I’ve read most of Windschuttle’s books, though not The Fabrication of Aboriginal History as well as a number of articles he’s written recently. I wanted to begin with my reaction to The Killing of History. Responding to this book, Brad DeLong observed

As I read the book, I found myself changing sides.

and my reaction was much the same. It was obvious that Windschuttle had moved to the right politically since he wrote Unemployment in the 1970s, but that didn’t bother me too much.

My problem was that, in methodological terms, Windschuttle threw out the modern baby with the postmodern bathwater. Not content with attacking the likes of Foucault and Derrida he denounced Thomas Kuhn and even Karl Popper (the most prescriptive writer on scientific methodology of modern times) as mushy relativists. His implied viewpoint, based on the work of David Stove, seems to be one in which historical truth can be directly apprehended from documentary evidence – a claim which I would have thought was discredited in the Middle Ages when the famous “Donation of Constantine” was found to be a fake. Of course, even Windschuttle admits that some documents are untrustworthy (for example, the writings of his opponents), but apparently right-thinking people such as himself are gifted with a special insight that enables him to dispense with the fallibilism of ‘irrationalists” like Popper, and to go straight to the truth.

An obvious corollary, which Windschuttle has expounded repeatedly, is that, if it isn’t documented it didn’t happen. His big objection to Henry Reynolds is that Reynolds took figures on the numbers of whites killed by Aborigines, added some limited evidence on relative casualty rates and estimated that ten times as many Aborigines were killed by whites. This kind of estimate would not raise any eyebrows among economists (in the absence of better evidence) but is taboo for Windschuttle. I find this about as sensible as the scientists who object to climate models on the basis that the only valid path to truth is through experimental testing.

The Guardian reports that (New Labour oriented) think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research has found that the Private Finance Initiative (the model for Australian Public-Private Partnerships) is ” failing schools and hospitals”. The IPPR found better results with respect to roads and prisons. PPPs need to be assessed on a case-by-case basis, but as long as they are promoted on the spurious basis that they can finance projects that governments could otherwise not afford, they will mostly be bad deals. I’ve written on this at length here (big PDF file)

It’s now clear to all that the US Administration has no real evidence on Iraqi weapons -there might be enough hints to help the inspectors, but even that’s not clear. Evidently, the strategy has been to apply maximum pressure and hope something turns up. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, the Administration is pinning its hopes on a defector, having finally abandoned the idea of ‘compulsory out of country interrogation’ or, as Hans Blix put it, ‘abduction’. Others are not so sure:

At the crux of the differences between the administration and the inspectors, however, are questions about the value of such interviews. Rumsfeld and others have said that Iraqi defectors provided the basic leads proving that Hussein had withheld prohibited weapons during earlier rounds of inspections. But the inspectors maintain that the productive leads came from their investigations on the ground, for which interviews with Iraqi scientists were among several tools.

“They think a lot of scientists are just waiting to get out and tell their stories,” said one former inspector about the administration.

The U.S. intelligence community is leery about taking large numbers of Iraqis out of the country, saying that such a process will not necessarily produce the information the administration is seeking, and that it may undermine the existing clandestine relationships it has developed in Iraq.

Something may well turn up. But there’s no reason to suppose that this will happen at a time convenient for the wintertime war the Administration still seems to be planning. And, as I’ve previously observed, no evidence will almost certainly mean no British participation.

According to those well-known lefties at the Bureau of Meteorology, El Nino’s return in 2002 helped raise global temperatures to the second-highest on record , with Australia experiencing its hottest year on record and the Earth scorched with widespread drought. No doubt Bizarre Science and its imitators will shortly be producing lengthy demonstrations that the thermometers and rain gauges have been tampered with.

