It is something of a truism, but one worth repeating nonetheless: every popular movement, whatever its cause, needs to be self-critical. As the Palestinian activist and scholar Edward Said once wrote on nationalist movements against imperialism, there was always an important element within such movements that was “vitally critical”, refusing both the blandishments of rhetoric and the slavish, uncritical acceptance of a purely oppositional standpoint. Instead, it constantly strove to realise more meaningful, humanistic forms of liberation and resistance.(1)
Fortunately for the contemporary anti-war movement, such a “vitally critical” element is indisputably present within it. It can be seen in all sorts of areas: the support for progressive movements within those countries that have been, or are likely to be, the target of Western aggression, including the women’s movements in Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran;(2) the willingness to criticise the dogmatism or dubious sympathies that undoubtedly exist within the anti-war movement, along with the amoral mentality that abandons basic principles in favour of supporting any opponent of the West;(3) even the willingness to accept – though far from uncritically, naively, or without respect for the principle of last resort – instances of military intervention, according to the resulting human consequences.(4)
Given that this strand both exists and is relatively active within the anti-war movement, the question naturally arises of what Cohen is trying to achieve in What’s Left? Are we not well aware of the failings within the anti-war movement? It quickly becomes apparent, however, that Cohen has very little interest in honest criticism: rather, his agenda is to attack anyone unwilling to back the war, and the broader “War on Terror”, more or less indiscriminately. Naomi Klein, for one, was to learn this well before the book’s publication. After producing some of the best writing from post-war Iraq of any columnist throughout 2004 – including calling for “protections for women and minorities”, speaking out against the repression of “groups demanding direct elections”, even noting the “chilling” sight of al-Sadr’s supporters chanting “Death to America, Death to the Jews” – everything, in other words, that, given Cohen’s usual grounds for complaint, we might have expected to placate him – he accused her, in his Observer column, of making “excuses for the theocrats and misogynists”.(5)
Cohen knows a lot about excuse-making. In What’s Left, he not only seeks to defend his own support for the Iraq war, but to whitewash the motives of its prosecutors, painting its opponents – whoever they may be – in the blackest terms possible. He relies, on more or less every page, on shoddy propaganda unsupported by credible evidence, extreme generalisations, wholesale misrepresentations, logical non sequiturs and straightforward falsehoods. What is most baffling is that it is quite often his own comments that make the positions he takes so transparently ludicrous. Consequently the argument of the book is a general mess – gushing polemic propping up staggering feats of doublethink.
Cohen’s Doublethink
“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself.”
– George Orwell, 1984
Absurd contradictions coexist side by side in What’s Left, barely acknowledged. Perhaps the most obvious example can be seen when Cohen transports us back to 1991 to replay what, with regard to Iraq at least, he sees as the West’s biggest mistake: failing to depose Saddam Hussein. He recalls almost reverentially the challenge of Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya after the Gulf War:
“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?”” (pp. 89-90; my italics)
Evidently neither Makiya nor Cohen can quite bring themselves to face what “the worst imperialist motives” actually means – nor even the explicitly professed motives at the time. What exactly did National Security Council official Richard Haass mean in 1991, for instance, when he stated that “Our policy is to get rid of Saddam, not his regime”?(6) Was he talking about a policy compatible with plans to “dismantle the apparatus” of the Iraqi state?
Yet bizarrely, Cohen has already made this exact point. In 1991, he notes, the “great powers wanted a palace revolution that would bring a reliable autocrat to the fore, not a popular uprising.” (p. 72) Nevertheless, he still seems to think the consequence for Iraqis of Saddam’s ouster by an invading American army would have been “freedom from tyranny” (p. 90). The contradiction is glaring, but never reconciled.
The same bizarre thought patterns reappear in Cohen’s discussion of Noam Chomsky, the subject of an entire chapter. Virtually every claim Cohen makes on this score is either a misrepresentation or an outright falsehood, but one in particular is worth mentioning: the claim (also the subject of the Guardian’s famous piece of fabrication last year) that Chomsky denied the Srebrenica massacre. As Cohen writes, “The ignoble and inevitable terminus of the reasoning of Chomsky and his comrades was denial. It had to be.” Srebrenica “had to be denied if the project of blackening the belated interventions in the Balkans was to stand a chance of succeeding.” (p. 171, my italics)
Denial, apparently, was “inevitable”; it “had to” be pursued: these are pretty strong imperatives. How exactly, then, does Chomsky go about this inescapable process of denial, denial which for ideological reasons he simply couldn’t avoid? “[N]ot with outright denial of massacres …” (p. 178). Oh.
In fact, as a straightforward search of the chomsky.info website for the word “Srebrenica” demonstrates, Chomsky referred to Srebrenica as a “horrendous”, “vicious” “massacre”, for which “[t]he estimates are thousands of people slaughtered”.(7) Chomsky’s form of denial, then, is denial without denial. Orwell would certainly have understood.
The same process is applied to the thoughts and motivations of Tony Blair, but this time in reverse: here, we are meant to believe the Prime Minister is an honest, moral agent, in spite of the evidence. Granted he may have produced some half-truths in the run-up to the war, according to Cohen (admitting he lied outright, a matter of public record, would apparently be too much); what he should have done is squared with the British public, saying “here was a chance to remove a disgusting regime and combat the growth in terror by building democracy, and he was going to take it.” (p. 285)
Nice as it is to have the benefit of full, unmediated access to the Prime Minister’s most private thoughts as Cohen apparently does, it is also a matter of public record that Blair was warned before the war about the increased threat of terrorism he was about to unleash.(8) Moreover, and at least as crucially, we are forced to ask why he was unconcerned about liberating, say, the Uzbeks from Islam Karimov’s similarly “disgusting” regime. The UK government was certainly concerned to intervene in that case: it intervened to stop its ambassador from doing anything about the monstrous totalitarian government with which the US and UK had allied themselves, and hounding him into a state of severe depression. Cohen knows this, because in a former incarnation he documented it.(9) According to Craig Murray, Cohen was even one of those who revealed that the pressure to oust him came from No. 10.(10)
But then, bewilderingly, it seems Cohen was always well aware of both Blair’s hypocrisy, and his lack of concern for Iraqis. In the introduction to the book he is scathing on the subject:
“I was infuriated by the sight of New Labour pretending Britain welcomed the victims of genuine persecution while all the time quietly rigging the system to stop genuine refugees reaching Britain. … among asylum seekers fleeing genuine persecution were countless Iraqis the Baathists had driven to pack their bags and run for their lives.” (p. 7)
Again, the doublethink is profound, and again it is unexplained. Treating Iraqis like so much human detritus one minute, the next Blair cares about them enough to want to “liberate” them from the “disgusting regime” under which they suffer – so much so, indeed, that he is prepared to pour state funds into a war on their behalf. Never mind the cries of suffering humanity elsewhere, suffering that could be alleviated without the invasion of a country “swimming in a sea of oil” in Wolfowitz’s words; never mind the potential alternatives to war; in the prize draw of the Prime Minister’s conveniently selective conscience, the Iraqis – those who weren’t refugees – won. How lucky they proved to be.
