Oliver Kamm

Those Respect campaigners

A vignette, with a stirring photograph, concerning the election campaign in East London of the pro-fascist Respect 'Coalition' in the current edition of Socialist Worker takes my fancy. It notes the support given by:

... leading pensions campaigner Gordon McLennan, aged 80. As a teenager in Glasgow Gordon helped organise solidarity for the democratic government of Spain against the fascist coup led by General Franco. Gordon later became general secretary of the Communist Party.

“George [Galloway] has done so well in opposing war and racism,” he said. “It’s great to be here to lend him my support in person. I’m going to be travelling up from Lambeth over the next two weeks to help get him elected.”

That's it: the post of General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain is noted in passing as if it were equivalent to the chairmanship of the local branch of Amnesty International. What a doughty, principled fighter for pensioners that McLennan is. Oddly, Francis Beckett's sympathetic history of the CPGB, Enemy Within: The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party, 1995, makes no mention of McLennan's selfless campaigning for pensioners. It does refer (p. 216-221), however, to the annual six-figure subventions given secretly by the Kremlin to the British Communist Party throughout the 1960s, with continued donations for at least another decade after that (i.e. that is what is on the record and admitted, but there is circumstantial evidence that donations continued in the 1980s). When McLennan was appointed General-Secretary in 1975, he was told of this activity by his predecessor, John Gollan. Beckett notes:

McLennan claims that he said he wanted it stopped and assumed that it stopped at once. In fact it carried on for another four years. Asked why he never checked, he says: "I wanted no involvement, all I wanted was it stopped." There is a sense here that if something is not discussed it does not exist.

Beckett also quotes McLennan's successor, Nina Temple (who presided over the dissolution of the British Communist Party):

Nina Temple says: 'Whenever you needed money Gordon would say, "Go and see Reuben [Falber, the party functionary who received the money and laundered it through the Communist Party's employee pension fund]."' When she wanted to dispute one of Falber's decisions McLennan told her: 'If you ever question Reuben you're out. Reuben looks after the money and I trust him totally.' There is one small but perhaps significant discrepancy. McLennan claims he never discussed it with Falber. Falber says there was in fact one discussion.

If I were a parliamentary candidate, I think I'd prefer to be photographed alongside Neil Hamilton.

The state of the Tories

The Times reports on the deserved implosion of a Tory election campaign slogan of scarcely credible disrepute:

MICHAEL HOWARD shifted the Conservative campaign away from Iraq and Tony Blair’s character yesterday as the latest Populus poll suggested that his “liar” attack on the Prime Minister had backfired.... The posters [for this campaign] — saying “If he’s prepared to lie to take us to war, he’s prepared to lie to win an election” — were unveiled on Tuesday. They never appeared on billboards and just featured on 12 advertising vans for three days.

Thus have the Conservatives adopted - and on no principled grounds, withdrawn - an electoral pitch indistinguishable from - no, literally the same as - that of the Respect 'Coalition', an electoral front for the totalitarian Socialist Workers' Party. Not even the Liberal Democrats, whose position on the Iraq War (proclaiming support for British troops while refraining from wishing them victory on the battlefield) was cynical and whose every consequent prediction (the supposedly inevitable refugee crisis; the blow to Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations) has been refuted, have descended to these levels of personal abuse. The same Times report notes the reaction of a principled former Conservative:

There was evidence last night of Conservative discontent over Mr Howard’s campaign. Stephen Yorke, who was John Major’s deputy political secretary, said he had resigned from the Tory party in disgust.

Mr Yorke said: “I’ve been a member for 20 years but when I watched Michael Howard trying to exploit the war for political advantage this week, I decided that I’d had enough.”

He now plans to vote Labour in the marginal seat of Battersea. “I think Tony Blair has shown enormous political courage over Iraq and we have a lot to thank him for. I also believe the Government was right on student fees.”

