My other commitments have prevented much blogging of late. My most culpable failure has been over the execution of Saddam. Luckily, Perry de Haviland sums up my thoughts almost exactly:

Why is a bloody tyrant getting his just deserts generating so many official grimaces and shocked swooning amongst the professional political classes? That Saddam Hussain's executioners visited upon him a tiny measure of the degradation and horror Saddam's own busy hangmen inflicted on so many others when he was in power is a trivial matter. Tyrants should have neither consideration nor dignity, deserving only to reap the harvest of hatred from the fields of skulls they have themselves planted, ideally at the hands of their victims or suitable representatives.

Tyrants are killed as punishment for unspeakable evil acts and as a warning to other would-be tyrants. Puncturing their vanity and disrespecting them is not 'inappropriate', it is justice and a small measure of revenge for against a person towards whom the most appropriated emotion is hatred. That such a person controlled a state makes their debasement all the more important, though quite possibly that very fact lies at the heart of why so object to what happened to him.

Sic semper tyrannis.

I find the whole upset over Saddam being taunted utterly perplexing. What does it matter if some people said a few nasty words to a murderous butcher as he prepared to meet his maker?

As for those ministers who have condemned the manner of his execution, whilst failing to condemn his execution: eh? If they condemned his execution, that would be one thing. But their stance is this: feel free to kill him, and say what you like about him behind his back, but don't say anything nasty to his face.

Bizarre.

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Daniel Finkelstein says everything I would want to say about the death of the murdererous tyrant, Augusto Pinochet:

The Times records Margaret Thatcher as being "greatly saddened". How extraordinary. Pinochet was a murderer, a torturer and a thief. How can you be greatly saddened by the death of someone like that?

Those (on the right I am ashamed to say) who whitewash Pinochet and his crimes are saying one or more of the following:

* No, he wasn't a murderer, torturer and thief. It's all been made up by Christopher Hitchens.
* His murdering and torturing were acceptable because the victims were primarily communists or socialists
* Yes, he was a murderer, torturer and thief but at least he was our murderer, torturer and thief.
* What's a little murdering when he introduced a funded pension scheme?
* What's a little torture when he was on our side in the Falklands War?

What pathetic, morally bankrupt arguments. There's no such thing as "our murderer". Such "realism" should have no place in the thinking of those who support liberty.

The newspapers say that Pinochet had heart failure last night. I think his heart failed him a long time ago.

This is the key sentence: There's no such thing as "our murderer". Such "realism" should have no place in the thinking of those who support liberty. And it goes to the heart of the moral flaws within the ISG report last week, which recommends a return to the morally bankrupt realpolitik policies of the past.

As Oliver Kamm puts it:

Of course we should stand ready to engage, and even negotiate, with our enemies. But the notion that we should do so without preconditions - overlooking Iran's nuclear deception and Syria's murderous attacks on Lebanese politicians - makes a mockery even of the diplomatic efforts of the European Union and the United Nations, and not only the interventionist policies of the Prime Minister...

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This piece of mine appears in today's Times.

If it's bad form to speak ill of the dead, it seems to be even worse form to speak ill of the almost-dead tyrant. When I’ve written before about the monstrous regime of Fidel Castro — one of the longest-standing abusers of human rights on the planet — I’ve been deluged with e-mails and letters accusing me of everything bar incest.

Despite the pictures of him that appeared on Monday, it’s clear that he is on his last legs. And when he does finally pop his clogs, the mourning of left-liberals will be intense.

Such hero worship of so brutal a tyrant would seem beyond rational explanation. As Amnesty International puts it in its 2006 report on Cuba: “There was increasing international concern about Cuba’s failure to improve civil and political rights . . . Restrictions on freedom of expression, association and movement continued to cause great concern. Nearly 70 prisoners of conscience remained in prison.”

Cuban prisoners are detained under the catch-all peligrosidad predelictiva, defined as “a person’s special proclivity to commit offences as demonstrated by conduct that is manifestly contrary to the norms of socialist morality”. Castro also operates a pretty basic form of censorship: he imprisons journalists to whom he objects. Twenty-four journalists were in prison at the end of 2005. And no Cuban is allowed to travel abroad without permission.

Rationally, those who describe themselves as “progressive” ought to be campaigning for Castro’s departure. Instead, when he does die, his image is likely to outsell even that of Che Guevara on the ubiquitous T-shirts. But rational explanation is the wrong place to start. Ever since Robespierre, the original left-wing tyrant, large sections of the Left have allied themselves with oppressors. Even when the evidence of Stalin’s butchery was known, for example, George Bernard Shaw continued to praise him, condoning Stalin’s purges by arguing that he was merely getting rid of those who weren’t up to their jobs, and that “they often have to be pushed off the ladder with a rope around their necks”.

