Back to basics

And back to business as Aaronormal. We're actually a week in arrears now because I want to say something about his latest on trade policy, but let's clear the backlog a bit; viz this column, where one ends up wanting to say that "A thing can be true even though David Aaronovitch says it".

Professor Falk is indeed wildly unchoosy about the books he writes forewords for. And I would tentatively advance that a man who acts surprised about the political reaction to Israel/Nazi analogies is an idiot, whatever he is Professor of. And in general the fact that some of the minor UN human rights talking shops are so bloody, bloody keen on passing meaningless and unenforceable resolutions about Israel is a bit of an embarrassment that somebody who takes the UN seriously ought to do something about. Perhaps one might want to consider why it is that so many countries who agree on almost literally nothing else might agree so unanimously on the subject of the Palestinians (worldwide and virulent anti-Semitism being only one of a number of possible explanations). And perhaps one might also wonder whether the constant passage of anti-Israel resolutions has anything to do with the fact that these resolutions are known by all involved to be definitely consequence-free, and whether the totality of this state of affairs is really all that good for the world. But withal, with all of this, the UN always has the chance to not make an arse of itself and ought to be criticised for not taking that chance more often. So the gut instinct of AW is that in this case, Aaro is on the right track.

Except, except ... we are old and wise in the ways of Aaronovitch Watching, this blog is older than the cheese in my fridge. And the number one principle has always been that Aaro is often at his most dangerous when at his most superficially sensible. And indeed, I find myself struggling to deliver that pat on the back. Consider the career of Steven Milloy ...

Milloy is the proprietor of "junkscience.com", a website devoted to uncovering the junk science used by political hacks to push specific policy agendas. He cut his teeth exposing the junk science linking cigarette smoke to lung cancer, has moved on to exposing the junk science of global warming, is a big critic of the junk science which holds that mosquitoes develop resistance to DDT and so on. In other words, a deeply worthless man, who has produced some of the worst works of corporate "sound science" hackery in a pretty horrendous canon.

But of course, it would have been possible for a smarter operator than Milloy to have achieved a lot of his goals without ever having written a single thing that he could be criticised for. If one were to simply constantly attack and critique methodological flaws in scientific papers on one side of a controversy while ignoring similar or worse flaws on the other side, one could end up creating a very misleading impression of the state of science, without ever having written a single paper that was itself dishonest. Milloy, of course, wasn't smart enough to do this.

Aaro, in a different field, is. I somehow missed his article about John Bolton, or about Dick Cheney, or about any of the nuts, imperialists and maniacs on the side of American unilateralism. Of course I missed them because they weren't there. Aaro is, as always, working the frame[1]. He's defining the acceptable terms of who ought to be taken seriously on matters of international human rights as having a left edge somewhere around Joe Lieberman, and a right edge practically nowhere. Often this is preliminary to presenting a Blairite party line as the sensible middle way between two extremes, but not always; in this context, the general weakening of the credibility of international institutions is an end in itself, and if the UN wants to stick its dick in a van der Graaf generator, Aaro is only happy to help turn the crank. So .... not a bad article in and of itself, but remember that rule one of Watching is to watch.

Update: I would have thought that the other theme of Aaro's column – the policing of the borders of what it is and isn't acceptable to say about Israel (basically, left edge is a long way to the right of Ha'aretz and right edge is a micron to the left of Melanie Phillips) – was so obvious as not to need mention. I am personally so confused about how one might discuss the economic and social grounds of the Palestinian intifada that my policy is to avoid the subject whenever possible and to speak bluntly when unavoidable; I do wish someone like Aaro would produce a style guide. Bonus points for claiming that the Darfur resistance doesn't kill civilians, by the way.

[1] I am assuming that this is the case; a still less charitable interpretation would be that Professor Falk is simply a talking point of the week somewhere.