Re: Bliar?

Anonymous — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:12:00 GMT

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

Zarbi - Bliar?

Re: Bliar?