It kind of started here – kind of, because (via Glenn) I see another party got there earlier. Anyway, now the story’s on our side of the water also.

I don’t recall if I’ve quoted from the Independent on this blog before, but now I have:

The United States election is still almost nine months away. But if recent events are any guide, the campaign already promises to be the dirtiest on record – with much of the muckraking centred not on Iraq, but allegations of sexual infidelity and a war which ended 30 years ago.

From a report by Jon Henley:

Investigators from the European Union’s anti-fraud office are currently in Jerusalem examining the [Palestinian] authority’s accounts after allegations last year that part of the EU’s annual aid package to Palestine – which totals about €350m a year – may have been misappropriated.

The EU’s concerns arise mainly from an audit of the authority’s finances carried out last year by the International Monetary Fund. In September 2003 the chief auditor, Karim Nashashibi, alleged at a press conference in Dubai that as much as $900m had been diverted between 1995 and 2000 into “a special account controlled by Yasser Arafat”.

IMF and EU officials say that because of the way the Palestinian leadership has done business over many years, relying on a web of companies to generate money and move cash around when Palestinian political groups were fighting Israel from exile, it is difficult to estimate what proportion of the diverted funds has been misappropriated. The investigation by the EU’s anti-fraud office has also taken in documents seized by the Israeli army during its reoccupation of Palestinian cities two years ago. The Israelis say the documents show that EU money went to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, responsible for suicide bombings.

This suggests that at least part of what MEP Ilka Schroder was saying in the passages I quoted from her yesterday was too pessimistic. See also this report (via Gene at Harry’s Place).

This report from Al-Ahram goes back aways, to the time of Saddam Hussein’s capture. I can’t vouch for its accuracy but I thought I might draw your attention to the following exceprt, for a reason I’ll come to:

British MP George Galloway – “Saddam’s friend” according to his critics – was probably the first to break the news of the ousted Iraqi president’s capture on Sunday. The lounge of the Egyptian Press Syndicate’s fourth floor was packed with hundreds of Arab and international anti-war activists, including Galloway, participants at the Second Cairo Conference. It was around midday and rows of riot police had positioned themselves around the syndicate.
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Chairing the press conference, Mohamed Sami, one of conference’s organisers, began by listing the names of the organisations that had funded the two-day meeting.

“Will you please just start with the press conference,” an angry journalist interrupted him.

“What will the conference say about Saddam’s arrest?” demanded another.

“We don’t know it’s true yet and that they got him,” replied someone from the podium.

But Galloway had taken the microphone. “The prisoner is Saddam,” he said, “he’s been paraded on the TV screens and he’s been virtually humiliated. His enemies are having a good laugh but it won’t be the last laugh,” at which point applause filled the hall.

Responding to demands from the auditorium to state the conference’s position on Saddam’s capture, Sami argued that the Cairo Declaration’s draft committee would have to hold a meeting first. But this was not enough for some.

“Do you need a meeting to decide what your position is on the arrest of a man who was an Arab head of state?” screamed Abdel-Mohsen Hammouda, an Egyptian lawyer. “Have you no shame? Where did Arab valour go?” he continued.

Lebanese journalist Kamil Dagher objected to what he viewed as pro-Saddam sentiments. “Have you forgotten what this man did? He killed and he tortured”.

Words such as “traitor!” and “agent of Saddam” flew across the hall.

I don’t know how much, if any, of it is true, but if it’s true, there appears to have been a difference of opinion. That’s all I’m saying. (Hat tip: AJ.)

My second post at Fistful of Euros is up – On ‘understanding’ evil. It’s a sequel to the first (on Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil), and by way of an attempted clarification of one issue.

You think he just wrote difficult philosophy, instructing us in the requirements of the categorical imperative. Not so:

He has been famously portrayed as a bore, a man whose habits were so regular that housewives could set their watches by his legendary afternoon walk.

But according to three new biographies, the celebrated German philosopher Immanuel Kant was not such a dry stick after all. Far from being a dour Prussian ascetic, the great metaphysician was a partygoer. He enjoyed drinking wine, playing billiards and wearing fine, colourful clothes.

The discrepancy between his sober reputation and this wild side has to do, apparently, with a difference between the old Kant and a younger Kant. As to the latter:

He was a very social type who often went to parties and sometimes drank too much. At times Kant could not find the street where he lived because he was so inebriated.