One of the strangest contortion acts Cohen engages in, though, is over the issue of “excuses for terrorism” – or diagnoses of the “root causes” of terrorism. It doesn’t take a genius to notice that these two are far from identical; Cohen, like so many commentators before him, conflates them nonetheless. Unfortunately, he is then obliged to indulge in manifest absurdities, like condemning John Maynard Keynes as a justifier of appeasement, for criticising the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles in The Economic Consequences of the Peace. In Cohen’s words, Keynes “provided a “root cause” to justify appeasement” – even though, returning to the real world, he “did not go along with appeasement and had no hesitation … in condemning the fascist states” (p. 228).
Most extraordinarily, however, Cohen himself is apparently immune to his own accusations, noting (correctly) that “The denial of constitutional rights at Guantanamo Bay was [sic] both a scandal and a recruiting tool for al-Qaeda.” (p. 324) The irony that he is acknowledging the contribution of an unjust Western policy to the radicalisation of Muslims and the growth of terrorist networks, precisely what he deems unforgivable in those he singles out for criticism, apparently eludes him.
Truth, rationality, and other irrelevancies
If the Leader says of such and such an event, “It never happened” – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs – and after our experiences of the last few years that is not such a frivolous statement. – George Orwell, Looking Back on the Spanish War
State violence, including its imperial form, both cultivates and relies on a certain ideological framework to justify and support it. Much of Cohen’s writing, it is no exaggeration to say, represents a fairly straightforward bolstering of this framework, supported by the uncritical reproduction of propaganda. It is impossible not to recall the “white man’s burden” as he berates the anti-war protestors (supported by Ian McEwan, no less) for their alleged selfishness; or to miss the marked idea of “civilisation versus barbarism”, implicit throughout the entire book. Perhaps the clearest instance of Cohen’s “civilisation” occurs when he contends that “Democrats , feminists and socialists in the poor world … turn for support to the home of democracy, feminism and socialism in the West” (p. 12), apparently unaware of just how patronising he sounds, how supremely arrogant, in presenting the West as the natural seat of all progressive values.
Rather more prominent, though, are Cohen’s barbarians. They crop up all over the place, but one area they are particularly difficult to miss is in Cohen’s treatment of Israel-Palestine. While he certainly advocates Israel’s withdrawal to the 1967 borders, it will only be feasible, apparently, in certain circumstances. “Maybe if the international community,” Cohen suggests, “were to deploy troops to safeguard Israel’s borders, it will happen.” (p. 354) Certainly Cohen can’t be faulted for his desire to protect the helpless US-backed IDF from the devastating might of the troops, tanks, planes and helicopter gunships of Palestine’s national armed forces (were any of these to exist). Obvious facts, on the other hand, like the enormous discrepancy between Palestinian and US-Israeli means of violence – resulting last year in a 30:1 ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed(11) – are simply ignored. Rational observers might have thought the withholding of active support to Israel until she desists in violating international law would be quite sufficient to bring the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza to an end; but when one sees the world through the doctrinal prism that posits “Western intervention” as a panacea, patent absurdities, it would seem, become truths. This even extends to recalling the West’s “acquiesence in the Indonesian invasion of East Timor” (p. 161) – a bit like recalling Hitler’s “acquiesence” in the Holocaust.
Similarly, when one is prepared to sanction outrageous historical distortions about “[t]he attempted Arab invasion of Israel in 1967” (p. 21),(12) or reproduce uncritically the canard about Ahmedinejad’s threat to “wipe [Israel] off the map” (p. 338),(13) the barbarians are likely to appear ever-present, not least to the reader. They are certainly present in Cohen’s Iraq, where he perceives a helpfully consistent standard of pure evil behind the Iraqi insurgency – indeed he bristles at the very use of the word. In Cohen’s world, the violence in Iraq can be reduced to a very simple formula: “Baathists … joined with Islamists from al-Qaeda to form what delicate euphemists called the “insurgency”” (p. 32). These delicate euphemists apparently include the International Crisis Group, whose 2006 report on the insurgency, published on the Financial Times website, noted that the US’s accounts of the identity and objectives of the insurgency have been “assumed rather than carefully investigated and scrutinised”, have consequently “relied on gross approximations and crude categories (Saddamists, Islamo-fascists and the like) that bear only passing resemblance to reality”, and that explanations identical to Cohen’s are “seriously flawed”.(14) Also among the euphemists, it would seem, are the US intelligence community.(15)
Cohen on the Media
Is the English press honest or dishonest? At normal times it is deeply dishonest. – George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn
One of the points it is hard to miss about the Euston Manifesto – the document in which Cohen’s ideological clique set out their ideas – is a powerful sense of grievance at being shut out of the mainstream media. Cohen’s contention in What’s Left is much the same; although here, at least, he offers an attempt at an explanation.
