Steven Den Beste at USS Clueless includes a detailed reply to my post in his latest, which also includes some commentary on the US election outcomes. First, let me apologize for mis-spelling and miscapitalizing Steven’s name – this happens to me all the time, and I hate finding out I’ve done it to someone else.

Second, Den Beste argues that I’ve misstated his position, (and in the process overstated the differences between us.) We are certainly in agreement on the crucial proposition that unfettered weapons inspections are needed, and that if Saddam obstructs them, his regime should be overthrown. I had formed the view that Den Beste regarded an invasion decision from which the UN was excluded as crucial, not only in this case but to provide a basis for unilateral US action in future cases where there is no pre-existing set of UN resolutions that could form a legal basis for intervention. If Den Beste doesn’t see it this way so much the better.

The points of disagreement between us, as I see it, are
(i) a factual judgement about Saddam’s likely response. Den Beste argues here that Saddam can’t give up his weapons for fear of a coup. But he doesn’t make this argument in detail, and I don’t buy it. Saddam let the inspectors find and destroy his nuclear weapons program in the early 1990s, and he’s still there. I think a more likely cause of noncompliance is a recurrence of the hubris that led to the wars with Iran and Kuwait.

(ii) a judgement about the US & UN response to noncompliance. As Den Beste sees it the US will probably invade without waiting for the UNSC and, if a report of noncompliance does go the UNSC, the French or Russians will veto any action. I don’t think this makes sense. Even if whole exercise was meant ‘to prove that the UN is useless and biased against the US, thus not to be trusted’ this end would not be served by Den Beste’s proposed course of action. The only way to prove this is to go back to the UN and get a veto. Den Beste takes the view that French and Russian resistance is motivated by concerns over oil leases etc. This is probably true of the Russians, but they can be bought off and would probably not cast a lone veto anyway. I think its pretty clear by now that the main French objective is to stand as a counterweight to US unilateralism. This end is served by supporting a second resolution (what they’ve been demanding all along after all), not by vetoing it and then seeing the US act anyway.

(iiI) The third point of disagreement relates to the consequences of Iraqi compliance. As I read him, Den Beste thinks that the UN process has kept alive the idea that the US could announce an invasion on the basis of past Iraqi violations even if the inspectors were in place and reporting satisfactory progress. I disagree. There’s no way any of the allies who might have reluctantly come on board after UNSC rejection of the US resolution (UK, Australia, Turkey, Qatar, Kuwait), or if the US had never gone to the UN at all, would do so if Iraq complies with a US-sponsored resolution. Hence, an invasion under these circumstances would be prohibitively costly in both military and geopolitical terms. If this was the intention, Bush would have been far better off never approaching the UN.

A few days ago, I asked “Why do Australian bloggers compulsively link to Mark Steyn when we have Janet [Albrechtsen] right here at home?”
Now, while American-Australian Tim Blair continues the tired tradition of citing Steyn’s repulsive offerings (most recently a Fisking of a funeral oration), the rest of Ozplogistan is piling on to Janet’s latest silliness, an attack on Lionel Murphy and Michael Kirby. From Jason Soon to Don Arthur to Gummo Trotsky, the condemnation of this serial plagiarist, distorter of quotes, and purveyor of urban myths is universal.
I’d like to claim credit for all of this but, as my comments thread reveals, the characterization of Janet as the Oz-Steyn is actually due to the inimitable Bargarz. Still, I want credit for tuning into the Zeitgest a few days ahead of the pack.

Gary Sauer-Thompson , who now has both permalinks and hyperlinks, manages to connect two of my favorite topics, Heidegger and the Murray-Darling river system (PDF file). As with postmodernism in general, I’m left with the feeling that, if I only looked harder, I could work out which shell the peanut was really under. Still it’s an impressive display, and we’re agreed that the Murray must flow again, whatever Heidegger might or might not think about it.

Warblogging increasingly resembles one of those that millennarian religions that persists long after the time when the predicted end of the world as we know it fails to materialise. A large proportion of them seem to have given up pretending that their rants have anything to do with reality, preferring to see themselves as some sort of right-wing equivalent to gangsta rap. The most striking manifestation is the proliferation of semi-ironic, semi-serious “most bloodthirsty warblogger”competitions, complete with contestants and their fans flashing skin to attract votes.