“He had a sense of humour. Not a German sense of humour where you have to spell out that you are telling a joke but a dry Anglo-Saxon wit.”

According to [Manfred] Kühn, whose acclaimed biography of the philosopher has just been published in Germany, Kant also had “amorous interests” in two women – though there is no evidence these were consummated.

The boy knew how to party.

Jonathan Freedland can sometimes write good sense, but in recent weeks, over the Iraq war, Hutton and all that, he has become rabid. In today’s Dragunia, he is worrying lest the critics of you know who and you know what might be starting to back off and to let things go. (I must say I hadn’t noticed.) But they shouldn’t do that, says Jonny, for this ‘could even break the governments of both Britain and the United States’ – an outcome, one must infer, to which he looks forward. Anyway, read:

The gravity should hardly need to be proved. Yesterday’s suicide attack on a police station 25 miles from Baghdad, killing dozens, was a reminder of how Iraq remains a matter of life and death. The rising number of British and US casualties drives the point home just as intensely. What more serious question could there be than whether all these deaths are the result of a grievous mistake?
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Still, the specific cost in human lives of the Iraq war is not the sole reason why this will remain the central question of current politics. There are wider reverberations. For this war was unique, the first truly pre-emptive attack lacking even the pretence of provocation.

There are two points worthy of remark in Freedland’s system of accounting.

1. America and Britain are held responsible here not only for the deaths which they cause, but also for the deaths caused by their fanatical enemies. (In the first Gulf War there were, likewise, those on the left who blamed Saddam’s torching of the Kuwaiti oilfields on the US.)

2. The ‘cost in human lives of the Iraq war’ is rolled out by Freedland without so much as a gesture towards the cost in human lives of the regime which that war brought to an end.

He, doubtless, would not buy it if I just wrote the whole cost of everything down to Osama bin Laden and his pals, and what they did on September 11, 2001 in New York City. It’s such an easy game to play – just starting these chains of causation and responsibility where it suits you and then factoring in, and factoring out, selectively.

Meanwhile, since the suicide attack which Freedland refers to, there’s been another.

Iraqi officials say 300 policemen – who have been regular targets of suicide bombings – have been killed by insurgents.

The US-trained force is a pillar of US plans to put Iraqis in charge of security before a transfer of sovereignty.

“If the Iraqis don’t join the police and army, that means we are saying to the Americans ‘Stay here forever’,” Haitham Imad, a 29-year-old army recruit who survived today’s blast, said.

The US and Britain’s fault, all the same. (For this latest atrocity see also the report here.)

BRITAIN is puzzled by the South Africa government’s attitude towards Zimbabwe, the chairperson of the British Foreign Affairs committee, Donald Anderson, said in Johannesburg on Tuesday.

Anderson and his committee are in South Africa on a fact-finding mission for the British Parliament.
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“We thought South Africa would be in the leading role on human rights,” he said, commenting on South Africa’s policy of “quiet diplomacy” as a means of dealing with human rights abuses in Zimbabwe.

Anderson said it would be better if South Africa had a “consistent policy on human rights”.
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“… from the British perspective human rights are human rights, and this is not altered by the Limpopo (River).”

See also here and here.

As I’ve now expressed my view on this issue several times (see here and follow the links back to earlier posts), I won’t comment on yesterday’s vote in the French national assembly to ban the wearing of religious symbols. I’ll point you towards other reading. Staying, first, with Sophie Masson (from the post immediately below): she writes, in the Sydney Morning Herald, of the paradox which she sees in the new law:

By banning symbols and depriving people of the right to religious expression, they are stirring up trouble but are not targeting the real problem – the failure of French society to integrate its Muslim youth, and the consequent rise in the influence of radicals.
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Luc Ferry said recently that his ideal is a system of religious-style ethics: a secular system that goes deep but keeps religion well out, calling it “sacred secularism”. He was not challenged on the contradiction. Perhaps that was because it perfectly illustrated the French paradox.

Scott Martens has a long and thoughtful post on the subject at A Fistful of Euros; it should be read in full. There is also a shorter post at the same place by Mrs Tilton, who says:

The French treasure laïcité as a safeguard of the republican values of liberté, égalité et fraternité. And so it is. All the more perverse, then, that liberté be abridged under the banner of laïcité.

