Sir Menzies Campbell is quoted here as follows:
Ten years on, it is almost impossible to find anyone in this country or even in the United States who is willing to support the military action against Saddam Hussein.
He can't be trying very hard. This is John Lloyd, in a column headed 'Iraq: Why Blair was right':
I and others who supported the invasion of Iraq a decade ago did so because we thought that Saddam Hussein's regime was among the worst in the world. This was, on the one hand, because of his propensity to violence against his neighbours – Iran during the 1980-88 war and Kuwait, which he attempted to annex in 1990 – and, on the other, because of his eager sponsorship of terrorist groups that saw the destruction of Israel as their life's (and death's) work, as did he.
But more significant still was the active delight in savagery in which he indulged, and passed on to his sons and presumed heirs. This he visited on the Kurds, on the southern marsh Arabs and on those, including members of his entourage, whom he suspected of disloyalty or who were linked to supposed traitors. It was a savagery which, unlike that of his hero Stalin, was not governed by a great deal of rational calculation: Saddam's war against Iran was a disaster for his nation and the invasion of Kuwait still more so. The possibility that such a man might possess weapons of mass destruction was a nightmare for the world.
.....
Rightly or wrongly, we were too sanguine about the prospects of regime change, especially in the light of the mess made of it. This was perhaps inevitable, because even well-trained armies are good at destroying but not fitted for constructing. In my case, nearly a decade of reporting in central and eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union for the Financial Times predisposed me to see western intervention (not military in that instance) as benign, as I believe it generally was. But we did not anticipate that Iraqi forces who hated the US – including those loyal to Saddam – would dominate after the invasion, that the population would not be active in ensuring democratic choice as it had been in, say, Poland, and that the west had limited staying power. We were much influenced by Kanan Makiya’s searing book Cruelty and Silence (1993), which detailed the horrors of Iraq under Saddam and called for intervention – an intervention, the author argued, that would be greeted with "sweets and flowers".However, the responsibility to protect remains a powerful moral imperative. It must remain part of the armoury of those states with the power and the will to stop tyranny where it is possible to do so and where intervention is likely to work – as it did in Sierra Leone, in Kosovo and ultimately in Bosnia. It may work in Mali. More thought needs to be given to how it might work in Syria. For the left, the responsibility to protect should be part of a progressive view of global problems. That the principle has become synonymous with a kind of refurbished imperialism is a sign of decadence.
Reminding Sir Menzies Campbell and others like him why there was support for Blair in this country - and plenty of it - is at once a matter of historical accuracy and a way of combating the impulse towards pretending that that support had no justificatory basis anyone can now recall.