Tainted Love

Nick Cohen looks back at the left of his youth and of the present day, and wonders what their motives are.

Fiery socialist MPs denounced Baathism, while playwrights and poets stained the pages of the liberal press with their tears for his victims. Many quoted the words of a brave Iraqi exile called Kanan Makiya. He became a hero of the left because he broke through the previously impenetrable secrecy that covered totalitarian Iraq and described in awful detail how an entire population was compelled to inform on their family and friends or face the consequences. All decent people who wanted to convict the West of subscribing to murderous double standards could justifi ably use his work as evidence for the prosecution.

The apparently sincere commitment to help Iraqis vanished the moment Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990 and became America's enemy.

Quite simple really. Once you control for your irrational hatred of the nation that brought the enlightenment into reality and made the concept of human rights a real and tangible thing, it’s easy to love a dictator.

I assumed that once the war was over they would back Iraqis trying to build a democracy, while continuing to pursue Bush and Blair to their graves for what they had done. I waited for a majority of the liberal left to offer qualified support for a new Iraq, and I kept on waiting, because it never happened - not just in Britain, but also in the United States, in Europe, in India, in South America, in South Africa ... in every part of the world where there was a recognisable liberal left. They didn't think again when thousands of Iraqis were slaughtered by 'insurgents' from the Baath party, which wanted to re-establish the dictatorship, and from al-Qaeda, which wanted a godly global empire to repress the rights of democrats, the independent-minded, women and homosexuals. They didn't think again when Iraqis defied the death threats and went to vote on new constitutions and governments.

So the imaginary “class struggle thing” proved to be more important than the real struggle for Arabs to be freed to the matrix of oppressive governments and oppressive Jihadists. Hardly any among those “pumping their fists for peace” seemed to be able to recognize the contradiction. American servicepeople develop personal relationships with Iraqis who were once compelled to fight them, and the left spouting on about liberation can’t. It's quite telling.