Sicilian Notes

Appointment

2006-09-27T23:58:00.000+01:00

I have agreed to join Associated Newspapers Ireland as Chief Political Commentator for the Irish Daily Mail and the Irish Mail on Sunday.

A Noteworthy Quote

2006-09-25T15:17:00.000+01:00

I am going through Irish Times archives at the moment (exciting, I know) and came across a line worth mentioning. The date is September 3rd 2002. The quote:

Mr Cheney and others have indicated that the inspectors issue is largely irrelevant to their thinking on the need to overthrow the Iraqi dictator.

I trust the Irish Times will not go unreminded of its own assessment the next time it argues that regime change and democratization were post facto rationalizations for Saddam's overthrow.

Dr. Rory Miller on Irish-Israeli Relations

2006-09-18T14:13:00.000+01:00

Dr. Rory Miller of Kings College London features in an important extended interview with the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, available here. Readers with any interest at all in Irish foreign policy should be sure also to acquire his definitive history of Irish policy towards Israel and the Palestinian organizations, Ireland and the Palestine Question 1948-2004.

Complacency Is Not A Virtue

2006-09-17T22:10:00.000+01:00

It is often levelled as a criticism of the Bush administration that the world is now less safe as a consequence of the policies they have pursued and today's Sunday Tribune poll shows 80% of us in Ireland sharing that view, (incidentally, the corresponding figure for American opinion is 76%). The extent to which this is a criticism rather than simply an observation is quite arguable. I for one would concur with the judgment concerning safeness, adding only that just about every alternative shaping of post-9/11 grand strategy would leave us worse off short of more adroit execution. But leaving that aside, though doing so relieves critics of their burden of arguing for better alternatives, it remains for critics to acknowledge precisely how dangerous are the times in which we live as a minimal starting point for further comment.

It is, for instance, probable that we will live to see nuclear terrorism in the West before too long. That is the opinion of, amongst many, Graham Allison, who writing recently in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists argued:

In sum, my best judgment is that based on current trends, a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States is more likely than not in the decade ahead. Developments in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea leave Americans more vulnerable to a nuclear 9/11 today than we were five years ago. Former Defense Secretary William Perry has said that he thinks that I underestimate the risk. In the judgment of most people in the national security community, including former Sen. Sam Nunn, the risk of a terrorist detonating a nuclear bomb on U.S. soil is higher today than was the risk of nuclear war at the most dangerous moments in the Cold War. Reviewing the evidence, Warren Buffett, the world's most successful investor and a legendary oddsmaker in pricing insurance policies for unlikely but catastrophic events like earthquakes, has concluded: "It's inevitable. I don't see any way that it won't happen."

It is not permitted in such times to resign oneself to partisan attacks on the current American administration or flippant digs at Western efforts at fighting the war. To do so carries about as much credit as blaming Western diplomacy for the debacle in France would have merited in 1940. And much commentary at the present time is well beneath even that in terms of seriousness or responsibility. Only an honest acknowledgement of the genuinely challenging history we are living through combined with a good-faith consideration of how we might now proceed counts as morally permissable engagement for those passing judgment. Nor should that count as a particularly onerous burden for those entering the debate.

It is becoming fashionable, most astonishingly, to argue in a sort of superior and knowing way that the threat is exaggerated by Western governments for political gain or more sinister purposes. Witness the recent discussion in Foreign Affairs. We forget rather hastily that the only reason 9/11 has not recurred in comparable form is because of a ceaseless and vigorous effort at apprehending the literally thousands of active Islamist terrorists plotting more such attacks and the good fortune that to date efforts at exploding airliners and releasing chemical attacks have been disrupted before coming to pass.

Complacency is only possible for those who choose not to see the blindingly obvious, and morally culpable to a very incriminating degree.

Politics In Ireland

2006-09-13T13:46:00.000+01:00

The fantastically useful Politics in Ireland site is up and running. It's has an excellent facility for sorting online writing on politics in Ireland by party or politician. Check it out.

Michael McDowell Leading the Progressive Democrats

2006-09-12T19:34:00.000+01:00

Versions of the following pieces were published in the Irish Daily Mail and Ireland on Sunday on Friday, Sunday, and Tuesday of the last week and are republished below in the order they were printed.

Friday September 8th

Michael McDowell was on his best behaviour yesterday but he wasn’t fooling anybody. Before Mary Harney ever took over the leadership of the Progressive Democrats, it was McDowell who famously declared that the party could only ever be either radical or redundant. As he watched Mary Harney declare herself redundant yesterday, he must have been wondering not only if his hour at last has come, but also that only radical changes can save a party now facing its sternest test yet.

Mary Harney’s resignation came at a time of her choosing, but we can be sure it did not come at a time of her party’s choosing. Nine months before an election is not the time to change leaders if there is any choice in the matter. Until the memoirs come out we can only guess whether Harney chose to save her dignity or sabotage her Minister for Justice. Perhaps she simply saw the writing on the wall. After doubling the number of PD seats in the Dail, Harney knows that it can only go downhill on results night next May.

Bowing out graciously in the sleek surroundings of Dublin’s Merrion Hotel gave Harney a dignified send-off, but expect the coming leadership struggle to be brutal. So close to an already tough general election, this month’s race won’t just be about choosing a new leader, but about a new ideological vision for Ireland, and about raw political survival.

The harsh truth facing the Progressive Democrats is that they have all but lost their special place in Irish politics. It’s not all that long ago in historical terms that the party was the third largest in the Dail with fourteen TDs. With the country on the brink of real economic disaster, the PDs were an answer to necessity and the waste of tax-and-spend policies under Garret Fitzgerald and the governments before his. When the country’s finances hung in the balance it was no surprise that the PDs crested to a level of support that seems unimaginable now.

The cruel irony is that the PDs have become victims of their own success. Don’t expect either Fianna Fail or Fine Gael to admit it, but both the big parties have been forced to accept the basic truth of the PD message that market economics work and government spending doesn’t. To be sure, we’ll never be free of pet projects and politically motivated giveaways – and the next budget is on course to be a disaster on both counts – but nobody in Irish politics is even arguing for tax increases of any great size let alone a return to the days when the need for change was strong enough to bring the PDs into being in the first place. Even in the present government it’s been hard to see where Fianna Fail ends and the PDs begin. Charlie McCreevy, out in front with a tribute yesterday afternoon, might as well have been a PD himself. In the Department of Enterprise and Employment job there’s been little if any difference between Michael Martin and Mary Harney, with Martin buying into Harney’s proven policies without even so much as a little tinkering around the edges. ‘No to one party government’ may have been a winner for McDowell at the last election, but it didn’t mean much once the cabinet posts had been divided up.

Just as the other parties won’t admit that the PDs were right, the PDs won’t admit that they are basically out of a job. Where it gets really tricky is what they individually say when asked what makes them so special anymore. In the coming leadership election, the choice for members won’t just be who they want to head up the party, but whether it's time to slip into the mainstream of Irish politics or strike out on a bold course. Liz O’Donnell is the candidate of the ‘softly, softly’ approach. Michael McDowell, needless to say, represents the alternative. Suddenly, the PDs have to ask themselves again whether its time to be radical. It won’t be an easy question to answer.

For a start, the PDs have to face up to the fact that the self-proclaimed party of slim and efficient government has been in office for nine years of waste and incompetence. It’s not easy now to turn around to voters and promise to fine-tune government spending when you’ve been part of the problem for so long. We still lack any real competition in healthcare, transport, energy, or communications in Ireland. These are all major areas of the economy that have resisted the sort of bracing change that catapulted the country generally towards success in the last fifteen years. In each case, the fingerprints at the scene of the crime are those of the government. Whether as the dominant player in the market or through burdensome regulation, the government has failed entirely to force these sleepy sectors into the twenty-first century.

A generation ago the PDs would have risen to the task with an uncompromising political zeal, but you really can’t call yourself the party of enterprise and opportunity and still leave whole chunks of the economy in the economic dark ages. At any point in the last four years, the PDs under Harney could have chosen to break ranks with a tired and unimaginative Fianna Fail and taken a stand on opening up these disaster areas. It really doesn’t take two terms of government to get around to it. If you’re the party of free market economics it shouldn’t take two months. It only takes a little courage.

If it’s too late for the PDs to rescue their economic credentials – and it probably is – it’s not too late for the party to mark out space elsewhere. As the Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell now stands in line to the PDs leadership and at the head of the country’s war against criminals. It’s time now for McDowell to shake himself out of the comfort zone, drop the air of unreality that crime fighting in Ireland has had in the face of surging violence, and start putting criminals behind bars at a serious rate.

It’s an opportunity both to do the right thing and to save his party. The party that sounded the alarm as Ireland’s economics fell apart can now sound the alarm as law and order falls apart in neighbourhoods across the country. The difference gun crime makes is immense. It puts up costs for everyone in business, leaves us all at risk, and victimises the most defenceless most mercilessly. Turning up the heat in the war on crime is long overdue – it would also break the image of a party working for a narrow professional base by doing neighbourhoods on the front line a service when they need it most.

Once in a while, politics enters defining moments. The emergence of the PDs in the first place was exactly on such moment. The landscape hasn’t been the same since. Harney’s bombshell is both a crisis and an opportunity for the party. Just as in the early days of the PDs, there’s no shortage of targets to take on. What remains to be seen is whether they have the imagination to strike out from their traditional policy areas. A new leader will take over at a critical moment for the party, but with the country slipping in competitiveness and with violent crime seeping across our cities, it’s a pretty critical moment for the rest of us too. We may not need the PDs anymore, but we still need their original ideas. It’s time for the party to step up to new challenges and justify itself to the voters.

Sunday September 10th

Michael McDowell yesterday had the look of someone who had played the scene out in his mind a long time ago. For the first time since records began, the Minister had nothing to say to reporters while arriving at the Department of Justice. Nor, it turned out during the day, did he need to say a word himself. The military precision with which the declarations of support rolled in from around the country ensured that by the time Mr. McDowell strode out of his Department into a hazy Friday evening, the election for the leadership of the Progressive Democrats was all but his.

That was the easy part. Now, McDowell is going to have to do rather more than sit in his office notching up the professions of support. The public – as he will be reminded the morning after the victory party – is likely to take a little more persuading. Indeed, McDowell is inheriting a party whose level of support in the polls is less than the statistical margin of error. Worse, with not one of the eight PD seats safe next May, the party’s very existence is hanging within the political margin of error. Let McDowell enjoy his weekend of triumph. He’s unlikely to enjoy what follows.

Where did it all go wrong for the PDs? This is a party, after all, that was for one brief spell the third largest in the Dail. After being in government for two terms and seeing their once radical economic ideas accepted grudgingly by rivals as simple common sense, they could be forgiven for feeling entitled to more than two percent support.

In truth, the PDs have only themselves to blame. It’s no good having successful policies if you don’t actually get out there and argue for them. Take Sinn Fein, who have dramatically disastrous policies on pretty much every issue going, but who still pound the pavements and rope in votes. Whether through complacency or lethargy, the PDs have become one of the laziest parties in the Dail. Indeed, one of the reasons a leadership challenge is so unlikely is that one-time favourite Liz O’Donnell has done so little with herself over the last few years that voters have forgotten about her and supporters given up on her. The party doesn’t even run candidates in most constituencies and bizarrely sat out the last European election.

Take money matters as an example of complacency. Nobody in the major parties would even dare argue for significant tax increases these days. To compare the situation now with the sorry state of affairs when the party was formed demonstrates just how comprehensive the PD victory has been on economics. Nor has it just been a victory of words – astonishing growth over more than a decade speaks for itself. Yet when was the last time you heard a PD politician claim credit for that little success? True, they weren’t the only ones involved and you can’t reduce something as complex as the nation’s finances to one party’s agenda, but the PDs can’t complain that they don’t get the credit if they don’t put themselves out there and ask for it.

It’s time now for the PDs to reassert their role as the government watchdog and open up on government waste and incompetence in all its forms. McDowell actually has a unique opportunity suddenly. Until this weekend, it’s been all but impossible for the PDs to attack government mismanagement because they’ve been part of the problem.

Now, with a change of leader, McDowell could do us all a favour by selling out his coalition partners in the interests of a hard-hitting campaign against the rampant misuse of taxpayers' money. It would take courage, but there is a desperate need for someone at the top levels of government to champion the consumer and the taxpayer and McDowell has the perfect opportunity to save our money and his party by standing up to the budget free-for-all being cooked up in Fianna Fail headquarters. McDowell should make a public pledge against government waste and be ready to collapse the government if Bertie insists on buying the marginal seats at the next election.

McDowell needs to bring the skill and imagination he showed on Friday when he wrapped up the party’s support to the trickier task of shaping a new manifesto. The thing is, there is a whole set of issues out there that are going for the taking. Nobody, to take another example, is making the argument for real tax cuts in the future. Yet when government waste is as rampant and as visible as it is at the moment, you don’t have to work to hard to convince taxpayers that they could do a better job of spending their money that their politicians are doing. With Brian Cowen planning a splurge with the budget surplus, McDowell should argue that if the government taxed more money than it needed, then it should simply give it back to the people – that’s you and me – who earned it in the first place.

But most importantly, the PDs should branch out. They should branch out geographically and politically. It’s a joke to call yourself a national party and yet to be limited to a small fraction of the country’s constituencies, but it’s also a mistake to run as a party of government and yet leave whole chunks of the policy agenda to the other parties. It’s time, after billions of money for no return, to give up on the tinkering approach and go straight to the source of failures in energy, transport, and, for that matter, health – government mismanagement. As a glance at the experience in neighbouring countries shows, public services simply do not work when the government is both paying for the service and actually providing it itself. Now nobody wants to start cutting people off, but there is a real opportunity for a courageous leader to break the mould of failing services by opening up the actual provision of services to the efficiencies of innovative independent enterprise. The government can still pay the bill, but let’s not pretend any longer that they can manage the business. Making that basic distinction between payer and provider is the shortcut to efficiency and it’s a tried and tested model for reform that could be applied across the board. Nothing would do more for buses and trains in this country than opening them up for the next Michael O’Leary and as the most energy vulnerable country in Europe we simply don’t have a choice any longer when it comes to competition in the energy market. If McDowell is looking for targets, he could worse than start right there.

But where McDowell really needs to get busy is with the most critical set of targets of all – the country’s burgeoning criminal underground. This is where McDowell – if he is prepared to raise his game and take on his critics – could really mark out space for himself. At every level of the criminal justice system in this country stands a well-funded, ideologically driven criminal rights movement that works tirelessly and shamelessly to reduce convictions, reduce prison time, and convince us that its not criminals who are to blame for crime but ‘society’, ‘inequality’, or ‘exclusion’. At a time when many in the public debate have lost the ability to make basic distinctions between right and wrong and to blame the aggressor not the victim, McDowell can and should take on those making excuses for criminals and wake up to the growing reality of a crime problem that for far too long he himself has minimised as a passing storm when in truth it is in danger of becoming a permanent fact of life in Ireland.

When your party is on two percent, there’s nothing to lose that hasn’t already been lost. The opportunity is there for unapologetic leadership and if McDowell is prepared to break the mould he may well find that the rewards are there too.

Tuesday, September 12th

Michael McDowell made a lot of promises in the banqueting hall of Dublin’s Westin Hotel in his first appearance as PD leader, but we can be sure of the truth of at least one of them – “I will not disappoint the media”. Indeed, he won’t disappoint anyone who thinks Irish politics has long been in need of a shot in the arm and a break with the politics of flabby consensus. Whatever else can be said about his sudden elevation and political instincts, it’s fair to expect some excitement. McDowell’s greatest tests lie ahead in the short months this side of the election, but if he can turn yesterday’s triumphal posturing into tomorrow’s transformative policies – and the PDs have a habit of surprising their critics – he’ll be well on the way to claiming a unique and well-deserved place in Irish political history.

McDowell is a fighting politician who will need all his brains to lead his party to electoral success in May, but he must be credited with a vital insight – tinkering with the problems we’re all facing isn’t a solution, it’s an avoidance of the problem. It remains to be seen if McDowell’s policy platform is up to scratch – and it will be a day of truth for his leadership when the manifesto is agreed – but in recognising that radical change is sometimes the wisest course of action he has opened up the possibility of urgent and overdue changes.

At a time when his coalition partner is prepared to sell out the nation’s finances to buy the election, McDowell yesterday stood up for economic prudence and slim government. Despite pursuing his running war of words on crime statistics, he yesterday bowed to the obvious and promised to prosecute the war on criminals with the vigour it deserves. When ‘social justice’ is being used as an excuse for politicians to take control of more and more of the economy, he emphasised that all social policy has to be built on strong finances to be possible. And with the alternative government flirting with the fringes of Irish politics in a bid to make up the numbers, McDowell had the honesty and the punchiness to target the inevitable “far-left” baggage in a Fine Gael and Labour coalition. It all signals the courage and conviction needed to rescue Irish politics from the swamp of trendy buzzwords, giveaways, and government by opinion poll. Not bad for the first day on the job.

It’s now time for the Minister to live up to his fine words. There’s nothing unforgivably wrong with a flight of oratory and combative positioning – especially after unanimously claiming the leadership – but only if it’s backed up by the hard work of practical politics and meaningful reform. McDowell’s past record on that count is pretty mixed. He’s quicker to announce reforms than complete them. More worrying, despite posing as the embodiment of principled politics, the PDs have been known to cave to pragmatic dealings when it suited. Now that fully five of the thirteen PD Oireachtas members sit in the Senate it’s long forgotten that the original policy platform McDowell drafted called for the body to be abolished altogether – though McDowell to his great credit didn’t take a seat for exactly that reason. Worryingly though, despite his cutting criticism of the Fine Gael led coalition in his speech yesterday, he’s freely admitted in the past that as recently as 1999 he agreed to meet with John Bruton to discuss rejoining the very same party. That lust for power is not necessarily a fatal flaw – at best if could fuel the drive to make deep and vital changes – but there are real limits to how much he can compromise before he becomes just another figures in the ‘politics of failure’ he yesterday so bitterly and justly attacked.

