> Not to trespass upon the patch of Last Night’s BBC News, but it doesn’t yet have anything up about this and nor does Biased BBC. So here’s something from last night on the Beeb’s 10 o’clock news broadcast: Andrew Marr commenting on Blair’s Basra jaunt. It’s only my impression from one viewing, but that impression was that Marr presented Blair as now going for the humanitarian dimension of the Iraq intervention because of how things had turned out with WMD and as though he had just discovered it. This is becoming one of the major components in the anti-war party’s current mythology. But that’s what it is: mythology. Blair stated the humanitarian argument plain as day, albeit as subsidiary. The same mythology now pretends that it was only the US and British governments that thought Iraq had significant WMD.
> From a Guardian leader today:
He [Tony Blair] is right that Saddam’s fall is a great boon for Iraqis. But… [i]t does not mean that forcible regime change is now an acceptable legal or moral principle.
I would say this point is moot, and there’s a long tradition of moral and legal thinking in support of my saying it.
> Anthony Cox, along the corridor at Black Triangle, writes today:
[T]here is a narrow (13 against 12) majority of European States supporting the action in Iraq. If you add in the applicant countries Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey, who all supported the coalition, then you have nearly 60% support for the action in Iraq. This is hardly news, but it [is] worth considering next time you hear Europe referred to by America[n] right-wingers as the opposition, or European anti-war protestors suggesting the UK should get in step with Europe.
> Just before the turn of the year, I put up a post about a review by Ed Vulliamy. Tony Hutchison sent in the following comment:
I write to express my disappointment with Ed Vulliamy’s position as outlined in the Shawcross review. Vulliamy is a journalist whose work in Yugoslavia in the nineties I believe helped to alter the moral climate in Europe and the US by the end of that terrible decade. It’s thanks to brave, honest reporters like him that there were no Srebrenicas in Kosovo. What troubled me most, however, was the following paragraph from his piece: ‘It is brutal but true to say that the very worst of what was happening in Iraq was over. That had happened while Iraq was America’s ally, and after America refused to go to Baghdad in 1991, for reasons of ‘realpolitik’. Yes, the regime of terror remained, but the genocide had abated, and the regime was set to totter, with Iraq remaining part of Arabia.’ Let me just say that the ‘brutality’ of this statement itself outweighs its dubious truth content but also gets to the heart of my own disagreement with the anti-war Left. Perhaps Srebrenica was the ‘very worst’ Milosevic had to offer? Was this the case too perhaps in Kosovo after the initial attacks on ethnic Albanians? Thankfully we’ll never have to find out but Vulliamy certainly wasn’t advocating a policy of inaction then. Perhaps because it represents the Alan Clark doctrine of ‘what one group of foreigners is doing to another is no concern of ours’.
I agree. This kind of statement, which comes up from time to time in anti-war argument, seems to suggest that, short of genocidal, things are somehow tolerable, even if they are post-genocidal – and include, as here, the ‘regime of terror’ in Iraq and all that this involved. What a standard.
> Finally, I commend to you this long piece by Jurjen Smies on post-Saddam apologetics. I’m delighted No Cameras is active again.