Before making a substantive post on Keith Windschuttle, I’ll declare an interest. Windschuttle’s press, MacLeay Press published a book by William Coleman and Alf Hagger (2001), entitled Exasperating Calculators: The Rage over Economic Rationalism and the Campaign against Australian Economists. I was criticized in the book (though not as sharply as others) and responded in kind in my review., which also covered a book by Wolfgang Kasper A short snippet:

lthough the authors claim to be responding to a ‘campaign against Australian economists’, their book contains more personal attacks on Australian economists, living and dead, of all schools and persuasions, than any other volume I have read. Those denounced include H.C. Coombs (‘elderly’ and ‘nostalgic’), Russel Mathews (‘frenzied’), Geoffrey Brennan (an ‘appeaser’), Stephen King and Peter Lloyd (‘indefensible’), Clive Hamilton (‘florid irrationalism’), Ted Wheelwright (‘insignificant’) and even Wolfgang Kasper, among many others. (The present reviewer gets off relatively lightly, as a ‘distinguished economic theorist’, who is prone to ‘foolishness’ in matters of policy).

My reaction to Windschuttle’s work is no doubt coloured by this book, which shares many of the faults he displays. It’s obviously polemical, but claims to be unbiased. The authors pick up trivial errors in the writings of those they want to attack, but (inevitably) their book is riddled with similar errors itself. They complain that opponents of economic rationalism haven’t defined the term, but offer no definition of their own.

In addition, although I didn’t want to waste the Fin’s review space on a personal gripe, I’ll use the freedom of blogging to suggest that the authors pinched the idea for their title from me. It’s a quote from W.K. Hancock’s Australia about the traditional Australian hostility to economists. In my book, Great Expectations: Microeconomic Reform in Australia, I quoted Hancock’s observation that ‘The Australians have always disliked scientific economics and (still more) scientific economists’ – I’m pretty sure I was the first to mention Hancock in the context of the microeconomic reform debate. Hancock’s reference to exasperating calculators is in the chapter following the one I quoted.

More generally, the historical discussion of economic rationalism in Exasperating Calculators draws heavily on my work and also on the work of Michael Schneider, without attribution (certainly in my case, and I think also in Schneider’s). It doesn’t rise to the level of plagiarism, a sin of which Windschuttle has been accused, but Coleman and Hagger are at least guilty of biting the hand that feeds them.

This NYT piece on the Bush response to the Iraqi declaration takes a long time to get the point, but finally says that Bush will not claim that the well-publicised omissions are sufficient to justify an invasion

Mr. Bush, some aides expect, will take a cautious approach, denouncing Iraq but stopping short of any pre-emptive action. Most likely, some officials say, is that President Bush will declare that what Washington sees as Iraq’s failure to account for missing chemical and biological weapons, and Baghdad’s declaration that all its nuclear weapons research has stopped, are the latest in a series of steps that violate Security Council Resolution 1441.

“I don’t expect the President will say that this this alone is casus belli” — a cause for war — said one senior Administration official. “But it builds the case.

Of course, the NYT has its best sources in the peace camp within the Administration, and people like Rumsfeld are clearly keen to declare war now, but the crucial point made in the report is that the British government is unwilling to back the claim that the declaration is a “material breach” sufficient to justify war. This accords with my reading of the British press. As I’ve consistently argued, Britain has an effective veto, not only because its military contribution is significant but also because the US public won’t support a war without international support and British participation is a minimal requirement for this.

An interesting sidelight is that the recent ‘Cheriegate’ mini-scandal over Cherie Blair’s dealings with Australian conman Peter Foster have been perfectly timed to weaken Tony Blair’s capacity to dragoon the Labour cabinet into supporting a war, assuming that this is what he wants. But the crucial factor is the weakness of the US case and the increasingly strong evidence that the ‘dossier’ Blair used as evidence against Iraq was at best erroneous in key respects and at worst fabricated. In these circumstances, it’s doubtful that Britain will be inclined to support any action until the UN weapons inspectors have made their report.

