Читать книгу What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way - Nick Cohen - Страница 11

I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.

William Morris, 1888

ON 2 AUGUST 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and Kanan Makiya awoke to find himself famous – and infamous. Republic of Fear sold out within days. The publishers ordered second editions, but this time with print runs in the tens of thousands. Senators, MPs, diplomats and journalists belatedly realized that they needed to know about the new menace. They had looked the other way because they worried the demented Ayatollah Khomeini would invade Iraq and be in a position to move into Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and control most of the world’s oil. Now the demented Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait and could move into Saudi Arabia and control most of the world’s oil.

In 1984, George Orwell’s Winston Smith says:

At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia.

It was like that with Saddam. You could hear the screech as the world’s leaders stamped on the brakes and wrenched the gear stick into reverse.

Makiya knew he had to speak plainly. News anchors wanted his face on their shows; editors wanted his words in their comment pages. He threw away his wig and pseudonym and used his celebrity to help his country. Much of what he said pleased leftish audiences. He lacerated the United Nations forces for bombing civilian targets, and tore into the refusal of George Bush senior’s State Department to meet Saddam’s opponents. So far so good, governments in general and America in particular were killing the innocent and betraying democrats. What hypocrites.

Then Makiya went too far by saying the war had not gone far enough. Instead of stopping at the border when they had defeated the Iraqi armies and thrown them out of Kuwait, the UN forces should help the Iraqi Kurds and Shia Arabs who had taken their chance to rise up. The world must know by now that Saddam wasn’t another tin-pot dictator. Baathism was a rolling programme of war and genocide – first Iran, then the Kurds, then Kuwait, while all the time the mutilation of Iraq continued. Saddam had to be stopped and the only way to stop him was to march on to Baghdad.

Iraqi exiles cheered Makiya, but Britain, America, the European Union, China, the Soviet Union and, predictably, the Arab dictatorships were adamant that Iraq had to stay a dictatorship. When Hajiz al-khwaf inksier – the barrier of fear – was broken and Iraqi intifada began, Brent Scowcroft, Bush senior’s National Security Adviser, bluntly told ABC News: ‘We clearly would have preferred a coup. There’s no question of that.’

In the ceasefire negotiations, the United States forces specifically allowed Saddam Hussein to keep helicopter gunships, which he duly used to slaughter the revolutionaries. The great powers wanted a palace revolution that would bring a reliable autocrat to the fore, not a popular uprising. After the humiliating defeat in Kuwait, they assumed the Iraqi army would seize the radio stations and install a sensible general. They waited, and kept on waiting because once a totalitarian regime is secure its totalitarian methods prevent its overthrow.

With Saddam clearly going nowhere, the US, UK and France tried other remedies. No-fly zones were established. They helped the Kurds in the north escape Baathist rule, but brought no good to the rest of the country. Sanctions were imposed which wiped out legitimate businesses while allowing black marketeers to flourish. The United Nations tried to relieve the suffering by establishing an ‘oil-for-food’ programme. This lavishly corrupt affair allowed the Baath to engage in smuggling on a gargantuan scale and bribe foreign supporters with money meant for the destitute. As General Tommy Franks said when the US Army finally invaded Iraq in 2003, it was more ‘oil for palaces’ than ‘oil for food’. The United Nations secured Saddam’s position because he decided who could and could not receive international aid.

The Nineties in Iraq were strange beyond measure. The Baathists had committed one of the last genocides of the twentieth century. They had started the longest conventional war of the whole twentieth century. They had invaded Kuwait and been defeated in battle. They had harboured international terrorists and organized terrorism themselves. They had developed weapons of mass destruction and used them against domestic and foreign opponents alike. Yet while George Bush senior, Margaret Thatcher, the Ayatollah Khomeini and all his other enemies lost power or died, Saddam Hussein stayed on, a victor of sorts.

