As various people have noted, the “Observer has started a blog”:http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/observer/ (or perhaps a “blog” ). Nick Cohen, darling of the pro-war lefties is, naturally, “one of the contributors”:http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/observer/archives/2005/02/26/so_this_is_blogging.html — and recommends his favourite blogs. Many of Cohen’s recent column’s have included fulminations against the “pseudo-left” , a term which designates those who take a different view to his own on such matters as Iraq and Sheikh Qaradawi. I’m always suspicious of people with the capacity the exhibit great moral indigation against imbeciles who are stupid or venal enough to espouse positions similar to those that they themselves have only just abandoned (John Gray is another good example). Unsporting it may be, but I’d like to take this opportunity to link to “one of Cohen’s columns on Afghanistan”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/waronterrorism/story/0,1373,582309,00.html (a war that, btw, I supported). The tone of outraged moral superiority is the same, but was, at that time, directed against different targets. Plus ça change ….
{ 32 comments }
Elmo 02.28.05 at 10:53 am
First visit, so forgive any misfires, wet powder, etc.
I was a lefty just a couple of short years ago. I still see the world mostly the same way (except of course militant radical Islam). I just am more willing to examine other’s views, and not reject them automatically.
I rather enjoy no longer being so pompous, arrogant, and full of it and myself. Laughing at myself. While smiling at those still wearing lead boots. Who are unable to take a single step towards the center. If only to take a single stolen peek.
Peter Briffa 02.28.05 at 12:12 pm
But don’t you think Nick Cohen is gradually turning into Paul Johnson, Chris? It seems to happen to all Lefties eventually.
Russkle 02.28.05 at 12:39 pm
I’m surprised that a CT post would take exception to a “tone of outraged moral superiority”.
Jimmy Doyle 02.28.05 at 12:50 pm
I think N Cohen’s indignation has been directed more specifically at the majority of antiwar types, who think it perfectly obvious that nothing the US does could possibly have good consequences, or should be supported for any other reason; or soi-disants multiculturalists who believe a priori that any criticism of someone like al-Qaradawi is a manifestation of Islamophobia — rather than merely “those who take a different view to his own.” There’s a huge gap in this and kindred respects (I am glad to acknowledge) between CT and the ideological centre of gravity of the Guardian Comment section. From what I’ve read of his recent output, I don’t believe that he would regard CT (eg) as part of the “pseudo-left,” or be inclined to direct any more moral indignation towards it than you are here directing towards him, Chris.
He is also happy, if embarrassed, to acknowledge that what he said about Afghanistan was “total bollocks,”, resulting from an excess of credulity toward the predictions of international aid agencies.
dsquared 02.28.05 at 1:07 pm
He is also happy, if embarrassed, to acknowledge that what he said about Afghanistan was “total bollocks,â€, resulting from an excess of credulity toward the predictions of international aid agencies.
But very similar predictions appear to have been proved right in the case of Iraq? I must say I’d really be interested in Cohen’s views on the Lancet study. Maybe I’ll post something to that effect on his weblog.
abb1 02.28.05 at 2:02 pm
…the majority of antiwar types, who think it perfectly obvious that nothing the US does could possibly have good consequences…
Why, isn’t it, indeed, perfectly obvious? Not ‘nothing the US does’ necessarily, but the US starting a war, bombing and invading another third world country. What was the last time something like that had any good consequences for anyone outside the United Fruit, oil companies and arm dealers and manufacturers?
Brendan 02.28.05 at 2:22 pm
Yeah but who are these people who proudly state that ‘nothing the US does could ever have good consequences’? Could you name them please? Where have they proclaimed this?
The phrase ‘pseudo left’ is highly dodgy btw: it was coined by the Maoist drones at LastSuperPower.net who are all, without exception, assholes.
Adrian 02.28.05 at 3:39 pm
“But very similar predictions appear to have been proved right in the case of Iraq?”
Sorry, but where exactly are the predicted hordes of refugees desperately fleeing Iraq?
