On the website Harry's Place, Alan Johnson gets the appeasenik tendency bang to rights. He pours blistering scorn on what he calls the Single Transferable Article about Iraq, or STAI:

'There are three simple steps to writing the STAI. Step 1: bracket out every single positive development in Iraq. That’s right, just ignore every one. Pretend they have not happened. Close your eyes, stick your fingers in your ears and hum loudly. After all it’s not your job to set out a real-world policy for Iraq. Step 2: play up every single error, set-back, crime, and cock-up you can find. Step 3: treat every set-back as the fault of Bush and Blair and ‘the war’ [admitting you are inwardly glad when an outrage occurs in Iraq because you think it is a poke in the eye for Bush is optional: only Yasmin has taken that option so far].

'The STAI reduces the political complexity of Iraq to a simple story of cowboys, poodles and freedom fighters. Mood music for your real interest: the attack on Bush-Blair. [Definition of irony: columnistas who daily ‘sex up’ Iraq in this way complaining about spin! In truth they have been the most disciplined on-message spinners, dicing and slicing Iraq to fit their ‘project’]...

'If you have little time there is a quick way to spot an STAI. The STAI has a symptomatic silence about one date: January 30 2005. Gary Younge offers a typical example in today’s Guardian. He offers dates galore! We have May'' 1997, Summer 2002, February 15 2003, June 10 2004, as well as ‘2001, after the bombing of Serbia’, and even ‘last summer in Tuscany’. And, of course, May 5 2005, when all good left-liberals will vote for ‘the Iraqi poor’ and ‘give Tony Blair a bloody nose’ Younge gives us all dates bar one: January 30 2005, the day eight and a half million Iraqis, most very poor, voted for a democratic future after thirty years of totalitarianism, war and misery, and danced with joy, purple fingers held aloft in pride. You see the STAI doesn’t do January 30 2005. It would spoil a good story.'

Great stuff. But then Johnson goes and ruins it by fingering the neocons as the spoiler in the fight against the neanderthal left and right. He does so by abusing and misrepresenting them in much the same way as do the neanderthals he has so roundly criticised. After all, to say

'The Neocons do not understand the pivotal role of civil society. We social democrats do'

is breathtaking, since the neocon project is all about renewing civil society and repairing the lethal damage done to it by the left. It got started by people on the left as a reaction to what they saw as the betrayal of the poor by Lyndon Johnson's 'Great Society', which threw money at the disadvantaged only to mire them deeper in moral, spiritual and economic poverty -- and took an axe to civil society in the process.

The essence of neo-conservatism is that it called time on so-called social democracy (aka the left) for grotesquely and lethally failing and abandoning the very people it claimed to be in politics to help. In foreign affairs, it took its cue from Senator 'Scoop' Jackson who similarly exposed the hypocrisy and moral turpitude of his own side in failing properly to confront Soviet communism.

Neo-conservatism is the movement which cast a beady eye at progressive politics and cried that the emperor had no clothes. That is what the grand-daddy of neo-conservatism, Irving Kristol, meant when he famously quipped that a neocon was a 'liberal mugged by reality'. It is the neocons who are today's progressives, exposing the left's pretensions to that soubriquet as a hypocritical and sanctimonious sham that has done real damage both to the most vulnerable and to the moral foundations of free societies both at home and abroad.

That is precisely why Johnson is so very sensitive about the neocons; it is why he cannot acknowledge the connection between the Iraq project he supports and neocon thinking; and it is why on this latter topic -- contrary to his splendid tirade over Iraq -- he could not be more wrong.

Posted by melanie at May 3, 2005