What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way
Nick Cohen
Fourth Estate, 405pp, £12.99
Nick Cohen has turned his war of words over Iraq into a broader polemic about how the left forgot what it is for. Cohen is eloquent on the post-Marxist left’s ‘dark liberation’ into the egotism of George Galloway. But he magnifies the fringe beyond reason, rarely engaging with what the boring, mainstream, social democratic British left thinks.
Before championing the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Cohen penned astonishingly fierce polemics against the Afghanistan war after 9/11. He now even concedes that most objections to Tony Blair and George Bush’s war were valid – but accuses opponents of selling out Iraq’s struggling democrats afterwards. He rightly praises the TUC’s support of Iraqi unions, but it is not clear that those who opposed the war could have affected the post-war outcome.
Labour’s agonised internal debates were very different from the simple ‘war for oil’ slogans of the left outside. Many were torn by the eloquent advocacy of Kanan Makiya and Ann Clwyd about Saddam’s brutality. But Robin Cook’s warning that a pre-emptive Iraq war would undermine the cause of humanitarian intervention has proved prescient. That is Darfur’s tragedy.
Cohen’s war of words with Galloway and Noam Chomsky barely matters. If he were to begin a deeper debate with the liberal internationalists who opposed Iraq, we might discover whether any alternative to realism and isolation on the right and left can be rescued.
The Iraq bit of the book – which is an awful lot stronger than the overview of the state of left-wing politics – falls down because the position that actually emerges from it seeming the most appealing is the Ariel Dorfman one, of opposing the war while feeling guilty and heart-broken about doing nothing for the Iraqi poeople.
Cohen has – for several years – made a good moral case for removing Saddam Hussein, he hasn’t got a practical case for current situation in Iraq or similar approaches elsewhere.
Iraq aside, Cohen skims over the social and cultural trends which have created the slightly confused modern left-liberalism we’ve got. A shame because this is the stuff he’s really good at.
Instead he attempts to use the actions of unpleasant fringe Marxist groups (past and present) to explain political positions in the real world – while practically ignoring the different strains of thought in the Labour Party.