Their reasons and ours

This has been on my mind since I read it on Thursday. Timothy Garton Ash asked how 'History [would] judge Blair's legacy in foreign policy' and answered that he deserves to have 'left Britain with a better name in the world' but probably won't have, and this 'for one reason only: Iraq'. Apart from Iraq, Blair's legacy includes, says Garton Ash...

... a positive approach to multiculturalism, intervening to defend Albanian Muslims against Christian Serbs in Kosovo, and trying to secure a viable state for the Palestinians.

He writes, also, of the interventions in Afghanistan and Sierra Leone as 'brave and justified' ones. So my first thought was that, for those of us who supported the intervention in Iraq, it isn't the exception Garton Ash says it is. This is because we think there were excellent reasons for that intervention as well: principally (for many of us) the humanitarian and regime change reasons, but also the worry (shared by many at the time) about WMD at the disposal of so dangerous a regime. But then my second thought was the following: those who opposed the war should also be able to recognize the validity of these reasons, even if they thought they were outweighed by the reasons against intervention - in particular, a more pessimistic expectation about the consequences of the war than that held by the war's supporters. I would have expected Timothy Garton Ash to recognize the validity of such reasons - reasons like wanting to see the back of a regime responsible for enormous human suffering, a regime in which atrocity was a daily reality. Perhaps he does. No, he surely does. But it should, then, inflect his judgement about Blair's foreign policy record.

In any case, this has been the locus of a significant difference amongst opponents of the war: between those who have been able to give serious weight to the reasons 'on the other side', and so allow that others might conscientiously have come to the opposite conclusion from their own; and those who have behaved as if supporting the war was simply beyond understanding - a basis for issuing anthemas and, more lately, calling for apology and repentance. Why such people cannot publicly grant the weight of the opposing reasons is an interesting psychological question in itself. I have suggested more than once that it might have to do with a moral discomfort about their own stance. But whyever they can't, by this reaction they forget the democratic values that most of them profess.