Greater Surbiton

Happy sixtieth birthday, Israel ! It should not be necessary to explain why today, formally the sixtieth anniversary of Israel’s independence, is worth celebrating for those of us who are not Israelis. The survival of a nation that has been threatened with destruction is cause for celebration. The fact that nationally conscious Jews have been able to exercise their right to self-determination, and establish a homeland that has successfully provided a safe haven for members of the long-persecuted Jewish people, is cause for celebration. And the fact that an Israeli nation exists at all is cause for celebration. This is not to say that the process by which the Jewish state came into being, or its actions since its birth, are without their moral ambiguities - far from it. But these moral ambiguities are not reasons why Israeli independence should not be celebrated; merely why Israeli policy needs to change. One day, it should be possible to celebrate Israel’s anniversary in the knowledge that the moral ambiguities are all in the past.

Israel’s critics point out that the establishment of the State of Israel involved the dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians - for Palestinians, the ‘nakba’. This is true, but frequently taken out of context: Israel is no different from most of the world’s other nation-states, which are founded upon the oppression and ethnic cleansing of other peoples. Beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the emergence of a modern nation-state of England, Britain and the United Kingdom and their evolution over hundreds of years involved the colonisation, dispossession and forcible assimilation of the Irish, as well as an almost unrivalled programme of imperial aggression and expansion overseas. But there is no way that our English and British nationhood can be divorced from this heritage. The modern French nation-state was founded with the Great Revolution of 1789, an event that is widely viewed as marking the birth of modern politics, yet it quickly involved the genocidal or proto-genocidal persecution of the people of the Vendee, acts of massive territorial conquest and, under Napoleon, a failed genocidal project directed against the black population of Haiti. The US is founded upon the genocide of the Native Americans, without which it would not exist. Yet one could not expect the French not to celebrate the Revolution, or Americans not to celebrate Independence Day.

Israelis may feel it is unfair of me to compare them with great imperial powers. So it is - I cite these examples to dispense with the myth of ‘good’ Western nations vis-a-vis ‘bad’ others. In the moral ambiguities of its creation, Israel more closely resembles the nation-states of Central Europe and the Balkans - appropriately, since Israel is itself a post-Ottoman state many of whose citizens originated in Central Europe. Where these nation-states are concerned, who was the ethnic-cleanser and who was the victim largely depended upon who happened to win the war. This was the case with Israel and the Palestinians: had the Arabs won in the 1940s, the extermination and explusion of the Jewish population of Palestine would have resulted. Throughout the region of Greater Europe, the question of which nation was dispossessed was open to question; the fact that dispossession would take place was not.

Today’s relatively ethnically homogenous states of Poland and the Czech Republic are founded upon the massive ethnic-cleansing of ethnic Germans after World War II, involving millions of victims. The Balkan states - Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey - are all in their present forms, to varying degrees, products of ethnic cleansing. The Orthodox Christian states of Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Greece were founded upon the slaughter and expulsion of a large part of their Ottoman Muslim inhabitants, and ideed upon the slaughter and expulsion of other Orthodox Christians. Romania had a large Jewish population and an exceptionally anti-Semitic political culture that culminated in massive Romanian participation in the Holocaust and the post-war emigration of Romanian Jews. The establishment of the Turkish nation-state involved the genocide of the Armenians, followed by the expulsion of at least one and a quarter million Greeks (or Turkish-speaking Christians) - which parallelled the Greek expulsion of a smaller number of largely Greek-speaking Muslims. Most recently, the establishment of independent Croatia involved the exodus of 150,000 Serb civilians from the ‘Krajina’ region and the slaughter of hundreds of them. I am leaving aside here the question of the respective rights and wrongs of these cases, or of how blame should be apportioned - that the formation of modern nation-states involves a process of ethnic homogenisation accompanied by real horrors should be indisputable.

There is no point pretending, therefore, that the establishment of modern nation-states - Israel included - is without its profound moral ambiguities. Yet it is the modern system of nation-states upon which our system of world politics is built - we can no more abolish nation-states than we can abolish modern politics. Indeed, nation-statehood is the prerequisite for liberal democracy: dynastic states such as the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires and multinational ’socialist’ federations such as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia had to give way to sovereign nation-states for Europe to become a continent of democracies. Perhaps even more importantly, the people of the world love their nation-states, which they consider part of themselves. Asking the Israelis or anyone else to renounce their national identity is a violation of the most dearly felt feelings of ordinary people.

