I can’t remember the last time I read quite so savage a denunciation in the form of a book review as Irfan Khawaja’s appraisal of Michael Byers’ War Law.

Although Mike and I are worlds apart on the matter of Afghanistan, and we’ve duked it out publicly, I still think of him as something of a friend. So I do feel a bit of a sting for him. Besides, Khawaja isn’t just one of Byers’ better-informed detractors. He’s a philosophy professor with the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at City University of New York.

In Khawaja’s view, Byers’ War Law is “a tendentious polemic masquerading as a textbook,” and a “polemic masquerading as a primer.” It’s an “apotheosis of incoherence” that “strives mightily for the advantages of toil by the methods of theft.”

It’s “weak on basic legal concepts,” even. It’s “a classic case of trying simultaneously to have one’s cake and eat it,” and Byers compounds the offence by engaging in “desperate apologetics” and “moral and political grandstanding.” Further, “a review of the book would be incomplete if it failed to mention the brazen tendentiousness of Byers’s handling of factual matters” - which Khawaja does not fail to mention. And it all goes to show “how putatively intelligent academics can lose touch with reality and compensate for their lack of contact with it by writing extended temper-tantrums. . .”

Ouch and ouch.

Nice to see the new Democratiya out, no matter.