Choosing Sides: On Nick Cohen's What's Left?

British columnist Nick Cohen was always one of the most gifted—and unexpected—of pro-war polemicists. In 2003 he was the most prominent left-wing critic of Tony Blair in the British press, poaching and filleting Blair's New Labour love-in with corporations and the super-rich every week from the impeccably liberal pages of the Observer and the New Statesman. His initial reaction to the September 11, 2001, massacres was, he writes now, "that they were a nuisance that got in the way of more pressing concerns. Throughout the Nineties, I had been writing about the overweening power of big business. . . . Attacking Tony Blair was what I liked doing." So—as anybody who knew him would have predicted—he opposed the invasion of Afghanistan, warning that it could trigger famine and mass death.

But then, an old left-wing value stirred unexpectedly in his conscience. Cohen was raised to believe the moral core of the left lies in its consistent antifascism, an absolute opposition to the far right in all places and at all times. He quips that when he was a child his mother was so scrupulous about never buying oranges from either Franco Spain or apartheid South Africa that if the general had held on for a few more years Cohen would have developed scurvy. He was raised to see Orwell in Catalonia as his moral archetype—the socialist bearing a pack and going abroad to fight fascists. If the pro-war left had any central spine to its thought, it was the unexpected question, what would Orwell do? Could it be, Cohen pondered as the left rallied against the war, that the Taliban and Saddam were also faces of fascism, and if so, did that not place an obligation on the left to support its victims?