Conrad Barwa 02.28.05 at 3:46 pm
Personally, I have always had a bit of a soft for Cohen; despite the fact that he writes utter crap on Iraq and the so-called pro-war case. I think he does a good job at looking at the various unpopular causes of the day, most notably asylum-seekers and at exposing the cushiness of New Labour with various business interests. I get the sense that he is somehow conflicted about a lot of the arguments over the Iraq imbroglio and the chapter in his book Pretty Straight Guys that deals with it, seems almost to castigate the anti-war Left for the poor way it presented its case as opposed to the substance of it which he seemed by large to take seriously. Balanced against this has to be occasional diatribe he chucks out in the NS about ‘Islamo-fascism’ and how anybody opposed to the war and taking part in anti-war demos was somehow a supporter of totalitarianism, homophobic etc.etc.
But don’t you think Nick Cohen is gradually turning into Paul Johnson, Chris? It seems to happen to all Lefties eventually.
Not really, in Cohen’s case he has too much dislike for a lot of Conservative bullshit for this to happen. His stance on issues such as immigration, race relations, influence of big business etc put him well on the left-liberal side of things.
dsquared 02.28.05 at 4:15 pm
Sorry, but where exactly are the predicted hordes of refugees desperately fleeing Iraq?
Dead, mainly, according to the Lancet.
Adrian 02.28.05 at 4:57 pm
Stop ducking the question dsquared. The aid agencies predicted a refugees crisis affecting millions, just as they had in Afghanistan. It didn’t happen.
The Lancet study, even if one is to accept its worst-case conclusions at face value, documents nothing of the sort. In fact it’s hard to say what that study documents apart from the prejudices of its authors, which clearly mesh comfortably with yours.
abb1 02.28.05 at 6:28 pm
The aid agencies predicted a refugees crisis
The distinction (without much difference) you’re playing here is refugees vs. internally displaced persons. There are, obviously, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of IDs in Iraq; that they haven’t left the country (for whatever reasons) is not necesarily something you should brag about.
Kevin Donoghue 02.28.05 at 7:11 pm
“In fact it’s hard to say what that study documents apart from the prejudices of its authors, which clearly mesh comfortably with yours.”
Almost all doctors have a strong prejudice against premature mortality. Statisticians have a prejudice to the effect that if a parameter estimate is very much larger than zero, the true value of the parameter is very unlikely to be less than zero.
Those who do not share these prejudices would be well advised to stay away from medicine and statistics.
Brendan 02.28.05 at 7:19 pm
What is one to make of a man who seems literally unable to tell the difference between the past and the future? Obviously everything he has to say about everything can and must be ignored (and ridiculed) but still, let’s waste some time and point out the most blatant error I have seen even by the low standards of pro-war rhetoric.
There is all the difference in the world between a prediction of the future and a statement that something has happened in the past (and is still happening). Predictions are (and please stop me if i’m boring everyone who can read without moving their lips) by definition, uncertain. They might be right, they might be wrong. That’s the way it is.
Statements about the past, on the other hand, are either true or false. There is no ambiguity.
Now: either the amount of people (within confidence intervals) stated in the Lancet study died: or they didn’t. To the best of my knowledge not one coherent counter-argument to the Lancet’s study has been produced. I.e. some people have made obvious and facile criticisms (most of which were acknowledge by the authors themselves), or else they have pointed out that more research is needed (true, but also true of all scientific studies).
But to the best of my knowledge not one serious critique of the study has been published BY A SERIOUS EPIDEMIOLOGIST OR STATISTICIAN.
Certainly lots of illiterate arts graduates have gotten pretty excited by phrases like ‘confidence intervals’ (which they have obviously never encountered before) but their opinions are worthless.
Given that their opinions are worthless, one can go onto looking at motives. Here’s a clue as to what their motives might be. What are the motives of those who attempt to minimise casualties inflicted by the Khmer Rouge? What are the motives of those who downplay the numbers of Jews exterminated by the Nazis? What are the motives of those who downplay the numbers of Stalin’s victims?
Brendan 02.28.05 at 7:23 pm
Students of the rhetoric of abuse will of course have noticed that reference to ‘illiterate’ arts graduates should of course read ‘innumerate’ arts graduates, although of course most of them are also illiterate, as their sleazy little blogs amply demonstrate.
