Nick Cohen attacks many enemies in this book, and he believes they are very bad indeed. They include: Amnesty International, Harold Pinter, Noam Chomsky, the Comment pages of the Guardian, the London Review of Books, Robert Fisk, George Galloway, the Socialist Workers Party, Edward Said, the anti-war coalition and (for reasons I could not fathom) Virginia Woolf.
With the exception of Virginia Woolf, the above are accused of a grand, historic betrayal of the values of the left. Cohen insists they have surrendered to fascism. He holds that this betrayal is more profound and historically significant than the one committed by the left-wing intellectuals (among them Eric Hobsbawn and Raymond Williams) who apologised for the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939.
The book veers off in a number of unexpected directions, at one point pausing to analyse Pride and Prejudice as a literary antecedent to Bridget Jones's Diary. But its thesis is nevertheless easy to state. The British left used to have a set of common values. Even when it was most catastrophically wrong - apologising for Stalin's death camps, or ignoring the horror of Mao - it meant well.
According to Cohen, this claim is now invalid. The collapse of socialism in the Eighties and the rise of what he calls Islamic fascism have changed everything. Cohen asserts that the left's hatred of America means it is no longer able to tell the difference between right and wrong. It suffers from the syndrome identified by Bertrand Russell 80 years ago, a belief in the superior virtue of the oppressed. This dogma has led left-wing writers and activists to make fellow cause with bigots, murderers, terrorists, gay-bashers, women-haters and the most dangerous kind of anti-semite.
Cohen skilfully shows how the left perversely sets its moral compass by the United States. When America refused to invade Iraq in 1991, it faced charges of collusion with a totalitarian regime. When it did go in some 12 years later, it was accused of taking part in an imperial adventure. For the left, whatever America does is by definition evil. Cohen is at his best as a painstakingly forensic reporter and he marshals his evidence with flair and rigour. Chomsky's erratic public career, including a brief spell as apologist for Pol Pot, gets the treatment it probably deserves. The section on how the Socialist Workers Party (a marginal organisation taken with perplexing seriousness by Cohen) evolved from a half-baked Marxist sub-group into a repository for Muslim grievance is very nicely done.
He is at his very best when he exposes the dishonesty of the liberal press. Here he is on the Independent's report of the murder of the American green party activist Marla Ruzicka by an Islamic suicide bomber in Baghdad in April 2005: 'The piece was headlined, "The senseless death of the woman who fought George Bush", which read as if her murder wasn't a premeditated act by a religious fanatic from the ultra-right but George Bush's fault. Her legacy "should put many politicians in America, and in our own country, to shame," the Independent continued, while carefully - and shamefully - avoiding criticism of her killer.'
This is admirable. Cohen's book has made me look with greater respect at the motives behind those who led the journey to war in Iraq in 2003, and view many of the anti-war campaigners with a new scepticism. There are, however, certain important methodological flaws that cast doubt on his central thesis.
Cohen grabs key Western concepts and applies them very loosely in a Middle-Eastern context, where they have a problematic application. For him Saddam Hussein's Baath Party is 'fascist' and so are the Islamic movements that it suppressed. There is no doubt that the word 'fascist' adds power and apparent clarity to Cohen's polemic, and it is of course the case that Saddam borrowed some of the most loathsome Nazi ideas. But the use of such a specific and emotive Western term to describe a variety of complex and distinct phenomena hinders rather than enables genuine understanding.
Cohen erects paper tigers. It is easy to turn over the SWP. The key failing of the book is that nowhere does Cohen seriously engage with the mainstream, anti-war left. Cohen's thesis simply does not begin to apply to the decent and honourable left-wing men and women who opposed the war: Robin Cook, Menzies Campbell, Chris Smith, Frank Dobson, Clare Short, Alan Simpson, Bob Marshall-Andrews, and so many others. These people are not rancid homophobes or anti-semites, reflex America bashers or secret supporters of al-Qaeda. They were perfectly clear-sighted about the horror of Saddam, and nevertheless found it natural as social democrats to oppose the war.
Then Cohen asks: 'Why is Palestine a cause for the liberal left but not China, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Congo or North Korea?' But precisely the same question must be levelled at Cohen's new-found neo-conservative friends, and with far greater force. Tony Blair, for example, has failed to lift a finger for Zimbabwe, been impotent on Darfur and sucked up to China, a serial failure of principle that raises the deadly question: why the obsession with Iraq?
This book is much more than a mere denunciation of old left-wing friends and colleagues. It is also a moving account of a long personal journey, carried off with wit, verve, considerable literary skill and human compassion. Its heroes include the Iraqi resistance to Saddam, Martin Amis, George W Bush, Paul Wolfowitz and Nick Cohen's long-suffering mother. Among its many other qualities it will come to be seen as a very powerful defence of Tony Blair's premiership: surely more intelligent, accomplished and eloquent than the Prime Minister really deserves.
· Peter Oborne is political columnist for the Daily Mail
'Instead of examining his estrangement, Cohen rants'
Beatrix Campbell
Writer and broadcaster
Nick Cohen's mother and her shopping strategies guide us to his location on the left. It is a charming introduction - ethical consumption by his communist parents infused his childhood. I recognised the tone. Mine were communists and we were blessed by the belief that politics and active citizenship mattered. In our house, domestic and generational tumult roared over the terrain of Russia. My father, in raging exasperation, would shout, 'The trouble with you is you're a ... a ... social democrat!'
That's what What's Left? brought to mind: the use of abuse as argument. It is written with something of those bad manners: intemperate, petulant, abusive. It is a painful text, simultaneously victimised and grandiose; it is personal without self-awareness, polemical without coherence.
