A war Britain shouldn't be ashamed of

Andrew Mueller opposed the war in Iraq - on the sort of basis I have expressed my disagreement with here - but he was not willing to go on the latest demonstration (of March 19). He explains why at Open Democracy. Commenting on the slogan 'Bring The Troops Home', he writes:

It's a shame they don't make banners large enough to include the parenthetical addendum: "and leave the Iraqi people – millions of whom recently risked their lives to vote – to the mercies of Ba'ath party recidivists, opportunist gangsters, and Islamist yahoos". The moral arithmetic of Stop The War's slogan is easy to appreciate – it was wrong to send troops to Iraq two years ago, therefore it must be right to withdraw troops from Iraq now – but it is the most depressing example yet of Stop The War's failure to engage constructively with anything that has happened in the last three and a half years. Its sole stock response has been to complain about any and every deployment of American or British military force, whatever the circumstances, whatever the reality.

In Iraq right now, the reality is that despite a rebellion by a ruthless and unpleasant assortment of Ba'athist holdouts, foreign adventurers and religious dingbats masquerading as a "resistance", elections have been held, a government is being formed, institutions are being built. There is absolutely no plausible way that any of this indisputable progress would survive the withdrawal that Stop The War are demanding.

Mueller goes on to report on what he saw during a visit to Basra, and then argues that the present war and the one that began two years ago are different wars (compare this):

The war that London protested against two years ago – the invasion of Iraq and the toppling by force of Saddam Hussein – was effectively over within weeks. The war that is being fought in Iraq now is different. It is by no means morally pure, in conception or execution – though I'd be willing to bet that the alleged resistance has killed many more Iraqis than have occupying soldiers. But it is being fought, meeting by meeting, reform by reform, for Iraqis who, at dreadful risk to their own safety, are voting, and attending political gatherings, and joining their police forces. It is being fought against people who, on several documented occasions, have seized groups of such Iraqis, bound them, shot them and left them dead in ditches.

... [I]t may not be easy for those of us who opposed the invasion to accept, but two years on, the war in Iraq is a war that Britain should not be ashamed of fighting, or of winning.

(Thanks: FB.)