McDowell put his credibility on the line yesterday with a promise to double the number of PD seats by this time next year. When you remember that it was against all the odds that Harney pulled in even the eight seats they currently have it’s clear that this is a challenge and a half. But McDowell’s political instincts are sharper than those of many of his critics. At the formation of the PDs he predicted Fine Gael would lose twenty-one seats at their next election. He was almost spot on, only two out as they lost nineteen on the day. His ‘no to one party government’ stunt last time out shifted opinion at the last moment. This time, he’ll need to drag his parties out of their suburban comfort zone and get stuck into the neighbourhood problems and rural issues that stand between the PDs and truly national representation. The PDs are probably the Dail’s laziest party when it comes to building constituency support and they’ve nobody to blame but themselves for being ghettoised in fashionable postcodes.

In truth, despite the image, the rich are the last people who need the PDs. Where there’s money, there’s always a way to keep it – as the scandals and tribunals of recent years confirm. Government waste and spending – the politics of the taxpayer-funded giveaway – are most lethal for the small businessman and ordinary taxpayer who get squeezed hardest by the drop in opportunity, competitiveness, and openness. Left-wing politicians like to speak in the name of the poor, but the economics of state dependency leave vulnerable individuals tied to an impersonal and incompetent welfare system. Small government, economic vitality, and personal responsibility towards friends and family make for an immeasurably more humane and successful approach. When monopolies are broken-up and services freed from management by bureaucracy, it’s the consumer and the average family who feels the gains first. McDowell should look to the example of young PD newcomers like Ben Doyle in southwest Dublin who are out on the pavements in places the PDs would never before have ventured as the way towards electoral rejuvenation and take on internal critics who would prefer the party remains the preserve of cosseted south Dublin professionals.

Back when Des O’Malley was dithering about forming the PDs in the first place, McDowell wrote to him to quote no less a statesman than Charles De Gaulle who had remarked that ‘people get the history they deserve’. After years of electoral ups and downs and hand-to-hand political combat, McDowell may be flattering himself with the remark as he contemplates his recent victory. He should remember it as he plots the coming campaign. This is no time for half measures – either for his party or for the country. McDowell may have indulged himself in a little Latin yesterday, quoting Virgil to declare that ‘fortune favours the brave’, but if he’s the intellectual he’d like us to believe he is he’ll know that Machiavelli, that great strategist of power politics, added to Virgil’s words by emphasising that fortune only dictates half of man’s fate – the other half is a matter of will.

All eyes yesterday were on McDowell at the rostrum, but high above him in the aristocratic banqueting hall chosen for the occasion were sculptures of two ancient goddesses, one holding an anchor, the other a scythe. Trust the PDs to park themselves in the middle of privilege and plasterwork, but if there’s a ‘McDowell code’ to be unravelled, it’s that he needs to lift anchor on the stagnant politics of Fianna Fail vote-buying or his party as a whole is up for the chop. PD leadership is not for the faint-hearted and when the political system is filled with shameless operators prepared to buy public support with public money, neither is politics itself if justice is to be done. McDowell proved yesterday that he is a man of promise whose instincts chime with the times but he will need to roll up his sleeves and choose daring over business as usual if he’s to fulfil his promise.

Some rights reserved.

McDowell's Leadership

2006-09-11T20:00:00.000+01:00

The third of my pieces since Harney's resignation is in Tuesday's Irish Daily Mail. Once they're no longer on the market, I'll publish the set online, if the editors are kind enough to grant me the permission to do so.

Various

2006-09-10T23:46:00.000+01:00

Some quick recommendations.

First, Foreign Affairs have a provocative roundtable on the state of the threat from al-Qaeda five years after 9/11. Of deeper and richer analysis, and as a very valuable effort both at putting al-Qaeda in historical perspective, is Audrey Kurth Cronin's paper in the most recent issue of International Security, 'How Al-Qaida Ends'.

I have been reading the newly established blog by Financial Times chief foreign affairs columnist Gideon Rachman. Rachman is a serious commentator in touch with current research and exactly the sort of informed voice that is, alas, conspicuously absent in a lot of Irish coverage of world affairs. I might add that more often than not I'm finding myself in disagreement with him, but usually learning something nonetheless.

As Monday is the fifth anniversary of 9/11 - astonishing in one sense to think it's been so long given how vividly the day remains to the memory - I link to a piece of mine slightly akwardly titled 'Death and Purpose in Iraq'. It's not my best piece on reflection, and it deals with Iraq rather than the War on Terror generally, but perhaps bears mentioning on the day we're in.

Incidentally, to my regret, pressure of commitments will limit postings to this blog to short posts like this and republications of the odd piece from my print journalism, at least until October. Readers disastisfied with the service are offered a full refund.

Update 1: Newseum has a valuable archive of September 12th front pages.

Update 2: And a photo-essay.

Blogging Conference

2006-09-08T09:51:00.000+01:00

Damien, Mick, Suzy, and Cian announced this morning the 'Blogging the Election conference'. Details here.

Memo to Politicians

2006-09-07T20:16:00.000+01:00

If you're going to resign, don't do it at five in the afternoon. Lowly scribes have deadlines you know.

Rory Miller in the Jerusalem Post

2006-09-07T14:39:00.000+01:00

The Jerusalem Post interviews Dr. Rory Miller on Irish-Israeli relations. One JP typo on Dail seat numbers, but an excellent piece.

Open University

2006-09-05T15:48:00.000+01:00

The New Republic, one of America's most distinguished political magazines, if a little left of this blog, has launched a very exciting groupblog titled Open University. According to the blurb:

It's dedicated to thinking about not just the news of the day but also the news from the academy: Controversies in campus politics that warrant thoughtful discussion. Scholarship from our various disciplines that we think deserves a broader hearing. Ideas we had in doing our research that seem eerily relevant to something we read in The New York Times today.

Sounds like good reading, and efforts to date have been first-class blogging.

Adams in Israel

2006-09-04T18:43:00.000+01:00

Assuming the schedule doesn't change, I am due to speak on BBC World Service tomorrow morning on Gerry Adams in the Middle East, particularly his meeting with Hamas. The program broadcasts worldwide but can be heard online here. It's the 10-11 slot.

Of Antiquarian Interest

2006-09-04T17:45:00.000+01:00

Intellectual fashions change surprisingly quickly. A friend of mine, a political philosopher in America now retired, took great pleasure in telling me when we first met that at the time he wrote his thesis on Adam Smith the foremost theorist of market economics was considered 'of antiquarian interest'.

I missed it at the time, but Francis Wheen had a stimulating article in the Guardian on Marx at the beginning of July. I'm not much of a Wheen fan personally. His 'How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World' badly caricatured Fukuyama's End of History thesis (even to the point of misquoting him, as Douglas Murray deftly exposed in Neoconservatism). But the Marx article was notable for its blurb:

Karl Marx's Das Kapital is a ground-breaking work of economic analysis. But, argues Francis Wheen, it is also an unfinished literary masterpiece which, with its multi-layered structure, can be read as a Gothic novel, a Victorian melodrama, a Greek tragedy or a Swiftian satire.

Anyone who's actually read any of Capital (and there can only be a few who've put themselves through the whole turgid thing) might demur from the view that the work is a 'literary masterpiece', but when Marx is being read for his literary references its fair to ask if he's worth reading at all. It's akin to reading Charles Dickens for economic analysis.

The kiss of death for any thinker is to be thought of as particular to time and place. That's why 'antiquarian interest' is so prejorative. By definition, it denotes that which isn't of interest generally, or rather of interest to our times. It is, of course, an academic way of making contary ideas parochial, by studying them as pertaining to a specific thought-world and set of circumstances.

Of course, in discerning what matters, a key question is whether a writer speaks to permanent problems or is indeed limited in time and space to the contingent. Plato may go out of fashion, but no canon could plausibly be constructed without him. That Marx has barely survived one generation after the end of the Cold War bodes ill for those who would insist on the 'timeless relevance' of his work, to take one of the more improbable claims recently made of his importance.

UN in Lebanon

2006-08-31T19:48:00.000+01:00

Myself and Professor Paul Rogers of Bradford University will be discussing the UN's performance in Lebanon on Newstalk tomorrow morning at about 7.40.

Trials of the Philosophers

2006-08-26T12:13:00.000+01:00

I suppose Socrates had it worse, but Bertrand Russell had his share of trials and tribulations. Not least, as Edward T. Oakes, S.J. reports in an amusing post that impressively combines blogging and nominalism, the post-lecture encounters with members of the public:

Bertrand Russell liked to tell the story of the time he gave a lecture after which an elderly lady came up to inform him that the universe actually rested, as the Hindus rightly knew, on the back of a turtle, to which he, in true tortoise mode, snappily replied, “And just what does the turtle rest upon?” to which she (allegedly) said, “Oh sir, you don’t understand, it’s turtles all the way down.”

Al Gathafi Speaks

2006-08-26T11:58:00.000+01:00

Lybian despot Muammar al-Gathafi (to use what seems to be his preferred transliteration) has a blog. You can read his thoughts on how to solve the Kashmiri crisis, the African cultural revolution, and Fifa.

What a world.

Eating Out

2006-08-25T13:11:00.000+01:00

I don't eat out as much as I'd like to, which is probably no harm, but I got a kick out of Trevor White's Ten Commandments for dining out. For instance:

9. When a man is served before a woman, that also means you’re welcome to leave before paying. If you regard chivalry as ancient gibberish, you don’t deserve to eat well.

And he has a book out too.

I would, however, take issue with his magazine's list of 'Dublin's Top Ten Bars'. At the risk of losing lifelong friends, any top ten list that includes The International is rather suspect.

Incidentally, posting here will be light through the next few weeks as I prepare for the start of the academic year in September and work on some writing that's nearing deadlines.

War of the World

2006-08-24T22:58:00.000+01:00

A version of this article was published in the June/July issue of Magill Magazine.

War of the World, Niall Ferguson Penguin, £25, 816pp

Britain, it is often said, lacks intellectuals. Niall Ferguson is proof to the contrary. Drawing on a dazzling array of sources and fields as diverse as evolutionary psychology, economics, and European literature, War of the World aims at no less than a reframing of the standard historical narrative of the last hundred years.

Accounting for the sheer violence of the last century provides Ferguson with his focus. He breaks with standard narratives of great power rivalry and ideological conflict to posit ethnic division, economic instability, and imperial decline as the lenses through which causes of conflict can best be discerned. Along the way he positively revels in upending conventional wisdom, but neither Ferguson’s playfulness nor his weakness for whistle-stop television histories should mislead. This is a serious work of scholarship.

Ferguson has been best known for his innovative applications of economics analyses to history since revealing the explanatory force of the comparative cost at which countries in the First World War killed enemy soldiers. War of the World has much of the same. Checking the economic record against the course of events throws up telling insights, such as the revelation that for every nineteen tons of additional steel produced in the Stalinist period, approximately one Soviet citizen was killed, or that European stock markets and investor confidence in peace held up almost until the very last moments before war began in 1914. Though not all of the examples adduced relate to Ferguson’s arguments – he’s too much of a storyteller to discard irrelevant vignettes, which is either an irritant or a pleasure depending on your taste and time – by recreating investor expectations and checking the sequence of events against the rise and fall of economic fortunes he deftly dispenses with such canards as the Depression causing European fascism and the Great War being foreseen in advance.

Ferguson’s emphasis on imperial decline is particularly persuasive. While attributing war to imperialism is no new move, Ferguson fruitfully distinguishes between periods of imperial strength and stability, such as the late nineteenth century and its economic boom, and the later decline of empires in Eastern Europe and Asia. The unprecedented globalisation and growth of the nineteenth century would not, he argues, have been possible without empires. Similarly, twentieth century strife in Eastern Europe and East Asia are best explained by reference to imperial weakness not strength, with the incorrigible tendency towards ethnic division filling the resulting power vacuum. (Though a longstanding prophet of American imperial decline, Ferguson holds back from applying the logic to the future, but presumably sees a similarly dark future of regional conflict if the US retrenches as he expects it will have to.)

This economic approach combines with Ferguson’s grasp of grand strategy in War of the World’s most successful passage, an extended examination of the appeasement period of the 1930s. Specifically, Ferguson challenges the received view that Chamberlain had bought badly needed time at Munich to argue that Britain in fact lost its strategic edge. Weighing the economic, military, and strategy balances of 1939 and 1940 against those that existed in 1938, Ferguson cogently demonstrates that “the tragedy of 1938 is that the British and French governments so completely misread the balance of power at the very moment it tipped most strongly against Germany”, arguing that “rather than flying back and forth like a supplicant, Chamberlain should have sat tight in London, declining to take calls from Germany”.

Despite various moments of brilliance, one feels that the book could have used a most strong-minded editor. Though Ferguson reveals the work to have been ten years in the making, it has the feel occasionally of having been rushed to print, presumably to meet the television tie-in. Several of the Excel graphs are incompletely labelled and the footnotes were ditched at the last minute, which will frustrate anyone trained to check sources routinely. The required space could easily have been reclaimed by excising some of the less necessary detours through twentieth century history and concentrating on the arguments for the causes of conflict.

Nor does the most provocative claim get full play. Ferguson argues that far from marking the end of history and the ringing victory of liberal democracy, the twentieth century marked an epochal shift of power from the West towards the East. Despite the importance of this claim, the last fifty years of the century are covered at a gallop. Attempting both to reconceptualize the causes of twentieth century conflict and to demonstrate Western decline in the same volume is probably an instance of authorial overstretch. The trajectory of Ferguson’s output over the last decades suggests he may do the job properly later, which is something to look forward to if he does, but the volume at hand could have benefited from a tighter focus.

Written with verve and sprinkled with fascinating details, War of the World definitively recasts the shape of twentieth century history, putting 1989 in its place and demonstrating what it means to recognise that history did not end with the fall of communism.

First Things Blog

2006-08-21T21:56:00.000+01:00

This is just a plug for the excellent First Things blog. Thanks to the generosity of a friend I've been a subscriber for several years to the print issue and nothing makes my evening like arriving in to see a new issue has arrived. The blog started up a few months ago, and I seem to remember mentioning it at the time, but in the last month or so the number of contributors has increased sharply and it's now amazingly lively, all the more so as the magazine itself is usually unapologetically rich fare intellectually.

And if you're looking for the 'Beer Blessing' from the Rituale Romanum, they have it right here. (Yes, really!)

Misuses Of History

2006-08-21T09:11:00.000+01:00

I read Oxblog daily, and was rather surprised when doing the morning rounds clutching a restorative mug of coffee to see my own name. I remembered after a minute or two. Myself and Peter Nolan sent them a short piece on the misuses of recent Irish history when discussing Hezbollah.

Blogging From The Front

2006-08-20T21:05:00.000+01:00

Ross Frennet, known to some readers of this blog, is blogging from the front in Syria, Israel, and the Lebanon. Quite a way to spend a summer and quite an example of blogging adding value.

The International Community At Work

2006-08-18T00:05:00.000+01:00

France, leading the force, pledges two hundred troops. Germany none. Ireland says we won't send troops if, you know, they might get shot at and stuff. Makes you proud, doesn't it? Nothing like living in a pretend country for idyllic unreality.

Normally it takes a few months for the international community to demonstrably prove its failure. It's only taking days this time.

Israel should point to Hezbollah's continuing violations of the ceasefire arrangments, the inability of the Lebanese army to disarm it, the tragic farce of the 'international force', and resume the job it left unfinished at the soonest opportunity, this week, using the ground operations that proved militarily highly effective in the last days of the recent fighting.

It won't, but it should. As Hezbollah grows in strength and Iran in boldness, it will have to attempt the job again soon in any case, only not at a time of its choosing and against a resurgent enemy. Rarely is strategic logic so clear-cut, the enemy's intentions so openly laid out, and the inevitability of future conflict so transparent. Weakness of will and mendacious advice and pressure from abroad endanger Israel more and more gravely by the day. Hezbollah's paymasters are pursuing a nuclear bomb and have promised to destroy Israel, not once, but repeatedly and clearly. I haven't felt so alarmed by the state of the world since September 2001. Disaster is the norm in history, and peace never an entitlement but an achievement.

Update 1: And just for good measure, two states in the 'international force', Malaysia and Indonesia, don't recognise Israel's right to exist. Nice one Kofi.

Separating Bush From His Doctrine

2006-08-17T09:57:00.000+01:00

The Telegraph reports astonishing poll numbers from the Spectator. Along with a collapse in British confidence in President Bush and the trans-Atlantic alliance, the survey reveals that:

When asked whether Britain should change its foreign policy in response to terrorism only 12 per cent said it should be more conciliatory, compared with 53 per cent who thought it should become more "aggressive" and 24 per who wanted no change.

A quick observation. The poll reveals at the same time a very hawkish stance on the part of the British public generally, alongside deep antipathy to the US and President Bush. Importantly, the two are recognised as quite distinct. On the face of things, there is no good reason to read low levels of support for the US and Bush as an implied criticism of forward defence. On the contrary, a majority are looking for a more "aggressive" stance. How many of that majority are angry at the trans-Atlantic alliance precisely because they've not been assertive enough in the last three years? At least a substantial part, one would think.

As I read it, the poll probably shows up deep structural support for the basics of the Bush doctrine or preventive war, democratization, and fighting Islamist terror as a war rather than a crime problem. Those elements, assuming they're what the British public has in mind when calling for a more "'agressive' foreign policy", suggest that the Bush doctrine has a life beyond its creator.

Two and a half years is not a long time in a conflict that is likely to last as many decades if not longer, but it's only that long until the Bush administration will have ceded office and Blair's stay in power will have ended. But it would be foolish to imagine that international politics would be substantially different for that. Once you separate public support for forward defence from the administrations in power at the moment, deep support for taking the fight to the enemy shows up as a structural feature of public opinion. That, and the fact that the choices will be limited by the enormity of the threat, mean that a return to anything approaching 1990s 'normalcy' is simply not on the cards.

(Norman Podhoretz at Commentary Magazine has just published an important essay 'Is the Bush Doctrine Dead?' that puts things in historical context and persuasively argues for the enduring validity of the basics of the Bush Doctrine.)

Welcome To The Blogosphere

2006-08-17T00:21:00.000+01:00

Graham Neary is blogging. Knowing Graham to some extent I expect great things.

Saving Lives

2006-08-16T22:13:00.000+01:00

The Guardian reports today:

Rashid Rauf, a British citizen said to be a prime source of information leading to last week's arrests, has been held without access to full consular or legal assistance. Disturbing reports in Pakistani papers that he had "broken" under interrogation have been echoed by local human rights bodies.

