THE PRO-INVASION left was always a small battalion, made up almost entirely of journalists and intellectuals who believed toppling the Taliban and Saddam Hussein was a good idea—even if the only leader available to lead the charge was George W. Bush. Yet almost since the first statue of Saddam fell to the ground, it has been losing troops—to the antiwar side, to a sullen AWOL silence, or to despair. So far, there have been retractions from Peter Beinart, Norman Geras, David Aaronovitch, and more; only a few lone fighters remain, like Japanese troops hiding in the forest, unaware their war has been lost. Now, with What’s Left?, the most substantial work by a pro-war left intellectual has been published, and we can ask, Did this strange niche in Anglo-American politics—of which I was a part, for a time—produce any enduring insights?

British columnist Nick Cohen was always one of the most gifted—and unexpected—of pro-war polemicists. In 2003 he was the most prominent left-wing critic of Tony Blair in the British press, poaching and filleting Blair’s New Labour love-in with corporations and the super-rich every week from the impeccably liberal pages of the Observer and the New Statesman. His initial reaction to the September 11, 2001, massacres was, he writes now, “that they were a nuisance that got in the way of more pressing concerns. Throughout the Nineties, I had been writing about the overweening power of big business. . . . Attacking Tony Blair was what I liked doing.” So—as anybody who knew him would have predicted—he opposed the invasion of Afghanistan, warning that it could trigger famine and mass death.

But then, an old left-wing value stirred unexpectedly in his conscience. Cohen was raised to believe the moral core of the left lies in its consistent antifascism, an absolute opposition to the far right in all places and at all times. He quips that when he was a child his mother was so scrupulous about never buying oranges from either Franco Spain or apartheid South Africa that if the general had held on for a few more years Cohen would have developed scurvy. He was raised to see Orwell in Catalonia as his moral archetype—the socialist bearing a pack and going abroad to fight fascists. If the pro-war left had any central spine to its thought, it was the unexpected question, what would Orwell do? Could it be, Cohen pondered as the left rallied against the war, that the Taliban and Saddam were also faces of fascism, and if so, did that not place an obligation on the left to support its victims?

Cohen began to pore through the works of Paul Berman and Christopher Hitchens, left wingers he had long admired in the world of September 10. They argued there was a jot of racism in the failure of many on the left to realize that, as Cohen puts it, “people with brown skins were as capable as people with white skins of forming a fascistic movement and murdering and oppressing others.” Didn’t al-Qaeda seek “a godly global empire to repress the rights of democrats, the independent-minded, women and homosexuals”? Didn’t Saddam slaughter trade unionists, socialists, and gays? Wasn’t this antithetical to everything the left believed? Bad though Bush is, isn’t he preferable to this?

Cohen seems to have had an epiphany: “Seeing fascism for what it is means shaking yourself out of old habits and looking at the world afresh.” So he cast off his former alliances—although not, he insists, his principles—and supported George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way is Cohen’s four-years-on manifesto, a polemic against the left wingers and liberals who failed to take the same stance and have ended up, he argues, as “apologists” for “the far right.”

To understand the pro-war left position, you have to break it down into four distinct readings: of Islamism, of Baathism, of the purposes of the post-socialist left, and of neoconservatism.

Reading One: Islamism. The pro-war left argued that Islamism (as opposed to Islam) is a variant on an old enemy of the left—fascism. Paul Berman, in Terror and Liberalism, carefully teased out the intellectual origins of Islamic fundamentalism, looking primarily at Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual godfather of al-Qaeda. It was not hard to find the links: Qutb was explicitly and openly influenced by European fascism. Nor was this a merely intellectual influence: when his ideas eventually became a state ideology—in Taliban Afghanistan—it looked hideously familiar to historians of fascism, with its fanatical Jew-hatred, homophobia, misogyny, the banning of all dissent (and even of music), and the suppression of all liberal freedoms. Jihadists even inherited the most eccentric lacunae of fascist conspiracy-thought: on March 9, 2004, a meeting of Freemasons in an Istanbul restaurant was blown up by Islamist suicide-murderers.

