Johann Hari

Nick Cohen has responded to my review of his book here.

This is my reply:

Nick Cohen's response is perplexing, since it is characterised by daft hyperbole (I'm Maoist now?), denial of his own statements, and arguments that he knows I agree with and have done rather more to advance than him.

It's disappointing he doesn't try to defend his positions or engage with any of my arguments, despite the fact I tried hard to fairly summarise his case. For example, he simply repeats his claim that the Iraq war marked a radical break with Henry Kissinger's influence on US foreign policy - and, to sustain this, he ignores the lengthy part of my review pointing out that Kissinger is now, according to Bob Woodward, "the most senior foreign policy advisor to [Bush] outside the administration." This information doesn't fit into his Manichean polemics so, rather than defend his case, he simply pretends it isn't so.

He asks: "What kind of left is it that shrugs as Iraqi trade unionists are butchered or Iranian feminists are persecuted?" But as Nick knows, I have been asking this very question longer and more persistently than he has. While he was opposing the war to depose the Taliban, I was travelling to the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and later Iraq, where I have supported persecuted feminists and backed underground gay groups. I received a slew of Islamist death-threats after I worked undercover at Britain's most extreme mosque and then appeared on the Islam Channel to expose and challenge the anti-Semitism, homophobia and totalitarianism of jihadists. So it is deeply strange for him to write: "Every now and again Hari manages to shake himself out of his world of make-believe and acknowledge that we’re up against a fascist enemy." Unlike Cohen, I have taken considerable risks that demonstrate my opposition to this enemy.

As anybody who read my review is aware, my criticisms of his book do not consist of a denial that jihadis are a fascistic enemy who must be defeated: we both agree that Islamists are a monstrous foe who would kill us both given the chance. (I am gay; Cohen is ethnically Jewish). Where we disagree is on how to defeat them. Cohen's preferred tactic - enthusiastically supporting the Bush strategy - has actually enlarged and spread jihadism, as every major study of the phenomenon shows. One of my Iraqi friends is now living in a Basra neighbourhood where Taliban-style militias beat women who walk onto the street without a veil and stone adulteresses. This is the consequence of the war Cohen still claims was necessary and worthwhile in his columns. The caveats he quotes in his response constitute literally a few hundred words out of tens of thousands backing Bush enthusiastically, as anybody who reads his book will see.

I am puzzled that Cohen will not defend his own writing, instead denying much of it exists. For example, he denies ever arguing that the West was right to back Saddam in the 1980s. Here are his words from his recent book 'Pretty Straight Guys, P127: "The world had little choice but to support Saddam's unprovoked war on Iran. A victory for the Ayatollahs would have left the Iraqi, Kuwaiti and Saudi oilfields at Iran's mercy." If he wants to renounce this argument, that is welcome; but he cannot claim I invented it.

Each of his claims about my "deception" have a similar clear quote disproving them. To give another example, he denies he has shown support for the more propagandistic claims of the neoconservatives. Yet he wrote in the Observer in January 2005:"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 is] feared and hated by right-thinking people the world over for saying so." And, again in the Obsever: "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". And - in a fawning account of meeting Paul Wolfowitz in the same newspaper - : “I was clearly in the presence of real power...I was in the presence of a politician committed to extending human freedom.” Yes, this is indeed "blind faith".

The list of odd misrepresentations goes on. Cohen writes: "For the record, I have written many pieces about civil liberties." He is clearly implying to readers that he has written in support of civil liberties. Yet if readers go to - for example - http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1939959,00.html they will find Cohen arguing that the British state should be deporting terror suspects to countries where they will almost certainly be tortured, because human rights are less important than "national interests".

Then he sadly obfuscates further by building a straw man about George Orwell. In conversations with me, Cohen has explicitly cited Orwell as a long-term inspiration since childhood. Here is a review in which he clearly claims Orwell as a major influence influence, and here is an interview that Cohen linked to from his website that describes Orwell as his "intellectual hero and forerunner." I cannot understand why he now denies it; I assumed this was an uncontroversial point.