And goes on to say:

This battle must be won within the law. Anything else is not just a form of defeat but will in the end fuel the flames of the terror it aims to overcome.

First things first. We don't know what happened or didn't in the cell. It's fair to presume the prisoner was subject to rougher treatment than would be the norm in the village Garda station. Secondly, we know (unless you are a conspiracy theorist of the first order) that the information that came out of that Pakistan prison or secret service facility led directly to a plot of at least the same scale of 9/11 being discovered and disrupted within days of it coming to pass.

It would then appear likely that something that we would normally regard as unacceptable was inflicted on Rashid Rauf. If this is so, those of you who regard any coercive interrogation of Islamist terrorists are wrong and off limits need to pose for yourselves the question of whether we would be better off practically, and, more particularly, morally, had that plot been allowed to success because of a by-the-book approach.

There are some incidental considerations. We don't know, for example, that if he was subjected to duress that this was initiated because they suspected a specific plot. For all I know this could be routine in Pakistan and the information a lucky shot. Obviously if this is the case, it's a very different matter morally to exerting extra pressure on someone you reasonably believe to be concealing details of an imminent mass casualty attack. We won't know which it was for some time. If it's the case that they ratcheted things up for very specific reasons, namely that British intelligence shared the fruits of their long-running earlier investigation convincing all concerned that the individual was top priority, we have for possibly the first time a real world example of the infamous 'ticking bomb scenario'. This is doubly noteworthy. First, as the moral hypothetical has apparently come to pass, and secondly, because many opponents of any reconsideration of interrogation options in light of apocalyptic terrorism argued that so uncomplicated a scenario where force might work would not come to pass.

So, where does right lie? Perhaps it depends to some extent on what actually happened in the cell. Being extensively beaten with cattle prods and having your genitals mutilated might reasonably be considered a severe order of abuse. Suffering sleep deprivation and some punches, while no walk in the park, is not quite the same thing. It is useful to distinguish between coercive interrogation and torture. It is possible to be rough with a prisoner without torturing him or her. The distinctions between interrogation, coercive interrogation, and torture, are and will remain open to debate, but we should be able to agree minimally at the outset that they represent three distinct categories of behaviour.

If the prisoner was kept awake for a long period of time and was kicked and punched without suffering lasting harm, that, in my cautious and provisional opinion, was no crime in the circumstances if it was reasonably believed in advance that he had the information he later divulged.

If the prisoner was subjected to water torture, mutilation, sustained electrical torture, or some other ingeniously horrendous practices over some hours before giving up his secrets, that's very hard. It would be much preferrable not to think about these things. I was close to beginning, in my day life in my university, a research program into exactly this question. At some point, after reading rather a lot of testimony about what torture precisely involves and a lot of philosophical meditation on what is involved, the latter being surprisingly much more harrowing, I decided to postpone my inquiry. The putative morality of torture is distinctly repellent to contemplate seriously and at length. I may revisit the issue in the future, but my academic inquiry to date has only convinced me quite thoroughly of the sheer awfulness of the whole business.

But whereas I can avert my gaze in a library, it is not a choice that those on the frontlines of the War on Terror can make. Security services know that the consequences of aversion to tough choices is mass murder. In truth, the question posed at the outset is one that does have to be answered. It will recur.

My instinct is that a terrorist withholding the information that prevented nine planes from being exploded over as many cities has no grounds, speaking morally, to argue that any and all torture inflicted on him to avert that outcome was unjust. But I would not relish having to make the decision either way.

Lunchhour Radio

2006-08-16T10:52:00.000+01:00

If your lunchhour just wouldn't be complete without hearing me criticising the Lara Marlowe school of Arab-Israeli coverage, I'll be on Newstalk from around 1.30 this afternoon, give or take.

Miller and Shatter in the Irish Times

2006-08-15T00:54:00.000+01:00

Tuesday's Irish Times has just gone online, carrying on the opinion page an article by Dr Rory Miller and Alan Shatter. It is the best opinion piece I have seen in an Irish newspaper all year.

A Bad Result For Israel

2006-08-14T23:30:00.000+01:00

Ehud Olmert should go. His leadership over the last two months has been confused, contradictory, hesitant, and unsuccessful. His strategic vision and the central role accorded to unilateral withdrawal has been discredited. The month-long conflict with Hezbollah has not been won and hearing President Bush describe the outcome as a victory for Israel I worry greatly about the depths definitions of victory from the White House seem to be reaching.

Israel's war was not chosen, in the sense that Hezbollah, sitting in the Lebanese government, committed an act of war necessitating a firm response, but the war aims were a matter of some decision. Olmert correctly decided against merely aiming at the recovery of the two captured soldiers. The brazenness of the unprovoked attack and the killing of Israeli soldiers ruled out to any leader with a sense of national honour and long-term security interests the option of attempting to restore the status quo ante. Once it was deduced from Hebollah's recent and historical behaviour that the group, operating as an Iranian proxy with the shared goal of destroying Israel, needed to be removed, the only acceptable war aim was the destruction of Hezbollah leaving South Lebanon secured as best as possible from future subversion by the group. That aim was clearly stated. Just as clearly, it has not been achieved.

That failure is immensely costly. Israel's security rests not on any measure of durable acceptance in the region, which has never existed. Formal peace agreements with some neighbours are credible only because the military balance tilts towards Israel and while some fragile regimes remain in power. But importantly, these are matters of perception too. There has been no concerted Arab attempt to fulfil their pledge to 'drive the Jews into the sea' since 1973 in part because Israel has each time fought better than expected and prevailed. This time, Israel fought very badly, much worse than everyone would have foreseen, and has done lasting damage to the regional prestige of the Israeli Defence Forces with obvious implications for Israeli deterrance. A repeat of 1967 or 1973 is unlikely in the foreseeable future, but much more possible is the increased resourcing of proxy groups to wage a war of attrition, much as suicide bombers in the past received more limited regional support.

The poor performance was not any fault of the men and women of the IDF, with the qualified exception of the Israeli Air Force leadership's intransigent refusal to admit early that its operations were insufficient. First and foremost it was the responsibility of Olmert and his security cabinet, who authorised a war to destroy Hezbollah and then balked at the necessary escalation to achieve the task at hand. In time, it will be important to learn who set the strategy. Seymour Hersh these last few days has published another of his long pieces for the New Yorker, a central contention of which is that the operation against Hezbollah, an air war against entrenched ground targets, was crafted by Israeli and American strategists working together with a view, in addition to destroying Hezbollah, of making a dry run for the sort of operation that might be needed soon against Iran. If so, this defeat has regional implications beyond the survival of Hezbollah as a strong fighting force. The West's credibility in halting Iran's acquisition of a nuclear bomb, weak to begin with, has been perhaps gravely undermined.

Olmert needed to push towards the Litani river, outflanking Hezbollah with the use of paratroopers dropped behind enemy positions, with air power used in support and against Beirut targets and other targets otherwise inaccessible to a ground offensive. When this was eventually begun in the last week of the conflict, the results were immediately impressive. This evening, as the ceasefire takes effect, Hezbollah has finally been surrounded in many areas and for the most part cut off. But it remains strong on the ground, awaiting a determined ground assault it could not long withstand but that will now not come. These would have been hard fights with quite a few casualties, as the tentative ground operations in near cross-border villages proved in the early days and weeks, but those afforded far better rates of attrition that the air campaign.

The failure to articulate a clear strategy when the air campaign visibly failed left Israel exposed internationally. Had Olmert pushed forward with the ground operation two weeks earlier than he did, he would likely have weakened Hezbollah beyond the point at which it could easily reassert itself in Lebanon once the fighting ended. Had it taken the two or three months as one point envisaged, the early demonstration of the village by village success of ground operations would nonetheless have stood in contrast to the indeterminacy of air power's utility and the uncertainty and unease prompted in Western capitals by the apparent lack of a strategy capable of achieving victory. Progress, even slow but steady progress, would have bought the time needed, once it was visible and real. By the time he chose to go in properly the international community had taken matters into its own hands with an ill-conceived plan to place UN peacekeepers in the combat zone. Their presence there will do nothing to disarm Hezbollah judging from their past performance, especially should Hezbollah resist as they almost certainly will, and the proximity of thousands of UN forces will make further against against Hezbollah, which will be needed sooner rather than later, all the more hazardous for all concerned. Worst, Israel has ended the conflict with its primacy in setting strategic policy on the Northern front ceded to international actors. The UN is simply incapable of achieving Hezbollah's destruction. It will quickly revert to its old, failed attempts at overseeing a non-existent peace.

Israel should now insist on the swift and complete disarmament of Hezbollah within an agreed timetable, promising that then the international community has had its chance to fail it will take matters in its own hands. Meanwhile, it is crucial to outline in preparation the strategy for doing this, one that draws closely on the experience of the last five weeks to make credible a plan for unilaterally disarming Hezbollah. This means engaging Hezbollah on the ground and inflicting the greatest possible damage on the group. Looking ahead, it is clear that unilateral withdrawal is a strategy that needs to be put on hold. Gaza is a launching ground for Hamas terrorism, south Lebanon has been used to rain rockets on Israel and as the staging ground for the initial unprovoked attacks. If the West Bank is also ceded Israel will be surrounded by hostile terrorist armies waging war across the 1967 borders while unmolested by Israeli ground forces. That's a completely intolerable scenario. It's time for a serious rethink.

Nasrallah Profiled

2006-08-13T19:54:00.000+01:00

Dr. Rory Milller of Kings College London has a must-read profile in the Sunday Business Post today of terrorist leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.

Sarah Carey On Irish

2006-08-13T19:44:00.000+01:00

I'm sure this will go up on SarahCarey.ie in due course, but read it on the ST site in the meantime.

The Ingenuity Of Evil

2006-08-10T15:59:00.000+01:00

Liquid explosives aren't something I'd heard discussed before, not in a counter terrorism context certainly. Doubtless they had been raised somewhere along the line, amidst the concerns about dirty bombs, biological weapons, electrical pusle attacks, and so forth.

Plausible but uncertain threats, especially involving badly understood technology, tend to be discounted. Much ink has been spilled discussing whether some of the more innovative means of attack, such as dirty bombs, are even a remote prospect. The truth is that there is no way of knowing if a specific delivery method or weapon is going to be used any time soon. What today's foiled attack involving liquid explosives should do is remind the sceptical of the inexorable rise of technological terrorism. Pretty much every good faith invention in human history has been used for destructive purposes sooner or later, and usually sooner. The Nobel prize was instituted by the remorseful inventor of dynamite, who hoped to facilitate engineering and was shocked to see his discovery used for terrorism. The conversion of airplanes into explosive fuel-laden missiles was particularly imaginative, but part of the established pattern whereby even the most innocently intentioned devices are perverted for destructive purposes. It's not going to end any time soon.

Update 1: Peter Nolan, a published authority on such matters, writes to say that in fact "liquid explosives, disguised as contact lens fluid, were produced and then used on a Japanese flight in Asia in 1995 by Ramzi Youssef, the World Trade Center bomber".

Update 2: Simon adds, regarding 'the conversion of airplanes into explosive fuel-laden missiles' that "actually they found plans to fly planes into downtown New York in the diaries of the kids in Columbine", which I didn't know either.

Edith Stein

2006-08-09T22:17:00.000+01:00

I was surprised to see red vestments today. I learned it is the feast day of Edith Stein, also known as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, the Jewish convert, Carmelite nun, and martyr, who was killed in Auschwitz sixty four years ago.

"We bow down before the testimony of the life and death of Edith Stein, an outstanding daughter of Israel and at the same time a daughter of the Carmelite Order, Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, a personality who united within her rich life a dramatic synthesis of our century. It was the synthesis of a history full of deep wounds that are still hurting ... and also the synthesis of the full truth about man. All this came together in a single heart that remained restless and unfulfilled until it finally found rest in God."

Pope John Paul II, when he beatified Edith Stein in Cologne on 1 May 1987.

It is worth mentioning that Alisdair MacIntyre, one of the pre-eminent living moral philosophers, has recently released a volume on her life and philosophical work.

On Israel And America

2006-08-09T21:53:00.000+01:00

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have more reason again to revise their notorious 'Israel Lobby' paper. (Though their first port of call when they emerge to face their critics should be Alan Dershowitz's admirably prompt and telling critique.) Far from offering Israel a free hand, President Bush this evening openly criticised plans decided earlier by Israel's security cabinet to expand the ground operations in Lebanon.

In truth, American support for Israel has not been fixed with anything like the permanence or reliability that is often implied. The 1973 war is an early case in point, though there are famous examples from before then. Henry Kissinger, it is now forgotten, was initially reluctant to authorize the substantial airlift to Israel that eventually arrived, causing a delay that left Israel teetering on a knife edge at the nadir of the war. We now know that aid was only forthcoming after the Soviets intervened on behalf of the attacking Arab states. Carter extracted the relinquishment of the Sinai penisular from Menachem Begin. Even under Reagan, the US was prepared to support a 1981 UNSC resolution condemning the normalization of the Golan Heights are part of Israel proper. Reagan's support a year later when Israel entered Lebanon was quite weak, with America insisting on a stabilization force and contributing troops to it, with the explicit aim of preventing an escalation of the conflict, something that did not tally neatly with strategic thinking in Tel Aviv. Most crucially, when American aid to Israel is viewed in historical perspective, it is immediately clear that material backing has dropped off considerably since the Seventies. Niall Ferguson's Colossus charted aid levels, at page 114, showing decisively a steady tapering off in support levels over the last generation or so.

None of this will surprise historians and specialists, to whom I defer, but it's well to remember on ocassions when America opposes Israel that this is not without precedent. Whether it is wise for Bush to seek a halt to the fighting with a surprisingly resiliant and well-armed Iranian proxy still undefeated in the field in another matter.

Update 1:Adam Maguire writes in, concerning the question of to what extent the White House actually did this evening criticise Israel:

I would [say] that the comments from the White House were not exactly critical of Israel, instead they were simply more cautious than those the US has made to date on the issue. In my personal opinion a comment such as asking Israel to re-think its decision would be critical or actually saying that the decision was a bad one would too. The comment on escalation ("we do not want escalations [to the violence]") is certainly a slight movement from the White House but I do think criticism is too strong a word at this stage; it is perhaps a sign of unease within the White House on Israel's plan, that is to say that they are not as confident of their judgement as they have been so far.
Frankly it's an issue of semantics either way, but an interesting run-through of the other side of the Israeli-US relationship otherwise and one that I certainly rarely hear (for more reasons than a lefty cover-up I'm sure!).

Blog Thoughts

2006-08-07T22:24:00.000+01:00

Blogging is in the news again. Nothing is worse than bloggers blogging endlessly on blogging itself, but I'll make an excursion in the circumstances, and then foreswear the issue for a while. Naturally, this is just my take on things.

To the news. First, Reuters took a heavy hit over the weekend when exposed by Charles Johnson and others for publishing several photoshopped or misleadingly captioned photos from a local anti-Israeli freelancer. Second, Ariana Huffington's Huffington Post has secured five million in venture capital. Third, when Joe Lieberman loses the Democratic nomination in Conneticut this week, as is likely, blogs will be credited as a significant factor.

There's not much of a common pattern in these stories that I can discern, but there is one crucial point of commonality. Blogging counts only when it's more than opinion mongering. The blogs who caught out Reuters did so by bringing together disperse individuals with some focus specifically in tracking media outlets they consider suspect, and in quickly and effectively pooling their findings once they realised they were on to something. The Huffington Post was initially heavily reliant on opinion, but is now preponderantly a news clearing house with some in-house comment retained. Its commanding position is attributable largely to speed, comprehensiveness, and a sure feeling for its audience. (The hottest British blog at the moment, Guido Fawkes, does something similar in that it pools tips from readers to aggregate salacious Westminster gossip.) The blogs credited with creating the netroots effect in the Conneticut primary didn't create that groundswell so much as they provided a vehicle to help mobilise already existing discontent a little more effectively. Blogs that present one person's take on the world are not where the action's at.

The comparative irrelevance of Irish blogging, mine included, is in my view a function of not having served any greater purpose than creating little platforms for people's opinions. I leave myself open to correction, but I can't think of any examples in the few years now that Irish blogs have been up and running in which anyone has decisively caught an Irish newspaper or TV channel doing something like Reuters has been up to. Nor is there a blog out there that is the go-to place for clearing through news, as is the Huffington Post, or political opinion, like Daily Kos or Instapundit. The challenge is not simply to opine or even to aggregate, but to provide a service. The two options, so far as I can see, are fact-checking, and selective, issue or group based, aggregating (this presumes a solid base of people writing stuff worth aggregating, which I think is there). It would be very interesting to see what happens if either is attempted in a fairly serious or professional manner.

What bloggers seem to forget here is twofold. First, individually, a blog doesn't really count. Three figure daily audiences are typical of the more established blogs. Some skilled bloggers have hit low four figures. Set against the papers, that's insubstantial. I know that a column I write for either of the newspapers with whom I publish will be read by more people that will see Sicilian Notes over a year. Even a very successful blogger like Sarah Carey reaches about one percent of her radio or newspaper audience through her blog. The comparison irritates proponents of viral media, or other voguish takes on blogging, but something written in a paper is perfectly viral in the sense of prompting knock-on effects, and besides, if most people read papers not blogs, it's papers not blogs that count. Attracting real readerships isn't possible through disconnected efforts. Second, bloggers forget how inaccessible the medium is to the outsider, which is to say, to most people. If you ask the average person who takes a fairly close interest in current affairs here, the likely reaction is first, that they don't read them, and second, if they do, that they have a handul they know and check in regularly with. I'd wager that almost nobody except bloggers themselves traverse the blogosphere to find what's out there. It's far too much of a jungle. There's a lot being written, much quite dismal, and no good way to navigate. The returns to exploring are uncertain and the reason to do so unclear to those not initiated. In short, blogging here is not user-friendly.

