World Politics

When someone says of their adversaries that they pay “lip-service” to something, they are trying to devalue some of the substance of what those people say. This may be a claim that their opponents are insincere, or simply that they lack a suitable degree of commitment. The suggestion is that someone is making a merely token acknowledgement of the importance of some matter or value but that it is merely incidental to their view of what matters, a view that is actually focused on other things. It is a charge that the authors of the “Euston Manifesto” have been happy to dish out:

bq. We have no truck, either, with the tendency to pay lip service to these ends [Iraqi democracy], while devoting most of one’s energy to criticism of political opponents at home (supposedly responsible for every difficulty in Iraq), and observing a tactful silence or near silence about the ugly forces of the Iraqi “insurgency”.

(Get the “silence or near silence” there! So if your opponent has actually said that beheading hostages or blowing-up civilians is a monstrous crime but hasn’t said it as often or as loudly as you think fit, you can still point the finger!)

Others can judge how much of the Eustonites’ energies have been devoted to criticism of political opponents at home and how much to the material promotion of Iraqi democracy (writing about it on your blog doesn’t really count, in my book). Anyway, here’s a list of the things that the Euston Manifesto pays “lip service to”, a charge I am as entitled to make, without supporting evidence, about them as they are about others:

Pure lip service, if you ask me, since issues such are rarely mentioned on the blogs in question without some degree of contextualization, minimization, relativization, whatabouterry, and so on. (Of course torture is bad, they acknowledge, but the real outrage is committed by those torture critics who compare Guantanamo to the Gulag.) These are the same verbal manoeuvres that, when applied to acts of terror, are condemned by said blogs as amounting to de facto apology.

Incidentally, it seemed odd to me for the Manifesto to include among the events that have made the democracy-and-human-rights package the heritage of us all, blah blah blah, the “anti-colonial transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries”. “Transformations” is a strangely euphemistic term to describe the various anti-colonial struggles of the last century. Still, I suppose it wouldn’t do to look too closely at the methods employed by the FLN, the Mau Mau, the NLF etc. just in case they resembled the “ugly forces” of the Iraqi insurgency rather more closely than would be comfortable. Some insurgents, it seems, have contributed to the great Enlightenment bundle, and some have not.

The peculiar British tendency that is the “decent Left” numbers among its sacred texts Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism. One of the most prominent Eustonian thinkers, the columnist Nick Cohen, has even mentioned Berman’s book as the reason for his own epiphany. But is it any good? Over at Aaronovitch Watch the Cous Cous Kid has been directing his attention to Berman’s work and noticing that the accounts Berman gives of other people’s ideas, of religion, and of historical events, ought to have impressed Cohen somewhat less than they did.

CCKs’ review is split into seven parts, so the easiest way to read his text is just to visit the site and scroll down. But for archive purposes, I also give the links to each part below.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

I’ve just come from a seminar given by Michael Tierney, who before launching into his paper on the Very Serious Subject of principal-agent relations in multilateral development agencies, encouraged us to visit and contribute to his list of “international relations themed music”:http://mjtier.people.wm.edu/teaching/irplaylist.php. Apparently, he begins his early morning classes by playing a song appropriate to that week’s topic so as to wake up the students. Contributions include “One is the Loneliest Number (Three Dog Night)” for the class on Polarity/Hegemonic Stability Theory and “Peace, Love and Understanding (Elvis Costello)” for Democratic Peace Theory. He pleads for alternative suggestions “to rectify the bad musical tastes of my colleagues,” which are indeed rather impressive. Sounds like exactly the right sort of silliness for a blog’s comment section – I’ll start the ball rolling by suggesting Tom Lehrer’s “MLF Lullaby”:http://www.song-teksten.com/song_lyrics/tom_lehrer/that_was_the_year_that_was/mlf_lullaby/ for a class on multilateral alliances, and indeed that Lehrer’s “We’ll All Go Together When We Go”:http://www.atomicplatters.com/more.php?id=70_0_1_0_M replaces Metallica’s _Blackened_ as the theme song for the week on Nuclear War and Its Consequences.

The great Madeleine Bunting/Enlightenment debate rolls one, with a “synoptic response from the columnist herself”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1750579,00.html . I’m not a great fan of Bunting’s brand of handwringing multiculturalism myself, but she doesn’t acquit herself badly despite getting in a bit of a muddle about rationalism and anti-rationalism. (It is instructive to contrast the calm engagement of her latest contribution with the “ill-tempered hectoring and puerile name-calling”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2006/04/10/she_wouldnt_let_it_lie.php that the self-styled defenders of the Enlightenment are engaging in, a mark of desperation if you ask me.) She also asks a very good question: why are this particular bunch of people wrapping themselves in this particular cloak at this particular time? I guess the answer is that once they have cast themselves in the role of historic defenders of reason and civilization against the barbarians, they can spare themselves the trouble of worrying too hard about the messy details of Guantanamo, torture, “extraordinary rendition”, and thousands upon thousands of dead bodies. They can also deliver stern lectures about “relativism”, “universalism”, “moral clarity” etc whilst applying one set of standards to them (the fanatical headchoppers) , and a different set to us (the shining defenders of civilization) . Steven Poole has written a “quite brilliant post”:http://unspeak.net/C226827506/E20060407120225/index.html on the use of the rhetoric of universalism to justify double standards by one of the foremost peddlers of this tosh, the ever-pompous Oliver Kamm.

