I’m just a-walkin’ the blog. Or maybe it’s…

Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of URL
Duke, Duke, Duke of URL
Duke, Duke, Duke of URL
Duke, Duke, Duke of URL

Never mind. It’s either there in your head, or it isn’t. Whatever, some items.

> Tom Watson MP has a signed copy of Tony Benn’s Free at Last!, which you have a chance to win in a competition Tom is running.

> A few days ago I posted an item with two stories about Sidney Morgenbesser. Chris at Crooked Timber put up another; and ‘squeakyrat’ in the CT comments box posted this one:

My favorite Morgenbesser crack is his answer to the allegedly “deep” philosophical question… “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Morgenbesser: “Even if there were nothing you’d still be complaining!”

I love it!

> Josh Cherniss at Sitting on a Fence has also posted about Morgenbesser (scroll down to January 20). Josh is back posting energetically, after having taken some time out from it.

> Chris Brooke wants to know if there’s anyone out there – out here – who doesn’t like Alison Krauss. I don’t suppose there’s any menace in the question, but OK, I like her. On the other hand there are quite a few people in the same line of country (groan) whom I like more. So how did I do? And then… those who don’t know Alison Krauss presumably don’t like her. But presumably they also don’t dislike her. Enough of that.

> Bobbie at Politx has A very long post about the BBC, companion to his earlier very long post about media bias. Bobbie proposes an explanation for the manner of the Beeb’s coverage of the Iraq war.

> Oliver Kamm discusses Tony Benn, commenting aptly on the notorious interview with a certain ‘powerful person’.

> Bill Sjostrom at Atlantic Blog asks why I treat the Guardian as my daily newspaper of choice. I’ve answered this question (after a fashion) once already, when it was put by Anthony of Plastic Gangster. See Dnoc dnoc dnoccing on Plastic’s door (old site, October 7). To the elements of an answer I assembled there I would add these. (a) The Guardian is an excellent newspaper. (b) David Aaronovitch, Martin Woollacott, Polly Toynbee, Catherine Bennett, Simon Hoggart, Matthew Engel, Jim White, Nancy Banks Smith and other journalists I respect, and whose writing I enjoy, write for it, and until recently Julie Burchill of that ilk did. (c) What I don’t like in it, which remains much, gives me material to blog about.

… and to keep you off the streets – to keep you off them for any nefarious purpose, I mean, not in the proper exercise of your democratic rights, or pursuit of other legitimate activities and aims, including all harmless forms of messing about – I invite you to try your hand at predicting, in rank order, the three top movies in the normblog Favourite Movies of All Time poll. I’ll tell you this much: the first- and second-placed movies are way out ahead of the rest of the field, each having secured a vote from roughly 1 in 5 of all entrants. The third-placed movie only just has its nose in front of the chasing pack.

Sender of the first completely correct prediction gets to nominate the charity (within reason – reason as adjudicated by me) to which I’ll donate 50 ruboolas. If there is no completely correct prediction, then I’ll donate 25 of the same ruboolas for the sender of the nearest to correct prediction, provided that the interpretation of ‘nearest to correct’ doesn’t prove too difficult; and in that event I’ll look for some benign resolution. ‘Ruboolas’, here, to be interpreted as pounds sterling.

The virtual world delivers its own facts. On Boxing Day I put up a post entitled The real world breaks in on the virtual world. Then a few days ago my ‘Stats and Referrers’ led me here – to the search item ‘Norm from the real world’.

Well, I’ve always thought so, but it’s nice to have it confirmed, even if I’m sharing the honour with a guy I didn’t previously know about: Norm from The Real World. And if that’s not real enough for you, please note that the photographer on the last item (scroll to the bottom) is also Norm.

Norms are everywhere, as I’ve been intimating on this blog from the start. But which is the True Norm? Indeed, can there be one? Can there be one? Some people think so, but not me.

David Sexton writes in The Scotsman on literary blogs:

The most intriguing literary event last year wasn’t the arrival of Harry Potter No5, or the waste of the Booker Prize on DBC Pierre, nor even the potty elevation of JRR Tolkien in The Big Read. It was the rise of the literary weblog.
…..
A year ago I rarely looked at blogs. Now I do most days – not only are they highly informative, they also create a sense of odd community across continents and time zones. Reading is a fundamentally solitary activity, which is why readers seek other readers, trying to create a sense that they are participating in a shared activity.

In the last year or so, literary bloggers have begun to take the place of the little magazines and have subtly tilted the entire critical climate.

Sexton goes on to comment on both the pluses and the minuses, as he sees them, of book blogs and he also has links to some of those he has found most interesting.

A ‘sense of odd community across continents and time zones’ – yup, I’ll certainly second that.

