Johann Hari

The pro-invasion left was always a small battallion, comprised almost entirely of journalists and intellectuals who believed toppling the Taliban and Saddam Hussein was a good idea - even if the only President available to lead the charge was George Bush. Yet almost since the first statue of Saddam was smashed to the ground, it has been losing troops - to the anti-war side, or to a sullen AWOL silence, or to despair. So far there have been recantations from Peter Beinart, Norman Geras, David Aaronovitch and more; only a few lone fighters seem to 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?

The British columnist Nick Cohen was always one of the most gifted - and unexpected - of pro-war polemicists. In 2003 he was renowned as the most prominent left-wing critic of Tony Blair in the British press, poaching and filletting his 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 11th 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 Aghanistan, 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 anti-fascism, an absolute opposition to the far-right in all places and at all times. As a child, his mother was so scupulous about never buying oranges from either General Franco's Spain or Apartheid South Africa that he quips if Franco had held on for a few more years he 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, leftw-ingers he had long admired in the September 10th world. They argued there was a jolt of racism in the failure of many on the left to realise 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 undergone 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 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 taked 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 quite distinct readings. Its arguments was based on a reading of Islamism, a reading of Baathism, a reading of the purposes of the post-socialist left, and a reading of neoconservatism.

Reading One: Islamism. The pro-war left argumed that Islamism (as opposed to Islam) is a variant on an old enemy of the left - fascism. Paul Berman, in his book 'Terror and Liberalism', carefully teased out the intellectual origins of Islamic fundamentalism, looking primarily as 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. Not 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 supression of all liberal freedoms. Jihadists even inherited the most eccentric lacunae of fascist conspiracy-thought: on 9th March 2004, a meeting of Freemasons in an Istanbul restaurant was blown up by Islamist suicide-murderers.

Ah, the minimisers of Islamism said, but these are the poor, the wretched of the earth! In fact, the pro-war left pointed out, Islamists activists are overwhelimgly wealthy - 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 which would be sated by America's collapse, are willfully neglecting its rancid positive intentions towards 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 US 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 US foreign policy. Qutb was scandalised 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, Osama Bin Laden "was rarely angry except when sexual matters came up." In his last will and testament, the lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta focused not on his hatred of US 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, like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion - was the most enduring insight of the pro-war left. But their reading of Islamism contained a second, much more feeble 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 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 it does is "appeasing fascists".

"I am very sceptical," 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 US played in smelting jihadism through supporting torture in Egypt and a Wahabbi 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.

If this were true, we would live a world bifurcated into The Rational, which has rational explanations, and The Irrational, which has irrational explanations, and never the twain shall meet. It's not hard, however, to think of obvious examples where we rationally explain the irrational all the time. We know that paranoid scizophrenia - the height of irrationality - can be caused by using certain drugs, for example. The obvious example from political history is Nazism. There is a near-total consensus among historians that the Versailles Treaty helped to create the trough of national humiliation and greivance in which the fungus of Nazism could grow. Yet - incredibly - Cohen rubbishes this view as appeasers' logic. J.M. Keynes, the great economist who first identified the disastrous effects of Versailles, merely, he writes, "provided a 'root cause' to justify appeasement".

(He is puzzled as to why, then, Keynes supported the war against the Nazis as early as 1936. He cannot see that although identifying root causes can sometimes be a glib way of avoiding the question, it is more oftenthe best way to rationally understand the question and find an answer. Keynes opposed Versailles precisely because he foresaw how horrendous a nationalist counter-revolution would be, not because he wanted to "excuse" or "dismiss" it.)

In an attempt to dismiss a facile explanation for Islamism - "it's all about Israel!" - Cohen ends up offering a more facile case still - "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: Ba'athism. The view that Saddam represented a strain of fascism is less controversial, because his track record - of genocide, unprovoked invasions, mass terror - is so beyond dispute. Only a depraved fringe of the left, most notably the British member of Parliament George Galloway, disputed this, and Cohen spills oceans of ink taking them 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 on a tyrant came when he saluted Saddam Hussein in 1994. He described Saddam's genocide of the Kurds as a "civil war", and when asked in 2006 if ordinary Iraqis hated Saddam, Galloway 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 anti-war 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 itself. 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 mankind 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 has no organisational links with left-wingers in the Middle East any more. With no obvious point of identification with people like them, 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 force in non-Western societies who 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 emphasising how similar suffering strangers are to us, multiculturalism has suggested they are irredemably 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 homosexual's 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 shibolleth" 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. 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. Against this, Cohen quotes the Iranian author Azar Nafisi: "I very much resent it when people - maybe with good intentions or from a progressive point of view - keep telling me, 'It's their culture'... It's like saying the culture of Massachucets is burning witches." 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 explictly states what he thinks of neoconservatism; his view emerges only in asides, where he condemns the left for not supporting it. But when this reading does slip out, it becomes clear 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 "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 the United States army has become the armed wing of Amnesty International, and the 51st Airborne Division of the United States army is the moral equivalent of the International Brigades. He even approvingly quotes Iraqi dissident Kenan Makiya's claim that "the neoconservatives were fighting the Left's battles for them."

It's painfully conspicuous that 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 privatisations, causing mass unemployment and sectarian unrest? The barricading of civilian men aged between 18 and 60 in Fallujah, a city the size of Baltimore, before attacking it with chemical weapons? 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 fale 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 anti-war demonstrations of that spring, arguing against George Galloway alone.