Ah, the minimizers of Islamism said, but these are the poor, the wretched of the earth! In fact, the pro-war left pointed out, Islamist activists are overwhelmingly wealthy—Osama bin Laden is the son of a billionaire—and they are oppressing the real wretched of the earth, not least women. Besides, to refuse to see that people living in poor or oppressive countries can become fascists is to fall for what Bertrand Russell called “The Fallacy of the Superior Virtue of the Oppressed.”

Those who see al-Qaeda as simply a negative protest movement against the United States, one that would be sated by America’s collapse, are willfully neglecting its rancid positive intentions toward its fellow Muslims and people everywhere. In his “Address to the American People” in October 2002, Bin Laden asked rhetorically, “What do we want from you?” He told U.S. citizens: “The first thing we are calling you to is Islam. . . .The second thing we call you to is to stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you,” of which the prime examples are “fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling and usury.” Removing women from the workplace and, presumably, imprisoning them in the home, as under the Taliban, is his next big demand. When listing “the worst kind of event” committed by America, he names not a foreign policy atrocity—of which there are many—but “your President Clinton’s immoral acts committed in the official Oval Office” with Monica Lewinsky.

If you study the biographies of leading jihadis, it becomes clear that their hatred of sexual freedom and feminism is at least as intense as their hatred of U.S. foreign policy. Qutb was scandalized by the drinking, sex-mixing, and free women he met even in 1950s America. In The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright notes that as a teenager, Bin Laden “was rarely angry except when sexual matters came up.” In his last will and testament, the lead September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta focused not on his hatred of U.S. foreign policy but on his insistence that “no woman should ask forgiveness of me,” and nobody should touch his genitals after death.

This identification of Islamism as a mutation of the old European fascisms—often with the same core texts, such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—was the most enduring insight of the pro-war left. But its reading of Islamism contained a second, much feebler element. Cohen is enraged by people who simplistically ascribe jihadism to the “root cause” of the Israel/Palestine conflict, which, he says is “to make a very large assumption about a very small war.” That’s true enough: getting justice for the Palestinians is morally essential, but the idea that it will stem jihadism other than in Palestine itself was always fanciful. However, Cohen then extends this argument—in a bizarre leap—to claim that jihadism has no root causes at all, and that anybody who suggests otherwise is “appeasing fascists.”

“I am very skeptical,” he says, “of people who think irrational movements have rational causes.” So if you talk, as virtually all serious scholars of jihadism do, about the role the United States played in smelting jihadism through supporting torture in Egypt and a Wahhabi clerical establishment in Saudi Arabia, you are in Cohen’s eyes an apologist. Jihadism is in his account a spontaneous theological psychosis sprouting in the void, with social and economic factors playing no role at all. Its irrationality means it cannot be explained or discussed; it can only be defeated.

In an attempt to dismiss a facile explanation for Islamism (“It’s all about Israel!”), Cohen ends up offering an even more facile case—that “it has no causes except its own crazy ideas.” His dismissal of any precondition or cause for jihadism—no matter how thoroughly documented—as “appeasement” and “making excuses” is profoundly disabling, leaving him unable to understand or account for the movement he so desperately wants to suppress. This scars his entire analysis.

Reading Two: Baathism. The view that Saddam represented a strain of fascism is less controversial, because his track record—of genocide, unprovoked invasions, mass terror— is beyond dispute. Only a depraved fringe of the left, most notably the British Member of Parliament George Galloway, disputed this, but Cohen spills too much ink taking him very seriously indeed. Galloway is an old-style Stalinist carbuncle who, as Christopher Hitchens once put it, “trawls the world looking for a tyrannical homeland.” A fawner over Fidel Castro and Bashar al-Assad, his most notorious act of political fellatio came when he saluted Saddam Hussein in 1994. Galloway described Saddam’s genocide of the Kurds as a “civil war” and, when asked in 2006 if ordinary Iraqis hated Saddam, said, “Not at all; not at all. . . .He wasn’t hated by the ordinary Iraqi—no, not at all.” Foul though this is, Cohen pays Galloway an unnecessary compliment by presenting him as a mainstream figure on the British left. The vast majority of the million-and-a-half people who attended the antiwar demonstrations in London had no idea who he was, and still don’t. He is the despised and discredited member of a far-left party.

