Tony Horwitz is a chastened pro-war liberal. I don't agree with everything in this article by him from the Sydney Morning Herald, but much of it is spot on:
Before the conflict, the anti-war left betrayed the shallowness of its commitment to human rights by downplaying Saddam's atrocities.(Hat tip: Jim Nolan.)A similar blindness is evident now in the relentless focus on the coalition's sins, as compared with those of its foes, and a reluctance to acknowledge that any good may yet result. There's also a head-in-the-sand approach to the crisis in today's Iraq that echoes the prewar refusal to face the cost of inaction; sanctions, periodic bombing and Saddam's rule amounted to a de facto war on ordinary Iraqis. As John Kerry's spokesman inelegantly put it to the Herald: "Regardless of what you think about how we got here, here we are." Rather than confront this reality and work to salvage it, many revel in coalition errors and gloat over Iraq's unravelling, if only because it punishes US hubris and promises electoral defeat for George Bush and John Howard.
Human rights in Iraq have become synonymous with Abu Ghraib. No amount of official buck-passing and weasel words can obscure the fact that US guards tortured Iraqis with the collusion of superiors. The Military Police officers will be jailed, and more information will emerge indicting others up the chain of command. This never would have happened in Saddam's Iraq when hundreds of thousands were maimed, executed and gassed while the world looked the other way, led by fellow Arab regimes that still torture their own, and are now loudest in condemning US abuses.
Abu Ghraib, in all its horror, shows how much has changed in post-Saddam Iraq. Scrutiny and accountability are possible now. But judging from the tone of much of the comment, you'd think that Abu Ghraib makes the coalition morally indistinguishable from the mass-murdering regime it deposed.
Critics of the war also display a creeping sympathy for the coalition's foes. We often hear that Iraqi insurgents are "nationalists", which sounds comfortingly like the French Resistance. But the main rebel factions are the opposite of freedom fighters: former Baathists and religious extremists, who mostly slaughter fellow Iraqis, beat or murder alcohol vendors, and threaten women displaying a strand of hair.