Those who opposed the Iraq war know themselves to have been so right about everything, so foresightful, so vindicated, so deliciously right-down-to-their-little-white-cotton-socks right, that you wonder why some of them persist in further washing their rightness in one or another form of... hogwash. (Sorry, hogs!) Could they be a bit uncomfortable about something? Only the latest offering of the amnesiac claim that humanitarian justifications for the war were 'post-facto', the piece here by Simon Tisdall gives it a twist worthy of his special intellectual talents:
Despite Blair's post-facto justification for the Iraq war - that it was morally right to save Iraq's people from Saddam Hussein - Iraq and Afghanistan were, initially at least, primarily self-interested military-led operations that had little to do with saving lives, more with assuring an illusory "western security". If this were not so, Blair would in all logic have supported intervention to protect Palestinians against their Israeli occupiers or North Koreans against their murderous rulers.Give that your full appreciative attention; don't let those taste buds miss any aspect of its complexly wonderful flavour. In all logic - no less - if there'd been any concern on Blair's part for the Iraqi people, he could not have supported intervention in Iraq without also supporting it against Israel and North Korea. Well, why not just everywhere? Everywhere where anything seriously bad was going on? Let's focus on two things to indicate how clever this is. (1) North Korea's nukes. (2) The fact that not even so virtuous and blessed a leader as Saint Tony can intervene everywhere simultaneously. Nay, not even the mighty US of freedom-loving, home-of-the-brave A, with all its just but deadly firepower, can do it.
Now, here's something else. The dead-tree Guardian today carries (on page 17) a world briefing column by Tisdall, 'The perils of unilateral intervention', which is a somewhat abridged version of the piece I've linked to. And it omits the quoted paragraph. Could this be because somebody at the Groan realized that Simon Tisdall's 'in all logic' argument is a killer objection to any intervention anywhere ever?