What is essential for the transition to full, post-nationalist democracy, however, is for members of every nation to face up to the moral ambiguities involved in the creation of their national state. This is not a question merely of assuaging liberal guilt. The crimes involved in the creation of a nation-state poison the functioning of its democracy and its relations with its neighbours. This poison can only be purged from its body politic by a recognition of its crimes. Turkey’s difficulty in functioning as a democracy is closely related to its unwillingness to face up to the Armenian Genocide or to the existence of a Kurdish people within its borders - hence it cannot fully permit freedom of speech, as this would result in open discussion of the Armenian Genocide and open expressions of Kurdish national politics. Greece’s imperialistic policy toward the Republic of Macedonia today is not based on any genuine national interest, but is a product of a nationalist ideology that guided a century of Greek colonisation, ethnic cleansing and forced assimilation in Greek Macedonia, of which the denial of the existence of a Macedonian nationality was a necessary part. The US’s record remains far from perfect, but in the US there is at least full freedom of speech - hence the possibility for films such as ‘Dances with Wolves’, that portray Native Americans sensitively and as victims of white oppression, to reach a mass audience. The American public still needs to face up to the genocide of the Native Americans, something that would produce a healthier American democracy and more politically aware citizenry. But we are still a long way off from the day when mass popular Turkish audiences will watch films of the ’Dances with Wolves’ variety about the Armenian Genocide, or Greek audiences about the colonisation of Greek Macedonia, or Israeli audiences about the nakba.

So far as Israel is concerned, its record of democracy and human rights concerning its own citizens compares very favourably with most other Middle Eastern countries, but very badly with just about any West European country, because its stage of national development more closely resembles Turkey or Greece than France or the Netherlands. The two deformations resulting from the nature of Israel’s birth are, firstly, a failure to embrace the concept of a multi-ethnic citizenry and accord equal rights to all its citizens regardless of ethnicity, resulting in suffering and injustice for Israeli Arabs; and, secondly, a continued policy of colonisation in the West Bank, resulting in massive suffering for the occupied Palestinians. These deformations are, of course, linked to the behaviour of the Arab states and the refusal of most of them to recognise Israel, as well as to the Palestinians’ own behaviour - but this is not ultimately a question of apportioning blame. Like every nation-state, Israel needs to develop a post-nationalist national ideology if it is to complete its national and democratic development. This means becoming a genuinely Israeli nation-state, i.e. a state of the Israeli nation; a state of the citizens of Israel - rather than simply a Jewish state in which non-Jews are second-class citizens. Jews would still form a comfortable majority in Israel, thereby guaranteeing Jewish national self-determination. But a Jewish ethnic majority can comfortably exist with a concept of citizenship blind to ethnicity - as all concepts of citizenship should be, from the US and France to Israel and the Arab states. And as the American and French models show, a concept of citizenship blind to ethnicity rests upon identification with the state’s legal borders - hence no colonisation projects directed against neighbouring peoples.

As a Croat, I am very pleased that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia is forcing Croats to face up to the crimes carried out in the course of their War of Independence. All Croatian children should celebrate this War of Independence, but they should also learn about its moral ambiguities - the crimes against Serb civilians and the parallel attempt, which thankfully was defeated, to expand into Bosnia. They should learn about Croatian resistance to the Nazis in the form of the Partisan movement, of which they should rightfully feel proud, but also about the Croatian Ustasha genocide of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies - and, of course, about Partisan atrocities. Above all, they should be taught that theirs is a multiethnic nation that encompasses Serbs, Bosniaks and others, who do not cease thereby to be Serbs or Bosniaks. One should be able to be an ethnic Serb and at the same time belong to the Croatian nation as fully as an ethnic Croat, without abandoning one’s Serb identity, just as one should be able to be an ethnic Arab or Palestinian and belong to the Israeli nation as fully as an ethnic Jew, without abandoning one’s ethnic Arab or Palestinian identiy.

When this happens, a national anniversary becomes something that everyone, regardless of ethnic background, can celebrate without reservation.

The democratic choice is an easier one for progressives to make in the UK than it is in the US. Over here, the ruling Labour Party is more progressive than the Conservative opposition on both foreign and domestic issues. But in the US, things are not so simple. Were I an American citizen, I would be inclined to vote Democrat over domestic issues - abortion, taxation, etc. But I have no doubt that the interests of South East Europe would be better served by John McCain as president than by either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.

Bill Clinton bears a very large share of responsibility for the problems faced by the Balkans and Caucasus today. These are, in particular, a dismembered, non-functioning Bosnia; an anti-Western, disruptive Serbia; and a dismembered Georgia. The problem was not that Clinton was a particularly reactionary president in world affairs, but that he simply was not very interested in them, something that resulted in a failure of leadership. The mess in Bosnia is above all the fault of the former British Conservative government of John Major and the former French Socialist regime of the late Francois Mitterand; they were the champions of appeasement and the architects, along with Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic and Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman, of Bosnia’s dismemberment. Clinton could and should have insisted upon a change in Western policy vis-a-vis Bosnia upon becoming president. Instead, he chose to defer to his pro-Belgrade European allies, Britain and France, not wishing to fall out with them over something trivial like genocide in the heart of Europe. This was not only a moral failing, but a betrayal of US interests; the disastrous Anglo-French policy and Clinton’s vacillating support for it greatly damaged both transatlantic relations and the Balkans. There are times when Europe needs American leadership; Bosnia was one of them.

After the initialling of the Dayton Peace Accords in November 1995, Clinton continued to neglect Bosnia, allowing the indicted war-criminals Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic to escape arrest - primarily because he did not want to risk American casualties in arrest operations. Nor does Clinton deserve particular credit over Kosova; it is highly questionable whether the US would have acted to prevent the genocide there in 1999 had not Major and Mitterand been replaced in the meantime by Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac. NATO’s liberation of Kosova should have been followed up by the prompt recognition of its independence, while the Russians were in no position to cause such trouble for us as they are today. We could have ’punished’ the Serbia of Milosevic with Kosova’s independence, instead of the Serbia of today, led as it is by the relatively pro-Western President Boris Tadic. But that problem, too, was allowed to fester; its resolution today is proving much more difficult than it need have been.