Nothing, though, was stranger and less discussed than the behaviour of the Left. The initial reaction of Makiya’s friends to Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait was to allow him to keep it. ‘Everyone I respected – anyone who was a friend, it seemed, immediately gravitated towards the peace position. And with almost every fibre of my being I longed to be there with them. Only, in this instance, it couldn’t be. It was an incredibly painful time.’

When he insisted on harping on about the Baathists’ crimes after Saddam became America’s enemy, Makiya’s friends turned on him. Writing of his former comrade in the New Statesman, Alexander Cockburn, an American leftist, said, ‘out of despair comes mental pandemonium’. Tariq Ali was like a teacher patting a little boy on the head. There were aspects of his former friend’s work which he ‘respected enormously, but I’m afraid he’s an innocent, a complete babe’. The Americans ‘were never going to support democracy in Iraq’, he concluded somewhat rashly. Edward Said, a New Left Review contributor and the most fluent defender of the Palestinian cause in the Western universities, was almost lost for words, and spluttered: ‘He suddenly discovers he’s got to do something, and what does he do? He appeals to the United States to come to rescue him! It’s astonishing.’

It wasn’t only Makiya who was being excommunicated from the church of the Left. The bell was being tolled and the book closed on the peoples of Iraq. In leftish circles and among the Arab intelligentsia, an instantaneous change took place. The screeching of brakes and the crunching gears weren’t only heard in the foreign ministries of the great powers. A tyrant the Left had happily characterized as a ‘fascist’ poured fire on a rebellious population from helicopter gunships. To punish the Marsh Arabs he unleashed an ecological catastrophe by blocking the flow of water into the Tigris-Euphrates flood plain. The angry condemnations that had once flowed as freely as the rivers of Mesopotamia dried up. From then on, the loudest voices on the Left were raised in favour of the causes of Saddam Hussein, not necessarily in favour of Saddam Hussein, although we were to hear that eventually, but in support of his demands. As the mood shifted, the liberal-left began to make novel arguments.

From the emergence of the pacifist movement in the mid-nineteenth century, the liberal-left had generally preferred the peaceful coercion of sanctions to war. As the Nineties wore on, however, sanctions against Saddam’s Iraq fell out of favour. At a meeting chaired by the Labour MP George Galloway in 1998, Harold Pinter said the deaths that resulted in Iraq were ‘Tony Blair’s legacy of corpses’. Labour MPs and Green Party activists agreed. The demands for a change of policy weren’t confined to the far left. In 2000 Sir Menzies Campbell – the then foreign affairs spokesman for the Liberal Democrats who was to go on to be the party’s leader – demanded that all sanctions except the ban on the sale of military equipment be lifted because they were being ‘used by the regime in Iraq to justify the systematic degradation of the Iraqi people’.

So they were, but none of those who called for the lifting of sanctions in whole or in part went on to say that troops should be sent in to remove the dictator from power. The option they supported, but rarely stated explicitly, was close to the option Saddam wanted: no sanctions and greater freedom for his dictatorship to perpetuate its rule.

Makiya saw at once that many on the liberal-left were prepared to turn their eyes from fascistic totalitarianism and realized the dismal consequences for the future. In 1993, he published Cruelty and Silence, which dissected the Arab intelligentsia’s unwillingness to confront its monsters. He took on Edward Said, whose Orientalism was and is a hugely influential account of how the West shaped the Middle East. Orientalism is a narrative of victimhood that finds in racist outsiders a comforting explanation for Arab backwardness. Makiya replied that if you placed all the blame for the region’s disasters on Western imperialism and racism, you ignored the home-grown disasters of Arab nationalism and Islamism. The unintended consequence was an inverted racism that denied the autonomy of Arabs and let local oppressors off the hook. Tyrants could always claim that the woes that afflicted their peoples came from America or Israel, and divert the anger that should have been directed against them.

