Bliar?
I just don't know what to think about the Iraq war. I read Christopher Hitchens on Iraq, and can't help but feel that getting rid of the torturing genocidal tyrant Saddam was a good thing. There is no doubt that Saddam had used chemical weapons, both against Kurds and against Iranians during the Iraq/Iran war.
I do wonder if the Americans hadn't seriously messed up how to deal with the Iraq after the initial victory, reactions might not be what they are now.
I know that international law exists, but I have this very uncomfortable feeling when people talk about the sovereignty of countries which aren't democracies. It seems to be saying that the people in a country are nothing more than the possessions of a ruler.
On the other hand, it seemed like the weapons inspector Hans Blix could have completed his job given a few more months.
The question I would like answered is this - what was the urgency to remove Saddam? Why would a delay of six months or a year to allow the UN weapons inspector to have done his best been a problem? If there were still major questions at that point, then it may have been easier to get UN approval for action.
I'm afraid I don't go for simplistic views that the war was wrong, or that Blair was a liar. Politics is messy and confusing. I don't think we have anything like the full story yet.
I do wonder if the Americans hadn't seriously messed up how to deal with the Iraq after the initial victory, reactions might not be what they are now.
I know that international law exists, but I have this very uncomfortable feeling when people talk about the sovereignty of countries which aren't democracies. It seems to be saying that the people in a country are nothing more than the possessions of a ruler.
On the other hand, it seemed like the weapons inspector Hans Blix could have completed his job given a few more months.
The question I would like answered is this - what was the urgency to remove Saddam? Why would a delay of six months or a year to allow the UN weapons inspector to have done his best been a problem? If there were still major questions at that point, then it may have been easier to get UN approval for action.
I'm afraid I don't go for simplistic views that the war was wrong, or that Blair was a liar. Politics is messy and confusing. I don't think we have anything like the full story yet.
Re: Bliar?
Spot on.
You mention the Hitch, and there is also much food for thought on this in the Observer columnist Nick Cohen’s splendid collection Waiting for the Etonians: Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England (Fourth Estate, 2009). [Which is excellent on many other subjects apart from this one, I think...]
Apart from the legal considerations (which, as you imply, seem to implicitly carry the assumption that Saddam’s awful, genocidal, murderous regime was somehow “legitimate”), there are the indisputable facts of what he’d done in the past, and the risks associated with what he might do if things were left alone.
And yet.
What was the urgency to remove Saddam?
You’ve squarely hit the most important nail, there, I think. Especially, as Sam Harris says somewhere (I think on his website, rather than in ‘The End of Faith’), since there was the additional complication (if one can use such a bland word in respect of an undoubted human tragedy) of the war in Afghanistan to consider, with its own requirements for resources etc...
I'm afraid I don't go for simplistic views that the war was wrong, or that Blair was a liar.
Me neither: in fact, as someone who habitually places himself to the left of Blair, I’m inclined to agree with him on this more completely than I did on almost anything else. But, as you rightly say, the danger is that this view, as with the maddest anti-war views, is that it might be too simplistic, and, that certainly, as yet, we simply don’t know...I certainly don't...
Mark_W