign for civil liberties could be good, but is of course “compromised by the refusal of many to stand up for the civil liberties of those who are oppressed by the various anti-Western tyrannies and terrorist movements.” (p 356) Some sort of nationalisation in unspecified “poor world” countries “may be for the better” (p 357) but might be spoiled by corruption.

After that, he’s “struggling”. In fact, the only glimmer on the horizon is the Euston Manifesto. The need for Professor Norman Geras’s bizarrely self-important tract is in Cohen’s world “a symbol of the dismal state of liberal life”. Cohen feels the same way about his book. I would agree, if I thought the Left were hanging by the thread of what they have to say. A political movement depending for its survival on the maundering effusions of a retired “professor of government” and the hallucinatory mudslinging of Cohen would obviously be doomed.

Fortunately, things aren’t like that. Although Cohen complains that the anti-capitalists lack a political programme (p 118-119), he never presents one himself. What little he says about economics is confined to asserting the victory of Thatcherite capitalism. The Euston Manifesto manages only platitudes on Make Poverty History. As far as they have anything to say on policy, the manifesto and What’s Left? are essentially Blairite. So one can discard immediately Cohen’s wails about the “stifling conformity of respectable liberal opinion” (p 182) shutting out his ideas. They are promoted by the nominally left-wing government in power.

Cohen’s book is fairly obviously not about the Left, but about Cohen and his clique of progressive bombardiers. It is ultimately directed at salvaging various “decent Left” reputations from the damage of the Iraq War, by blowing out smoke and crying foul about other people’s bad faith. For Cohen, the crime of the anti-war Left was not dallying with reactionary Muslims, or their tenuous association with post-modern gibberish, or the countless other accusations scribbled on the charge sheet, but being right about the war. If he illustrates any problem of the Left, it is that it gives people like Cohen such an easy ride.

Blair's Poodle

2007-01-23T12:45:00.000Z

I wrote this last year, but didn’t post it, mainly because I felt there was too much Kamm-watching on here. I still think there is, but since then he has yet again repeated the point it deals with, and amazingly there are people out there who apparently want to read more about The Times’s foremost foreign policy poseur, so perhaps it’s worth posting.

It concerns Blair’s April 1999 speech to the Chicago Economic Club. Kamm likes mentioning this. It means he can hymn Blair’s foreign policy as a liberal interventionist departure from the realist consensus, and that means he can talk of “conservative pessimism” or “amoral quietism”. These favourite terms refer to the dark days of the non-interventionist Major government, before Blair’s progressive optimism and moral activism transformed Iraq into a killing ground for hundreds of thousands of its civilians. Via these means, Blair’s entanglement with a reactionary fundamentalist’s invasion is painted as left-wing moral action, dictated by conscience. It must be left-wing because – we’re supposed to believe – John Major wouldn’t have done it.

Unfortunately there are some who still cleave to the preposterous idea that Blair simply rolled over; possibly they were misled by, for instance, Blair’s chief of staff instructing his Washington ambassador to “get up the arse of the White House and stay there”. In this case Kamm has an ace to play. Tony Blair couldn’t possibly have been bounced into supporting the Iraq War because he was already wedded to his longstanding Chicago doctrine, “a distinctive approach to foreign policy that derives from the PM's own philosophy and ideals”.

In one of his recent sabbatical-busting posts, Kamm made the point once more:

“I referred here to Blair's 1999 Chicago speech, which explicitly referred to the urgency of countering Saddam, at a time when George W. Bush was a Governor of Texas of isolationist views. Blair is no poodle of the US administration.”

Quite why he finds this argument so convincing is not clear. It is true that Blair referred to Saddam Hussein in that speech, but that does not mean he was advocating an invasion. The Iraq reference was confined to these sentences:

“Many of our problems have been caused by two dangerous and ruthless men - Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic. Both have been prepared to wage vicious campaigns against sections of their own community. As a result of these destructive policies both have brought calamity on their own peoples. Instead of enjoying its oil wealth Iraq has been reduced to poverty, with political life stultified through fear.”

Given that this speech was delivered four months after Operation Desert Fox, where Blair joined Clinton in bombing Iraq, it is plainly a retrospective justification for that action. There is no mention of further military action, let alone of invading Iraq. To take the above comments as proving Blair’s independent intent to invade is in itself a bizarre extrapolation.

Even weirder is Kamm’s repeated reference to Blair delivering his speech when, in one formulation, “George W. Bush was a Governor of Texas of isolationist views”. Nobody ever suggested Blair had some kind of fawning personal relationship with Bush before 2000; back then Blair was too busy obeying William J. Clinton, a President of the United States of interventionist views. Any poodling would self-evidently be towards the office, not the man. To think otherwise would be, at the least, to “misunderstand both British foreign policy and the transatlantic relationship.” (It might be worth remembering, in all this, that this quotation comes from a piece pompously titled “The PM and Atlanticism”. “Transatlantic” is one of Kamm’s special words, apparently used to connote ocean-straddling political nous.)

But we need not confine ourselves to a single speech when examining claims of autonomous warmongering. Well after he had espoused his liberal interventionist “philosophy and ideals”, Blair told Tam Dalyell in a written Commons answer that “[w]e believe that the sanctions regime has effectively contained Saddam Hussein in the last 10 years. During this time he has not attacked his neighbours, nor used chemical weapons against his own people.” He said this in November 2000, so it is hard to see how anything before this point can be used to prove his desire to end sanctions and invade. Whatever “urgency” Kamm detected in 1999 had evidently gone by 2000, only to mysteriously reemerge once Bush was in power and pushing for new military action. Yet according to Kamm, it was Blair’s high-minded principle that drove him to invade.

This is just one example, but it illustrates the desperation of Kamm’s argument. He wants to say that New Labour radically differs from the Conservatives, and that Tony Blair is an independent moral agent, driven forward by his enlightened beliefs. That this is the best he can produce surely shows that Kamm is incompetent or wrong or both in pressing this view. As things stand I’d bet on the last.

Sabbatical Perils

2007-01-11T17:30:00.000Z

As people might have noticed, there hasn't been anything new on here for some time. Let me take this opportunity then, to retrospectively declare that period an almost Kamm-style sabbatical. Almost, because unlike the great man's it actually was period of leave. I do this in the full knowledge that

“[t]here's always a slight danger in taking a short break from polemic, lest it be interpreted as a desire to evade discussion rather than defer it.”

Thoughtful words from a man who never evades discussion.

I do plan to return to posting soon. If anyone has emailed me over the past months I've quite possibly lost your email, since Hotmail disabled and emptied the account. Please send it again if you can.

No Excuses for Aaronovitch

2006-10-03T22:26:00.000Z

Aaronovitch Watch called it “Euston: the movie”, which is a reasonable summary, although it never reached beyond the intellectual level of a pantomime. David Aaronovitch’s programme, No Excuses for Terror, was the whole absurd routine one more time – the same questions, the same pat answers, from the same monotonic commentators. The only novelty came from unintentionally hilarious tough liberal cut-n-paste rhetoric – that Hizbollah is “the armed wing of Iran” was the insight from geopolitical heavyweight Kim Howells.

As usual, government propagandising was portrayed as marginalised truth telling. According to Aaronovitch, his collection of freelance Blairites “do sometimes struggle to get a hearing.” But don't worry, because “today all that changes” – as if regurgitation of Tony's conference speeches is some sort of samizdat dissent.

Although the documentary was not primarily a defence of Iraq War (decentists have largely given up on that) Aaronovitch did give it a go. He did this by ignoring everything happening there. In April 2004 Oliver Kamm declared that “[t]here is no development that would cause me to conclude I was wrong to support war. It’s not that type of issue.” In other words, the horrors suffered by Iraqis since the invasion are irrelevant. In the same vein, Aaronovitch’s only bid to defend the war was a melodramatic false dilemma that ignored current reality:

“I defy anyone to stand at the edge of a mass grave like that and say Saddam was a good man, why did you get rid of him?”

This is an only slightly more dishonest version of what Blair has been saying for years. In 2004 he told the Labour conference that he could not “sincerely” apologise (as if sincerity had ever bothered him before) for removing Saddam Hussein because it was axiomatic that “[t]he world is a better place with Saddam in prison not in power”, irrespective of tens of thousands of civilian deaths.

This was all Aaronovitch could manage: an attack on something not even slightly resembling anything said by any serious Western opponent of the war. Even George Galloway, who of course featured prominently in Aaronovitch’s stock footage, and who was taken – as usual – as being representative of the entire anti-war Left, said no such thing. And if he had it would have made no difference at all to the morality of launching the Iraq War.

Yet Aaronovitch harped relentlessly on that favourite decentist theme – the shocking alignment between the anti-war Left and “fascist” Muslims exemplified by Respect, as if discrediting Stop the War marchers somehow legitimises what they oppose. On this subject we heard “Professor Alan Johnson”, who apparently makes up for his lack of a doctorate by launching pompous websites (see “Unite Against Terror” and “Democritiya”). Naturally enough, since he’s a full-time decentist, all we got from this academic titan was the usual boilerplate about why people oppose American wars and Israeli oppression: they are instinctively anti-American; they think they’re standing up against imperialism; etc. – all treated as revealed wisdom, without any evidential underpinning.

So, quite naturally, opposition to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and its attack on Lebanon, could only be irrational anti-Americanism born of an inability to confront the new deadly terrorist threat. Because Israel is an unfortunate “lightning conductor”, it attracts an unfair share of criticism. “Increasingly what has become the... a sort of sewage of the fringes of the far right and far left... political discourse concerning Israel have now become increasingly... have contaminated mainstream political discourse”, opined Shalom Lappin. It is apparently “far right” or “far left” – the action of “sewage” – to object to Israel killing a thousand Lebanese civilians.

Decentists' principles are rarely universal, however much they claim otherwise. Take Jane Ashworth. Another co-organiser of the Unite Against Terror wheeze, according to the Democratiya website “Jane is a lifelong Labour Party member and a graduate of it’s [sic] youth and student movements”. She is a “consultant specialising in working class access to sport”. She’s only slightly less qualified than Alan Johnson, then, to pronounce on what the Left must do. “The Left should have a moral benchmark,” she tells us. “One of the things where we should draw that line is around the bombing of civilians.”

That is, bombing by Muslim terrorists – not Israel. She somehow failed to draw this line when Israel bombed civilians in Lebanon. Her “Engage” website (a nascent UK equivalent of the ADL, it would seem) instead ran criticism of Jews who objected to the bombing of civilians in Lebanon. Thus does Engage battle “contemporary antisemitism”.