Over Russia and the Caucasus, too, Clinton, like George Bush Snr before him, showed a disastrous failure of leadership. With Russian politics in a state of flux, with the pro-Western Boris Yeltsin in power in Moscow and financially dependent on the West, a golden opportunity existed to push Russian policy in the Caucasus in a less imperialistic direction. The Western powers should have acted decisively to halt the dismemberment of Georgia in the early 1990s and prevent the break-away regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia from falling under Russia’s exclusive control. We should have recognised the independence of Chechnya, preempting Yeltsin’s violent assault on the country in 1994. But as is so often the case, the dovish policy is the one most likely to lead to confrontation in the long-run - think of Neville Chamberlain and Munich. Our failure to engage in the Caucasus, and Blair’s shameful support for Vladimir Putin over Chechnya in 1999, have been richly rewarded: Georgia, an aspiring NATO member, faces perpetual dismemberment, while an aggressive, ungrateful Putin has reentered the Balkans with a vengeance with the deliberate aim of derailing the region’s Euro-Atlantic integration. Chechnya proved to be the poison of Russian democracy and Russian-Western friendship; a Russian president willing and able to use weapons of mass destruction against his Chechen citizens is unlikely to respect democratic freedoms in Russia proper, and an undemocratic, authoritarian Russian regime is more likely to be hostile to the West.

In fairness, Russia is not solely responsible for the mess in the Caucasus; Georgia’s brutally chauvinistic former president Zviad Gamsakhurdia was one of the architects of his country’s dismemberment, as was the Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudayev, who supported the Abkhazians. The people of Abkhazia and South Ossetia had legitimate grievances against Gamsakhurdia’s regime and its successors in Tbilisi. These are all issues that a more forward-looking US policy could have helped to resolve, but did not. 

I fear, therefore, the consequences for South East Europe of a US president who is dovish, uninterested in or unserious about foreign policy. Hillary Clinton has always worked hand-in-glove with Bill in the political sphere, and should share responsibility with him for his disastrous Bosnia policy. Indeed, the story is that her influence made it worse; that she read Robert Kaplan’s truly dreadful book ‘Balkan Ghosts’ and passed it on to her husband; this book, filled as it was with crude stereotypes about the Balkans (along the lines of ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’), encouraged the perception of the Bosnian war as an expression of intractable ethnic conflict in which no moral issues were at stake, militating against any intention Bill might have had to resist Serbian aggression. Be that as it may, Hillary was more frank in welcoming Kosovo’s independence than Obama, who appears to see Balkan politics largely through the prism of his need to win the goodwill of the Serbian and Greek lobbies in the US. Hence his letter to the Serbian Unity Congress, in which he stated: ‘I support and shall help in every possible way development of the dialog between all sides in Kosova because I believe that peace and stability can be reached only by solutions acceptable for all sides’ - not far from an endorsement of the Serbo-Russian position on Kosova, which insists on a Serbian veto on any settlement. Hence also Obama’s endorsement of the Greek-nationalist position on Macedonia. These acts may be motivated by simple electoral opportunism, but they do not bode well for a principled and forward-looking US policy toward the Balkans should Obama become president. In flirting with the US’s Serbian and Greek lobbies, Obama is flirting with groups that encompass ultra-right-wing, Christian-fundamentalist, Muslim-hating bigots.

There are several reasons to believe that McCain would follow a more serious and principled policy toward South East Europe than either Clinton or Obama. He is aware of the importance of what he calls a ‘progressive Turkey’ as a strategic partner of the US and a beacon of Muslim democracy, and of the mutual inter-relatedness of democracy and stability in Turkey and Iraq. Turkey is both the most important Balkan country in world affairs and a state that borders on Iraq; the Balkans and the Middle East are adjacent, interlocking regions; McCain’s commitment to staying the course in Iraq is therefore most likely to promote stability in the Balkans.

McCain was correct to oppose Congressional recognition of the Armenian Genocide (here I break ranks with Norman Geras). The Ottoman Empire in 1915 was undoubtedly guilty of genocide against the Armenians, and Turkey should recognise this genocide. But it is not for an outside power like the US to single out this historic crime as uniquely totemic and worthy of recognition, particularly given that the US Congress has taken no parallel steps to recognise the genocidal crimes carried out by Russia and the Balkan Christian states against Ottoman and Caucasian Muslims during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Why should the US recognise the Ottoman genocide of one million Armenians, but not the Balkan Christian genocide of over six-hundred thousand Ottoman Muslims in 1912-13, when the latter crime was an immediate catalyst of the former ? The Turks would be entirely justified in taking offence at such double standards, and McCain is entirely correct that the US should be developing its relationship with Ankara, not creating new barriers to it - though he is also far from uncritical in his support for Turkey.

