On Blair's speech to the Labour Party conference yesterday, Jonathan Freedland says:
Tendentiously, he [Blair] sought to roll Iraq together with Afghanistan, Kosovo and even Sierra Leone as a single "progressive cause".There's an important nuance here. Had he written 'debatably' or 'controversially' or 'contentiously', then fair dos - the Iraq war has been a matter of debate, and controversy, and contention. But 'tendentiously', to my ear, suggests 'in a misleadingly partisan way', and it thereby implies a viewpoint from which the writer can authoritatively judge it to be so - authoritatively judge it to be the case, here, that the Iraq war just couldn't have been seen as part of a 'progressive cause'.
Jonathan's judgement in this matter would therefore seem to be of a piece with the view that it wasn't possible to support the Iraq war for progressive reasons - or, in its more noxious versions, that any liberal or leftist who did support the war must have sold out, crossed over to the enemy, and so forth. Even now, after so many words have been spilled on this matter, the view continues to mystify me, since there were progressive reasons for supporting the war that were, not merely obvious, but glaringly so.
I've said it before, but not for a while now, so I'll say it again. What can account for the fact that so many in the anti-war camp are unable to see (or at least publicly allow) that there were such progressive reasons? Might it be a discomfort with their own stance - that they were for a course of action that would have left a genocidal tyrant in place?