Reading Three: The Proper Role of the Left. Cohen says that it is “hard to know what it means to be on the left today,” after the old state socialisms have died. But—after some cursory praise for European social democracy—he says he believes the core of the left lies in the impulse “to feel solidarity with suffering strangers in [your] bones.” To be left wing, he reasons, is to wish for all humanity the same securities and rights we wish for the people we love.

But the pro-war left also looked to a left-wing tradition that had fallen dormant: they argued for a self-consciously 1930s Victor Lazlo left rather than a 1960s flower-power one. Quoting Orwell, they called for a left that is aware there are enemies that may need to be fought rather than hugged into submission. What had caused this wing of the left to wither? Cohen argues it has been dissolved by three acids. The first is the collapse of the international socialist movement, which has put the left in “the absurd position of being socialists without comrades.” Outside a few heroic straggling survivors in the trade union movement, the left no longer has organizational links with left wingers in the Middle East. With no obvious point of identification with like-minded people, Cohen argues, they have ended up supporting—or at least politely excusing—people whose views they would find abhorrent in a white-skinned American. Cohen argues they have clutched at any forces in non-Western societies that seem to have the same enemy and supported them.

The second acid, that of multiculturalism, provided a righteous ideological sheen for this betrayal. Rather than emphasizing how similar suffering strangers are to us, multiculturalism has suggested they are irredeemably different, and that practices that look like oppression to us might actually be enjoyed by their victims. The third acid, postmodernism, then provides the final corrosion, suggesting that there is one culture that must legitimately be destroyed. The liberal values of the Enlightenment, rather than being the solution, are the real source of tyranny in the world.

There are indeed some examples of people on the left who match Cohen’s description. For example, Madeleine Bunting is a columnist for the Guardian newspaper who campaigns for women’s and homosexuals’ rights in Britain. But when she met with an Egyptian defender of wife-beating and gay-killing, Sheikh Yusuf al-Quaradawi, and wrote a fawning account of his life, she demanded to know why protesting left-wingers like Cohen were making “a shibboleth” out of women’s and gay rights. It’s hard to see this as anything other than a form of soft racism: while she finds misogyny repellent in London, it becomes a trivial matter in Damascus, where she is happy to wave away the rights of 55 percent of non-Westerners as a “shibboleth.”

One of the most popular left-wing blogs in Britain, “Lenin’s Tomb,” goes further, viciously scorning Muslims who fight back against Islamic fundamentalism. Even though it is written by an atheist writer who enjoys alcohol, female company, and free speech, it has ridiculed Muslim women who attend freedom of speech rallies as “Uncle Toms,” and condemned Muslims who have “comfortable upper-middle class” lives because they aren’t “interested in subjecting [themselves] to the ascetic demands of religion.” Cohen’s thesis applies with laser accuracy to these parts of the left, and it is here that his critique is most powerful: they have indeed become reflexive defenders of the far right. Again, he exaggerates the extent to which these thoughts are part of the mainstream left. But this error is as nothing to the pro-war left’s final and most disastrous reading of all.

Reading Four: Neoconservatism. Cohen very rarely states explicitly what he thinks of neoconservatism. But it is clear that Cohen takes the Bush administration’s most idealistic rhetoric at face value. For example, in one column he writes, “In the long-run the only solution is for the global move towards democracy to get moving again. In these strange times, the only person who believes that this is possible or desirable is George W. Bush . . . [and he] was feared and hated by right-thinking people the world over for saying so.” He later goes further, saying that “neoconservatives . . . [are] hated because of their espousal of causes the liberal-left had once owned but no longer had the moral self-confidence to defend.” Under their leadership, the U.S. Army has become the armed wing of Amnesty International, and its 51st Airborne Division of the United States the moral equivalent of the International Brigades. He even approvingly quotes Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya’s claim that “the neoconservatives were fighting the Left’s battles for them.”