McCain was an early supporter of Kosova’s independence. He stood by the oppressed Kosova Albanians before it became fashionable in Washington to do so, and continued to do so despite the support given by many right-wing Republicans - largely for anti-Clinton and anti-Islamic reasons - to the anti-Albanian policies of Milosevic and subsequent Serb-nationalist politicians. A Republican president who is ready to put a combination of US strategic interests and morality above petty sectarian domestic feuds and religious hatred is more likely to act in South East Europe’s best interests.

Finally, McCain led a delegation of US senators to Tbilisi in August 2006, to express unconditional support for Georgia’s territorial integrity and to challenge the presence of Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia, suggesting they be replaced by a UN or OSCE force. Although Moscow likes to draw a false parallel between Kosova and South Ossetia, in reality, secessionist South Ossetia is more like the Serb-controlled enclave in northern Kosova - an expression of the imperialism of a larger neighbour that seeks to punish a former colony for seeking independence by dismembering it. Georgia is not Russia’s backyard, and any policy that treats it as being so will only bolster the anti-Western Russian neo-empire that has arisen under Putin to become a dangerous enemy of the West. McCain is entirely correct in his belief that in defending Georgia, the West will be defending itself. His suggestion that Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia be replaced by a UN force should be welcomed by all multilateralist opponents of unilateral intervention by great powers in the internal affairs of other countries. But don’t hold your breath.

Turkey has launched a large-scale military assault against Workers Party of Kurdistan (PKK) guerrilla bases in northern Iraq - the biggest Turkish attack on the region since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. This presents the democratic world with a dilemma.

In principle, every state has the right to defend itself from military attacks by neighbouring states, and this includes attacks by guerrillas based in neighbouring states. If a government allows its territory to be used by guerrillas to attack a neighbour, it becomes in practice an aggressor in relation to that neighbour, which then has the right to retaliate. Formally speaking, Turkey is acting within its rights when it carries out attacks on PKK bases in northern Iraq. In this case, however, there are three complicating factors.

The first is that this security problem is of Turkey’s own making. Having subjected the Turkish Kurds to decades of national oppression and forced assimilation, while at the same time outlawing any peaceful and democratic expression of Kurdish national politics in Turkey, Ankara has generated the problem it now faces: the PKK insurgency is its Frankenstein’s monster. There is ultimately no military solution to this problem, which will go away only when Ankara permits its Kurds the option of peacefully agitating for their national rights within the democratic system.

The second complicating factor is that Turkey’s interest in Iraqi Kurdistan is far from purely defensive. Ankara wishes to prevent a powerful, effectively sovereign Kurdistani entity from coming into being in northern Iraq, one that it fears might further catalyse the nationalism of its own Kurdish population. For this reason, Turkey is opposed to the inclusion of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk in the Kurdistan Region in Iraq. Furthermore, Ankara is attempting to use the Turkoman minority in Iraqi Kurdistan as a catspaw with which to destabilise the region; its proxy political force, the Iraqi Turkoman Front, campaigns against the federalisation of Iraq and the incorporation of Kirkuk into the Kurdistan Region. Turkey has long expressed an interest in the territory and, in particular, the oil of northern Iraq, following claims that go back to the 1920s and the foundation of the Turkish Republic. In other words Turkey, which has not been a very good ally to the US and UK over Iraq, is pursuing an entirely selfish and destructive policy at the expense of the Iraqi Kurds, our best friends in the country.

The third complicating factor is that the impetus to attack the PKK in northern Iraq comes less from Turkey’s democratically elected leaders, President Abdullah Gul and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), who are more enlightened with regard to the Kurdish question, but from the Turkish military, which is itself hostile to the AKP regime and which is putting pressure on the latter to be more hardline. A Turkish victory in northern Iraq, in the unlikely event that one were to occur, would strengthen the most undemocratic and retrograde elements in the Turkish state.

In these circumstances, it is not in our interest to support Turkey’s anti-Kurdish policy; nor are we under any obligation to do so. By collaborating with Turkey’s war against the PKK and policy of destabilisation of Iraqi Kurdistan, we become collaborators in Turkey’s oppression of the Kurdish people; participants in a nationalist conflict on the side of the party that is, quite frankly, more in the wrong. Yet we cannot ignore Turkey’s legitimate concern at PKK attacks, nor can we afford to turn our backs on this potentially disastrous conflict that pits our allies against one another and threatens our vital interests in all-too-fragile Iraq. We need to address the legitimate fears of the Turkoman and other non-Kurdish minorities in Kirkuk and the Kurdistan Region, and to put pressure on the Kurdistan Regional Government to ensure that all ethnic groups under its jurisdiction are properly protected and represented. But a solution to the Turkish-Kurdish question has to span both sides of the Turkey-Iraq border.

Britain and the US must engage with the PKK in an effort to bring its insurgency peacefully to an end, on the basis of a negotiated compromise, similar to that which has been successfully reached in Northern Ireland. Turkey’s conflict with the PKK is scarcely more intractable than was our own conflict with the Irish Republican Army; the coexistence of ethnic Turks and Kurds at the grass-roots level is rather better than that between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. There is absolutely no reason, therefore, why Ankara cannot pursue a similar negotiated settlement with the PKK, as we pursued it with the IRA. However comical the image of Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness as partners at the helm of the new Northern Ireland might be, it is at the same time symbolic of how even the bitterest enemies can come to collaborate when given the right inducements. It might prove difficult to persuade the PKK to lay down its weapons, but our interests are sufficiently at stake for it to be worth the effort.