There is a further, more modern, incongruity: the willingness of elements of the Left to ally with Islamists who exemplify everything they ought, rationally, to be campaigning against. So when Ken Livingstone sings the praises of the Muslim cleric Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Mayor of London is eulogising a man who — quite apart from supporting suicide bombing — argues that it is a husband’s duty “to beat her (his wife) lightly with his hands” when she does not obey him, and who proselytises that a homosexual should be given “the same punishment as any sexual pervert . . . Some say we should burn them, and so on. There is disagreement . . . The important thing is to treat this act as a crime.”

The roots of such bizarre hero worship are complex, but for all its apparent incompatibility with a Left which claims to promote freedom, equality and prosperity, there is a linking thread. Whether it be Robespierre, Stalin, Castro or al-Qaradawi, all their actions stem from the same certainty that the broader Left holds: that the ends it seeks are so incontrovertibly proper that the means are justified for the greater good.

It might not be a very deep philosophical explanation, but it works even for relatively prosaic obsessions of the Left such as high taxes. Because it is, to most of the Left, self-evident that only the State should run schools and hospitals, so it is perfectly proper to take people’s money to finance it. The ends make the means entirely justified.

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Having moved house recently, my thrice-weekly run is no longer on streets but in a park. I was worried about all sorts of things when I moved, but one development has taken me entirely by surprise. I want to shoot on sight every dog I see.

Why do dog owners think that their animals have the right to run freely off the leash in a park? I can put up with the faeces that they deposit on the pathways. It’s possible, albeit unpleasant, to run around them. What one can’t ignore is when a hulking beast of teeth and jaw, or even some puny yapping squirty thing, decides that the thing running in front of it — me — is its prey.

Dogs chase after things, especially when those things are moving. Their owners are either too stupid or too selfish to care. On second thoughts, it’s not the dogs that should be shot . .

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News to brighten a dull Sunday:

ID cards doomed, say officials

TONY BLAIR’S flagship identity cards scheme is set to fail and may not be introduced for a generation, according to leaked Whitehall e-mails from the senior officials responsible for the multi-billion-pound project.
The problems are so serious that ministers have been forced to draw up plans for a scaled-down “face-saving” version to meet their pledge of phasing in the cards from 2008.

However, civil servants say there is no evidence that even this compromise is “remotely feasible” and accuse ministers of “ignoring reality” by pressing ahead.

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Oliver Kamm has an appropriate response to the death of Milosevic. He cites Lord Ashdown's comment that, while it is "an act of closure", it "is not an act of closure that anyone would wish to see. The act of closure we wished to see was the end of the Milosevic trial and justice taking its course."

No one who values human life, democracy, and justice can disagree with that.

But I find that I have an additional reaction to the death of a butcher, the like of whose evil we must forever fight and defeat. It consists of just three words:

Rot in hell.

On Aug. 29, 1991, the Supreme Soviet, the parliament of the U.S.S.R., suspended all activities of the Communist Party, bringing an end to the institution.

One of the most often used arguments against our intervention in Iraq is 'what about Zimbabwe?' (or North Korea, or anywhere where people are governed by a tyranny).

It is, of course a flawed argument. Our lack of action elswehere is not an argument against action in Iraq; it is an argument in favour of acting elsewhere, too.

But at least we do not call Mugabe an ally, and we make gestures (albeit tokenistic) against him and his regime.

The classification of Karimov, however, as an ally is based on the most cynical realpolitik foreign policy - that your enemy's enemy is your friend. The liberal foreign policy of Bush and Blair is something very different, as Blair outlined in his seminal Chicago speech in 1999.

President Bush was right when he stated in 2003 that

Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom... did nothing to make us safe - because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty.

Bush must thus be criticised for failing to follow the logic of his own otherwise admirable foreign policy. The US should not give support to tyrants - especially murderous tyrants; it should work to remove them.

There's a superb - and chilling - piece on the SAU blog about the influence of Soviet-sympathising academics. If you thought that those who have been exposed for being fellow travellers with - and, in some cases, agents of - an evil empire have somehow disappeared from public life, think again. One - Lord Roper - is the LibDems' Chief Whip in the Lords.

Amazing. Or perhaps not, given that party's support for Saddam Hussein's continuance in power.

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