The underdeveloped nature of the Irish blogosphere is worth exploring if you think it shouldn't be this way, especially given the success of the medium in Britain and America. Part of the problem is immaturity and parochialism. Typical is Bernie Goldbach, who managed in the same week to call over at Damien Mulley's blog for more linking between blogs, and to post on his own about the urgent need for people not to link to the big bad neo-con at Sicilian Notes, which is fine when it's just one crank, but damaging for the medium were it to be taken seriously generally. (My technorati ranking actually increased marginally in the subsequent days, but it would be foolish to infer any cause and effect.) Behaving like a teenager who's discovered boards.ie for the first time is a bit too common for anyone's good. My post on the Irish language that so irked people elicted some very thoughtful replies, some that resisted the temptation to round off with a deductive proof of my being ignorant/arrogant/evil, but the largest number were unsophisticated personal attacks. Don't spare my pride, but I daresay nothing has been achieved except a very slight increase in my name recognition. Similarly, the MyersWatch project could have lit a fire under Myers if it had set out to assiduously check his facts and logic, but it suffocated under its own adolescent smarminess and is now defunct. Irish Election is a worthier project, but the content is unoriginal and the site quite often out of sync with the news cycle and entirely reliant on very variable opinion writing. More generally, when it comes to politics in the Irish blogosphere, posts attacking views by far outnumber posts arguing for a position. The consequence is a blogosphere heavy on pot-shots, but light on original ideas, notable exceptions notwithstanding.

Is there a solution? If so, it won't come from me. I blog for myself and those I know read this blog, but I know others think the medium could be more significant and I tend to agree in principle. I'd say only that you don't earn an audience by virtue of quantity of content, but by providing a service, be it a professionally executed fact-checking role, or a speedy and selective aggregating service. In short, when the blogosphere is geared to people who don't blog, as opposed to bloggers themselves as is the situation now, the medium has a decent chance of going mainstream. It will be interesting to watch.

Update 1: On a related note, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has been blogging for five years today. Check out his very first posts. Update 2: Nicholas Lemann has a fairly biting article on the subject in the New Yorker.

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf

2006-08-04T16:16:00.000+01:00

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf died this week.

Schwarzkopf possessed great tonal richness and a vocal and theatrical poise. That's her to the right, pictured in her signature role as the Marschallin in Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, the role in which she sang her last operatic performance in Brussels in 1967.

Der Rosenkavalier was very much a Schwarzkopf opera, the most luxurious of operas, of which countless stories abound concerning the loving extravangance of pre-war productions. It is said that in Clemens Krauss's Munich production, destroyed in war, even the door handles were gold plated. Schwarzkopf too was the genuine article and her singing will always evoke for me a Europe and a Germany that no longer exists, if it ever did. She was the voice of high birth and high art, of consummate excellence, perfection without pretension.

Schwarzkopf joined the Nazi party in 1938. Her devotees for long have stressed her account of this decision, centering on the possibility of joblessness and the necessity of formal membership. In truth, her party file ran to 2,000 pages and proves beyond argument the extent of her willing cooperation. She was seduced by Naziism's noxious allure. Her unforgiveable accomodation with evil paralleled the accomodation of Old Europe of which she was so fine an example. Some never did forgive her. She was boycotted in America and her ennobling by Queen Elizabeth stoked resentment.

Her great rival was the Greek Maria Callas. Opera lovers of a time could be classed neatly as either Callas or Schwarzkopf enthusiasts and to a great extent still can be. For me, Schwarzkopf is by far the superior. Callas had a precision and dramatic edge that impress. Her control, in arias like Casta Diva, was remarkable. But her tone could thin out at times, ocassionally even harden towards brittleness. Schwarzkopf's voice was more sonorous, her readings more luxurious. Callas's interpretations were often cleaner, but Schwarzkopf's stylised readings never strayed beyond the bounds of decency. Her presence in the music was no intrusion. She sang always as a singer of the late European tradition unobtrusively claiming her musical inheritance.

She will be best remembered for her Strauss, but it's not the operatic roles that come to my mind when hearing of her death, but her reading of Strauss's Four Last Songs, a reading completely at home in the lush Middle European tonal landscape Strauss revelled in. The four songs, written in 1948, is forever a valediction to the nobility of musical tradition that in every sense lay in ruins. They are intensely beautiful.

May she rest in peace.

Economists Who Blog

2006-08-04T10:33:00.000+01:00

Today's Economist has a round-up.

Reconstructing 9/11

2006-08-03T22:09:00.000+01:00

Michael Bronner, writing in Vanity Fair, has reconstructed events at NORAD through the morning of September 11th. His piece is long, detailed, complete with audio clips from the newly released tapes, and is one of the most astounding pieces of journalism I've ever read.

Iran On Israel

2006-08-03T19:24:00.000+01:00

Well this is pretty direct:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Thursday the solution to the Middle East crisis was to destroy Israel, Iranian state media reported.

To think that this guy could have nuclear bombs in a few months or a few years. And we're not even watching him anymore, as his agents rain rockets on Israel.

Irish Language Discussion

2006-08-03T12:38:00.000+01:00

Sarah Carey has found a very interesting column concerning the Irish language. This may not be news to more assiduous readers than me, but I'd missed it in the Irish Times last week.

I've left a comment, and as I know others have views on the whole matter, I'd be happy to join a civil chat about the language, its merits, its future, and that sort of thing, over at Sarah's. (No prizes for guessing which word carries the emphasis in that sentence.) Apologies in advance if I'm slow keeping up though; there's a pile of reading to do for the day job for Monday so I'll be intermittent at best.

Update 1: And read John Mortell's take.

The Reform Agenda

2006-08-01T21:11:00.000+01:00

A version of this article was published in the June edition of Magill Magazine. Blogging will recommence at Sicilian Notes on Monday August 7th.

Hearing Enda Kenny’s conference speech last month, you could have been forgiven for wondering if next year’s election is going to be exceptionally dull. With the contentious matter of tax policy off the table, there’ll certainly be fewer sparks. Kenny came out with a vital promise– “there will be no rise in personal tax, no rise in corporation tax, no rise in capital tax”.

Turning Ireland into a stagnant outpost of the continental economy only requires a return to old-style taxation. With Fine Gael now on board there is a consensus shared by the current government and the biggest chunk of the alternative– tax is not going to go up. Irrespective of which way May 2007 works out, and assuming the various parties keep their word, Ireland’s government will be expressly committed to not raising tax. The miscellaneous bits of an alternative government might try, but it wouldn’t be easy for Enda Kenny to walk away from a pledge like that.

Yet this is no time for anyone concerned about prosperity and economic freedom to declare victory. Stopping tax hikes doesn’t stop existing government mismanagement; it just prevents more of it. Getting the government out of the bulk of the economy was the task of the Nineties. Getting the government out of chronically mismanaged service provision is the next big task. The next reforms need to focus on three values that have got short shrift over the last few years – transparency, competition, and choice.

Value for money begins with transparency. Transparency is a word that gets thrown about a lot, but we really need it when it comes to tax and spending. Do you know exactly how much tax you paid last year? It’s not your income tax amount anyway. That only accounts for about a quarter of the government’s total tax take. Three times as much again gets collected in various other ways. Many of us have no real idea how much we actually pay in tax. Without knowing this, it’s impossible to judge what kind of value for money we’re getting. If tax was simplified to enable taxpayers to see in a single figure sum just how much they were losing to the state each year, it might open a few eyes. But at the very least, rife stealth taxation is dishonest and misleading, making taxes seem lower and public spending seem cheaper than each actually is.

The lack of competition is still an issue in Ireland. We like to talk about the Celtic Tiger and the success of the Irish economy, but in reality there are two Irish economies, not one. The first is the international face of business in Ireland, the thriving world of multinationals, foreign investment, and steady growth. The second is the domestic economy. Irish domestic firms are a whole different story altogether. As a paper by Trinity academics Frances Ruane and Philip Lane revealed earlier this year, domestic economic activity in Ireland is not in good shape. The best part of our exports and our growth comes not from our own firms but from foreign firms operating here. The reason is that in many sectors of the economy in Ireland there still does not exist real competition. There is little competition in transport, for instance. Less again in the energy sector, where ESB using every trick in the book to capture the market. Sorting out the lack of competition in key domestic sectors requires that we think in terms of Ireland’s two economies, identifying and fixing the uncompetitive sectors hiding behind foreign firms’ success.

Lastly, choice is a value that has been greatly under appreciated. Once you’ve paid your taxes, you have next to no control over how they get used by the government of the day. It doesn’t have to be like that. Across the developed world, reforms have been pioneered that transform taxpayers into customers with real power and choice over how their money is used. Pension reform is one example. Instead of surrendering wages into a government kitty that can’t match the market rate of return, retirement accounts would allow taxpayers to decide how much to save, how they want to invest, at what level of risk or security, and when they want to retire. Healthcare vouchers would do the same for the health service, allowing patients a choice in where and when they’re treated as they have a stake in the funds.

It’s not just a question of efficiency, though once taxpayers have the power to control the use of their money the effect on sectors like pensions and healthcare has been remarkable in other countries where it’s been tried. The true value is in restoring to families and individuals the ability to control their own lives and not have key decision about retirement and healthcare made for them by the government.

Keeping taxes from rising only prevents more government waste. Government speTo move from disastrous public services and a sluggish domestic economy we need to rethink fundamentally public policy, which means transparency, competition, and choice. Now that would give us an interesting election.

Barr Tribunal

2006-08-01T21:10:00.000+01:00

A version of this article was published in Ireland On Sunday on July 23rd:

The one piece of good news from the Barr Tribunal is that they’ve shut up shop. This tribunal was supposed to take six months time. Four years later, eighteen million in the hole, we’re rid of the thing at last. By the time the report finally emerged the Tribunal had used every excuse in the book down to the complaint that the printers weren’t working on time. But don’t think that’s the end of the matter. The damage the Barr Tribunal has done to policing in Ireland will be with us long after the lawyers have been paid off. Nobody comes out of the Abbeylara siege or its later investigations well, but the gardai are the least of the problem. The Barr Tribunal’s report is a seven hundred page attempt to shift the blame for this country’s failures on gun crime from the officials responsible to the men and women on the front line. But what the report shows up in shocking detail is the complete disconnect between Official Ireland and the reality of the gun crime epidemic on our streets.

The least we can expect from the judiciary and the government is an understanding of what gardai are putting themselves through in keeping us safe. It’s one thing to design crime policy behind a desk. It’s a very different thing to put yourself out on the streets to enforce it. Abbeylara is hardly the only time our gardai have been in harm’s way. The very day the Barr Tribunal finally reported it had to compete for headlines with new stories of gun crime in Limerick and Dublin. Facing a criminal with a gun is a very real possibility for each garda each time they start on duty. The least they’re entitled to is a judiciary and a government that backs them up. This isn’t about covering up mistakes or making excuses when their judgment is wrong – the report has a lot of fair lessons for gardai too – it’s about Official Ireland waking up and recognising that gardai doing their best in a dangerous and unpredictable situation deserve support, not one-sided criticism.

Some recognition that gardai have to make split-second decisions in life and death situations should have been the starting point for the Tribunal’s investigation. Instead, you’ll read many long chapters of criticism without a mention of the fact. It’s as if the decision to shoot was itself made over four years time with the benefit of millions of euro spent on research and expert advice and not in a moment of fear and unpredictability.

Take the criticisms. The report argues that negotiators should be sent on two week training courses. Yet the Abbeylara negotiator had been on exactly such a course, with the world-respected London police’s negotiating unit. The report criticises the gardai for not getting enough psychiatric support in, yet the team leader of the Emergency Response Unit was a trained psychiatric nurse. These weren’t trigger-happy amateurs, as the report’s tone so disrespectfully implies.

Worse follows. Even accepting that the gardai should have cleared the road outside the house, as the report recommends, rather than position themselves there where they were too close to the house, the report is shockingly indifferent to the lives of gardai once John Carthy had started his advance. Let’s remember the basic facts. A man with an eighteen page history of erratic and threatening behaviour, known to be unstable, known to have it in for the gardai, advanced on them bearing arms, ignoring all warnings. What exactly, in that situation, were they supposed to do? This is threatening behaviour of the highest order. You can’t explain Carthy’s behaviour any other way. Yet instead of agreeing that once this situation arose the first duty of the gardai at the scene was to protect innocent life, the report amazingly criticises the force on the grounds that gardai should have given based their actions on the fact that Carthy had told a friend he didn’t plan to shoot anyone. That’s the verdict of official Ireland on garda safety. When your colleagues are in imminent danger from a clinically ill patient with a gun and a grudge, you’ve to take the guy’s word that he means no harm over the testimony of his actions, each one of which points to trouble.

It makes you wonder what exactly it would have taken to get the Tribunal to agree that the gardai had a right to defend themselves. Do they have to wait until they’ve been shot before they can defend themselves? Fingering gardai for defending themselves is disastrous. We rely on these people to take great personal risks for our safety. The surprise is not that there are tough calls or questions of judgment to be debated back and forth, but that anyone would take on such a burden for the sake of public well-being. When gardai are next faced with a life and death situation – and it’ll happen sooner rather than later – they need to know that the country backs them to keep us safe, not that they’ll be persecuted for their judgment call six years after the fact. As of this week, every garda in a split-second life and death situation will have to think not just of safety but of what an out-of-touch elite might do to him years down the line. The damage this whole affair has done to the gardai’s ability to protect us is immense.

Blame the politicians too. If indifference to garda safety is the hallmark of the Barr Tribunal, indifference to gun crime marks out this government. Reading through the recommendations for the future it’s staggering that these common sense measures aren’t already in place. At a time when gun crime of one type or another is a daily event, we’re still without trained police dogs, Tasers and other non-lethal weapons, specialist command vehicles for sieges, a garda training course on mental illness, or even a manual on how to handle similar situations in the future. Unbelievably, the government has actually cut funding for firearms training.

Official Ireland simply does not take gun crime seriously. It’s not something you can tackle with eighteen million euro inquiries or a door-stopper of a rulebook. It’s something that’s only going to get ended once we give gardai the tools and the freedom they need to stand up to armed criminals. No police force is perfect or above scrutiny, but we’ve one of the best of the world. If they’re prepared to put themselves in harm’s way for our safety – and they are – the least we can do is see that they have the equipment they need and the confidence of officials. As it is, people are getting shot by the dozen and the gardai seem powerless to do anything about it.

The threat isn’t from gardai. It’s from a political culture that insists of blaming the wrong people. It’s high time we laid the blame for gun crime with criminals, not with inequality or exclusion or some other abstract liberal concept. It’s time government shouldered its share of the blame for not funding gun crime strategies that match the scale of the problem. And it’s time we recognised the gardai are doing us all an immense service. They’re on our side. We should be very grateful for the risks they take for us.

Email Postscript

2006-08-01T19:25:00.000+01:00

Following this post, the Sunday Independent ran this article. Much nonsense online has followed. While I regard the matter as closed, and said this when contacted by the author of the Independent piece, some clarification is in order.

First, I should not have published the name of the person who sent the email, as that put me on the wrong side of my own email policy. I'm happy to put my hands up and accept that I was in the wrong on that count. It's a remote probability that the author checked the policies or even knew they were there, but that's immaterial.

Second, the reports that the author lost his job are news to me. I know only that disciplinary processes were initiated. I neither know nor have any interest in what become of the email's author. Those presuming either way should limit themselves to known facts.

Third, the allegation online that I have misused IT facilities at one of my places of work is entirely incorrect. Moreover, had I chosen to use UCD facilities to blog outside the time I allocate to fulfill my responsibilities there I would have been entirely entitled to do so, as is every other member of staff and the student body. It is possibly defamatory to report that I am in breach of contract by misusing facilities. I note in passing it has not been made by anybody writing under their own name. I note also that I have sought recourse to libel lawyers in the past with a 100% success rate to date. If the author is serious, I invite him or her to publish the claim under their own name. I will then refer the matter to one my lawyers (I find it a sad reflection on the world that at twenty-two I already have need of two of them). I invite those who have made or spread this claim to withdraw it.

Fourth, though doubtless accidentally, Sarah Carey is incorrect in reporting that I "probably wouldn’t do it again". I would act exactly as I have with the single exception, as already mentioned, that I would not have made public the actual name of the person who sent the email. That an inappropriate and abusive email was sent from a state funded body is a matter of legitimate public interest and I would have considered myself remiss in not reporting the email, as I did straightaway, and in making public the basic facts of the matter. At the time I had no idea whether the author was a chief executive or a secretarial temp and would in any case have treated the matter in the exact same manner irrespectively. If the author did indeed lose his job the responsibility for that fact is entirely his and I neither express nor feel regret. There will be no apology. The responsibility is his and no amount of politically-motivated dislike of yours truly changes that fact.

Fifth, Sarah Carey is in the wrong when she argued that I "shouldn’t have let the SINDO article go forward implying that [I] hadn’t complained". I supplied the journalist with all the information he requested and an accurate timeline of events on the day. I have at no point denied this and would have no reason to. If she is unhappy with the article in the Sunday Independent she should get in touch with the paper. They will, presumably, then tell her to get a life. As she is in the business of demanding apologies from people, myself included, she might consider, if not an apology, a correction at least.

Lastly, had the Irish language zealots who protested my brief piece in such inflammatory and unreasonable language across the blogosphere had the minimal maturity to respond in a rational fashion and desist from explicitly directing readers to send hate mail to my account, they would not have had one of their own suffer, by all accounts, a clear career setback of one type or another. You lost. And it was needless and entirely your fault. Learn from it by learning to deal with disagreement as adults and not as caricatures of fringe interest lunatics. I accept no blame in the matter, reserve my right to report civil servants in the future for similar breaches of contract, and advise those who have devoted not inconsiderable time to this most trivial of news stories to find something else to blog about in what could hardly be considered a slow news week.

The matter is closed.

Another Charity Off My List

2006-08-01T00:10:00.000+01:00

Trocaire.

At this rate I'll be down to pretty much just Goal amongst Irish charities. I'm giving Oxfam a pass as it is, what with 'Fair Trade'. (Full disclosure: I used to volunteer there once for a not particularly long time.)

Why can't charities stick to the original meaning of the term and leave politics to political groups? They're free agents naturally, I'd just prefer to see them stick to what they do best and steer clear of simplisticly and needlessly politicising their work.

Anti-Semitism, Part II

2006-07-31T23:48:00.000+01:00

I rarely answer queries addressed to me online. Doubtless this strikes those taking the time to pose questions for me as rather rude, which perhaps it is, but this blog drains more of my time than I can really afford to lose without seeking out more arguments to join.