Mr Yorke's views are mine exactly. I would add to the charge sheet a Tory campaign on immigration and asylum that, despite the efforts of civilised and urbane Tories to convince me otherwise, I find unprincipled and populist. When I started this site a couple of years ago I had intended to use it in part to urge the case for tactical voting to defeat the Liberal Democrats. The intellectual and moral decline of the Tories even since the fecklessness and foreign-policy vacillation of John Major's Government makes that impossible to countenance. I wish to see the Tories' electoral strategy firmly rebuffed and a third term for Tony Blair with a substantial majority. Even the new Tory candidates I respect appear ready, if decently embarrassed, to follow their leader. Times columnist Michael Gove, who is standing in a safe Tory seat, is inteviewed in the paper today:

So, when [Gove] sees those Conservative posters denouncing Mr Blair as a liar over Iraq, does he feel the glow of pride or the prick of shame? “Neither. The poster makes the point that Blair harmed the case for war by massaging it.” Did he lie? “He damaged trust in government.” But did he lie? “He gilded the lily.”

This is getting nowhere.

Gove is more independent-minded and direct than that. (He is also better-read. The correct quotation from Shakespeare's King John is not "to gild the lily" - something that is impossible to do - but "To gild refined gold, to paint the lily.... Is wasteful and ridiculous excess".) In short, while there are individual Conservatives whose election I would welcome, including Gove's, I can see no case for widespread tactical voting in this election. The proper course is to vote Labour; there is in addition a strong case for all democratic voters, and not only those of us on the Left, to wish to see a Labour victory over the pro-fascist Respect 'Coalition' in two East London seats.

The one caveat I have to my overall conclusion about the election is the quality of new Labour candidates. The Times published a disturbing survey last Tuesday showing that:

THE majority of Labour’s potential new MPs dare not talk about the war in Iraq, with just one in 12 of them prepared to back Tony Blair’s decision to send in British troops, a Times survey has shown. Mr Blair has described the 48 new candidates defending seats in which a Labour MP is stepping down as even more new Labour than himself, but only four of them would publicly support his decision to go to war. Two of the four said they had grave reservations. More than a quarter of the new candidates in Labour seats said that they were against the war and half simply refused to discuss their views on Mr Blair’s most controversial decision.

Mr Blair's "most controversial decision" it doubtless was, but it was far more than that. Contrary to the Liberal Democrats' depiction of the Iraq War as the "biggest foreign policy error" since the Suez crisis, it was the most strategically far-sighted and noble act of British foreign policy since the founding of Nato. Labour came to office promising to conduct foreign policy "with an ethical dimension"; the overthrow of clerical barbarism in Afghanistan and Baathist totalitarianism in Iraq shows that this was no idle boast. I want to see the maximum representation in the new Parliament of liberal-democratic internationalists who will support the promotion of global democracy and an interventionist stance against autocracies and failed states. The feebleness of Labour's new candidates on these axiomatic liberal principles augurs badly.

My local Labour candidate, one of the respondents in The Times survey, is making an issue of being ready to vote against her own party in further exercises of military force. Why she sought the Labour nomination in the first place when she publicly opposes the policies of the Labour Government is not for me to speculate upon, but it does put those of us who support the revolutionary cause in a tricky position. As it happens, the Tory candidate, Nicholas Boles, is one of the few in his party who it is reasonable to assume would extend consistent and principled support to Tony Blair's foreign policies (he is a patron of the Henry Jackson Society, which I wrote about here, and I am seeking further information on him). There may be other cases, but this is the only one I have come across where, in a marginal seat, a supporter of progressive policies would have good cause to welcome the election of a Conservative candidate.

Political theorists of our time

I have never heard of an actress called Maggie Gyllenhall, but her political opinions, as reported by the BBC, are highly familiar to me:

Actress Maggie Gyllenhaal has prompted outcry after she remarked that the US was "responsible in some way" for the terror attacks of 11 September 2001. Gyllenhaal was speaking at an interview promoting her new film, The Great New Wonderful, about people living in New York in the aftermath of 9/11. In a subsequent statement issued by her publicist, she defended the comment.

"Not to have the courage to ask these questions of ourselves is to betray the victims of 9/11," the 27-year-old said.

In the statement, Gyllenhaal said 11 September was "an occasion to be brave enough to ask some serious questions about America's role in the world". She added: "It is always useful as individuals or nations to ask how we may have knowingly or unknowingly contributed to this conflict."

