normblog

Nightmare state

Coming at the same thing from a different angle, Christopher Hitchens also 'wants the Qaddafis and Assads and their accomplices... on notice' - on notice that they will be tried for their crimes. As usual with the Dude, there is other matter of interest along the way:

It was particularly satisfying to see, in the filling of Green Square in Tripoli and the over-running of the vulgar Xanadu of Muammar Qaddafi's so-called private "compound," the use as real space of areas that had hitherto been reserved for that special kind of degradation and humiliation - the rally for The Leader. Picture four decades in which compulsory attendance at such a ritual - kissing your owner's feet and shouting his praises in unison - was a major cultural activity. So addicted was Qaddafi to this sadomasochistic enactment that he, and his ghastly sons, continued it until the very last minutes. So, of course, did Saddam Hussein. So, as we speak, does Bashar Assad. In the nightmare state so cherished by such fantasy rulers, mere acquiescence or subjection is not enough. You must become a full participant in your own oppression, and find it in yourself to adore the collectivization of compulsory enthusiasm.

Worse than demeaning

Geoffrey Robertson is arguing here that Gaddafi and his son Saif should not be put on trial in Libya; they should, rather, 'be dispatched to The Hague for fair trial in an international court'. In making the argument Robertson writes of crimes against humanity that they are...

... offences so barbaric that the very fact that a fellow human can commit them demeans us all.

This repeats what he says in his book on crimes against humanity. While I have no quarrel with the claim that crimes against humanity demean us, it cannot be what is distinctive about them, since demeaning people doesn't in itself suffice to constitute a crime. It is, therefore, the 'so barbaric' in the line above which does the real work of delineating the content of the offence and which needs to be elaborated in clearer terms in order to define it. So I argue at length in chapter 2 of Crimes against humanity: Birth of a concept.

A big five

Some time yesterday this blog had its 5 millionth visitor. Actually, to be strictly accurate, there have been thousands more than that, because there was a period of a month or so when I moved from my old site to this one and left my Sitemeter behind. But I'm happy to count it as 5 million - the reading I passed on Sitemeter yesterday - and to set off the uncounted hits against those times I visit normblog myself, to retrieve a link or check on something I've written. In any event, thanks, everyone, for reading and continuing to read. I know there are many blogs out there with a lot more traffic than normblog's, but... er... there is no but. That's them and this is me.

The normblog profile 395: Steven Fielding

Steven Fielding was born within the gravitational pull of Manchester and was educated at Cambridge and Warwick. He is currently Professor of Political History in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham, where he is also Director of the Centre for British Politics. Steven has written on the Labour party and popular politics but is currently focusing on the depiction of formal politics on the screen, stage and page for a book due out in 2012. He blogs at Ballots & Bullets among other places.

Why do you blog? > To communicate my work to as wide an audience as possible – and maybe encourage more people to read some of my academic articles and books.

What would be your main blogging advice to a novice blogger? > Keep it short and snappy: have a good start, a good end and a good title.

Who are your intellectual heroes? > Quentin Skinner, Garry Wills, Gareth Stedman Jones.

What are you reading at the moment? > The Way We Live Now.

Who are your cultural heroes? > Tony Wilson, J.M.W. Turner, George Gissing.

What is the best novel you've ever read? > Tristram Shandy.

What is your favourite movie? > Mon Oncle.

What is your favourite song? > 'Being Alive' (from Company).

Who is your favourite composer? > Wojciech Kilar.

Can you name a major moral, political or intellectual issue on which you've ever changed your mind? > The Iraq War. (Yes, then No.)

Can you name a work of non-fiction which has had a major and lasting influence on how you think about the world? > The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson – it variously showed how history could be written and how it shouldn't be written.

Who are your political heroes? > Abraham Lincoln, Herbert Morrison, Robert Kennedy.

What is your favourite piece of political wisdom? > 'All men are intellectuals: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.' (Gramsci)

Do you think the world (human civilization) has already passed its best point, or is that yet to come? > The best is yet to come!

What would be your most important piece of advice about life? > You are ultimately the only person responsible for your own life.

Do you think you could ever be married to, or in a long-term relationship with, someone with radically different political views from your own? > No.

What do you consider the most important personal quality? > Kindness.

What personal fault do you most dislike? > Arrogance.

In what circumstances would you be willing to lie? > To spare feelings.

What commonly enjoyed activities do you regard as a waste of time? > Watching TV reality/cooking/home & garden improvement shows.

What would you call your autobiography? > So There!

Who would play you in the movie about your life? > John Cusack.

Where would you most like to live (other than where you do)? > Northern California.

What do you like doing in your spare time? > Laughing.

What talent would you most like to have? > To be able to remember everything.

