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Oliver Kamm has an excellent piece at Comment is Free about Jonathan Steele's new book on Iraq. As Oliver writes:Jonathan Steele's account of the defeat of western intervention in Iraq must have seemed a good idea in conception. Steele now has to make the best of the circumstance that, while his book was in press, events undermined him. Barring a fleeting reference to the multinational force's success in suppressing al-Qaida, his article this week might have been written a year ago for all its acknowledgement of Iraq's recent history.
I supported the Iraq war and would do so again. It was - to invoke Talleyrand's terminology - neither a crime nor a blunder to overthrow a gangster regime that was in breach of the UN security council resolutions (among many others) that marked the conditions for ceasefire in the first Gulf war in 1991. But it was nearly a failure. Culpable negligence by the Bush administration left post-Saddam Iraq without a functioning state. The combined forces of Baathism and jihadism (grotesquely lauded by some columnists on this newspaper as the "resistance") opportunistically filled that vacuum, with unmitigated barbarism and an appalling civilian death toll. Don't bother reading the comments. I did, and although there is some sensible discussion, much of it is the usual Guardian stuff:More drivel from this Zionist ghoul, trying to tell us that murdering millions of people was worth it. These people never learn, history will just keep repeating itself.
What a sick and bloodthirsty (other peoples of course) tribute to death and war on the false pretext of democracy and freedom.
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