Harry has a post which I urge everyone who passes here to go over and read. It’s about why we on the pro-liberation left have to keep plugging away with the arguments; why not to move on.
[T]he problem is that the issue just won’t go away will it? Every day there is another article in the liberal press that pretends to deal with the Iraq war while blissfully ignoring the startling relevant facts that the Ba’athists have been removed from power, Saddam has been captured and that Iraq, horrible mess that it undoubtedly is, has begun on the long and difficult road to democracy. It was an unnecessary war says one anti-war columnist today.
The Unnecessary Liberation – what a perfect title for one of the next hundred anti-war books.
Those in the anti-war movement who are not cheering on the killers of their ‘resistance’ instead pretend that the daily tragedies are the inevitable result of unnecessarily bringing down a fascist government. Or, as we have seen this week, they celebrate their shameful, pathetic demonstrations of a year ago as though they were events that everyone on the left recalls with a warm feeling. Oh the excited thought that in twenty years time we’ll all be recalling February 15, “the day when a million people were on the streets” with the same smug nostalgia as the 68ers. Or not as the case may be.
…..
Of course not all of the anti-war movement supports the ‘resistance’. Many apparently disagree with [those supporting] Stop the War. But you can hardly hear the dissent can you?And instead of support for the terrorists and religious fanatics, we get as a supposedly more palatable alternative a feigned disinterest, a neutral approach to the struggle in Iraq as though the battle between the forces of democracy and those of oppression is something people, left-wing or otherwise, can remain detached from.
Which might, just might, be acceptable if this were some minor dispute on the other side of the world. But everyone knows that the struggle in Iraq, is not just an armed conflict between terrorists and the US army. It is a conflict which clearly has an international dimension, which is connected to struggles elsewhere and the outcome will have a very real impact on the streets of many other places.
As Christopher Hitchens put it recently: “You should not believe for a second that you watch all this as non-participants.”
So my reply to the complaining reader who wishes I would move on is this – sorry, but we are all still involved.
It’s a long post. Go read it all.