The concession that Ankara would have to give in exchange for a cession of PKK violence would be the lifting of all restrictions on the peaceful expression of Kurdish nationalist politics in Turkey. Kurdish parties in Turkey should be free to organise and to campaign for Kurdish national rights - for language and cultural rights, autonomy and even secession and independence, just as in the UK we permit Sinn Fein, the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru to campaign for a united Ireland, independent Scotland and independent Wales respectively. Ankara has to realise that the territorial integrity of a democratic nation-state ultimately rests upon the consent of its citizenry, for which repression and coercion cannot substitute.

Turkey should, however, be reassured in the belief that ending the repression of its Kurdish population and permitting it full political freedom would be highly unlikely to lead to the emergence of an independent Turkish Kurdish state, for the simple reason that such a state would not be in the interests of the Kurdish people of Anatolia. Ethnic Kurds and Turks in Anatolia are too intermingled to make a bloodless drawing of a border between them feasible, even if the Turkish state were incomparably more enlightened and well intentioned than it is - more likely would be something similar to the intercommunal massacres that beset fledgling India and Pakistan in the 1940s. A particularly high price would be paid by the Kurds who would remain behind in a rump Turkey; they would be transformed at a stroke from ‘Turks’ into foreigners. Independence would cut the Turkish Kurds off from the prosperous cities of western Anatolia, the natural destination of their economic migration, and confine them to an impoverished and landlocked state wedged between unstable Iraq and hostile Turkey. As citizens of Turkey, by contrast, they are only a step or two away from Europe.

Self-determination does not mean simply drawing lines on a map as though it were a blank slate; one cannot disregard decades of history. However unjust the division of the Kurdish people following World War I between Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria may have been at the time, the clock cannot simply be turned back. The transformation of Turkey into a bilingual state with Kurdish as an official language - as Swedish is an official language in bilingual Finland - while Iraqi Kurdistan enjoys widespread autonomy, might represent the best possible solution to the Kurdish question. Europe’s German-speakers are, after all, divided between the states of Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Italy’s South Tyrol, and the arrangement is entirely satisfactory to all concerned.

A bilingual Turkish national state in which both Turkish and Kurdish are official languages would not be some arbitrary Western imposition; Turkish nationalists have traditionally viewed Kurds as Turks, while Kurds for their part were ready to fight in large numbers in defence of the common Anatolian homeland in Turkey’s War of Independence in the 1920s, against the European invaders and their local Greek and Armenian allies; Ismet Inonu, the most important of the founders of the Turkish Republic after Kemal Ataturk, was himself of partly Kurdish background. So too was the former Turkish prime minister and president Turgut Ozal, a pioneer in the lifting of restrictions on the Kurds.

In attempting to suppress all manifestations of the Kurdish language and identity, Ataturk, Inonu and their successors may have been doing what they saw as necessary in their endeavour to create a homogenous Turkish nation-state in place of the ruined Ottoman Empire. But today’s Turkish leaders have to realise that with the Turkish Republic a securely established fact, it is time for them to moderate a policy that has been too rigid for too long and that has come to threaten the very national unity it is supposed to uphold. Indeed, the ruling AKP has already taken major steps towards improving the rights of the Turkish Kurds, and it is imperative that Western leaders further encourage them in this direction, and help them to overcome the resistance of hardline nationalist elements in the army and elsewhere.

While the danger of radical Islam in Turkey is not to be neglected, yet it is ultra-nationalism that has proven to be the most dangerous force in contemporary Turkish politics, as witnessed by the assassination at the start of this year of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, and by the attempt to prosecute the great Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, in both cases for the ‘error’, in nationalist eyes, of raising the question of Turkey’s historic crimes against the Armenians. This ultra-nationalism is ruinous to Turkey’s own interests. A Turkey that allows Kurdish political parties freely to operate and the Armenian Genocide to be freely discussed would be much more attractive as a member of the European Union, which is where Turkey rightfully belongs. So much is at stake in an untangling of the Turkey-Iraqi Kurdistan-PKK triangle that we cannot afford not to attempt it, difficult though it will be.

This article was published today on the website of the Henry Jackson Society.

David Zarnett has written a devastating critique for Democratiya of Edward Said’s disgraceful record over Kosovo, about which I have been meaning to comment since it appeared at the start of this month. Some time ago, David wrote to me asking my opinion as to whether an article on Said and Kosovo would be a worthy endeavour; I remember expressing to him a certain scepticism as to whether Said had written enough about Kosovo to make an in-depth study feasible. I am sorry to say that my scepticism has proven unfounded and that David’s judgement as to the relevance of this topic has been entirely vindicated - Said wrote much more about Kosovo than he should have. I am sorry, because it means that yet another eminent left-wing intellectual may be added to the list of those prepared to denigrate the peoples of the former Yugoslavia and minimise their suffering, for the sake of the ‘higher cause’ of scoring cheap points against the US. Said was not, as I had imagined, someone who had simply added his voice casually to the ‘anti-imperialist’ chorus at the time of the Kosovo War in 1999, but a dyed-in-the-wool anti-American zealot to whom the question of whether the Kosovo Albanians would be able to live in their own country, or whether they would become the Palestinians of Europe, mattered absolutely nothing. Indeed, he was much happier with the idea of the Kosovo Albanians losing their homeland and becoming a diaspora than he was with the idea of the US intervening militarily.