Makiya said that for all their radical rhetoric, Said and those like him made ‘Arabs feel contented with the way they are, instead of making them rethink fundamental assumptions which so clearly haven’t worked’. India had been occupied by the British for several centuries, and Indians had far more reason to be angry than the Arab states, which had been occupied by the British and French for a few decades. Yet Indians got on with the struggle to build a successful democracy and economy, while Arab intellectuals were crippled by their resentments.

Said greeted the challenge with incontinent abuse. He sounded more like a Soviet prosecutor than an academic when he denounced Makiya as a ‘guinea pig witness’ and ‘native informant’ for the Americans. His former comrade was now ‘a man of vanity who has no compassion, no demonstrable awareness of human suffering’. His work was ‘revolting’, and based ‘on cowardly innuendo and false interpretation’. Westerners respected Makiya only because he ‘confirmed the view in the West that Arabs were villainous and shabby conformists’.

Said was a Palestinian and in a small way his viciousness and betrayals of principle were excusable. For the early Zionists to say that Palestine was ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’ was not so much to look down on Palestinians from a position of colonial superiority, as to look through them and deny their existence. You can see why Makiya’s comparison of the thousands killed by the Israelis with the millions killed by the Baathists horrified him. Said had an urgent interest in keeping anger and attention directed at the Israeli occupation of Palestine. If it turned to other horrors, which had little to do with the West, the Palestinian cause might suffer.

Yet to use this excuse is to sink into the racism of low expectations – he’s a Palestinian and so we can’t expect too high a moral and intellectual standard. Said summed up his own failure to confront totalitarianism, and with it the failure of a large section of the Arab intelligentsia, just before the war in Iraq and his own death.

He said the war was all the fault of … oh, go on, guess.

Iraq ‘was the one Arab country with the human and natural resources, as well as the infrastructure, to take on Israel’s arrogant brutality’, he explained. ‘That is why Begin bombed Iraq pre-emptively in 1981, supplying a model for the United States in its own pre-emptive war.’ (He meant the Israelis’ destruction of the Tammuz nuclear reactor, which was going to give Saddam the bomb.) Because Said believed Saddam could one day have the men and munitions to take on Israel, the war against him had to be the result of a sinister plot by Jewish puppet masters who pulled the strings of American policy. The Jews operated with impunity, he explained, because corporate media covered up their crimes by failing ‘to elucidate the Likud’s slow takeover of US military and political thinking about the Arab world’.

Although the Israeli government was far more worried about Iran than Iraq, there were supporters of Israel in Washington who believed that a democratic Iraq would inspire revolutions across the Arab world. If they resulted in democratic governments, they reasoned, the pressure on Israel to cut a deal with the Palestinians would be reduced. The wacky and frankly insulting assumption behind their thinking was that Arabs would abandon the Palestinians if they were given a free choice in democratic societies.

Said’s underlying assumptions weren’t so different from the friends of Israel on Capitol Hill. He saw Saddam’s Iraq only as a potentially powerful enemy of Israel with ‘the human and natural resources’ to take Jerusalem on. The Americans must not overthrow Saddam because the toppling of the dictatorship would weaken the Palestinians’ hand. Said’s line of reasoning led to the conclusion that Iraqis must live under tyranny so that Palestinians might be spared the Israeli occupation – some Arabs must be in bondage so that others might be free. This was a counsel of despair and a scandalous one at that. What was wrong with supporting freedom for Palestinians and Iraqis and Syrians, Saudis and Egyptians for that matter?