What can you say of a young lady for whom history has never happened, and who mistakes amorality and ignorance for personal bravery? The notion that we - the western democracies allied to the United States - might have knowingly provoked the murder of 3000 civilians is beyond everyday categories of stupidity. The amount we contributed to this 'conflict' unknowingly is moreover a matter on which it is unnecessary to speculate, for we already know the answer: it is zero. The theocratic totalitarians who attacked the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did not leave a suicide note, but their leader has made no secret of his ambitions. As he explained to the BBC in an interview in 1998, he regarded "holy war against Jews and Christians" as a duty. We could adopt every single policy laid out in the 2004 election manifesto of Ralph Nader and still be the target of holy war by our declared Islamist enemies. There is no negotiated solution possible in such a conflict - only military victory for our side or theirs. And to paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, this is just as well, because what their side objects to about us is everything - everything - that distinguishes our societies from the clerical barbarism that they represent: democracy, pluralism, liberal political rights, sexual equality, religious liberty, homosexual rights and so on.

Maggie Gyllenhaal managed to reserve a casual blasphemy for her coda:

She also expressed her grief for "everyone who suffered and everyone who died in the catastrophe".

With the phrase "everyone who died" she includes - if I may employ a Gyllenhaalism, "knowingly or unknowingly" - the bigots and fanatics who carried out these monstrous acts of terror. I trust that in conveying that judgement, she will find that the exercise of free speech that her country protects will nonetheless not be commercially costless to her. That is as it should be.

Don't try this at home

Daniel Finkelstein writes in The Times of an unilluminating and ungrammatical executive toy:

THE http://whoshouldyouvotefor.com website has been very popular during this election, with so many people wanting to use it that it can take ages to get online.

Sadly, it does not live up to its promise. It informed me that I should vote UKIP. It did the same for a pretty left-wing friend of mine. It gives this advice because it fails to distinguish between opposition to the euro and the new European constitution (my view) and support for leaving the EU (the UKIP’s).

This is a pretty fundamental flaw and despite asking for comments they seem to be in no mood to correct it.

I wouldn’t bother if I were you.

I had already bothered by the time he wrote this, but found the exercise as perverse as he did. It did admittedly get the parties in the order I would rank them - Labour first, then the Tories, with the Liberal Democrats and the Greens miles behind - but gave a surprisingly neutral score to UKIP, whose distinguishing policy is withdrawal from the EU, whereas I had agreed (in principle: it would depend on the circumstances in practice) with both the euro and the European constitution. These in any event are issues that will be decided by referendum.

Those Liberal Democrat defectors

The former Labour MP Brian Sedgemore writes in The Independent today:

I've been a Labour MP for more than a quarter of a century. In my last speech in Parliament, I described New Labour's descent into Hell and added that Hell was not a place where I wanted to be. Some MPs thought it was just rhetoric. It wasn't. I meant it. I am going to leave the Labour Party and join the Liberal Democrats so I can help them in this election campaign. To my former comrades, I say, 'Sorry but all nightmares have to end'. I'm renouncing Tony Blair, the Devil, New Labour and all their works. I don't do this lightly. I know that some of my friends will be angry, and I will be rubbished by the New Labour spin machine. Mad Dog [John] Reid will be set on me. John Prescott will say, "Brian? Brian who?"

I can help Prescott out. In the 1974-79 Parliament, Sedgemore was considered some sort of intellectual influence on the Labour Left's "Alternative Economic Strategy". Martin Holmes, in The Labour Government, 1974-79: Political Aims and Economic Reality (1985, p.96), takes up the story:

To the right of the Labour Party, the "alternative strategy" was neither an alternative nor a strategy. One Tribunite MP recalled that: "In 1975 the Tribune Group put forward an alternative strategy which was printed in Tribune at the end of 1976. We were like a government in exile. When Brian Sedgemore saw [Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis] Healey to put the alternative strategy, Healey just fell about laughing."

That marked the summit of Sedgemore's influence in public policymaking in his chosen specialist subject. When you consider that the alternative economic strategy (known by the initials AES, which was a talisman of the Left for another decade) comprised import controls, directed investment, compulsory planning "agreements" with industry, price controls and the nationalisation of the largest 25 companies, you begin to wonder why Healey was so generous.

Sedgemore later distinguished himself as a member of the Treasury Select Committee by shouting "snivelling little git" at the then Chancellor, Nigel Lawson. On being quizzed on this in a television interview, Sedgemore said he had probably been wrong to use the word "little", because Lawson was, in fact, fat.

