Johann Hari: Fleet St commentators show the left is divided

LONDON - A year ago, the proposals for a second Gulf War seemed very much the brainchild of the American right. The intellectual arguments backing the conflict emerged almost entirely from hard-right US think tanks and senators.

But then a funny thing happened: a significant portion of the dissident left began to come out, in dribs and drabs, for overthrowing Saddam through force. There is now a considerable school of British centre-left thinkers and commentators who are lobbying hard for the war to happen so the Iraqi people can be freed: Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, John Lloyd, Julie Burchill, Roger Alton, and David Aaronovitch (who has a unique claim to consistency among this group, since he was calling for Saddam to be overthrown by the US over three years ago in the Independent).

On the surface, there seem to be few similarities between these disparate lefties-for-the-war. Lloyd, a senior reporter for the Financial Times and contributing editor at the New Statesman, for example, is a fierce defender of the Blair government, while Cohen detests New Labour.

Yet below the surface there is an intriguing commonality: almost all of them are former communists.

John Lloyd, who was a member of the Communist Party and considered himself a Marxist until his early thirties, identifies a strand of Marxism which seems to have echoes in the pro-war arguments being made today. He explains: "It's that side of Marx that argues that imperialism was good for India and industrialisation good for the working class. It's the side of Marx that disliked soft liberals, and said that if you're going to make the world better you have to go through a number of necessary evils. I don't think Marx was especially worried about those evils -- he was a real arsehole -- but we [Marxists] accepted that in order for history to triumph and a more enlightened future to prevail, certain bad things would have to be endured."

Although Lloyd was never what he calls a "break-any-amount-of-eggs-to-make-an-omelette communist", there is a similar acceptance on the pro-war left of necessary violence and the creation of victims which soft liberals blanch at.

The pro-war left insist that power - even American hyper-power - can be used for constructive purposes. Lloyd says that "when I ceased to be a communist and therefore ditched an essentially undemocratic philosophy, I adopted democracy as a new faith with the real fervour of the convert. We [centre-left ex-communists] believe passionately in democracy because we've reasoned ourselves towards it, so we are perhaps more prepared to support wars that establish or defend it. We are articulating the democratic case for war. Our belief is that the revolution which has really lasted is the democratic revolution emerging from France and the US in the eighteenth century. We believe that liberal democracy still holds out a promise to all societies -- all our political values are based on this -- so we must support those who are fighting for it within their own societies, like in Iraq."

Another common strand for pro-war lefties is disillusionment with the contemporary mainstream left, and especially the anti-war movement Observer editor Roger Alton is unreserved in his dislike for "the vapid old cack that you get from the implacable opponents of the war", and in particular "Tony Benn's spine-chillingly, stomach-churningly disgusting interview with Saddam Hussein".

Columnist for the Independent Nick Cohen divides the anti-war protestors into two groups. The first are "those who just lack imagination -- the actors and so on who can imagine war because they see it on the TV but, because there aren't pictures of the Marsh Arabs or the on-going Iraqi tyranny, they just can't picture themselves in the position of the Iraqi people and they don't realise how few options the Iraqis have." The other group are, he says, "the ones who have become trapped in a cul-de-sac. They're the absolute mirror image of the Americans: whatever the US supports, they oppose. I remember in the eighties, working with Iraqi refugees when it was a big cause of the left, and you had people like [leftwing MP] Jeremy Corbyn [who now opposes sanctions and the war] calling for sanctions against fascist Iraq. But when the US shifted to opposing Iraq in the early 1990s, they mirrored that hypocrisy and dropped the Iraqi exiles too." This wing of the left "has become incredibly conservative, with nothing to offer Iraqis but the brutal status quo." It's because of this that far too few people are campaigning for Iraqi democracy. "Almost nobody," Cohen notes, "is demanding of Blair and Hoon: what kind of Iraq are you fighting for?"

The mainstream left have forgotten the need to vigorously overthrow tyranny and build democracy. This leaves a hole where its positive agenda should be.

As Lloyd explains, "The left now sticks up for anybody who complains. Anybody who resists any change by any government, especially our own [centre-left] governments, is now an honorary part of the left. They've abandoned the idea of lesser evils. Leftism has really become an extreme form of anti-powerism."

His most unreserved contempt is reserved for "the Pilger/Benn left," who "believe that anything any government ever does is bad, because it has downsides. Iraq is just an obvious example of that. It's the belief that all power is corrupt."

Cohen is equally contemptuous of the likes of George Galloway and Benn, who form the spine of the anti-war movement

"Anybody who knows anything about history knows that there is a very dark side to the left," he explains. "It has its own graveyards As soon as you see people like George Galloway and Tony Benn sitting in front of Saddam and asking sycophantic questions, and then you see them come back [to Britain] and attack Iraqi democrats for being stooges of the CIA, you know they are part of a very dangerous left tradition which you see in the Stalinists of the 1930s."

The intellectual genesis of the pro-US-intervention left lies in the events of the 1990s. The twin shocks of the Rwandan genocide and the collapse of Yugoslavia into sectarian murder forced a reconsideration of the position of thinkers like Christopher Hitchens.

Attacking all actions by Western governments as imperialist suddenly seemed hollow, especially in Kosovo, where, as Lloyd explains, "There was nothing to plunder in the former Yugoslavia. It was a barren piece of land filled with people trying to kill each other. The war and the UN presence have been of no financial or strategic benefit to anybody, it's just swallowed lots of money. If the US was really the kind of imperial power that people like [Noam] Chomsky and [John] Pilger imagine, they would never have gone in, and they would certainly have pulled out long ago. When the implications of Kosovo really sank in, it forced many people on the Left to seriously think again about their old assumptions."

Cohen also traces the shift to a change in US foreign policy itself. "From the early 1950s to the mid-1980s, the USA caused as much misery in the world as the Soviet Union. That still isn't properly acknowledged. But since the time of the Contra campaigns, the US doesn't really support tyranny. If you look at what's happening in Venezuela now, thirty years ago the US would have just authorised a coup. Now they won't."

Cohen freely admits the flaws in current US policy -- "The US is not upholding universal values. They won't support the International Criminal Court or Kyoto" -- but adds, "nor is the Left consistently supporting universal values. They won't support their extension to Iraq. They won't even listen to the Iraqi democrats."

Everybody on the pro-war left is taking a huge amount of flak at the moment. My own email inbox is heaving under the weight of all the hate-mail I receive on this issue, and all the others are experiencing the same. (The hundreds of emails from Iraqi exiles explaining that they are bewildered by the anti-war left and are extremely grateful for making the case for the Iraqi people are, admittedly, more than enough compensation.)

Now that so many prominent figures on the left are supporting their comrades in the five-million strong Iraqi exile community, it is no longer accurate to say that the left is anti-war. The left is divided; and at least when all this is over, some of us will be able to defend the reputation of the left as exponents of deposing tyrants and building democracy in the Arab world.

- INDEPENDENT