Guardian review

The Guardian reviewer Steven Poole selects my book Anti-Totalitarianism as one of his non-fiction choices in the newspaper today. He writes:

In this fizzily pugnacious, stylish essay, Oliver Kamm makes a much better case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq than the US or British governments ever did. Yet it is still problematic. We are, for example, to understand "regime change" as being synonymous with "invasion", even though none other than Paul Wolfowitz has admitted that there were other means. Secular Iraq is supposed to have had something to do with "theocratic fanaticism", and is even, bizarrely, named as the "most likely source" from which al-Qaida followers would have obtained frightening weapons, even though it is and was plain that Iraq was among the least likely sources of such weapons.

Kamm demolishes with puckish vim those on the left who took delight in the Iraqi "resistance" (a term he rightly rejects as loaded, though his own "Jihadists" is hardly any more accurate), or who saluted Saddam's courage and indefatigability. More nuanced and finely argued are his historical discussions of leftists' previous tergiservations [sic] over totalitarianism, before the second world war and during the cold war. Finally, the question of civilian casualties arises, prompting this curious formulation: "The civilian death toll appears to have been substantially higher than the war's supporters generally expected". How many civilian deaths would have been acceptable? No one ever answers that question.

The reason no one answers that question, if indeed no one does, is probably that the values at stake - overthrowing a bellicose tyranny as against the lives lost as a result - are not commensurable. But I shall, in another post, endeavour to answer it.