In today’s Guardian 25 writers give their views, pro and anti, on the Iraq war. As is not going to surprise anyone, the breakdown is well over two to one on the anti-war side. Of the many anti-war statements there is only one that, in my own judgement, measures up to the gravity of the issue. This is the statement by David Lodge. Though coming down in the end against the war, Lodge speaks of the difficulty he had in doing so and of the primary reason for it:
It is increasingly clear that Saddam Hussein’s regime was an exceptionally evil one, and very unlikely that it would have fallen without armed intervention from outside.
Most of the rest of the anti-war writers either don’t register this consideration at all or do so only obliquely and without appearing to have let it trouble them too much or too long.
To readers wishing to save themselves the time of reading all those anti-war statements, I offer you a convenient short cut. As it happens, Linda Colley had a piece in the same newspaper on the previous day, containing the following passage:
If Saddam Hussein really didn’t possess any WMD, then there was no justification for a pre-emptive strike against him (always, anyway, a dubious notion). And – if this was the case – then whatever they personally believed, and whatever the benign effects this conflict may have, Bush and Blair conducted a war that was not necessary, even though they assured us that it was.
There you have it: ‘whatever the benign effects this conflict may have’, they just don’t come into the reckoning. Getting rid of a regime which was ‘exceptionally evil’ doesn’t come into the reckoning for Colley, and so it is with most of the anti-war writers collected in the Guardian today. Just one more symptom, if any more were needed, of the moral failure of left-liberal opinion in face of the threats to left-liberal values today.