But rarely is not never. Though I will be justly thought to be cherry-picking easy targets, I see that 'The Irish Bulletin' has posed one such question, of a sort, for me this evening:

To Mr. Waghorne, and all the Israelophile commentators

Amidst all the recent guff on proportionality, here's the latest from the Judaic news source, Ynet:

Yesha Rabbinical Council: During time of war, enemy has no innocents The Yesha Rabbinical Council announced in response to an IDF attack in Kfar Qanna that "according to Jewish law, during a time of battle and war, there is no such term as 'innocents' of the enemy." All of the discussions on Christian morality are weakening the spirit of the army and the nation and are costing us in the blood of our soldiers and civilians," the statement said.

The Yesha Council, you will not learn from Irish Bulletin, is the successor movement to Gush Emunim, the settler movement, and these days a fringe group on the Israeli right and frequent critics of the Likud party, which should give you an idea of their marginal status. It is the hardline contemporary voice of those remaining adherents to the vision of Greater Israel. Importantly, they no more speak for Judaism as a whole than the schismatic Society of Saint Pius the Tenth, a favourite at Irish Bulletin, speaks for Catholicism, even for advocates of the traditional rite, amongst whose number I count myself.

The anti-semitism consists first in seeking out the most extreme voice of the religion and casting it as the mainstream authority and second in the motivation behind that misrepresentation. I have no doubt that the vast majority of Jews would need no time at all to come to the conclusion that the loss of innocent life in war is something to be avoided where at all possible, while worrying intensely about the tragic choices Israel faces on each of its two fronts.

Though one should not expect too much from a blog that links to the Immigration Control Platform, Youth Defence, Republican Sinn Fein's newspaper, the fascist Spanish Falange, the neo-Nazi NDP in Germany, Final Conflict e-zine, and the Holocaust revising Institute for Historical Review.

"Israel Must Be Wiped Out"

2006-07-31T23:09:00.000+01:00

If you cast your mind back to October 2005 you may remember the furore after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that "Israel must be wiped off the map", to use the translation adopted by Aljazeera.net. Some time subsequently, it became controversial as to precisely how his words should be translated and what they might mean in context. When speaking at a debate on Iran last month I was assured by Raymond Deane of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign that Iran's president had meant little more than the oft-heard contention that Israel was a destabilising presence in the region. Juan Cole, Professor at the University of Michigan, embroiled himself is a much-enjoyed tussle with Christopher Hitchens for arguing similarly, though a little differently, that the President's words were more a poetic allusion to standard regime platitudes than a call for Israel's destruction as such.

The picture above runs in Sunday's New York Times (I hope they'll forgive my pinching it.) The story has attracted comment for it's analysis of Hezbollah's strength and Iran's at this stage in the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel. The story, however, is most interesting for the picture, and specifically for the words in the bottom-left hand corner - 'Israel Must Be Wiped Out The Map'. Leaving aside the mullah's grasp of English (it is, after all, considerably better than my Farsi), might it be fair to suggest that the presence of those words on a government poster in Tehran pretty much settles the matter of what they mean? This time, they've done the translation themselves, and it's pretty unambiguous.

The A Case

2006-07-31T17:16:00.000+01:00

Legal reasoning is too often dry and technical. Karole Cuddihy demonstrates how it can be both penetrating and elegant. To this layman, Karole's analysis of the A case reads as definitive. Check it out.

More On Proportionality

2006-07-29T13:10:00.000+01:00

Slate magazine has a helpful roundup of posts on the idea of proportionality as it pertains to the current Middle East Conflict, kindly referencing my post from a few days back.

City Journal Issue Out

2006-07-26T17:00:00.000+01:00

Point at City-Journal.org. The new issue is out. It's one of America's leading high-end intellectual journals and definitely one of the most exciting.

Understanding the Current Conflict

2006-07-26T14:44:00.000+01:00

Rory Miller of Kings College London is the indispensable authority for those seeking to understand what's happening in Israel and Lebanon. Check out his piece in the most recent Sunday Independent and today in the Irish Times, with Efraim Karsh. Given the number of people once again falsely analogising the situation to what existed in the North it's worth mentioning also the report 'Why Hamas is not the IRA' that myself, Rory Miller, and Peter Nolan published with the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre.

Excavations

2006-07-26T00:55:00.000+01:00

Our pioneers keep striking Inwards and downwards, Every layer they strip Seems camped on before. The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. The wet centre is bottomless.
Bogland, Heaney

Today's find was a great one indeed, likened in the Irish Times to an Irish dead sea scrolls. Even I know enough to know that psalters like the one newly uncovered are not ten a penny.

The first passage reportedly legible was a transcription of the eighty-third psalm. This is not a particularly cheerful one - "Let them be confounded and troubled for ever; yea, let them be put to shame, and perish; That men may know that thou, whose name alone is JEHOVAH, art the most high over all the earth" - but it underpins theologically one of the finest pieces by Irish composer Charles Villers Stanford, 'For Lo, I raise up', a setting of the breathtakingly dramatic Book of Hakkubah.

While we're at it, psalm 83 by chance is not unrelated to today's reading from the Second Letter to the Corinthians. The relevant verses from the epistle read:

We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed;

while the earlier part of the psalm is Paul echoes is:

For, lo, thine enemies make a tumult: and they that hate thee have lifted up the head. They have taken crafty counsel against thy people, and consulted against thy hidden ones.

As throughout, the optimism with which the New Testament reworks what went before is accounted for by the Resurrection.

And on connections one last time, it's quite a coincidence to hear today in the same reading "They have said, Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation; that the name of Israel may be no more".

One can only wonder how many other treasures lie in the bog. And how many more might be found by an industrial cutter rather than an archaeologist.

Update 1: Fox News notes the Israel reference. I'm shocked that they didn't credit me.

Barr

2006-07-23T14:21:00.000+01:00

I've a piece defending the gardai's use of lethal force in Ireland on Sunday today.

Update 1: If you've too much time on your hands you can listen to five people I haven't heard of and one I have complaining about my article and others on the matter on RTE last Sunday. It's here from somewhere about thirty-seven minutes in. It's news to me that I don't think the report was needed, but if it's on RTE it must be true.

Anti-Bush Protests

2006-07-21T18:35:00.000+01:00

I see that some of Ireland's few remaining unemployed protested Jeb Bush's presence/existence/family in town today. It even made the second slot on Sky News Ireland (I know, but there was nothing else on). Pity the speaker, Rory Hearne, didn't get any coverage. His claim that Hamas and Hizbollah deserve support as "national liberation movements" would have been useful to publicise a little more widely as an insight into the scum that are the Irish Anti-War movement and the Ireland Palestine Solidary Campaign.

Update 1: Small world. I know the young woman in question being turfed unceremoniously out the back door of the hotel in the news shot, one Jane Horgan Jones, a signed up member of the UCD loony left, though perfectly pleasant to talk with. Interested to see Labour Youth associating themselves with this disgrace.

A Short Word On Proportionality

2006-07-21T17:07:00.000+01:00

Why the focus on proportionality? The prominence the concept has attained in the last ten days is striking. It's also problematic. Proportionate in relation to what precisely? The tightening of the debate from the moral question of whether Israel's actions are just to the narrower legalistic question of whether the actions are proportionate is both a sign of the times and an obstacle to proper moral evaluation of the conflict currently afoot.

Proportionality has an important place in just war theory, delimiting what is and is not permissable (within the context of what's presumed to be a just war). That's fine, but it's far from a lot of the loose talk one hears right now. Proportionality is more often discussed at the moment as if it were something closer to balance, to an equality of violence or loss inflicted and endured. At its worst, this thinking counts bodies and accuses the nominally less-afflicted party of injustice on the basis of 'disporportionate' suffering inflicted. This is morality by numbers of the sort that the likes of Bob Fisk and his innumerable cut-and-paste acolytes unreflectively go in for.

Making sense of proportionality isn't possible without an understanding of ends. What's proportionate if the end is total victory is different from what's proportionate if the end is repelling an incursion, and if the end is something comparatively trivial like accosting a terrorist leader, that naturally has distinct implications for proportionality too. Disabling infrastructure is legitimate in some instances; in others it would be too much to take any significant risk of civilian casualties, such as an attempt at killing a relatively unimportant terrorist leader. The fact of civilian casualties itself says nothing about whether an action is just (assuming that their deaths are not the purpose of the attack, in which case it's straightforwardly immoral). Relating ends and proportionality basically requires the use of a minimum of force, and the minimum risk to civilian life, (the two are quite distinct), consistent with attaining ends that are just. Once the ends are established as such, what follows is a question of practical ethics concerning how they can justly be realised (the double effect kicks in here), but the weight of moral evaluation in war is born at the end of the consideration that concerns the basic objectives of the campaign and their justice. Nobody today complains about the thousands of dead French civilians from the liberation of Normandy and it would be self-evidently ludicrous to do so.

So I don't see any common ground amongst people talking about proportionality at the moment because I don't see any serious attempt at reasoning through what might be just ends for Israel to be pursuing. There are plenty of possibilities on the table. One would be the simple release of their soldiers. Another would be achieving a halt to the thousands of rocket attacks they're suffering. A third would be to destroy Hezbollah as a threat for the future as well. A fourth would be to establish a buffer zone to prevent a repeat build-up. A fifth would be punitive strikes on Lebanon for not disbanding Hizbollah. A sixth would be the exemplary use of force to deter future potential adversaries like Syria. (I'm sure the list of possibilities presented here is far from exhaustive, and I limit myself here to listing rather than endorsing.)

Of course, the question of ends itself can be considered through the lens of proportionality. What is a proportional response to the initial attacks is a plausible question. But it's not quite the right one. The better question is what are just ends for Israel at this point in time. There is a significant difference betweeb the two. Rather than constricting moral reasoning by limiting the consideration to what is permissable by reference to a single given incident, the kidnappings, the fuller and proper investigation takes all the factors obtaining as relevant to question of what ends are just, such as Hizbollah's history, nature, intentions, current acts, and debilitating regional effects.

Without establishing what would be just ends for Israel to pursue, talk of whether their actions are proportionate is nonsensical. Once there is a sense of what the just end point looks like, talk of what fits the bill to get there comes back into play. At the moment it serves as a way of avoiding the basic question of justice.

DuPont Circle

2006-07-21T16:41:00.000+01:00

When in Washington I like to park myself near DuPont circle and was delighted to hear this week that friends have set up camp there. Though I was living in Virginia when over last year, DuPont had the virtue of good booksellers and cafes with decent coffee and wireless. That combination pretty much makes my weekend anywhere in the world (I am a man of few and simple needs) and I spent an inordinate amount of time in the sunshine reading magazines I've to pay through the nose to get sent to Ireland. DuPont in other respects is an area of questionable virtue, but what interested me this afternoon was the little piece in The Morning News charting a surprisingly varied history of the area. I had no idea how many names had been in situ there. The article is a minature 'who's who' of a certain chunk of American life. Amidst the local history is a fun little observation:

From time to time, often by pure coincidence, small groups of amazing talent have coalesced around a charismatic genius, a research institution, or a neighborhood café. Bloomsbury. The Wollstonecraft circle. The Frankfurt School. It’s something seemingly as mysterious as the origins of life itself— the right combination of personalities, abilities, and interests creating a mutually reinforcing atmosphere of creativity and ideas, often with world-historical consequences.

Irish cultural history has its counterparts in this respect, if maybe not quite any of 'world-historical conseqeunces', but how nice simply to see someone for once take intellectual life as a naturally arising fact of human life generally and not reduce it to the play of economics or some such.

From Israel

2006-07-19T23:10:00.000+01:00

'We are all Israelis now'

Added

2006-07-16T23:37:00.000+01:00

The excellent Manhattan Notes.

Update 1: And if you're trying to follow the news from the Middle East as it unfolds, try J-Blogosphere and, for analysis critical of Israeli leadership from the right, Israpundit.

Update 2: Cliff May:

Since disarming Hezbollah is what is called for by the “international community” in UN Security Council Resolution 1559, it is hard to see how even the French could call such an action disproportionate. It makes one wonder what the French would regard as a proportionate response. Forming a collaborationist government in Vichy, perhaps?

Zidane And Virtue

2006-07-16T22:20:00.000+01:00

What to say about Zidane? For once, events on the field aren't just the preserve of football pundits. It's easy to read too much into it, but Zidane's rash end to his career had too much of the poetic about it to pass the commentariat by. The moment had too much human drama to leave to Johnny Giles and company. Making sense of what prompted Zidane to throw away much of a reputation and much of his country's chance of winning the World Cup invites careful reflection on the nature, and morality, of his choice.

Courtesy of Sinead Glesson's excellent Sigla Blog comes Roger Cohen's styling of Zidane as a latter day Meursault:

Zidane chose his fate. We all do, or so Camus believed. Zidane chose his moment, 10 minutes before the end of his career.

That sounds plausible, taking Zidane's action as irrational in a strict sense, yet this seems incomplete. Zidane's head butt was rash, but it was not impulsive. It was not straightforward self-assertion as per Camus's antihero. He considered before acting, not at length but long enough to reason it through, and it was an act of judgment, a weighed response. Meursault was a man of empty self-assertion. His murder is unreasoned. Zidane was fully engaged in his act of downfall, thinking it through, and quite prepared to stand over his act and its consequences, quite prepared in other words to make sense of it where Meursault absorbed himself in meditation on senselessness. Rather than being meaningless, and an assertion of such, the personal momentousness of Zidane's choice seems thoroughly shot through with meaning and judgment. Bernard Henri-Levi comes closer, with a piece in Tuesday's Journal, assimilating Zidane to Homeric heroes of antiquity:

Here is a man of providence, a savior, who was sought out, like Achilles in his tent of grudge and rage, because he was believed to be the only one who could avert his countrymen's fated decline. Better yet, he's a super-Achilles who--unlike Homer's--did not wait for an Agamemnon (in the guise of coach Raymond Domenech) to come begging him to re-enlist; rather, he decided himself, spontaneously, after having "heard" a voice calling him, to come back from his Spanish exile and--putting his luminous armor back on, and flanked by his faithful Myrmidons (Makelele, Vieira, Thuram)--reverse the new Achaeans' ill fortune and allow them to successfully pull together. And then this valiant knight who is a hair's breadth from victory and just minutes from the end of a historic match (and of a career that will carry him into the Pantheon of stadium-gods after Pelé, Platini and Maradona); this giant who, like the Titans of the ancient world, has known Glory, then Exile, then Return and Redemption; this redeemer, this blue angel dressed in white, who had only the very last steps to scale to enter Olympus for good, commits a crazy incomprehensible act that amounts to disqualification from the soccer ritual--the final image of him that will go down in history and, in lieu of apotheosis, will cast him into hell.

Style aside, he's on to something. Something, but not the whole story. Zidane's act, one of pride, neatly assimilates the Homeric hero's fall, with an individual laid low by wilfulness and a refusal to bow to limits or necessity. Though Henri-Levi reads Zidane's act as a deliberate refusal of any sense of superiority, hubris allows another classical possibility, though one that again seems to miss the point somehow. Zidane was surely on the far side of what was permitted to him, but his motives don't fit. They're not the motives of Greeks who seek to climb to high, to outstrip the human sphere and assert themselves above the human plain tolerated by whimsical and vindictive gods. Rather Zidane's act looked more like self-abnegation. He brought about his ruin quite consciously. There remains, as there never does with hubris, an unanswered question of 'why?'.

The missing part of the explanation is honour, a concept and virtue much missing today. Peter Berger, writing thirty-six years ago in the European Journal of Sociology put his finger on the status of honour today:

Honour occupies about the same place in contemporary usage as chastity. An individual asserting it hardly invites admiration, and one who claims to have lost it is an object of amusement rather than sympathy. Both concepts have an unambiguously outdated status in the Weltanschauung of modernity. Especially intellectuals, by definition in the vanguard of modernity, are about as likely to admit to honour as to be found out as chaste. At best, honour and chastity are seen as ideological leftovers in the consciousness of obsolete classes such as military officers or ethnic grandmothers.

Quite apart from being accurate, this invites the question (answered by Berger in course) of why honour was once so central a virtue. We can no more understand Zidane's decision without recourse to a consideration of honour that was can understand what happened on the battlefields and duelling plains of recent centuries. In Zidane, we find that almost extinct creature, the man who is prepared to take on great burdens for the sake of his standing and the honour of his family. Thinking through Zidane's act without accounting for the motive of personal honour gives rise to interpretations like Henri-Levi's and Cohen's, as they think of his as a man much in the image of themselves, unsure of his values, or at least open to self-reconstruction, and not as someone willing to refer each choice to a moral code, albeit a simple one. To understand is not necessarily to excuse, but the virtue of honour has much to recommend it. The confusion concerning Zidane arises not so much because commentators do not similarly recommend it, but because they don't recognise it. We should perhaps be glad there are still those willing to bear high costs for the good names of those in their care.

Summer Magill

2006-07-15T14:05:00.000+01:00

The summer issue of Magill is out, and it's a good one. The big news is the exclusive release of a set of what will doubtless be highly controversial portaits of Haughey styled as an English lord, painted during the Eighties by Edward Maguire.

John Lalor has a piece on animal testing and Conn Corrigan details support for Castro in the Dail. There's much more too, including an essay on the decline of the left in Ireland by Jason Walsh.

I've a review of Niall Ferguson's War of the World at the back, but the column is given over to my half of an exchange with Amnesty Ireland Director Sean Love, who took issue with my expose of his fraudulent research tactics in the May issue.

Enjoy!

Ann Coulter on Newstalk

2006-07-14T11:00:00.000+01:00

Word has reached Sicilian Notes that Newstalk have scooped an interview with Ann Coulter, the columnist who managed to get sacked from National Review for being too right-wing. It's tomorrow (Saturday) at 9.30.

Letter Of The Day

2006-07-14T10:09:00.000+01:00

It's a bad habit I'll never be able to ditch. Reading the IT letters page that is. Today's pick:

Madam, - I agree with Sophie Franklin (July 7th) that the noise from helicopters is particularly irritating and intrusive. It feels like an invasion of one's personal space, possibly because these inherently noisy machines fly at such a low level.
The occasional mercy dash or Garda unit checking for nude sunbathing would be tolerable, but I have seen or heard a total of 43 flights over this area in the past seven days at intervals of as little as three minutes. I am, as my wife will freely attest, a grumpy old man and this ever-increasing row from the Celtic Tiger is not helping.
GERARD PALMER, Taney Rise, Dundrum, Dublin 14.