Sedgemore is, in short, a man of neither ability nor attainment who held a safe Labour seat for 22 years (he was out of Parliament between 1979 and 1983) for no obvious reason except that constituency Labour parties of the 1980s were largely uninterested in ideas, and few talented people other than Blair and Brown chose to become Labour politicians at that time. Even The Independent delicately observes that Sedgemore "was never trusted with a ministerial post higher than the unpaid PPS job", but fails to draw the obvious inference about why this was.

I am glad that Sedgemore has found his political home, and hope he will be happy there.

Synagogues for burning

Gilad Atzmon's reported views on the "rationality" of burning down synagogues have, incidentally, a provenance. A new book by Wolfgang Kraushaar of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, Die Bombe im Jüdischen Gemeindehaus (in German only), is (I believe) the first book-length account of one of the most disturbing incidents in the history of democratic Germany: the planting of a bomb in 1969 in a Jewish community centre in West Berlin (the Gemeindehaus). The date (9 November) was chosen because it was the anniversary of Kristallnacht. Fortunately the bomb failed to detonate, yet the horror of the incident - targeting Jews less than a quarter of a century after the defeat of Nazism, and in obvious awareness of Nazi precedent - needs no explication.

The perpetrators of this outrage were not - superficially, at least - neo-Nazis, but a far-Left group calling itself the Tupamaros West-Berlin. The rationale of the bomb was to signal that Germany should abandon any sense of guilt at the Holocaust. The group condemned such feelings as "neurotic, backward-looking anti-Fascism, obsessed as it is by past history, [which] totally disregards the non-justifiability of the State of Israel".

There is a book to be written one day on the ideological convergence of Europe's far-Left and far-Right, symbolised in their attitudes to the Jewish state. What I trust civilised people can agree on in the meantime is that that convergence is a political fact and not a speculative hypothesis.

Those AUT boycotters

David Aaronovitch, in The Observer, writes of the decision of the Association of University Teachers to boycott certain Israeli universities. He says, rightly, that the aim of those wanting peace and justice in the Middle East is to secure a two-state outcome and build confidence between Jews and Palestinians:

Unless, of course, you don't believe that Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state at all within any borders. And this, as it happens, seems to be the view of Sue Blackwell, who describes Israel as 'an illegitimate state'. Unlike the United Nations, she does not believe it should have been set up and she would rather it disappeared. As she pointed out in 2003 to a previous AUT council: 'From its very inception, the state of Israel has attracted international condemnation for violating the human rights of the Palestinian people and making war on its neighbours.' Or, to put it even more bluntly, everything is all the fault of the Israelis.

Sue Blackwell, of Birmingham University, was the proposer of the boycott motion at the AUT council, and is even less politically subtle than Aaronovitch suggests. In 2002, after criticism of her personal web site from Jewish organisations, she declared:

If I've inadvertently linked to something that glorifies suicide bombers I would remove it immediately.

The notion that linking to such material is an innocent mistake that anyone could make is one that, for all my charitable instincts, I find difficult to swallow. I should still have done my best, however, were it not for the fact that Mrs Blackwell's personal site also links to an antisemitic campaigner who believes that it is a rational act to burn down synagogues. You doubt me? Well, she's just added a link - helpfully annotated "NEW!" in dancing yellow capitals - to Gilad Atzmon's site. On that site you can find, as well as the "scathingly comic take on Zionist politics and Israeli espionage" that Mrs Blackwell plainly admires, such scathingly comic sentiments as that the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion gives an accurate description of the Jewish scheme for world domination:

[W]e must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously. It is beyond doubt that Zionists, the most radical, racist and nationalistic Jews around, have already managed to turn America into an Israeli mission force. The world's number one super power is there to support the Jewish state's wealth and security matters. The one-sided pro-Zionist take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the American veto against every 'anti-Israeli' UN resolution, the war against Iraq and now the militant intentions against Syria, all prove beyond doubt that it is Zionist interests that America is serving. American Jewry makes any debate on whether the 'Protocols of the elder of Zion' are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews do try to control the world, by proxy. So far they are doing pretty well for themselves at least. Whether the Americans enjoy the deterioration of their state's affairs will no doubt be revealed soon.