Aside from ceaseless ululations over Europe's rampant anti-Semitism and the “existential threat” facing Israel, another major preoccupation of the Bush-boosting Left is denial of any causal link between the Iraq War and terrorist attacks on the West. Aaronovitch's entirely unbiased framing of the problem went like this:

“The apologists for terror state it as a fact that only a fool would deny that 7/7 was primarily caused by Blair's adventure in Iraq. Now, that's the same as saying that without Iraq it wouldn't have happened.”

He then goes on to recite the standard list of Islamist terrorist actions predating the war, thus supposedly disproving the link. The same day, Blair was conveying this view – recall that its proponents have struggled to get a hearing – to the Labour conference:

“This terrorism isn't our fault. We didn't cause it. It's not the consequence of foreign policy. It's an attack on our way of life. It's global. It has an ideology. It killed nearly 3,000 people including over 60 British on the streets of New York before war in Afghanistan or Iraq was even thought of.”

It is wrong to assert that war in Iraq hadn't been thought of in 2001. Several key members of the Bush administration had signed a letter in 1998 demanding exactly that. But Aaronovitch anyway immediately undercut his case by switching to Dr Martin Navias, who revealed that al Qaida's stated purpose was to drive US troops from the Arabian peninsula – troops that had been there since 1990, before any of his exemplary incidents. Furthermore, regardless of preexisting grievances, or whether Iraq was the primary cause of 7/7, the Iraq War is widely recognised by analysts as having exacerbated the Islamist terrorism problem that Blair claims to be fighting. If anybody who holds that view is an “apologist for terror”, then these include at a minimum the US and UK intelligence services, Chatham House, and a third of the UK population in the immediate aftermath.

Decentists get round this basic fact by exploiting the ambiguity of the word “understanding”. “Understanding in terms of justification is dangerous territory”, because according to Aaronovitch one might conclude that 7/7 was “our fault, or Tony Blair's”. Except he immediately draws from this, as Blair does, that “understanding” the London bombings in any sense is disallowed. To point out the obvious fact – that they were indeed linked to Iraq – is not to understand “in terms of justification”; it is to understand in terms of causes. This is what rational people do, and it has no connection with apologias for terrorism. Indeed, this principle is selectively accepted by decentists: according to them, the recent attacks on Lebanon could only be understood, and justified, by reference to Hizbollah actions before Israel began its bombing.

The Iraq War was right because some of its opponents are wrong. Bombing civilians is always wrong, but not when Israel does it. Our foreign policy has nothing to do with terrorism, but it will make us safer from it. The value of this documentary was in collecting together all the standard decentist positions. By doing so, Aaronovitch neatly illustrated their lack of coherence. That they make no sense is unsurprising, given that they are a rebadged selection of Republican talking points grouped according to whether they can be sold under the Left banner, however desperate the accompanying arguments.

Anti-Chomsky campaigns, and the lying liars who run them

2006-09-04T10:28:00.000Z

In view of Oliver Kamm’s enduring commitment to factual accuracy I sent him this email on 24^thAugust:

Mr Kamm,

I write to draw your attention to a number of factual errors and misrepresentations in your series of postings, “Chomsky Bamboozles on the Balkans”.

You misrepresented Nicholas Wheeler's book, “Saving Strangers”, by suggesting that on page 269 he meant 500 Kosovars of unspecified ethnicity were killed before the bombing, when he was plainly referring to ethnic Albanian Kosovars. This misrepresentation was only plausible because you left out the preceding sentence of Wheeler's book. That is to say, you apparently went out of your way to “omit the context that allows reasoned conclusions to be drawn”.

You misleadingly imply that Chomsky claimed Wheeler gave relative numbers of pre-bombing ethnic Serbian and Albanian casualties. Chomsky is quite explicit in “Hegemony or Survival” that he is relying on Wheeler for the 500 figure, not a relative estimate. “Talk about a straw man”.

You falsely suggest that what Knightley “really said” about the LM libel trial was confined to war photography generalities, and did not support what Chomsky claimed. In fact what Chomsky said corresponded closely with what Knightley concluded. You finish by referring to “barbed wire enclosing” Trnopolje, when according to Knightley that barbed wire was “symbolic” and did not confine anybody. The entire posting was based on, if not ignorance, a “shameless distortion”.

You misleadingly imply that Chomsky has habitually misattributed, or failed to source correctly, a quotation from Robin Cook regarding pre-bombing casualties in Kosovo. You base this implication on a single interview, yet you know that Chomsky correctly cited both the quotation source and the inquiry in “Hegemony or Survival” and “A New Generation Draws the Line” respectively. This is surely “deliberate misdirection designed to impress a personal following that evidences scant familiarity with the issues involved”.

You misleadingly imply that Chomsky is habitually silent about the Racak massacre, specifically drawing attention to his silence on this subject in “Failed States”. You do this when you demonstrably know that he discussed it in on page 56 of “Hegemony or Survival”, and you demonstrably know that this page was cited by the section of “Failed States” under discussion. You also know that he discussed Racak in (at least) two other books, one of which you purport to have reviewed. Your failure to mention these facts is patently an “egregious omission”.

These issues are further detailed in my blog at http://indecent-left.blogspot.com/2006/08/oliver-kamm-and-his-scholarly-scruples.html. I trust that you will be publishing a retraction, and an apology for these contraventions of your own scholarly standards.

Stuart A

I followed up on 28^th August:

Mr Kamm,

This is the second time I have written to you about this issue. In the intervening time you have treated the world to your ruminations on the Truman Doctrine, German literature and Salman Rushdie, but not an apology for your misleading and incorrect statements. Allow me, therefore, to reiterate the situation. (In order to save time I have taken your words of 20th June 2003 as a template.)

Your “Chomsky Bamboozles on the Balkans” series of postings contained several serious errors. Those who read those postings in good faith supposing them to be a reliable source of information about Chomsky have therefore been misled. They have so far received no indication from you that that is the case.

Having put false claims in the public domain, you do need to issue a correction. I undertake to do all I can to assist you by referring to this episode repeatedly and often in my blog, but I cannot be certain of reaching all who might have read your original postings.

Stuart A

Sadly no reply has been received. This silence stands in contrast to Kamm’s public reader responses on several occasions, and to his reaction when I emailed previously on a different matter.

Based on Kamm’s record, I had thought he might simply delete the articles. Those who read his output in 2003 might recall what he did when his misquotation of the New York Times was exposed. He silently deleted the posting and never spoke of it again. The traces are extant, as is the article itself in the Wayback Machine. He was apparently unable to bear the irony that a piece accusing Chomsky of misrepresenting the New York Times itself misrepresented the New York Times more seriously. The same irony applies, of course, to his clownish efforts described below.

Oliver Kamm and his Scholarly Scruples

2006-08-22T21:54:00.000Z

Oliver Kamm takes scholarly standards seriously. He is a stickler for correct handling of source material. There is no difficulty in finding, among his many ponderous denunciations, a consistent rhetorical front against sophistic interpretations and misrepresented citations.

A favoured target is Noam Chomsky. In recent years, Kamm has asserted that this “undeservedly influential writer on politics” is guilty of “dishonest handling of source material” that is “demonstrable and persistent”. He fails to adhere to “scholarly standards” — indeed, his political output is an “affront to the notion scholarship”.

So disgraceful are Chomsky’s tactics that Kamm has devoted, at a conservative count, seventy separate blog articles to the subject, along with an assortment of incidental jibes, with the consistent theme being Chomsky’s misrepresentations. These postings are largely of a piece with his identikit Amazon “reviews” and tireless newsgroup efforts to educate “the Professor’s undergraduate admirers” that Chomsky is “an ignorant, innumerate crank”. (The latter are chiefly distinguished by Kamm’s adoption of a peculiar pseudo-Wodehousian, blazer-jacketed style, only partially abandoned since: “There's nothing to stop you incriminating you further as an ignoramus, old bean...”)

So we can be in no doubt that Kamm takes scholarly probity seriously. Why, then, have several of his attacks on Chomsky exhibited, and indeed relied upon, the exact flaws that he decries in others?

The most recent example was pointed out by Steven Poole. In his posting, “Chomsky bamboozles on the Balkans III”, Kamm quotes a paragraph about Kosovo from pages 56-57 (note the numbers) of Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival:

“Nicholas Wheeler ... estimates that Serbs had killed 500 Albanians before the Nato bombing, implying that 1,500 had been killed by the KLA.” (pages 56-57)

Chomsky cites Wheeler’s book, Saving Strangers, in support of his 500 figure, having given the 2000 number earlier. Kamm denies Wheeler says 500 Albanians were killed before the bombing:

“On p. 269 he says: ‘It is estimated that some 500 Kosovars had been killed and 400,000 displaced in the year leading up to NATO's action, but the justification for intervention was that without it many more Albanians would have been killed and forcibly driven from their homes.’ Note the term Wheeler uses: he says 500 Kosovars (i.e. residents of Kosovo, both Serb and Albanian) were killed; he does not say or imply there were more Serb than Albanian casualties.” (Kamm’s emphasis)

Kamm has previously complained that “Chomsky goes out of his way to omit the context that allows reasoned conclusions to be drawn”, so how to understand what he has done here? With context re-inserted, Wheeler said this:

“The difficulty with this criticism [that the bombing accelerated Serbian ethnic cleansing] is that it relies on the assumption that, in the absence of NATO bombing, the Serbs would have ended their killings and forced expulsion of ethnic Albanians. It is estimated that some 500 Kosovars had been killed and 400,000 displaced in the year leading up to NATO's action, but the justification for intervention was that without it many more Albanians would have been killed and forcibly driven from their homes.”

That is, Wheeler was talking about killings by Serbs, not of “both ethnic Serb and Albanians”, but specifically ethnic Albanian Kosovars. Lest there be any doubt on this, Steven Poole gave a list of pages where Wheeler clearly means “Albanians” when he writes “Kosovars” (245, 258 and 284). As Poole says, on this count, Kamm is “plain wrong”.

On the second charge — that Wheeler does not specify the relative numbers of Serbian and Albanian deaths — Kamm is simply irrelevant, because Chomsky does not claim this of Wheeler. He is comparing Wheeler’s 500 figure with a separate 2000 figure — a fact clear from the surrounding discussion. Whether this is a valid comparison is a different matter, not addressed by Kamm.