And see also Chris Brooke. He doubts that ‘the Conseil d’État in Paris or the court in Strasbourg [will] strike down the new law’.

On Monday I ended a post with this observation:

[O]ver a decade or so I have begun to wonder whether there is something intrinsic to a certain kind of well-meaning progressive outlook that makes it resistant to recognizing the darker possibilities which from time to time overwhelm whole segments of humankind.

From Australia, Sophie Masson writes with these reflections:

I think your final comment is quite right. I have to say that I think that there is a fatal flaw at the heart of much optimistic humanist thought, or progressive thought: that is, that people are good by nature and only society makes them bad. The reality of people having a divided nature and having to struggle against the ugly side of it within themselves and in the wider world was, I suppose, rejected by Rousseau and Voltaire as indicative of a bad old world view that shackled people. It’s hard, too, to find a balance that doesn’t just lead people to fatalism or defeatism. Personally I think the idea of original sin – as the faultline that developed with consciousness itself, leading both to our greatness and our horror, to good as well as evil – is due for a re-evaluation.

All too many people don’t seem to believe in the reality of evil… I think there’s an unwillingness for many people to think or feel outside their insulated bubbles. They can’t imagine evil coming close to them. They think they’re protected… It’s the dark side of optimism.

I’m not familiar enough with the theology here – the theology of original sin – to be able to say how much my own present thinking might share with it. As a resolute atheist, all I can say is that I derive nothing from it directly. But one thing I was alluding to in the sentence with which I ended that post of mine was a puzzlement I have over why many of those who believe in extending and enhancing human freedoms, who believe in the possibility of a much better world in this respect, also tend to see great wrong-doing, the perpetration of atrocity, in a word, evil, as produced by external circumstances and not also by people’s choices. As if human beings are free (to deliberate and choose), or at least capable of that freedom, but could not ever, in benign circumstances, choose to harm others. But it is a fact of common experience that they can.

It is right to hope that such negative tendencies or impulses could be checked, held within more tolerable limits than they historically have been. But it is better to face up to the various different sources of human trouble. Bad circumstances may be the root of much of it, but they are not the root of it all.

(Updated at 3.45 PM: I have argued these points more carefully and at greater length in chapter 2 of The Contract of Mutual Indifference.)

Christopher Hitchens in the WSJ Opinion Journal:

Worst of all was the heavy innuendo about the President’s supposed foreknowledge of the Sept. 11 conspiracy. I think it is absolutely essential that no accusation of disloyalty be leveled against those who criticize the authorities in time of war: criticism at such a time being more of a civic duty than a right. If Mr. Dean had the smallest evidence of collusion or coverup at any level of the administration, one could have admired him for airing it, and never mind that Al-Jazeera might have used it for ammunition. What was really abysmal was that he knowingly took the latter risk without any foundation of seriousness. Before disowning it, he described this notorious piece of Internet paranoia as “rather interesting,” which in a depraved way it is (not unlike the ingenuity of suggesting that Jews evacuated the twin towers just in time). So what are we to conclude – that he just thought it worth passing on?

I have now several times seen Mr. Dean saying that there is Islamic terrorism in Iraq now, but that there wasn’t any before last March. If this means anything, it means that the activities of the bin Ladenist mercenaries in that country are the fault of George Bush. You can, I suppose, believe that if you care to. But watching, I realized something even more depressing: It’s not just that Mr. Dean doesn’t know anything at all about Iraq, it’s that he doesn’t care. His bored shrug at, first, the overthrow and, second, the capture of Saddam Hussein was a shrug of indifference as well as ignorance. And how can a man who flirts with moral equivalence between Washington and bin Laden expect to be listened to when he talks about a “distraction” from the hunt for the latter? He clearly thinks that the main enemy is at home.
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Look at it from one point of view, and you can take heart from all this. There are, clear across the country, people who sincerely cannot stand the policies or the personality of the president. When they say “ABB” (Anybody but Bush) they say it as if they really mean it. But there are limits, and Mr. Dean managed to find them in only a few weeks of cocky, half-baked and spendthrift posturing. This is not a time when the United States can afford even to flirt with the idea of an insecure narcissist and vain windbag as president. It’s good to know that many liberals and leftists recognize that fact and act upon it, even when it costs them something.

Is the Dude pulling his punches here?

(Via Jackie at Au Currant.)