In light of the horrific evidence about how the Iraq War has increased jihadism and the already-vast misery of Iraqis, I prefer to develop strategies that actually defeat fascists, rather than handing millions of recruits and the control of entire cities to them. (This has involved painful rethinking of my own previous position, as I made clear in the very first paragraph of my review; Cohen must have been blinking very hard to miss it.) I would like to have an intelligent conversation with Nick Cohen about how to do this - but, alas, it seems he prefers to engage in name-calling and a baffling denial of his own words.

POSTSCRIPT: Oliver Kamm has another response here. Bizarrely, he thinks that placing the quote from Nick - that the West had to support Saddam - in the wider context negates it. It doesn't. Read the rest of the passage, which he helpfully provides. Nick isn't paraphrasing somebody else's view; he isn't talking hypothetically; he is speaking as himself, describing the world as he sees it. And that is a world where "the world had little choice but to support Saddam's unprovoked war on Iran. A victory for the Ayatollahs would have left the Iraqi, Kuwaiti and Saudi oilfields at Iran's mercy." The words mean what they say, and no amount of wriggling can change that. He goes on to say the West should have cavilled at the use of chemical weapons in Halabja and the later invasion of Kuwait - both more than five years after the war began. They are the sole qualifiers. This does not change the fact he says there was "no choice" but to support Saddam's attack on Iran, when, of course, it was a very real and quite obscene choice.

In private conversation with me - in the company of quite a few other witnesses, including Andrew Sullivan - Nick made this point much more forcefully, saying the West had to back Ba'athism at that point. Nick is indeed clear, and anyone can see what he's saying. I can't understand why Nick won't just defend what he has written and said, or retract it. I've said stupid things in the past, as everyone sometimes does. I don't deny saying them, and slur anyone who repeats them as liars; I own up and say I was wrong.

Nick and Oliver's tactic seems to be to throw a great deal of aggressive invective, but not to actually engage with any of the points I made in the review. This morning I got a call from a friend in Baghdad, who I profiled in the Independent a few years ago; her cousin was killed by an American soldier three weeks ago as he approached a checkpoint. It put the unreal, arid debate with them into a horrible sort of context. Even if every single person on the left had taken the position Nick recommends and donated money to the Iraqi trade unions - as I recommend too: www.iraqitradeunions.org - her cousin would still have been shot. To blame "the left", and implying that it is liberal op-ed columnists who are driving the Iraqi insurgencies, for this situation is delusional.

(To be fair to Oliver, at least he admits he is an outright defender of neoconservatism, even if he glosses over the real actions of the neoconservatives and even if he surreally cites Eliot Abrahms - who helped unleash the fascist Contras on Nicaragua - as a witness for his defence. Nick won't even admit to his own fawning descriptions of neconservatism and George Bush, instead posing as some sort of critic of them. )

Oliver talks about the fracture-lines within the American right over what should drive US foreign policy, and suggests I am ignorant of them. I can assure him I'm not: I have interviewed some of the leading figures in these debates, and read extensively about them. (I must admit I find it a bit tedious that he argues as if almost everyone who disagrees with him is ignorant.) He says I don't offer evidence that the US is acting in Iraq primarily because of oil. In 1977, Paul Wolfowitz - as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for Regional Programs - wrote: "We... have a vital and growing stake in the Persian Gulf Region because of our need for Persian Gulf oil and because events in the Persian Gulf affect the Arab-Israel conflict." In 1990, Dick Cheney - then Defence Secretary - said of Iraq and Kuwait: "We're there because the fact of the matter is, that part of the world controls the world supply of oil." When does Oliver think this stopped being the driver of US foreign policy? How does the presence of Eliot Abrams change it?

(There's another response to Oliver at the blog AaronovitchWatch here.)