Not for the first time, however, he relies on arguments straight out of the right-wing tabloids. The “liberal journalism” of the BBC is apparently an inevitable by-product “when you hire upper-middle-class arts graduates, pay them well and allow them to work, eat and sleep together in west London …” (p. 304). The result is a “collective group think” (p. 304), in which the BBC “treat upholders of the liberal consensus as purveyors of an incontestable truth”(16) and “doesn’t report certain things which are uncomfortable”.(17) Thus, he claims (with the kind of generalising hyperbole typical of the entire book), after 7 July 2005, “conventionally minded BBC presenters would gasp if an interviewee suggested that there was more to Islamist violence than a dislike of British foreign policy.” (p. 279)
What, then, would such liberal-minded middle-class metropolitans do with, say, a leaked document from inside government, noting the link between the government’s foreign policy and the increasing risk of Muslim extremist violence within Britain? We don’t have to imagine, as it happens, because, shortly after the July 7 bombings, the Times reported on, and published online, the leaked joint Home Office-Foreign Office report “Young Muslims and Extremism”, which noted exactly that.(18) Confirming that it does indeed disregard “uncomfortable” facts, the BBC simply ignored it, despite being contacted repeatedly (by myself, among others) and urged to report it. To this day, a search of the BBC website for “young muslims and extremism” fails to produce any mention of the report or its contents. In the BBC’s version of history, it never existed.
So much, then, for Cohen’s critique of the BBC. He also lends his efforts, however, to an attempt to debunk radical analysis of the mass media. Much of his intermingling commentary on Chomsky is simply rubbish – but rubbish that, unfortunately, to a layman with minimal knowledge of the man’s writing, just about passes the credibility test. According to Chomsky’s account of the media, we are told, “rival owners unite in a political pact to brainwash the masses” (p. 159); “peoples of the democracies” apparently “didn’t realize that their freedom was a fraud” (p. 157); Chomsky “was emphatic on the worthlessness of the US system of government …” (pp. 156-7). Returning once more to the real world, of course, Chomsky has pointed out exactly the opposite of the latter claims, that “One of the very good things about the United States is it’s a very free society, uniquely so”.(19) But Cohen isn’t one to let the facts get in the way of a good slander.(20)
While most of Cohen’s account here relies on the tired “conspiracy theory” line, and the reductive and largely irrelevant label of “false consciousness”, he does offer one attempt at a substantive counter-example, which is worth examining more closely:
“The majority of British newspaper proprietors are as right wing as they were in the Forties. Yet they turned on John Major’s Conservative government when its popularity vanished and allowed their reporters to reveal as many of the sexual secrets of its members as they could find. They based their treachery on the sound commercial grounds that their readers had had enough of the Tories and sex sold. Owners and editors, including the senior management of the publically funded BBC, are true capitalists because they will put the interests of increasing market share before the interests of their class. If that entails turning on the governing elite, so be it.” (p. 159)
At a stroke, Cohen knocks down volumes of careful scholarship. Bravo indeed. Yet even the most cursory examination reveals his example to be a remarkably weak one. In Power Without Responsibility, for instance – a book Cohen elsewhere refers to as “the best guide to the British media” (and thus rather a good text against which to test his claims) – James Curran writes:
“It is tempting … to explain the change in the press as a market-oriented response to a political shift in the country, but what actually happened was a good deal more complicated than this. The key defector was Rupert Murdoch, who transferred one-third of the national press’s circulation from Conservative to New Labour, and thus transformed at one stroke the political affiliation of the British press. However, his papers did not change their underlying editorial orientation in response to a perceived change in the country; their argument was rather that Blair was the only credible conservative worth supporting intentional in 1997. In addition, while continuing to support New Labour in principle, Murdoch’s papers still pursued a right-wing agenda in the early 2000s. The Murdoch press thus changed its political loyalty, but not its politics.”
Curran concludes:
“In effect a tacit deal was forged between two power-holders – one a market-friendly politician and the other a pragmatic businessman – in a form that sidelined the public. This was consistent with Murdoch’s record over the past thirty years.”
After these “power-holders” had got together, Richard Desmond, whose “instinct, in this situation, was to gravitate towards official power”, became “The other architect of the press’s realignment behind New Labour”, siding with the party in 2001. Cohen’s one solid example of the press in operation, then, far from supporting his argument, actually serves to refute it.(21)
Back to Reality
“War prisoners apart, the average citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies.” – George Orwell, 1984
Sadly I have only been able to deal with a fraction of the sheer rubbish that fills Cohen’s book in this review. Nonetheless, it is worth examining some of the details, if only to reveal just what a terrible book it is. And have no doubt: it is truly terrible.
Which, it must be said, inevitably raises the question: what’s all the fuss about? The press has been filled with commentary on Cohen, some of it critical, some of it ecstatic, but all of it presuming the book to be in some way worthy of the attention. As the conservative pundit Iain Dale pointed out in his interview with Cohen, What’s Left has now become “something of a publishing phenomenon”.(22)
And it’s worth noting, while we’re on the subject, that along with Cohen’s profoundly distorted apperceptions and explanations of the mainstream media, the Eustonians’ account of their own exclusion from the mainstream media never really stood up either. While authoritative reports on the link between Western foreign policy and terrorism are ignored, “the newspapers, the Times and the Observer in particular,” as the New Statesman’s John Kampfner correctly points out, “give commentators like [Cohen] a profile far greater than their salience among public opinion.”(23)
One of the Eustonians, Oliver Kamm, even went so far as to acknowledge this quite openly on his blog last October:
“In the last fortnight or so I have received quite a large number of invitations to appear on radio and television to argue the case for the Iraq War. I realise this is no reflection on my cogency; the programmes’ researchers state frankly that they have severe difficulty finding anyone willing to represent the pro-war view.”(24)
As Kampfner notes further, “Cohen himself writes for three publications”; David Aaronovitch, of course, also props up the viewpoint in the Times, with occasional help from Kamm; while associated pundits, among them Michael Gove and the Daily Mail’s Melanie Phillips, peddle a more or less indistinguishable line on both the anti-war left and foreign policy issues.