Obviously, all this is speculation. But I’ve had a pretty good track record on this so far. By contrast, the warbloggers have repeatedly overestimated the likelihood of war, and underestimated the need for international support. In September, for example, Steven Den Beste predicted

Support for the war in the US will rise; concern about foreign support for it will fall; American unilateralism will reemerge; Congress will grant formal approval in October; and actual hostilities will begin no later than the end of December.

We’re right on track.

I pick SDB because he’s among the most sensible of the warbloggers. As I noted a while ago, the majority have now descended into self-parody, or else moved on to other things.

Taking a break from corporate corruption and the war of the rich against the poor, Arianna Huffington focuses on America’s apostrophe catastrophe, one which is at least as bad in Australia, where any plural word can come with a free apostrophe. She defends spending time on this trivial issue saying

sometimes a small thing like this can have much bigger ramifications.

Think of it as the literary equivalent of the broken-windows theory of crime fighting, which holds that by fighting small quality-of-life crimes like graffiti and vandalism, police send a persuasive message that antisocial behavior, of any scale, will not be tolerated. In this case, putting an end to the chronic misplacement of apostrophes could eventually lead to a better-educated populace, a greater sense of harmony and order, more fuel-efficient cars, a slimmer, trimmer you, cleaner air, an end to the heartbreak of psoriasis, the cancellation of “The Bachelor,” and, who knows, maybe even world peace.

At this point, if Arianna were a blogger, she would surely invoke George Orwell. Mercifully, she doesn’t.

Nathan Lott continues his coverage of the EU-Turkey issue. I’d like to over the relatively optimistic view that, disappointing though the outcome was, even a ‘date for a date’ will be hard to break. Europe’s leaders will be forced either to confront xenophobic anti-Muslim sentiment or cave in openly. And, as far as Turkey is concerned, it’s hard to see them spitting the dummy at this point, and the only reasonable response is to push ahead with much-needed improvements in human rights. Nathan suggests his post will be the last for a while on this topic, and barring big news, the same is true for me.

A while ago, I asked whether Strom Thurmond had conceded that he deserved to lose in 1948. According to this piece by Timothy Noah the answer is no. He says

The legend of Strom’s Remorse was invented, by common unspoken consent within the Beltway culture, in order to provide a plausible explanation why Thurmond should continue to hold power and command at least marginal respectability well past the time when history had condemned Thurmond’s most significant political contribution

. Noah suggests that Thurmond made a few token gestures like hiring black staff, and was promptly given a free pass by the bipartisan Establishment.

William Safire seems to specialise in making counterproductive suggestions. A little while ago, it was his suggestion that a tame post-Saddam government would repudiate Iraq’s debts to any countries that were not enthusiastic supporters of the US. Now it’s his plan to interrogate Iraqi scientists outside the country. He says

Draw up his own list – the names and addresses of the leading 50 scientists are no secret – and then go and knock on their doors. Ask them to step into a helicopter, with families if desired, and transport them to a safe house outside the country for questioning.

The first interviewee should be obvious to longtime readers of this space: Rihab Taha, “Dr. Germs,” the British-trained biologist who has been running Saddam’s anthrax and botulism laboratories for nearly 20 years. In the mid-90’s, when a U.N. inspector caught her in a flat lie, she replied, “It is not a lie when you’re being ordered to lie.”

Would Dr. Germs and her oil-minister husband tell the truth now, if spirited out of Saddam’s circle? Unlikely; but if told their secret cooperation might ameliorate sentences at war-crimes trials, they might discreetly provide a few leads. Same with the smallpox virologist Hazem Ali, the anthrax expert Abdul Nassir Hindawi, the nuclear physicists Jaffar Dhia Jaffar and Mahdi Obeidi, all named in The Washington Post yesterday.

Even if these scientific Saddamites hang tough, such off-site interrogation of supposed Saddam loyalists would give cover to other Iraqi scientists

If I was an Iraqi scientist reading this, I can’t say I’d be keen to get on any helicopeters.