http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/a-step-to-the-right-a-slap-to-the-left/2007 /02/23/1171734017549.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
A step to the right, a slap to the left Nick Cohen was a leftie's leftie. In the 1970s his mother, a teacher and former communist, refused to buy oranges from Portugal or Spain, which were then ruled by fascist dictators. She banned her son from watching Disney on television and blacklisted the Beano comic because it was printed by a non-union firm. A decade of Margaret Thatcher, two cruel recessions and mass unemployment did nothing to douse Cohen's leftism. He went on Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marches and collected money for striking miners. But it was in journalism that Cohen found his fire. In British left-wing publications such as The Independent, New Statesman and The Observer, he pounded away for years at standard left issues: housing, education, corporate villainy. Attacking Tony Blair, he wrote, "was what got me out of bed in the morning". So, unsurprisingly, when the United States led an invasion of Afghanistan after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Cohen was against it. Anti-Americanism was justified, he wrote, when there was so "little about modern America to be for". But something happened to Cohen on the road from Kabul to Baghdad. By the time the coalition of the willing invaded Iraq in 2003, he had turned around. He now supported the invasion and said so in his Observer and New Statesman columns, week after week. There followed what he calls the most intense three years of thinking of his life. Amazement at what he saw as the liberal left's failure to confront the threat and reactionary nature of radical Islam led him to wider revelations about the movements and people he has been connected to for most of his 45 years. The result of his journey is What's Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way, an exuberant, punchy, scornful polemic on how the radical idea went radically wrong. To be published in Australia next week, it is already causing a fair storm in Britain, where it came out three weeks ago and is already in its fourth print run, with 15,000 sold. The writers Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens have lined up to praise it. Predictably, the right loves it: a "splendid, passionate book" that caught the best of conservative thought, wrote The Times columnist Daniel Finkelstein. (The endorsement reminded Cohen, he writes on his website, of a scene in Rosemary's Baby where the satanists hiss at Mia Farrow: "Join us! It's easier that way!") Just as predictably, many - though by no means all - on the left hate it. To the feminist Beatrix Campbell it is "intemperate, petulant" abuse posing as argument. Simplify and exaggerate is Cohen's approach, writes former New Statesman editor Peter Wilby, an old friend of Cohen's who thinks "he is, and always was, a political innocent". But whatever is said about Cohen - and a Google search will turn up any amount of vitriol - he insists he has not swerved right, like those American former commies who turned neocons. Some old comrades might look the other way when he passes in the street; he is no longer a leftie's leftie. But he is adamant he is still a leftie. "My book grew out of a vicious barney on the left that began after 9/11 and grew from there," he says. "It's been like an 18th-century pamphlet war." Cohen, a classic pamphleteer, seems to have relished it. It is only noon but we are in the pub because Cohen, a nervy character with a capacity for sudden, convulsive laughter, has insisted we leave the north London cafe we met in so he can smoke. Over two pints and about 10 cigarettes he explains, with a rapid-fire delivery that resembles the style of his book, why he wrote it. The left has forgotten its core principles, he charges. It has abandoned its commitment to democratic and human rights struggles in poorer countries. In place of its old internationalism is an isolationist and narcissistic obsession with the evils of Western corporations and governments - in particular with the Great Satan, the United States. As evidence, he tells the story of Hadi Saleh, to whom he dedicates the book. Saleh was an Iraqi exile and trade unionist who, despite opposing the war, went back to Iraq after the toppling of Saddam to try to build a union movement. As a result, former members of Saddam's secret police murdered him last year. Cohen says there were very good reasons, as well as bad ones, to oppose the war. But, he argues, once Baghdad had fallen, the left's duty was to form alliances with Iraqi democrats trying to resist Baathists and Islamists. Some did: the British Trades Union Congress supported Saleh's work. "They have behaved brilliantly," Cohen says. "They opposed Bush and Blair but when it came to showing solidarity and shipping aid to Iraq, they did it." But they were the exception, he argues. "Your typical London publisher or BBC editor" in the left-liberal elite would not support Saleh, if they even knew he existed, because to do so would mean indirectly supporting Tony Blair and George Bush, architects of an illegal war. "Why isn't Hadi Saleh as