New Statesman: Nick Cohen Doubleplusungood

John Kampfner responds to his renegade columnist Nick Cohen (whose book What's Left I greatly enjoyed) in this week's New Statesman, largely by ignoring what he actually written. 

Cohen may or may not be right that much of the anti-war protests were shameful in being driven by a mixture of the ugliest toilet-mold of the British left, in the shape of the Socialist Workers Party and George Galloway.  However, Kampfner makes no response to Cohen's key criticisms, of the magazine's revolting editorial after 9/11:

American bond traders, you may say, are as innocent and as undeserving of terror as Vietnamese or Iraqi peasants. Well, yes and no. Yes, because such large-scale carnage is beyond justification, since it can never distinguish between the innocent and the guilty. No, because Americans, unlike Iraqis and many others in poor countries, at least have the privilege of democracy and freedom that allow them to vote and speak in favour of a different order. If the US often seems a greedy and overweening power, that is partly because its people have willed it. They preferred George Bush to Al Gore and both to Ralph Nader.

Here precisely, is what I think is Cohen's main point, that the "left" is saying "I don't like George W Bush and since al Qaeda don't either, then al Qaeda is, I assume, motivated by the same values towards the same objectives as I am, against globalisation, for the Palestinians etc".   To be charitable, one might say that this is as a result of falling into a psychological trap.  As I wrote in Magill in April 2006,

However, even the most brilliant and best-funded scholars and intelligence analysts struggle to avoid falling into the comfortable trap of "mirror imaging", subconsciously assuming that foreigners will think in the same way that they do. Hence, the CIA imagined that Saddam Hussein was acting like the American bureaucracy did –consensus-driven, risk-averse and seeking to avoid war, rather than understanding him as an adventurer prone to rash gambles like the invasion of Kuwait. Similarly, academics studying the Middle East, especially since the late Edward Said published his book Orientalism in 1979, have noted how political interests, especially the imperial ambitions of West in the Arab world, led to scholars and writers to fit their portrayals of the region to their political agenda.

In effect, what the New Statesman, and much of the British left is guilty of, is of an orientalism of opposition: Even in the explicit rhetoric of bin Laden, who sets out an agenda in his statements that is both totalitarian in its vision of opposition to a liberal democratic model of the state and makes demands that no western government would willingly accomodate, they cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.   The irony is, as Cohen aptly notes, is that th right in Britain - or in America, as figures such as former CIA bin Laden expert Michael Scheuer show, make the same mistake.

I'll post a fuller review of the book after I hear Cohen himself speak at Frontline on Tuesday 20th February.