It's the same story out at UCD. More often than not, when stepping outside there'll be one in the sky. The faint whir is audible as I type at the moment. Happily the noise inside this concrete bunker we all work in is reduced to insignificance, but the sheer number is striking. Given that helicopter traffic to UCD itself is unlikely on academic salaries, the supposition is that much of it is for the Radisson, which apparently is a favourite hideout of the helicopter set.

Another Petition

2006-07-14T09:49:00.000+01:00

This one is from the Anti-Defamation League. I find the ADL a little headstrong on ocassion, but this letter is spot on:

On the eve of the first session of the new Human Rights Council in Geneva, you rightly said: "I hope we are not going to see a situation where the Human Rights Council focuses on Israel, but not on the others."
Sadly, that is exactly what has happened. The obsession with Israel which discredited the old Human Rights Commission has been transferred to the new Human Rights Council. We have had a resolution condemning Israel but ignoring Palestinian acts of terror and violence. Condemnation of Israel is to be a fixed item on the agenda at all future Council meetings.
We urge you to speak out again. Tell the Human Rights Council that its fixation with Israel is not acceptable. Make the Human Rights Council understand that its agenda should be about promoting human rights, and not the narrow interests of its member states, many of which themselves have appalling human rights records.
Mr. Secretary-General, if we cannot have a Human Rights Council which does not make a mockery out of the noble concept of human rights, then perhaps we should not have one at all. The choice is clear: reform or disband.

I've added my signature. You can do so here.

(via the invaluable Atlantic Blog)

Blaming Israel

2006-07-13T13:20:00.000+01:00

The Irish Times today blamed Israel for the escalation in the Middle East:

Israel's decision to go for maximum response after the provocative capture of two of its soldiers by Hizbullah militants has brought the Middle East to its most dangerous level of instability in recent times. Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert's description of this as an act of war by the Lebanese government, in which Hizbullah has two ministers, was followed by a sharp escalation of official rhetoric about the need for a military campaign to change the rules of the regional game. International pressure is urgently needed to scale down the tension.

This one paragraph is problematic for several reasons and is a model example of the anti-Israeli bias in D'Olier Street. First, Israel did not "escalate" the situation, Lebanon did. A cross-border raid killed several Israeli soldiers and captured another two. That was the escalation. Israel's ground operation that followed was designed to cut off routes deeper into Lebanon to prevent their captured soldiers from being spirited further from safery. The air strikes that followed against infrastructural targets are a perfectly legitimate response to this act of war, calculated to force the return of the soldiers. Second, the Irish Times is wrong if it considers Ehud Olmert's recognition of the attack as an act of war to be anything other than perfectly accurate. Hizullah sit in the Lebanese government. Astonishingly, the editorial sees fit to make no mention of this fact. They operate in the south of Lebanon on the Israeli border (or did until yesterday, I suspect their operations are somewhat more 'limited' suddenly) without any hindrance or opposition from the Lebanese security services. The serviceable analogy would be if the IRA, sitting in the Irish government, captured troops from the North, killing the rest. For a party in government to do such a thing is an indisuptable act of war. It is deeply disappointing that the Irish Times presents this as a matter of opinion on Israel's part when it is completely clear-cut.

There is a set framework for reporting attacks on Israel. First, Israel is designated as the party at fault. Second, straightforward designations such as terrorism or act of war are relativised and undermined. Third, the required response is dismissed as somehow extreme, and the editors in Dublin 2 call for calm and restraint. Today's editorial has all three. First, Israel is blamed for escalation the day after it suffers an unprovoked attack by the government of a neighbouring state. Second, the nature of this attack and its legal and political status as an act of war is put in question. Third, the appropriate response - coercion and punishment designed to deter future agression and free the captured soldiers - is dismissed as an 'escalation', with the implicit charge that Israel is overresponsding and thus bringing future attacks on itself.

Fighting on two fronts is testing for a small democracy in a profoundly hostile environment. The least the moral cretins at the Irish Times can do is acknowledge an unprovoked act of war for what it is and afford an embattled state the right to self-defence.

Lusitania Find

2006-07-13T12:41:00.000+01:00

The upside to summers at a university is the peace and quiet. The downside is that the person I want to ask about today's story of note in the Irish Times has decamped to Washington. Anyway, in case you missed it:

An Irish diving team has discovered munitions on board the wreck of the Lusitania, which was sunk by a German submarine off the Co Cork coast during the first World War. [T]he diving team, led by Patrick Glavin of Cork Sub Aqua Club, found up to 15,000 rounds of .303 bullets in cases in the bow section of the ship during a licensed dive on the hull in some 90 metres of water earlier this month. However, a subsequent check of the ship's manifest has shown that the munitions may have been legitimate.

Dating America's Great War entry to the Lusitania sinking has always been a bit dodgy given the two year time delay, but Niall Ferguson takes the moment as significant as it represents the end of the period of unprecendented economic openness of the previous forty years. Naturally, the question of what the Lusitania was or was not up to is of considerable interest either way. The state has not been helpful in ascertaining this. Of additional interest is the possibility that Sir Hugh Lane's art works might be down there, along with other items of interest not on the manifest. It would also be intriguing to learn more about British attempts in the 1950s to destroy the wreck. Getting closer to answers has been made more difficult by Michael D. Higgins's decision in 1995, as reported in the article, to designate the site as heritage. While preventing looting is sensible, it's a pity the Department can't bring itself to allow the expert team responsible for the most recent discovery to pursue their investigations, at their own cost, as far as they would like.

Email From Udaras

2006-07-12T16:10:00.000+01:00

Udaras, the Gaeltacht development board, has been in touch. I believe, though I'm open to correction, that this is taxpayer funded body:

Hey there Dick,
You say a lot, but have you any actual reasons or back-up to your article entitled ‘we can do without Irish’, other than your own spurious and totally groundless opinions. In response I simply say, “We can do without Waghorne’.
Go away, and rot, somewhere outside Ireland so your ilk does not pollute any of my Irish island
Sáigh suas do thóin é
Ultan Ó Haodha

Your taxes at work.

Update 1: Impressive. I took a phone call from an extremely apologetic Udaras lady an hour or so ago and this followed in the email shortly thereafter:

Mr Waghorne a chara,
I would like to apologise to you for my previous mail. The sentiments contained were wholly my own and did not in anyway express the opinions of Údarás na Gaeltachta. It was a misuse of my Údarás na Gaeltachta e-mail account.
I apologise for any offence caused.
Is mise le meas
Ultan Ó hAodha

Ultan, it should be noted, was there on work experience and isn't Udaras staff, something I'm happy to pass on. I fear his career prospects have not been enhanced, but that's his problem. The Udaras staff I spoke with were exemplary.

Israel Deserves Support Today

2006-07-12T13:35:00.000+01:00

Already suffering from ongoing cross-border rocket attacks directed against its towns in southern Israel, and engaged to recover their captured soldier in Gaza, Israel had two soldiers abducted today by Hezbollah.

Israel is now on the move on two fronts. On each, its action is defensive, seeking to recover soldiers captured from inside Israel. On each, the adversary is a terrorist group committed to the murder of Israelis and the destruction of their state. Their actions are designed to wear down Israel through attrition. Justice lies clearly and unambiguously with Israel, a democracy resisting an existential threat from enemies with whom no negotiated settlement is possible.

Retreating unilaterally to likely post-conflict lines of defence is a strategy now in doubt. The presumption, that a defensive posture and modest territorial claims would ease the threat, has been falsified by the experience of the last year. The claim for forward defence is now very strong. If Israel again administers the Gaza strip and south Lebanon, it will be doing so after a good faith attempt at withdrawal, one ended by terrorism.

This is a tough time for Israelis and they deserve support. It's to be hoped our government will have the decency not to pretend that some false moral equivalence exists between the parties, will recognise the offensive, terrorist nature of the enemy and the defensive nature of Israel's actions, and will support an embattled democracy at a testing moment.

Where Can I Sign Up?

2006-07-12T12:15:00.000+01:00

William Sjostrom at UCC is a smart man:

I got a letter that cheered me up greatly. I am now affiliate faculty at both the University of Haifa and at Bar-Ilan University. So if the Jew haters try to get a boycott of Israel started here, they have to formally boycott a member and former secretary of the union. Chew on that, you little creeps.

North Korea

2006-07-12T11:37:00.000+01:00

Fiona's tightly reasoned post on North Korea deserves careful consideration.

From The Mailbag

2006-07-12T10:38:00.000+01:00

The email account gets feedback of varying coherence. Some is too good not to share, the latest (anonymous) offering being a case in point:

Cad é an fadhb atá agat Dick? In my many years of suffering assualts by speaking Irish, or being a native Irish speaker (Normaly by morons), I have some questions of someone who writes with your fortitude or fervour. Is your ineptness at basic languages that has prompted your assault on the easy whipping boy the minority, which was untill the turn of the century only declining to it's dinminshed status as the patricians had no work for them? Why not start on other minorities french people residing here, or english, or is that what is wrong with you Waghorne... Does somebody wish he didn't feel guilty in his union jack jammies? Awaiting you reply

Needless to say, against such insights there is no adequate reply I could possibly make.

Politics In Ireland

2006-07-12T09:34:00.000+01:00

Damien Mulley yesterday sparked two conversations. His first contention is that bloggers here will not affect the next election. The second is that "the time has run out on ALL parties. They all need to be voted out of office."

Blogging here, to take first things first, is completely inconsequential. The are two more or less insuperable limitations. The first is audience. This blog gets a few hundred hits on an average day. If I put up a post I guess that on a very good day five hundred or so people might see it and on a very bad day a third or so of that would. I understand that's fairly typical of Irish blogs, though others, like Damien for instance, have many more readers. Now set that against print media. A piece in pretty much any of the national newspapers is read by upwards of one hundred thousand or so. Using blogs to derail the debate on the election is like trying to take out a train with a tennis ball.

Quality counts too. The reason the usual suspects in the print media are the usual suspects is because they're very good at what they do. Little self-published online in Ireland would make it past an editor. I don't think that's an unfair judgment and it's not to say that blogs don't have their uses, but let's not think that just because we can each set up a blog account we're sudden a country of H L Menckens. Most people who consider themselves engaged in politics broadly conceived in Ireland would feel that the Irish Times, to take an example, is essential reading of a day. I know I would, though it does nothing for my blood pressure. I know nobody, in journalism, academia, or public life, who would lose one moment's sleep over missing Irish blogging altogether. Little of insight or originality gets said online, and finding the gems is more time than its worth. And yes, this is merely my own take on things not word on tablets from above, but those who disagree might ask themselves why after several years of growth in volume Irish blogs remain entirely irrelevant to the actual course and content of national political debate in this country. (You may ask why I haven't given up if I've such a low opinion of the medium. I probably should, and have cut back, but I find it diverting and useful as a sort of online jotter for my thoughts. Besides, friends often have very valuable criticisms of my ideas that I'd lose if stopped blogging.)

On the second point, I don't share the disillusionment with Irish politics that others have expressed over the last few days. Don't get me wrong, much of it pains me and I think the political culture and debate in this country is profoundly enfeebled, particularly when set against countries such as Britain and the United States where political options are considerably greater and the questions under consideration often of immeasurably more moment and importance. But there are real choices in Irish politics. The degree to which the state runs things is still an open question. Tax levels make a real difference to individuals and families. Abortion and gay marriage aren't going to go away as issues. Safeguarding the Republic against the IRA is still a big deal and gives rise to wide disagreement concerning approaches. Whether we want to buy into fanciful anti-American propaganda and withdraw our most limited assistance in the War on Terror is up for debate, as is our future stance towards interventions generally and the use of our own armed forces. The question of whether the state should actually run the services it provides or move to private models as per elsewhere (including Sweden) opens up a whole variety of possibilities. Our vulnerable position as regards energy security underpins the current debate on nuclear power while our economic policies are going to become more controversial not less as things cool down here in light of property market issues, increasing uncompetitiveness, and our exceptional international exposure. On all of those issues there are identifiable politicians and parties with distinct, differing views that usually determine their actions in power. I think the contention that all parties govern in the same way is wrong, straightforwardly and obviously, and can be shown to be so simply by considering their policies and records on specific issues in turn. A simple thought-experiment suffices - if Garret's government had replicated itself and held power from 1982 through to now would Ireland even look remotely like it now does? I think the answer is, indubitably, no.

As a final aside, one thing I'd caution against is attacking parties for seeking votes. I'd rather have parties trying to implement popular policies than unpopular ones. When someone like Adam Maguire, a partisan of the Irish Election project, writes that:

few [parties] have the balls to actually take a chance and stand for something unless it’s public-approved first

you have to wonder what planet he's on. Quite apart from the fact that Sinn Fein, the Socialist Party, the Green Party, and the PDs, are all quite marginal political parties with distinctive and sharply divergent political visions, the idea that parties should be criticised for pursuing 'popular' policies in quite undemocratic. The translation is - these parties should listen to people like me with all the answers and not be so craven as to give in to the will of the majority. Truth is, if you don't like the fact that you're outnumbered on an issue - as I frequently am myself - the onus is on you either to accept the fact and get on with things or to do something about it. Blaming parties for pursuing policies that, shockingly, many people approve of is a pretty weak criticism.

Added

2006-07-12T09:24:00.000+01:00

Two new blogs I should have mentioned sooner. The first is Peter Nolan's, here. Peter's one of the few established political writers blogging, with a track record in the Wall Street Journal, the Sunday Business Post, the Jerusalem Post, the Sunday Independent, Magill and another half dozen or so publications. It's great to see him blogging again.

A new read of mine that I'm also mentioning is an eclectic arts and culture blog by former New Criterion staffer Andrew Cusack.

Enjoy!

We Can Do Without Irish

2006-07-11T12:31:00.000+01:00

Not just as a compulsory subject in our schools, but altogether. Irish is about as much a part of our heritage as are famines, which is to say we should keep the memory of it alive and make sure a few specialists know it well, but be glad that in the end it's a part of the past, not the present. While it's correct to say that Irish is a part of our heritage, it's a distinctly unimportant part. There is nothing particular to the Irish language that is essential to valuing Irish heritage.

By any reasonable definition, there are two aspects to taking one's heritage seriously - history and culture. Neither require Irish. The Irish language is not needed to be more than adequately appraised of Irish history and culture. In fact, approaching each through Irish rather than English puts you at a distinct handicap. Irish history happened through English for the most part and at the least for the last number of centuries. The great works of Irish culture - all of them - are through English. Joyce, Beckett, Wilde, and Shaw aren't just better known because they wrote in English, they're better known because the worked in the greater European literary traditions - and because they were better. There is no writer in the Irish language that anyone need bother reading if looking for Irish literary contributions - there are more than enough Irish writers in English of truly first-class stature without excavating a dead language for literary fossils.

Nor can Irish music be taken as much of a contribution to Western arts. In fact, Irish music is better understood as resistance to Western artistic achievements. Rather than learning from the musical advances of Europe in the second half of the last millenium, Irish music is characterised by the primitive harmonic and melodic structures characteristic of peasant music from here to India. The self-conscious attachment to this artistically barren music is a cultural form of clinging to the soil. Again, looking for the Irish contribution involves looking past 'Irish' music. Irish composers of enduring note such as Field and Stanford are immeasurably superior standard bearers for Irish culture and heritage.

The conflating of Irish language and Irish heritage traps us in the idea that the oldest most primitive forms of heritage on this island are somehow the authentic ones. They're of marginal value only, but no more. The great contributions of Irishmen and women were almost uniformly made through English or in the greater traditions of Western civilization. The Irish language embodies little of our true heritage and obscures the rest. We can do without it. Leave Irish to the specialists and let's stop pretending our heritage lies in its dead hands.

Migration And Dignity

2006-07-11T12:17:00.000+01:00

From the Wall Street Journal's most recent defence of its open borders position:

Our own view is that a philosophy of "free markets and free people" includes flexible labor markets. At a fundamental level, this is a matter of freedom and human dignity. These migrants are freely contracting for their labor, which is a basic human right. Far from selling their labor "cheap," they are traveling to the U.S. to sell it more dearly and improve their lives. Like millions of Americans before them, they and certainly their children climb the economic ladder as their skills and education increase.

They're speaking about the American debate, but point is particularly applicable to the Irish situation. When the unions and Labour talk about exploitation, they miss this. Defence of dignity is a point for those of us championing open borders and the freedom of migrant workers to move to better paying jobs. The fact that those of us accustomed to high wages in the world's second richest country would not want and do not need the jobs and the wages new workers are looking for should not blind us to the fact that these moves are a marked improvement for those arriving here. Moving from a number of cent an hour to a number of euro and hour is a good deal for eveyone, but, crucially, particularly so for the person taking the job. You don't move here from Latvia because you think the terms of employment constitute exploitation, you move here because you want to and because you recognise the opportunity it affords. It is, as the Journal puts it, a basic right to choose freely where you want to work. It's not on that we have a siuation where the unions and leftist parties deny potential new workers in the economy the right to take up a job here because the wages it pays would not satisfy any of their cossetted members.

The most basic moral question when asking if wages are right is to ask the person in question - do you want this job? If the answer is yes it takes a lot for someone else, be they unions or government, to justify standing in their way.

The Defence Amendment Bill

2006-07-11T08:48:00.000+01:00

The passing, though quietly, of the Defence Amendment Bill is big news. The gist of the new legislation is that the state's executive is now closer to having real powers over the deployment of our military. The importance of this for those of us who would have Irish forces take on a greater international role is very great. Step one, the dismantling of legal barriers to deployment, has happened. Two remain. Of those the first is the urgent need to fund the military properly. At the moment we spend .7% of GDP on defence which is pitiful. Even effectively demilitarised European welfare states spend two percent or so and responsible countries typically spend between three and four percent. Targetting funding in the development of niche capacities would allow us to complement ad hoc coalitions while making a substantive contribution. The second remaining step is the larger fight to build the moral consensus behind intervention and state building. This is further down the line than might be imagined. People here may not trust US motives all the time, but there is a lot of support in principle for the idea of liberating clearly oppressed people. What is encouraging is that the Minister for Defence Willie O'Dea, writing today in the Irish Times, clearly spells out the moral framework within which the deployment of Irish forces will be assessed:

In passing the Defence Amendment Bill so decisively by 98 votes to 12 we have ensured that Ireland participates and contributes fully, in line with its significant capability, to international peace and security. There is a real job that needs to be done by troops who can work closely with other forces and deploy rapidly in support of UN peacekeeping and humanitarian operations. The Irish people expect no less. And our Defence Forces deserve no less. After Rwanda, after Srebrenica and after Darfur, the cry of "never again" rang out across the globe, just as it had after the second World War. Yet it did happen again. Saying "never again" is not sufficient. We must take the steps necessary to see that we can act quickly. We have an obligation to do all we can to ensure there are no more Rwandas and Srebrenicas. Not to participate would be turning our backs on our obligation. The choice is that stark.

