On the surface, there seem to be few similarities between these lefties-for-the-war. Lloyd, senior reporter on the Financial Times and contributing editor at the New Statesman, for example, is a fierce defender of the Blair government, while Cohen detests New Labour. Yet, below the surface, there is an intriguing commonality: Almost all of them are former communists.

John Lloyd, who was a member of the Communist Party and considered himself a Marxist until his early thirties, identifies a strand of Marxism that seems to have echoes in the pro-war arguments being made today. He explains: “It’s that side of Marx that argues that imperialism was good for India, and industrialization good for the working class. It’s the side of Marx that disliked soft liberals and said that if you’re going to make the world better, you have to go through a number of necessary evils.” Although Lloyd was never what he calls a “break-any-amount-of-eggs-to-make-an-omelet communist”, there is a similar acceptance on the pro-war left of necessary violence and the creation of victims, which “soft liberals” blanch at.

Many journalists on the British conservative right — such as Matthew Parris of The Times and Stuart Reid of The Spectator — are skeptical of the war precisely because they see it as an overly optimistic Enlightenment project inimical to conservative values. Reid is dismissive of the “neo-conservatives who are really 19th-century liberals”, who want to promote democracy abroad; they are concerned that many of the most vigorous exponents of the war (including US pro-Bush neo-conservatives such as David Horowitz) are former communists. As a recent article in The American Conservative magazine pointed out, the new liberal interventionism could be characterized as Marxist revolution drained of the communism. It still retains the (to conservatives) wildly over-optimistic view that the world can be constructively rebuilt using a firm body of Enlightenment values.

The pro-war left insists that power — even American hyper-power — can be used for constructive purposes. Lloyd says that “when I ceased to be a communist and therefore ditched an essentially undemocratic philosophy, I adopted democracy as a new faith with the real fervor of the convert. We (center-left ex-communists) believe passionately in democracy because we’ve reasoned ourselves toward it, so we are perhaps more prepared to support wars that establish or defend it.

“We are articulating the democrats’ case for war. Our belief is that the revolution that has really lasted is the democratic revolution emerging from France and the US in the 18th century. We believe that liberal democracy still holds out a promise to all societies — all our political values are based on this — so we must support those who are fighting for it within their own societies, like in Iraq.”

Another common strand among pro-war lefties is disillusionment with the contemporary mainstream left, and especially the anti-war movement.