by James Heartfield
Two weeks ago, a motley gathering of parliamentarians, pundits and academics announced themselves as the Henry 'Scoop' Jackson Society in the Palace of Westminster. A small flurry of newspaper reports tried to divine the meaning of the argument they initiated over the discipline of International Relations, and its relevance to their political allegiances (1).
Among them were Labour MPs Gisela Stuart and Denis MacShane, as well as Tory Michael Gove and Ulster Unionist David Trimble: something of a broad church (2). Testing for the reporters was the proposition that the Henry Jackson Society were critics of something called 'realism' (sometimes 'cynical' or 'hands-off realism') and supporters of liberal internationalism.
Easier to understand was that this was a rally in support of the government's war in Iraq. But muddying the waters again was the question: left wing, or right wing? To help us understand this mess of labels comes the Henry Jackson Society's own Oliver Kamm, sometime Times contributor and prolific blogger, with his book Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-Wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy (Social Affairs Unit). ...
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