POSTSCRIPT: On a final note, here is Oliver Kamm's latest comment, in which he claims his book - subtitled "The left-wing case for a neoconservative foreign policy" - is not an outright defence of neoconservatism. When you reach this level of silliness, it's time to check out of the debate...

Amazingly, though, Kamm simply passes over in silence the fact that I have totally debunked his claim that I distorted Nick's support for Western backing of Ba'athism in the 1980s. He then proceeds to ignores the Dick Cheney quote, pretending it's not there so he can question a conclusion I draw from it. Instead of dealing with what I say, he has gone on to making more transparently incorrect allegations, presumably in the hope that one of them sticks. It's a bit depressing to see somebody argue in this unsequential and specious way, really.

I think it's sadly revealing that while I have linked to everything Nick has to say on this, along with many other critics of my position, Nick has not linked to this reply, in the list of comments on this article. He hasn't even informed his readers it exists.

There are some further comments (one compaing me to a chipmunk, an frequent accusation which, as my mother once told me "is awffy harsh on the fuckin' chipmunks") here, here, and here. There's also another critique of Nick's book here which Nick will now almost certainly accuse of being fictitious, untrue, made-up etc etc. He has responded to everyone who has criticised the book so far in this way, to my knowledge. If literally everyone has 'misunderstood' your book, Nick, maybe there's a problem with the book, not the reviewers.

(At last! A way to resolve this, advertised here. I'm up for it if Nick is...)

POST-POSTSCRIPT: There are yet more comments by Oliver Kamm here, and a post debunking his latest claims here.

(Unfortunately Oliver still doesn't engage with the fact that he has not debunked my quote about Nick supporting Ba'athism in the 1980s; indeed, I have shown his attempted debunking is nonsense. He hasn't honestly engaged with any of my responses to Nick's false claims. I should add, however, that Oliver was very nice to me when a nutcase set up a website calling for me to be killed, and e-mailed blogspot to complain about it. Despite our plain and big disagreement on this issue, where we both think the other is arguing dishonourably, I like him personally, and I'm grateful to him for the way he acted then.)

I also see Nick is now linking to ludicrous and discredited accusations that were made about me by a British scandal sheet four years ago, shortly after I criticised its former editor for his rancid homophobia, and its current editor for other reasons. Nick, would you be prepared to defend a single one of those accusations? Or are you just tossing any old mud you can find because you don't have answers to my arguments?

It's also sadly hypocritical for Nick to complain that I am not prepared to see libellous comments about myself on websites I've been associated with in the past. Nick closed down his own comments section on his website because he was worried about libel, and derogratory and defamatory remarks about him are routinely (and quite rightly) removed from the Guardian/Observer website. Will he tell the Guardian Online to keep up all the slurs against him from now on because he will never sue? Will he reopen the comments section on his own site? If not, he has no right to condemn me.

Thanks to everyone who has e-mailed in support about this row. Sorry I haven't responded to you all but I'm working my way through a pile of commissions at the moment...

Anyway, enough of this: my article about France's secret war in Africa follows soon...

Very last comment here. This is a typical e-mail from a reader, called Anna Powell:

"I was very interested to read the diagreement between you and Nick Cohen, which I found through a link from the Harry's Place blog. Your review was thorough and very critical, but it was not nasty or personally abusive. So I was surprised that Nick Cohen, who I have admired for many years ever since he wrote for the Independent, reacted by being so abusive about you. It is bonkers to call anyone who criticises their former position Maoist, especially since Cohen himself is advocating a position that is 180 degrees opposite to what he was saying three years ago. I thought Cohen would have some interesting responses.

As you say, he doesn't deal with any of your arguments. He seems to have latched onto one fairly trivial line of the review, about his parents supporting Orwell, and inflated into into a big issue. The links you provide show that he does indeed claim Orwell's mantle. The Times interview you link to shows that he actually suggests meeting interviewers in the pub where Orwell used to live, and points this out. You could mention this on your website. I could not understand Oliver Kamm's argument about the passage where Cohen supports supporting Saddam. As you say, the lines surrounding it do not contradict what Cohen says in that passage. If anything, I thought they made it look worse.

