It's not a defence of his position on the war in Iraq, and it's not an assault on the whole of the left by a renegade. Nor does it pretend to be a piece of cutting-edge original research or scholarship, contrary to Stuart A's fisking.
It's a polemic by a democratic leftist who watched in mounting frustration and disbelief as the democratic left around him screwed up by tolerating the intolerable and excusing the inexcusable.
What started him off was the refusal of a large section of the democratic left to dissociate itself publicly from (mainly Leninist) apologists for the intolerable and the inexcusable in the wake of 9/11 – lest we forget, indiscriminate mass murder in New York and Washington DC. He then found much the same phenomenon in the anti-war movement of 2002-03, in the left's response to 7/7 and in the left's continuing obsession – on the whole – with banging on about whether invading Iraq was right, oblivious to the actual situation in Iraq. And, boy, do his leftist critics prove him right.
1. Not one left critical review of Cohen has admitted that he's got a point when it comes to the disgraceful excuses for Islamist terror put out in the wake of 9/11 and 7/7 by the New Statesman, the Guardian and others.
2. Not one has accepted that it was at best moronic for anti-war democratic leftists to acquiesce in the Socialist Workers Party, George Galloway and a reactionary Islamist pressure group – all of them de facto revolutionary defeatists when it came to the war, and thus not anti-war but protagonists of Saddam – appointing themselves as the leadership of the anti-war movement in 2002-03.
3. And not one has even engaged seriously with Cohen's argument that, regardless of what you thought about the rights and wrongs of the war, what should matter for the left now, with Saddam overthrown and Iraq on the verge of civil war, is how to prevent a sectarian bloodbath there – not continuing a self-indulgent debate about the rights and wrongs of the decision to invade.
As I've said before, though the caveat means less and less as time goes by, I disagree with Cohen about the war. But the left consensus – not just the Stalinists and Trotskyists and Islamist apologists – is as putrid as he describes it, if not worse.
15 comments:
Hi Paul
As I’ve tried to elucidate in an email to Nick and also on my blog, it seems to me that part of the problem to your average left-ish Herr and Frau-on the street (I’m in Germany) is not so much the message as the way the message is put across.
Firstly, and this was my big failing, when I read Nick’s articles in the New Statesman and the Observer it was all to easy to dismiss them as coming from “bloody-pro-war Cohen”. That’s a challenge Nick must overcome if his ideas are to be widely acknowledged. It was, and obviously for many still is, not easy to get past overwhelming anger at the war and its aftermath. People don’t want to listen – it’s entirely understandable. I’m still against the war but, to my shame, I’ve only recently seen merit in some of what Nick says about solidarity with Iraqi democrats.
You broadly agree with Nick that, “it was at best moronic for anti-war democratic leftists to acquiesce in the Socialist Workers Party, George Galloway and a reactionary Islamist pressure group.” I don’t know one person here in Germany, nor in Britain, who supports Galloway or supports reactionary Islam (though some people obviously do). Why conflate all on the left with Galloway and the Socialist Workers Party? Is Nick talking to average left-leaning individuals like myself or groups of faceless middle-class London intellectuals? If so, then I’ll readily skip his New Statesman and Observer columns.
To put it bluntly, unless one carefully analyses Nick’s message, for some people it can be difficult to ascertain what he’s banging on about. The message of supporting democracy in Iraq is too important to be left as a bye-line to his support for the war. The fixation with attacking the left can no longer be as important as highlighting the dangers of civil war in Iraq and the possible implementation of some warped form of Islam.
And this is where the message goes awry. Yes, attack Galloway and his ilk, but just as loudly – more loudly – explain that even though most left-leaning people don’t support the war and the mess of an aftermath, it is of paramount importance to support Iraqi democrats. If you think this message is simple, you’re wrong. As Iraq goes deeper into a quagmire, fewer and fewer people are listening.