The reason this is particularly shocking in Said’s case is, of course, because he was himself a Palestinian; indeed, the most eminent intellectual champion of the Palestinian cause in the Western world. Said perceived a parallel between the fate of the Kosovo Albanians in 1999 and the fate of the Palestinians in 1948; in an article published during the Kosovo War, he wrote of the ’persecution, ethnic cleansing and continued oppression of Albanians in the province of Kosovo by the Serbian forces of Slobodan Milosevic’, before adding that ’for Palestinians, 1948 was like this minus CNN: at that time 780,000 were evicted from their houses and property by Zionist forces. They remain a nation in exile fifty-one years later.’ But his perception of this parallel did not lead him to express the slightest solidarity with the Kosovo Albanians - on the contrary…

I do not wish to plunder Zarnett’s splendid article for quotes showing just how far Said was prepared to go in minimising both the suffering of the Albanians and the crimes of the Milosevic regime; I’d recommend instead reading the article directly. Suffice to say that Said used the term ‘Sunday school picnic’ in reference to the fate of Milosevic’s Albanian victims. A fate that was, in his opinion, similar to that which befell the Palestinians in 1948, only with added CNN coverage.

I supported the US-led military intervention to oust Saddam Hussein and the Baathist regime in Iraq and, like most people who did, I have had plenty of second thoughts about it. But I can say, hand on heart, that I never felt the question of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ was in any way relevant to whether the war was justified or not. The Baathist regime may not have possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction according to some technical criteria, but it certainly possessed what I would call ‘weapons of mass destruction’, meaning weapons capable of destroying masses of human beings. In the Rwandan Genocide, between 800,000 and a million people were killed mostly using technologically simple weapons, above all the machete. This is several times more than were killed by the atomic bombs that hit Japan in 1945. Judging by the twentieth-century historical record, the machete is a more dangerous weapon of mass destruction than the nuclear bomb. Saddam Hussein had repeatedly carried out genocide and mass murder against the Iraqi population. With the weaponry still available to him in 2003, he was entirely able to do so again. That he did not possess what are technically classified as ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ may make a difference to how one evaluates the justification for the war, if what concerns one is British or American national security or even Middle Eastern regional security. But for those of us who thought about the intervention in Iraq primarily in humanitarian terms, what mattered most was his ability to harm his own people. The failure to discover ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ in Iraq following the invasion made no difference in this regard.

In considering whether invading Iraq to overthrow the Baathist regime was the correct course of action, the number one question is whether it made life better for the Iraqi population. On this basis, it is very difficult not to have, at the very least, profound misgivings about the whole enterprise. The failure of the intervention to create a stable Iraq and improve the quality of life of the Iraqi people has been due to the prolongued, murderous insurgency by ultra-right-wing Islamist and former Baathist elements; if we have failed, it is essentially because the enemy has been too good at killing Iraqi civilians and because we have not been good enough at stopping it from doing so. The US and its allies of course made many mistakes that have helped to fuel the insurgency, and it is impossible to know what the situation would be like today had these mistakes not been made. Nevertheless, the principle of democratic accountability requires that the occupying powers bear responsibility for the poor record, particularly given that the population directly concerned - the Iraqis - had no say in the matter. So far as the wider region is concerned, it is a moot point whether the Islamist insurgents now ensconced in Iraq represent a greater danger than the former expansionist, genocidal dictatorship. But perception arguably matters as much as reality, and the perceived failure of the action in Iraq has greatly set back the noble cause of humanitarian intervention. The successful international interventions in Kosovo and East Timor in 1999 have undoubtedly been vindicated from the perspectives of both humanitarianism and justice and the balance sheet in Afghanistan remains positive. It is a great tragedy that the perceived failure in Iraq has made the case for a similar military intervention to liberate Darfur that much more difficult to argue. A tragedy, that is, for the people of Darfur.

