I have been following with some interest the various feathers ruffled by Johann Hari’s latest couple of pieces, one a review of Nick Cohen’s What’s Left? - a book which will be familiar to regular readers of this blog - the other a trimmed version of the same that appeared in the Independent.
Hari’s overall characterisation of Cohen’s book is fairly accurate, and there are many good points to his review. Some of them, indeed, are a little familiar. Hari skewers Cohen, for instance, over his suggestion that John Maynard Keynes put forward an argument to “justify” appeasement - precisely what I noted in my own review. And he notes the equal absurdity of the idea that Iraqi suicide bombers were adopting the objections and ideas of Western liberals as they self-detonated, along with Cohen’s shameful attempt to smear the late Edward Said - both points made by Stuart Abercrombie in his review.
Hari does still feel the need, apparently, to continue smearing members of the anti-war left himself, resulting in an unfortunate tirade against the Lenin’s Tomb blog, which “lenin” himself has ably dispatched. But I am, on the whole, glad that Cohen’s book will be receiving some of the treatment it so clearly deserves in the mainstream press, rather than merely in the all-too-ignorable blogosphere. The reactions it produces will also be thoroughly fascinating to observe.
Already lunging into view is Oliver Kamm, who has written a bi-partite commentary on Hari’s pieces. Almost too wonderfully, he begins by criticising Hari’s grammar. So far, so predictable. But some of his more substantive points are also worth examining.
On neoconservatism, for instance. Kamm criticises Hari for conflating all neoconservative ideology into the figure of Jeane Kirkpatrick, and failing to note how later ideological progressions took the devotion to democracy promotion beyond the realms of mere rhetoric. His evidence? That, after the Kirkpatrick era came to a close, Elliot Abrams was appointed secretary of state for inter-American affairs.
Abrams, one would have thought, is a straightforward enough case to dismiss. For this is the man who was indicted in 1991 for lying to Congress about his role in raising money for the Nicaraguan Contras - the US-backed insurgent army that fought to bring down the democratically-elected government of Nicaragua. Managing to display your utter contempt for democracy both in and outside your home country in the course of a single scandal, it has to be said, is no mean feat. It also displays considerable chutzpah to select such a character as an exemplar of democracy promotion. But this is far from beyond Kamm’s reach.
Bewilderingly, however, after this he immediately backtracks. “Johann is free” he points out, to say “that the Reagan administration was scarcely at the forefront of democratic change in Latin America - and of course he would be right.” Indeed one hardly knows why he brought it up in the first place.
But Kamm also plays up Abrams’ neoconservative credentials with this interesting link: Abrams, he writes, “is literally part of the family of neoconservatism (he is the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz, Editor-in-Chief of Commentary)”. So how has Abrams’ father-in-law - evidently himself a quintessential neoconservative by Kamm's standards - advanced the cause of democracy promotion in recent years? David Hirst, former Middle East correspondent for the Guardian, cites the frankly terrifying words of one of Podhoretz's seminal essays from Commentary in September 2002:
““There is no denying that the alternative to these [Middle Eastern] regimes could easily turn out to be worse, even (or especially) if it comes into power through democratic elections,” because “very large numbers of people in the Muslim world sympathize with Osama bin Laden and would vote for radical Islamic candidates of his stripe if they were given the chance”. “Nevertheless,” he dauntlessly continued, “there is a policy that can head it off, provided that the US has the will to fight World War IV - the war against militant Islam - to a successful conclusion, and provided that we then have the stomach to impose a new political culture on the defeated parties.”” (Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch, Faber & Faber 2003, pp. 113-4; my italics.)
In other words, Podhoretz’s favoured solution is to batter the Islamic world into submission, allowing them elections, continuing to batter them if they elect candidates the US does not deem fit, with the ultimate aim of imposing “a new political culture” - which one can refer to as “democracy” if one so chooses; or one can refer to it as “rice pudding”, given that it bears an equivalent degree of resemblance.
In summary, then, when Kamm writes that “it is demonstrably false that the neoconservative stress on democracy was merely a rhetorical creation of the 1990s”, since “it has a clear lineage in theory and practice”, naming such prominent examples of the movement as Elliot Abrams and Norman Podhoretz, it is surely one of those moments which - in Tom Lehrer’s justly famous words - make satire obsolete.