This inept pedantry was preceded by an equally false prequel, about which I’ve already written. Here Kamm claimed Chomsky had misrepresented Phillip Knightley’s testimony regarding the Trnopolje camp, and an inmate there, Fikret Alic, pictured behind barbed wire. In an interview Chomsky suggested Knightley had “determined that it was probably the reporters who were behind the barb-wire, and the place was ugly, but it was a refugee camp”.

Not so, said Kamm, quoting as proof a pre-trial Guardian report carrying some general comments from Knightley about the general nature of war photography — no mention among them of refugee camps or barbed wire at all. He characterised this as “what Knightley really said about the case”.

Except it wasn’t. Knightley said more, as one would expect, given that he was a defence witness in a libel case hinging on the photograph in question. He confirmed that Trnopolje was probably partly a refugee camp, and that the footage “was misleading because it implied that they [the pictured inmates] were detained by the barbed wire”, which was “symbolic”.

In this case, if anyone’s “handling of source material is fundamentally untrustworthy” it is Kamm’s. He has expended 1427 words analysing a single point made during a wide-ranging interview, and is shown to have either a comically poor understanding of the material under discussion (even with the Internet to help, and Nick Cohen passing him references), or a simple lack of concern for the truth.

His penchant for microscopic analysis of interviews also led to his first “bamboozles on the Balkans” post. He quotes Chomsky in a New Statesman interview referring to a British parliamentary inquiry that “reached the astonishing conclusion that, until January 1999, most of the crimes committed in Kosovo were attributed to the KLA guerrillas.”

Kamm then makes a big play of investigating which “unnamed parliamentary inquiry” Chomsky is citing. “I believe I have found what Chomsky is referring to,” he announces. It was, he reveals, a quotation of Robin Cook in a Defence Select Committee report.

But that wasn't all:

“[W]hat makes Chomsky's use of this quotation disgraceful and dishonest is that, as well as attributing it to the inquiry rather than the Foreign Secretary, he omits what it refers to and why it was said.”

He goes on to flail Chomsky for only implicitly referring to the Racak massacre as a “single exception”:

“It is, to say the least, highly relevant ... to the reckoning of moral culpability by the protagonists in the conflict, and to the reasons that Nato resolved upon a bombing campaign to repulse Serb aggression.”

Consequently, Kamm concludes, he “leaves it out, the better to misrepresent his material and prettify his political record.”

The reader comes away with the impression that Chomsky has consistently misrepresented the Defence Select Committee report and remained quiet about the Racak massacre — Chomsky makes reference to this inquiry, we are informed, “quite often”. Only through the sedulous detective work of Oliver Kamm was the truth brought to light.

But the strange thing is, Kamm didn't need to conduct any extensive researches to find a more precise and detailed statement of Chomsky's position on the report. All he needed to do was read the rest of page 56 of Hegemony or Survival, where both his complaints are answered.

First, Chomsky quite explicitly sources the statement to Robin Cook:

“A subsequent parliamentary inquiry revealed the Foreign Secretary Robin Cook had told the House on January 18 that the KLA had “committed more breaches of the ceasefire, and until this weekend were responsible for more deaths than the [Yugoslav] security forces.”

Then he addresses the Racak massacre in the next sentence:

“Robertson and Cook are specifically referring to a massacre carried out by the security forces at Racak on January 15, in which forty-five people were reported killed.”

Chomsky goes on to explain why Racak was not a key justification for bombing, as Kamm implies, because “Western documentation reveals no notable change in the distribution of violence after Racak”, among other reasons. (The bombing began over two months after the 15^th January Racak massacre and crucially after the Rambouillet conference.)

There is little evidence Chomsky was being deliberately silent about Racak in the New Statesman interview. It isn't even certain he was silent, given the ellipsis before his mention of a “single exception”. But regardless, it was an interview, and inevitably limited in detail. The only fair thing to do, when considering why Chomsky didn't mention something in an interview, is to consult his written work, which shows that he has not shied from discussing what Kamm says he's trying to conceal.

By contrast, it is quite clear that Kamm has remained silent on crucial context, and in a distinctly more discreditable fashion. He must know that Chomsky has discussed the Racak massacre in print because that discussion appeared on a page of Hegemony or Survival that he quoted. It is also discussed in earlier books, A New Generation Draws the Line and The New Military Humanism, with which Kamm is familiar if he was correct in his 2005 boast that he believed he had read all Chomsky's political books, and which are cited in the endnote immediately following the one he quotes from Failed States. Nor is it hard to find interviews and articles in which Chomsky mentions Racak.

But instead of mentioning these “to say the least, highly relevant” facts, Kamm alerts his readers to silence on Racak in Failed States in his third “bamboozles on the Balkans” posting. As discussed, the third posting's primary theme was an erroneous allegation about Wheeler's book, raised in the context of Chomsky's discussion of Kosovo. Kamm knows that the section of Failed States in question cites page 56 of Hegemony or Survival, because he quotes the citation. And he knows that on page 56 of Hegemony or Survival there is a discussion of Racak. Yet he “leaves it out, the better to misrepresent his material”.

Is it fair to quote Kamm now and say that “[t]he further you penetrate, the greater are the evasions, short cuts and falsehoods”? I haven't even mentioned here his bizarre defence of an interview, not on the grounds that the factual claims it made were correct (they weren't), but that its author was “entitled” to her “interpretation”. Nor have I gone into his persistently extravagant accusations regarding Chomsky's quoting of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's memoirs.

How does one evaluate such a collection of distorted analyses? Are they all just slips? Is Kamm, nonetheless, a fair commentator on Chomsky? Let's consult, once again, Oliver Kamm, defender of scholarly scruple:

“When the 'errors' are all in the same direction... then something more is involved.”

More Successful By The Day

2006-07-31T11:54:00.000Z

Last year, Bush supporters found it convenient to paint a selection of largely unrelated events as somehow resulting from George Bush's glorious strategic vision for the Middle East. Behind those squinting eyes, we were informed, was a grand plan that was only beginning to unfold.

Since it's always difficult to argue the case for the Iraq invasion while actually looking at the chaos it caused there, it's useful to be able to point to something more positive. Almost anything will do, which is why we've heard that toppling Saddam resulted in, variously, the end of Pakistani nuclear proliferation, the "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine, Libya giving up on its WMD, Mubarak's multi-party elections, Saudi Arabia's municipal elections -- and, perhaps most popular of all, the expulsion of Syria's puppet government from Lebanon.

This last was a great testament to the soundness of the Bush strategy, we were told. Even though the obvious cause was the assassination of Hariri, it was actually down to George Bush's fetish for democracy. Melanie Phillips, for instance, detected that the anti-Syrian demonstrations were sparked by a presidential pronouncement:

"Soon after Hariri’s assassination, President Bush declared:

‘We want that democracy in Lebanon succeed, and we know it cannot succeed so long as she is occupied by a foreign power, and that power is Syria.’

The Lebanese, paying close attention, took to the streets and demanded Syrian withdrawal."

This being the case, she castigated David Hirst for his "exemplary omission" of enlightened Washington policy from his analysis of the situation.

Even keener than her to sell the Lebanon success story was Stephen Pollard. As soon as the Karami government stepped down he knew whom to thank for the surge of democratic feeling. It was "real man of peace", George Bush:

"[T]oday's resignation of the Lebanese Syrian quisling government is but the latest demonstration of something which the Bush-hating fanatics (by which I mean the BBC and the rest of bien pensant opinion) will continue to ignore whatever the evidence: that Bush's foreign policy is not merely wise, but grows demonstrably more successful by the day."

The explanation was clear:

"None of this happened by accident. It happened as a result of one common factor: the exercise of American power in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the consequent fear amongst terror-supporting regimes that they too would go the way of him and it."

So America's "wise" and "successful" democracy spreading policy was the direct cause of regime change in Lebanon -- leading, within months, to the Siniora government now in power. In 2005 we were instructed to congratulate Bush for this feat.

Now it turns out this wonderful democratic government, arising out of "fear amongst terror-supporting regimes" instilled by Bush's activities, is in fact an Israel-hating, terror-supporting regime unwilling, rather than unable, to rein in Hezbollah. The president remains disgracefully attached to Hezbollah. Presumably it's no longer evidence that Bush's foreign policy "grows demonstrably more successful by the day".

Expect continuing demonisation of the Lebanese government, a total silence on last year's extravagant claims that Lebanon vindicated the Bush doctrine, and a search for some new ex post facto justification for the Iraq invasion.

Kamm's Defence

2006-07-29T13:16:00.000Z

A commenter Owen has this to say about the Kamm post below:

Pick an argument with Kamm about the perhaps cavalier way in which he summarises arguments, but credit him for the essential, which is that he refuses to condone obfuscation of the truth, which is what LM, Deichmann and Johnstone are all about. If Chomsky is unable to take an unambiguous stance on the issue of their mendacity his reputation deserves to live with the consequences.

While much of Owen's comment is too vague to be answered, his attempt to suggest that, in spite of what I wrote, Kamm still has some sort of case against Chomsky regarding Trnopolje warrants a response.

Although Owen has not disputed any part of my argument that Kamm falsely accused Chomsky of misrepresenting Knightley's views, he attempts to brush off Kamm’s own misrepresentation as “perhaps cavalier” summarizing.

I accuse Kamm of more than this, because his case derives entirely from what he left out of Knightley’s testimony: he didn’t provide a summary at all. If he had any knowledge of what Knightley said – and he certainly made a pretence of this – he would have known that the Guardian report he cites does not begin to encompass what Knightley “really said about the case”. Why did Kamm think LM would call a defence witness to lecture the court on the Spanish Civil War?

Charitably assuming Kamm to be merely ignorant, his self-righteous pronouncement about he who “obfuscates and denies the crimes at Trnopolje” is nonetheless baseless. Given this, I find Owen's comment hard to fathom.

Firstly, Kamm’s own performance here entails “obfuscation of the truth”, regardless of his alleged refusal to condone it elsewhere. Until this is disputed, Kamm is not in a position to be an exemplar of historical accuracy. As I have pointed out, he is an obsessive pursuer of Chomsky, and this is only one of a stream of questionable allegations he’s levelled.

Secondly, I have yet to see evidence that Deichmann did substantively misrepresent the truth at Trnopolje. LM lost the case because they were unable to show that ITN had deliberately misrepresented conditions at Trnopolje as being like a concentration camp. There was little dispute that the coverage had been misleading, and that the barbed wire did not serve the purpose that reports implied. The judge said this:

“Clearly Ian Williams and Penny Marshall and their TV team were mistaken in thinking they [the TV crew] were not enclosed by the old barbed wire fence. But does it matter?”

