But events have overtaken my natural abhorrence for mediaspeak; I must admit at least one thing will never be the same for me post 9/11: my reflexively good opinion of George Orwell, icon-saint of the non-communist left, whose holy reputation rests in part on its usefulness to the anticommunist, neoconservative right.

In truth, I've never felt that attached to Orwell; somehow his writing never evoked the passionate admiration I hold for Albert Camus or Graham Greene. But I've always felt obliged to exalt Orwell, whatever my gut feelings. Within the small corner of the media that I inhabit, one could say that it's politically correct to love Orwell; and to be sure, there's much to love about his work, the journalism, of course, but also his remarkable talent for exposing hypocrisy and demolishing cant.

So I bristled when I was contradicted on a radio show by journalist Michael Barone, who invoked Orwell to excuse civilian casualties in Afghanistan caused by U.S. bombing. Mr. Barone, of U.S. News and World Report, had drawn attention with an extraordinary statement made on Fox TV to the effect that Americans shouldn't get too upset about "collateral damage" during Operation Enduring Freedom. Civilian casualties aren't news, he said. "The fact is that they accompany wars. What's newsworthy here is that the United States taxpayer and the United States military has spent billions of dollars to develop these precision weapons, which most of the time hit a very precisely defined military target."

Nicely put -- if you're a Pentagon press agent. I replied that I didn't think the Afghan civilian deaths were all necessarily accidental. Deliberate terror bombing of civilians was an established U.S. military strategy with prominent antecedents (Dresden, Tokyo, Vietnam) that is still hotly debated at war colleges around the world. The theory goes that if civilians provide support for an army, then bombing will make them abandon their supportive tasks -- factory work, shelter and concealment, food gathering, etc.

Morality aside, more than a few military analysts believe this tactic to be pointless. German industrial production grew during the height of the Allied bombing campaign in 1943-44 and draft resistance in the Fatherland was rare. But that hasn't stopped our government from trying terror bombing again. Lacking a legitimate strategic motive, the rationale of our bombers becomes revenge -- "they did it first [the Germans in London and al-Qaeda in Lower Manhattan] so it's just too bad for the civilians."

I don't agree. But Mr. Barone brought me up short with his trump card: "George Orwell . . . basically took the position that in one sense any wartime death is a tragedy . . . why should we be any less concerned about an 18-year-old man getting killed than an 18-year-old woman?"

Call me old-fashioned, but I said it was worse to kill an innocent bystander than a soldier. And if that bystander is a woman, all the more unfortunate. Women are the bearers and nurturers of babies, and if their special status as such disappears then we in the "civilized" West become little better than our enemies.

But I was flummoxed by the Orwell citation; surely, I asked, Orwell didn't consider children to be equivalent victims. Yes, he replied: "Read the Orwell essay."

So I did. Published in May, 1944, the piece appears in the collected works. To my dismay, I discovered that the U.S. News man hadn't really misrepresented Orwell's overall argument. In the course of attacking a British pamphleteer opposed to the bombing of civilians in Germany and Italy, the high priest of antitotalitarianism ridiculed the notion that wars could have rules at all: "All talk of 'limiting' or 'humanizing' war is sheer humbug," Orwell declared. "The first question that strikes you is: Why is it worse to kill civilians than soldiers? Obviously one must not kill children if it is any way avoidable, but it is only in propaganda pamphlets that every bomb drops on a school or an orphanage."

In any event, Orwell's concern for youngsters seems almost pro forma. "German bombs," he wrote, "have killed between 6,000 and 7,000 children in this country [England]. This is, I believe, less than the number killed in road accidents in the same period."

As a newspaper columnist, I'm acutely aware that the first obligation of my trade is to be interesting, not to be right. But the Orwell on display here is more than just provocative; he's very, very cold. For the first time, I realized why I could never be quite the fan I'm supposed to be; why I don't find it funny when Orwell, by way of brilliantly defending Kipling, puts down the "pansy left" that reviled the poet of empire. I began to understand why Orwell's biographer Bernard Crick writes eloquently of his subject's "love of nature, love of books and literature," but not of his love for people.

Which isn't to say Orwell was wrong to suggest the so-called rules of war are hypocritical: "War is of its nature barbarous, it is better to admit that. If we see ourselves as the savages we are, some improvement is possible, or at least thinkable."

But his refusal to make the obvious distinction between combatants and noncombatants reveals the Orwell that always made me uneasy, the side that others have associated with the pessimistic and chilly Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four. I never accepted Anthony West's contention that Nineteen Eighty-Four was mainly a sadomasochistic fantasy based on Orwell's miserable boarding school experience, rather than a good political novel. Now I can grasp the analysis.

"What a simple, straightforward, absolutist mental world George Orwell lived in," writes Norman Sherry, remarking on Orwell's bloodlessly one-dimensional review of Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter. Maybe it's absolutist coldness that enables the merciless political right to treat Orwell like its prize pig; why Barone can casually resort to him to justify the dismembered corpses of the innocent; why Norman Podhoretz was able to write his self-important Cold War essay in Harper's Magazine in 1983, "If Orwell Were Alive Today" (which should have been subtitled, "He Would Be Me").

More interesting is why the left so often genuflects to Orwell. Is it residual guilt over Soviet communism and the gulag? The right thrills to Orwell, the socialist who saw through the Stalinist fraud during the Spanish Civil War and then skewered his own kind for their continuing blindness to Soviet crimes. For my part, I've never bought the Orwellian guilt trip. The Beatles pretty much destroyed Marxist/Maoist chic by the time I was a teenager, what with Back in the USSR and Revolution, so I never had to wrestle with the god that failed. But why so many communist "dupes" were made to suffer for wanting to believe in a utopian dream of social equality promoted by our wartime Soviet ally -- while dupes of Hitler, such as Joseph Kennedy and Charles Lindbergh suffered only scant embarrassment -- is a hypocrisy that Orwell on his better days would have eviscerated. Or would he?

For the duration of George W. Bush's war on terrorism (which every day sounds a little bit more like the permanent war described in Nineteen Eighty-Four), Mr. Barone and his friends are free to use Orwell for anything they please. As far as I'm concerned, they can have him. You can mark me down with the pansy left.

John R. MacArthur is the publisher of Harper's Magazine.

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