For all their bluster, however, it is rather more plausible to conclude that it is they, rather than the left they lay into, who have betrayed Iraq. For all their talk of the left’s “abandonment” of Iraqis, was it not Christopher Hitchens and David Aaronovitch who indulged in almost reflexive dismissal of the Lancet report’s figures on Iraqi civilian mortality? (Norman Geras, for one, was at least honest enough to admit that he “lack[ed] the statistical competence to be able to judge these reports”,(25) a damning indictment of his colleagues.) Is it not Oliver Kamm who, abandoning the real hopes and wishes of the men and women of Iraq, instead seems to have decided to invent his own version, in order to prop up support for a policy Iraqis overwhelmingly reject?(26) Is it not in fact Nick Cohen who, in parroting state propaganda, fosters “denial” about the true facts of the Iraqi insurgency – and, by extension, denies that it is Iraqis’ deep grievances at the post-war situation, including the occupation, that have fuelled it?
Of course Cohen, when he is willing to mention post-war Iraq at all, readily admits the disaster it has beome. In 2003, on the other hand, supporting the war “was so clearly the only moral option, it never occurred to me that there could be another choice.” (p. 314) Yet he still, after all this time, cannot answer the key question asked back then: why Iraq? Nor can this question simply be dismissed with accusations of “bad faith”, try as Cohen may. Even assuming the very best of intentions we know our leaders not to have possessed, human suffering at the time was very far from being confined to Iraq’s national boundaries. The extent of such suffering that could have been alleviated with the resources ultimately poured into Iraq, without the necessarily dangerous, costly, bloody, and unpredictable course of warfare, is vast. As the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard budget expert Linda Bilmes pointed out one year ago, the likely cost of the war is around $1-2 trillion dollars. According to Stiglitz, they were erring on the side of caution.(27) It has taken, in other words, an almost unfathomable amount of money to create a humanitarian catastrophe.
We could put this another way. If we thought it would be “moral” for, say, a hospital to blow its money on a course of treatment for an individual patient, treatment that was painful, expensive, potentially fatal, administered by a doctor who appeared to have no interest in the patient’s recovery, and for which there were potential, unexplored alternatives,(28) our case would be strongly suspect, to say the least. If we did so in a hospital full of other, easily treatable – and as yet untreated – patients, we might just about be approaching consistency with the “moral” standards that led Nick Cohen to support the Iraq war in 2003. These are not, let us hope, the kind of moral standards that will be widely shared.
Lest we forget, this line of inquiry does have implications in the present. We are still pouring billions into an occupation that a large majority of Iraqis want to see brought to an end; as Greg Palast puts it, we are being asked to save Iraq from the Iraqis.(29) Since the fatally compromised Iraqi government has failed to represent their will, it falls to us to do so. It is, as others might have put it, the only moral option.
Tim Holmes is a member of the UK Watch collective; he also blogs at The Memory Hole. This is an original article for UK Watch.
It is something of a truism, but one worth repeating nonetheless: every popular movement, whatever its cause, needs to be self-critical. As the Palestinian activist and scholar Edward Said once wrote on nationalist movements against imperialism, there was always an important element within such movements that was “vitally critical”, refusing both the blandishments of rhetoric and the slavish, uncritical acceptance of a purely oppositional standpoint. Instead, it constantly strove to realise more meaningful, humanistic forms of liberation and resistance.(1)
Fortunately for the contemporary anti-war movement, such a “vitally critical” element is indisputably present within it. It can be seen in all sorts of areas: the support for progressive movements within those countries that have been, or are likely to be, the target of Western aggression, including the women’s movements in Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran;(2) the willingness to criticise the dogmatism or dubious sympathies that undoubtedly exist within the anti-war movement, along with the amoral mentality that abandons basic principles in favour of supporting any opponent of the West;(3) even the willingness to accept – though far from uncritically, naively, or without respect for the principle of last resort – instances of military intervention, according to the resulting human consequences.(4)
Given that this strand both exists and is relatively active within the anti-war movement, the question naturally arises of what Cohen is trying to achieve in What’s Left? Are we not well aware of the failings within the anti-war movement? It quickly becomes apparent, however, that Cohen has very little interest in honest criticism: rather, his agenda is to attack anyone unwilling to back the war, and the broader “War on Terror”, more or less indiscriminately. Naomi Klein, for one, was to learn this well before the book’s publication. After producing some of the best writing from post-war Iraq of any columnist throughout 2004 – including calling for “protections for women and minorities”, speaking out against the repression of “groups demanding direct elections”, even noting the “chilling” sight of al-Sadr’s supporters chanting “Death to America, Death to the Jews” – everything, in other words, that, given Cohen’s usual grounds for complaint, we might have expected to placate him – he accused her, in his Observer column, of making “excuses for the theocrats and misogynists”.(5)
Cohen knows a lot about excuse-making. In What’s Left, he not only seeks to defend his own support for the Iraq war, but to whitewash the motives of its prosecutors, painting its opponents – whoever they may be – in the blackest terms possible. He relies, on more or less every page, on shoddy propaganda unsupported by credible evidence, extreme generalisations, wholesale misrepresentations, logical non sequiturs and straightforward falsehoods. What is most baffling is that it is quite often his own comments that make the positions he takes so transparently ludicrous. Consequently the argument of the book is a general mess – gushing polemic propping up staggering feats of doublethink.
Cohen’s Doublethink
“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself.”
– George Orwell, 1984
Absurd contradictions coexist side by side in What’s Left, barely acknowledged. Perhaps the most obvious example can be seen when Cohen transports us back to 1991 to replay what, with regard to Iraq at least, he sees as the West’s biggest mistake: failing to depose Saddam Hussein. He recalls almost reverentially the challenge of Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya after the Gulf War:
“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?”” (pp. 89-90; my italics)
Evidently neither Makiya nor Cohen can quite bring themselves to face what “the worst imperialist motives” actually means – nor even the explicitly professed motives at the time. What exactly did National Security Council official Richard Haass mean in 1991, for instance, when he stated that “Our policy is to get rid of Saddam, not his regime”?(6) Was he talking about a policy compatible with plans to “dismantle the apparatus” of the Iraqi state?