Donald Johnson 02.28.05 at 9:52 pm
There wasn’t a mass famine in Afghanistan because the Taliban lines crumbled before winter set in. The bombing rate (which was a big part of the reason why truck drivers didn’t want to enter) dropped off and enough food made it in to prevent a large-scale catastrophe. There probably were many thousands of people (possibly in the low tens of thousands) who did die as a result of the war, according to Jonathan Steele in the May 20 (or 23, I forget) 2002 issue of the Guardian. I think an American group estimated around 8000 deaths, much smaller than what was feared, but noticeably larger than the 9/11 death toll.
Anyway, whatever the true number of deaths it’s fatuous to pretend there wasn’t a real danger of mass famine. If you bomb a country where many people are on the brink of starvation and cut off food aid, then, depending on how long that situation goes on, there’s a chance massive numbers of people will die. Famines are often associated with wars, you know, but a lot of people pretended not to know this in the fall of 2001.
BTW, I was opposed to the Afghan War at the time precisely because of the famine warnings, but changed my mind roughly about the time the Kabul residents expressed their joy at being liberated from Taliban rule. (I didn’t change immediately, but that was the start.) And there was all this talk of Marshal Plans and I felt like this was one time when the far left had been overly cynical. I still think the war might have done more good than harm (though maybe many Afghans would disagree and it isn’t my place to judge), but on the other hand, all that talk of turning Afghanistan into a model of nation-building seems to have been mostly hot air.
SloLernr 02.28.05 at 10:22 pm
Not to obsess on the aside here but who’s John Gray been kicking?
dsquared 02.28.05 at 10:57 pm
I’m not aware of Gray having gone after people by name (though Chris might be), but if you read some of the rhetoric in “False Dawn”, it’s pretty hard to believe that it was the same guy who wrote all those libertarian articles in the 1980s.
John Quiggin 02.28.05 at 11:38 pm
A general observation about predictions that resort to war will cause various kinds of disaster, such as thousands of new terrorist recruits, tens of thousands of civilian casualties, millions of refugees, lengthy guerilla/civil war, large-scale starvation, environmental catastrophe and so on.
It’s not enough for supporters of war to show that some of these predictions, or even a majority, are wrong. Any one of these outcomes is sufficient to undermine the case for war.
Henry 02.28.05 at 11:46 pm
bq. but if you read some of the rhetoric in “False Dawnâ€, it’s pretty hard to believe that it was the same guy who wrote all those libertarian articles in the 1980s.
Or the same guy who used to be a Millsian liberal, post-Millsian, green conservative, Germanic ordoliberal and so on – more incarnations than Dr. Who. For my money, the green conservative phase was the best one – some interesting ideas in there. Although he also has a short review which is the single best piece on J.G. Ballard that I’ve ever read.
neil 02.28.05 at 11:54 pm
But the case for war also rests on whether or not the status quo should be allowed to continue. Those who oppose military action should put forward estimates of the human cost of such inaction. Bosnia for example – three years of inaction.
Sebastian holsclaw 03.01.05 at 12:11 am
First, there is the above problem of valuing inaction.
Second, at some point you get to the stopped clock problem. I’m very capable of making dramatic predictions that certain individual stocks will perform dramatically against the market’s current understanding. Eventually I’ll be right. That doesn’t make my predictions worth listening to.
slolernr 03.01.05 at 5:43 am
I only met Gray once and briefly so can’t really claim personal knowledge but it seems to me either (a) the person he’s implicitly critiquing is not a former fellow-traveler but the previous iteration of Gray, i.e. it’s himself yesterday he’s displeased with or (b) he’s taking these positions and arguing these points to see what happens if you take the position and argue the point.
Dr. Who’s various incarnations didn’t get on entirely well with each other either.
Chris 03.01.05 at 7:31 am
It seems to me that there is, in general but especially in academia, an extremely strong bias against people who change their minds on major questions. The academic figures we admire are mostly those who carve out strong, but nuanced, positions and then maintain those views over the course of a career, while nevertheless being willing to modify them slightly in response to criticism. Rawls, Foucault, Hayek, Derrida, etc.
