We now know that David Miliband isn't to be the new leader of the Labour Party, but on Wednesday, before we did, Philippe Sands was considering whether he, the older brother, was fit to lead. The piece in which Sands did this was mainly concerned with the question of complicity with torture - a grave charge, for sure - but in a coda he extended his focus to the Iraq war, and this is a separate matter. About it Sands wrote:
If this [complicity with torture] was the only baggage, he [David Miliband] might not be hampered. But it's not. His attitude to the Iraq war is equally unhappy, invoking the refrain that "if I knew then what I know now I would have voted against". This recognises that the war was the wrong decision but falls well short of an expression of regret.
Miliband is a man of great ability. He would have earned considerable respect if he had said sorry for the war...
Sands may or may not be aware of this, but it is worth pointing out that a person can think they have been wrong about something, and even feel regret for having been wrong, but without thinking they owe anyone an apology for it. I don't claim to know the thoughts of David Miliband on this score, but in politics people can make mistakes and yet not see them as culpable. They might think that the options before them when they made the relevant decisions weren't easy ones, that some of the 'alternative paths' were as fraught with the possibility of bad consequences as the path that was in the event chosen, and so forth. Nothing I have read by Sands suggests he would be sensible of this line of thought in relation to Iraq. But the distinction between believing you've gone wrong and accepting that you owe an apology for it is incontestable.