Yet bizarrely, Cohen has already made this exact point. In 1991, he notes, the “great powers wanted a palace revolution that would bring a reliable autocrat to the fore, not a popular uprising.” (p. 72) Nevertheless, he still seems to think the consequence for Iraqis of Saddam’s ouster by an invading American army would have been “freedom from tyranny” (p. 90). The contradiction is glaring, but never reconciled.
The same bizarre thought patterns reappear in Cohen’s discussion of Noam Chomsky, the subject of an entire chapter. Virtually every claim Cohen makes on this score is either a misrepresentation or an outright falsehood, but one in particular is worth mentioning: the claim (also the subject of the Guardian’s famous piece of fabrication last year) that Chomsky denied the Srebrenica massacre. As Cohen writes, “The ignoble and inevitable terminus of the reasoning of Chomsky and his comrades was denial. It had to be.” Srebrenica “had to be denied if the project of blackening the belated interventions in the Balkans was to stand a chance of succeeding.” (p. 171, my italics)
Denial, apparently, was “inevitable”; it “had to” be pursued: these are pretty strong imperatives. How exactly, then, does Chomsky go about this inescapable process of denial, denial which for ideological reasons he simply couldn’t avoid? “[N]ot with outright denial of massacres …” (p. 178). Oh.
In fact, as a straightforward search of the chomsky.info website for the word “Srebrenica” demonstrates, Chomsky referred to Srebrenica as a “horrendous”, “vicious” “massacre”, for which “[t]he estimates are thousands of people slaughtered”.(7) Chomsky’s form of denial, then, is denial without denial. Orwell would certainly have understood.
The same process is applied to the thoughts and motivations of Tony Blair, but this time in reverse: here, we are meant to believe the Prime Minister is an honest, moral agent, in spite of the evidence. Granted he may have produced some half-truths in the run-up to the war, according to Cohen (admitting he lied outright, a matter of public record, would apparently be too much); what he should have done is squared with the British public, saying “here was a chance to remove a disgusting regime and combat the growth in terror by building democracy, and he was going to take it.” (p. 285)
Nice as it is to have the benefit of full, unmediated access to the Prime Minister’s most private thoughts as Cohen apparently does, it is also a matter of public record that Blair was warned before the war about the increased threat of terrorism he was about to unleash.(8) Moreover, and at least as crucially, we are forced to ask why he was unconcerned about liberating, say, the Uzbeks from Islam Karimov’s similarly “disgusting” regime. The UK government was certainly concerned to intervene in that case: it intervened to stop its ambassador from doing anything about the monstrous totalitarian government with which the US and UK had allied themselves, and hounding him into a state of severe depression. Cohen knows this, because in a former incarnation he documented it.(9) According to Craig Murray, Cohen was even one of those who revealed that the pressure to oust him came from No. 10.(10)
But then, bewilderingly, it seems Cohen was always well aware of both Blair’s hypocrisy, and his lack of concern for Iraqis. In the introduction to the book he is scathing on the subject:
“I was infuriated by the sight of New Labour pretending Britain welcomed the victims of genuine persecution while all the time quietly rigging the system to stop genuine refugees reaching Britain. … among asylum seekers fleeing genuine persecution were countless Iraqis the Baathists had driven to pack their bags and run for their lives.” (p. 7)
Again, the doublethink is profound, and again it is unexplained. Treating Iraqis like so much human detritus one minute, the next Blair cares about them enough to want to “liberate” them from the “disgusting regime” under which they suffer – so much so, indeed, that he is prepared to pour state funds into a war on their behalf. Never mind the cries of suffering humanity elsewhere, suffering that could be alleviated without the invasion of a country “swimming in a sea of oil” in Wolfowitz’s words; never mind the potential alternatives to war; in the prize draw of the Prime Minister’s conveniently selective conscience, the Iraqis – those who weren’t refugees – won. How lucky they proved to be.
One of the strangest contortion acts Cohen engages in, though, is over the issue of “excuses for terrorism” – or diagnoses of the “root causes” of terrorism. It doesn’t take a genius to notice that these two are far from identical; Cohen, like so many commentators before him, conflates them nonetheless. Unfortunately, he is then obliged to indulge in manifest absurdities, like condemning John Maynard Keynes as a justifier of appeasement, for criticising the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles in The Economic Consequences of the Peace. In Cohen’s words, Keynes “provided a “root cause” to justify appeasement” – even though, returning to the real world, he “did not go along with appeasement and had no hesitation … in condemning the fascist states” (p. 228).
Most extraordinarily, however, Cohen himself is apparently immune to his own accusations, noting (correctly) that “The denial of constitutional rights at Guantanamo Bay was [sic] both a scandal and a recruiting tool for al-Qaeda.” (p. 324) The irony that he is acknowledging the contribution of an unjust Western policy to the radicalisation of Muslims and the growth of terrorist networks, precisely what he deems unforgivable in those he singles out for criticism, apparently eludes him.
Truth, rationality, and other irrelevancies
If the Leader says of such and such an event, “It never happened” – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs – and after our experiences of the last few years that is not such a frivolous statement. – George Orwell, Looking Back on the Spanish War
State violence, including its imperial form, both cultivates and relies on a certain ideological framework to justify and support it. Much of Cohen’s writing, it is no exaggeration to say, represents a fairly straightforward bolstering of this framework, supported by the uncritical reproduction of propaganda. It is impossible not to recall the “white man’s burden” as he berates the anti-war protestors (supported by Ian McEwan, no less) for their alleged selfishness; or to miss the marked idea of “civilisation versus barbarism”, implicit throughout the entire book. Perhaps the clearest instance of Cohen’s “civilisation” occurs when he contends that “Democrats , feminists and socialists in the poor world … turn for support to the home of democracy, feminism and socialism in the West” (p. 12), apparently unaware of just how patronising he sounds, how supremely arrogant, in presenting the West as the natural seat of all progressive values.