I thought the nub of your review was when you say "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." This put together a feeling I have had about Cohen's writing for some time. He has asked in a recent interview "why can't you talk and chew gum at the same time?" He was presumably meaning why can't you on the left condemn Islamism and neoconservatism. But Cohen very rarely criticises neoconservatism, and more often apologises for it, as the quote you give about Wolfowitz shows. In his own terms, he can walk but he can't chew gum.

This argument inspired me to go out and buy Cohen's book, which I have read this weekend but not quite finished. I have to say I think your representation of it was very fair. Your review highlights the strengths of the book but also why everyone I know who has read it has had an uneasy feeling. You said you were "bemused" by Cohen's response. I am not "bemused" but appalled."

Last year, I went on the National Review annual cruise, along with the leading luminaries of the American right - including Bill Buckley, Norman Podhoretz, Ken Starr and Mark Steyn.

The article describing this trauma is in this week's issue of The New Republic, America's leading liberal magazine, and you can read it here.

It begins:

"I am standing waist-deep in the Pacific Ocean, indulging in the polite chit-chat beloved by vacationing Americans. A sweet elderly lady from Los Angeles is sitting on the rocks nearby, telling me dreamily about her son. "Is he your only child?" I ask. "Yes," she answers. "Do you have a child back in England?" she asks me. No, I say. Her face darkens. "You'd better start," she says. "The Muslims are breeding. Soon, they'll have the whole of Europe."

I am getting used to such moments, when holiday geniality bleeds into--well, I'm not sure exactly what. I am traveling on a bright-white cruise ship with two restaurants, five bars, and 500 readers of National Review. Here, the Iraq war has been "an amazing success." Global warming is not happening. Europe is becoming a new Caliphate. And I have nowhere to run."

Read the rest on the site.

(I must take this opportunity to thank my wonderful friend Antonia Cedrone, who endured the trauma with me, and saved me from committing a horrific massacre. Also, apologies to anyone who has e-mailed over the past few weeks - I'm travelling through sub-Saharan Africa at the moment to write about Darfur and France's secret African war. I'll be back to normal next week...)

There have been lots of responses to my Nick Cohen review, and as I'm in parts of Africa where the internet is barely known, never mind broadband, I don't have much time to read and respond at the moment. I know Nick has written a really strange response for Dissent (in which he surreally accuses me of being "Maoist" and denies many of his plain, documented statements) which will appear online soon, and I'll write a response to that when I get back.

In the meantime, here's some links. Oliver Kamm responds here and here. I'll write a proper response soon, but let me give just one example of why he's wrong. He accuses me of deliberately distorting Nick's views, and cites as a prime example my claim that Nick says the West was right to back Saddam in the 1980s. Well, here's what Nick writes in his book 'Pretty Straight Guys' on page 127: "The world had little choice but to support Saddam's unprovoked war on Iran. A victory for the Ayatollahs would have left the Iraqi, Kuwaiti and Saudi oilfields at Iran's mercy." Every claim of "distortion" he makes is easily refuted with a quote like this.

I'm happy to disagree and discuss, but let's do it without fabricating claims of fabrication...

There's a critique of Oliver's position here. Lenin's Tomb responds disingenuously here, the depraved pro-Milosevic writer Neil Clark totally misunderstands me here, Norman Geras responds here (marking the first and only time anyone has ever accused me of being "religious"), Harry's Place reacts here, and (let's end on a high note!) the excellent Matthew Ygelesias responds here.

Right, I'm off to find out more about France's secret war in Africa... back in Britain tomorrow.

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.

