In a letter to the Guardian today Anthony Garrett writes:
Asked why she was protesting on Saturday... an anti-war demonstrator replied: "Because I have the right to tell the government that I don't approve of what it did." Fair enough, but the invasion gave the Iraqi people a similar right, which Saddam's continued existence would have denied them. Apparently this hadn't occurred to her. Extraordinary.Quite. I use this letter as a convenient peg on which to hang my second response to Chris Young. (For the first one, see here.)
Earlier this month I posted an argument on the limits of national sovereignty. In that context I suggested that critics of the Iraq war with a sufficient breadth of moral understanding to grasp why some of us on the liberal-left thought it right to support the war, should now be willing to move on. Those unwilling to do so, I said, were probably wanting an alibi for not taking the important moral reasons of us supporters seriously. Chris Young responded with a long post in which he made several points, the more important of which (N.B.) I leave to one side for the time being and a subsequent post. Here I want to address a point which was made, not only by Chris, but also by Stuart Turner on his blog Short Hope Unfiltered. In substance (and amongst other things), both Chris and Stuart argued against me that to consent to move on would not be right because the justification that was presented for the war by the Bush administration and the Blair government was a dishonest one. It was based on lying and/or the manipulation of intelligence. So Chris and Stuart believe. For the health of a democratic political culture, they hold, it would be wrong simply to draw a line under this.
Their criticism misunderstands my argument. It's true that I didn't, in the post they take issue with, explicitly address the concern about public honesty. But one can't say everything at once. This is an issue I have in fact dealt with on my blog. I've argued that, if it should be established that either or both of the two leaders were responsible for wilfully deceiving their respective publics, then they 'may be held to democratic account'; '[d]eliberate public deception by democratic politicians is... a vice not to be taken lightly'. (See But where is the green parrot?: old site, August 21.) I've said, also, that questions relating to the use of intelligence in making the case for war are a quite proper subject for investigation. (See The poison in the body politic.)
The burden of the post which Chris and Stuart criticize was not to deny that these are legitimate concerns. It was rather to reaffirm what have been consistent themes here pretty much since normblog began (as can be seen under the two links just given, and also in the post An unusual voice: old site, October 2). These themes: that (a) opponents of the war with any genuine attachment to left-liberal values should be able to acknowledge, whatever moral reasons they themselves had for opposing it, that there were also powerful moral reasons in its favour, connected with the desirability of removing a genocidal, torture-loving dictator and his regime; and (b) should be able to acknowledge that, in the event, his and its removal was a great good from which a number of other political and social goods have flowed, and further goods might yet be forthcoming; and (c) should be able to acknowledge these things in a clear and open, rather than side-of-the-mouth, mumbling, way; and (d) should be willing to focus forward on what is now needed maximally to conduce toward a positive outcome for the people of Iraq, rather than just repeating over and again the putative lack of justification for a war fought a year ago. It's hard, otherwise, not to conclude that an alibi is wanted for their preference at that time that Saddam Hussein should remain in power sine die, with everything which this would have entailed.
There are, in any case, different ways of refusing to move forward in the sense just specified. The worst of them is the sort we saw again worldwide on Saturday: people marching to oppose something that has already happened; many of them wanting the Coalition's troops out at once irrespective of what the people of Iraq might want; some of them supporting an insurgency of wanton murder. But there is also the more genteel not moving on, as typified by rather too much of the content of my daily newspaper of choice - which, twelve months on, still has people telling us on a daily basis why the war should never have been fought.
