The God that flails: Bernard-Henri Levy takes on the rudderless European left.

• Author: Moynihan, Michael C.
• Position: Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism - Book review

Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism, by Bernard-Henri Levy, New York: Random House, 214 pages, $25

FEW ON THE American left will today defend the Iraq war on moral grounds or suggest that the long-term retention of U.S. troops in that country is necessary. Right-wing pundits and intellectuals, by contrast, have fractured over Iraq. Paleoconservatives still battle neocons; national greatness conservatives duke it out with traditionalists and the Robert Taft fan club.

The political battle lines have been drawn in Europe too, with Iraq again a litmus test. There, however, the loudest arguments are on the left side of the spectrum. In England, it was public intellectuals such as Guardian columnists David Aaronovitch, Andrew Anthony, and Nick Cohen; Times writer Oliver Kamm; and former New Left Review Editor Norman Geras who accused their own side of being more interested in Bush bashing than in overthrowing a hideous dictator. In France the philosopher Andre Glucksmann and Doctors Without Borders founder (and current foreign minister) Bernard Kouchner did the same. In Germany, it was the singer, poet, and former dissident Wolf Biermann. A similar debate took place in America a few years ago, with liberal pundits such as Jacob Weisberg, Thomas Friedman, George Packer, and Peter Beinart taking the pro-war position. But the stateside battle has receded in recent years, with most liberal hawks abandoning their previous enthusiasm for the Iraq project.

None of the continental left-wing interventionists consider themselves converts to a new ideology. They're orphans, they say: The left has left me, they argue, not the other way around. They almost uniformly reject the label neoconservative as a term designed more to insult than to illuminate, though many acknowledge trundling down a path very similar to that of the American liberal who has been "mugged by reality."

Standing near them, but not exactly among them, is Bernard-Henri Levy. In 1976 Levy, a telegenic ex-Maoist famous for his unbuttoned shirts, declared himself a "new philosopher," becoming, Time noted at the time, an "overnight celebrity" plastered on magazine covers (including reason's) and on TV talk shows. The following year Levy would publish Barbarism With a Human Face, his stinging attack on the Sovietophilia of his fellow intellectuals. "No socialism without camps," he declared. "No classless society without its terrorist truth."

The left, he still insists, remains...