Cohen’s statements about neoconservatism consist solely of assertions, primarily about the personal niceness of Paul Wolfowitz. The overwhelming contrary evidence is simply ignored. A policy of systematic torture? The immediate imposition of mass privatizations, causing mass unemployment and sectarian unrest? The trapping of civilian “military-aged men” between eighteen and fifty-five in Fallujah, a city the size of Baltimore, before setting off white phosphorus, a waxy substance that burns to the bone? Cohen does not say how these neoconservative tactics have been “fighting the Left’s battles for them.”

Indeed, Cohen has never engaged with the situation in Iraq after March 2003, other than a grudging two-line concession that “the American and British governments sold the invasions to their publics with a false bill of goods and its aftermath was a bloody catastrophe”—and a mockery of the Lancet report showing that 650,000 Iraqi civilians have died. Cohen is frozen in the antiwar demonstrations of that spring, arguing against George Galloway alone.

That’s why his thinking on neoconservatism quickly becomes slippery and relies on the same evasions he so skillfully condemns in others. The most obvious question Cohen and others on the pro-war left have to answer is, when, in their view, did U.S. foreign policy change, and why? This is important because Cohen was a consistent critic of crimes committed by the U.S. state during the cold war and after, and believes—rightly, in my view—that Henry Kissinger should be on trial in The Hague for crimes against humanity. Cohen has not gone through a David Horowitz-style transformation on these events; he repeats a list of them here. He approvingly quotes Makiya’s statement that “US foreign policy towards the Middle East had rested for 50 years on support of autocratic regimes (like Saudi Arabia, like Saddam in the 1980s, like Mubarak’s Egypt) in the interests of securing oil supplies.”

Yet his working hypothesis seems to be that the geopolitical and corporate interests driving U.S. policy toward the Middle East for fifty years suddenly died in the rubble of the World Trade Center, and pure Wilsonian idealism (in neoconservative garb) took its place. If he tried to state this outright, its naïveté and implausibility would become clear, so he expresses it only in jibes at the left. Again, any countervailing evidence passes in the night. If the United States became a Wilsonian force committed to spreading democracy everywhere in 2001, why did it support the antidemocratic coup against Hugo Chavez in oil-rich Venezuela in 2002? Could it be that the old oil interests that he concedes were so essential until a few years ago still hold great sway? This would inject a shade of gray into Cohen’s Manichean rage. Therefore, he ignores it.

Christopher Hitchens, a strong influence on Cohen, has tried harder to answer these core questions about neoconservatism. He has argued—with characteristic lucidity and elegance—that Wolfowitzian neoconservatism represents “a radical break with Kissinger’s realpolitik and war crimes.” In his recent short biographies of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, Hitchens returns to the roots of the American Revolution in order to find succor for his view that this revolution is still ready for export on neoconservative bayonets.

Hitchens shows how Paine, the great unacknowledged Founding Father of the American republic, conceived the United States as “the conscious first stage of a world revolution . . . . Paine always hoped this would be a superpower for liberty and democracy.” This, Hitchens hints, is what the neoconservatives have done for the United States. Just as Paine dedicated “The Rights of Man” to George Washington, Hitchens dedicates his biography of Paine to Jalal Talabani, the new Iraqi president, describing him as a “sworn foe of fascism and theocracy; leader of a national revolution and a people’s army. In the hope that his long struggle will be successful, and inspire emulation.”

Hitchens’s vision of a United States opposed to tyranny everywhere is a glorious one, and it’s easy to see why it seduces Cohen. But it is not the Bush administration’s vision or that of any administration conceivable without drastic internal and democratizing change within the United States itself.

It is this disastrous misreading that has discredited the other valuable insights of the pro-war left. It can only be conjured into existence with a shallow and ahistorical reading of neoconservatism. The notion that neoconservatism is a vehicle for a global democratic revolution is a 1990s rhetorical creation. On the contrary, for most of its short intellectual life neoconservatism has been a force defending autocracy.

THE MOST FAMOUS and influential neoconservative essay is Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s terse essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” published in Commentary in 1979. In it, she drew a distinction between “authoritarian” regimes and “totalitarian” regimes and said that the United States should foster and fuel the authoritarians. Far from being a democracy-hungry human rights activist, she attacked Jimmy Carter for pushing too hard for rights in places “not yet suited” to them. She later added, “There is no mystical American ‘mission’ or purposes” that should compel the United States to spread democracy. Neoconservatives only started talking about spreading democracy in the 1990s as the sugar-coating on their demand that the United States achieve “global hegemony,” and hobble any potential strategic competitor that gets in the way.