“Scott McLemee”:http://www.mclemee.com/id4.html is a superb critic, and one of the things that makes him good is that he is generous. He can get something interesting out of not very interesting books, and he doesn’t go out of his way to be snarky. But when he feels like filleting something, “his knife is very sharp”:http://www.mclemee.com/id165.html.

THE MAN ON WHOM NOTHING WAS LOST: The Grand Strategy of Charles Hill, by Molly Worthen. Houghton Mifflin, 354 pp.

… Charles Hill — a former Foreign Service officer who served in important positions under Henry Kissinger and George Schultz – has for a few years now taught a class at Yale University called Grand Strategy. Young aspirants to the diplomatic corps flock to it. … Molly Worthen, a recent Yale graduate, was one of Hill’s junior illuminati, and her book The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost is an authorized biography of the great man. … The result is not a book so much as it is an alumni-magazine profile gone horribly, horribly wrong. … Hill comes across as a single-minded careerist who did not notice his wife’s alcoholism until she mentioned it during the final days of their marriage. If not for the element of hero worship pervading the book, one might suspect an element of sarcasm in Worthen’s title … something is missing from Worthen’s gale-force proclamations of wonder … There is nothing resembling a substantial idea in the entire book. Worthen presents Hill as a neoconservative guru. But her portrait is that of a mind bearing less resemblance to the political philosopher Leo Strauss than a walking edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. … the author never forgets herself entirely. Or at all, really. … She also indulges in a considerable amount of “my generation” babble: “We sit in coffee shops and complain about the doldrums of ‘real jobs,’ the stress of having to commit to a career that won’t ever let out for the summer,” etc.

This is not a biography, but a study in self-absorption by proxy. The publisher ought to be ashamed. The manuscript should have been left in a drawer, where it might embarrass the author 10 years from now, and in private.

Ouch.

Johann Hari, Independent columnist and one-time contributor to the “decent left” blog “Harry’s Place”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/ , writes “eloquently in the Indie today”:http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=831 about why he was wrong about the Iraq war and how he now regrets his pro-war stance.

(I note, btw, that there is “a dismissive post at HP”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2006/03/20/whither_iraq.php referring to Hari as a “London-based journalist” but omitting to mention his former association with the site.)

Like John Howard, I won’t be shedding any tears over Slobodan Milosevic, whose death in prison, apparently from natural causes, has been announced.

An obvious question raised by his death is whether (and how) his trial on a variety of war crimes charges could have been accelerated. The fact that he will never be properly convicted is certainly unfortunate. Even if it would have had no short run impact on opinion among Serbian nationalists, it would have helped to set the historical record straight. Milosevic’s death increases the urgency of capturing his main instruments, Mladic and Karadzic, whose connection to the crimes of the Bosnian war is more immediate, and whose trial could drive home the evil of Milosevic’s policies.

Still, the long, and now abortive, trial in The Hague is better than the alternative on offer in Baghdad, where Saddam Hussein, whose wars cost millions of lives, is being tried, and may be executed, for a comparatively minor crime, but one which is politically convenient for the purposes of victors’ justice.

* An adaption of the headline of the Sydney Telegraph on the good news of 5 March 1953.

Lawrence Kaplan (with Irving William Kristol) selling The War over Iraq

The United States may need to occupy Iraq for some time. Though the UN, European and Arab forces will, as in Afghanistan, contribute troops, the principal responsibility will doubtless fall to the country that liberates Baghdad. According to one estimate, initially as many as 75,000 US troops may be required to police the war’s aftermath, at a cost of $16 billion a year. As other countries’ forces arrive, and as Iraq rebuilds its economy and political system, that force could probably be drawn to several thousand soldiers after a year or two. After Saddam Hussein has been defeated and Iraq occupied installing a decent democratic government in Baghdad should be a manageable task for the United States. (pp19-20) quoted here

Lawrence Kaplan presenting “The Case for Staying in Iraq” in TNR

The administration intends to draw down troop levels to 100,000 by the end of the year, with the pullback already well underway as U.S. forces surrender large swaths of the countryside and hunker down in their bases. The plan infuriates many officers, who can only say privately what noncommissioned officers say openly. “In order to fix the situation here,” Sabre Squadron’s Sergeant José Chavez says, “we need at least 180,000 troops.” Iraq, however, will soon have about half that. An effective counterinsurgency strategy may require time and patience. But the war’s architects have run out of both.

Maybe if Kaplan, Kristol and others had told us this in the first place, there wouldn’t have been a war.