That's why his thinking on neoconservativism 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 US foreign policy change, and why? This is important because Cohen was a consistent critic of crimes committed by the US 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. He has not gone through a David Horowitz-style transformation on these events; he repeats a list of them here. Cohen 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 US policy towards the Middle East for fifty years suddenly died in the rubble of the World Trade Centre, and pure Wilsonian idealism (in neoconservative garb) took its place. If he tried to state this outright, its naivety and inherent implausibility would become clear - so he expresses this view only in jibes at the left. Again, any counterveiling evidence passes in the night. If the US became a Wilsonian force committed to spreading democracy everywhere in 2001, why did it support the anti-democratic 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 - so he ignores it.

Christoper 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 succour for his view that this revolution is still ready for export on neoconservative bayonets.

Hitchens shows how Thomas Paine - the great unacknowledged founding father of the American republic - conceived the US 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 turned the US into. 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' vision of a Paineite United States opposed to tyranny everywhere is a glorious one, and it's not hard 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 democratising change within the US 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 neoconservativism. 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'. In it, she draws a distinction between "authoritarian" regimes and "totalitarian" regimes, and said that the US should foster and fuel the authoritarians. For 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 US to spread democracy. Neoconservatives only start talking about spreading democracy in the 1990s as the sugar-coating on their demand that the US 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 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 and Hitchens' support for Bush has strengthened everything they loathe. Much of Iraq, for example, has now been turned over to Islamist control. George Packer, an Iraq-based 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, assaulted 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 US 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 US control over the Middle East's oil supplies. After September 11th, 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, however, been subject to an even great blow than this alternative explanation. Henry Kissinger is back in the Oval Office, at the heart of foreign policy planning once again. As Bob Woodward puts it in his book '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 Aghanistan 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 mometumn for a withdrawal that was less than victory."

Cohen, perhaps sensing these flaws in his implict defence of neoconservatism, tries to jump free of them by making his largest - and most glaring - leap of logic. He writes apropos 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 Crusades, for example. Indeed, Cohen himself did not "pick a side" in the Cold War. He sensibly opposed both the US-led assaults on democrats in Iran, Guatemala, and Congo, and the Soviet-led assaults on democrats in Hungary, Czecholslovakia and Afghanistan.

This injuction to "pick a side" is Cohen's way of ironing out the cognitive dissonance that comes from being aware of crimes by the Bush adminstration, but supporting them anyway. As for the idea that people who do not pick one of two forces are "the biggest villains of all", using this logic, the greatest villains in the Cold War were India - a rather eccentric judgement.

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

Indeed, the only extended passage in which he engages with the disaster in Iraq is where he blames it, bizarrely, on the left: "The liberals gave aid and comfort [the definition of treason in the US Constitution] to the Islamists and the Baathists. The 'insurgents' were able to use the liberals' slogans - 'It's all about oil!' 'It's illegal!' - and to taunt their opponents with the indisputauble fact that even their supposed liberal allies in New York, London, Berlin and Paris didn't support them."

Cohen seems, by the time he writes passages like this, to have lost touch with reality. The idea that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was eagerly reading up on Molly Ivins and Paul Krugman is as laughable as Cohen's notion that it would not have occurred to Iraqis that the invasion was largely about oil if Western liberals hadn't raised the topic. (When you are more inclined to blame liberal op-ed writers for the Iraq disaster than Donald Rumsfeld, something has horribly gone wrong with your explanatory framework.)

Just as Cohen blames Keynes for the problems stemming from Versailles, when all he did was accurately 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. Real democracy in Iraq - and elsewhere - would require us to build a world where the choices are far better than that between George Bush and Saddam Hussein.

But this is a slow, reformist argument. Cohen and Hitchens were both revolutionaries at formative points in their intellectual development, and in 2003 they still clearly pined impatiently for what Hitchens called "a revolution-from-above", led by the US - a vast purging act of violence that would extirpate evil and make the world anew. The incremental work of transforming US 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, and an admission that Cohen is sliding into full-blown neoconservatism.

After this, there are even worse moments, when his views disintegrate into a drizzle of dismaying right-wing talking points. He describes the Spanish people's democratic decision to elect a Socialist government after the Madrid train bombings as a victory for al Queda. 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 Cohen has ended up in. 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 9/11 hijackers. In one 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.

Cohen has even declared that - although it may make his ancestors churn in their graves - he will vote for the Conservative candidate for mayor in the next London elections, because Ken Livingstone is providing cheap fuel for poor Londoners provided by the twice-elected Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Most of those on the pro-war left who have not recanted appear to be following this dismal trajectory.

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 recanted 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 Ba'athism and Islamism is an honourable cause; to do it with the weapon of neoconservatism was a disastrous misjudgement.

Cohen, ostentatious claimer 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 towards George Galloway to give him another well-deserved - but increasingly irrelevant - spit in the face.

POSTSCRIPT: There's a small error in this piece. It was in fact Lyndsay German, the Stop the War committee member, who referred to gay rights and feminism as "a shibboleth", not Madeleine Bunting. Bunting has expressed that sentiment but not used those exact words.

There have been lots of responses to this article, including from Nick Cohen. You can read them with links, here and here.