And throw the anti-war left some scraps (no not Galloway, the liberal-left). Why doesn’t Nick criticise the US more severely? Why doesn’t he make it clearer (or even extra clearer, if you prefer) about his opinion on US aims for oil wealth exploitation, failure to push for a solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict? This is not anti-Americanism; they are legitimate questions. If Nick wants to get his message heard, he may have to couch it within the wider question of the failure of the aftermath rather than within an attack on the left.
On the one hand, I happen to think Nick got it terribly wrong with his pro-war stance. On the other hand, there’s a great deal to his exhortations for the left to support Iraqi democracy. I’m afraid, however, Nick isn’t getting his worthy message across in a way I believe many on the left would listen to.
I'm not a spokesman for Nick Cohen: if he has time to answer you he will do it himself.
I'll make one point: the big anti-war demos in London were organised by the Stop the War Coalition, which was dominated by the Socialist Workers Party and the Islamist Muslim Association of Britain, was chaired by a member of the the Communist Party of Britain, Andrew Murray, an enthusiast for the Comintern line during the Hitler-Stalin pact, and fronted by George Galloway, another hardline Stalinist but more importantly also the prime apologist for the Saddam regime in the UK.
All of them wanted Saddam to win in 2002-03. And they organised the demos, coined the slogans and provided the placards – on their terms, the most important of which was that the only thing that really mattered was defeat for America.
Thousands of people who were clueless about the organisers' politics carried their placards, applauded their speeches, handed them money and thereby gave them spurious legitimacy.
The point is to remember. Next time, shun Leninist front organisations with Islamists and create genuinely democratic organisations to protest -- from scratch. Do it yourself.
Never trust a Leninist. Never trust an Islamist.
On one level I agree with all this an d much in Cohen's book. But.
1. Slightly cheap shot, but some of his coterie remind me of 80s Thatcherites keen on unions in Poland but not at home. Don't see Mr Kamm, for example, showing the same enthusiasm for the British union movement as for the Iraqi one.
2. The analysis of Islamism is problematic and it is this, not Iraq war as such, that I think is the key point. By buying into Paul Berman (Islamism is a death cult, unamenable to rational analysis)we have a terrifying vision that dominates everything. Ironically rejecting rational analysis of phenomena like radical Islamism is something the postmodernists would agree with. It is possible both the maintain that radical Islamism has a death cult but also that there are analyzable reasons for its rise, its strength in different countries. Just reading the texts of Qatb, as Berman does, isn't enough. One killer fact: after a decade of new Labour cancer survival rates remain amongst the worst in Europe. That is far more likely to kill Britons than Islamist terrorism. Pre-war Nick Cohen would have seen that, written a trenchant Observer piece criticising govt policy and funding. Regrettably Cohen now seems so obsessed by Islamism that everything else pales into insignificance
And not one has even engaged seriously with Cohen's argument that, regardless of what you thought about the rights and wrongs of the war, what should matter for the left now, with Saddam overthrown and Iraq on the verge of civil war, is how to prevent a sectarian bloodbath there – not continuing a self-indulgent debate about the rights and wrongs of the decision to invade.
Ah I see, he wants the Left to do something does he?
Well, he's part of the Left, and his a responnse it to write a book about internecine warfare in the Left and those little groupuscules like the SWP. Not about practical suggestions regarding Iraq. The book will do sweet F.A. for the people of Iraq: but his heart bleeds for them, so he says.
So, judging by that, one would have thought that Nick would be a tireless human rights campaigner, involved in human rights groups and trade union campaigns. But you'd be wrong.
He's not, he has barely any involvememnt there at all: he's a well paid columnist at the Observer writing books about the SWP and the little internecine scraps in the Left: the political equivalent of belly button fluff.
And as supporter of the US practice of rendition, he actually supports the locking up of suspects in crappy jails in authoritarian states without proper justice: there's Nick's human rights work - that tireless campaigner against totalitarianism!