Please apply to Sue Blackwell, and not to me, if you want to know why she links approvingly to the personal web site of a man who promotes hoary anti-Jewish conspiracy theories - even though I suspect you'd get a more accurate answer from me.

Respect and antisemitism

From The Guardian, 12 April:

"This is one of the most disgusting slurs I can remember for a long time," said John Rees, national secretary of Respect. "George Galloway and everyone in Respect has a long record of fighting anti-semitism - longer I suspect than Oona King."

From The Observer, 17 April:

Gilad Atzmon, a pro-Palestine advocate, gave a talk to [SOAS] students this month, arguing: 'I'm not going to say whether it is right or not to burn down a synagogue, I can see that it is a rational act.'

John Rees is a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers' Party, at whose 'Marxism 2004' jamboree Gilad Atzmon was an invited speaker on the subject "How can Palestine be free?" (see here for Socialist Worker's obsequious piece on Atzmon before the event, where his unabashedly antisemitic writings are termed "Gilad's fearless tirades against Zionism").

"The most conservative voice in this election"

I have written nothing so far about the vitriolic and increasingly violent election battle in Bethnal Green, but the incumbent Labour MP, Oona King, was one of the first subjects I wrote about when I started this blog. She is a sort of family friend, and I’m sorry to be so critical of her, but there it is. The Guardian profiled her a couple of years ago with this introduction:

She comes from a distinguished American political clan, and was tipped by many to be the Blairista most likely to succeed. So why isn't Oona King in the cabinet?

It was left unmentioned by the interviewer, but the answer was contained in the same article when Mrs King gave her views on the place of the United States in the world order:

It's a fucking fucked-up power man, it's a fundamentalist Christian power if we're not careful. It's terrifying.

So Oona King is not in the Cabinet because anyone with common sense – and certainly the PM – can see her potential for blowing up. She also memorably wrote an article for The Guardian two years ago in which she demonstrated an idiosyncratic grasp of history:

The original founders of the Jewish state could surely not imagine the irony facing Israel today: in escaping the ashes of the Holocaust, they have incarcerated another people in a hell similar in its nature - though not its extent - to the Warsaw ghetto.

I won’t on this occasion go into why a historical analogy between Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto is wrong and reprehensible, but note only Mrs King’s baffling parenthetical distinction between the “nature” and the “extent” of the suffering in either case. She seems at least to be aware that Nazi genocide is a case sui generis but can’t work out why. She thus tries to cover herself with a casuistic distinction that breaks down the moment you try to analyse what she means. The only sense I can make of it is that she believes Israel seeks to murder every Palestinian in Gaza (the “nature” of the two cases), but has so far unaccountably failed to realise that aim (their “extent”). Politicians and others who write for the press often get accused of not knowing the first thing about the subject on which they write, but Mrs King is an unusual case where the charge is literally and not merely hyperbolically true.

But for all Oona King’s weaknesses, she is facing down an unscrupulous campaign to unseat her and doing so with conspicuous personal courage. She deserves support not only from those of us on the Left but from everyone else who subscribes to democratic values. Mick Hume in The Times today makes an unexceptionable observation about the Respect ‘coalition’ that is attempting to defeat Oona King:

Respect acts as a reminder of why I describe myself as “on the left, but not of it”. It has been accused of flirting with the Islamic lobby in its campaign against the Iraq war, and it is noticeable that its manifesto commitment to defending civil liberties against the Government makes no mention of defending free speech against new Labour’s incitement to religious hatred laws. But even worse than that is Respect’s embrace of today ’s fashionably backward Western prejudices, opposing everything from GM foods and nuclear power to more animal research and road building. As the Left turns into the enemy of progress and the embodiment of self-loathing, Respect sometimes sounds like the most conservative voice in this election — a pretty remarkable achievement, given who it is up against.

But he understates. The reason that all democrats, and not merely those on the Left, should support the Labour campaign in Bethnal Green and Bow was intimated by Nick Cohen in The Observer this week:

In 2005, in London's East End, George Galloway, a former Labour MP and moustachioed loudmouth, is urging supporters of Respect to propel him back to power. Just as Mosley bent the knee to the fascist leaders of his day, so Galloway bent the knee to Saddam Hussein when he flew to Baghdad and burbled: 'Sir, I salute your courage, strength and indefatigability.'

