Even if It Wasn't True it Ought to Have Been.

Nick Cohen tries to re-establish his radical credentials by commenting on the greed of society, comparing the fuss of Manchester United footballer Wayne Rooney's demand for an increase in pay to city fat cats who give themselves colossal salary rises and the morality of such people,

The rumour in Manchester is that Coleen Rooney wanted an audience with the Pope to ask what she should do about Wayne. It's one of those stories that journalists don't like to check too strenuously because even if it isn't true, it ought to be.

A bit like the idea that the invasion of Iraq was about a "humanitarian intervention" then. As far as Rooney is concerned he's an overpaid oaf and football long ceased to be a merely entertaining game but a crashingly boring form of bread and circuses for the masses.

The destruction of the game by greed and too much money is fairly obvious, rather like the greed for oil that motivated the invasion of Iraq and the debt fuelled financial crash of 2008 that has compounded the decline of the USA and Britain as their colossal deficits expanded.

Just to remember how misjudged Cohen's support for the Iraq War was, it needs to remembered what he wrote in The Times ( The Left betrays the Iraqi people by opposing war, Jan 14 2003 ).

The truth is that the overwhelming majority of Iraqi dissidents are an embarrassment to the Left. After enduring misery few of us can imagine, they have discovered that, without foreign intervention, their country won't be freed from a tyrant who matches Stalin in his success in liquidating domestic opponents. Only America can intervene. Therefore an American invasion offers the possibility of salvation.

The first prediction that only the US offered salvation looks perverse now in the light of the Wikileak evidence about the scale of US collusion with the torture imposed by Iraqi state authorities and the napalming of Fallujah in 2004.

The second prediction was the complete reverse of what actually happened.

The Iraqi opposition had a right to expect support. The alternative it offers to Saddam's secular tyranny is not Islamic theocracy. The INC and the London conference of exiles both want a democratic Iraq that gives a voice to the suppressed Shia; a federal Iraq that allows autonomy for the Kurdish minority; and a secular Iraq that can contain the differences between Sunni and Shia Islam.

It seems that much of Cohen's support for Iraq was a faux Orwell stance to establish his credibility as some "decent left" writer who wanted to 'rub the cat's fur backwards' as Orwell did with the pro-Soviet supporting left in the 1930s.

If so, he failed pitifully.

I hear that the peoples of Iraq will slaughter each other if Saddam goes; that any US-sponsored replacement will be worse. They may be right, although the second prediction will be hard to meet. What is repulsive is the sneaking feeling that they want the war to be long and a post-Saddam Iraq to be a bloody disaster. They would rather see millions suffer than be forced to reconsider their prejudices.

It was idiocy for Cohen to project on to all those who opposed the war in Iraq the mental vices of some cranks and trendy poseurs in the anti-war movement, even if it's true that some reflexively opposed the war simply through disliking the USA.

Yet when supporting a war on the scale of Iraq, it was incumbent upon those like Cohen to provide authoritative evidence that the war was being fought for the humanitarian reasons posited and whether it had a realistic chance of a stable outcome.

Cohen did not. One has the sneaking feeling Cohen did not give a fig about millions of Iraqis either but in scoring polemical points over his opponents and who expected to attach himself to the success of the US war to portray them as spineless and craven.

For few really take the Socialist Workers Party seriously. They latched on to the anti-war protests in order to channel them into permanent agitation and created RESPECT which failed to mobilise opinion on any long term basis.