There is a more resonant parallel between Thomas Paine and the pro-war left that Hitchens mentions only briefly. For a brief period, Paine supported Napoleon Bonaparte and his acts of aggression, believing they were expressions of revolutionary Enlightenment values when, in reality, they were squalid expressions of realpolitik. Hitchens notes wistfully that Paine “had fallen victim to a gigantic counter-revolution in revolutionary guise, which had succeeded in entrenching rather than undermining his original foes.”

It is a moment of horrible clarity. Hitchens himself believed, for the best motives, that the Bush administration’s actions were expressions of revolutionary Enlightenment values when they too were in reality squalid expressions of realpolitik. Just as Paine’s support for Napoleon ended up strengthening everything he loathed, so Cohen’s and Hitchens’s support for Bush has strengthened everything they loathe. Much of Iraq, for example, has now been turned over to Islamist control. George Packer, a journalist who supported the invasion on liberal grounds, says that power has been effectively ceded to fascist militias who “take over schools and hospitals, intimidate the staffs, assault unveiled women, set up kangaroo sharia courts that issue death sentences, repeatedly try to seize control of the holy shrines, run criminal gangs, firebomb liquor stores, and are often drunk themselves. Their tactics are those of fascist bullies.” The U.S. National Intelligence Estimate recently suggested the forces of jihadism had been significantly bolstered by the Iraq War.

It is increasingly clear that the invasion of Iraq was motivated not by Enlightenment values, but by a desire to achieve U.S. control over the oil supplies of the Middle East, after September 11, 2001, especially since it was now plain that the House of Saud’s vast oil fields were vulnerable to an Iran-style internal Islamist revolution, and Iraq’s were the most appealing alternative. As long ago as 1991, back when the only thing George W. Bush tortured was the English language, Dick Cheney said about Iraq, “We’re there because the fact of the matter is that part of the world controls the world supply of oil.” Yet the only times Cohen mentions oil is to mock the madness of the left for bringing it up. Is his explanation—that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were suddenly gripped by Wilsonian idealism—more plausible?

The Hitchens-Cohen thesis that the Iraq War marked a radical neoconservative break with Kissingerism has been subject to an even greater blow than this alternative explanation. Kissinger is back in the Oval Office, at the heart of foreign policy planning once again. As Bob Woodward puts it in State of Denial: “Kissinger has a powerful, largely invisible influence on the foreign policy of the Bush administration” and has become “the most regular and frequent outside advisor to Bush on foreign affairs. Bush, according to Cheney, was ‘a big fan’ of Kissinger.” Kissinger supported the Iraq War, he has said, “because Afghanistan wasn’t enough. And we need to humiliate them.”

The old, revolting arguments, back again. Kissinger has been merrily recycling the Vietnam arguments that appalled Cohen and Hitchens when they applied to jungles, not deserts. As Woodward notes, “For Kissinger, the overriding lesson of Vietnam is to stick it out. . . . [He] claimed that the United States had essentially won the war in 1972, only to lose it because of weakened resolve. . . . Even entertaining the idea of withdrawing any troops could create a momentum for a withdrawal that was less than victory.”

Cohen, perhaps sensing these flaws in his implicit defense of neoconservatism, tries to jump free of them by making his largest—and most glaring—leap of logic. He writes of Iraq: “You have to choose which side you are on, and those who don’t usually end up as the biggest villains of all.”

The obvious response is, why? Why do you have to pick a side between two forces that repel you? There are plenty of conflicts where no sensible person would pick a side: the Thirty Years’ War in Europe between sectarian Catholics and sectarian Protestants or the recent civil war in Liberia between Charles Taylor and LURD (Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy), for example. Indeed, Cohen himself did not “pick a side” in the cold war. He sensibly opposed both the U.S.-led assaults on democrats in Iran, Guatemala, and Congo, and the Soviet-led assaults on democrats in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan.

