Wars and the like often throw up new spokesmen - previously unknown pamphleteers, essayists and theorists who can articulate and capture the moment. Unhappily, such upheavals also produce people such as Scott Lucas - bad writers and sloppy thinkers whose stuff, like rubbish from a broken outflow pipe, surfs into town on an undiscriminating wave.
This book started, says Lucas almost tearfully in his introduction, "as a short polemic . . . but finished as so much more". Actually it finished as a very, very long polemic; a vast, windy, snide collage of decontextualised press cuttings and Lucas's own uninteresting and constantly predictable opinions. It is the work of an untravelled Pilger, missing the great Australian's waspish sense of humour. And it concludes in an embarrassing attempt at written peroration - an interminable series of painful artificial climaxes.
Before that dreadful last chapter Lucas's line, in essence, is this: George Orwell was not a socialist but a bad bloke and an establishment nark, whose work was used to persecute honest lefties back in the 1950s. His modern equivalent is the writer Christopher Hitchens who - assisted by various other traitors to the movement (I take a bow here) - is trying to pull the same trick now, in order to shore up the New American Empire. But do not despair, men and women of peace - it won't work, because the people united will never be defeated.
A lot of the Orwell stuff was in Lucas's critically unacclaimed biography of the writer ("a resolute hatchet job": Terry Eagleton). Lucas reiterates his earlier points about the demobilising effect of Animal Farm and 1984, and slams Orwell's treatment of socialists such as J D Bernal, "whose advocacy of co-operation with the Soviet Union became 'subservience to the Soviet Union'", and someone called Alaric Jacob, "who dared to think, during the Second World War, that Soviet society was basically a just one".
However, the unacknowledged problem (and why does Lucas not acknowledge it?) is that Orwell turned out to be right. When communists of J D Bernal's kind talked about co-operation with Russia, it usually did mean subservience: look at what happened in 1939. What's more, Alaric Jacob's daring thought - and I know many who dared to think it - helped prepare the way for the delivery to Stalin of most of eastern Europe.
But Lucas never sticks around for an argument like that. Orwell's sins are supplanted by those of Christopher Hitchens, and two whole chapters which manage to make the point that the old contrarian is occasionally rude, sometimes contradicts himself and is known to like a drop. He was once on the side of what Lucas calls "dissent", but is no more.
Let me register at this point the curiously unreflective way in which Lucas appears to define dissent. It is, as far as I can see, to have views that are different to the line of the government. But Lucas cannot be bothered to deal with one obvious problem, which is the question of what constitutes dissent in a country where the government is opposed to, say, the war in Iraq. Who is the dissenter in France, or Germany, or Russia? Let alone Syria or Saudi Arabia.
Lucas confers all intellectual virtue on his friends and vice upon his enemies. Those he agrees with are invariably "cogent" or "acerbic", whereas only his opponents can be "smug" or "crude". Far worse, however, is his Olympian ascription of motive, which eventually leads to farce. At one point Lucas writes that, "By intention or convenient coincidence the War on Iraq could divert attention from the 'quagmire' on the West Bank." It is pretty daft to claim that the coalition may, "by intention", have launched a full-scale invasion of a country thousands of miles away, in the hope that it would make people forget about Palestine.
Yet even that is not as silly as Lucas can get. He also argues that Hitchens, after lashing the anti-war movement over Afghanistan, "needed to renew himself with another cause". So along came Iraq because, "if the first unifying crisis in the War on Terror [the situation in Kabul] was becoming far too complicated, another one could be found to revive the denunciation of the left". So not oil. Not imperialism. Not even Palestine. The invasion of Iraq was undertaken to give people like me something to attack people like Scott Lucas for. By the book's end, however, not only is Lucas on the right side, but he is on the winning side - the side of the majority, with even people of the Pat Buchanan kind supporting the anti-war movement. Now "capitalism v socialism" represents "obsolete labels", and "right and left" are of no importance any more. "We" are "beyond" all that. Even so, he is being victimised - as a dissenter - by Orwell's ghost and by the equally dismaying Nick Cohen. In the process, they have provoked the unique stance of this book: triumphalist self-pity.
The editor of the New Statesman has called this book "fearless". But what, I wonder, have Lucas and his comrades ever had to fear? Tariq Ali is lionised by cafe society, George Monbiot zooms around the world lecturing and publishing and is never off Newsnight, and Scott Lucas is still, God help us, head of American studies at a major British university, with full run of the common rooms and the comfy chairs. His "dissent" has cost him absolutely nothing.
I am not sure I can say the same. My eventual support for the war to get rid of Saddam Hussein has earned me letters and e-mails calling me a wanker, brown-nose, arse-licker, propagandist, warmonger, Zionist, Islamophobe, neoconservative, glorifier of slaughter and murderer by proxy. Old friends say I have gone mad, old comrades that I have become an apostate and committed heresy. My father, I am told by a veteran communist who seems to know nothing about what Iraqi communists are saying today, would be turning in his grave.
And not because I have "suppressed" anything but because (and this is the real point), like Hitchens and others, I have put the other side of the argument, have argued what many Kurds and Iraqis and Sierra Leoneans and Bosnians know - that there is a leftist case for intervention, just as there is a leftist case against it. It is this second case that Lucas is unequipped, or unwilling, or too scared to make.
David Aaronovitch is a columnist for the Guardian