famous as Nelson Mandela?" he demands. "Because no one wants to know." This is a generalisation, but it is that kind of sweeping book. What's Left? is not merely or even mainly about Iraq. It is about a certain left-wing tolerance for totalitarianism; about apologetics for Serbian concentration camps and militant Islam. The Guardian columnist Martin Kettle wrote that it was also about the left's "retreat from the street to the sofa". Left is a fairly meaningless term, ranging from Leninists to liberals. In an effort to define it, Cohen separates the far left, the old left - grouped around trade unions - and what might be called the soft left of middle-class progressives. One of the left's great losses, he believes, has been the severance of the last group from the working class. He blames it on the decline of the Labour Party as a mass party, but also intellectuals' abandonment of the working class when it failed to become the vehicle for the social transformation they longed for. Today, while academics bury their heads in racial and sexual identity politics, the working class is seen as a reservoir of racism and homophobia, he says. It has gone "from the salt of the earth to the scum of the earth in three generations". The book is also about the disappointment of middle-class liberals with politics, even as - or perhaps because - politics delivered many of the changes they demanded. In a sparkling passage, Cohen imagines going back 100 years and telling an audience of the liberal intelligentsia what the world looks like today. Women will have the vote, the time traveller says. Nearly all monarchies and empires will be gone. Minority groups will have rights; machines will end drudgery. Health care will be free, almost no newborns will die and most people will live to 80. "Your future has everything we have always wanted," the liberals will cry. "So it has, you reply, which is why you will hate it." But with the death of socialism, the left's disillusionment was complete, Cohen writes. It no longer proposed alternatives to the democratic, free-market state. It was no longer for anything, merely against. What it was against most was the one superpower that the fall of the Berlin Wall left standing. "My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable," wrote the English novelist Margaret Drabble. "It has possessed me, like a disease . I detest Disneyfication, I detest Coca-Cola, I detest burgers." Drabble wrote that after the Iraq war. But Cohen finds similar sentiment well before the war, including just after September 11. "American bond traders, you may say, are as innocent and as undeserving of terror as Vietnamese or Iraqi peasants," wrote his friend, Peter Wilby, in the New Statesman. "Well, yes and no. "If America seems a greedy and overwhelming power, that is partly because its people have willed it. They preferred George Bush to both Al Gore and Ralph Nader. These are harsh judgements but we live in harsh times." Cohen now sees Wilby's view as "morally bankrupt", yet at the time he might have sympathised. What changed him, he says, was talking to Iraqi exiles in Britain about the monstrous nature of Saddam's regime. He came to believe that any plan to rid Iraq of Saddam deserved support. Not all the exiles backed the invasion, but what amazed Cohen was that when debate over the war began, few on the left showed interest in their stories. Where were the banners, he asks, opposing Saddam as well as the US? Why did the decent left allow the then Labour MP George Galloway - who in 1994 flew to Baghdad to salute Saddam's "courage, strength [and] indefatigability" - to lead the million-strong anti-war rally of February 2003? Cohen's critics say he tars the broad left with the sins of its extreme wing. They say most anti-war protesters did not endorse Saddam or Islamism by opposing the war. They just thought it was a dumb idea that would kill a lot of people and inflame, not reduce, terrorism. That turned out to be a reasonable assumption. Kettle writes that the book "ought to force anyone on the left to think carefully about where their movement has ended up in the modern world". But he also thinks Cohen and other war supporters have their own lessons to face up to. "They were right about many things," Cohen says, perhaps a little ruefully, about what he calls the sensible anti-war left. Still, "I would not turn the clock back and put Saddam in power. That strikes me as an incredible thing to suggest." He thinks that the left must stop dwelling on the decision to invade and who was to blame, and look at what to do now. In this he sounds a little like Blair, and Cohen would not deny it. "I am a lot softer towards him than I was," he says. "This Labour Government has spent a fortune on public services and redistributed a lot of money. Generally, it is probably about as left-wing as you can get in a modern democracy." What's Left? is bound to provoke passionate responses, many hostile. Will it also spur, even shame, people on the left to renew the internationalism Cohen believes it so desperately needs? The author, for one, believes it will. "I don't think radical Islam is going to go away," Cohen says. 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