Sorry, couldn't resist this - a name check on Harry's Place.
The Foreign Minister of China when asked in the 1950's about the consequences of the French Revolution answered "It's too early to tell" . A couple of years on from the toppling of Saddam is probably too soon to start writing the second draft of history but I think some of the broader outlines of that eventual narrative are becoming clearer for those prepared to see them.
Earlier in the post, Marcus quotes Times columnist Gerard Baker's measurement of success in Iraq: ...potential threats removed; future wars that don't have to be fought. It is numbered in the unenumerable: the slow awakening of human freedom; the steady, incremental spread of dignity it brings to people cowed and trampled for decades.
Well, it really is too early to tell, isn't it, but for each of those clauses I could find a reason why the war in Iraq failed, and indeed never should have been fought.
On a personal note some of the thinking behind TETT was for me consistent with what my opposition to the war was about: a profound wariness of ideologically-driven change and its unforseen consequences. For me, war, and particularly offensive war (I'm not a pacifist, sadly) is an essentially evil tool, so it seemed clear to me that only bad was likely to come of it, never mind the good intentions. I can see little in Iraq to prove me wrong, regardless of the muscular efforts of the posters on Harry's Place, ironically one of my favourite places on the web.
Friday, December 02, 2005
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Indeed - as for HP, after a while one realises that their 'search for sauce' (cf Rubarb & Custard those great political satirists of the animated world) is indeed a case of blind faith of a sort so objectionably inhumane as to be best left to those who have only stopped beating themselves up over the myriad casualties of their last ideological mistake long enough to make another, though oddly this time they seem to have adopted a policy of kicking the corpses around afteward instead of burying them in dogma and pretending they never existed. I'm confidently awaiting a point where they metaphorically at least try a monkey for being a Fenchman - then again they have had a long-running saga of wanting to indict George Galloway... whose poltical significance is definitely analaogous to the literary impact of primates with typewriters.
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