Writing in 1997, Makiya tried to be generous. He saw that he and Said shared a common delusion. Campaigners against oppression have a temptation to identify with its victims because ‘one needs some kind of moral assurance, some handle on the hellishness of the world, in circumstances where God and religion are undeniably absent (at least for me)’. The alternative was ‘a descent into the nausea and misanthropy and self-hatred about whose destructive possibilities this century has taught us everything we need to know’. However, Makiya conceded that support for victims could lead to an idiotic myopia. There were Arab intellectuals ‘who so idolised Palestinian victimhood that they became blinded to the nature of the regime in Iraq’. He admitted, the same could be said of his idolization of Iraqi victimhood. Both Palestinians and Iraqis were:

allowing ourselves to believe that there is something morally redeeming in the quality of victimhood itself. There isn’t. The very opposite is likely to be the case: the victims of cruelty or injustice are not only no better than their tormentors; they are more often than not just wanting to change places with them. That has been the experience of Israelis, particularly since they became an occupying power in 1967, and it has been the experience of Palestinians and Kurds under self-rule in recent years.

The Bertrand Russell whom his mother had dragged his father to hear in the Forties was more succinct when he mocked ‘The Fallacy of the Superior Virtue of the Oppressed’. Russell said that for too many right-thinking, left-leaning people it wasn’t enough to assert that oppression was an evil which destroyed its victims. The oppressed’s experience of oppression had to ennoble them. Their leaders had to become titans, their poets geniuses and their fighters heroes. The point of honest politics is to end oppression and allow its victims to be like everyone else. The Fallacy of the Superior Virtue implied that victimhood was morally invigorating, so the more of it there was the better.

You only have to glance at a newspaper or turn on the television to learn that Russell’s fallacy has spread like bindweed through a well-manured flowerbed.

Both Makiya and the British and American forces would have done well to think about it before the invasion of Iraq – so would I and other supporters of the war. Makiya realized it wouldn’t be easy. ‘Iraq was a state whose legitimacy was derived from impossibly intertwined circles of complicity and victimhood,’ he wrote long before the invasion. The post-Baathist future was ‘going to be like walking a tightrope, balancing the legitimate grievances of all those who have suffered against the knowledge that if everyone is held accountable who is in fact guilty, the country will be torn apart’.

In the Nineties, however, the ranks of those outside Iraq who wanted to overthrow the Baath Party were thin. The Berlin Wall was down and the terrors of the twentieth century appeared to be over. Consumers dedicated their lives to getting and spending, and the liberal-minded among them relaxed and enjoyed their world music and GM-free organic food. Makiya cut a lonely figure as he toured American universities and think tanks trying to prick consciences. In his speeches he declared that it was foolish to regard Iraq as a sovereign nation whose internal affairs were its own business, and not only because of the crimes against humanity the Baathists had committed. Iraq’s political system was now the responsibility of the international community, he argued. The United Nations had imposed sanctions and no-fly zones but had left Saddam Hussein in power. Iraqis were ruled by the Baathists, and punished because the Baathists ruled them.

His audiences tut-tutted and offered what sympathy they could. Few had the faintest idea what to do. At the end of a talk in Washington DC, a well-dressed middle-aged man with a lined face and an intense gaze approached Makiya and offered him an apology. He in particular and the United States in general had let the people of Iraq down in 1991, he said. We should never have allowed Saddam to crush the rebellion. The massacre and his own failure to act haunted him.

‘I was impressed,’ Makiya told me. ‘It was an unsolicited gesture. There was no audience watching, no possible political gain. He said his name was Paul Wolfowitz. It meant nothing to me.’

Within a decade Wolfowitz’s name would be a swear word. As the conservative journalist Mark Steyn noted, the first half reminded his enemies of a scary predator and the second of a scary Jew. At the time, Wolfowitz was just another Republican out of office during the Clinton years. His last government job was as under-secretary of state at the Pentagon from where he watched in 1991 as Bush senior ordered American troops to pull back from helping the Iraqi revolutionaries for fear of upsetting a Saudi Arabian monarchy that most definitely did not want to see democracy in the Middle East. A character based on Wolfowitz appears in Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein fulminating at the cowardice of it all. ‘They send out a terrific army and give a demonstration of up-to-date high-tech warfare that flesh and blood can’t stand up to. But then they leave the dictatorship in place and steal away.’