Steven Den Beste* is too sensible for this kind of nonsense. But he seems to be incapable of updating his model to accommodate new data. For Den Beste and other warbloggers, the desired outcome is one in which the US launches a unilateral and successful war on Iraq, dismissing the UN as irrelevant and establishing itself as a benevolent hegemon.

Instead what we actually see is the US negotiating with the French to pass a resolution which, as I predicted some time ago forswears a unilateral invasion in return for a commitment that “if inspectors report obstruction to the UNSC, the US and UK will not necessarily accept a veto on military action cast by, say, France.” In effect, whereas the US wanted one resolution, and the French wanted two, we have ended up with 1.5, precisely the kind of messy UN compromise that warbloggers loathe.

The accompanying rhetoric is equally unsatisfactory from the warblogger viewpoint. Colin Powell states “this is not a resolution for war….Everybody keeps looking for war. We keep looking for peace.” And of course, George Bush has announced that the abandonment of WMD programs would constitute regime change.

One might suppose from all this talk of peace that people like Den Beste who want a unilateral war, would be feeling unhappy. In particular:
(i) The US has agreed that if Saddam accepts inspectors and the inspectors do not report him for noncompliance, there will be no war
(ii) If the inspectors do report him for noncompliance, the matter will be taken back to the UNSC which, since the French have effectively foregone their veto, will authorise a multilateral response along lines similar to Gulf War I
(iii) If the French or Russians veto this, the Americans will invade anyway
(iv) In the light of (ii) and (iii), Saddam will prefer compliance to suicide.

Not a bit of it, according to Den Beste. “No matter what happens, the US will act and the UN is effectively dead.” To reach this conclusion he assumes that Saddam will refuse to comply, thereby handing the US/UN a loaded gun. One apparent reason for this is the belief that Saddam can’t confess to having had a WMD program without providing the basis for an invasion. I don’t think there’s legal basis for this belief, but more to the point, particularly after the North Korean debacle, there’s no political basis for it. If Saddam confesses and invites the inspectors to a huge bonfire of all his chemical weapons equipment, calutrons etc. the idea that the US government will then be able to launch an invasion to punish him for lying is silly. So the first stage in den Beste’s argument relies on Saddam being suicidal.

The second stage of the argument is a standard post-millennial redefinition of terms, similar to Bush’s redefinition of regime change. Supposing that Saddam fails to comply and the UN authorises an invasion to overthrow him, “Given that the US did not blink and did not give in to the “two resolution” requirement, then if France and Russia knuckle under and don’t veto then the UNSC will widely be viewed as an American rubber stamp. ” The weasel word here is ‘widely’. No doubt Den Beste will see it that way, but the French will correctly regard themselves as having kept their position at the top table. Certainly an episode of this kind will set no precedent for the doctrine of unilateral pre-emption.

A final interesting aspect is Den Beste’s increasingly weak insistence that “Iraqi failure is to be reported to the UNSC for further consideration, but it is also characterized as a “material breach” of existing UNSC resolutions, which means that the US would still be free to act.” It’s clear that the whole point of the negotiations has been to kill off the idea that the US can invade Iraq on the basis of past violations alone. Den Beste obviously recognises this, but is unwilling to admit it.

Of course, the US could invade anyway and announce whatever pretext it chose. But if that’s the plan, why go through a pointless (in fact counterproductive) charade of consulting the UN? It’s clear that the dominant group in the Administration has realised that the idea of a unilateral war is unsalable.

The fact is that, failing really stupid decisions by both Saddam and the French, warblogging as we know it is dead. Just don’t tell the zombies.

*Note I’ve edited this post to correct the spelling and capitalization of Steven Den Beste’s name.

Brian Weatherson is an expatriate Oz philosopher. Much of his blog is given over to complex arguments about propositional logic, but the link is to a nice statement of the basic arguments about gun control.