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Maher Arar’s case against the US government got “thrown out of court”:http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html?id=4569af5b-6e67-4ba9-b4bd-c4fe29f28e70&k=31064 today. From my very limited understanding of the law, this wasn’t a surprising result, which isn’t to say that it’s not very disappointing. Both the US and Canadian governments appear to have behaved appallingly. The opinion (“long PDF”:http://www.ccr-ny.org/v2/legal/september_11th/docs/Arar_Order_21606.pdf) is here; a press release from Arar’s attorneys is “here”:http://www.ccr-ny.org/v2/reports/report.asp?ObjID=r1AsHgY6Ly&Content=712. People who want to refresh their memory regarding Arar’s story can’t do better than to go back to Katherine of Obsidian Wings’ “synopsis”:http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2005/12/not_so_extraord.html of what happened (Katherine is very sorely missed).

I’m offended. Those people, by their actions, have demonstrated the essentially corrupt nature of their society and culture. Their behaviour, which all right-minded people should be offended by, should be universally condemned. If anything shows that we are right and they are wrong, this is it. And I call upon all of those who agree with me to take action, while there is still time. To those who say that our side has also erred, I agree: there have been errors of judgement. But if anything our mistake has been to do too little and too late. We now need to wake up and respond to the danger that confronts us. In any case, to suggest that what we have done bears comparison with what they have done is itself deeply offensive and such sentiments betray the inner corruption of those who utter them. Some principles are absolute and this is one of them. Some have suggested that it is hypocritical of me to take offence at what those people have done whilst ignoring or excusing what some other people have done. Such critics thereby reveal their own inability to distinguish between those people and the other people (who have surely suffered enough and deserve a break). Others have intimated that I spend my time trawling the internet looking for obscure TV clips and articles in foreign languages to be offended by. Frankly, I find such comment offensive: the price of what we hold sacred is eternal vigilance and someone has to take on the responsibility of telling our people about the grave danger they face from those people.

A long excerpt from Osama bin Ladin’s complete letter to America (UPDATE: Please note, as per comments, that this is a letter from 2002.) Between the call to Islam, the condemnation of homosexuality, gambling, financial interest, alcohol, the separation of church and state, and the liberation of women, does anyone else feel like they’ve heard this before? It’s practically Howard Dean’s stump speech, isn’t it?

Between the part about how Clinton was let off too easily for immoral acts committed in the Oval office, and the part about how America “brought (the world) AIDS as a Satanic American Invention”, I’m surprised he doesn’t already have a diary at Daily Kos. Is Osama really out of the anti-Bush mainstream with this?

Um, yeah. He really, really is.

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Via “Max”:http://maxspeak.org/mt/archives/001917.html comes a Washington Post column on The Realities of International Relations by “Robert Kagan”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/13/AR2006011301696.html who apparently is a “transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund.” But not, it seems, a transpacific one:

bq. China’s (and Malaysia’s) attempt to exclude Australia from a prominent regional role at the recent East Asian summit has reinforced Sydney’s desire for closer ties.

I’ve always thought that the Oil-For-Food scandal and the parallel scandal (promoted mainly on the left of the blogosphere) about corruption in Iraq’s postwar reconstruction were overblown. Under the circumstances, corruption was inevitable in both cases. If you supported feeding Iraqi children or attempting to repair the damage caused by the war, you had to expect, as part of the overhead, that those with power in Iraq would seek to skim money off the top, and that they would find willing accomplices in this task. Having said all that, corruption shouldn’t be passively accepted. It’s a crime and, wherever they can be caught, those guilty of it should be punished.

By far the biggest fish to be caught in the net so far is Australia’s monopoly wheat exporter, AWB, which was, until 1999, the government-owned Australian Wheat Board. It has become evident that AWB paid hundreds of millions of dollars to Saddam’s regime, and it has now been stated in evidence that the deals in question were discussed with Australia’s foreign minister, Alexander Downer., who has played a leading role in defending Australia’s participation in the Iraq war.
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Iraq’s most powerful Shiite leader on Wednesday rejected making major changes to the new Constitution, diminishing Sunni Arab hopes of amending the charter to avoid being shut out of the nation’s vast oil wealth.

Sunnis were reluctant to sign on to the Constitution last fall, fearing that provisions granting wide powers to autonomous regions would leave oil in the hands of Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south. Sunnis dominate in western and much of northwestern and northcentral Iraq, but the oil lies beneath Kurdistan and parts of southern Iraq that one day may be subsumed in a semi-independent region controlled by Shiites…

“We will stop anyone who tries to change the Constitution,” said Mr. Hakim, whose party has close ties to Iran. “Many of the people who voted for us were promised federalism in the south,” he said, referring to the form of government allowing for semiautonomous regions. He said Kurds, who joined Shiites to form the current ruling coalition, “agree with us about this condition, and we will continue our strategic coalition with our Kurdish brothers.”

I don’t have any non-obvious comments, but I thought that this story deserved a little attention.