(1) I wouldn't concede that disgraceful excuses were put out for Islamist terror after either attack. What were put forward, even by the milieu that Cohen attacks, were reasons. I can't recall a single leftist actually saying that the bombings were a good thing.
(2) See this is where I get irritated. Cohen wasn't at the antiwar meetings, social forums and all the rest where the libertarian and secular left got stitched up and outmuscled by the Swaps et al. So what the fuck does he know about whether we acquiesced or not? We were publicly making the same criticisms of the StWC long before Cohen.
(3) Prevent a sectarian bloodbath? Too late. Maybe if the occupation had ended a couple of years ago, before the insurgency got this entrenched. Now, it's inevitable.
One things for sure, the anti-war left has certainly got more answers than the pro-imperialist one, which ignores the will of most Iraqis by supporting the occupation, and implicitly supports pro-coalition violence.
Paul, I think that the answer to (1) is that we don't think he does have a point on this one. Even the article Nick wrote himself about how the Americans had it coming on 9/11 (for not signing Kyoto) wasn't really apologism.
On (2) I have never understood this one. In what did this "leadership" consist, beyond the logistic organisation of the February 2003 march in London? Before the war, STWC was, correctly, a broad church organisation of everyone who wanted to stop the war. After March 2003, it can't be fairly characterised as providing a way in which the organisations you name were "leading" the anti-war movement. Nick doesn't in fact make this claim, as far as I can see; he explicitly recognised in his journalism at the time that the TUC and other union affiliates of StWC were taking the correct kind of critical stance. Also note that Nick has go after go at the Liberal Democrat party, which was never part of StWC but which provided (along with the nationalists) the only effective parliamentary opposition to the war.
3. Motes and beams here, innit? The book is entitled "What's Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way". If this is a pointless and self-indulgent fight about rights and wrongs, Nick started it. I also note that if Nick was serious about this, he would have given credit where due to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, who have been doing incredibly important and difficult work in postwar Iraq, whereas in fact he doesn't.
I'm sorry but it's not good enough to say, 'It's not a defence of his position on the war in Iraq' without explaining why not. If Cohen hasn't the guts to either defend his political positions or apologise for getting them so wrong, then he deserves nothing more than contempt and ridicule.
You also misrepresent StuartA's review. He did more than expose Cohen's limited and innacurate sources, he pointed out factual error after factual error. In the case of Edward Said, Cohen is lucky that you can't libel the dead. Most of these errors could have been avoided with minimal research.
This book is an attack on those who were right about the war by someone who was wrong. We can guess the motive.
What started him off was the refusal of a large section of the democratic left to dissociate itself publicly from (mainly Leninist) apologists for the intolerable and the inexcusable in the wake of 9/11 – lest we forget, indiscriminate mass murder in New York and Washington DC.
First off, no, Cohen's critics haven't forgotten this, and it's a pretty squalid bit of rhetoric to pretend that they have.
Second, the whole claim you make here isn't really true, is it? Cohen's response to 9/11 wasn't disgust at leftist apologetics, refusals to dissociate, etc., but to write classic columns such as Come on you liberals and Why it is right to be anti-American. On his own admission, it was reading Paul Berman's silly little book, Terror and Liberalism -- the obvious model in so many ways for What's Left? -- that set him on his new course, and led him to re-evaluate his own, and many other people's, post-9/11 evaluations.
Anyway -- why is it "self-indulgent" for Mr Blair's critics to want to keep the rather important question of whether invasion was, all things considered, a good idea, but not similarly "self-indulgent" for his supporters in the GWoT endlessly to harp on about the somewhat less important question of what people like Peter Wilby and Mary Beard wrote in small circulation magazines a couple of years earlier? This one puzzles me.