In his discussion of the Four Corners program on Australia’s environment, Ken Parish suggests that they weren’t hard enough on the Club of Rome and says of the environmental scares they raised “Each of them has been shown by the experience of the last 30 years to be grossly exaggerated, if not completely misconceived. See Bjorn Lomborg’s excellent book The Skeptical Environmentalist and earlier work by people like Julian Simon.”
The late Julian Simon was a good illustration of the “stopped clock” model of punditry. He routinely denied all claims about environmental hazards, and was thereby right pretty often and wrong pretty often. His admirers, like Lomborg, select the points on which he was right and ignore the fact that he denied the dangers of ozone depletion atmospheric lead, radon, asbestos etc etc. Lomborg is basically an updated version of Simon, conceding the points where Simon has been proved wrong (but without admitting error), then presenting the most optimistic possible view on all other issues as if it were scientific fact.
The relevant chapter of Simon’s book is here. Some of the sillier claims:

Radon. Eventually, too little radon found dangerous, rather than too much.
Lead ingestion by children lowers IQ. Study by Herbert Needleman led to the federal ban on leaded gasoline. Study entirely repudiated in 1994. No mention of again allowing leaded gasoline has been made, however.
Ozone hole. No connection found between thinner ozone layer and skin cancer.

As I noted, you can equally well select from Simon a list of correct claims that supposed hazards are really harmless. A stopped clock is right twice a day, but that doesn’t make it useful.

Another ‘sceptic’ to whom all of the above is applicable is Steven Milloy, whose site is aptly named “Junk Science”. Conversely, my comments on Milloy are applicable to Simon and Lomborg. And this is as good a time as any to mention an equally aptly named Australian imitator of Milloy, Bizarre Science.
Of course, these guys have their mirror-images on the Green side of the debate. For example, these guys apparently never met a chemical that wasn’t toxic, although they recommend lactobacillus fermented foods, taking advantage of one of humanity’s favourite genetically modified organisms, the product of millennia of selective breeding.

A wise man once wrote “If you can mimic my dispositions then you know what I really meant.” If you believe this wise man, you won’t want to know that his name is Don Arthur, that he wrote this sentence yesterday, and that it occurs in the course of
an argument against my claim that, if you want to assess the arguments of a political philosopher, it’s frequently necessary to consider their entire body of work, including the political inferences they drew from their theories. But as I read him, Don wants to argue that a sentence is a sentence is a sentence. At least some bloggers seem to agree, posting what appear to me to be random collections of sentences. But despite his oracular ambiguity, it seems to me that Don’s sentences benefit from their proximity to each other, and from the fact that I can read them in the expectation that they are intended as a coherent argument rather than as isolated propositions.

There was an interesting Four Corners last night on a CSIRO report forecasting a range of possible outcomes for the year 2050. It was basically the author of the report, Barney Foran and another ecologist, Ted Trainer, against three economists, Warwick McKibbin, whom I’ve mentioned previously, Chris Murphy (a leading macroeconomic modeller) and Rod Maddock (a policy economist, once leftwing, but now decidedly rightwing).
I thought the economists had decidedly the best of the argument. Although I haven’t read the CSIRO report, it seems to be, in essence, an updated version of the (in)famous Club of Rome modelled published as Limits to Growth. The economists pointed out that the Club of Rome model contained no prices and no adaptation to scarcity and was therefore proved woefully wrong on most counts (for example, it predicted that reserves of most minerals would be exhausted before 2000). The response of the ecologists, at least as reported on Four Corners was “we have faster computers than did the Club of Rome”, to which the obvious rejoinder is “garbage in, garbage out even faster”.
Still to viewers unfamiliar with the debate it’s pretty clear that the ecologists came out looking like the good guys. In his blog, Ken Parish said he thought the whole thing was biased, but I didn’t see any evidence of deliberate bias. The ecologists were decidedly more telegenic than the economists, but, speaking as someone who knows most of those involved, I don’t think this was the product of manipulative editing. Guys in suits don’t make good TV in general, whereas Barney Foran came across just right.
More importantly perhaps, the economists selected, although prominent in the debate, weren’t really representative of the economics profession in general, and they were quoted on the issues where their stance is most extreme. For example, Warwick McKibbin attacked the Kyoto Protocol, a policy supported by the majority of Australian economists – McKibbin himself is the only opponent of Kyoto with any real credibility in the profession. Similarly, Rod Maddock was quoted as taking an ultra free-market line on land degradation which is very different from the position of most economists who have examined the issue in any depth (a group in which Rod is not included). This was unfortunate, but I don’t think the Four Corners crew went out looking for extreme viewpoints. It’s just that strongly stated positions make better TV than subtle nuances.
In summary, even though I don’t think the show was biased in the usual sense of the term, TV as a medium is inherently biased in quite complex ways. In this case, as is allegedly true of the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates, the TV audience got a misleading picture.