That is, he essentially accepted what Knightley said, and what Chomsky mentioned in the interview. If Kamm had had a passing familiarity with the case he would have known this.

The unqualified accusations of “obfuscation of the truth” are impossible to address because they have no specific content. Who denied what? And what does that have to do with Chomsky? Johnstone, of course, has nothing at all to do with this case.

Double Standards

2006-07-28T17:25:00.000Z

Stephen Pollard doesn't like double standards. Nor does he like racism. And he's most exercised about anti-Semitism, most recently detecting it in a Martin Rowson cartoon that had the Star of David in it. What to make of his recent sidesplitter then?

Even the most dedicated regurgitator of Republican newsletters needs a break. And Stephen gets his entirely non-racist kicks from "light relief" fantasising about urinating in Arabs' drinks. Or, that's how it seems. In his words, it's "up to those who have seen it to judge for themselves".

The Blair Manifesto

2006-07-17T12:24:00.000Z

Entertaining that Harry's Place linked to this interview at FrontPage magazine.

Geras and Cohen presumably thought their now extensive history of fawning to the right would secure an easy ride. Sadly, Horowitz and co. felt unable to accept even the slightest measure of decency in these decentists, as long as they continued to identify themselves with the Left.

This makes Harry's Place happy because, as with the BNP, it gives them something, anything, to point to in their struggle to convince anybody that they're left-wing:

“For all that those associated with projects like HP, or supportive of the ideals of the Euston Manifesto, and so on, get accused, by some of being 'right wing' or 'having betrayed the left', etc, etc, ad infinitum, it's interesting to note the complete lack of comprehension that there can be any such thing as a 'decent left' on the part of the FrontPagers.”

Unfortunately FrontPage's fixation on Pol Pot gave Geras and Cohen an opportunity to largely evade the one question they have never properly answered about the Euston Manifesto. As Horowitz said:

“If you had Blair social democrats in mind in writing the Manifesto, you would hardly need a manifesto. You would just be Blair Laborites. And if this is the case, Blair has already provided all the manifesto you need.”

The Manifesto writers always claim to be sticking up for an underrepresented view on the nominal left, ignoring the fact that their views are held by the bulk of the parliamentary Labour party and the Prime Minister (not to mention practically everybody else in parliament, and the bulk of the media).

All we get in response is this, from Geras (Cohen says nothing):

“I'm not a Blair Labourite, to answer your direct question with a direct answer, because I'm a socialist and Tony Blair isn't.”

That is, he draws the distinction personally, wisely ignoring the Manifesto entirely – wisely, because the Manifesto isn't socialist. If Geras believes in the redistribution of wealth, or the nationalisation of industry, or anything else identifiably socialist, he certainly doesn't appear moved to mention them in his blog. But even if he did hold these beliefs, it would have no relevance to his absurd Manifesto, which says nothing meaningful on economic policy. All it contains are platitudes that could have been copied from the first draft of a Blair conference speech:

“The benefits of large-scale development through the expansion of global trade ought to be distributed as widely as possible in order to serve the social and economic interests of workers, farmers and consumers in all countries. Globalization must mean global social integration and a commitment to social justice.

Oh, and they're fans of “Make Poverty History” just like Tony and Bob Geldof.

If the distinction that Geras draws between himself and Blair is limited to the Socialist tag – and he raises nothing else – then it seems clear there is no difference at all between Blairism and the Euston Manifesto. That's probably why, despite widespread media coverage, it has been such an abject failure.

Kamm's Bamboozling

2006-06-22T10:52:00.000Z

More news from the world of Kamm, with the latest phase in his obsessive anti-Chomsky campaign.

Long-term Kamm watchers will recall that well before he got space in the The Times, and even before his chief occupation was spewing entirely predictable “reviews” of Chomsky's books into Amazon's servers, he was trolling Usenet on the same subject.

Since 1998 he's been searching for new ways to repeat the same discredited charges against his great enemy, so it's no surprise that he joyously seized on Emma Brockes's “perceptive” interview with Chomsky last October. To complement his endlessly regurgitated Faurisson and Khmer Rouge smears, he now had a new one: Chomsky was an apologist for Serbian atrocities in former Yugoslavia.

Having precipitately grabbed at another dubious stick with which to beat Chomsky, Kamm was stuck defending a false and defamatory interview. As detailed previously, his superficial, long-winded complaint about the interview's withdrawal, co-signed with fellow Blair fans Aaronovitch and Wheen, did not even allege to support Kamm's gloss. It did not dispute that Brockes had misattributed a quotation to Chomsky. It quoted nothing on Bosnia by Chomsky. All they'd managed was a forlorn suggestion that Brockes was “entitled” to her “interpretation” of Diane Johnstone's work (which they ineptly attempted to suggest was indicative of Chomsky's own views).

But Kamm can't let it go. He continues to maintain that he was right to praise Brockes's interview. It was all down to inadequate appellate facilities at the newspaper, you see. The Guardian's refusal to look at more than procedure in its appeal process left him with the nebulous case that, had he not been denied a substantive appeal by a technicality, he would somehow have won out with his dull, pedantic list of half-accusations. He naturally took refuge in this haziness.

As part of the effort to cover for his error he continues to fling out whatever Bosnia-related slurs he can manage. The new allegation is that Chomsky misrepresented Phillip Knightley in a bid to “bamboozle on the Balkans”. Kamm quotes Chomsky in an earlier interview talking about how Knightley investigated a photograph at issue in the Living Marxism/ITN libel trial – a picture of an emaciated man, Fikret Alic, behind barbed wire at Trnopolje:

“He did a detailed analysis of it. And he determined that it was probably the reporters who were behind the barb-wire, and the place was ugly, but it was a refugee camp, I mean, people could leave if they wanted and, near the thin man was a fat man and so on, well and there was one tiny newspaper in England, probably three people, called LM which ran a critique of this, and the British (who haven't a slightest concept of freedom of speech, that is a total fraud)… a major corporation, ITN, a big media corporation had publicized this, so the corporation sued the tiny newspaper for [libel].”

This characterisation of Knightley's views is false, according to Kamm, because it isn't supported by a Guardian report Nick Cohen told him about – a report that he appears to think reveals “what Knightley really said about the case”. Its summary of Knightley's views refers more to the Spanish Civil War than Bosnia, and Kamm's precis is accurate: Knightley is seen only arguing that “it's dangerous for people to form their opinions about a war from a single image”.

On the strength of this, Kamm delivers a grave pronouncement:

“According to Chomsky's telling of this case for the defence, Knightley argued something rather different: that "it was probably the reporters who were behind the barb-wire", and not Fikret Alic and the other victims. From being a defence witness for LM in a libel case brought by ITN, Knightley has been miraculously transmuted into a supporter of precisely the revisionist case that LM mounted in accusing ITN of trickery.” (Kamm's emphasis)

The only problem is that the article he quotes was not “the case for the defence”. Kamm is promoting a minimal, partial, pretrial summary of Knightley's views as encompassing the entirety of what he said. Firstly, a pretrial newspaper report can hardly be credible evidence on which to found his accusations. Why would anybody believe Chomsky must have invented something just because it didn't appear in a single newspaper report?

As it is, Kamm is wrong. Knightley did not confine himself to the generalities that the Guardian reported. In response to Brockes's interview, Alexander Cockburn quoted Knightley's testimony at length, as Kamm would have found if he'd been capable of conducting a Google search. Among other things, Knightley said this:

“The most likely explanation is that Trnopolje was both a refugee camp and a detention camp--there were at least two different groups of people there--and that this is what has confused the issue. Refugees had come there of their own free will and could leave at any time. But there were also Bosnian Muslims like Fikret Alic who had been transferred there from other camps, who were awaiting identification and processing, and who were not free to leave

“But even this group was not confined by barbed wire. The out-takes show them in the main camp, outside the agricultural compound, and the main camp was not surrounded with barbed wire, as the War Crimes Tribunal agrees, but by a low chain-mail fence to keep schoolchildren off the road. As well, the barbed wire fence was no deterrent to anyone determined to escape because it was poorly constructed with wide gaps. What confined the Bosnians at Trnopolje, the War Crimes Tribunal says, was the presence of armed Serbian guards. So ITN was right in that the men in the film were detained in Trnopolje, but the image used to illustrate that was misleading because it implied that they were detained by the barbed wire. The barbed wire turns out to be only symbolic.

“Were all the inmates starving? No. Fikret Alic was an exception. Even in Marshall's report other men, apparently well-fed, can be seen, and the out-takes reveal at least one man with a paunch hanging over his belt. Phil Davison, a highly-respected correspondent who covered the war from both sides for The Independent says, "Things had gone slightly quiet. Suddenly there were these death camps/concentration camps stories. They were an exaggeration. I'm not excusing the Serbs but don't forget that there was a blockade on Serbia at the time and there not a lot of food around for anyone, Serbs included.”

If we believe him, the “symbolic” barbed wire was not confining anybody, and Chomsky could indeed point to Knightley's opinion when suggesting “it was probably the reporters who were behind the barb-wire". Kamm did not examine what Knightley “really said” at all.

Of course, the feebleness of Kamm's evidence is never a restraint on his pomposity. He describes Chomsky's accusation of “tacit acquiescence to horrendous crimes” in these terms:

“Coming from a man who obfuscates and denies the crimes at Trnopolje, who believes the barbed wire enclosing the camp was a piece of Western media trickery, this type of accusation is quite some compliment”.

Yet according to the same Knightley whom Kamm recruits in his campaign against Chomsky, there was no wire “enclosing the camp”, and this was accepted by the War Crimes Tribunal. Kamm is leaning on a witness whose testimony demolishes his own case, and most particularly this final surge of bumptiousness. He accuses Chomsky of misrepresenting evidence based, not on facts, but at best his own ignorance. It is hard to believe he didn't know better, if he looked at all at what Knightley said – surely something worth doing in a posting claiming this was misrepresented.

He tells us “[i]t is a reasonable bet that viewers of Serbian television, still less readers of the 'Chomsky info' site, will not trouble to check Chomsky's empirical claims, which is why it's important that others do.”

This after demonstrating his total lack of ability, or honesty, or both, on this count.

All of which is why Kamm's words apply most appropriately to himself:

“Every claim he makes, every reference he cites, needs to be checked independently. The further you penetrate, the greater are the evasions, short cuts and falsehoods, which form an interlocking structure.”