Bellow didn’t get it right, Wolfowitz wasn’t shouting ‘forward to Baghdad’ in 1991, but he agonized over the failure to remove the Baath Party and the tens of thousands of Iraqis who had died in the attempted revolution. Wolfowitz’s academic parents brought him up on George Orwell and other writers from the democratic left. His father’s family had survived European fascism by fleeing Poland before the Nazis invaded. Other relatives weren’t as fortunate. He did not find a policy which left fascist dictatorships in power easy to live with. According to the conventional measures of the time, Wolfowitz was on the Right and Makiya on the Left, but they weren’t so different in beliefs and background, and in any case, conventional measures were no longer as reliable as they once had been.

George Packer, a historian of America’s involvement with Iraq, presents Wolfowitz as a tortured man who wanted to remove Saddam but accepted the reasons for stopping at the Iraqi border in 1991. If the Americans were to go in, of course, ‘the obvious question would have been: What then? It’s a question that Wolfowitz never managed to answer.’

If this makes Wolfowitz sound a tad more likeable than the standard portrait of a blood-crazed lackey of imperialist oil corporations, then that is because he was. True he had been a Cold Warrior and produced ludicrous overestimates of Soviet strength in the Seventies. But as communism fell apart, democracy began to follow Wolfowitz around. He argued that America should back the revolution against Ferdinand Marcos, its Cold War dictator of the Philippines, and was a supporter of the democratic movement against the pro-American tyranny in Indonesia and the feminist cause in Iran.

I saw him at a press briefing in London in 2004. It was a disconcerting occasion. His adviser told me to meet him in a Mayfair nightclub more usually associated with minor royals than shabby journalists. To make matters worse, the bulk of Wolfowitz’s audience consisted of Conservative pundits I’d attacked over the years – occasionally fairly. This wasn’t my world and I found the only other leftie in the room and huddled next to him for warmth. We listened to Wolfowitz present a coherent case for helping the democratic movement in Iran fight the priests. It was hard not to be impressed by his seriousness of purpose.

On the way out, I asked my friend, ‘What’s wrong with supporting the overthrow of a theocracy?’

‘Well, it may not work, but apart from that nothing.’

That was the nub of it. The Wolfowitz who introduced himself to Makiya in the mid-Nineties, and the other neo-conservatives who were to take up the anti-Saddam cause, were hated because of their espousal of causes the liberal-left had once owned but no longer had the moral self-confidence to defend. Freud’s narcissism of small differences played its part in widening the divide that opened up as the second Iraq war approached; as did the subconscious acknowledgement that the devil had stolen the best tunes. ‘The neo-conservatives were fighting the Left’s battles for them,’ said Makiya pithily, and no one likes a plagiarist.

Like many other political labels from Tory to suffragette, ‘neo-conservative’ began as an insult. Michael Harrington, a left-wing American activist in the Seventies, invented it to describe liberals who retained their support for the New Deal and welfare state but wanted a hard line against the Soviet Union. The Republican neo-conservatives of the Nineties were different. They had no affection for social democracy. They didn’t support the welfare state but said they wanted to ‘reform’ welfare – i.e. cut it – while simultaneously stuffing the pockets of the wealthy. After 9/11, the Republican priority was to give a huge tax cut to the rich – in contravention of the old and honourable policy that in time of war soldiers and their families should be the first to be compensated. The British Liberals and Conservatives who sent hundreds of thousands to die in the trenches of the First World War gave working-class men the vote when it was over. In 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Democrats passed the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act that guaranteed the troops help with finding jobs or a good education when the Second World War was over. When American soldiers came back from Afghanistan and Iraq, they found the Republicans had acknowledged their sacrifice by giving the boss class a tax break for staying at home. Neo-conservatives were as much in favour of privatization and executives bloating themselves at the expense of workers and taxpayers, and just as willing to make excuses for know-nothing creationists, as any other American conservative. In domestic policy, there was no ‘neo’ about them.