This injunction to “pick a side” is Cohen’s way out of the cognitive dissonance that comes from being aware of crimes by the Bush administration but supporting them anyway. As for the idea that people who do not pick one of two forces are “the biggest villains of all,” by this logic, the greatest villain in the cold war was India.

Indeed, once Cohen’s blind faith in neoconservatism becomes clear, many of the accusations he makes against the left begin to look like psychological projection rather than serious political arguments. He accuses the left of siding with the far right, while he lines up with Rumsfeld and Cheney. He accuses the left of being blind to the use of torture and chemical weapons by their allies, while he is silent about the use of torture and chemical weapons by his allies. He accuses liberals of emptying the left of all positive content, while ditching class as an analytical tool and defending Wolfowitz’s World Bank. He accuses the left of supporting Saddam Hussein and then, in his most shocking claim, says the United States was right to support Saddam in the 1980s because it was the only way to stop the “Islamic revolution.”

Just as Cohen blames John Maynard Keynes for the problems stemming from the Treaty of Versailles, when all he did was predict its effects, so he blames liberals and left-wingers for accurately predicting how the war would pan out. They did not hate Bush because he was for democracy; they hated Bush because they knew that it would not be the outcome of this war. Cohen presents the Iraq War repeatedly as a choice between democracy and tyranny, and damns the left for picking the wrong side. But the liberal-left opponents of the war said this was, in reality, a choice between tyranny and more-bloodshed-then-another-tyranny. Those of us who made a mistake in supporting the war should be honest enough to admit they were right.

Cohen and Hitchens were both revolutionaries at formative points in their intellectual development, and in 2003 they still clearly pined for what Hitchens called “a revolution-from-above,” led by the United States—a vast purging act of violence that would extirpate evil and make the world anew. The incremental work of transforming U.S. power from within, to make it more friendly to democrats without, is less sexy, but far more real.

This book appears to have been written as Cohen hit a personal tipping point. At times, he presents himself as the last true left-winger, but at other moments, he appears to be abandoning the left in disgust. A passage where he complains that the benefits system “provides a perverse incentive for single motherhood” says that “the liberal professionals of the welfare state were aggravating the poverty and racism they said they opposed,” and rants about “the two-faced civil liberties lawyer” sounds like Norman Podhoretz circa 1968, a sign that Cohen is sliding into full-blown neoconservatism.

After this, there are even worse moments. He describes the Spanish people’s democratic decision to elect a socialist government after the Madrid train bombings as a victory for al-Qaeda. So the Spanish people should have voted for a right-wing government to prove they were left wing? That’s the ludicrous and contorted position in which Cohen has ended. Out of nowhere, he accuses Edward Said—a man who took Palestinian teenagers to Auschwitz to educate them about the horrors of Jew-hatred—of anti-Semitism and “pardoning” the September 11 hijackers. In an Observer column, he has suggested that the British government should be sanguine about sending suspected Islamists to countries where they will be tortured, because the sole criterion should be Britain’s “national interests.” This is an abandonment of the universalist language of the left for a parochial conservative agenda.

In its confusions and contradictions, What’s Left? distills what has become of the pro-war left. The nuggets of important insight we had—into Islamism, tyranny, multiculturalism, and the misguided reactions of the left to them—have been cluster-bombed and suicide-massacred to death in the killing fields of Mesopotamia. The few who have not reconsidered are tied in painful knots, and every tug cuts off a little more circulation to the brain. To rally the left to solidarity with the victims of Baathism and Islamism is an honorable cause; to do it with the weapon of neoconservatism was a disastrous misjudgment.

Cohen, ostentatious claimant of George Orwell’s mantle, has forgotten the quality that made Orwell great—the power to face inconvenient truths. He simply averts his gaze from the burning vistas of Iraq that contradict his thesis, turning toward George Galloway to give him another well-deserved, but increasingly irrelevant, spit in the face.

Read Nick Cohen's response to Johann Hari and Hari's response to Cohen

Johann Hari is a columnist for the Independent newspaper in London. He has reported from Iraq, Congo, Israel/Palestine, Latin America, and Northern Ireland. His work can be read at www.johannhari.com.

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