The Middle East By Bernard Lewis. The main part of the book covers the period from the rise of Islam to the 19th century Ottoman empire. Apart from bits and pieces I’ve , my knowledge of this comes from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, not the most modern source and told from the other side. So there’s a lot here that’s new to me.

Like just about everyone else, I went, with my son, to The Two Towers. The films are doing quite a good job, staying faithful to the original without some of the longeurs of, for example, Tom Bombadil.

With the welcome return of Ken Parish, Ozplogistan is just about back to full strength, though the blogging blues are affecting quite a few. Ken threatened to talk about trivial fluff like the High Court and Lomborg, but has instead gone straight to the crucial issue in modern life – the difficulty of getting a good cup of coffee, particularly in the United States. This should certainly attract some responses from outraged American aficionados, who are unlikely to be appeased by his concession that Vietnamese ‘weasel coffee’ (I can’t bring myself to describe this) is even worse than Starbucks.

Having made some incautious statements on this subject myself, I’ll observe that the US situation is highly variable – some places are good and getting better, but there are others where the sight of a Starbucks would seem like a godsend.

The issue of GM food has returned to centre stage with the US threat to take the Europeans to the WTO, I thought I’d continue my practice of reposting pieces that seem relevant.

On this issue, I’m a big believer in the principle of subsidiarity, that is, letting the people directly affected make the decisions. Speaking for myself, I’m convinced by the scientific evidence that GM food is as safe as the ordinary sort, that is, not perfectly, but safe enough that I have plenty of bigger things to worry about. On the other hand, the idea of tomatoes with fish genes makes me a bit queasy, and I think I and others should have a choice about whether or not to eat them. Hence, I’m in favor of labelling and I think the producers of GM foods, as the innovators, should bear the cost of this.

Taking it a level higher, I think that this is an issue that is within the competence of individual countries to decide. If Australians, contrary to my preference, decide to ban GM foods altogether, then that is our decision to make and we should not be subject to punishment by bodies such as the World Trade Organisation. To paraphrase our beloved leader, we will decide what foods we eat and under what circumstances. Similarly I think the Americans are showing some chutzpah in taking Europe to the WTO. The Bush steel tariffs are a far more fundamental breach of free-trade principles than food-safety laws which, whatever their scientific basis or lack of it, have no obvious discriminatory impact. Obviously the same freedom should apply to poor countries that want to take advantage of GM foods – they should not be subject to bullying from anti-GM Europeans.

My only dispute with the pro-GM side on the latter point is that I haven’t seen much evidence of GM foods that are actually useful in feeding the poor. Rice with added Vitamin A sounds nice, but it’s scarcely the next instalment Green Revolution. Most of the effort seems to have gone into making crops like soybeans “Roundup Ready’, which is not much use in poor countries. I have a bit more to say in this 1999 article entitled, The pros and cons of labelling are food for thought

Update The link that was not working has been fixed, though you have to click on an annoying disclaimer from UQ. I hope to bypass this shortly. Also, there’s an excellent comments thread, well worth reading.

“Nathan” seems to be a common name among US bloggers, or maybe just the ones I like. Recently-added Nathan Newman is the third bearer of that name to join the roll*. Here’s a sensible (that is, in agreement with me) statement of Why Iraq War Looks Unlikely. I’ve also added bertramonline and Tom V’s Rippy aggregator service. Check them all out.

*There are two Australian Tims plus one Tom – this must mean something!

It’s time for the return of the ever-popular Song for Saturday. This one’s just doggerel, but I couldn’t resist it given the themes we’ve been discussing recently. The original* is a Just-So story, explaining why dogs sniff each others’ rear ends on meeting.

The Racists’ Meeting

Oh, the racists held a meeting and they came from near and far
Some tried to hide their faces but we all know who they are
And before they were let into the hall or out onto the floor
Each one had to take his conscience off and leave it at the door
Yes, each one had to take his conscience off and leave it at the door

But scarcely were they all sat down and ready with their mud
Than a terrible hullabaloo broke out, ’cause someone shouted “Flood!”
The all jumped through the windows, upon that terrible day
And the flood roared through the building, washed their consciences away
Yes, the flood roared through the building, washed their consciences away

That’s why with all these gentlemen, so lily-white and pure
If you get too close to one, you’ll catch a whiff of sewer
They’ve been crawling through the gutters in groups and all alone,
Fishing for guilty consciences and trying to find their own
Fishing for guilty consciences and trying to find their own

* In the performed version of the original, scansion and decency are preserved by replacing the crucial word with three knocks

As this LA Times report (free registration required) shows, arguments like those I’ve been making for months are finally sinking in with the US Administration

It’s wrong to assume anything has to happen in January or February. We’re not in this to call a quick war, so don’t assume any timetable,” a senior State Department official said Thursday on condition of anonymity.