Their difference with other conservatives was their opposition to ‘realism’ in foreign policy. Or rather, the neo-conservatives held that they were the true realists, as everyone in politics does. The interests of the United States lay in spreading democracy, they said, because democracies did not go to war with each other. This was an idealistic, almost Utopian foreign policy which looked as if it would have no influence in Washington. George W. Bush wasn’t a convert. He won power in the 2000 Presidential election on an isolationist ticket and said he had no time for the ‘liberal’ wars of his predecessor, Bill Clinton. Wolfowitz and his friends had limited influence until Mohamed Atta and his fellow martyrs proved on 11 September 2001 that oppression in the Middle East was not producing virtue, superior or otherwise. Tyrannies were pushing the disaffected into a psychopathic cult of death. For all the interminable arguments about the origins of the second Iraq war, the simple truth remains that it would never have been possible without the atrocities in New York and Washington.

The friendless Iraqi opposition had been befriended by the neo-conservatives long before. I remember listening in wonderment to socialist Kurds just back from Washington after Bush’s election in 2000. They were full of praise for the determination of Wolfowitz and the other neo-conservatives in the Pentagon to overthrow Saddam. Makiya shared their admiration. By 2002, he had had enough of writing about victimhood and the treason of the intellectuals. The Baathists had been in power for all of his adult life and he wanted them out. Republic of Fear became a part of the case for war. When no weapons of mass destruction were found beyond odds and ends, you could say it became the whole case for war. Makiya too became a partisan. He argued in favour of going in, and threw himself into the intense and vicious debates within the US administration. Afterwards as he looked on the bloodbath that followed the invasion, he explained that he sided with Wolfowitz against the CIA and the State Department because Wolfowitz and the neo-conservative Pentagon believed that:

US foreign policy towards the Middle East had rested for 50 years on support of autocratic regimes (like Saudi Arabia, like Saddam in the 1980s, like Mubarak’s Egypt) in the interests of securing oil supplies. This policy had led to a level of anger at the United States inside the Arab world that provided fertile breeding ground for organisations like Al-Qaeda … The United States should reach out to peoples not governments, to focus on democratisation as opposed to stability. That school of thought emerged in the Pentagon, led by people like Paul Wolfowitz. It ran headlong against the State Department’s traditional accommodationist policies. The conflict was between those agencies that were wedded to the policies of the past and those breaking new ground. The former were often in the State Department – people who knew that part of the world in a very particular way. They had been Ambassadors, they had hobnobbed with the Saudi ruling families, and they had developed certain preconceptions about how the Arab world worked. By contrast those who were pushing for a dramatically new policy, like Paul Wolfowitz, were not shackled by such a past, nor burdened by the weight of those prejudices. But they did not necessarily know the Middle East as well.

Intellectuals in politics are occasionally dangerous and invariably disappointed. George Packer, who had known Makiya for years, said his friend didn’t understand that for all their tough talk the neo-conservatives were far less worldly than they appeared. The Republicans had been out of the White House in the Nineties. Most of the party’s senior figures had treated the decade’s debates on humanitarian intervention and failed states with derision, and opposed the wars to stop ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia as bleeding heart indulgences. They hadn’t thought about the mass migration of refugees, chemical weapons in the hands of terrorists and global crime. They hadn’t come to terms with the new age of warfare where the infantry had to be soldiers one minute and police officers the next. Makiya’s last, best hope was George W. Bush, who as Packer said, came to power with ‘no curiosity about the world, only a suspicion that his predecessor had entangled America in far too many obscure places of no importance to national interests’.