Rather more prominent, though, are Cohen’s barbarians. They crop up all over the place, but one area they are particularly difficult to miss is in Cohen’s treatment of Israel-Palestine. While he certainly advocates Israel’s withdrawal to the 1967 borders, it will only be feasible, apparently, in certain circumstances. “Maybe if the international community,” Cohen suggests, “were to deploy troops to safeguard Israel’s borders, it will happen.” (p. 354) Certainly Cohen can’t be faulted for his desire to protect the helpless US-backed IDF from the devastating might of the troops, tanks, planes and helicopter gunships of Palestine’s national armed forces (were any of these to exist). Obvious facts, on the other hand, like the enormous discrepancy between Palestinian and US-Israeli means of violence – resulting last year in a 30:1 ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed(11) – are simply ignored. Rational observers might have thought the withholding of active support to Israel until she desists in violating international law would be quite sufficient to bring the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza to an end; but when one sees the world through the doctrinal prism that posits “Western intervention” as a panacea, patent absurdities, it would seem, become truths. This even extends to recalling the West’s “acquiesence in the Indonesian invasion of East Timor” (p. 161) – a bit like recalling Hitler’s “acquiesence” in the Holocaust.
Similarly, when one is prepared to sanction outrageous historical distortions about “[t]he attempted Arab invasion of Israel in 1967” (p. 21),(12) or reproduce uncritically the canard about Ahmedinejad’s threat to “wipe [Israel] off the map” (p. 338),(13) the barbarians are likely to appear ever-present, not least to the reader. They are certainly present in Cohen’s Iraq, where he perceives a helpfully consistent standard of pure evil behind the Iraqi insurgency – indeed he bristles at the very use of the word. In Cohen’s world, the violence in Iraq can be reduced to a very simple formula: “Baathists … joined with Islamists from al-Qaeda to form what delicate euphemists called the “insurgency”” (p. 32). These delicate euphemists apparently include the International Crisis Group, whose 2006 report on the insurgency, published on the Financial Times website, noted that the US’s accounts of the identity and objectives of the insurgency have been “assumed rather than carefully investigated and scrutinised”, have consequently “relied on gross approximations and crude categories (Saddamists, Islamo-fascists and the like) that bear only passing resemblance to reality”, and that explanations identical to Cohen’s are “seriously flawed”.(14) Also among the euphemists, it would seem, are the US intelligence community.(15)
Cohen on the Media
Is the English press honest or dishonest? At normal times it is deeply dishonest. – George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn
One of the points it is hard to miss about the Euston Manifesto – the document in which Cohen’s ideological clique set out their ideas – is a powerful sense of grievance at being shut out of the mainstream media. Cohen’s contention in What’s Left is much the same; although here, at least, he offers an attempt at an explanation.
Not for the first time, however, he relies on arguments straight out of the right-wing tabloids. The “liberal journalism” of the BBC is apparently an inevitable by-product “when you hire upper-middle-class arts graduates, pay them well and allow them to work, eat and sleep together in west London …” (p. 304). The result is a “collective group think” (p. 304), in which the BBC “treat upholders of the liberal consensus as purveyors of an incontestable truth”(16) and “doesn’t report certain things which are uncomfortable”.(17) Thus, he claims (with the kind of generalising hyperbole typical of the entire book), after 7 July 2005, “conventionally minded BBC presenters would gasp if an interviewee suggested that there was more to Islamist violence than a dislike of British foreign policy.” (p. 279)
What, then, would such liberal-minded middle-class metropolitans do with, say, a leaked document from inside government, noting the link between the government’s foreign policy and the increasing risk of Muslim extremist violence within Britain? We don’t have to imagine, as it happens, because, shortly after the July 7 bombings, the Times reported on, and published online, the leaked joint Home Office-Foreign Office report “Young Muslims and Extremism”, which noted exactly that.(18) Confirming that it does indeed disregard “uncomfortable” facts, the BBC simply ignored it, despite being contacted repeatedly (by myself, among others) and urged to report it. To this day, a search of the BBC website for “young muslims and extremism” fails to produce any mention of the report or its contents. In the BBC’s version of history, it never existed.
So much, then, for Cohen’s critique of the BBC. He also lends his efforts, however, to an attempt to debunk radical analysis of the mass media. Much of his intermingling commentary on Chomsky is simply rubbish – but rubbish that, unfortunately, to a layman with minimal knowledge of the man’s writing, just about passes the credibility test. According to Chomsky’s account of the media, we are told, “rival owners unite in a political pact to brainwash the masses” (p. 159); “peoples of the democracies” apparently “didn’t realize that their freedom was a fraud” (p. 157); Chomsky “was emphatic on the worthlessness of the US system of government …” (pp. 156-7). Returning once more to the real world, of course, Chomsky has pointed out exactly the opposite of the latter claims, that “One of the very good things about the United States is it’s a very free society, uniquely so”.(19) But Cohen isn’t one to let the facts get in the way of a good slander.(20)
While most of Cohen’s account here relies on the tired “conspiracy theory” line, and the reductive and largely irrelevant label of “false consciousness”, he does offer one attempt at a substantive counter-example, which is worth examining more closely:
“The majority of British newspaper proprietors are as right wing as they were in the Forties. Yet they turned on John Major’s Conservative government when its popularity vanished and allowed their reporters to reveal as many of the sexual secrets of its members as they could find. They based their treachery on the sound commercial grounds that their readers had had enough of the Tories and sex sold. Owners and editors, including the senior management of the publically funded BBC, are true capitalists because they will put the interests of increasing market share before the interests of their class. If that entails turning on the governing elite, so be it.” (p. 159)
At a stroke, Cohen knocks down volumes of careful scholarship. Bravo indeed. Yet even the most cursory examination reveals his example to be a remarkably weak one. In Power Without Responsibility, for instance – a book Cohen elsewhere refers to as “the best guide to the British media” (and thus rather a good text against which to test his claims) – James Curran writes:
“It is tempting … to explain the change in the press as a market-oriented response to a political shift in the country, but what actually happened was a good deal more complicated than this. The key defector was Rupert Murdoch, who transferred one-third of the national press’s circulation from Conservative to New Labour, and thus transformed at one stroke the political affiliation of the British press. However, his papers did not change their underlying editorial orientation in response to a perceived change in the country; their argument was rather that Blair was the only credible conservative worth supporting intentional in 1997. In addition, while continuing to support New Labour in principle, Murdoch’s papers still pursued a right-wing agenda in the early 2000s. The Murdoch press thus changed its political loyalty, but not its politics.”