I’ll be particularly interested to read the response of Steven Den Beste to this. He originally forecast a December war, then revised it to War in February. I think it’s clear now that Den Beste’s analysis was based on the mistaken assumption that the US could go to war with no allies, or alternatively that it could drag sufficiently many of them (notably Britain and Turkey) into war without going through the UN process.

Once it’s clear that the US needs to go through the UN, the logic of war by timetable (US military preparations leading inexorably to a war where timing is dictated by logistical and tactical considerations) becomes irrelevant. The UN process must be pursued until it either produces a definitive outcome or has blatantly failed. The obvious definitive outcome is a discovery of hidden Iraqi weapons or a UNMOVIC declaration that they have enough evidence to convict Saddam. The obvious failure would be acquiescence in obstruction by Iraq, particularly if this took the form of a French or Russian veto of a UNSC resolution.

For Blix and UNMOVIC have made very skilful use of the situation. On the one hand, their statements have been highly critical of Saddam, putting on enough pressure to secure prompt compliance with some pretty humiliating demands. On the other hand, they’ve said they need more time, something which everyone except the US Administration is very happy to give them.

What are the likely outcomes now? I see three main possibilities:

(a) As always, UNMOVIC may discover weapons or a locked and guarded gate. It seems unlikely now that this will happen in a physical sense, but we could see something analogous with an Iraqi scientist either informing on Saddam or being done away with by his security police

(b) A negotiated outcome in which Saddam goes into exile. His Arab neighbors would love this. The US would be unlikely to accept a replacement from Saddam’s family or inner circle, but given their support for dictatorships across the region, they’d be hard-pressed to say no to, say, a military government with a professed commitment to democracy in the long term. The weapons inspections would continue of course, but no-one would care too much.

(c) A long period of inspections, finding no ‘smoking gun’, and accompanied by a gradual easing of sanctions.

This is a repost of a piece I wrote on Lomborg a few months ago – long enough, in blogtime, to justify a reprise, given that the issue of Lomborg’s honesty has come up in the public debate

This will, I promise, be the last thing I post in relation to Lomborg and Kyoto for some time. I want to explain a bit about the development of my ideas and why I’m so strongly pro-Kyoto and anti-Lomborg. I didn’t as ‘Robert Musil’ suggests, reach this position in some kind of green-liberal cocoon. Anyone who knows the ANU economics department, the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE) or Townsville, to name a few of my influences, will find this idea laughable.

Rather, I am an environmentalist for the boringly straightforward reason that I love natural environments and want to see them preserved. My favorite environments, reflecting the places I’ve lived most, are the Australian Alps and the Great Barrier Reef. If we get the kind of global warming that seems likely under ‘business as usual’, both will be destroyed or at least radically transformed.

In this context, I think it’s important to take some modest actions now so as to prepare for the need for more substantial reductions in CO2 emissions once the scientific doubts are resolved. If, as is possible but in my view unlikely, it turns out that the problem has been greatly over-estimated, and we have incurred some small economic losses (less than 3 months economic growth) needlessly, it will in my view have been a worthwhile insurance premium. In this context, Kyoto is far from ideal, but it’s the only game in town. The US Administration has given up pretending it has an alternative – it’s talking about adapting to climate change. This is fine for agriculture in the developed world and maybe even in the developing world, but it’s not an option for the Alps or the Reef. So, I’m 100 per cent for Kyoto.

On most other issues, I am, to coin a phrase, a ‘sceptical environmentalist’. That is, I accept the need to take substantial action to control pollution, make agriculture sustainable and so on. But I’ve never believed in the kind of doomsday scenarios postulated in the 1970s by the Club of Rome.

I’m also sceptical in the sense that I try to evaluate each issue on its merits, and to reach my own conclusions, rather than accepting or rejecting environmentalist claims holus-bolus. For example, I’m happy to eat GM food, provided it is properly labelled so I can make my own choices. Similarly, while I doubt that nuclear power is ever going to prove an economically viable energy source, even in the presence of high carbon taxes, I have no problem with mining and exporting uranium, subject to the usual environmental safeguards needed for mining operations in general.

With this background, I began with a very positive attitude towards Lomborg. He seemed to be taking a sensibly optimistic attitude towards environmental problems, pointing to our successes in fixing up pollution problems, the ozone layer and so on, rather than focusing on doomsday scenarios. Then I gradually realised that Lomborg only endorsed past actions to address environmental problems – whenever any issue came up that might involve doing something now, Lomborg always had a reason why we should do nothing. In particular,he came up with an obviously self-contradictory case for doing nothing about global warming, and gave a clearly biased summary of the economic literature on this topic, which I know very well.