It starts from Cohen's support for the Bush-Blair new imperialism and all the trouble that caused. Cohen's book isn't interested in why he and a few influential political commentators hailing from the left landed up isolated from the majority progressive resistance to the invasion of Iraq. Instead of asking why his coterie was estranged from the rest of the left, he rants, he explodes, he hyperventilates.
The text begins with Iraq and then callously evades the sponsorship of militarism, sectarianism and sexism and corruption no one knows how to fix. It ends with Israel instead. Yes, he admits, Palestine suffers racism and collective punishment. Yes, that's worth fighting. 'Yes, until you ask the question I've delayed asking: what is anti-semitism?' What is this conditional 'until'? What makes ending collective punishment and the occupation of Palestine so unthinkable?
After the end of the Cold War, he says, the left embraced fascist fundamentalism as its expression of anti-Westernism. Cohen responds to the anti-semitism swirling around Islamic fundamentalism with an alarming hypothesis: after the Cold War 'radical intellectuals fled from universal values' into cultural relativism; gay, black and feminist cultures became separatist, they 'couldn't be criticised' and nor 'by extension could any other culture, even if it was the culture of fascism, religious tyranny, wife-burning or suicide bombing'. Ergo, the liberal left has become fascist.
Do you recognise yourself here, dear reader? We're used to this sort of stuff, of course: Melanie Phillips has been a prolific exponent of apostasy. It's mad.
'The question remains: was war the best approach?'
Isabel Hilton
Editor of opendemocracy.net
Immanuel Kant, in his treatise on perpetual peace, argued that any leader of peace, who would embody in his person the responsibility for international administration and enforcement of justice, would quickly become a despot.
That is why he advocated that the role should be undertaken collectively and only with the consent of the peoples. Nick Cohen's book is detailed and passionately argued. It is also more than merely a rehearsal of the argument about the Iraq war, but that, nevertheless, lies at its heart: those who opposed the war, he says, were in de facto support of fascism. As one of them, I disagree.
Let's assume for a moment that the desire to overthrow Saddam Hussein derived from the good and disinterested intention to bring democracy to the Middle East. Let's stretch our credulity further to say that, in the pursuit of a good cause, the manipulation, deviousness and lies employed to launch the war were justified and that the abuses of justice and liberty that followed were necessary. The question remains: was war the best approach? Any who knew the region, and many who didn't, understood that this was a criminally dangerous gamble that risked setting in train events that could cost untold lives, all for an uncertain result that might well be worse.
Those who opposed it did so for many reasons - perhaps some of them unworthy. But to reduce this opposition to an acquiescence to fascism is itself unworthy. The idea that lethal force is a tool to refashion the world into something better is an illusion most easily maintained by men and women who have never been to war or sent their children, never lived it or had to flee the consequences - and who appear unable truly to reckon the cost in the sufferings of others or understand the long aftermath. It is something to undertake only when there is truly no alternative. Those misgivings have been amply vindicated.
'The left is still relevant today'
Sunder Katwala
General secretary of the Fabian Society
Nick Cohen accurately skewers some of his main targets on the left, especially the Socialist Workers Party's use of the anti-war movement. The left should not let valid criticisms of the botched Iraq war slip into a 'my enemy's enemy' approach.
But what Cohen calls 'the left' is a leftist fringe. It has never achieved much. There is another left - the constructive democratic liberal left - which has many achievements. You owe to it your weekend, the NHS and the minimum wage. Cohen thinks this is all over - there are no causes left, except perhaps the environment. 'I doubt if anyone can tell you what a society significantly more left-wing than ours would look like,' he writes.
He is wrong. It would be a more equal society, where our opportunities in life were not so strongly determined by who our parents are and where we commit to sustain our environment for future generations. There are many great causes left - at home and abroad. Why doesn't Nick Cohen join those campaigns?
In praise of what's left? What the other papers say
John Lloyd
Financial Times
It is an essay of wide reference and great brilliance, which flays every kind of foot-shuffling excuse for not facing up to the nature of the regime which that most evil (and now, mercifully, dead) tyrant, Saddam Hussein, inflicted on his country and planned for his region. Cohen surveys a gamut of left-liberal Western opinion that, in part under the pressure of the Iraqi war, has forgotten its best traditions and instead lapsed into its worst, that regards nothing as more important than the failures of its own societies, and that lacks the imagination or the will to comprehend the agonies of those living under tyranny.'
Michale Gove
The Spectator
'Nick Cohen scrupulously anatomises the way in which anti-Americanism, and the doctrine that my enemy's enemy is my friend, has driven people whose political inspiration was a belief in progress to make excuses for forces that are trying to use murder to propel us back into the Dark Ages.'
Christopher Hitchens
The Sunday Times
'An exemplary piece of political satire, in which the generally amusing and ironic tone should not lull you into ignoring the deadly seriousness of the argument. It is not necessary to have a personal stake in a discussion like this, but it does help. Cohen started out trying to defend the honour of the left and attempting to appeal to its better traditions. He swiftly found that this made him the target of the most hysterical slander, from people whose hatred of liberal democracy has a long and sordid ancestry. He then lowered his head, clenched his teeth, steered into the storm and embarked on the toughest struggle an old leftist can ever undertake: a confrontation with former comrades who suspect him of "selling out"... Cohen's is an admirable example of self-criticism and self-examination, using intellectual honesty as a means of illuminating a much wider canvas.
· What's Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way, by Nick Cohen, will be published on 5 February by Fourth Estate at £12.99.
Listen to Nick Cohen discuss his book online and read the extract that provoked a huge response from readers. Read their comments and see how he fared in our live online chat, at: observer.co.uk/audio