One morning in 2001, the Downing Street switchboard called Alistair Campbell, asking cheerily how he was. "Both homicidal and suicidal," he replied flatly. That distills the 794 pages of his diaries - the ones that have dominated Westminster conversations for a week now - into a neat soundbite. Campbell does not just rage; his book shakes with a pure volcanic fury that you fear will singe your hands. Every single day as Tony Blair's Press Secretary, Campbell woke up in a mood to hammer a hack. And as the book progresses, it's not hard to see why.

The vast majority of Campbell's time (and this book's endless words) focus on mind-numbing trivia that he was forced to talk about by "the babble industry" - the Westminster lobby. It's a refresher course in all the most pointless non-scandals of the 1990s: Derry Irvine's wallpaper, Jo Moore's e-mail, Peter Mandelson's mortgage, Robin Cook's penis, Ron Davies' penis, David Blunkett's penis, all amounting to nothing at all. A paradigmatic sentence is: "Virtually the whole day was taken up dealing with [the media row over] Humphrey the Downing Street cat." Or this: "The lobby worked themselves into a mini-frenzy re: a story in the Times that Prince Philip had opposed the Order of the Garter for the Emperor of Japan."

This endless sludge culminates in the grand non-story nonsense of Cheriegate. But these mind-rotting distractions from actually running the country consume Campbell's every hour. He complains - unconsciously echoing Harold Wilson - that he is "swimming through shit", and the reader begins to feel the same, wandering through one piece of forgotten trivia to another. Campbell is trapped, simultaneously feeding this cretinization of our politics and lamenting it. There is a blackly revealing moment when he goes to a focus group in Watford: "A woman called Georgina said she didn't like [Blair's] smile, and they spent 20 minutes talking about whether they liked his smile or not." He leaves in despair at the "ignorance", but goes on to fuel it, believing there is no other way.

But the diaries begin in the wrong place to understand how Campbell became like this. His fury at the press was born with the media massacre of his close friend and hero Neil Kinnock in the 1980s and early 1990s, when he concluded that the British press consisted of little more than poisoned propaganda. His flaws were born there, fighting their flaws. He became the mirror-image of their distortions and lies, in order to serve his team: Labour. But as Freidrich Nietzsche warned: "Take care when you fight with monsters, lest you become a monster yourself. And remember - when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you."

Fighting against what he accurately calls the "evil" of the Daily Mail, Campbell begins to replicate their lax attitude to truth and raw tribalism. And spending all day dealing with presentation, the mask begins to devour the face, with Campbell coming to believe that presentation is more important than reality. He approvingly quotes Bill Clinton: "Achievement is less important than definition in the information age." Really? Only Gordon Brown pops up to query this, insiting that "policy is the answer."

But then - in the middle of all this obsession with artifice - looms The Real World, in its most hellish form. Like the shark-fin in Jaws, Saddam's Iraq first surfaces in 1998, when Blair first declares "nobody should underestimate Saddam's determination to develop Weapons of Mass Destruction." The diaries stir only when they reveal Blair's internal motivations, on Iraq and everything else - and they are almost unfailingly depressing when they do. Blair's rage is invariably directed against the left, and most notably trade unionists. They "just aren't serious people", he declares. When the Low Pay Commission suggests a minimum wage of £3.50 - a fairly low level by international comparisons - Blair goes "off on one, ranting that they were all going native and not understanding the bigger picture and have they thought of the effect on business? He said just because we have some superhumanly mad people running the unions doesn't mean we are obliged to meet them halfway in their madness." It's superhumanly mad to want a minimum wage you might actually be able to live on? Campbell himself bcomes depressed about this, complaining "it was all geared to a right-wing prism."

In contrast, Blair fawns on the right. As Thatcher passes by, he says in awe, "God, she is so strong." Rupert Murdoch periodically descends down into Downing Street from the clouds above to be praised unquestioningly and to offer his benedictions. Revealingly, Blair frets about the degree of Muroch's vast undemocratic influence being revealed: "[Blair] said he didn't fear [the press] coming at him about me, but about the relationship with Murdoch. He didn't fancy a sustained set of questions about whether Murdoch lobbied him." Campbell cavils: "It was faintly obscene that we even had to worry what [he] thought", and Blair gets "really irritated" at Murdoch's more antedulluvian right-wingery - but they never even consider challenging it. His power is taken as supreme.

