Nick Cohen and the anti-war left

When the Euston Manifesto was published in April last year, something strange happened. A paragraph of the manifesto had clearly stated that there were both supporters and opponents of the Iraq war within the group that had produced the document, and the list of signatories straightforwardly confirmed this. And yet the Euston Manifesto was received by some as a statement from the pro-war left. Even after the mistake was pointed out, there were those who continued to speak of it in the same terms.

So, if I'm looking across the park with a clear view of a black and white dog, and I mention this to you but you don't see the dog, the chances are that something is blocking your vision - like, maybe, a tree. If you'll just move a few steps, you should be able to see the dog.

(Unless, that is, you've got your eyes firmly shut and refuse to open them. I must take a few lines to deal with what I'll call the clever-clever account of why the Euston Manifesto really is a pro-war document, despite the fact of that paragraph - '[w]e recognize that it was possible reasonably to disagree about the justification for the intervention...' - and despite the make-up of the signatory group. This clever-clever account says that the manifesto is pro-war because it contains a paragraph on humanitarian intervention that is too lax in what it says about thresholds of intervention. The paragraph in question is general rather than lax; and it's true that the threshold question is a big and a tough one, to which there can be more than a single compelling answer. But this isn't relevant to whether the Euston Manifesto was pro-war in the meaning in which it was said to be pro-war by some of its critics and denied to be pro-war by its authors - that meaning indicating, without obscurity or ambiguity, support for the Iraq war. Searching for an analogy here, I propose that if you were to deny that Australia had just beaten England with a 5-0 clean sweep in the recent Ashes series, deny it on the grounds that England had had the better of some sessions of play - like at Adelaide before the roof fell in - so that their score couldn't have been nil, this would be a clever-clever, a.k.a. nincompoop, denial, one based on wilfully ignoring the meaning of 'clean sweep' and the established scoring system for calculating the result of a Test series.)

What was the tree-in-the-eye of those who couldn't see the clearly visible, those who wouldn't take at face value the make-up of the Euston Manifesto Group and the content of the document it had produced? The tree-in-their-eye was the fixed idea that the pro-war left had given out a blanket condemnation of the entire anti-war left as being apologists for Saddam, fellow-travellers with Islamist extremism, rabid anti-Americans, and so forth. But if this truly was the standpoint of the pro-war left, how could we possibly be making common cause, producing a common position statement, with other leftists, social-democrats, liberals, who had themselves opposed the war - or how they with us? The Euston Manifesto had to be a pro-war statement 'really', and its anti-war signatories either wavering or confused.

But in fact the real explanation is that, with some possible exceptions about whom I'm ignorant, the pro-war left were generally not attached to a blanket condemnation of the kind commonly ascribed to it. We knew perfectly well what the difference was between those who were indeed apologists and fellow-travellers, and people with reasonable and well-grounded doubts about the war and who opposed it because of these and without losing sight of the principles of democracy and human rights. But we also perceived, between these two political constituencies, another large group whose own opposition to the war seemed to blind them to, or at least put them into intermittent denial about, the valid reasons why others of us on the liberal-left had supported the war - as if there could be no such reasons, good reasons, for supporting the overthrow of a mass-murdering tyranny, as if there was only a single truth about Iraq, and as if the future, in terms of possible success and failure, was perfectly foreseeable. I've already written about this other constituency here.

What has all this got to do with Nick Cohen? Well, it has to do with the reception of his recently published What's Left? It's already evident from some of the reviews that Nick is being taxed with treating the anti-war movement as all of a piece. But it isn't so, and anyone who reads his book without the tree-in-the-eye I've spoken of will at once be able to see that. Even this brief excerpt from the Observer contains enough to show that Nick knows the anti-war movement was made up of others than George Galloway and the SWP. The protesters, he says...

...were right in several respects. [They] were right to feel that Bush and Blair were manipulating them into war.

And:

It is a generalisation to say that everyone refused to commit themselves. The best of the old left in the trade unions and parliamentary Labour party supported an anti-fascist struggle.

However, neither does he settle for the myth - and that is what it is - that, apart from the 'hard-left' segment of the anti-war movement, all was well on the broader left with respect to Iraq. As Paul Anderson has written in a review on Gauche:

... Cohen's central thesis is absolutely to the point. Most opponents of the war who did not share the "revolutionary defeatism" of Galloway and the SWP or the reactionary politics of their Islamist allies turned a blind eye to them. They certainly did nothing to distance themselves publicly - let alone anything to seize leadership of the anti-war movement.

And since 2003 the obsession of most people on the non-Leninist left who opposed the war - I know there are honourable exceptions - has simply been to get their own back on George Bush and Tony Blair for starting it. For the parochial self-righteous left, the important thing about the growing sectarian strife in Iraq is not that it threatens to turn into a full-scale civil war that then engulfs the whole Middle East. It is that it shows Bush and Blair were wrong three years ago - just as we said they were. Pinning the blame on Bush and Blair and demonstrating we were right matters more than working out how best to support the Iraqi people against the murderous militias terrorising their country. It's comfortable collective political narcissism, no more.

A final point. One confirmation of the fact that Nick Cohen's target is a real one wider than the SWP, is the intense hostility there has been, way beyond that organization, towards the pro-war left. Dip into any relevant comments thread on the Guardian's Comment is Free for a dose of such poison; note that there is a mini-industry in the blogosphere obsessed (some of its denizens to the point of appearing half-crazed) with those they contemptuously call 'the decents'; give some time, if you can bear it, to re-reading through the comment and opinion pages of the liberal press for the last four years. That you were of the left and supported regime change in Iraq has just been unthinkable, unassimilable, for many - hence the hostility and the anathemas. It could not be that there was a difficult issue and a difficult choice, with weighty reasons on both sides. If, on the other hand, you consider what volume of critical animus and commentary has been directed from the same quarters at the rank apologists in the anti-war movement, you'll find that it pales by comparison.

This is why many on the anti-war left had a tree in their eye over the Euston Manifesto; and this is why some of these same people won't be able to see clearly what is in Nick Cohen's new book.

[This post was drafted before I'd read Oliver Kamm's. Oliver's covers different ground from mine, but I'd like to echo his closing paragraph, with one modification: reader, Nick Cohen's book may also be about you.]