Curran concludes:
“In effect a tacit deal was forged between two power-holders – one a market-friendly politician and the other a pragmatic businessman – in a form that sidelined the public. This was consistent with Murdoch’s record over the past thirty years.”
After these “power-holders” had got together, Richard Desmond, whose “instinct, in this situation, was to gravitate towards official power”, became “The other architect of the press’s realignment behind New Labour”, siding with the party in 2001. Cohen’s one solid example of the press in operation, then, far from supporting his argument, actually serves to refute it.(21)
Back to Reality
“War prisoners apart, the average citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies.” – George Orwell, 1984
Sadly I have only been able to deal with a fraction of the sheer rubbish that fills Cohen’s book in this review. Nonetheless, it is worth examining some of the details, if only to reveal just what a terrible book it is. And have no doubt: it is truly terrible.
Which, it must be said, inevitably raises the question: what’s all the fuss about? The press has been filled with commentary on Cohen, some of it critical, some of it ecstatic, but all of it presuming the book to be in some way worthy of the attention. As the conservative pundit Iain Dale pointed out in his interview with Cohen, What’s Left has now become “something of a publishing phenomenon”.(22)
And it’s worth noting, while we’re on the subject, that along with Cohen’s profoundly distorted apperceptions and explanations of the mainstream media, the Eustonians’ account of their own exclusion from the mainstream media never really stood up either. While authoritative reports on the link between Western foreign policy and terrorism are ignored, “the newspapers, the Times and the Observer in particular,” as the New Statesman’s John Kampfner correctly points out, “give commentators like [Cohen] a profile far greater than their salience among public opinion.”(23)
One of the Eustonians, Oliver Kamm, even went so far as to acknowledge this quite openly on his blog last October:
“In the last fortnight or so I have received quite a large number of invitations to appear on radio and television to argue the case for the Iraq War. I realise this is no reflection on my cogency; the programmes’ researchers state frankly that they have severe difficulty finding anyone willing to represent the pro-war view.”(24)
As Kampfner notes further, “Cohen himself writes for three publications”; David Aaronovitch, of course, also props up the viewpoint in the Times, with occasional help from Kamm; while associated pundits, among them Michael Gove and the Daily Mail’s Melanie Phillips, peddle a more or less indistinguishable line on both the anti-war left and foreign policy issues.
For all their bluster, however, it is rather more plausible to conclude that it is they, rather than the left they lay into, who have betrayed Iraq. For all their talk of the left’s “abandonment” of Iraqis, was it not Christopher Hitchens and David Aaronovitch who indulged in almost reflexive dismissal of the Lancet report’s figures on Iraqi civilian mortality? (Norman Geras, for one, was at least honest enough to admit that he “lack[ed] the statistical competence to be able to judge these reports”,(25) a damning indictment of his colleagues.) Is it not Oliver Kamm who, abandoning the real hopes and wishes of the men and women of Iraq, instead seems to have decided to invent his own version, in order to prop up support for a policy Iraqis overwhelmingly reject?(26) Is it not in fact Nick Cohen who, in parroting state propaganda, fosters “denial” about the true facts of the Iraqi insurgency – and, by extension, denies that it is Iraqis’ deep grievances at the post-war situation, including the occupation, that have fuelled it?
Of course Cohen, when he is willing to mention post-war Iraq at all, readily admits the disaster it has beome. In 2003, on the other hand, supporting the war “was so clearly the only moral option, it never occurred to me that there could be another choice.” (p. 314) Yet he still, after all this time, cannot answer the key question asked back then: why Iraq? Nor can this question simply be dismissed with accusations of “bad faith”, try as Cohen may. Even assuming the very best of intentions we know our leaders not to have possessed, human suffering at the time was very far from being confined to Iraq’s national boundaries. The extent of such suffering that could have been alleviated with the resources ultimately poured into Iraq, without the necessarily dangerous, costly, bloody, and unpredictable course of warfare, is vast. As the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard budget expert Linda Bilmes pointed out one year ago, the likely cost of the war is around $1-2 trillion dollars. According to Stiglitz, they were erring on the side of caution.(27) It has taken, in other words, an almost unfathomable amount of money to create a humanitarian catastrophe.
We could put this another way. If we thought it would be “moral” for, say, a hospital to blow its money on a course of treatment for an individual patient, treatment that was painful, expensive, potentially fatal, administered by a doctor who appeared to have no interest in the patient’s recovery, and for which there were potential, unexplored alternatives,(28) our case would be strongly suspect, to say the least. If we did so in a hospital full of other, easily treatable – and as yet untreated – patients, we might just about be approaching consistency with the “moral” standards that led Nick Cohen to support the Iraq war in 2003. These are not, let us hope, the kind of moral standards that will be widely shared.
Lest we forget, this line of inquiry does have implications in the present. We are still pouring billions into an occupation that a large majority of Iraqis want to see brought to an end; as Greg Palast puts it, we are being asked to save Iraq from the Iraqis.(29) Since the fatally compromised Iraqi government has failed to represent their will, it falls to us to do so. It is, as others might have put it, the only moral option.
Tim Holmes is a member of the UK Watch collective; he also blogs at The Memory Hole. This is an original article for UK Watch.
