Intellectuals in politics are occasionally dangerous and invariably disappointed. George Packer, who had known Makiya for years, said his friend didn’t understand that for all their tough talk the neo-conservatives were far less worldly than they appeared. The Republicans had been out of the White House in the Nineties. Most of the party’s senior figures had treated the decade’s debates on humanitarian intervention and failed states with derision, and opposed the wars to stop ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia as bleeding heart indulgences. They hadn’t thought about the mass migration of refugees, chemical weapons in the hands of terrorists and global crime. They hadn’t come to terms with the new age of warfare where the infantry had to be soldiers one minute and police officers the next. Makiya’s last, best hope was George W. Bush, who as Packer said, came to power with ‘no curiosity about the world, only a suspicion that his predecessor had entangled America in far too many obscure places of no importance to national interests’.
Needs must when the Devil drives, but the Republicans weren’t the best generals to follow into battle. The charge from his old comrades that Makiya had travelled to the right when he went along with them seemed proved beyond reasonable doubt. In conventional political terms, there was truth in it. Yet the purpose of his life was how to end the subjection of his people by a genocidal warmonger, and from that Makiya never faltered. While all around rushed by, he kept his feet on the ground and his eyes fixed on the face of fascism. If he had gone from left to right, he had crossed the political spectrum by standing still.
And what of our friends on the Left, where were they going as they heaped abuse on their former comrade? A long way from where they came from was the kindest answer.
By chance, Makiya’s family found asylum in London rather than Paris, New York or Kuwait City. Perhaps more predictably, Kanan Makiya fell in with leftists who were like him: refined revolutionaries, many with family money in trust funds to keep them in style while they fought the workers’ cause. With Saddam’s Iraq throwing millions of refugees into dozens of countries the initial confrontation between the Western and Iraqi lefts might have been in a different city with a different group of leftists, but I doubt that the outcome would have been very different.
As it was, the workings of chance had it that Iraq’s foremost dissident fell in with intellectuals from the English-speaking academic left of the Eighties. They were among the first to face the challenge of coping with the ultra-right after the end of the Cold War, and among the first to flunk it. Two decades on, the brazenness of their behaviour remains astonishing. The U-turns of this part of the Left precisely matched the U-turns of the powerful. When Saddam was America’s ally, Iraqis received fraternal sympathy; when he was America’s enemy, they got the cold shoulder.
The virulence with which they tore into Makiya is telling. The Eighties leftists made no expressions of regret for the Iraqis who must continue to live under Saddam; delivered no arguments more in sorrow than in anger. They didn’t conclude with a remorseful shake of the head that on the balance of the available evidence it was better to leave Saddam in power, but turned on their former friend and screamed that he was ‘a man of vanity who has no compassion’, a ‘guinea pig witness’ and a sufferer from ‘mental pandemonium’.
They were flipping and flopping in a crucial year. The world’s decision to pull back from Baghdad in 1991 coincided with the final collapse of the Soviet Union. Crowds had torn down statues of tyrants in Europe, but in the Middle East, the United Nations ruled that they should remain in place. For the Left of all shades, the collapse of communism presented both an opportunity and a potential crisis. Most seized the opportunity to remove the faint hint of association with totalitarianism. The victories of centre-left parties in Britain and Western Europe, and Bill Clinton’s far more equivocal successes in the United States, seemed to foretell a world that took universal human rights seriously.
The crisis began on the far left that needed the Soviet Union, although it pretended it didn’t. Many of the revolutionaries of the 1968 generation called themselves Trotskyists rather than communists to avoid taking responsibility for Stalin, a transparent manoeuvre to keep communism alive by pretending that the one-party state would have been fine if only Lenin or Trotsky had stayed in charge of the secret police. While the Soviet Union was there, they could dream that it would transform itself and its occupied territories into true socialist societies, and be flattered by the knowledge that its existence forced important people to take their ideas seriously. Diplomats and spies had to learn the language of Marxism to understand the code of the Soviet Union. Once it was gone, Marx became just another economist. Parts of his analysis of capitalism still stand up in my view, but I wouldn’t argue if you said you could find better elsewhere.
Makiya abandoned his Marxism because it couldn’t explain Baathism or Islamism or why the Palestinian groups he and Said had supported when they were young degenerated into criminal gangs in the Lebanese civil war. So, too, did millions of other socialists. Everywhere in the late twentieth century, communist and socialist parties dissolved or transformed themselves. If Iraqis had overthrown Saddam in 1991, and turned to people in the rich world who called themselves Marxists and said, ‘Tell us how to govern our country, teach us how to build the good society’ they would not have heard an articulate reply. The failures and massacres of communism were too fresh and the success of market economics was too great.
The old double standard whereby the Right tended to support the victims of communism and Soviet-sponsored dictatorships while the Left tended to support the victims of fascism and right-wing dictatorships went with the Cold War. The single standard that most on the liberal-left and moderate right said they accepted was universal human rights. But in the rubble of the far left, among the irreconcilables who could not stand the turn history had taken, a rival standard developed that was anything but a principled call for universal freedom.
On the contrary, its adherents used the end of the Cold War to embrace a kind of nihilism. They could break the old taboos that had stopped them supporting the ideas and movements of the extreme right, and endorse or excuse any foreign force as long as it was the enemy of Western democracy. Naturally, they found that many of those enemies were in the Middle East whose power structures were unaltered by the collapse of Soviet power and the Gulf War of 1991.
You have to have been on the Left to understand the extraordinary nature of the shift. The reason why communism doesn’t seem all bad to me is the same reason the BBC gives airtime to Trotskyist comedians but not to neo-Nazi raconteurs: the far left was meant to be solidly against the extreme right. In reality, the anti-fascist left was a bit of a myth. Communists and fascists worked together against liberalism many times in the Twenties and Thirties. Rationally, I know it was a natural partnership because the similarities between communism and fascism were more important than the differences. But viscerally to anyone brought up on the Left after the Second World War, an unwavering opposition to fascism was the trait in which we could take the greatest pride. There was a hierarchy. The best society was some form of socialism that varied according to taste, and like the kingdom of God never came. The runner-up was what we had: a liberal democracy with a mixed economy. The lowest of the low was