Obviously it’s partly that a major shift in worldview makes one’s prior thought more-or-less obsolete — you can’t build an intellectual cathedral if you’re always starting over from the foundation. But I think it’s also partly that we just don’t trust such people to be intellectually serious. They seem sort of adolescent: like a teenager trying on radically new personae to see what fits.
Yet I think this tendency is sometimes unfair. I’m not speaking to this particular case, which I know nothing about. But there’s no a priori reason to conclude that it’s okay to change one’s mind about little questions but not about the big ones.
Martin Wisse 03.01.05 at 7:58 am
I was and am still opposed to the war against Afghanistan and still convinced it did more harm than good.
It seems largely to have resulted into trading in a fundamentalist Islamic tyranny ruling most of Aghanistan for a group of not that flavour of fundamentalist Islam warlords ruling parts of the country, plus a weak “central” government whose writ runs out in the Kabul suburbs.
As far as I know, most of the grandiose promises made before the war were not kept, not since Bush got himself a new toy, Iraq.
Where it is still somewhat p[ossible to disagree about Afghanistan, I do feel that those still supporting the war on Iraq are naive dupes at best.
None of the reasons for going to war given _before_ the war have held up and the country is in a far worse state even than it was under Saddam.
That Cohen should feel obligated to castigate people as “pseudo-left” because they opposed this war, is just a sign of the weakness of the “pro-slaughter” brigade.
Martin Wisse 03.01.05 at 8:06 am
Chris:
being open enough to argument to change your minds on important issues is a good thing.
However, it is typical for far too many people to be dishonest about these conversions.
You either get people to pretend they’ve always held those opinions, rubbish their earlier convictions
(“youthful follies” being a particular favourite) or pretend it’s not they who have changed, but their former comrades.
That last tendency is most noticable in the socalled “leftist” supporters of the Iraq war (cf. Hitchens, Cohen, “Harry’s Place”)
I read _False Dawn_ some years ago and I seem to remember John Gray being reasonably open about his conversion.
Donald Johnson 03.01.05 at 1:30 pm
Sebastian, your stopped clock analogy is silly in this context. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, there was a very good chance of catastrophe if the US attacked. The debate should have been about the relative dangers of various policies–instead what we got were dogmatic pronouncements on both sides, followed by triumphalist (and inaccurate) claims that nothing terrible happened as a result of either war.
Martin Wisse is right about how most dramatic changes of mind seem to occur in the public sphere. Hitchens shows how successful a career-booster such a change can be when it comes accompanied by huge amounts of invective aimed at people to his left.
Harry 03.01.05 at 10:15 pm
I was and am still opposed to the war against Afghanistan and still convinced it did more harm than good.
What a joker.
nick 03.02.05 at 12:46 am
Cohen still has to recover, in my estimation, from his ‘there is an Iraqi government in waiting, and its leader is Ahmad Chalabi.’ (I paraphrase, but not too loosely.) Such things tend to be somewhat terminal to one’s credibility.
Chris 03.02.05 at 8:58 am
I know no one’s following this thread anymore, but I still have to mention this H.L. Mencken quotation that illustrates just what I was talking about above:
I dislike persons who change their basic ideas, and I dislike them when they change them for good reasons quite as much as when they change them for bad ones. A convert to a good idea is simply a man who confesses that he was formerly an ass — and is probably one still.
Jabotinsky 03.02.05 at 12:52 pm
Like most people, Cohen gets less interested in theory and more in practice as he gets older. He privately discards the pretence of universal concern for humanity which so many younger professional wordsmiths feel is de rigeur, and lets “Is it good for the Jews?” steer his preferences. (Hitchens likewise.)
Uncle Sam is our protector and bankroller, so we must give him a pass against all those apathetic Nazi-collaborating Europeans and mad mullahs who are out to get us and our cousins in Israel. The verbal form this takes is an increasing concern for “freedom” and “democracy” (codewords for compliance with globalist military and economic hegemony) and a decreasing stress on “justice” and “equality” (codewords for collectivist nostrums).
Blood will out, even among “public intellectuals”.
anon 03.02.05 at 4:45 pm
That’s really antisemitic drivel, jabotinsky . I think Nick Cohen is 100% wrong on this issue, but to suggest he supports the war on Iraq because of his surname is just racist rubbish.
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