And so is that of the United States. While Blair is clearly motivated in part by disgust at Saddam's regime, he is also determined to side with the US on virtually everything. When Jack Straw raises the prospect of not going with the US into Iraq, Blair says "it would be the biggest shift in foreign policy in 50 years." What? This is bizarrely ignorant: Wilson didn't send troops to Vietnam. But Blair "said he believed it would be folly for Britain to go against the US on a fundamental policy, and he really believed in getting rid of bad people like Saddam." It is revealing he placed them in that order.

Once the war is launched and the WMD turn out to be non-existent, Campbell embarks on a vast act of displacement. He begins to harry and hound the BBC to correct a minor error, while all around him the rationale for the war - and his life's work - collapse. It is like a soldier in a trench on the Somme obsessing about a missing button on his uniform.

And yet, for all the inherent drama of this situation, the diaries are strangely flat. The entries are full of exposition - who said what where - but there is very little description or introspection. Potentially great vignettes are thrown away in a few terse sentences. At a dinner for all the former Prime Ministers, Campbell notes that "Ted [Heath] could barely bring himself to look at Thatcher but she teased him a bit, tried to make him laugh, without any apparent success." How did she tease him? What did she say? Campbell doesn't say. Can you imagine a great political diarist - a Chips Channon or an Alan Clark - letting this gold-dust go?

But 'The Blair Years' helps to illustrate why the great political diarists are almost always peripheral figures, like backbenchers or junior ministers. They have time to stand back and notice the small, telling details. Trapped in the ceaseless breathless one-thousand-miles-an-hour torrent of events, Campbell can't - so his diary reads like a Reuters summary of the Blair years, with a few backstage quotes tossed in. It's an disappointingly dull diary to find vomitted out at the end of Campbell's rollercoaster of rage.

The Quiet Man is turning up the volume once more - and this time, he wants to drown out the demon dealers of the Demon Weed. Ian Duncan Smith (remember him?) is back with a fat report into how to end poverty in Britain. The sections demanding the financial punishment of single mothers have already been pored over and torn up for their sociological illiteracy. But there is a yet-to-be-noticed section of the new Tory plans that would have an even more bracingly reactionary effect - and send your own odds of being a victim of crime sky-rocketing.

Let's look at skinning-up first. IDS believes that spliff-smoking is such a catastrophe that cannabis needs to be reclassified as a Class B drug and the police need to spend thousands of hours to tracking down the people who sell and smoke it (rather than, say, murderers and rapists). But he bases this view on blatant three factual errors.

IDS Error One: Cannabis today is much stronger than the cannabis of the 1960s. It is now a different drug to the one our hippy parents smoked. This is asserted casually these days, even by cuddly liberals who once supported cannabis legalisation. But in reality, the European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction has published a major long-term study of cannabis potency - and found this is nonsense. "The effective strength of cannabis consumed in Britain has remained stable for the past 30 years," the report explains. There is variety between different kinds of cannabis - super-skunk is obviously more powerful - but the report found that "this variety always existed... there have always been some samples that have had a high potency."

IDS Error Two: cannabis 'causes' psychosis. A major study at the University of Cologne and King's College, London published this May showed a much more complex picture, with different chemical constituents of cannabis having different effects. The researchers found that although tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the ingredient that produces a high, giggly feeling, can trigger psychosis in a very small number of users, another chemical component to cannabis, cannabidinol (CBD), actually inhibits and supresses psychotic symptoms in people suffering from them. CBD is so good at supressing psychotic symptoms that it proved to be more effective than any of the major anti-psychotics currently prescribed by doctors.