Neverthless, if the intervention in Iraq is to be condemned, it should be condemned because it hasn’t worked very well, not because it was wrong in principle. Helping to overthrow dictators is something our elected leaders should be doing more of, not less. The representatives of the Kurdish victims of Baathist genocide supported the invasion, as did many other of the best representatives of democratic Iraq, such as Kanan Makiya who, despite all the horrors his country has experienced since the overthrow of Saddam, still believes that it was the right thing to do. I do not for one minute regret standing behind these people, and behind Tony Blair - Britain’s greatest prime minister since Clement Attlee - against the Baathists, Islamists and phoney ‘anti-war movement’ spearheaded by apologists for Saddam, Slobodan Milosevic and other fascists. Let’s be clear about this: most of the people who marched in Britain against the war in Iraq may have done so for the best of motives; it was not they, but the leadership of the movement that was rotten. This leadership included Tony Benn, who praised Mao Zedong as ‘the greatest man of the twentieth century’, though Mao’s policies make the Iraq war seem positively bloodless and successful; the Socialist Workers Party, which continues to revere the Bolshevik Revolution, which was an unequivocally greater and bloodier failure than the Iraq war, and whose supporters continue to deny the Srebrenica genocide and support Hezbollah; George Galloway, who praised Saddam Hussein and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad; the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, whose leading lights in the 1990s joined with Alfred Sherman, a political friend of Jean-Marie Le Pen and political advisor to the genocidal murderer Radovan Karadzic, to form the ‘Committee for Peace in the Balkans’; Harold Pinter, a supporter of the ‘International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic’; John Pilger, a denier of Milosevic’s atrocities; and so on. Any movement spearheaded by such people should automatically be opposed, regardless of what it claims to be campaigning on. This does not mean the war was necessarily right, but it is a factor in the balance sheet.

Ultimately, the real division was not between those who supported and those who opposed the Iraq war - there were many honourable members on both sides of the debate - but between those who supported the Iraqi people and those who supported their oppressors. All those who supported the Iraqi people were, once the invasion had occurred, on the same side in support of the struggling Iraqi democracy, regardless of whether or not they had favoured the invasion. This essential division will repeat itself in future conflicts across the globe. In future crises, solidarity with freedom fighters struggling against a dictatorship, fascism or genocide may mean supporting military intervention, if that is what the freedom fighters feel is best for their country. Support for military intervention is a tactical question; solidarity with the oppressed against the oppressors - defending them against weapons of mass destruction, whether the machete or poison gas - is a matter of principle.

Local political and religious figures in Afghanistan are apparently concerned that the TV screening of a Shakira concert could inspire suicide bombers. It would be superfluous to comment on what this tells us about the terrorists’ motives. But we can safely discount a sense of injustice at the crimes of Western imperialism.

On Sunday evening I had the privilege of attending a lecture given by Richard Perle at the Finchley Synagogue, on the topic of whether peace is possible in the Middle East. Perle has been one of a number of US officials who have promoted a progressive vision of US foreign policy. In an earlier era, a US overthrow of a hostile dictator would probably have been followed simply by his replacement with a pro-American dictator, yet it was thanks to the vision of Perle and other neoconservatives that the overthrow of Saddam was followed by the establishment of a democracy in Iraq. An Iraqi democrat who attended last night’s meeting gave his thanks to Perle and his colleagues, describing them as architects who had drawn up a beautiful plan, only to see it spoiled by mistakes during the construction. Perle gave his blessing also to the plea from an Iranian dissident, who was also present, that the US should support the democratic movement in Iran. He has been a principled champion of the defence of Bosnia-Hercegovina and Kosovo from Milosevic’s aggression and tyranny and critic of Putin’s brutal repression in Chechnya.

In his speech last night, Perle highlighted not only the obstacle to Middle Eastern peace represented by traditional US foes like the Iranian and Syrian regimes, but also the threat posed by the regime in Saudi Arabia which, as he pointed out, spreads the poison of Islamic extremism across the globe. He criticised the British government for providing the red carpet treatment to Saudi King Abdullah during his recent visit. It is deeply ironic that neoconservatives like Perle have been so vilified by fashionable left-liberal opinion, when it is precisely they who have broken with the prevailing orthodoxy among Western policy-makers, that realpolitik requires the support of brutal dictators who happen to be friendly to the West. Neoconservaties like Perle are doing precisely what traditional leftists should be doing but in most cases are not: agitating against the dictators.

It was in his discussion of the Israel-Palestine question that I found myself disagreeing with Richard; not because I disagreed with his principles, but because I disagree with how he interprets them. Responding to a question from an American graduate student, who asked him whether the US really derived any benefit from the alliance with Israel, he responded that the day the US abandoned a friend to ingratiate itself with the enemies of that friend will be the day that the US loses all moral authority as a superpower, and that it will be perceived globally as having done so. Israel is the US’s friend, it is a democracy and a loyal ally, and the US should support its friend. If I understood correctly, Perle interprets this to mean supporting Israel in all its outstanding areas of dispute with the Palestinians.

I entirely agree that the US should support Israel. The question is: what does ’supporting Israel’ mean ? What does it mean to be a friend ?

A true friend does not just support everything one does, even when one is not in the right. A true friend should be prepared to tell one when one is in the wrong and to dissuade one from a course of action that will lead one to harm. A true friend of Turkey would advise it to withdraw from Cyprus; a true friend of Serbia would advise it to give up Kosovo; a true friend of Iran would advise it to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons. If the US is to be a true friend of Israel, it is not enough just to support Israel against its enemies; it must also guide it away from a self-destructive policy.

Israel’s waging of a territorial conflict with the Palestinians in the West Bank is a self-destructive policy. Because while Israel is in the right in its determination to defend itself from neighbouring regimes or movements that seek its destruction, such as Ahmadinejad’s regime in Tehran or Hezbollah in Lebanon; while it is in the right to face down enemies that deny its right to exist; while it is right to defend its population from suicide bombers; in its policy in the West Bank, Israel is in the wrong. No amount of pointing to the crimes of the other side - great though they are - can hide this fact.

