As it happens, I agree with Clark on the Iraqi elections in 2005, but someone who once wrote what amounts to a defence of the one party state (de facto or actual) is adopting a stance of "political contingency" over elections now. In 2002, Clark commented in of all places, The Spectator magazine:
After the signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975, the US was understandably keen to use the issue of human rights as a way of weakening the Soviet Union and its control over Eastern Europe. Human Rights Watch, set up in 1978 as Helsinki Rights Watch by the publishing tycoon Bob Bernstein, was to be the vehicle for achieving this. Over the next ten years the organisation was to play a key role in publicising human-rights breaches behind the Iron Curtain and helping dissident groups there to organise and eventually grow into opposition parties. Vaclav Havel, the Czech President, recognises the debt that he and many others owe to the organisation, and is on record as stating that without Human Rights Watch there would have been no Velvet Revolution in his country.No doubt the conservative Spectator finds it useful to keep a 'left-wing' autocrat on its roster of contributors from time to time. Just to remind its readers of the worst attitudes the 'left' can come up with.
Update: Plagiarism by Clark in yesterday's First Post article.