Nick Cohen manages to write a book about the Left in this country without once mentioning Tribune, the Tribune Group or the Socialist Campaign Group. It is if Labour's Lefts are written out of the record - has he taken the wrong lesson from Orwell's 1984?
sorry just one last point - I don't think it makes any sense or does any good to claim that Nick's book "isn't about his position on the Iraq War". It's like trying to claim that "War and Peace" isn't about Russia.
also, what Harry said - since this list of charges isn't true of the Liberal Democrat Party and isn't true of Amnesty International, as well as not being true of all the broad-left groups Harry mentions, it's hard to see how it's true of "the liberal left", a term that Nick, seemingly purposefully, uses in a very vague and non-specific manner.
I'm not going to spend the rest of my life defending Nick Cohen but ...
1. Quite a few comments here are by people who simply haven't read the book. Cohen makes it clear that he does not endorse Guantanamo Bay, for example; he goes out of his way to make the point that he can see there was a legitimate case against the Iraq war; and he explicitly criticises himself for writing facile anti-American diatribes after 9/11.
2. I agree with Harry Barnes and others that Cohen underplays the extent to which the democratic socialist Labour left, the libertarians and the secularists have resisted the idiocies of the SWP, Andrew Murray and George Galloway. I don't think Tribune has done too badly – most of the time – and Labour Friends of Iraq has been a beacon of hope. The TUC has been solid.
But ... First, Cohen is doing polemic, and a little exaggeration and a little underplaying are essential tools of the trade. And second, he's right that those of us who were anti-war and anti-Saddam didn't make the running in 2003-04. For the most part we failed to get our argument across, and for some time we were swamped by the revolutionary defeatists.
The "Cohen is doing polemic so getting lots of the facts wrong doesn't matter" line is an interesting one. IIRC, Paul Krugman mounted a very similar defence of Farenheit 9/11. When he did so he greatly upset Geras. See
http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/07/the_morgan_rati.html
Paul, I don't mean to be a dick here, but you wrote:
"But the left consensus – not just the Stalinists and Trotskyists and Islamist apologists – is as putrid as he describes it, if not worse"
yourself and it didn't look like you were doing polemic.
I don't agree that he goes out of his way to admit that there was a legitimate case against the Iraq War. He grudgingly admits it, in a short sidebar immediately following a long passage in which he repeatedly and seemingly unqualifiedly asserts that marching against the war meant marching for Saddam.
I also think you're being way too hard on yourself here:
"those of us who were anti-war and anti-Saddam didn't make the running in 2003-04. For the most part we failed to get our argument across, and for some time we were swamped by the revolutionary defeatists"
There was no such implicit duty to maintain our moral purity (particularly since Nick Cohen himself was more than happy to ally himself with actual neoconservatives, an alliance that he actually did go out of his way to mention was still in place). The only priorities in 2003 and 2004 were a) to stop the war and b) when that failed, to ensure that the occupation was carried out sensibly and humanely.
The second one failed too, abysmally, but it wasn't for want of the anti-war left trying. I seem to remember that our constant warnings that Iraq was breaking down into anarchy and disaster were shouted down at the time by people like Nick Cohen who claimed that we'd gone berserk with Bush-hatred and were spitting in the face of Iraqi democrats. He was wrong then; what makes him think he's right now?
My tuppence worth on Cohen's terrible book:
http://www.ukwatch.net/article/taking_nick_cohen_seriously
Anderson's defence is dire, but that's not terribly surprising since the book itself is largely indefensible.
The stuff Nick criticises is wrong. But it was wrong years ago too and from what I have seen he never bothered his arse to contest it then, so why now? A whingeing angry diatribe may sell papers but I have never notice him make any constructive suggestion. Ever. That's the problem with a lot of journalism, it criticises things but rarely suggests how to improve things.
As for the things Paul criticises Nicks detractors for I would never associate the STWC mob as Democratic Left in a million years.
Paul: As a lecturer in journalism you should know better than the rest of us that newspapers sell copy by taking the controversial soundbites people produce and work their articles around them. C'mon Paul sharpen up.
BTW: You seem obsessed with Iraq. Isn't it time to move on?
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