Needs must when the Devil drives, but the Republicans weren’t the best generals to follow into battle. The charge from his old comrades that Makiya had travelled to the right when he went along with them seemed proved beyond reasonable doubt. In conventional political terms, there was truth in it. Yet the purpose of his life was how to end the subjection of his people by a genocidal warmonger, and from that Makiya never faltered. While all around rushed by, he kept his feet on the ground and his eyes fixed on the face of fascism. If he had gone from left to right, he had crossed the political spectrum by standing still.

And what of our friends on the Left, where were they going as they heaped abuse on their former comrade? A long way from where they came from was the kindest answer.

By chance, Makiya’s family found asylum in London rather than Paris, New York or Kuwait City. Perhaps more predictably, Kanan Makiya fell in with leftists who were like him: refined revolutionaries, many with family money in trust funds to keep them in style while they fought the workers’ cause. With Saddam’s Iraq throwing millions of refugees into dozens of countries the initial confrontation between the Western and Iraqi lefts might have been in a different city with a different group of leftists, but I doubt that the outcome would have been very different.

As it was, the workings of chance had it that Iraq’s foremost dissident fell in with intellectuals from the English-speaking academic left of the Eighties. They were among the first to face the challenge of coping with the ultra-right after the end of the Cold War, and among the first to flunk it. Two decades on, the brazenness of their behaviour remains astonishing. The U-turns of this part of the Left precisely matched the U-turns of the powerful. When Saddam was America’s ally, Iraqis received fraternal sympathy; when he was America’s enemy, they got the cold shoulder.

The virulence with which they tore into Makiya is telling. The Eighties leftists made no expressions of regret for the Iraqis who must continue to live under Saddam; delivered no arguments more in sorrow than in anger. They didn’t conclude with a remorseful shake of the head that on the balance of the available evidence it was better to leave Saddam in power, but turned on their former friend and screamed that he was ‘a man of vanity who has no compassion’, a ‘guinea pig witness’ and a sufferer from ‘mental pandemonium’.

They were flipping and flopping in a crucial year. The world’s decision to pull back from Baghdad in 1991 coincided with the final collapse of the Soviet Union. Crowds had torn down statues of tyrants in Europe, but in the Middle East, the United Nations ruled that they should remain in place. For the Left of all shades, the collapse of communism presented both an opportunity and a potential crisis. Most seized the opportunity to remove the faint hint of association with totalitarianism. The victories of centre-left parties in Britain and Western Europe, and Bill Clinton’s far more equivocal successes in the United States, seemed to foretell a world that took universal human rights seriously.

The crisis began on the far left that needed the Soviet Union, although it pretended it didn’t. Many of the revolutionaries of the 1968 generation called themselves Trotskyists rather than communists to avoid taking responsibility for Stalin, a transparent manoeuvre to keep communism alive by pretending that the one-party state would have been fine if only Lenin or Trotsky had stayed in charge of the secret police. While the Soviet Union was there, they could dream that it would transform itself and its occupied territories into true socialist societies, and be flattered by the knowledge that its existence forced important people to take their ideas seriously. Diplomats and spies had to learn the language of Marxism to understand the code of the Soviet Union. Once it was gone, Marx became just another economist. Parts of his analysis of capitalism still stand up in my view, but I wouldn’t argue if you said you could find better elsewhere.

Makiya abandoned his Marxism because it couldn’t explain Baathism or Islamism or why the Palestinian groups he and Said had supported when they were young degenerated into criminal gangs in the Lebanese civil war. So, too, did millions of other socialists. Everywhere in the late twentieth century, communist and socialist parties dissolved or transformed themselves. If Iraqis had overthrown Saddam in 1991, and turned to people in the rich world who called themselves Marxists and said, ‘Tell us how to govern our country, teach us how to build the good society’ they would not have heard an articulate reply. The failures and massacres of communism were too fresh and the success of market economics was too great.

The old double standard whereby the Right tended to support the victims of communism and Soviet-sponsored dictatorships while the Left tended to support the victims of fascism and right-wing dictatorships went with the Cold War. The single standard that most on the liberal-left and moderate right said they accepted was universal human rights. But in the rubble of the far left, among the irreconcilables who could not stand the turn history had taken, a rival standard developed that was anything but a principled call for universal freedom.