Considering how little appetite there was for this way of thinking as recently as the second Nice referendum, I think the change of position is a credit to ongoing and broadly based efforts to cultivate a more responsible Irish posture in the international system. John O'Shea is one of many who has argued that flexibility in deployment is essential if we're to get anything useful done. It's now not unreasonable to hope that in the lifetime of the next Dail we might actually see Irish troops overseas under the provisions of this new act.

Decision-Chart

2006-07-10T13:48:00.000+01:00

From the Weekly Standard (click to enlarge):

Target Hawaii

2006-07-07T10:40:00.000+01:00

The latest on those North Korean launches:

A North Korean missile launched on Wednesday was aimed at an area of the ocean close to Hawaii, a Japanese newspaper reported on Friday. Experts estimated the Taepodong-2 ballistic missile to have a range of up to 6,000 km, putting Alaska within its reach. Wednesday's launch apparently failed shortly after take-off and the missile landed in the sea between the Korean peninsula and Japan, a few hundred kilometres from the launch pad. But data from U.S. and Japanese Aegis radar-equipped destroyers and surveillance aircraft on the missile's angle of take-off and altitude indicated that it was heading for waters near Hawaii, the Sankei Shimbun reported, citing multiple sources in the United States and Japan. North Korea may have targeted Hawaii to show the United States that it was capable of landing a missile there, or because it is home to the headquarters of the U.S. Pacific fleet, the paper said.

It's this sort of thing that the concept of preventive war was developed to counteract. A state, run by a clinically insane Stalinist, with nukes and an offensive posture against democracies, tests the technology to allow him to threaten or, if he chooses, deliver nuclear war to America, Japan, South Korea, and everywhere else within his newly acquired missile radius. These tests could have been prevented by blowing up the launch sites. Instead, the US has lost prestige and credibility in the region and risked the arrival of a test missile around Hawaii. But for the fact that it happened to fail (this time) we could now by watching a nuclear armed North Korea with deliverable missiles deliberating over its next move while the US makes threats of much diminished credibility. It's possible to turn the screw on this guy by insisting that China, who are bankrolling the regime, take responsibility and cut off the supplies heading in. Comprehensive sanctions accompanied by routine destruction of launch sites and testing facilities would both cripple the regime's capabilities and encourage a palace coup, which is pretty much the only thing that has a chance of relieving the North Korea people. (An invasion of choice is completely off the cards with Seoul in range of ten thousand artillery pieces.)

As it stands, North Korea has yet again broken its commitments and US ultimatums to no great cost. The day when they achieve the capacity to land nuclear weapons on American soil with all the diplomatic muscle that brings is that much closer. We'll wish we hadn't been so complacent once we're sitting across the table from a nuclear armed madman.

Update 1: They have another Taepodong-2 waiting in the wings.

Update 2: The latest:

Bush said that the United States had "a reasonable chance" of shooting down the long-range missile, if it had not failed.

Well, that's a start.

Wagner Giveaway

2006-07-06T21:42:00.000+01:00

You can get Wagner's Ring on Amazon at the moment for £6 plus shipping. Astonishing. Admittedly, the recording is Clemens Krauss at Bayreuth, which means the latest it was recorded was 1953, the year of his last performance there. That said, old recordings still pack a punch. The oldest Wagner recording I have is from 1909 and it's a valued addition. Recordings from the twenties and thirties are often excellent. So don't be put off by the prospect of a crackle or two. There's always the usual sets at more predictable prices, but I know a few of you have muttered distantly about getting into Wagner. Now's the chance to do it on the cheap. At that price there's no excuse for not picking up the set. Fourteen discs for about a tenner, in euro. Do it now.

On The Record

2006-07-06T11:51:00.000+01:00

Congratulations to Rory Miller whose work was cited at length by Senator Pascal Mooney in yesterday's Seanad debate on the situation in Gaza. You can read the relevant part of the transcript here.

In other news, Labour want to end the embargo on dealing with Hamas. Speaks volumes about the moral disorder of that party.

Democratic Deficit

2006-07-06T09:24:00.000+01:00

Milton Friedman remarked often on the tendency of any government program to expand to the limits of its logic. Set up social security as a safety net for pensioners and soon enough you've nationalized pension provision. Once the program is there, the bureaucratic and political momentum for it to grow of its own accord is always with you.

'Partnership' in Ireland is an excellent example. 'Partnership' was never conceived or justified, outside Italy's experiment with corporatism under fascism, as a way of running a whole economy or society, yet that's exactly where it moves over time. The idea here in 1987 was to moderate wage demands at a point when the economy was truly on the brink. It was thought of as a necessary stop-gap measure, whether or not it actually was. Today, 'partnership' bears almost no relation to its original incarnation. Partnernership now extends well beyond pay deals to determine employment regulation, migration and labour controls, maternity and paternity policy, social cohesion, poverty policy, minimum wage policy, and a host of other tasks traditionally reserved to democratic decision. One estimate reports a sixfold increase in scope.

Today's opinion-piece in the Irish Times by Oisín Coghlan takes the expansion further into aburdity, arguing that environmental policy should similarly be set not by democratically elected politicians accountable to the Dail and to their constituents but in a backroom. It's got to the stage where if you want the law changed, you don't go through the Dail but through the partnership process. Once that's routine, as it is becoming, democracy becomes a generous desciption of the political process. The sooner this whole thing is shut down the better. It is the top priority.

Calling American History Buffs

2006-07-05T21:21:00.000+01:00

You can help me out. I'm looking for some tips on which Truman biographies readers recommend. David McCullough's is my starting point, but what I'm looking for, for reasons that will become clear if the idea works out, is a fairly representative sample of Truman biographies going back to when he left office, or before if there are any. Email is easiest. Hope to hear from you.

Unacceptable

2006-07-04T23:51:00.000+01:00

President Bush a few days ago warned that it would be unacceptable for North Korea to launch a test missile. Today it tested not one but three or four. It remains to be seen if President Bush uses the word unacceptable in any meaningful sense. In the absence of a punitive response, the word and the warning are just gestures.

Update 1: They're still at it. Missile seven went up this morning. The US has the capacity to destroy these launch sites at will. Quite why they are allowing a nuclear state run by a clinically insane Stalinist throwback to perfect the technology to deliver warheads to American soil is beyond me. They should have destroyed the launch sites yesterday. Given that the tests are ongoing, it's staggering that they've still holding back.

The West's interaction with North Korea since the early Ninties when the regime was caught moving towards nuclear weapons has been a consistent pattern of incentive packages without penalties for breaching terms. The worst fate the regime can expect is to be denied direct negotiations with the US, having to go through the six party talks instead. That's hardly the sort of disincentive that's likely to deter agressive arms developments and tests. Blowing up the launch sites and maybe a few presidential palaces while we're at it might moderate behaviour. The Bush administration should attack today. Frankly, I'm surprised at their slackness.

Update 2: Duck of Minerva is an international relations blog I've been enjoying for some time now. It's more inclined towards realism in things theoretical than I'd usually go for, but the have some sharp things to say. And I think they have the right idea today about North Korea and the lamentable passivity of the Bush administration in light of the missile launches:

With the (failed) test launch of the Taepodong-2--along with a few other Scud-like missiles)--some uncertainty regarding North Korea's capabilities has been cleared up--the DPRK lacks the capability to credibily threaten an "annihilating strike" (or any strike for that matter) against the United States. However, by going forward with the test launch, North Korea has put the United States in a position where it must now reveal just how much it really believes what it says about the importance of its reputation. As Dan notes, the US (along with Japan) has been making all sorts of noise regarding possible punishments if the DPRK launched the multi-stage missile. Well, the ball is now in the US's court. And given all the rhetoric by the administration about the importance of reputation and resolve, I don't see how inaction is a possible option. What would happen in future stand-offs with the DPRK? How might inaction affect current negotiations with Iran? With similar rogue states in the future? What might this signal to the insurgents in Iraq and terrorists in general? Etc, etc, etc. We now get to see to what degree rhetoric matches conviction.

Update 3: RTE just reported that China has been loath to tackle North Korea because of "strong trade links". RTE is clueless. China has no trade with North Korea to speak of as North Korea has no products to trade in the first place. The regime is, on the contrary, totally dependent on external aid. When China recently sent aid across the border in trains, the regime refused to send back the train carriages the aid arrived in, so desperate are they for moving stock. Without Chinese largesse the regime could not continue as it has. RTE, not for the first time, are at sea when it comes to international politics.

Update 4: So far as I can see, no Irish blogger has put together a post on what response is appropriate. We Irish are good at bemoaning the supposed eptitude of American leadership but tend not to be so hot at thinking through anything along the lines of a constructive proposal when the chips are down. Irresponsibility is the consequence of irrelevancy. Admittedly, my own words on this are somewhat less than treatise length, though I posted here recently on pre-emption and presumptions underwriting forward defence strategy, but it says a lot about the provincialism of the Irish blogosphere and Irish intellectual life in general that there is next to nobody with a constructive comment on what the US should or should not do at this juncture.

Happy Fourth Of July

2006-07-04T09:28:00.000+01:00

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government….

To my few but loyal readers, a very happy Fourth of July. Especial greetings to those of you who are in Washington this summer and those of you who are citizens of the Republic. For the rest of us, the Fourth is still a day to celebrate. Quite apart from gratitude to America for her leadership and sacrifice, the day itself puts one in mind of the Declaration of Independence. Hitchens recently described the Declaration as the best document ever written by a committee, alongside the Bible, and it's a possession for the world, not just for Americans. Constitutional government securing the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is not the default state of affairs in the world. It is always an achievement. It is the good fortune of the rest of the world that America has ensured that the lights did not quite all go out when they had gone out in most other places. The prospect that the liberty's reach might stretch further still is a prospect devoutly to be desired. The price of freedom is indeed eternal vigilance, but it is also perhaps gratitude. Without an appreciation of what it means to live in a free society under the rule of law it's doubtful how long such an arrangement can endure. The Fourth is as good a time as any to say thank you.

Outsourcing

2006-07-04T09:18:00.000+01:00

From Richard Littlejohn in today's Irish Daily Mail:

So much for Israel's security wall. The Palestinians simply tunnelled their way under it before taking a young soldier hostage.
The 300-yard long tunnel took less than six months to complete. In London, it is predicted that the new underground rail link will not be finished in time for the Olympic Games in 2012. Why don't we just give the contract to Hamas?

In other news, blogging is to pick up here from tomorrow through the weekend. I've been on something of a self-imposed reading retreat. Nothing feels better than doing the book pile sustained damage.

On Hamdan

2006-06-30T09:36:00.000+01:00

I'm no legal scholar, but I've read enough to know to that yesterday's Supreme Court decision certainly does not rule out military tribunals, as is being gleefully reported across the Irish media. It rules that the president does not at this moment have the authority to proceed with them, but leaves open the straightforward option of going to Congress to get that authority. Republican Congressmen have, naturally, promised to do just this. It's an issue that would play well in advance of November, so it should be easy enough to fix things up before the end of the year.

It's a setback for the executive branch and the Bush administration's reading of presidential authority, but those terrorists in Gitmo aren't getting out quite yet.

The Paper Of Record

2006-06-30T09:15:00.000+01:00

Letters page editors warn:

The Irish Times receives a great many letters each day and it is possible to find space only for a small selection.

Yet space didn't seem to be an issue for this particular contribution, spotted this morning:

Madam, - I was delighted to see your report on the 9/11 Truth Movement conference in Los Angeles ("Conspiracy theories abound as US line on 9/11 challenged", The Irish Times, June 26th).
Like many readers, I think it is high time a proper, independent investigation was launched into the terrible events of September 11th, 2001. There are too many loose ends and suspicious coincidences to be ignored.
I would also like to voice my support for the efforts of the Irish branch of the organisation 9/11 Scholars for Truth and for Morgan Stack, who will stand in the Dáil constituencies of Kerry North and Cork South Central to draw attention to this issue. - Yours, etc,
MARK SUGRUE, Egham, Surrey, England.

That American (or Israeli) intelligence deliberately orchestrated mass murder in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania is now a legitimate view on the Irish Times letters page. I find it hard to believe that every other letter they received this week but did not publish yesterday is a bigger load of rubbish, but then the Irish Times has always had an odd attitude towards what counts as an insight.

Stem Cells

2006-06-29T19:27:00.000+01:00

My thoughts are in tomorrow's Irish Daily Mail.

On Crime

2006-06-29T18:17:00.000+01:00

A version of this article appeared in the June 21st issue of the Irish Daily Mail.

Never make predictions, especially in politics. Pretty much as a rule, politicians careless enough to divine the future get snared. Dick Cheney last year foolishly said the Iraqi insurgency was in its death throes. British politicians in 1914 even more foolishly thought the First World War would be over by Christmas. And Michael McDowell, two years ago, described a rash of shootings as the “sting of a dying wasp”.

It turns out that gun crime is a wasp that keeps on stinging. Yet McDowell keeps on predicting. Last November, he forecast that a range of new anti-crime measures, including new gun laws, electronic tagging and antisocial behaviour orders, would be in place by “mid-2006”. Then earlier this year he called the murder of Donna Cleary a “watershed”. Yesterday, he was snatching the headlines again talking up the garda reserve and his record on gun crime and promising that the campaign against organized crime would be intensifying. None of the Minister’s words seem to have made a dent on gun crime. Nor is this surprising. Words have not been followed by action and words don’t impress murderers much.

McDowell’s flat-footedness on gun crime is odd. McDowell is probably the craftiest Irish politician out there when it comes to words, as many an interviewer has discovered. You don’t reach the top of law and politics without being adept at putting your point across well. Nor is this something we should hold against him. Someone with McDowell’s rhetorical force is exactly who you want in the Department of Justice when the IRA are up to their tricks and it’s to his credit that’s he’s been so effective at making the case to keep the Provisionals in their place. Clearly spelling out the problem sometimes really counts.

But crime is different. Everyone already knows crime is out of control and criminals only respect tough policing anyway. McDowell’s words have been too optimistic and too little backed up by actions. The giveaway was a little noticed line in the publicity material put out yesterday by the Minister’s press people. In with the talking points about the new garda reserve was the remark that the Garda Commissioner Noel Conroy “had assured him that resources were not the problem”. It’s a good comeback for McDowell to throw in there. After all, if the Commissioner himself doesn’t think we need more resources in the fight against crime then who are the rest of us to argue? Except it’s not quite so simple. Even if you accept that resources aren’t the problem, which few will, perhaps the Minister would tell us what exactly is the root problem. Clearly there is a crisis and the refusal to name what’s wrong is preventing an effective solution. More resources would hardly go amiss, but there’s a grain of truth in the Minister’s statement, though probably not for the reason he recognises. The truth is that even as we commit more resources to the fight against crime we’re losing the fight to create a society where crime isn’t tolerated. Nobody wants to say it but the real problem, along with resources, is the softly softly approach favoured by an out-of-touch elite.

McDowell should start by taking on the liberal establishment whose misguided theories on crime have greatly contributed to the rise of Ireland’s gun culture. Various academic and NGO types are queuing out the doors of RTE and the like to argue that crime is the result of poverty and that criminals are victims in their own ways too. Without missing a beat, each killing is followed by some pundit calling on the government to crack down not on criminals – they think we’re too tough already - but on the “causes of crime”. The idea is that some people in Ireland are so poor that we can hardly be surprised that they wind up as criminals. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties recently called for McDowell to scrap his new measures and to fight crime with “youth outreach initiatives”.

Hang on. First off, poverty in Ireland is a tiny problem these days compared even to the recent past. The number of people in Ireland under the European poverty line is less than five percent. What’s more, we didn’t have a drug fuelled gun crisis back in the Eighties when poverty was visible on the streets and the young of the country were leaving Ireland in their thousands. Second, poverty doesn’t stop most people on most low incomes from living upstanding, self-reliant lives. It’s a pretty big insult to low earners to suggest that they’re naturally likely to become criminals when most of them wouldn’t dream of it. Third, it’s not even clear that the liberals have their analysis right. Instead of poverty causing crime, it’s increasingly looking like it’s crime that causes poverty. When criminals get a hold over an area, as is happening in parts of Dublin, the area goes downhill quickly. Clear out the criminals and business and services move back in. More often than not, poverty is what follows after crime takes hold, which is all the more reason for cracking down hard, early. Fourth, crime isn’t something specific to any one group in society. Bankers and lawyers have their own ways of stealing and there’s no shortage of middle class criminals and drug addicts. Some people are better able to hide their misdeeds, but that doesn’t change the basic fact that in all walks of life you’ll find people who’ll commit crimes if they’re given the chance. Blaming background is no match for the eternal fact of human failings.

And that’s a vital point. Criminals choose to become criminals and choose to go through with each individual crime they commit. The man who yesterday shot 22 year old Jamie Purdue as he walked to the apartment he shared with his girlfriend and his child isn’t a robot. He picked his spot, waited, saw his victim, chose his moment, and then, exercising his free choice to the end, shot him dead.

That matters because a lot of people close to power would rather think of crime as something that’s ‘society’s fault’. To an extent, they’re right, but not for the reasons they think. The role of society in the rise of gun crime in Ireland has nothing to do with poverty and everything to do with the fact that we’ve collectively sent out the message that vague concepts like inequality or exclusion are responsible whenever a young man gets shot.

