The pro-invasion left was always a small battalion,

made up almost entirely of journalists

and intellectuals who thought that toppling

the Taliban and Saddam Hussein was a good idea

- even if the only person

available to lead the charge was Bush

The pro-war left somehow managed to move

from tactically siding with the US

in order to defeat a greater enemy to reflexively

defending US imperial power, no matter how horrific

They somehow convinced themselves that the US military

had become the armed wing of Amnesty International

Many even claimed that the neoconservatives

were fighting the Left's battles for them

Young Radicals Become Middle-Aged Reactionaries

The claim by pro-war 'leftish' writers and their neocon allies that the left dumped its principles to embrace 'islamofascism' is absurd.

This kind of propaganda bubbles forth in the writing of a handful of former Trots and communists who make up the so-called pro-war left.

Such as Christopher Hitchens and David Aaronovitch, these days happy allies of a motley neocon crew, including Melanie Phillips and Michael Gove, and backed by the troika of literary belligerents, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan.

The Pro-War Left's Disastrous Misjudgment

The pro-invasion left was always a small battallion, comprised almost entirely of journalists and intellectuals who believed that toppling the Taliban and Saddam Hussein was a good idea - even if the only President available to lead the charge was George Bush.

Yet almost since the first statue of Saddam was smashed to the ground, it has been losing troops - to the anti-war side, or to a sullen AWOL silence, or to despair.

It's now a year since the Euston Manifesto, an attempt by the pro-war left to hone its position into a coherent set of principles, was issued.

So this is a good time to ask: did this strange niche in Anglo-American politics - of which I was a part, for a time - produce any enduring insights?

To trace an answer, you have to break its argument down into four distinct readings.

Reading One: Islamism.

The pro-war left argued that Islamism (as opposed to Islam) is a variant on an old enemy of the left - fascism. The founding jihadi intellectuals, like Sayyid Qutb, openly admired fascism.

Where they were allowed to take power, as in Taliban Afghanistan, they swiftly built up a totalitarian state as extreme as Nazism, and with the same paranoid obsessions: Jews, gays, Freemasons.

To refuse to see that people living in poor or oppressive countries can become fascists is to betray their victims, and to fall for what Bertrand Russell called "The Fallacy of the Superior Virtue of the Oppressed."

Reading Two: Ba'athism.

The view that Saddam represented a strain of fascism is less controversial. Only a depraved fringe of the left, most notably the British member of Parliament George Galloway, disputed this.

Reading Three: The role of the left itself.

The pro-war left looked to a left-wing tradition that had fallen dormant: they argued for a self-consciously 1930s Victor Lazlo left rather than a 1960s flower-power one.

Quoting Orwell, they pointed out that there are enemies that may need to be fought rather than hugged into submission.

This insight stems from the one irreducible left-wing principle: solidarity with suffering strangers.

This principle is the reason why it was the left that made the case for fighting fascists in Spain, and it is - we argued - the left that should make the case for fighting fascists in Afghanistan.

By 2003, much of the left had abandoned this core instinct. For example, Madeleine Bunting is a left-wing who campaigns for women's and homosexuals' rights in Britain.

But she demanded to know why protesting left-wingers like me make "a shibolleth" out of women's and gay rights when it comes to Muslims.

It's hard to see this as anything other than a form of soft racism: while she finds misogyny repellent in London, it becomes a trivial matter in Damascus.

She is happy to wave away the rights of 55 percent of non-Westerners as a "shibboleth". The Eustonites aimed to be the opposite of this.

Reading Four: Neoconservatism.

Here is where we have to declare: Euston, we have a problem. The pro-war left somehow managed to move from tactically siding with the US in order to defeat a greater enemy - my initial position - to reflexively defending US imperial power, no matter how horrific.

Many Eustonites somehow convinced themselves that the US military had become the armed wing of Amnesty International. Author Nick Cohen even claims that "the neoconservatives were fighting the Left's battles for them."

The overwhelming contrary evidence is simply ignored. A policy of systematic torture? The immediate imposition of mass privatisations, causing mass unemployment and sectarian unrest?

The barricading of civilian men aged between 18 and 60 in Fallujah before attacking it with chemical weapons? Indeed, with a few exceptions, the pro-war left has never engaged with the situation in Iraq since March 2003.

They are frozen in the anti-war demonstrations of that spring, arguing against George Galloway alone.

It is this disastrous misreading that has discredited the other valuable insights of the pro-war left.

It can only be conjured into existence with a shallow and ahistorical reading of neoconservativism.

The notion that neoconservatism is a vehicle for a global democratic revolution is a 1990s rhetorical creation. On the contrary, for most of its short intellectual life neoconservatism has defended autocracy.

The most famous and influential neoconservative essay is Jeanne Kirkpatrick's "Dictatorships and Double Standards".

In it, she draws a distinction between "authoritarian" regimes and "totalitarian" regimes, and says that the US should foster and fuel the authoritarians.

For from being a democracy-hungry human rights activist, she attacks Jimmy Carter for pushing too hard for rights in places "not yet suited" to them.

She later adds, "There is no mystical American 'mission' or purposes" that should compel the US to spread democracy.

"Neoconservatives only start talking about spreading democracy in the 1990s as the sugar-coating on their demand that the US achieve "global hegemony", and hobble any potential strategic competitor.

Yet there is a bleak historical parallel for the pro-war left. For a brief period, Thomas Paine supported Napoleon and his acts of aggression, believing they were expressions of revolutionary Enlightenment values.

In reality, they were squalid expressions of realpolitik. Pro-war leftist Christopher Hitchens notes wistfully in his book about Paine that he "had fallen victim to a gigantic counter-revolution in revolutionary guise, which had succeeded in entrenching rather than undermining his original foes."

It is a moment of horrible clarity. The war in Iraq has entrenched jihadism.

It is clear that the invasion of Iraq was motivated not by Enlightenment values, but by a desire to achieve US control over Middle East oil.

Yet the only time people like Cohen mention oil is to mock the madness of the left for bringing it up. Is his explanation - that Rumsfeld and Cheney were suddenly gripped by Wilsonian idealism - more plausible?

The nuggets of important insight we on the pro-war left had - into Islamism, tyranny, multiculturalism, and the misguided reactions of the left to them - have been cluster-bombed and suicide-massacred to death in the killing fields of Mesopotamia.

The few who have not recanted are tied in painful knots, and every tug cuts off a little more circulation to the brain.

It is time for the signatories of the Euston manifesto to make a confession.

To rally the left to solidarity with the victims of Ba'athism and Islamism is an honourable cause; to do it with the weapon of neoconservatism was a catastrophic misjudgement.

Those on the pro-war left who ostentatiously claim Orwell's mantle have forgotten what made him great - the power to face inconvenient truths.

Cohen and those like him simply avert their gaze from the burning vistas of Iraq that contradict their thesis, turning towards Galloway to give him another deserved - but increasingly irrelevant - spit in the face.

Johann Hari @ Indy