On the contrary, its adherents used the end of the Cold War to embrace a kind of nihilism. They could break the old taboos that had stopped them supporting the ideas and movements of the extreme right, and endorse or excuse any foreign force as long as it was the enemy of Western democracy. Naturally, they found that many of those enemies were in the Middle East whose power structures were unaltered by the collapse of Soviet power and the Gulf War of 1991.

You have to have been on the Left to understand the extraordinary nature of the shift. The reason why communism doesn’t seem all bad to me is the same reason the BBC gives airtime to Trotskyist comedians but not to neo-Nazi raconteurs: the far left was meant to be solidly against the extreme right. In reality, the anti-fascist left was a bit of a myth. Communists and fascists worked together against liberalism many times in the Twenties and Thirties. Rationally, I know it was a natural partnership because the similarities between communism and fascism were more important than the differences. But viscerally to anyone brought up on the Left after the Second World War, an unwavering opposition to fascism was the trait in which we could take the greatest pride. There was a hierarchy. The best society was some form of socialism that varied according to taste, and like the kingdom of God never came. The runner-up was what we had: a liberal democracy with a mixed economy. The lowest of the low was fascism or some other kind of chauvinism.

After the Cold War, the hierarchy began to crumble. Apologists began to pop up for dictatorships and religious fundamentalists so far to the right it was impossible to outflank them. As long as they were anti-Western, nothing else mattered. Makiya was among the first to suffer the consequences of the new ideas because Iraq raised the awkward problem of what happened to people whose miseries could not be blamed on ‘the West’. Suppose, he said, the Americans had marched on to Baghdad. Suppose they had the worst of imperialist motives, to get their hands on Iraqi oil, for instance. Iraq would still be a better place because they would have to dismantle the apparatus of the genocidal state. He looked at his comrades and asked, ‘Do you want to keep that apparatus in place?’

His former friends did not want to defend Saddam passionately in the way that the communists of the Thirties passionately defended the Soviet Union; rather they treated his continued rule with an indifferent nonchalance because the survival of the Baath was against American interests. To their mind, the worst form of government, the power which was responsible for the world’s crimes, was ‘the West’ or liberal democracy or ‘capitalism’ or America. Bubbling underneath, I suspect, was a fear that freedom from tyranny anywhere in the world would lead in the long run to societies rather like the societies they lived in – and that was intolerable.

Makiya’s awkward questions did not go away in the years that followed. What were the leftists of the rich world going to do when confronted by not only Iraqi socialists, but Iranian feminists and Zimbabwean liberals telling them very loudly that there were worse ideas than modern democracy? Betray them? Pretend they didn’t exist?

If they did, they would reveal their emptiness. With the exception of religious fundamentalism and extreme nationalism, political ideas are universal. A believer in the free market has to believe it can work as well in Bahrain as Boston and offer intellectual support to his fellow advocates of capitalism. If a Western feminist were to turn her back on persecuted Afghan women, you could call her a hypocrite. If the majority of Western feminists were to do the same, you could conclude that feminism was not a serious political force. The oppression of women is as wrong in London as Kabul. If Western feminists say it isn’t, then they unwittingly parrot the imperialists of the nineteenth century who believed God gave rights to freeborn Englishmen but not dark-skinned natives. In these circumstances, feminist beliefs wouldn’t be a philosophy but a lifestyle choice or a way of obtaining advantage in the Western job market.

So it was with the Marxists Makiya confronted. If they couldn’t talk to others who called themselves socialists, and who had suffered far more than wealthy intellectuals could imagine, they were in the absurd position of being socialists without comrades.

When that kind of sickness is abroad, the smell that hits your nostrils is not the whiff of hypocrisy but the stench of death.