As Tom Happold points out elsewhere, Iraq sits in the midst of the Hay festival in the manner of a dull headache. And from the few liberal(ish) belligerents still standing (ie Christopher "the Hitch" Hitchens) to the festival's droves of anti-war complainants, the issue is so skewing argument that 1) I rather fear that people are in dire danger of forgetting the cornerstones of their own politics, and 2) so desperate is the desire to link Iraq to just about everything that you occasionally end up with something close to arrant nonsense.
A perfect case in point was yesterday's debate about America - billed as a discussion of The State Of The Union - and the man who took the microphone after the Graydon Carter/Hitchens/Gary Younge main event to allege that expenditure on New Orleans levees was hacked down to pay for the war. Nice try - but it was actually down to Bush's insistence on old-school right-wing tax cuts (see this piece for details), a fact that should have had liberal-left passions roused and the polarized state of the US bemoaned as never before. But no: as the preceding 40 minutes of rather slack conversation had proved, these days we prefer to put such quaint concerns as inequality to one side and tie ourselves up in war-related knots.
On that score, of course, Hitchens is in league of his own - now a self-confessed "single issue voter" who'll support the Republicans as long as they sound hawkish enough, and so gleefully wrapped up in his contrarian schtick that you begin to wonder whether he has any coherent politics left. In the midst of a debate that should have been orientated around such trifles as the liberal/conservative divide and the US's ongoing political paralysis, it probably wasn't Hitchens' fault that he got pulled into a soliloquy about his surreal contention that the discredited claims about Saddam Hussein and African yellowcake actually remain beyond reasonable doubt, but the moment said it all. Similarly, it was some token of the extent to which Iraq has so warped his thinking that he claimed that the US is "the only country incompatible with jihadism and totalitarian government", before Younge neatly reminded him of that long history that takes in Chile, Nicaragua, the funding of the Mujahadeen and the US's latter-day view of Bolivia and Venezuela.
Listening to most of the ex-left belligerati, I wonder: did the dereliction of their politics lead them to support the war or their support for the war lead to the dereliction of their politics? I actually suspect it's the former: fifteen years of post-cold war confusion and Third Way sophistry that has led too many people to completely mislay their compass (A pre-emptive digression: the "progressive intervention" arguments vis-a-vis Iraq only back that up - some of us still had enough political clue to know that the spectacle of the most right-wing US government in history, operating outside the UN, rather undermined such claims). Thus, the Euston manifesto mysteriously omits any mention of what might constitute the good society in favour of bilious rhetoric about the creed of liberal Interventionism, and at least one war-scarred ex-leftie columnist (oh, alright then - the venerable D Aaronovitch) has recently proposed switching between voting for Labour, Lib Dem and Tory candidates on the basis of a specious "progressive/reactionary" axis. But it's not just them: those of us on the other side of the war divide might also like to consider whether our recurrent inability to talk about anything else might be the product of our own kind of wash-out.
Whatever, yesterday brought it all home: a handful of people gathered on a stage to talk about the fate of the most powerful country on earth, only for the any sense of the shape of the conversation to disappear (and fair play to Carter and Younge - much of this was down to the slightly woolly chairmanship style of Alan Yentob) and the vacuum to be filled by the usual depressing arguments: everything either linked or reducible to the Iraq; Hitchens in favour, everybody else against; the distinct sense that the intelligentsia is trapped, a la Groundhog Day, somewhere around February 2003.
Of course, we need to talk about Iraq - ideally, I would argue, in the twin context of economics of oil and the need for a stable system of global governance. But just occasionally, if only for old time's sake, why don't we have a go at thinking about class, the welfare state, global and domestic inequality and the looming ecological crisis? Way back when, didn't they used to be called The Fundamentals?