The refusal to blame criminals for their crimes has knock-on effects. It leads groups like the Irish Penal Reform Trust to call for prisons to be closed and punishments reduced. It leads to a breakdown of moral order in communities where people stop believing in individual responsibility and self-reliance because they have a government and an elite that patronises them into thinking their moral choices are secondary to social forces controlling them like pawns. It leads to opposition to the only proven tactic to cut crime – zero tolerance policing and tough sentences. And it leads to gardai getting blamed when criminals get shot – even when they have their weapons drawn and are threatening innocent life, as at Lusk.

McDowell needs to beef up resources, but he’d be mad to stop there. At all levels of policing and the criminal justice system, liberals stand ready to make excuses for criminals and shift the focus away from deterrence and punishment. A gun crime crisis means there’s been a breakdown in law and order, but it also means there’s been a breakdown in moral order. McDowell needs to get us back to the days when young men would be shamed to be known as a criminal, not looked up to by the victims of a popular culture riddled with violent music and a ‘do as you want’ ethic. That’s not an easy job, but it’s a vital one.

Stalinist PR

2006-06-28T13:58:00.000+01:00

Everything you always wanted to know about the Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea but were afraid to ask. Surely a hoax, but then who knows?

Update 1: Don't miss the gift shop.

Update 2: A correspondent who knows his internet research has just been in touch to tell me the site in hosted in Madrid and is indeed a fake.

Update 3: John Carroll has an informative post and points out that the BBC treat the site as an official mouthpiece.

Occupational Hazards

2006-06-28T12:52:00.000+01:00

I did a short radio spot for Newstalk today, but from home rather than the office, as I'm tucked up with the sniffles this morning. Halfway through making my point on the Irish language and the new EU nameplates, the catflap swung noisily, followed by an even noisier cat, meowing as if she'd been starved for the last week, doubtless clearly audible across the city. There followed a rather undignified (though happily unseen) effort from yours truly to lure the cat into the kitchen where she could be locked in for the remainder of the radio spot whilst at the same time trying to maintain some semblance of coherence. I did my best but I can only imagine how it must have sounded.

From Hitchens

2006-06-28T12:26:00.000+01:00

Christopher Hitchens is in fine form today. I particularly enjoyed this paragraph:

What happened to the human shields? I didn't think it was wise or principled of certain activists to go to Baghdad in 2003 and swear to put themselves between Iraqi civilians and undue harm. (To most Iraqis and Kurds, they looked like sheepish guards who were standing between Saddam Hussein and what was rightly coming to him, and there were protests at their presence. And they did seem to leave when things became nasty.) But the idea of witnessing for peace in this manner has its attractions. That new hero, Rep. John Murtha, repeated a familiar slur the other day, attacking Karl Rove for supporting the war from an air-conditioned office—as if a person with a White House job has no right to an opinion on the war. But would not now be the ideal time for those who hate war to go to Iraq and stand outside the mosques, hospitals, schools, and women's centers that are daily subjected to murderous assaults? This would write an imperishable page in the history of American dissent.

Two quick points. First, the fact that this is such a non-starter ought to highlight that for a considerable chunk of those in the public debate, violence committed by America, irrespective of context, purpose, or justification, is the only violence in the international system about which they are prepared to do anything, rhetorically or substantively. If pressed, most (not all, mind you) will agree that violence committed by the likes of the Iraqi insurgency is regrettable or wrong, but the hard left in this debate is perhaps best defined by the persistent focus of moral outrage on the actions of the American and Israeli militaries rather than mass murderers, be they of the non-state terrorist variety or the brutal dictator variety.

Second, there is an implicit admission in the fact that no human shield group from 2003 sees fit now to repeat the trick with the insurgency as the party to be deterred. What they recognise and reveal in their actions, to the extent that their intervention today is a possibility in the first place, is that unlike the United States, the insurgency in Iraq will pay not one moment's notice to how many human shields they do or do not kill. The fact that they went out of their way to target the UN in Baghdad in 2003 suggests that humanitarian types are targets in their own right. If you want the gut instinct of the hard left on the insurgency, look to their refusal to go near them themselves.

Irish Academia

2006-06-28T10:41:00.000+01:00

UCD's Andreas Hess, a very fine scholar by all accounts, has an important piece in the Irish Times today. His argument repays close reading. Key passage:

In the case of Irish higher education, an additional political problem can be detected. The stakeholders in higher education usually shy away from or are simply afraid of discussing the democratic dilemmas openly and honestly. This is probably because of a deep-seated fear of being denounced as elitist, undemocratic and anti-republican (or all three) - the worst accusation one can make in a country that promised to "cherish the children equally". An obligation is felt to provide equality of opportunity and to aim for the ideal of universal access to higher education.
However, you can be anti-intellectual and fêted. Ireland has one of the lowest budget allocations for higher education in the EU, and indeed in the western world. Ever since entry levels to university here reached the 50 per cent benchmark - whereby half of a given annual cohort with leaving certificates enters higher education - the problem has been this: Is it possible for the currently under-financed university sector to initiate and socialise all these newcomers so they can recognise and digest an intellectual argument? Or must the institutions dumb down and give in to the dead weight of numbers by lowering intellectual standards and turning lecturing into a branch of the entertainment industry?
It will take a long time for liberal higher education to succeed. In Ireland we are also talking about a future that probably never was. While we hope and strive for the long-term goal of liberal education, short-term measures can be taken.
I suggest first that we acknowledge the societal problem that intelligence levels and comprehensive approaches to dealing with the way knowledge is produced have not kept up with the development of the Celtic Tiger, particularly not in the university sector whose task it is to provide such intelligence.
Sure, there has to be renewal and reform, yet these should be determined not in simple input-output measures, but in terms of quality.
Second, communication needs to be improved. We should get rid of the fads and foibles that surround the agenda of renewal. Currently the gap between rhetoric and reality is so largethat one is often reminded of the house of cards that was late bureaucratic communism, and we all know how that ended up.
Finally, let's be realistic. Let's stop talking about Irish universities becoming like privately funded Princeton. If our top universities could only become half as good as the public University of Zurich they would have achieved an enormous amount.
To pretend that genuine advances in intellectual and scientific inquiries can be easily combined with democracy's demand for undergraduate mass intake and teaching is a complete illusion.
However, I fear that, once more, populist, democratic agendas from the right and the left - usually both illiberal and anti-intellectual - will again prevail over that delicate achievement which liberal education has always been, particularly in Ireland.

These are important points, ones that are not easy to make. When you consider the percentages of the populations that universities once educated and the numbers now passing through, it seems quite inevitable that a strain is placed on academia that is additional to simple resource constraints. That's not insuperable, but when third-level policy is set by a political agenda that takes it as axiomatic that the more people in college the better, the ability of top scholars to cultivate excellence is liable to be compromised. As I say, Hess's argument repays close reading and I would rather suggest it be given careful attention than interpret it for myself or co-opt it to my own concerns, but his identification of a basic and now quite acute tension between the mission of universities and the demands of public policy ought to prompt reflection amongst academic policymakers.

A Word On Pre-emption

2006-06-26T00:08:00.000+01:00

Karole Cuddihy helpfully highlights the Washington Post op-ed this week by Carter and Perry, formerly of the Clinton administration. The piece has attracted as much attention for its provenance as for its argument that the US should "immediately make clear its intention to strike and destroy the North Korean Taepodong missile before it can be launched".

Neither should surprise. The supposed novelty of the Bush doctrine's position on pre-emption is more mythical that actual. John Lewis Gaddis pretty definitively demonstrated the two centuries old history of American preventive war in Surprise, Security, and the American Experience. Through the Cold War, pre-emption was seriously considered as first Russia and then China moved towards the acqusition of nuclear weapons. More recently, historians have documented the debates within the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations on the possibility of nuclear first strikes. The dynamics of MAD were never so finely balanced in practice as in theory. Interestingly, the issue of nuclear first-strikes is back on the table at the theoretical level. The current issue of International Security, the discipline's leading journal, leads with a provocative paper arguing that the US is on the brink of nuclear primacy, meaning that the possibility of a successful first strike that would eliminate the potential for retaliation has come into being again since the end of the Cold War. The paper also notes, in passing, that it would be childishly easy to take out China's nuclear arsenal with a first strike. I hadn't known that, though the technical arguments look pretty persuasive. It changes the balance of risk regarding Taiwan if China's nuclear status is for practical purposes a mirage. Given China's noises and the anti-seccession law, should a crisis come to a head in the future the West will need to do something it's not done in two generations and focus attention on whether to attempt a successful first strike.

Regarding North Korea, it seems to me quite straightforward that a rogue nation in breach of its nuclear commitments headed by a certifiable lunatic should not be allowed to test devices that would enable it to deliver a nuclear warhead to the American mainland. If international law claims this is problematic, the problem is with international law. The only loser if North Korea's missile program is taken out is Kim Il-Jong. Expect more Irish Times editorials touting 'moderation' and 'negotiation' but the only prudent course of action is to pick off these things as the regime throws them up. North Korea's ability to raze Seoul is enough of a problem without adding Seattle to its attainable targets.

Loose Ends

2006-06-25T23:53:00.000+01:00

For those of you in the PDs, I'm speaking on Wednesday, the subject being the Progressive Democrats and some questions about their future. The Dublin South Central guys have the details.

Thanks to those of you who were at the Freedom Institute's seminar with Scott La Ganga on Friday. It was a good show, especially considering the short notice, and a good evening afterwards.

Lastly, this blog is slowly but surely winding down. Much as I enjoy it, it was never the best use of my time. As I get stuck into other projects I'm finding the time simply isn't there. If editors allow, I may use it much as Richard Delevan uses his, as a respository for published articles.

Update 1: Dan Drezner has a timely post.

McDowell, Crime, And Liberals

2006-06-20T21:48:00.000+01:00

My thoughts are in tomorrow's Irish Daily Mail.

Update 1: More from me on McDowell in the Mail tomorrow. People will think I've developed a fixation.

Noted

2006-06-20T21:41:00.000+01:00

From today's Wall Street Journal Europe:

In this year's summer show at London's Royal Academy of Arts, "Exhibit 1201" is a large rectangular tablet of slate with a tiny barbell-shaped bit of boxwood on top. Its creator David Hensel must be pleased to have been selected from among some 9,000 applicants for the world's largest open-submission exhibition of contemporary art. Nevertheless, he was bemused to discover that in transit his sculpture had gotten separated from its base. Judging the two components as different submissions, the RA had rejected his artwork proper - a finely wrought laughing head in jesmonite - and selected the plinth.

Sometimes you really have to wonder.

I don't think things are quite so bad in Dublin. I certainly greatly enjoyed the RHA this year and the NCAD graduate exhibition, experiences doubtless improved by carefully avoiding conversation with the curators or artists themselves. But really - you have to question the values that lead to the absurdity above.

Capitulation

2006-06-20T11:57:00.000+01:00

It's disappointing to see that the Afghans who defiled St. Patrick's won't face charges. The difficultly is that the Church of Ireland won't help, preferring to let the matter drop. Presumably they think this is the charitable thing to do but the decision is unwise and regrettable. For a start, the weeklong blackmail was criminal in various respects. It was also deeply disrespectful and entirely unacceptable as a negotiating tactic. Nor were those in the cathedral it quite the worthies that the consensus media made out. As the Irish Daily Mail helpfully comments today:

Here was a group of Muslim zealots, some of whom were allied in Afghanistan to political groups who treat Christianity with murderous contempt. The group includes former officials of the murderous Taliban regime. One of the demonstrators apparently is a member of Hezb-e Islami, a group whose leader has publicly committed his support to Osama bin Laden. It was no coincidence that the men kept up contact with fellow zealots in Kabul by mobile phone throughout their occupation of the cathedral.
At least one of the men is a self-confessed multiple rapist. All of them may be in this country illegally, and not one of them at the time of the occupation had even completed the procedures for applying for asylum. One of the men had been in this country for just a few weeks.

That's a tough assessment but it strikes me as an accurate one. They could have added that they had their children on hunger strike with them or that their assessment that Afghanistan is too unsafe to return to isn't share by the millions of their compatriots who traveled back after the liberation.

But where the decision not to prosecute is really disappointing is in the twofold precedent it sets. First, outrageous tactical blackmail didn't get punished and stands as an attractive option for would-be repeat acts, or at least as a cost-free option. Second, Ireland failed to recognise an Islamist challenge to the state's right to control its borders and policies, preferring instead to coerce the story into the media's preferred template of victims pushed to the edges by the government. The absence of the story from the RTE/Irish Times end of the media as the evidence accumulated for terrorist connections and communications is willful blindness to the deeply disconcerting arrival of Islamist agitation in Ireland.

Iran Debate Postscript

2006-06-19T00:19:00.000+01:00

(Richard Delevan of the Tribune, myself, and Michael McClellan of the US embassy. Copyright belongs to Paula Geraghty)

Thursday was a lot of fun. About three hundred people showed up, about two-hundred and ninety-seven of whom were not just viscerally opposed to coercive diplomacy against Iran but also unabashedly anti-American. With a unanimous audience like that an event billed as a debate can easily be a disaster, but I have to give the organizers credit. Apart from Vincent Browne who is even more of a jerk in person than in print, those running the show were genuinely interested in facilitating a good discussion, even going out of their way to make more time at the end for pro-American speakers because of the one-sidedness of the floor debate.

It's an odd thing to speak when you know in advance that there simply isn't an undecided middle ground you're trying to win over. Instead of playing to non-existent waverers, I tried to outline the form of the argument for robust engagement with Iran, discussing the nature of its program, the most reasonable interpretation of its intentions, and the options that then arise on my reading. I won't bother recapping that here as regular readers have seen me on the subject often enough.

Some of the contributions were genuinely nutty. We had the full gamut from nakedly anti-West speakers (everything since 1492 has been a crime) through 9/11 conspriracy theorists ('just google 9/11 truth'). That said, given the audience, there was more of an attempt at logical and falsifiable reasoning than I'd expected, though typically mingled with some pretty objectionable premises concerning Israel or the nature of the American government.

That said, it was a worthwhile event if a laughably biased one. As I said at the end, it's the only public event on Iran I know of and the Irish Anti-War Movement do get credit for organising a public exchange of views on the matter, just as the absence of any others puts in question the quality of the overall foreign policy debate in this city. I left glad I agreed to do it, secure in the knowledge that not one person there on either side of the argument came close to changing their mind on the matter, but pleased by the fact the event happened in the first place.

Shane Hegarty's Bad Review

2006-06-18T23:57:00.000+01:00

I was surprised to see Harvey Mansfield's Manliness reviewed in this weekend's Irish Times and more surprised again to see Shane Hegarty writing the review.

Harvey Mansfield is a venerable political philosophy who has been publishing in the leading academic journals for almost a half century. Shane Hegarty writes trite tripe for the IT's 'Irishology' column each Saturday. Predictably, Hegarty's review reveals little of the book but much of his own self-evident ignorance.

The first mistake is factual. Hegarty first reveals his flawed credentials when he states that Mansfield is at Yale when in fact he's at Harvard. Does this matter? Yes, actually. You can't understand Mansfield's place in the public debate without understanding his role in Harvard's distinctive internal politics where he has been at the centre of debates concerning grade inflation, military recruitment, and most recently Larry Summers's dismissal and the preceding row over innate gender differences. That Hegarty has taken it upon himself to review Mansfield latest work of political philosophy without acquaintance with the basic facts of the context from within which it arises bodes ill.

More substantively, Hegarty cannot get beyond his coupling of conservatism and the present-day Republican party, wondering why Mansfield is "tackling the topic of manliness without mentioning the man whose swagger has so shaped the history of our times". The answer, amply supplied by Mansfield a full two years ago in an essay for the New Criterion, is that Theodore Roosevelt comes far closer to an exemplar of the ideal at issue. Nor is it plausible to adduce Bush to the argument as he has neither a career (strenuous, outdoors, adventurous, self-reliant) nor a body of thought or writing (philosophically engaged, high-end, concerned with virtue) that fits the profile of the type described by Mansfield. Hegarty's insistence on reducing a work of conservative political philosophy that deals with canonical thinkers from two and a half thousand years to the current White House incumbent betrays his own facile conception of the philosophical foundations of contemporary conservatism, a fixation with Bush that manifests itself from nowhere, and a straightforward misunderstanding of the conception of manliness defended. That Hegarty concludes the detour with a go at the "so-called War on Terror" ("an exercise in manliness as much as one in coherent geo-political policy") does nothing for the credibility of the review.

But most crucially, Hegarty simply does not get the argument. The tell-tale line is when he complains that Mansfield does not detail "[what] manliness might mean to a new generation." The error is the historicist error, presuming that values and virtues are historically contingent. A reviewer with a passing familiarity with Mansfield's work or his prior philosophical commitments (he is typically described by more informed commentators as a Straussian, and it's a fair ascription) would have known that it is the fundamental philosophical premise of Mansfield's work that the task at hand is not a reinvention of moral categories and codes but their recovery through close attention to the key works of philosophy with particularly emphasis on the classics and without a predisposition to regard the present time as either on the far side of an insurmountable historical break or necessarily superior to what has gone before. Hegarty's charge that Mansfield reads as someone "who thinks himself rather funnier and sharper than he actually is" is ill-made by a reviewer too ignorant to get right the author's career, argument, or philosophical purpose.

Shane Hegarty may be an idiot posing as a literary reviewer, but the important question is why the Irish Times let a hack journalist churning out the succesor column to 'people we all know' near one of the most high-profile works of conservative political philosophy this year. The only explanation I can think of is that the Irish Times doesn't take conservative intellectuals seriously. Fine. This is hardly news. But don't then expect the review or the paper to be treated too seriously if this is what results.

Update 1: Rule One - don't blog last thing on a Sunday evening. I've no idea who I had in mind when referring repeatedly to Shane Coleman, but of course the review was written by the IT's Shane Hegarty. (Who was I thinking of?) Nothing undermines a post like getting someone's name (or gender) wrong and I seem to be on a roll of sloppy mistakes when laying into IT journos that rather obscure the substantive points. More coffee needed.

Thanks to A for the correction.

Once A Blogger...

2006-06-18T23:02:00.000+01:00

Mental Meanderings and Disillusioned Lefty are both back onstream, appreciably raising the quality of the Irish blogosphere overnight.

Haughey

2006-06-17T16:47:00.000+01:00

My thoughts are on the op-ed page of Ireland on Sunday tomorrow.