Hitchens on the case

2006-06-09T15:25:00.000Z

While it's sometimes depressing, it's also frequently amusing to watch Hitchens complete his transformation into a Bushite hack. The Slate columns have always provided rich amusement for those in the reality-based community, but his musings on the death of al Zarqawi are a particularly fine example.

We have the usual swipes at the anti-war movement (this time it's Nick Berg's father), designed to suggest that anyone opposing the Hitchens stance is a “defeatist” or “pacifist”. But alongside this he feels compelled to attack those suggesting al Zarqawi was a less important figure than Bush apologists, scraping around for good news, are keen to suggest. Prominent among these is Mary Weaver, whose article in the Atlantic Monthly Hitchens clearly drew on for the various affectations of deep knowledge sprinkled through his piece.

After a vague introductory paragraph congratulating the Americans on their putative “black propaganda”, and the obligatory sniping at MoveOn, we progress to something more substantive, if less truthful. He characterises Weaver's measured piece as suggesting al Zarqawi was “an American creation”, which is something she doesn't do. She makes plain, with detailed background, that he became a jihadist primarily under Jordanian and Afghan influences well before “Operation Enduring Freedom”. What she does say, the factual basis of which Hitchens doesn't trouble to dispute, is that once al Zarqawi was operating in Iraq the US quite probably did inflate his importance. In support of this she cites Jordanian, Israeli and Western intelligence assessments, alongside Washington Post reports of “Pentagon documents that detailed a U.S. military propaganda campaign to inflate al-Zarqawi’s importance”.

While not actually disputing any of this, Hitchens makes the at best feeble, at worst incoherent, point that the article “seems to undermine its own prominence by suggesting that, in addition to that, al Zarqawi wasn't all that important.” Thus, Hitchens's only argument that perhaps al Zarqawi was important was the judgment of the Atlantic Monthly's editor in his cover choice – a judgment that was, in any case, hardly independent of the US government's spin (and also, one might point out, possibly also not independent of Hitchens's own input as a contributing editor of the magazine).

Having erected this most rickety of platforms for criticism, we then segue onto a sequence of question begging generalities and unsubstantiated allegations regarding al Zarqawi's activities:

“Not so fast. Zarqawi contributed enormously to the wrecking of Iraq's experiment in democratic federalism.”

We can't assume this if, as has been suggested, Zarqawi was primarily a figurehead rather than a mastermind for Sunni insurgents. Nor is there any meaning in the revelation that he “was able to help ensure that the Iraqi people did not have one single day of respite between 35 years of war and fascism”. “[H]elp ensure”? So did every other suicide bomber and AK47 firer, not to mention Saddam Hussein and both George Bushes.

It does seem probable that he instigated the bombing of the U.N. headquarters and the assassination of Ayatollah Hakim. But Hitchens offers no reason why, given widespread doubt, anybody should take as necessarily genuine the allegedly intercepted communication declaring “a jihad against the Shiite population in general”. Even if it were genuine, it would hardly establish him as the pivotal figure Hitchens claims unless that declaration had widespread influence – a dubious proposition, given the split on that policy within al Qaida, and the serious possibility that he was betrayed precisely because there was disagreement among Sunni jihadists. (In the first paragraph Hitchens enthuses that he might have been betrayed by people “close to him”. If true, this would seem to cut against the idea that his death would necessarily lead to the diminution of the insurgency).

After gleefully describing al Zarqawi as a “semi-literate goon”, apparently forgetting that this background hardly bolsters his credentials as a terrorist mastermind, Hitchens goes on to mock as kneejerk purveyers of cliche the people discounting the alleged role of al Zarqawi as bin Laden's envoy to Saddam Hussein (they find the questions “easy”, as opposed to Hitchens, who is trying so much harder). Against the strong evidence in Weaver's article and elsewhere, he amasses... al Zarqawi's presence in Kurdish controlled Iraq – that is, the same nonsensical connection Colin Powell tried to make between al Ansar al-Islam in Kurdistan, and Saddam Hussein's regime further South. “I think that (for once) Colin Powell was on to something,” says Hitchens of Powell's U.N. speech, where among other things he mistakenly claimed al Zarqawi was Palestinian and had received medical treatment in Baghdad.

Bereft of actual evidence to establish the connection, Hitchens instead struts into the domain of pure speculation. The clincher is that al Zarqawi managed to enter the Sunni triangle while Hussein was still ruler:

“One might add that Iraq under Saddam was not an easy country to enter or to leave, and that no decision on who was allowed in would be taken by a junior officer.”

The aim is to imply that Hussein must himself have permitted al Zarqawi to enter Iraq and set up camp, even though through much of this period Hussein didn't believe there would be a war and was being pressured over allegations that he was a sponsor of terrorism (and, as Weaver says, al Zarqawi “based himself primarily in Iran”). In these personal border guard duties Hussein was allying himself not only with Sunni extremists who hated him, but with his historic Shiite enemy. How else to explain Weaver's selectively ignored statement that al Zarqawi's “links had been not to Iraq but to Iran”?

After these wild extrapolations we return to insinuation grounded in Powell's widely discredited U.N. speech. “Furthermore,” Detective Hitchens tells us, “the Zarqawi elements appear to have found it their duty to join with the Ansar al-Islam splinter group in Kurdistan, which for some reason thought it was the highest duty of jihad to murder Saddam Hussein's main enemies.” This is presumably a reference to their attacks on Kurds, but naturally Hitchens again forgets that Ansar al-Islam received artillery support not from Iraq, but Iran. “But perhaps I have a suspicious mind,” says Hitchens, invoking the wrong adjective for his sozzled meanderings.

What other circumstantial ambiguities and figments of wishful thinking can he round up? Well, there are the explosives used in the Canal Hotel Bombing. “That bomb at the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, for example, was no improvised explosive device.” Clouseau pounces: “It was a huge charge of military-grade ordnance. Are we to believe that a newly arrived Bedouin Jordanian thug could so swiftly have scraped acquaintance with senior-level former Baathists?”

Well, we can believe a well-funded terrorist who'd been in and out of Iraq multiple times in the preceding year according to Weaver (and according to Hitchens, who was just moments ago documenting al Zarqawi's lengthy pre-war stay in Iraq), managed to collect together the old munitions necessary from an unpoliced country full of discarded weaponry. But “acquaintance with senior-level former Baathists”? That's just a Hitchens invention, unless one believes every Improvised Explosive Device made from an old shell was necessarily constructed by one of Saddam's friends.

Hitchens is right that the al Askari mosque bombing was conducted in military style, but that occurred in February 2006 – surely enough time, even if we swallowed the rest and ignored the lack of clear evidence linking al Zarqawi to the act, to accept that he could have forged an alliance with Baathists (not to mention that the military nature of the operation to which Hitchens excitedly points diminishes the likelihood of al Zarqawi's direct involvement).

Truly staggering is Hitchens's sudden lurch from emphasising al Zarqawi's Baathist connections to considering what's “[m]ost fascinating of all”: “the suggestion that Zarqawi was all along receiving help from the mullahs in Iran”. It's not fascinating because it almost certainly gives the lie, if true, to everything he's previously said. And it's not fascinating because the case is stronger for this link than the one he went to so much effort promoting.

It's only fascinating because Hitchens can use it to lay into Bush's next target: “we have the Shiite fundamentalists in Iran directly sponsoring the murderer of their co-religionists in Iraq”. Bizarre though the switch around is, it's needed to get two-for-one value from al Zarqawi's death: Bush's policy towards both Iraq and Iran can be justified because maybe both evil regimes were helping him, even though both of these occurring together is deeply unlikely.

“If we had withdrawn from Iraq already, as the "peace" movement has been demanding, then one of the most revolting criminals of all time would have been able to claim that he forced us to do it,” concludes Hitchens.

That's true, but it's also true that most of his revolting criminality – the beheadings, the U.N. bombing, and so on, would never have happened if America hadn't invaded Iraq. It's also entirely possible that, had the Americans withdrawn before now and removed their troops as a focus of resentment, al Zarqawi would have been dealt with by fellow Iraqis disgusted by his actions. But anyway, at least we got a new excuse to invade Iran.

Stop Press! Stephen Pollard's abandoned the left

2006-04-19T13:26:00.000Z

Perhaps the strangest reaction to the preposterous Euston Manifesto is that of Stephen Pollard. In what he portrays as a separate splintering from the left, Pollard yesterday announced the “Maida Vale Manifesto”. The tone and trajectory are predictable from the first two lines:

“We the undersigned have always thought of ourselves as being on the Left. We have held it as axiomatic that the Left believed in fighting tyranny, liberating the oppressed, and spreading wealth and power.”

As you'd expect, he goes on to berate “leftists” for their morally degenerate reaction to September 11^th and alliances with “Islamists”. Although he concedes that “[t]here are many decent people on the Left”, he concludes that “[t]heoretical arguments about what is or is not a proper left-wing position are now meaningless” and “[t]he Left, in any recognisable form, is now the enemy.”

It's interesting that, in spite of wishing the Eustonites luck, he views their much trumpeted document as “meaningless” (and presumably them as the enemy, if he buys their self-description). But what I find truly astonishing is his attempt to pretend that he ever was on the left. Of course, Harry's Place contributors, Oliver Kamm, Norman Geras, and many others, have also claimed a place there in the face of all evidence, but how were we to know Pollard even pretended to be left-wing?

The Euston Manifesto takes an explicitly undecided stance on economic questions, with a vaguely Blairite wave towards “economic equality” and “development-as-freedom”. Generally, decentists like to maintain a facade of socialist leanings by avoiding discussion of the subject. But Pollard has never, as far as I'm aware, troubled to conceal his love of tax cuts, private healthcare, etc. In other words his position has long been indistinguishable from assorted small-government conservatives on both domestic and foreign policy, whereas the Euston signatories like to maintain a convenient haziness on the former.

Today's rant in the Times confirms Pollard's generalised dislike of the public sector. Michael Heseltine's description of it as “a bloated, badly run, inefficient impost on the taxpayers’ back” was not a caricature, as Heseltine intended, but “wholly accurate”, we learn. And it would be wrong to think this was a recent trend, or even a shift in economic outlook accompanying his dislike of alleged al Qaida apologists: way back in January 2001 he was complaining to Wall Street Journal Europe readers of Conservative timidity towards attacking the NHS.

For at least five years, Pollard has pursued an aggressively pro-Israel, pro-US foreign policy, campaigned against the NHS, and advocated spending public money on private school vouchers. He's moaned about high taxes, and retailed (and written) Adam Smith Institute propaganda. In that time he's never identified with a recognisably left-wing position. Yet, apparently on the strength of once being a Blairite Labour Party researcher, he claims to have only just broken from the left.