In the comments thread for my previous post on Heidegger and the Nazis, Tex raises the parallel issue of Sartre’s adherence to the Stalinist French Communist Party and Gummo Trotsky the archetypal example of Plato’s admiration for Sparta. I had something to say about these points in my review of Mark Lilla’s The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics published a while ago in the AFR Review section.A couple of quotes relevant to the debate

Plato travelled repeatedly to the Greek colony of Syracuse, in the hope of convincing its young ruler Dionysius to adopt, and perhaps to implement, his philosophical and political ideas. As might have been anticipated, and Plato claims to have foreseen, Dionysius wanted little more than the gloss that would come from having such an eminent court philosopher and had no intention of modifying his tyrannical rule.The story of Plato’s travels to Syracuse is the central metaphor for Mark Lilla’s study of the political follies and crimes of European intellectuals. The most direct link is to the life and career of Martin Heidegger …

A fascinating contrast might have been offered at this point by a study of philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser who by very different routes became, and remained, orthodox Stalinists. Lilla briefly mentions, but does not illuminate, the paradox that Sartre, the self-conscious heir of the Dreyfusard tradition of resistance to oppression ended up as a servant of one of the most oppressive regimes of all time.
The difficulty for Lilla’s theme of ‘the reckless mind’, when applied to the left, is that two very different types of people have ended up as Communists. First, there are those for whom the central appeal was the cartharsis of a revolutionary smashing of the existing order. This was essentially the same appeal offered by the Nazis, and many of this type changed sides when the mandate of Heaven appeared to shift from one totalitarian party to the other.
On the other hand, there were large numbers of liberals and social democrats who were dissatisfied with the obvious failings of their own countries and accepted, at face value, the claims of the Soviet Union to be a peace-loving, democratic and socially just alternative society. Beatrice and Sydney Webb are prime examples of this sort of ‘fellow-traveler’.
The fellow-travelers may fairly be accused of gullibility and wishful thinking in their assessment of the Soviet Union, but this does not imply that their own ideas contained the seeds of totalitarianism. In fact, unlike the Nazi sympathisers discussed by Lilla, the vast majority of fellow-travelers, including those who took the formal step of joining the Communist Party, ultimately realised they had been deceived. Some repudiated their previous views entirely and became, in the American parlance, neoconservatives. Others simply accepted they had made a mistaken judgement, and adopted a more skeptical view of life, while retaining their old ideals.

Sartre is, I think, an intermediate case. I don’t think his existentialist philosophy was really consistent with any form of political Marxism, but on various occasions he distorted his philosophical arguments to generate politically correct conclusions.

In another take on the debate, Don Arthur says “Meanwhile John Quiggin is trying to pick a fight with somebody willing to defend Martin Heidegger. Don’t look at me.”
Actually, I picked Heidegger because, as a person, he’s generally agreed to be indefensible, but as a thinker, he’s widely regarded as having important and valuable things to say. He therefore raises in a sharp fashion the general question of the validity of arguments ad hominem and, conversely, arguments from authority. As I argue, I don’t think the idea that the arguments of a political theorist or philosopher can be treated in isolation from their life and work as a whole is, in general, sustainable.

Salman Rushdie articulates my main concerns about the Iraq debate, but naturlaly more eloquently than I could ever do

I, among others, have remained unconvinced by President Bush’s Iraqi grand design. But as I listen to Iraqi voices describing the numberless atrocities of the Saddam years, then I am bound to say that if, as now seems possible, the US and the United Nations do agree on a new Iraq resolution; and if inspectors do return, and, as is probable, Saddam gets up to his old obstructionist tricks again; or if Iraq refuses to accept the new UN resolution; then the rest of the world must stop sitting on its hands and join the Americans in ridding the world of this vile despot and his cohorts.

It should, however, be said and said loudly that the primary justification for regime change in Iraq is the dreadful and prolonged suffering of the Iraqi people, and that the remote possibility of a future attack on America by Iraqi weapons is of secondary importance.

A war of liberation might just be one worth fighting. The war that America is currently trying to justify is not.

I can only say, I agree with everything above, and with nearly everything in Rushdie’s article.