After that, I looked at his story about being an environmentalist reluctantly convinced of the truth according to Julian Simon. As I observed a while ago, I first heard this kind of story in Sunday School, and I’ve heard it many times since. It’s almost invariably bogus, and Lomborg is no exception. You don’t need to look far to find errors in Simon’s work as bad as any of those of the Club of Rome, but Lomborg apparently missed them. Going on, I realised that Lomborg’s professed concern for the third world was nothing more than a debating trick – otherwise he wouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss emissions trading with poor countries as politically infeasible.

There’s nothing I hate more than being conned. Lomborg tried to con me, and, for a while, he succeeded. That’s why I’m far more hostile to him than to a forthright opponent of environmentalism like Simon.

According to this piece in the SMH, sourced from the UK Telegraph and Guardian (admirable balance there) Britain is moving to delay war until the end of year. The analysis in the article confirms almost precisely the one I have been putting forward on this topic.

It’s increasingly clear that a US declaration of war, without a return to the UNSC, runs the risk an embarrassing fiasco, with key allies like Britain, Turkey and perhaps even Australia, suddenly finding they have urgent engagements elsewhere. Even Kuwait and Qatar, generally assumed to be safely in the bag, have not made firm commitments – a British pullout could give them the escape hatch they’ve obviously been looking for.

Another noteworthy development is the US plan for postwar reconstruction which calls for the US military to share power with a civilian, preferably UN, administrator. It’s hard to see how this can work if the UN is bypassed.

The only case for immediate action is the ‘war by timetable’ argument – the US has mobilised for a February war, so February it must be. This kind of thinking led to disaster in 1914, and will do so again.

(Thanks to Jack Strocchi for alerting me to this piece).

Following my item on Ron Brunton’s review of Windschuttle, I got a very nice email from Ron, who turns out to be a reader of this blog, though, not surprisingly, he disagrees with me on a number of issues. He enclosed a complete copy of his article. I’ll quote another passage with which I’m in (almost) complete agreement

For instance, Lyndall Ryan, who receives the heaviest battering in the book, wrote an article for The Australian which could be read as a collective suicide note for her profession. She did not contest Windschuttle’s allegations of fact against her, and even admitted to a few `minor errors’ in her footnotes. But she had her `truth’, Windschuttle had his, and history was a `complex terrain in which multiple stories and interpretations are represented’.

Fine, but if there is no way of deciding between such strikingly different accounts, why do we need university departments of history? Perhaps the public interest would be better served by closing them down and using the money to establish schools of astrology or feng shui.

My main concern with the last suggestion is that one of our ‘enterprising’ Vice-Chancellors will take it seriously. I’m sure there’s a big unmet demand for degrees in feng shui.

And I should note that Ryan seems to have realised the futility of this line – her letter to the Australian attacking Windschuttle’s misquotation of her work didn’t seem to leave any room for ‘multiple truths’. Hopefully she will follow up with a more substantive response giving a clear statement of the basis for the claims criticised by Windschuttle.

Update The passage in Ryan’s article that upset me most was not the one quoted in full by Brunton, but the one he alluded to, which was also pounced on by Miranda Devine
“Two truths are told. Is only one ‘truth’ correct?”
Not to put it too bluntly, Yes. We are always fallible, and can never be certain of knowing the truth, but that doesn’t mean that there can be as many different truths as we like.
More generally, the piece as a whole was aptly described by Rob Corr as a ‘time-buyer’. I think it’s clear that if Ryan had access to her notes and could prove Windschuttle wrong, she wouldn’t have indulged in this kind of thing, which just played into his hands. I’m prepared to wait and see what she has to say – given the inaccuracies and selective presentation already pointed out by Bain Attwood and Henry Reynolds among others, I don’t see any reason to rely on Windschuttle’s assertions.

Further update All the comments threads are lively today, but this is probably the best. Out of a bunch of excellent contributions, pro and con, I’m most grateful to Rob Corr for putting something very close to my own views better than I could myself. For a thoughtful statement of the contrary view, read the thread then visit Gary Sauer-Thompson. And the renewal of the pomo debate has tempted its undefeated champion, Don Arthur, out of retirement, squaring off against the self-explanatory Derrida Derider. Last, but not least, one of the main participants in the debate, Cathie Clements, has offered some useful thoughts on truth and history. She has more to say here.

Quite a few people have made comparisons between the controversies that have been discussed here recently and the exposure of bogus (or at least very unprofessional) research by US historian Michael Bellesiles purporting to show that very few Americans owned guns before the Civil War. Bellesiles has had a major prize revoked and has resigned his position. You can pick your own parallels, but I was struck with this familiar rhetorical trope, quoted in a long and critical piece in the History News Network

In a taped interview published in the Emory Report in 1999, Bellesiles said, “I’m familiar with guns — I used to be in the NRA, as a matter of fact.

Another example of a sinner seeing the light!