Mick Hartley

On the occasion of the publication of a new anthology, “Authors Take Sides on Iraq and the Gulf War”, Clive Davis in the Times has an article that’s worth reading:

The literary classes often follow a party line, so no one should be surprised by their stance in a new anthology about the rights and wrongs of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
Authors Take Sides on Iraq and the Gulf War has contributions from the great and the good of the literary world, from Antonia Fraser to Paul Theroux and John le Carré. The co-editor, Jean Moorcroft Wilson, says that of 70 authors polled on the war, which started one year ago this week, at least 50 weighed in on the anti-war side, a dozen were broadly neutral, and only the meagre remnants supported George Bush and Tony Blair.

Wilson insists that the project was not conceived as an anti-war exercise, and points out that she and her husband and co-editor, Cecil Woolf, are on opposite sides of the debate. Extracts that appeared before publication gave a flavour of the arguments. David Hare denounced the mendacity of the Anglo-American allies; Nadine Gordimer skewered the West’s “subliminal racism”; David Guterson bemoaned the “blind greed” of American capitalism; Harold Pinter muttered darkly about a “gangster act” designed to bolster US plans for world domination. There was a sprinkling of pro-war voices, including John Keegan, D. M. Thomas and Alan Sillitoe, but few of them could be considered members of the Hampstead-Hamptons axis. […]

Fortunately for the population of Kuwait, perhaps, writers are not the legislators of our age. What was striking about the extracts was how few of the war’s opponents acknowleged the complexity of the issues at stake. David Lodge, grappling with questions of legality, proved one of the honourable exceptions.

From most of the others came the sound of righteous platitudes. David Hare’s indignation even led him to claim that the American President “lied when he pretended (Iraq) possessed nuclear weapons”. Since Bush had said that part of the war’s raison d’être was to prevent Saddam acquiring a nuclear weapon, this assertion seems odd, to say the least.

Most troubling of all was the collective inability to understand the forces driving American policy. The liberal intelligentsia spends an awful lot of time denouncing the actions of the Bush Administration, yet rarely bothers to analyse its philosophy. Neo-conservatism, to give the most obvious example, is the most fashionable word on everyone’s lips — the actor Tim Robbins flays into Richard Perle & Co in his satirical play Embedded, at New York’s Public Theatre — yet how many of the literati actually know what the term means? I sometimes suspect that salon critics like the term because it sounds thrillingly close to “neo-fascist”.