It can only take a near-unfathomable level of self-deception to be Nick Cohen. As the guy wrote in last Sunday’s Observer:
“I don’t think the moral blindness of the intelligentsia can last much longer. Obviously, some who have lost their bearings after Iraq will never find them again and stagger around bellowing for the rest of their days, but the hysterical mood is lifting from others.”
The best explanation for sentences like these can only be a careful attempt at self-satire. Surely. A few paragraphs previously, on the protest of Brian Haw in Parliament Square, Cohen is telling us that the man “can’t ask who is killing whom in Iraq”. For Nick, the answer is quite simple: “the death squads of the Baathists and Iranian-backed Shia militias”; people like “Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the late leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq”. In Afghanistan, the problems fall at the door of “the Taliban’s crimes and ideology”. Put simply, it’s the bad guys.
As for the good guys, our only crime is our insufficient resolve in seeing the job through to the end. Says Nick:
“The best justification for Haw’s morality is that if British and American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot guarantee order, they are indirectly responsible for atrocities committed by their opponents. As the inevitable conclusion is that they should try harder to defeat their enemies, it is not a point that Haw would want to hear.”
Poor, deluded Brian Haw. If only he could aspire to the level of rational perspicacity promoted by Observer columnists. He cannot understand that it is not we who are bombing, shooting, beating and torturing innocent Iraqis. The deaths squads, of course, have nothing to do with us. Iraqis continue to think we’re doing a great job. We are there with a UN mandate. Our presence has helped stem the violence. Our enemy, on the other hand, are ruthless fanatics, jihadists and Baathists hell-bent on causing suffering and mayhem.
Another member of Cohen’s camp, Oliver Kamm, argues along similar lines. Kamm, indeed, holds Cohen in such high regard that he has nominated the latter’s What’s Left? as one of his books of the year. (Observant readers will note that he chooses the later edition, which carefully omits one extraordinary slur against a deceased academic, so perhaps he has at least some shame.)
In any case, on Iraq, it’s the old familiar line from Ollie:
“British and American forces operating under a UN mandate in Iraq are not practising terrorism; they are fighting it. They are not targeting civilians; they are protecting civilians.”
It’s instructive to note that, when questioned previously on a similar line of argument (“It is flatly untrue … that US troops are a cause of violence …”), Kamm provided no substantive evidence to refute what a large majority of Iraqis – not to mention the head of the British army – believe.
As it now turns out, residents of Basra don’t really miss us. Yet this latest addition to an increasingly voluminous pile of evidence does not seem to in any way alter the trajectory of writers like Cohen and Kamm. Which is hardly a surprise, of course. Their arguments on this note are supported not by evidence, but precisely by “stagger[ing] around bellowing” in a “hysterical mood” and a state of “moral blindness”; by constant repetition of a constant theme: it’s not us who are to blame – it’s them. The “lapdogs of war”, then, are a lot like real dogs: they can see the world only in black and white.
P.S. Did I say “bombing”? I did.
