On Hubris

Leslie Jones

Nick Cohen, What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way, Fourth Estate, 2007

David Owen, The Hubris Syndrome: Bush, Blair and the Intoxication of Power, Politico’s Publishing, 2007

Godfrey Hodgson, Woodrow Wilson’s Right Hand: The Life of Colonel Edward M. House, Yale University Press, 2006

Two of the symptoms of what David Owen calls the hubris syndrome are 1) an excessive confidence in one’s own judgement and 2) a loss of contact with reality often associated with progressive isolation[i]. Witness journalist Nick Cohen, whose polemic What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way could be crudely summarised thus- “Why I approved of the Iraq war– and why I was right and everybody else was wrong”.

Although Nick Cohen no longer proclaims the inevitability of socialism, his thinking retains some distinctly Marxist elements. Sectarianism is evidently hard to give up and he wilfully conflates the heterogeneous elements within the anti-war coalition. Those who in 2003 marched through London to oppose an invasion of Iraq marched “against the overthrow of a fascist regime”, in his estimation. Regardless of their personal attitude towards Saddam Hussein, the demonstrators gave succour to the dictator. In terms of praxis (ie what they did rather than what they thought) they might as well all have been outright supporters of Saddam or have personally dropped the gas on Halabja.

Cohen’s tendentious critique of the anti-war movement brings to mind the ultra-leftist theory of ‘social fascism’ that was de rigueur for all Stalinists until 1934 (when it was abruptly replaced by the People’s Front policy).The thrust of this self-stultifying theory, which paralysed resistance to the Nazis, was that fascism and social democracy were allies in the service of monopoly capital[ii].

In his new book The Hubris Syndrome, David Owen also defends his stance on the Iraq War (although ‘book’ is a generous description for a mere 144 pages, including endnotes, which have been separated from a much longer forthcoming work entitled In Sickness and in Power: Illness in Heads of Government during the Last 100 Years).

In Dr Owen’s judgement, the existence of WMD should never have been allowed to become the sole reason for justifying an invasion, since “Regime change and ensuring WMD could never return were part and parcel of the UN’s responsibility”. For Owen, this was just one of Blair’s many mistakes. Dr Owen approves of the overthrow of Saddam and thinks that “Bush and Blair showed courage in deciding to invade Iraq”. Nevertheless, The Hubris Syndrome contains a devastating indictment of their incompetence, over-confidence and inattention to detail.  

David Owen’s overarching theme is the psychopathology that can attend the protracted exercise of political power. Here, the paradigmatical text is Freud and Bullitt’s Thomas Woodrow Wilson. In one particularly memorable passage therein, Freud and Bullitt* are referring to President Wilson’s unconscious identification with Christ. They write, “He was rapidly nearing the psychic land from which few travellers return, the land in which facts are the products of wishes, in which friends betray and in which an asylum chair can be the throne of God” (quoted by Geoffrey Hodgson, in Woodrow Wilson’s Right Hand). But some intrepid travellers have returned from this land and found book deals and sinecures awaiting them.   

Dr LESLIE JONES is the QR’s deputy editor

* William C. Bullitt was one of Colonel House’s advisors.