It is often, and rightly, pointed out by Israel’s defenders that critics of Israel, from the ranks of the Islamic world, the left-liberal intelligentsia in the West, and elsewhere, will single out Israeli crimes and misdemeanours for condemnation while ignoring the equal or greater crimes and misdemeanours of neighbouring Muslim states: Syria’s Hama massacre and promotion of the Lebanese civil war; Iran’s persecution of the Ahwazi Arabs; the genocide in Darfur; the brutal oppression of women and absence of democracy in Egypt and Saudia Arabia; and so forth. But it does no good to point out this hypocrisy and condemn all these crimes, and then to turn a blind eye to the utterly unjustifiable Israeli policy of colonisation and settlement building in the West Bank; the denial of human rights to the West Bank Palestinians; the attempt to squeeze them into an ever-smaller slice of their homeland.

The reason it does no good - leaving aside the question of morality - is that it is extremely damaging to us in our life-and-death struggle against Islamist terrorism and the dictatorships that promote it. In this struggle, the propaganda war is all important. A large part of our difficulties in Iraq stem from the fact that - unlike in Kuwait in 1991, Kosovo in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2001 - we did not win the propaganda war prior to our military intervention. It might once have been thought that the US was powerful enough simply to forge ahead with its preferred policy regardless of what the world thought, but that does not appear so feasible today. We are waging a struggle with the Islamists for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims across the world, and we cannot afford to be the bad guys anywhere at all. Because our enemies will always highlight our errors - Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and so forth.

It is, arguably, hypocritical when Muslims complain about the mistreatment of other Muslims in Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya and elsewhere while ignoring the persecution of Muslim populations by Muslim regimes, in Darfur, Khuzestan, eastern Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. But the problem is not that they are highlighting the plight of Palestians, Kashmiris and Chechens, but that they are failing to highlight the persecution of Muslims by other Muslims. Both Muslims and non-Muslims should be highlighting alike the plight of Palestinians and Ahwazi Arabs, Kashmiris and Sudanese, Chechens and Saudi Shias.

For better or for worse, the Palestinian question has come to assume tremendous symbolic importance in the eyes of many Muslims - and indeed of many non-Muslims. Objectively speaking, the oppression of Palestinians by Israel in the West Bank forms only a small part of the total oppression that is occurring in the Middle East. But symbolically, the Palestinian question has come to assume an importance out of all proportion to its objective importance in Middle Eastern geopolitics.

Our credibility in the eyes of world opinion, and particularly world Muslim opinion, rests disproportionately on our ability to deliver a just settlement to the Israel-Palestine dispute. Not a pro-Palestinian settlement, but a settlement that is just for both sides.

The Israelis and Palestinians are two great nations; equally worthy of freedom, independence and security. This has nothing to do with the awfulness of the leaderships of one or both of them. The fascistic, anti-Semitic nature of the Hamas movement, the suicide bombings, or the corrupt brutality of Yasser Arafat do not detract from the Palestinian right to national independence, any more than the massive war-crimes of Ariel Sharon, the anti-Arab racism of parts of the Israeli right or the pro-Nazi and terrorist past of Yitzhak Shamir detract from the right of Israel to security and self-defence.

I have yet to hear, let alone be convinced by, any Israeli justification for the existence of the West Bank settlements, or for exclusive Israeli possession of Jerusalem. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank may have made military sense when Israel was threatened with the conventional armies of neighbouring Arab states, but today the threat is different: suicide bombers, rocket attacks and potentially a nuclear strike. The occupation of the West Bank does not help Israel to defend itself from these threats, but it does massively alienate world opinion. Furthermore, Israel’s security rests on the sanctity of legally established borders; by questioning the sanctity of these borders in the goal of annexing West Bank territory, Israel is undermining the very institution that underpins its own territorial integrity. The occupation of the West Bank and the abuse of Palestinian human rights that this involves drives ordinary Palestinians into the arms of the extremists. The longer this goes on, the more danger there is of Israel eventually coming to grief at the hands of its enemies. And all for a few small slices of territory that, objectively, it needs less than the Palestinians do.

As an outsider with no personal emotional ties with either Israel or Palestine, any settlement that would award the Palestinians less than 22% of the territory of historic Palestine, or that would award all Jerusalem to just one of the two nations, would strike me as deeply unjust. No matter how awful the Palestinian leadership is, the Palestinian people deserve better than that. It is only through a just settlement - an Israel secure in its pre-’67 borders, an independent Palestine comprising the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, and a Palestinian abandonment of the right to return to pre-’67 Israel in exchange for fair compensation - that a stable peace can be born. A peace that would undercut the appeal of Hamas and other extremists and remove this symbolic injustice in the eyes of world opinion while safeguarding Israel’s security.

If Hamas were to continue to attack Israel from the West Bank following an Israeli withdrawal, Israel would be in an incomparably stronger position strategically than it is today. Because Israel would be unquestionably and totally the good guy; it would lose its negative image in the eyes of all but the extremists; it would enjoy the sympathy of the whole world.

That’s something anyone would want for a friend.