One Reason Fewer to Read the Guardian

David Aaronovitch, one of my favorite columnists anywhere, and a member of the London chapter of the "Left Behind" club, has written his final piece for the Red Lady.

[Hat tip, Solomonia]

Aaronovitch made a fine case for the invasion of Iraq, back in April 2003. It resonated with me, living on the "right" side of the debate, but with the intact principles and worldview of a lifetime on the "left":

This war for me has always been a fine judgment call, a choice between deeply shitty alternatives (my big argument with some in the anti-war campaign has been their belief that there are -- or were -- No-Die options in Iraq). Agnostic on the threat of weapons of mass destruction (though believing that Saddam would develop them if permitted to), sceptical on alleged Iraqi links with new Osama bin Laden-type groups, it finally came down to the lesser of these three evils: Saddam unchained; a "contained" Saddam plus sanctions and endless inspections; invasion and no Saddam. In the end, I chose the latter.

Even so, there has always been the possibility of a war that was worse even than another 20 years of Saddam, Uday, Qusay, Chemical Ali and Dr Germ. And there have been moments in the past few days when I have wondered whether we aren't fighting it.

He writes that his departure from the Guardian has nothing to do with the political disjunction between his employer and his brain. Still, he must feel like an ice cube in hell there, and his farewell column is a machine-gunning of leftist stupidity in Merrie Olde.

Haven't I also moved, like Clark, from my former leftiness, to become - as one BBC presenter put it to me - a "cheerleader for George Bush," an apologist for US imperialism, a British neocon, a neoliberal, and all that?

Last summer I was sitting outside a cafe talking to a friend when a young black woman, walking by, stopped and asked me whether I wasn't David Aaronovitch, "the evil writer." She wasn't to be persuaded to sit down and talk things over, but told me that my articles were "racist and sexist," and stalked off.

In the grand scheme of things, if we establish continuums between, say, Richard Littlejohn and Benjamin Zephaniah on race and Jeremy Clarkson and the late Andrea Dworkin on gender, I think that my stuff would tend to be on the left side of the median point. Certainly people on the right tend to accuse me of excessive liberalism on such issues.

So I felt that my accuser was really reacting to something else. What has put me beyond the pale has been my support for the Iraq war and - to a lesser extent - my support for the imposition of top-up tuition fees. Somehow or other these have become the key determinants of one's position on the political spectrum.

Iraq you know about. There is a leftwing case for supporting the overthrow of a fascist regime, even if it is done by a rightwing American government. And there most certainly is a leftwing case for funding the expansion of higher education through fees that are repayable on graduation into the qualified middle classes, especially when linked to a substantial package for supporting students from poorer backgrounds.

None of that seems to matter. Since I decided, in January 2003, that if Iraq was invaded I would not oppose it, I have had the almost astral experience of finding myself excommunicated from the movement, sometimes by fellow journalists who I know do not possess a political bone in their entire bodies.

All of a sudden I began to experience the left from the outside. And the first thing that struck me was its capacity for smug certainty and uniformity of response. Look at the cartoonists, whose work trumps debate. You may have Blair the poodle, Blair with blood-stained hands, Blair the liar, Bush the absurd chimp, but never, ever, Galloway the consort of tyrants or Kennedy the comforter of "insurgents."

Keep writing, David. We'll look for you in greener pastures.