The Daily Novel

Because I am the kind of journalist I am I will begin with what’s right about the new book by Nick Cohen of The Observer, What’s Left?, which has caused quite a stir because it is a denunciation of the British liberal left into which Cohen was born and which he has epoused for most of his working life. Until now.

As Peter Oborne writes in the main review of Cohen’s book in today’s Observer,

‘It is also a moving account of a long personal journey, carried off with wit, verve, considerable literary skill and human compassion.’

I agree. And such it deserves a Daily Novel gong. Cohen tells his own life story and discloses stage by stage how his own personal biography has affected what he has written. He was born into an articulate left wing middle class family and given an excellent liberal education. What drives this present book is what he learnt while working as a journalist in Iraq, when he met many Iraqi’s who had suffered under Saddam Hussain’s regime, several of whom he has stayed in contact with. This caused him to believe that Hussain was indeed a Hitler-like dictator, so he supported the Bush/Blair war to get rid of him.

My own position on these matters was much the same as Cohen’s before the latest war begain and for quite similar reasons.

My first Iraqi student arrived in the early 1980s, the day after the Iran/Iraq war (in which Britain and America supported Hussain). He said rather dramatically as he sat down in his chair, ‘My country is at war’. But as I got to know him he told me quite a lot about what Hussain was actually doing. As did the Iraqi Kurdish refugee student I took on later that year. During the 1980s I had several Iraqi students (and quite a few Iranians) so that long before the main-stream press started talking about him as Hitlerite or evil, I knew what he was like.

I strongly supported an international effort to topple Saddam Hussain. But I was alarmed when Bush, with Blair’s support, by-passed the United Nations, because they said the need was so urgent that action had to be taken immediately and unilaterally.

They advanced two grounds, for which they said they had evidence. (We now know they were lying).

First, Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and that our intelligence services had discovered their existence. Untrue.

Second, and less mentioned these days, that Saddam’s Iraq was one of the breeding grounds for the kind of international terrorists responsible for 9/11. The rhetoric of the Iraq war as played to the American public was that this was a demonstration that America would strike back against the forces of evil. The war against terror was intertwined in the Bush mind with the war against terror.

When the American bombs began to fall I felt for the families and friends of my many Iraqi students and all the other innocent civilians killed. I still feel for them in the slaughter of innocents which has gone on daily in the chaos of warfare between Sunnis, Shias and Kurds ever since.

My view is that the Bush/Blair decision to go to war to go to war against Hussain unilaterally was one of the worst mistakes in recent history. It has not only caused the most appalling slaughter of Iraqis and destroyed many of its building and made it difficult for normal life to continue. How can Iraqi students sit down and read their books with all this going on?

But it also provided a recruiting ground for all would-be suicide bombers. And it fuelled the resurgence of the very Muslim fundamentalism that Nick Cohen attacks so trenchantly in his book.

This is certainly the view of the mainstream left. But it is also the view of increasing numbers on the mainstream right.

Which is why Bush’s current rating in the American opinion polls is down to the level of Nixon’s at the height of the Watergate exposures.

But I shall still give Cohen his gong. Because his views, though mistaken are honestly held. And I still have an over-riding belief that it is vital that journalists should seek to write the truth as they see it.