On January 8 Bill Martin sent me an email taking issue with a post of mine – Who’s a liberal? – of the day before, an email which he also posted on his blog. Kind of an open letter therefore. Bill presents his blog, Reasons to be Impossible, as being ‘so ultra-left even Pannekoek’s own mother wouldn’t recognize it’. On that self-characterization I’m not going to pass judgement except to say I enjoyed it.

I’ll reply at some length to one of the points Bill makes, and to a second point more briefly. There is a third issue I also want to deal with, which he himself mentions only in passing when he says that ‘the “Why single out this particular dictator while leaving others in place[?]” argument… is quite a strong one’. But I shall reserve this for a separate post. I’ve been meaning to write on it for some time, since it has figured so prominently as an anti-war riposte to humanitarian intervention arguments on the pro-war side, and it is weak. I won’t respond to Bill’s argument that the ending of the Baathist regime was an ‘incidental outcome’ of the war, other than to say that I don’t accept this, and to refer him and others to the debate between myself and Ken MacLeod, where I’ve explained why I don’t accept it. (See here and follow the links back to earlier instalments.)

The main thing I want to do is to correct a misunderstanding on Bill’s part. He writes:

I will start by taking arms against your assertion that opponents of the war need to annunciate: ‘It would be better if Saddam Hussein were still in power in Iraq’. Or: ‘It would be better if the torture chambers and all the other paraphernalia of murder and oppression in Iraq were still in place’, i.e. that that is their effective position. (Emphasis added.)

No, this is not what I have ever said. There may be some anti-war liberals and socialists who think it would be better if Saddam Hussein were still in power, with all that that entails; but there are many who do not think this, and have clearly said they do not, and there are many who, though they have seemed to find it hard to say explicitly that they do not think this, show indirectly by their very difficulty that they probably do not think it, or that they are unsure about the issue. My point in the post Bill criticizes was not to say that liberals and socialists who opposed the war do, or must, think that it would be better if Saddam Hussein was still in power, but rather to insist that, unless they can say it would be better if he were, they have no grounds for questioning the liberal and/or left credentials of those of us who supported the war because it would bring a murderous tyranny to an end.

Here is the relevant passage from my post of 7 January:

There was every reason for liberals to support the liberation of Iraq, as there was every reason for socialist democrats to do so, and I think, as I said in the September 19 piece, that anti-war liberals and socialists who say different need (at the very least) to pronounce clearly the following statement: ‘It would be better if Saddam Hussein were still in power in Iraq’. Or: ‘It would be better if the torture chambers and all the other paraphernalia of murder and oppression in Iraq were still in place’. Otherwise, it’s not clear why they should see support for the war as a basis for denying the relevant labels to others.

And here is a segment from my September 19 post (on the old normblog site – Blog’s dreckfest), to which I refer in the above passage:

Let them say… that they think it would have been better for the Iraqi people to still be enduring the torments they suffered under Saddam Hussein than to be in the position they are now in, for all its many difficulties. Just say it: ‘It would be better if the torture chambers and all the other paraphernalia of murder and oppression in Iraq were still in place’. And unless you can say that, then you should back off the ‘idiots’ and ‘so-called left’ stuff. Because those of us who do very much think it’s better that all of that is over, we not only think it now that it is over; we thought it before the war, when its being over was in the offing. It was possible even then, with a certain amount of foresight, to think Iraq would be better off after the military intervention of the Coalition than it was before it. So to those … who speak thus contemptuously of the pro-war left, I would say – meaning no impoliteness, naturally – put up or shut up. That is, answer the question, would it have been better for the people of Iraq to continue under Saddam? If you can’t say yes, then you should be willing to allow that the pro-war… left had some weighty grounds for thinking as they did.

The other point I want to take up more briefly is Bill’s statement:

I hope I’ve made clear that I consider that socialists should oppose all wars – as my organisation, the Socialist Party of Great Britain, has done throughout it[s] 100 years of existence.

Against Bill and the SPGB, I think that the necessity, difficult as it is, of trying to distinguish between just and unjust wars is likely to remain with us for some time to come. For there will be those who will continue to wage unjust wars against, or impose unjust and terrible regimes upon, others. To be against all wars and all armed struggles indiscriminately is to deprive nations and peoples who are unjustly attacked – in one mode or another – of mechanisms of defence, while those who attack and oppress them continue to avail themselves of the weapons, and the use of violence, which they judge they need.

In an interview recorded in October 2002 and to be screened on Panorama tonight at 8.30, Dr David Kelly said it ‘could take Saddam Hussein “days or weeks” to mobilise weapons of mass destruction’:

In the interview Dr Kelly… made it clear that he did regard Saddam as an “immediate threat”.

