John Kampfner is right to draw attention to the importance of the far-left starting point of Nick Cohen's political journey (Books, 12 February). Cohen rightly pinpointed the failure of the anti-war movement's leadership to see the Saddam regime - with its history of violence - as a problem that needed international action. Yet he himself so easily embraced the equally problematic violence of bombardment, invasion and "accidental" civilian casualties that constituted the US/UK response.

The common thread is the facile politicisation of violence: the inability to see violent means as problematic, so long as the political ends are justified. The cases of George Bush and Tony Blair show that such attitudes are by no means exclusive to the left, but they do have a peculiar history in communism. Just as some "anti-war" leftists will condone any violence that is "anti-imperialist", old leftists do seem to supply a disproportionate number of Bush's intellectual fellow-travellers. This is hardly accidental, as we used to say.

Martin Shaw
Professor of international relations
University of Sussex

John Kampfner correctly points out some of Nick Cohen's terminological shortcomings. However, he fails adequately to tackle one of Cohen's central points. His charge is not that the left fell into support for Islamist terror. The quotation Kampfner cites on "Stalinism, Castroism . . ." refers to George Galloway, not to the million who marched. Nor does Cohen argue that an anti-war position had no merits. Indeed, in his introduction he concedes: "They had many good arguments that I would have agreed with in other circumstances."

Cohen's charge is that, once the war had started, a clear majority of the left failed to back Iraqis fighting for democracy in the most difficult conditions. This leaves aside key figures on the left who explicitly backed "the resistance". This void becomes clearer when filled by a few such as Peter Tatchell and the British trade unions that Cohen credits. "Where was he when we demonstrated for the Solidarity trade union?" Kampfner asks. But where were the left-wing marches for Iraqi trade unions?

George Eaton
Leamington Spa, Warwickshire

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