What would be your ideal choice of alternative profession or job? > Journalist.

Who is your favourite comedian or humorist? > Laurel (and Hardy).

Who are your sporting heroes? > Eric Cantona, Alex Ferguson, Bobby Charlton.

Which English Premiership football team do you support? > Manchester United.

How, if at all, would you change your life were you suddenly to win or inherit an enormously large sum of money? > Not much.

[A list of all the normblog profiles to date, and the links to them, can be found here.]

The broken down house at Milne corner

Seumas Milne, hey? Impossible to please. On 23 March he was complaining (already) that Nato's Libya campaign was 'coming apart'. Now his beef is that it's been too effective:

[T]he western powers have taken sides in a civil war, relying on air power and special forces to turn the tide against an unpopular authoritarian regime.

Oh no, taken sides and turned the tide. Send him a strawberry milk shake, for goodness sake; put a bunch of roses on his work table. Anything to make the guy smile. If he were just himself, poor Seumas, it would be no more than a sad joke. But he stands, as one might say, for something more - for a whole current of deluded Western opinion. Here is one more token of it:

[S]uch intimate involvement of the US and the former colonial powers taints and undermines the legitimacy of Libya's transformation.

Think about that - a man who appears to have no qualms about the legitimacy of the theocratic tyranny in Iran, but is very picky about the legitimacy of a people overthrowing the dictatorship that has oppressed them for four decades. It's a simple matter, though, of aligning oneself 'properly' vis-à-vis the US. Milne's stuff testifies yet once more to the debacle that has overtaken the Western far left.

Birds, tea cups, edibles

In today's Times Matthew Syed is discussing some of the problems of categorization (£). He gives the example of book classification:

It is a question that librarians grapple with every day. Their job is not to divide the organic world into species, but to categorise thousands of books so that readers can easily find them. Basic categories, such as Science, Sport and Fiction are self-evident, but where do you place a sporting novel or a fictional account of the life of Darwin? What about a science book written in German: in the science section or the foreign language section?

Not only are there questions of what is the most suitable category for a given item; there's also the problem that boundaries aren't always clear-cut. What is the proper age of maturity (my example, not his)? When does day become night (ditto)? And so on.

In making these valid points, however, Syed says - twice - that there's no objectivity is the matter: 'no objective answer'; no 'objective boundaries'. That is going too far. If it were true, then any old classification would be as good as any other. But if you were to place a few deadly poisons in a collection of 'harmlessly edible foodstuffs', you'd quickly find out your mistake; a rock isn't a warm-blooded mammal; and birds would be able to fly in a way that tea cups still couldn't even if humans and all their classifications were to disappear tomorrow.

There's no single optimal system of classification for everything, or indeed for anything. But there are good ones and bad, and there are objective distinctions (in the world) that the good ones need to 'fit'.

The wit and wisdom of Simon Jenkins

Being a few selected aperçus from his journalism about Libya over the last few months. This is what he had to say on 31 March:

No war can be won from the air. A temporary balance of advantage can be awarded to one side, but pilots can only destroy...

At present Nato strategy appears to be to prolong civil war by bolstering the weaker side.

And here he is on 19 April:

The great lie has once again been rumbled, that air power can deliver any sort of victory.
.....
Cameron watchers are mesmerised by how he found himself up this creek with no paddle...
.....
The resolution [UN resolution 1973] is rotten, based on the false premise that a no-fly zone can determine a civil war.
.....
Britain is helping to prolong the agony of another country's civil war.

He's back with more of the same on 17 May:

For Britain to be spending millions of pounds a night rearranging cement in the Sahara sand must be the daftest use of public money imaginable.
.....
[T]he mission has passed from civil protection to backing a territorial rebellion. Worst of all, it is not winning.

As recently as 2 August, he's saying:

Britain's half-war against Libya is careering onward from reckless gesture to full-scale fiasco.

So, after all that, when over the last few days it seems that these diagnoses and prognostications aren't altogether accurate, how does Jenkins respond? He responds, on 23 August, as follows:

So do this week's events justify Britain's Libya intervention? No, however churlish it may be to say so at this point.

He is perfectly entitled to that view, of course. Just as the failure of an undertaking doesn't always show that the attempt wasn't justified, so nobody is obliged to be won over by a success, as others perceive it. Still, do recent events suggest to Jenkins that he may have gone wrong somewhere? He could, for example, read the following in today's edition of the paper for which he writes:

As rebel forces broke through the frontlines and approached Tripoli, locals were inspired to join them. The surge also forced government troops into the open, allowing allied warplanes to strike.

Gaddafi's forces attempted to hold off the rebels on Sunday by trying to outflank [them] and recapture Zawiya. But Nato warplanes bombed the convoy before it could reach the city as part of a series of attacks on Gaddafi's forces, including bombing raids on bunkers set up in civilian buildings in Tripoli in an effort to ward off allied attacks.