The only innovation in the Maida Vale Manifesto, then, is the admission that he now views the term “left-wing” as “meaningless” -- which it plainly is in his hands.

Just the Norm

2006-04-18T15:56:00.000Z

Much as it pains me to do anything that might even slightly increase the triumphalist arm-waving accompanying the launch of the “Euston Manifesto”, it's simply too tempting a target (unlike, for instance, the comparably self-important and inane “Unite Against Terror” initiative). Like all bar room soliloquys, it's long and tedious, so I'll confine myself to making a few points.

Broadly speaking, the manifesto is a statement of the obvious, larded with unsubtle jabs at political opponents who are, as ever for the decentist “left”, left-wing: nobody on the right is worth criticising. So we're for “democracy” and against “tyranny”; we want “human rights for all” and “equality”; we oppose “racism”. We like “critical openness” and “freedom of ideas” (and, oddly, Linux). So far, so dull.

Strangely, though, the manifesto also elevates to a principle “opposing anti-Americanism”:

“That US foreign policy has often opposed progressive movements and governments and supported regressive and authoritarian ones does not justify generalized prejudice against either the country or its people.”

What do they mean by “country”? If it doesn't mean “people”, it seems to mean “government”. The US's extraordinary history of supporting dictators, then, is axiomatically excluded from the discussion. To draw any lessons from it would be to exhibit “generalized prejudice”.

Elsewhere, under innocuous headings, we see the usual Harry's Place jibes re-draped as high-minded scruples. “No apology for tyranny,” they declare in Principle 2, when they mean “we don't like George Galloway”. They decline, they inform us, “to make excuses for... reactionary regimes”, forgetting in their rush to stick it to Respect that they regularly make excuses for George Bush.

“Human rights for all,” the Eustonites shout, but only so they can moan of “double standards” underpinning attempts to hold Bush accountable for Abu Ghraib. In the “elaboration” on this subject, Guantanamo, etc. are “roundly condemned” in the preamble to a near-identical gripe about people trying to hold democracies to higher standards than dictators (how dare they!).

In principle 8 they're “Against racism”. Who wouldn't be? Except that the racism they highlight most specifically (leaving aside the cancer of anti-Americanism) is “prejudice against the Jewish people behind the formula 'anti-Zionism'”. It's a fairly clear warning to those taking Principle 7's purported even-handedness on Palestine too seriously: get too anti-Zionist and you'll be suspect.

They're in favour of “critical openness” and “[h]istorical truth”, but these are just openers for insinuations of holocaust denial, Stalinism, etc. among their opponents.

Nowhere do they address the catastrophic increase in death rates in Iraq since the invasion, the bombing casualties, the shooting victims – i.e. everything that shows that even by the same standard as dictators they've actually made things worse there if human suffering has any relevance. Nor do they apparently care, for all their vaunted commitment to democracy, that most Iraqis want US troops out.

Even on its own terms it isn't a new manifesto for the left, because the only novel elements are not principles, or commitments, but simply over-familiar and weightless complaints about political opponents. “Millions”, the second elaboration solemnly informs us, “live in terrible poverty.” You don't say. “We repudiate the way of thinking according to which the events of September 11, 2001 were America's deserved comeuppance, or 'understandable' in the light of legitimate grievances resulting from US foreign policy,” we hear, as the manifesto switches from Oxfam Press Release to Hitchens-lite. That's slightly newer, but it's still a straw man dating from 2001.

Alongside all this, perhaps the strangest tack is the attempt to pretend that the Euston group in some way incorporates the principles of some who opposed the Iraq War. Even though the defining, the creating, issue for decentists as a group was this war, they step back from suggesting that supporting it is crucial. This appears to be an attempt, like so many others, to suggest that their pro-war fervour derives from some deep-seated liberal creed rather than an ever-changing collection of debating points.

But if this is so, if you can oppose “the justification for the [Iraq War]” and still be a decentist, what is the point of the whole thing? Do all these highfalutin principles funnel into nothing more than loud support for Iranian bus drivers? Here the manifesto descends into incoherence, because Eustonites believe Saddam's overthrow was “a liberation of the Iraqi people”, and you have to be in favour of liberation if you sign up. (In practice, the aim seems to be to foreclose fundamental criticism in favour of Andrew Sullivan-style, “sack Rumsfeld” fault-finding, but the language is too vague to be sure.)

So what do they stand for? Well as far as we know, they're self-described leftists who rank Linux and combating the scourge of “anti-Americanism” alongside “equality” as founding principles – surely a minority group.

He can't help it

2006-04-12T16:03:00.000Z

I nominate this Harry's Place posting for a special “blame everything anti-war commentators say on racism and naive determinism so we can pretend we're more progressive than them” prize.

Simon Jenkins, you see, ended his column today with the comment:

If ever there was a regime not to goad into seeking nuclear weapons it is Iran. Yet that is precisely what British and American policy is doing. It is completely nuts.

after making the point that “[e]very sabre rattle in Washington must be music to Ahmadinejad's ear”, because it threatened to “heighten nationalist fervour and increase hatred of the west”. This sentiment was paraphrased in a subheading that drew Harry's Place ire.

Marcus sees this as “patronising, infantalising [sic] guff” because it suggests, he claims, that “Muslims have no free will”.

How he reaches this conclusion is perhaps worth considering. He is apparently suggesting that Jenkins's analysis derives from a strange and unstated belief that, on account of being Muslim, Ahmadinejad et al. are incapable of independent action. Somehow Marcus feels able to discard out of hand the idea that Jenkins could simply be applying geopolitical logic, and instead leaps to his own peculiar conclusion.

The reason, of course, is that Harry's Place and other decentists frequently need to divorce cause from effect, because otherwise they might have to explain how, for example, Britain got safer after the Iraq invasion increased terrorist sympathies and activity. In the same way, they're now trying to defend the US's belligerent Iran policy. They also like to pretend that opposition to Western interventionism is racist, because that's one of the few ways they can lay claim to being on the left. Here we have a succinct combination of the two.

Foam at the mouth

2006-04-12T10:33:00.000Z

Since Stephen Pollard unrepentantly posts trivialities to his blog, I feel entitled to point out the mysterious fate of his latest four hundred words, a perspiring after dinner speech apparently designed to land the portly one a restaurant reviewing sinecure:

I am lucky enough to have eaten in Restaurant's Top Three, and many others beside. I could tell you that the meal at The French Laundry in California was the most perfect of all I have ever eaten, that the butter and greens alone at Arpege in Paris made the €328 cost worth it, and that The Fat Duck far exceeded my already over the top expectations.

Oh and he will tell us. He also informed Pollard watchers yesterday that this gourmandising paean was to appear in The Times, presumably, given its length and Pollard's record, in the ever-forgiving Blusterer column. But tragically two other pieces have appeared since then in that space, and there's no sign of it anywhere else. Somehow the comment editor felt a barely coherent Tim Luckhurst rant about immigrant marriages, and an intemperate eruption regarding Dr Who from Leo McKinstry, were more important.

It's a poor substitute, but until The Times gets desperate fans can enjoy a further sampling of that between-mouthfuls eulogy here:

The ‘Tierra 2005’consisted of a polystyrene box, with a mound of parmesan foam inside. It was as full of flavour as any meat. To add to it I was given a bag of "raspberry muesli". The combination was breathtaking.

One is reminded of Pollard's strange assertion in the Guardian that opera is better than theatre because, well... because it's got music in it, and it's, um, better. The breathless argument by assertion style is probably better suited to generic Brown vs. Blair pieces for the Mail.

Update: Commenter "delworth" points out that I was wrong -- the piece did appear, in the Food and Drink section. It was still a lousy article, however.

It's much ado about nothing, it's not so simple, so calm down

2006-04-11T13:00:00.000Z

Judging from his recent output, David Aaronovitch's main purpose now is to persuade people not to worry about what governments might be doing (when he's trying to be serious, that is: his attempted rib ticklers are, like almost all examples of columnists seeking to demonstrate their satirical abilities, not worth remembering).

Last month began with a bid at making out Guantanamo to be far more complicated than human rights-crazed simpletons will allow. After irrelevant sniping at Rowan Williams's silence on Darfur, he moves on to a critique of improbable plotting in Michael Winterbottom's film on the "Tipton Three”. He doesn't say he thinks they were guilty, just that they look like maybe they could be.

We're told the apparent innocence of the inmates discredits their case, because if there were a good, or at least simple, case against Guantanamo it wouldn't hinge on inmates' innocence. One might think Rowan Williams had already made such a general argument, not contingent on any inmate's innocence, in the comments Aaronovitch quoted at the beginning of his article:

“any message given that any state can just override some of the basic habeas corpus-type provisions is going to be very welcome to tyrants elsewhere in the world”

But no. For Aaronovitch, nonsense about fundamental juridic principles and their worldwide impact is irrelevant; the only argument against Guantanamo worth addressing is one he suggests is made implicitly in a film about three individuals. Why? Because then he can mask his basic, crude, argument – that we should detain without trial anyone on vague suspicion of guilt – with a pretence of fairness and nuance.

His next attempt at governmental exculpation was even vaguer. “In the end,” he announces after some pseudo-sophisticated padding about a theatre trip, “I think it's unlikely that much – if any – influence was bought, or much policy bent by donors to political parties.” So that's OK then. Except the accusation was that peerages, not influence or policy bending, had been bought.

But “is this absolution for Mr Blair? Absolutely not.” He's guilty of being “hypocritical and myopic”, apparently – damning charges. This hypocritical myopia innocently led him to nominate friendly creditors for peerages: the only question is how he could have missed how bad it would look. And besides, “democracy costs”. “Getting the message out costs.” So we should accept corruption, basically, unless we're prepared to hand taxpayers' money to political parties. It's part of the “messiness of democracy”.

Curiously Aaronovitch seeks to portray such whitewashing as brave, via the device of complaining that if he had attacked the government he'd have received congratulatory letters on his bravery. “There is nothing safer for a writer than being told by everybody just how brave one is,” he says, boldly eschewing this course for some edgy defence of a right-wing government in a right-wing newspaper. He stands alone as a voice of sanity, prompted by “the misunderstood little boy in me”, pluckily standing up for the government.

Dave “voice of reason” Aaronovitch is back today, asserting, as ever without actual evidence, that Bush won't attack Iran and that Seymour Hersh's widely-reported New Yorker piece was wrong.

