CREDULOUS WHERE IT'S DUE. posted by Richard Seymour

Are the "tortured liberals" groping their way to the truth on Iraq?

Timothy Garton Ash first landed this astonishing phrase on an unsuspecting world of Guardian readers, some of whom have known the torture of trying to find anything they like at Waitrose, but might have been shocked at the phrase being used in connection with Iraq. The inappropriateness of this phrase could hardly have been missed, since it was those who had been subjected to the brutality of an increasingly beseiged Ba'athist regime and the bombing of increasingly aggressive Western airjets who had really been tortured. Liberal ambivalence might not have been as impressive to Iraqis at that juncture as it is to Western intellectuals who like to retain a supple intellect that far from being faithful to a single dogma, can at least be faithful to several.

Nevertheless, it would seem that these liberals, some of whom enthusiastically joined the War Party, some of whom (like Garton Ash and David Aaronowitzch) maintained a "tortured" posture of fence-sitting, are now beginning to rediscover the idea of criticising things. Garton Ash himself has encouraged us to "Fight the Matrix" in an alarming fogey reference to youth culture. John Sweeney, who before the war poured scorn on the claims that sanctions were killing Iraqi children (he claimed in a personal correspondence with me that Saddam had "tortured the statistics" because they had been supplied by the Iraqi Ministry of Health - absolute twaddle, of course, because the UN conducted the investigations themselves and constructed the statistics from their findings) has recorded a documentary for BBC 2 pugnaciously entitled "Iraq: Whose Country is it Anyway?". In it, he managed to sustain his support for the American intervention by interviewing a few Iraqis who appeared to be pliant to the goals of America, but nevertheless he did repeatedly question America's actions, its refusal to allow representation of what he called "the moderate Shi'a" opposition, as embodied by the large Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI).

David Hare, who was not so much a tortured liberal as a bemused one (the closest he could get to an explanation for the war on Iraq was that Bush was a former alcoholic and displayed the acted out aggression often found among such unfortunates), had at one stage been utterly convinced by the Blair project for re-making the world. The Labour Party conference in 2001 was a sombre farce, and it was capped by the most alarming, sincere evangelical load of old satanic codswallop that Tony Blair has ever managed to concoct. Most delegates watching this presumably felt like someone had shat down their throats, but David Hare was apparently swept up by the glorious thought of Tony Blair healing Africa, the "scar on the world's conscience". If only he'd known that what the Prime Minister meant was that Africa should be privatised and be made the willing or unwilling subjects of live GM crop trials, he might have paused to consider that word "scar" and its previous connections in the Prime Minister's mind. For Tony Blair, the overdog is the victim and the underdog an unwilling subject of his own salvation.

Nevertheless, he has now allowed us to know that he feels "betrayed" - and who can blame him? In his lengthy Guardian column, he does articulate the genuine amazement that many feel at the arrogance and insular smugness of the Blair clique - reminding us, perhaps, of St Augustine's dictum that ignorance is the mother of amazement. Hare also provides the most concise account of the current imperialist division of labour that we are likely to hear: "The deal is this: America provides the firepower; we provide the bullshit."

When liberals start turning on their bullshit-detectors, ideological hegemony is falling apart, because the last place that general disgust and cynicism about the political class registers is the Westminster-Fleet Street-Hampstead zone of credulous liberalism.