Like Marc Mulholland and me, Dave Gwydion was also a supporter of the war. But unlike me, he now thinks he was wrong to support it. Dave's post to which I respond here is a brief one and so he only sketches out why he's changed his mind and why he thinks I'm mistaken not to have done. I for my part am in the process of explaining why I haven't in the series of posts - still in progress - to which Dave links. However, I do want to respond to him on one point. He writes that:
anyone who had earlier favored intervention ought to apologize to the world.I mean no disrepect here, but I would like to express the following point with some force and vividness. Consequently, try to imagine this day: the great George Jones seated beside the comparably great Merle Haggard, and on the other side of each of them the ghosts of that even greater pair, Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill, these four driving a large lawnmower through the centre of Denver, Colorado, in search of a drink. Until it happens is how long anyone who's interested will be waiting for me to apologize for declining to lend my voice and my energies to a political effort that, had it succeeded, would have resulted in prolonging the life of a regime of torture, wanton murder and daily barbarism. And they'd still be waiting after that.
The more hopeful of the empirical hypotheses that informed the moral and political choice we on the pro-war left made may in the end be confounded - though, pessimistic as Dave Gwydion himself clearly now is, even he is not yet ready to say this for definite. But the moral and political choice itself was not a shameful, dishonest or reckless one, and I see no need to apologize for it. Dave, of course, is at liberty to apologize or not as he sees fit.