While he doesn't have evidence, he does have insinuation. Not everything Seymour Hersh has said previously has been right. One quote, about Bush being “messianic”, might have come from a “political opponent of Mr Bush”. Hersh doesn't name all his sources, Aaronovitch reveals, as if this were a new or surprising phenomenon. “How [Jeremy] Bowen knows whether Hersh's sources for this are good or not is anyone's guess”, he intones. “The problem here is that we simply have to take Hersh and his judgment on trust.”

And who would trust one of the world's most successful investigative journalists, with all his sources and concrete claims? Who would bother considering the US covert operations reported to be already underway in Iran? Or the government consultant “absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb”? Or the Pentagon adviser recounting the White House view that “the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war”? Or European diplomats or the IAEA? (Not to mention the fact that claims of an impending Iran attack are hardly confined to Seymour Hersh.)

None of it matters, because a multi-chinned former NUS president has pronounced: “My own uninformed guess,” he says, “is that there's a lot of contingency planning going on about Iran, just as we plan for the unlikely eventuality of an avian flu pandemic.” So there.

(For a helpful rundown of Aaronovitch's strangely naive position on the Iraq War, see here.)

The Unholy Alliance

2006-04-07T14:45:00.000Z

One of the peculiarities of the self-described “decent left” is a combined obsession with the the alliances of the SWP, and a total lack of sympathy with their aims. Over the years it's spawned a stream of articles detailing their machinations, as if these had any bearing on whether the Iraq War was right. Today's Comment is free contribution from David T of Harry's Place is a fine example of this smear-by-association genre.

The piece almost reads as if it's from a disaffected member of the SWP, rather than somebody who supported the Iraq War, and who has displayed no concern for left-wing causes except where they can be plausibly painted as in alignment with Bush's agenda. It warns of the dangers of the “unholy” SWP/MAB alliance as if courting such bedfellows might damage a valuable movement. “Why”, Dave asks, “do these rightwing falangists [anti-homosexual Muslims] so fascinate a revolutionary socialist organisation?”

Rather than accepting the obvious explanation – that they both opposed the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns – he meanders off to flaunt his intimate knowledge of Trots via a decade-old article in the International Socialism Journal. He contends that, because they both make up the Respect party, they must be in some sort of long-term alliance, and this in turn is explained by a plan to swallow up Islamist members once they realise Islamism is “contradictory”.

But none of this really matters, because Dave isn't interested in the future of the SWP, or the left. What he cares about is discrediting the anti-war movement. He affects concern that members of an organisation ritually denounced by decentists, “have been forced into an absurd and overblown defence of the Islamist politics”, even though he's deeply happy about this as far as it's true; he deploys sociologist-speak to worry vaguely that the alliance has emphasised “essentialist religious categories”, even though the alleged SWP strategy he quotes explicitly aims for the opposite outcome. Finally, he asks in pseudo-newspaper columnist style, “the romance between the left and Islamist politics is bound to come to an end, sooner or later”, so “will love turn to hate?”

Who cares? Certainly not Dave, except in as far as such a falling out might make his job as a Bush cheerleader easier. He isn't on the left, let alone a “revolutionary socialist”; he doesn't support unions unless they're being targeted by opponents of Bush: he is a thoroughgoing Blairite. Whether the SWP were allied with the MAB or not, he'd still be criticising them, because they oppose his beloved war – that's the only reason he's interested in them. All the rest – the pretence of a concern for the future of left-wing politics – is a transparent pretext for wheeling out what he views as discreditable aspects to a prominent anti-war organisation. It's a bait and switch, based on a temporary claim to be associated with a movement he despises.

One might equally pose another question, given Dave's love of George Bush. The romance between the pseudo-left and Christianist politics is bound to come to an end, sooner or later, so will love turn to hate? Unlike him, I'm not going to pretend I care.

Roll on, the six month strike

2006-03-28T13:48:00.000Z

“Strike as long as you like”, Ross Clark combatively advises council strikers today in The Times. Why? Well, in the usual aren't-I-clever way of the Blusterer column, he's making the case that, in fact, none of these workers does anything useful, so we won't notice if they stop doing it. Aha, they'll just put themselves out of jobs!

“The difference between now and 1979 is that council workers no longer do much in the way of real work,” Clark informs his readers. Instead of fulfilling any useful function, “they are employed in trifling bureaucratic matters that few of us will miss.” Everything important, or at least rubbish collection and grave digging, has apparently been contracted out.

Ross Clark's hoping that “these bolshie town hall employees will strike for six months or more”. Then “[a]ll they will achieve is to expose the pointlessness of their jobs.” After some silly-sounding job titles plucked from the Guardian's Society section he's done – off to spend his fee. If unargued, bald assertions are all you can manage, the Blusterer's four hundred word limit is a great boon.

Of course, if those assertions are shown clearly to be false in the same edition of the paper as that column, it might be thought of as a slight problem -- that is, if the aim isn't just to provide rich people with something to hear-hear over breakfast.

Because it does appear that he was wrong, at least if functioning schools are deemed “useful” -- or libraries, or leisure centres. But maybe these state institutions aren't really of much concern to the moneyed Times writer. What about the very things Clark claimed would be unaffected? Bafflingly, in spite of that glorious privatisation he mentioned, the strike “disrupted refuse collection, street cleaning and the running of courts”. “In some places, burials were cancelled.” Is this enough?

No? How about – admittedly the preserve of the lower orders, by dint of their location – the Mersey Tunnels, reduced to emergency vehicles only, or the Mersey ferry service, or the Tyneside Metro rail service, or the Tyne Tunnel crossing, all closed? According to Unison, “120 schools, 24 libraries and 15 leisure centres” were closed in Liverpool alone. All, one must assume, because their operations hinged on “trifling bureaucratic matters”.

Even the North East Chamber of Commerce seemed to mind, claiming it would lead to “transport havoc”. But roll on, the six month strike – Ross doesn't care.

The Mark of a Dogmatist

2006-03-27T16:50:00.000Z

Sadly Oliver Kamm's latest post isn't in itself very interesting. It's perhaps worth commenting on, though, just because it is a model for Kammology.

First, the reference to a current event – the hook. In this case it's Norman Kember, and his apparent slowness or unwillingness to thank the brave military men who stormed a building devoid of kidnappers to rescue him.

Then we have the segue into a tangential discussion of what Oliver read in his Big Book of 20th Century British Politics. “[T]he fact that gratitude is late and grudging is not in itself a reason to begrudge it”, Oliver pronounces, throwing on his schoolmaster's gown. “What seems to me more interesting than the etiquette is the insight afforded into modern pacifism.”

Oh, and it is! For it allows him to name check his hero, the “great” Reinhold Niebuhr (a pro-war theologian), and to flash some entirely irrelevant factoids about earlier pacifists and the CND. The only price was spewing forth an entirely incoherent argument, but who's going to notice that among all the fussy verbiage?

The Christian Peacemakers, according to their own statement, hold to a commitment to non-violence. This is somehow transmuted, via Kamm's tortured analogies, into support for totalitarianism. Note that this isn't de facto support, deriving from non-opposition to totalitarians. Kamm draws a distinction between that and what he accuses Kember et al. of when he suggests that Albert Hassler and Norman Thomas were, in spite of their pacifist stance, opponents of totalitarianism, even in spite of Thomas's endorsement of Charles Lindbergh and involvement with the America First Committee (which campaigned against fighting Nazi Germany).

“Something”, we're gravely told, “went badly wrong with the pacifist movement in the 1930s on this side of the Atlantic, when it was infected by a stance of neutrality towards despotism.” Later we learn that “[t]he same happened in the US after Thomas's death in 1968.” This is all by contrast, in Kamm's world, with the America First people, even though they explicitly campaigned for enforcement of the 1939 Neutrality Act.

If what Kamm says means anything at all, he is suggesting that those ungrateful Christian Peacemakers are, by virtue of their tardy thanks to the military, on a par with what he diagnoses to be a pro-Soviet element among the CND (and later, a pro-Iranian element), and secondly that that tendency was in some way qualitatively different from the pro-Nazi element among American isolationists.

But nowhere is it made clear why helping the Soviets or Iranians was dramatically worse than helping the Nazis. At most some vague attempt is made at drawing a distinction between “personal” and “political” pacifism, but this founders on the fact that the American isolationists were, by any reasonable definition, political pacifists (that's the bad sort, apparently). Nor is it made clear just what the relation is between a slow thanks and a campaign against fighting a totalitarian state.

All that matters is that Oliver can employ his stock of pub quiz knowledge, show everyone he's read a bit of Niebuhr (he even gets to fling out a favourite quote), and reach one of those wearingly pompous conclusions. The final paragraph comes with all the usual pretence at fine grain scholarship, blotted by a desperate bid to relate the preceding witterings to the story at hand:

I cannot but think that the moral compromises (I use the weakest and most generous term I can find) involved in this type of politicised pacifism have their counterpart in the response of the Christian Peacemakers to the rescue of their comrades. Servicemen took personal risks to free the pacifist captives; tardiness in expressing thanks has the mark of the dogmatist. That is a politer term than bigot, but in this case the difference is a matter only of degree.

What could it all mean? Since Kamm makes such a token bid for the tag “rational analysis”, the two remaining explanations I see are a) it's all a joke or b) it's a sort of psychological therapy for Kamm.

Did anyone challenge him?

2006-03-27T14:36:00.000Z

The Harry's Place vacillations on free speech continued today, in characteristic form.

“Does anyone who attended Saturday's March for Free Expression in London have anything to say about it?” asks Gene, following up with a defensive remark about the “sneering” naysayers who didn't go. And, would you know it? Dave T stepped in with a report.

“OK. It might not have been the biggest rally I've ever been on,” admits Dave, although he understandably didn't want to produce a number, because a conservative estimate was perhaps five hundred. It would be unkind, in the light of this, to draw attention to the “Stopper Shortage” article on Harry's Place earlier this month, indulging in what might be termed “sneering” over only ten thousand anti-war protesters on the last march.

It would be wrong too to pick up on Dave's sudden belief that “free speech is a precondition for democracy”, and point out that he supported prosecuting BNP activists for exercising that right.

Perhaps more interesting, because it's new as far as I know, is Dave's defence of protesting with those whose beliefs you strongly disagree with. Any reader of HP will know that the hookup between socialists and fundamentalist Muslims is deeply frowned upon among the muscular left. And we know from Gene that going on a march with a man who has a possibly anti-semitic placard is also wrong, at least if the placard holder hasn't been “challenged”. “Did anyone challenge him?” cried Gene into the wilderness, back in June 2004, over a “chilling photo” depicting just this.