Describing Iraq’s weapons, Dr Kelly told Panorama: “Even if they’re not actually filled and deployed today, the capability exists to get them filled and deployed within a matter of days and weeks.”

He also said Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons programme posed a “real threat” to neighbouring countries.

The report here highlights the discrepancy with the ‘within 45 minutes’ claim and also Kelly’s opinion that Saddam Hussein was unlikely to use WMD unless attacked first. Still, it looks as though the interview might serve as a useful reminder of what seems to be widely forgotten: that others than Tony Blair and George Bush thought there were WMD in Iraq and thought they amounted to a real threat.

It’s not often I enjoy reading something by Gary Younge, but this one I did.

Simon Jeffery reports:

The frozen wastes of the Antarctic are far removed from the conflict of the Middle East but a joint team of Israeli and Palestinian amateur explorers hopes that its pioneering mission there will have a peaceful influence back home.

The six man and two woman unit, which included an Israeli special forces veteran and two former Fatah activists, set itself the goal of overcoming its divisions to work together in one of the world’s most hostile natural environments and climb a previously unclimbed mountain.

At the summit, scaled with the accidental symbolism of the eight amateurs roped together in mixed groups, they unfurled the two national flags and read a declaration in support of a non-violent solution to the Middle East conflict.

The day before Caroline Hawley’s report (see post immediately below) the Guardian carried a piece by Peter A. Hall, Krupp Foundation professor of European studies at Harvard University, about the BBC. Hall expressed a worry that the independence of ‘a British institution that is the envy of the world’ – its independence from government pressure and influence – might now be under threat. Writing as ‘an outside observer’, he suggested that:

A foreign perspective has some value. Although the US press is widely said to have been docile in the face of the Iraq invasion, it has been full of sceptical reporting about the claims of the Bush administration.

I write as someone who (a) highly values the BBC when taken all in all; and (b) has until recently only ever had one major gripe about it, and this was over its coverage of the Miners’ Strike 20 years ago. So I don’t start out with some fixed prejudice or hostility towards it. But I wish that just one of these recurrent dnoc pieces in defence of the BBC’s independence, as well as making the routine points about its having, quite rightly and properly, to pose challenging questions to spokespersons of the government and so forth, would at least register some of the key points on the other side of the issue and try to meet them.

1. The BBC was – is – widely perceived as not being even-handed as between pro- and anti-war opinion over the Iraq war. The issue is not about its questioning of government policy; it’s about its taking a partisan stance on a matter which has divided the nation and the world; about its not posing similarly tough questions to the anti-war camp, not being sufficiently independent of that.

2. This worry is made more serious by the fact of the licence fee. For if the worry is well-grounded, then many of us paid to support a supposedly impartial public organization aligning itself with a campaign that would have left a genocidal tyrant in power had it been successful. Naturally, that is not a use of the licence fee we find welcome.

Bobbie, at Politx has a long, informative and, to my eye, judicious piece (A very long post about ‘media bias’) about the political complexion of the British media. On the subject of the Beeb, he writes:

In the last year especially, the BBC has come in for huge criticism from many quarters – particularly over perceived bias in its coverage of the Iraq conflict.

But Bobbie offers no judgement on the merits or otherwise of this criticism.

Two days ago, after the latest bomb in Baghdad, I was going to post something about a report by Caroline Hawley, a two-minute video on the BBC’s website. Then I went back to get the link and found – or so I thought – that her report had been replaced by someone else’s. Forget it, then. But today I came across this post (scroll down to ‘The BBC Sunday Night News For January 18, 2004’) at Last Night’s BBC News, and it restored my confidence that Hawley’s report had really existed. It must have survived my failure to find it a second time, rather than going down some tube of oblivion at the BBC site, as seems to happen from time to time. I went back to look for it, and lo and behold, I found it (click on the ‘Watch and Listen’ video).

OK, after that long rigmarole, here’s the pitch. Caroline Hawley says at one point:

Just as the Coalition was talking of the decreasing violence over the past few weeks, the bombers have struck right at the gates of their headquarters.

She does also go on to say that most of the dead were Iraqis, but then her report concludes as follows:

The first major bomb in Baghdad this year shattered hopes that the Coalition is winning the battle against the insurgents.

So, the bombing is evidently bad news for the Coalition – as indeed it must be. But the question I’d like to pose, without pretending to any expertise in the area, is this. According to what news values, what conception of balance or objectivity, is it more important to stress the bad news for the US and the British than it is to stress the bad news (in a different sense) for the insurgents – namely, that they are people willing to kill and maim innocent Iraqis in large numbers in defiance of the recognized codes of warfare?