Professor Jim van Os suggests a solution: legal cannabis could be easily grown and marketed with high CBD levels, ending the psychotic effect. Indeed, such a drug would actually be helpful for psychotics to smoke. Obviously, it's impossible to do this while cannabis remains in the hands of gangsters and organised crime syndicates - a certainty under prohibition. So it is actually more accurate to say cannabis prohibition causes cannabis psychosis - and legalisation would end it.

IDS Error Three: Relaxing the law makes more people use drugs. Between 1972 and 1978, eleven US states decriminalized marijuana possession. So did hundreds of thousands of people rush out to smoke the now-legal weed? The National Research Council found that it had no effect on the number of dope-smokers. None. The people who had always liked it carried on; the people who didn't felt no sudden urge to start.

But IDS' factual errors become even more startling when he turns to the needle. He has a simple solution to heroin addiction: he will end all the legal methadone and heroin prescriptions in Britain, and demand addicts stop altogether. They will be offered a Bible and a session of rehab - and after that, they're on their own.

This is part of a Tory critique of the current government's policy. Since 1997, Labour has - below the radar - radically revised Britain's drug treatment policies. They took a hard look at the evidence and admitted something inconvenient: even the best rehab centres in the world, the Betty Fords and the Priorys, have a success rate of just 20 percent. That means that for 80 percent of addicts, rehab, alas, doesn't work. If these addicts are offered no help or support beyond that one policy, as IDS demands, then we know what happens: they become burglars, or street prostitutes, or corpses. So the government increased methadone prescriptions by 87 percent. (They were more cowardly on heroin prescription, only running a few clinical trials).

And the result? As the former Deputy Drugs Tsar Mike Trace told me, "These prescriptions are the secret reason why crime has fallen so much under the current government." The Cheshire Drug Squad found in the 1980s that the presence of a rare heroin-prescribing clinic on their patch caused an incredible 94 percent drop in theft, burglary and property crimes. We are seeing a similar effect across Britain today - and IDS will reverse it.

Far from "giving up on addicts", giving them a regular prescription sets them free to have a normal life. Many go on to excel. Look at Dr William Stewart Halsted, the early twentieth-century captain of the Yale football team who became "the father of modern surgery" and the cofounder of the world-famous John Hopkins Hospital. Here is a typical description of his surgical technique: "He used frequently light, swift, sparing movements with the sharpest of knives, instead of free, heavy handed deep cutting... [There was] the minimum of hemorrhage." He did it all while injecting a minimum of 180 milligrams of morphine a day. He, of course, had access to a safe, legal supply, which he prescribed to himself. All the evidence shows it is scrambling for an illegal and contaminated supply that screws up opiate addicts - not the drug itself.

But IDS calls all this "methadone madness", serving up in its place a plate of cold turkey, with a cup of lukewarm moral piety to wash it down with. As Danny Kushlick, head of the drug reform charity Transform, explains: "The report's authors avoid the science and the evidence like the plague. It is the worst-written, most poorly informed report on drugs policy I have ever seen."

Will this now become Tory policy? One of the very few areas in which David Cameron is impressive is in his subtle, supple understanding of drugs policy. In 2002 he served on the Health Select Committee, interviewing dozens of experts on drugs policy, where he clearly understood the issues. He ended by co-authoring a brave report which said legalisation should be considered as an option - so we can finally take drugs back from armed criminal gangs and hand them to doctors and pharmacists.

As he picks up IDS' ramblings, Cameron faces a dillemma. Will he go with his own intellectual convictions, which tell him drug prohibition has been "disastrous", or will he appease his panicked party yet further by adopting this infantile prohibitionist cry? David, it's time to turn the volume down on the Quiet Man - to zero.

You can send comments on this article for publication in the Indie to letters -at- independent.co.uk or just for me to johann -at- johannhari.com

You can read more articles I've written about drug legalisation here.

If you support drug legalisation, the best British organisation to join is the excellent Transform whose website is here.