But when it comes to a free speech march endorsed by Harry's Place, well, that's different. “I will not let the dubious politics of some other participants dissuade me from supporting what are important, progressive humanitarian values," Dave endorsed Peter Tatchell saying, solemnly ignoring everything Harry's Place had said in the past about anti-war demonstrations.

As well he might, for the Freedom Association, who were invited to speak at the rally, have a long history of attacking the things that Harry's Place allegedly holds most dear. For instance, in the mid-1970s they acted as proto-Thatcherite strike breakers (she reportedly described their anti-postal union operations as the “best thing since Entebbe”). Of course, on the general rule that labour disputes are only of concern if they involve Iranian bus drivers, it's hard to say that Harry's Place would care. But if that's not enough, you have the campaign to break the boycott of apartheid South Africa, and similarly stringent views on Rhodesia and immigration.

So the obvious question about the Freedom Association speaker is: Did anyone challenge him? More generally, will Dave T and Harry's Place follow their usual path of flitting to whichever elevated principle most conveniently allows them to reach their predictable, preordained conclusion?

Freedom of speech... for people I agree with

2006-03-24T14:52:00.000Z

Today Dave T makes another of his garbled contributions to the debate over free speech:

One of the strongest arguments for Freedom of Expression the protection of speech facilitates the exploration of conflicts of belief: freely and without restraint.

He goes on to offer a rib-tickling chant for the free speech march:

"What do we want: FREEDOM OF SPEECH. When do we want it: NOT NOW BUT CERTAINLY IN A FORUM IN WHICH THINGS CAN BE SEEN AND DEBATED WITHOUT THEM BEING, IN CONTEXT, INTIMIDATING TO ANYONE"

But of course not republishing the cartoons at issue was the line advocated by two Harry's Place contributors, and not disputed by Dave T. (Brownie cunningly suggested that, instead of the originals, anti-semitic cartoons be published instead. Gene chipped in with a stern reminder that to republish would be to offend the Iranian bus drivers Harry's Place cares so much about.)

He should therefore have altered his “strong argument” to:

One of the strongest arguments for... the protection of speech [is that it] facilitates the exploration of conflicts of belief: freely and without restraint... but if that speech would cause offence then this argument evaporates.

This applies especially when those being offended are Harry's Place pundits. Back when two BNP activists were acquitted of inciting racial hatred, Dave T was similarly muddled. In fact, such was his bemusement that he went spiralling straight into doublethink mode.

“What it boils down to”, we're told, “is this”:

Racist rhetoric should be condemned, discrimination combatted, and racists exposed and fought. However, the State shouldn't punish speech unless there is a direct causal, and intentional, link between the speech and a physical attack, an act of discrimination.

So you might think that meant dear Dave was against prosecuting Griffin and co., because nobody suggested Griffin calling Islam a “wicked vicious religion” had a direct causal link with violence or discrimination. But of course not. Smoothly adopting the exact opposite of the conclusion that his ringing declaration demanded he went on:

That said, I can't fault the prosecution. There is no point in having a law on incitement to racial hatred, unless what appear to be clear cut cases are prosecuted.

He reiterated this in a further posting. So we can add a second modifier:

One of the strongest arguments for... the protection of speech [is that it] facilitates the exploration of conflicts of belief: freely and without restraint... but if that speech would cause offence then this argument evaporates... and if a law exists that looks like it could curtail that speech it should be used.

In other words, the State shouldn't punish speech unless it wants to punish speech; and one should uphold one's principles right up to the point where they conflict with the law, whereupon they should be abandoned, because we might otherwise have wasted ink on the statute books. Thanks Dave -- it's much clearer now.

Kamm, The Guardian and bollocks

2006-03-23T15:47:00.000Z

A few days ago, Oliver Kamm made the mistake of publishing his letter to Guardian about the Chomsky interview affair, a letter he co-signed with David Aaronovitch and Francis Wheen. (In the strange world of Stephen Pollard the three of them were “three musketeers”, using their “forensic” powers to uphold the "traduced" Emma Brockes's “bona fides” via this self-important, prolix communication.)

In the months since the interview, Kamm hinted in his habitually pompous way that great things were afoot regarding his complaint about the Guardian's retraction of the interview. It was all stalled, apparently, by the need to appoint a readers' ombudsman of appeal, to whom complainants could turn when Ian Mayes, readers' editor, failed to give satisfaction.

This situation was, it would seem, quite satisfactory to Kamm. It allowed him to characterise as temporary the present state of affairs, with the Brockes interview discredited, and Srebrenica not available as a stick with which to beat Chomsky. On 20th February, for instance, he reminded his readers of his “very long letter” on the subject. He also mysteriously drew attention to Brockes being shortlisted for an “Interviewer of the Year” award on a site so amateurish it has "British" misspelt in the title, and in a competition boycotted by three newspaper groups, as if this in some way preemptively validated his complaint. (Of course, if the awards did mean anything, one could point out that Brockes didn't win, while the Guardian itself was deemed "Newspaper of the Year".)

This was only the latest of a stream of bulletins on his campaign against a Guardian retraction. He also notified us of developments on 15th November, 19th November, 22nd November, 28th November, 1st December, 12th December and 4th January.

Now Kamm's made the error of letting the world read his tedious correspondence. It quotes at great length both Guardian reporters' and Diane Johnstone's writing on Srebrenica. And it tells us that Chomsky took part in a campaign against the suppression of Diane Johnstone's work. But what it doesn't do is quote any of Chomsky's books or articles on Bosnia, or justify what Kamm contends – that it is Brockes who is owed an apology because her infamous “massacre in quotes” claim was essentially correct.

All the letter even purports to do is show that “Chomsky most certainly does seem to believe that, in the sense that international legal and human rights organisations, NGOs and reputable reporters understand it, Srebrenica was not a massacre” -- that is, it makes the case that Chomsky "seems" not to agree with some loosely defined organisations on usage of an ill-defined term, “massacre”. It does not claim to show that Chomsky ever referred to the Srebrenica massacre in quotes, which is what Brockes wrote in her interview – the letter doesn't even address this basic factual error.

One premise is that Johnstone minimised the Srebrenica massacre, by putting the term in quotes herself. Even here the letter falls down. Johnstone did refer to the Srebrenica massacre in quotes, but did not deny that many people were killed there. The sentence that Kamm et al. quote where “Srebrenica massacre” is written in quotes does not show what they claim, because it is a quote of what the Clinton administration referred to – they aren't scare quotes announcing an authorial view. She did question the official casualty figures (even today only a few hundred bodies have been found), and she did suggest that the killing at Srebrenica was emphasised to serve anti-Serb propaganda ends. The rest is essentially quibbling about terminology, where we see them, for instance, complaining about use of the “quasi-judicial” term “executed”. In sum, all they show is that Johnstone was sceptical about Western claims regarding the killing at Srebrenica.

Even if it were true that Johnstone had, in the sense of Brockes's interview, declared the non-occurrence of the Srebrenica massacre via quotation marks, it would not have implied anything about Chomsky's own views, let alone writing, on the subject. The link Kamm et al. try to make is that Chomsky endorsed Johnstone's book, Fools' Crusade. But this, just as with the Faurisson case that Kamm also likes to mention when he can, is an astonishingly flimsy ground on which to base very serious claims. The argument boils down to “Johnstone implied A, Chomsky says Johnstone's work is valuable, therefore Chomsky believes A”.

Balanced against this hand-waving non-argument is the easily verifiable reality that where Chomsky has been explicit about Srebrenica he has quite clearly accepted that there was a massacre there. If Kamm has, as he has suggested, read all of Chomsky's books, then why didn't he see this fact as relevant? Presumably, if he wasn't just being dishonest, he views his own inferences regarding Chomsky's beliefs as overriding what Chomsky has actually stated. If this is indeed the case, one would surely have expected him to have mentioned and justified it, an outlandish view though it may be.

As it is, the letter moves breezily on to conclude that Brockes was “certainly entitled” to her “interpretation” of Chomsky's defence of Johnstone's work. But the question isn't one of entitlement to views; it's one of whether Brockes was factually accurate in what she wrote. She wasn't, as the Guardian accepted. Unlike Kamm et al., Brockes herself has made no public statement that she felt she was wronged by the paper in its handling of the complaint. Nor has she released her tape of the interview, which would surely bolster her case if it contained anything like what she alleged Chomsky said. She is reported to have accepted the outcome.

So should we. The only people, surely, who could set any store by such a feeble, witless defence of the indefensible would be those as detached from reality as Stephen Pollard and his three musketeers.

What Liberty Means

2006-03-23T13:05:00.000Z

Liberty, says the strapline at Harry's Place, is the right to tell people what they don't want to hear. That doesn't include people publishing cartoons that offend Muslims -- Harry's Place didn't support that, on vague and hypocritical grounds of causing offence. And it doesn't include commenters at Harry's Place, whose comments, it seems, are sometimes deleted by those running the blog on the grounds of... them being what they don't want to hear. In other words, it's a pretty circumscribed liberty.

The most egregious example I've seen occurred yesterday, when David T, most bumptious of all Harry's Place commentators, ran into an argument about jilbabs. Neatly ignoring the actual content of the Law Lords' ruling, which emphasised that the school in question was largely Muslim, had a Muslim-friendly uniform policy already, and had only drawn the line at an all-encompassing jilbab, Dave T weighed in with his own back-of-an-envelope reasoning for why the Law Lords were wrong.

This looked, and looks, like an attempt by Harry's Place to look balanced alongside their fervent advocacy of the Iraq War. A few vague motions towards placating Muslims, and they can make everybody happy that their support for invading Iraq was based on elevated democratic principle rather than crude islamaphobia. In this, Dave T and the others are simply following Blair's lead with his preposterous Religious Hatred Bill.

When this was pointed out in their comment space, David T replied with a "Fuck off." After some mockery of this inarticulate response, and more of the same from him, he responded by deleting almost all the nasty comments, rendering the comments thread nonsensical (see, for instance, the first comment). Today all that remains is one strangled reply from him, giving a sense of the level of his debate. It says, "You're still a cretin."

I say all this not because its intrinsically interesting, or because I ever thought Harry's Place was actually committed to any sort of real debate; but to explain why I've begun this blog. I want to say things that the self-styled "decent left" would rather weren't expressed, and obviously that requires a forum not controlled by them -- hence this blog.