Whose side are you on?

As troops prepare for war in Iraq, a battle of ideas is taking place in Fleet Street. And both positions have some unexpected recruits, says Johann Hari

A year ago, the proposals for a second Gulf War seemed very much the brainchild of the American right. The intellectual arguments backing the conflict emerged almost entirely from hard-right US think-tanks and senators. But then, a funny thing happened: a significant portion of the dissident left began to come out, in dribs and drabs, for overthrowing Saddam by force. There is now a considerable school of British centre-left thinkers and commentators who are lobbying hard for war, so that the Iraqi people can be freed: Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, John Lloyd, Julie Burchill, Roger Alton and David Aaronovitch

On the surface, there seem to be few similarities between these lefties-for-the-war. Lloyd, senior reporter on the Financial Times and contributing editor at the New Statesman, for example, is a fierce defender of the Blair government, while Cohen detests New Labour. Yet, below the surface, there is an intriguing commonality: almost all of them are former communists.

John Lloyd, who was a member of the Communist Party and considered himself a Marxist until his early thirties, identifies a strand of Marxism that seems to have echoes in the pro-war arguments being made today. He explains: "It's that side of Marx that argues that imperialism was good for India, and industrialisation good for the working class. It's the side of Marx that disliked soft liberals and said that if you're going to make the world better, you have to go through a number of necessary evils." Although Lloyd was never what he calls a "break-any-amount-of-eggs-to-make-an-omelette communist", there is a similar acceptance on the pro-war left of necessary violence and the creation of victims, which "soft liberals" blanch at.

Many journalists on the British conservative right – such as Matthew Parris of The Times and Stuart Reid of The Spectator – are sceptical of the war precisely because they see it as an overly optimistic Enlightenment project inimical to conservative values. Reid is dismissive of the "neo-conservatives who are really 19th-century liberals", who want to promote democracy abroad; they are concerned that many of the most vigorous exponents of the war (including US pro-Bush neo-conservatives such as David Horowitz) are former communists. As a recent article in The American Conservative magazine pointed out, the new liberal interventionism could be characterised as Marxist revolution drained of the communism. It still retains the (to conservatives) wildly over-optimistic view that the world can be constructively rebuilt using a firm body of Enlightenment values.

The pro-war left insists that power – even American hyper-power – can be used for constructive purposes. Lloyd says that "when I ceased to be a communist and therefore ditched an essentially undemocratic philosophy, I adopted democracy as a new faith with the real fervour of the convert. We [centre-left ex-communists] believe passionately in democracy because we've reasoned ourselves towards it, so we are perhaps more prepared to support wars that establish or defend it.

"We are articulating the democrats' case for war. Our belief is that the revolution that has really lasted is the democratic revolution emerging from France and the US in the 18th century. We believe that liberal democracy still holds out a promise to all societies – all our political values are based on this – so we must support those who are fighting for it within their own societies, like in Iraq."

Another common strand among pro-war lefties is disillusionment with the contemporary mainstream left, and especially the anti-war movement. Roger Alton, the editor of The Observer, is unreserved in his dislike for "the vapid old cack that you get from the implacable opponents of the war", and, in particular, "Tony Benn's spin-chillingly, stomach-churningly disgusting interview with Saddam Hussein".

A columnist on Alton's paper, Nick Cohen divides the anti-war protesters into two groups. The first are "those who just lack imagination – the actors and so on who can imagine war because they see it on the TV but, because there aren't pictures of the Marsh Arabs or the ongoing Iraqi tyranny, they just can't picture themselves in the position of the Iraqi people."

The other group are, he says, "the ones who are trapped in a cul-de-sac: whatever the US supports, they oppose. I remember in the Eighties, working with Iraqi refugees when it was a big cause of the left, and you had people such as [leftwing MP] Jeremy Corbyn [who now opposes sanctions and the war] calling for sanctions against fascist Iraq. But when the US shifted to opposing Iraq in the early 1990s, they mirrored that hypocrisy and dropped the Iraqi exiles, too."

This wing of the left "has become incredibly conservative, with nothing to offer Iraqis but the brutal status quo." It's because of this that too few people are campaigning for Iraqi democracy. "Almost nobody," Cohen notes, "is demanding of Blair and Hoon: what kind of Iraq are you fighting for?" The mainstream left have forgotten the need to overthrow tyranny and build democracy. This leaves a hole where its positive agenda should be. As Lloyd explains, "The left now sticks up for anybody who complains. Anybody who resists any change by any government, especially our own [centre-left] governments, is now an honorary part of the left. They've abandoned the idea of lesser evils. Leftism has really become an extreme form of anti-powerism".

Everybody on the pro-war left is taking a lot of flak at the moment. My own e-mail in-box is full of hate mail on this issue. (The hundreds of e-mails from Iraqi exiles grateful for those making the case for the Iraqi people, are more than enough compensation.) Now that so many prominent figures on the left are supporting their comrades in the Iraqi exile community, it is no longer accurate to say that the left is anti-war. The left is divided; and at least when this is over, some of us will be able to defend the reputation of the left as exponents of deposing tyrants and building democracy.