Reasons, plural

I go to town to buy a tent and a pair of scissors. I go because I want to get the tent and the scissors. The scissors are, then, one of the reasons I go to town. This is true even if I would not have gone to town just for the scissors, and even if the tent is the main reason for going to town. In yesterday's Guardian Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes:

Blair himself is now far beyond reason, but Benn and Blears should begin each day by saying 10 times: We did not go to war to depose Saddam Hussein. That was indeed the object of those in Washington who dreamed up the war: destroying Saddam, or regime change for the sake of regime change.

But it was specifically not the purpose of British participation. Blair had been told by his own attorney general - in a moment of lucidity and candour before Lord Goldsmith mysteriously changed his mind - that regime change as such was an insufficient legal basis for war. And he knew that even his most servile and corrupt MPs would hesitate to support a war on that basis alone.

Wheatcroft begins his column by talking of 'selective amnesia'. But the selective amnesia is his. It may explain why he brings this fallacious logic to his aid. Even if regime change is argued to have been an insufficient legal basis for the Iraq war, that doesn't establish that it wasn't a supporting reason for those who made the decision - as in fact it was.

This, from Matthew Parris, seems pertinent:

Like old soldiers, controversies do not die, they fade away. Iraq is set to become one of these. The argument is exhausted. So are the protagonists. So are you. So am I.

And this, from Denis MacShane, does too.