References:
1. See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, Vintage, 1994, pp. 262-5.
2. See, for instance, Noam Chomsky, “The War in Afghanistan”, http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20020201.htm ; “Should U.S. Troops Withdraw Now From Iraq? A Debate Between Naomi Klein & Erik Gustafson”, Democracy Now! April 20 2005, http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/20/1427259 ; “IRAN: NEITHER U.S. AGGRESSION NOR THEOCRATIC REPRESSION”, Znet, May 18 2006, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?itemid=10289
3. See, for instance, David Wearing, “Gorgeous George”; from The Democrat’s Diary,
http://www.democratsdiary.co.uk/2005/04/gorgeous-george.html ; Greg Palast, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Constable and Robinson, 2003; Greg Palast, “What’s Left? Galloway Versus Hitchens; Progressives Versus Ourselves”, Znet, September 14, 2005, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=8732 The latter article was a “featured article” on both Znet, and on UK Watch. “Anti-war activists told not to support resistance in Iraq”, Doug Ward, Vancouver Sun, June 26 2006, http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/features/15days/story.html?id=281ad440-0695-4f35-af02-07bd982f2cf3&k=45638
4. See, for instance, Mark Curtis on Sierra Leone, Unpeople, Vintage, 2004, pp. 113-6; George Monbiot, “A Charter to Intervene”, Guardian, March 23 2004, http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/03/23/a-charter-to-intervene/
5. Naomi Klein, “Let’s Make Enemies”, The Nation, April 19, 2004, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040419/klein ; Klein, “Hold Bush to His Lie”, The Nation, Feb 23, 2004, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040223/klein ; Klein, “Mutiny in Iraq”, The Nation, May 17 2004, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040517/klein ; Cohen, “How to Handle Racism”, Observer, September 26, 2004, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/farright/comment/0,,1313015,00.html
6. Brian Urquhart, “How Not to Fight a Dictator”, The New York Review of Books, Volume 46, Number 8 (May 6, 1999), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/502 ; Peter W. Galbraith, “The Ghosts of 1991”, Washington Post, April 12, 2003, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10874-2003Apr11?language=printer
7. “Imperial Presidency”, http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20041217.htm ; “Civilization versus Barbarism?”, http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20041217.htm ; “Terror and Just Response”, http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20020702.htm
8. See, for instance, Tom Allard and Peter Fray, “Australia was told: war will fuel terror”, Sydney Morning Herald, September 13, 2003, http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/12/1063341770496.html ; “Cabinet aware of war terror risk”, P.A. report, September 12, 2003, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1040950,00.html
9. Nick Cohen, “Trouble in Tashkent”, Observer, December 15, 2002, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,860121,00.html ; Nick Cohen, “The mystery of our man in Tashkent”. New Statesman, 13 October 2003, http://www.newstatesman.com/200310130017
10. See Craig Murray, Murder in Samarkand – A British Ambassador’s Controversial Defiance of Tyranny in the War on Terror, Mainstream Publishing, 2006.
11. B’Tselem press release, 28 December 2006, http://www.btselem.org/english/Press_Releases/20061228.asp
12. Within a year of the June 1967 war, Yitzhak Rabin stated “I do not believe that Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent into Sinai on May 14 would not have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it.” Menachem Begin echoed his remarks: “In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.” http://www.arabmediawatch.com/amw/Default.aspx?tabid=248
13. See Juan Cole, http://www.juancole.com/2006/05/hitchens-hacker-and-hitchens.html , http://www.juancole.com/2006/05/bill-scher-importance-of-cole-v.html ; Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, June 2 2006; also June 14 2006, http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jonathan_steele/2006/06/post_155.html
14. Crisis Group Middle East Report N°50, In Their Own Words: Reading the Iraqi Insurgency, 15 February 2006, p. 1, i, 5; http://news.ft.com/cms/e9ac0db0-9e31-11da-b641-0000779e2340.pdf
15. “President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld and others continued to describe the insurgency as a containable threat, posed mainly by former supporters of Saddam Hussein, criminals and non-Iraqi terrorists – even as the U.S. intelligence community was warning otherwise.” Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay, “Intelligence agencies warned about growing local insurgency in late 2003”, report for Knight Ridder Newspapers, Feb. 28, 2006, http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/nation/13984788.htm
16. Nick Cohen, The Observer, October 8 2006, http://www.nickcohen.net/?p=134
17. Interview with Cohen, http://www.18doughtystreet.com/on_demand/92
18. Robert Winnett and David Leppard, “Leaked No 10 dossier reveals Al-Qaeda’s British recruits”, The Sunday Times, July 10 2005, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article542420.ece The full report is available in HTML format at http://www.globalsecurity.org/security/library/report/2004/muslimext-uk.htm Also see Justice Not Vengeance’s coverage: http://www.j-n-v.org/London_Blasts/Extremism_Report_Conclusions.htm ; http://www.j-n-v.org/London_Blasts/Extremism_Report_Policy_Recommendations.htm
19. “Does the US Intend to Dominate the Whole World by Force?”, http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20030530.htm
20. On Cohen’s treatment of Chomsky, it is worth noting the thanks extended to Oliver Kamm in the book’s acknowledgements for “help[ing] clear away many misconceptions” (p. 386). Kamm and Cohen have apparently corresponded on material relating to Chomsky in the past – see, for instance, Oliver Kamm, “Chomsky bamboozles on the Balkans II”, http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2006/06/chomsky_bambooz_1.html For exposure of Kamm’s dishonest manipulation of source material in his treatment of Chomsky, see in particular the Indecent Left blog: http://indecent-left.blogspot.com/
21. James Curran and Jean Seaton, Power Without Responsibility. London, Routledge, 2003, pp. 74-5.
22. See note 12, above.
23. John Kampfner, “Black and White …”, New Statesman, 12 Feb 2007.
24. Oliver Kamm, “In Defence of the Iraq War”, http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2006/10/in_defence_of_t.html
25. Norman Geras, “Failure in Iraq”, http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2006/10/failure_in_iraq.html
26. Tim Holmes, “Kamm Redux”, http://memory-hole.blog.co.uk/2007/01/28/kamm_redux~1641020 “Quibbling While Iraq Burns” , http://memory-hole.blog.co.uk/2007/02/04/quibbling_while_iraq_burns~1676966
27. “Iraq war could cost US over $2 trillion, says Nobel prize-winning economist”, Guardian, January 7 2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1681119,00.html.
28. See, for instance, George Monbiot, “Dreamers and Idiots”, http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2003/11/11/dreamers-and-idiots/
29. “Most Iraqis Want U.S. Troops Out Within a Year”, Project on International Policy Attitudes, November 27, 2006, http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/brmiddleeastnafricara/250.php?nid=&id=&pnt=250&lb=brme ; Greg Palast, “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy”, gregpalast.com, http://www.gregpalast.com/waist-deep-in-the-big-muddy/