Bad boys of Europe.

Power and the Idealists: Or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer, and Its Aftermath, by Paul Berman (Soft Skull, 314 pp., $23.95)

IN modern times, the Left has been wrong about everything important--with the one exception of Nazism. Wrong about Stalin, wrong about Mao and Castro, wrong to support North Vietnam and the Sandinistas and Milosevic, wrong, wrong, wrong. And now the Left comes out to say that Saddam Hussein should have been allowed to stay in power, and his overthrow is worse than a mistake, indeed a crime. The enthusiasm for dictators is really quite extraordinary, except that it is so absolutely ordinary.

Why does the ideology of the Left give priority to totalitarianism over straightforward human freedom? Why is the Left habitually blind to the real victims? Probably there is no fully satisfying explanation of these central political conundrums, but Paul Berman explores them with insights all his own, and what's more, in prose of strength, subtlety, and even humor.

Superficially, Power and the Idealists is an account of the author himself: an intelligent and informed man taking his distance from the leftist ideology with which he had grown up. Once, he lets drop, he lived in a Maoist commune in Paris; he researched the literature of the Left, and he knew and admired Edward Said, then in his heyday as chief causemonger for Palestine. The 1968 student riots in Paris were an unforgettable moment of hope for him and many others like him. Revolution, at last!

Generously, maybe nostalgically, Berman supposes that the '68ers and their kind were conditioned by the specter of the Nazism that their parents had endured, imagining themselves as potential resisters, never collaborators. In the absence of Nazism, something else would have to substitute as a bogey, for instance America, Israel, the West, capitalism, democracy.

The revolution, then, was grounded in myth, not reality, so naturally things did not work out as expected. Delirium and mania are among the words Berman attaches to the few who resorted to terror in the form of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Black Panthers, and the Red Brigades. Mainstream '68ers confined themselves to posturing; they were in the grip of vanity and self-indulgence, much too rich and privileged for their own good. Most of them have long ago risen to the top of their society, where the power and influence they wield is irreconcilable with their former ideals.

Berman became acquainted with several contemporaries already prominent at that time. Their development into public figures over the years allows him to analyze and interpret how the Left in general has lost its way. Chief among them, and in some ways the book's villain, is Joschka Fischer, until recently the German foreign minister, and most improbable in that role. A '68er through and through, he began as a scruffy Marxist agitator. At one demonstration he was caught on camera attacking and injuring a policeman. If not a terrorist himself, he was certainly an accomplice of terror. He attended a PLO conference where a motion to eliminate Israel was passed unanimously. According to Berman, the Entebbe hijacking shocked Fischer into realizing that he was now supporting the murder of Jews--and thus not opposing Nazis, but imitating them. The Marxist swiftly morphed into a Green, a parliamentarian, if not exactly a politician like any other.

The Balkan crisis was Fischer's first big test, and he was able to identify the victims correctly. For the sake of ending Serbian ethnic cleansing of Albanians, he was willing to order German troops into a place Hitler had once invaded. He was turning his back on an anti-Nazism that was no anti-Nazism at all: To be siding with NATO, that is to say with the United States, was humanitarian and only normal.

Then, in February 2003, a conference was held in Munich at which Donald Rumsfeld put the case to European leaders for going to war with Saddam Hussein. Fischer was being invited to join another humanitarian enterprise, but this was a test that he failed. In English, and with practiced self-drama, he sneered at Rumsfeld, "Excuse me, I'm not convinced." It was ironic, not to say amusing, that he was now wearing a three-piece suit and had a respectable haircut, but there is no way to understand his attitude except as indifference to Saddam's cruelty and a predisposition for claiming moral superiority--in sum, a reversion to the leftism of 1968. So, after all, he proved to be the enabler of a totalitarian dictator, not a resister.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Fischer's close friend and a star of 1968, had also transformed from a Red into a Green, in his case becoming a member of the European Parliament and an echo for every ideological fashion. A yet more willing enabler, he too was not convinced that the U.S. could be anything other than imperialist and bad. Iraqis were therefore condemned to suffer Saddam Hussein without reprieve.

In contrast, another '68er, Bernard Kouchner, passionately advocated overthrowing Saddam and he is in some ways the hero of this book. A one-time Communist, he had been influenced by Che Guevara's doctrine that revolution has no boundaries. Experience in much of the Third World taught him that victims have rights, and resistance and revolution means standing up for them. Medically trained himself, he founded Doctors Without Borders, a truly Guevarist organization in pacifist form, and at one point he had been a French government minister. For him, the American government might very well be bad, but its intervention in Iraq was an unmitigated good. Lives would be saved, and victims spared.

Berman thinks it ought to have been possible--indeed obvious--to reach a political consensus that the overthrow of Saddam was justified on humanitarian grounds alone. The inability of the likes of Fischer and Cohn-Bendit to see this fact has done great and continuing damage. And although Saddam owed much to Nazism, it was not even necessary to see him primarily in that light. It should have been enough to listen to Iraqis themselves, for instance to Kanan Makiya, who had also started on the left but broke with the movement when he wrote books that graphically exposed Saddam's totalitarian horror.

Unexpectedly, and rather movingly, Berman also singles out for comparison a specimen conservative, the well-known journalist Michael Kelly. Convinced that the Iraqis deserved to be freed from Saddam, he made it his business to cover the 2003 war and was killed in the course of it. In this appraisal, Kelly shines through as someone with a sense of the brotherhood of man deriving from his religious faith--and also as an example to follow.

This book, it is true, erects much general argument on a smallish base of personal observations and apparent chance. And it might be objected that none of these people really matter: They are marginal intellectuals, the flotsam and jetsam of 1968, itself an episode interesting mostly to Freudian theorists. Not so. It is in the restricted arena where marginal intellectuals teach and preach that ideas turn into causes and agitprop of all kinds, and so work their way up into the politics of the larger society. The leftists currently demonstrating against the Iraq War are unable to rid themselves of bad ideas absorbed long ago, and that is why they persist in being wrong. They have to be resisted, and Berman shows that all it takes is an open and humane spirit.