This analogy with fascism, unlike Oona King’s, is well-chosen. The Respect ‘coalition’ is, as Cohen points out, not properly described by the term – habitually employed by the BBC – “anti-war”. The party has an ideological character derived from the organisation that controls it, the Socialist Workers’ Party. The best historical precedent I can think of is the Progressive Party under whose auspices Henry Wallace ran for the White House in 1948. Ostensibly devoted to a foreign policy of accommodation and cooperation with the Soviet Union, the party was a straightforward front for the Communist Party, which in turn was an instrument of the Comintern. (The analogy isn’t quite exact: Wallace, who had been Vice-President to Franklin Roosevelt, was a featherheaded and gullible man who probably never realised the use to which he was being put. Of the many things I could say about George Galloway, I would not include the charge of gullibility: he knows what he's doing.) If you refrain from pointing out the ideological character of Respect, then you delude the public and possibly yourself. It is like referring to the British National Party on its own terms as a nationalist organisation while making no reference to its neo-Nazi antecedents, organisational links and ideology.

Saddam Hussein’s regime is properly described as fascist – among other things – because fascism provided the inspiration and model for it. As the historian Walter Laqueur writes in his valuable survey of Fascism: Past, Present, Future (1996, p.162):

The Iraqi political system is [i.e. under Saddam] not just a military dictatorship or a one-party system. It has been striving for totalitarian rule, with a massive use of terror and propaganda, the cult of its leader, unbridled nationalism, and military aggression that have taken it as far on toward full-fledged fascism as most European fascist regimes and movements did in the 1930s.

I have written many times, and will point again in the hope that it will be repeated widely, that in the Iraq War the Socialist Workers’ Party, for which the Respect ‘coalition’ is an electoral front, explicitly campaigned for military victory for fascism. It commends to its supporters overt and shameless anti-Jewish bigotry. In an open letter published on the party’s web site, SWP ideologue Alex Callinicos of York University maintains that "road-side bombs that kill American soldiers and attacks on Iraqi recruits to the puppet regime’s army and police and on its officials" are "legitimate attacks" (for an example of such attacks on “Iraqi recruits to the puppet regime’s army and police”, see – please see – this report).

The SWP, under its label of convenience, is one of two organisations fighting this general election that promote fascism, antisemitism, totalitarianism and political violence. Even in allying with theocratic Islamist reaction the SWP is following where the British National Party has led. The BNP leader, Nick Griffin, was caught on camera last year rousing his supporters with anti-Muslim demagoguery, but in the late 1980s was a prominent advocate of a current in European fascism known as the “Political Soldiers”. This group gained its intellectual ballast from the doctrines of the Italian fascist theorist Guilio Evola and its historical inspiration from the Romanian Iron Guard. Its cult of violence was expressed in support for the Islamic Republics of Iran and Libya. (Griffin, with his associate Derek Holland and prominent Italian fascists, split from the National Front in 1989 to found the "International Third Position", which advocated Holy War on the model of the Revolutionary Guards of Iran. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, a specialist in esoteric doctrines and the far-Right, at Lampeter University, gives a fascinating account of the bizarre notions of Evola and his later followers, including Griffin, in Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity, 2002, pp. 52-71.)

Securing the defeat of these two parties, which politically and morally serve the same ends, is the first duty, and will be the greatest satisfaction, of civilised voters.

Shame of The Independent

Fine letter in today's Independent from the journalist William Shawcross:

Marla Ruzicka was a brave and selfless woman who did an enormous amount in her short life for innocent victims of conflict. To run the story of her death under the splash headline "The senseless death of the woman who fought George Bush" (19 April) is totally misleading. She was murdered by a suicide bomber in Iraq. Your editorial rightly praised her work and you said her legacy "should put many politicians in America, and in our own country, to shame". Yet you have no criticism for those who murdered her. That puts you to shame.

Shawcross's book on the background to the Iraq War, Allies (recently reissued with a new preface bringing the story up to date) is the best thing written on the subject. It is a shame, and a dispiriting reflection on the governments of the US and UK, that the urgent and compelling case for overthrowing Saddam Hussein by force was largely left to writers such as Shawcross and Christopher Hitchens to argue. They did, and do, a fine job in a noble cause.