Two good anti-war voices

I commend to you two excellent posts from people on the left who opposed the Iraq war. For reasons which he explains, Paul Anderson at Gauche comes in late on the discussion about the state of the left started by Nick Cohen's article. Do go and read what he has to say:

Unlike Cohen, I opposed the war – not because I thought it was wrong to overthrow Saddam Hussein but because I thought the US and its allies hadn't thought it through and were taking an irresponsible risk – but like him I believe that the left in Britain and elsewhere should now be supporting those in Iraq who are trying to create a tolerant liberal democratic polity, not whining about the process through which the US and Britain went to war. I have been sickened by the way that so many of my fellow opponents of the war have gloried in every setback that the US and the interim Iraqi government have suffered. And I can't believe the tolerance of idiocy and worse that seems to have become the norm in the liberal and left press. The left in Britain today is in a worse state than at any time in my adult lifetime.

But I'd stop short of writing off the left completely. Waves of cretinism have swept the left in Britain before... but they have passed, largely because some part of the left kept its head and argued the case against the prevailing delusions consistently and publicly. We need to do the same today. [Italics mine.]

And Marc Cooper responds at length to Naomi Klein's article which I discussed here yesterday. Marc writes:

[A]las, I can only conclude that [her] column is a forthright apology for the religio-fascist militias of Muqtada Al Sadr. Indeed, it's damn near a call for the peace movement to join in solidarity with his Mahdi Army.
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Klein should know better. All enemies of the U.S. occupation she opposes are not her friends. Or ours. Or those of the Iraqi people. I don't think that Mullah Al Sadr, in any case, is much desirous of support issuing from secular Jewish feminist-socialists. And no one can provide any credible evidence that the Iraqis wish to trade the dictatorship of Saddam or the uncertainty of American Occupation for a religious dictatorship run by a black-shirt militia which has so far distinguished itself only for unbridled violence and its absolute contempt for civil society.
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Nothing - not even the U.S. Army - more threatens the future of a democratic, pluralistic and (dare we wish) secular, Iraq than the political ascendancy of Islamic fascists like Al Sadr.

Read the whole thing.