Does it prompt our veteran journalist to reconsider his previous assessments of the futility of air power? Well, you won't know from his most recent column - because it contains not a word, not a single lonely syllable, of any acknowledgement that he might have misjudged anything. So it goes.

There's one determining certainty in the man's moral universe, and this is that it is not Britain's business how other people achieve their liberation from tyranny. Not our business. When, however, the matter of protecting civilians from crimes against humanity on a mass scale shades into the issue of removing the regime that is responsible for those crimes, it arguably is our business. It is, in a manner of speaking, everybody's business. For, since the Nuremberg Trials at least, the international community has taken upon itself the obligation not to stand idly by to mass crimes against humanity, and though this obligation isn't always honoured, that is no reason to pretend it is of no moral account. The view that it is of account is preferable, in any case, to a perspective in which such crimes are the 'business' only of the victims of them and (presumably) the perpetrators; and of others (if Jenkins will allow this) who just happen to be close by, in the same national neighbourhood.

On the ball

There'll be some normblog readers who want to know how this project has been going. Well, I'll tell you. The lacky-band ball is growing. It's bigger now than a golf ball but still smaller than a tennis ball. Sometimes my walk in the late afternoon takes me along the streets of south Cambridge; sometimes it also doesn't, but when it does, I pick up those red elastic bands left on the pavement by postmen and women. I find one or two, or on a good day four or five.

But the day before yesterday I found 26! Yes 26, all on a three-mile walk. You'll be wondering: did I have a spectacular success, finding a whole bunch of them somewhere in the same place? Well, I'll tell you. I'd found 18 just in ones, and I was thinking I could do with two more to make a nice round figure, when not far from home I suddenly found eight together.

So, what are the chances of that, hey - 26 lacky bands in the space of three south Cambridge miles?

You'll have been waiting for this one, by way of some light relief.

Justification retrospective and prospective

A point I registered but didn't discuss about today's Guardian leader on Libya was its contention that recent developments there provide 'some retrospective justification' for Nato's military intervention. Coincidentally (or not?), in today's Times Danny Finkelstein rebuts this notion. The core of his argument is contained in the following two paragraphs (£):

So David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy (and to a much lesser extent Barack Obama) decided to act in order to save civilian lives. And it is their success in achieving that objective that justifies their action. It would still have been the right thing to do even if there had been an impasse.
.....
Before they go in, leaders can't know if they are going to be successful. All they can do is consider what is at stake and make a reasonable judgment about the probabilities. It is whether they have been diligent and sensible when making this calculation that determines whether a leader deserves praise or criticism.

As we all know, nothing succeeds like success, failure is an orphan, and all the rest of it. In the doctrine of humanitarian intervention it is also a standard requirement that intervention should be predicated on there being a good prospect of success. However, that said, military action is always attended by a high degree of uncertainty; and difficulty or even sometimes failure doesn't prove that an action was without reasonable justification when the key decisions had to be made.

A truth about Iraq uncovered in Libya

There have been earlier intimations that there might be truths of such a kind, as I pointed out in March of this year. Today the Guardian comes up with a beauty of the genre. An editorial in today's edition concedes - against the background of the paper's opposition to Nato's intervention in Libya - that there might now be said to be 'some retrospective justification' for it. The editorial then continues:

Intervening in Libya was contentious, and properly so. There were strong arguments for action, and there were strong arguments for staying out, or for getting out, once in, via a negotiated settlement. We know that the Americans were reluctant partners, that our own military chiefs, particularly the soldiers, were dubious, and that Arab countries were suspicious and nervous. We also know that Britain and France rushed into the action, and rushed others into it, without much thought and without much knowledge of the country we were proposing to save. Libya was the classic "far-off country of which we know little". Except that this time, of course in very different circumstances, we decided to do our bit. Because it was a close argument, there should be no point-scoring now. Critics and supporters of the intervention should be able to join in agreeing that it was a close-run thing, that we are lucky it has turned out, so far, reasonably well, and that the story is far from over.

History as it unfolds is not a lawsuit, serially delivering some into the dock and others into the jury. True, there are mistakes whose consequences are so serious they must be rigorously investigated. Libya itself would not fall into this category, however it had gone.

You see, there should be no point-scoring and history is not a law-suit - strong arguments for and strong arguments against. Some of us have been saying that about Iraq forever, so to say; but the Guardian and its opinion-formers have not always kept clear of the law-suit style point-scoring. So, welcome to the real world, my friends.

(Damn, I forgot. Iraq for them was different. There were no strong arguments for overthrowing the torturing, mass-murdering regime of Saddam Hussein.)