Matt T

Nick Cohen

Nick Cohen, the famed author of "Why it is Right to be Anti-American" and "Come on you Liberals if you think you are hard enough" has excerpts from his new book, "What's Left - how Liberals lost their way", in today's Observer.

There are only two chapters (or bits of chapters), and they deal with somewhat different themes. The first is essentially 'how the left (or liberal-left) lost its way' and the second is how dealing with Iraqis made Cohen support the war.

On the development of his own views it is a little disappointing. There is a great big gap between the end of the 1990s and 2003, of which very little is mentioned. But this was the time of "Why it is Right to be anti-American", the attacks on liberals for supporting the Afghan war, the attacks on Blair for supporting Bush's Iraq policy. The criticism of America in his first article is based on three things unrelated to Iraq - Kyoto, the anti ICMB treaty and its failure to sign up to the ICC, none of which I think he has changed his mind on. But there's nothing here about that (it could of course be in the other chapters), and also nothing to note that a lot of the criticism he makes of liberals really apply more accurately to himself.

Furthermore Cohen also can't resist his usual tactic of conflating tiny subsections of the left with the left, liberals, and the liberal-left. For example:

why were men and women of the left denying the existence of Serb concentration camps?

On the Iraq war, his criticism is some of the strongest I have seen from him.

The protesters were right to feel that Bush and Blair were manipulating them into war...they were manipulating the evidence..Cook told his special adviser David Mathieson after the meeting that Blair did not know about the detail and didn't seem to want to know either...if democratic leaders are going to take their countries to war, they must be able to level with themselves as well as their electorates...If the Labour party had forced Blair to resign, there would have been a rough justice in his political execution...The war was over soon enough, but the aftermath was a disaster.

and at times he appears to want to say that opposition to the war was justifiable, and even perhaps right, but that it was the failure to support Iraqis since that has been the true betrayal. At other times he seems to think that supporting the war was the only 'moral option'.

Alas, I can't help agreeing with him when he says "All right, you might say, but the reaction to the second Iraq war is not a good enough reason to write a book". A lot of the behaviour he writes about from far-left groups seems indefensible. But it's also atypical of the left, and more so the liberal-left. Most people who opposed the war did so from a strong feeling that it would make things worse. So far, at the very least, it's hard to say that they were wrong. We know at a minimum 150,000 Iraqis have died (and Cohen might profit from asking why so many people on the right and pro-war left seek to downplay or deny this) and probably two or three times more. There's no way those deaths would have been avoided if more liberals or more leftwingers had written columns saying how much they supported Iraqi trade unions.

These observations that there is a small subsection of the left who have lost the plot wouldn't make much of a book (and despite Cohen's denials that there was any anti-Americanism in 1960s Vietnam protests, I suspect he could have written much the same book in 1972). You could make much the same charge against the right if you could be bothered, with hatred of Muslims and demand for oil obviously behind some people's support for the war. For Cohen, however, whose previous position was on the far-left, it's obviously personal. Add to that his bizarre hatred of liberals (maybe because history was kinder to their views than his when he was on the far left, and kinder now he has outflanks them to the right?) and you get this latest tome.

I said, "outflanks them to the right", and I think this is fair due to what I've read in his columns more than in these pieces. Cohen doesn't talk much about his non-foreign policy positions in the two chapters in the Observer, but we get a glimpse when he talks about economics.

Socialism, which provided the definition of what it meant to be on the left from the 1880s to the 1980s, is gone. Disgraced by the communists' atrocities and floored by the success of market-based economies, it no longer exists as a coherent programme for government. Even the modest and humane social democratic systems of Europe are under strain and look dreadfully vulnerable.

This adds to the feeling that its the far-left he is writing about, not the liberal-left or even the soft-left. And maybe it means "Why it is Right to be anti-European" is in the offing?

In any case, though I think this was best left in its Observer and Evening Standard column form, I do want to know what he says in the other chapters, and am pleased to say you can get it for under £8 from Amazon.

Update: Hitchens' review suggests other chapters may have more on Cohen's bizarre reaction to September 11th. It also contains this strange bit:

In one telling example, Cohen cites the work of Iranian feminist Azar Nafisi, who three years ago dedicated her book Reading Lolita in Tehran to Paul Wolfowitz. “By 2003 it was no longer surprising that an Iranian feminist should turn to an American neoconservative,” Cohen writes pointedly, “for where else was she to look for support?”

This is Decency gone circular mad. The populariser of this story is Christopher Hitchens himself, and it isn't true and he knows it isn't true. "Paul", almost certainly Wolfowitz, is mentioned in the acknowledgements, along with lots of other people from 'all sides of the political spectrum'.

UPDATE II: That wasn't Hitchens' fault, but Nick Cohen's. Apparently the last paragraph was formatted in the print edition of the Sunday Times as a boxed excerpt from Cohen's book, and Cohen must have just taken it from a Hitchens' piece without bothering to check the details. I'm not surprised about Cohen, but I'm surprised it got through all of the proof-reading and editing stages, and of course that the Sunday Times itself made no checks (they could have done it on Amazon's Look Inside the Book, if they didn't want to use google).

Labels: Nick Cohen

posted by Matthew @ 1/21/2007 09:32:00 AM Comments: 7