Thursday, July 08, 2004
The Palpably Absurd WMD Cook-up
While perusing The Virtual Stoa I noticed that the good people over there (or rather the good person) has taken the rather kind and very sensible step of "blogrolling" me. And unlike with certain other such occurences I didn't even have to do anyting.* Nonetheless I've never been averse to a little reciprocal backscrathching...
More substantially there's a very interesting post and comments discussion there on the issue of the pre-war "WMD" claims, and how they relate to the position those who supported the war as a liberation from tyranny.
I certainly wouldn't have supported the war on "WMD" alone, or even mainly. (In any case my support for the war was somewhat ambivalent). And Robin Cook's speech was impressive in its own way (even if it did disregard the "humanitarian intervention" argument). The statement that "Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term - namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target" was pretty remarkable from someone who was sitting around the cabinet table and had been Foreign Secretary less than two years before.
On the other hand, Patrick from the notorious SIAW comments with characteristic stridency:
Elsewhere in the comments that stridency slips into equally characteristic aggression/discourtesy, but while I'm shamefully ambiguous about Blair even for a pseudo-Marxist, the above expresses much of my own sentiment.
The Iraq war can have been worthy of support even if it was prosecuted by a reactionary imperialist on the basis of lies.
Remind you of anything?
*UPDATE: Just to clarify, I'm absolutely certain that Norm would have blogrolled me even if I hadn't so much as mentioned this. After all, who could resist? Of course we can never know...
More substantially there's a very interesting post and comments discussion there on the issue of the pre-war "WMD" claims, and how they relate to the position those who supported the war as a liberation from tyranny.
I certainly wouldn't have supported the war on "WMD" alone, or even mainly. (In any case my support for the war was somewhat ambivalent). And Robin Cook's speech was impressive in its own way (even if it did disregard the "humanitarian intervention" argument). The statement that "Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term - namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target" was pretty remarkable from someone who was sitting around the cabinet table and had been Foreign Secretary less than two years before.
On the other hand, Patrick from the notorious SIAW comments with characteristic stridency:
"Since I also regard Blair as an unreliable judge on any set of issues, and supported the liberation of Iraq despite his involvement, not because of it, there’s no inconsistency [with disregarding Cook - DC]. But then, unlike most of the “anti-war” crowd, I didn’t regard Iraq as merely a pretext for carrying on domestic (British or US) political spats by other means. I can separate my dislike and contempt for Blair (and Cook, and Dubya, and indeed almost all other bourgeois politicians) from my judgement on Iraq: can you?"
Elsewhere in the comments that stridency slips into equally characteristic aggression/discourtesy, but while I'm shamefully ambiguous about Blair even for a pseudo-Marxist, the above expresses much of my own sentiment.
The Iraq war can have been worthy of support even if it was prosecuted by a reactionary imperialist on the basis of lies.
Remind you of anything?
*UPDATE: Just to clarify, I'm absolutely certain that Norm would have blogrolled me even if I hadn't so much as mentioned this. After all, who could resist? Of course we can never know...
Comments:
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My name is Chris. But you can call me Michael.
Be careful, though, not to confuse me with my older brother, whose name is Michael.
But perhaps you might call him Chris, in order to resolve the confusion in a suitably dialectical fashion.
Be careful, though, not to confuse me with my older brother, whose name is Michael.
But perhaps you might call him Chris, in order to resolve the confusion in a suitably dialectical fashion.
That's the problem with the bloody dialectic isn't it? You just end up collapsing into confusion.
Sorry about that Chris, I had just thanked Michael Fisher, so it's his fault really.
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Sorry about that Chris, I had just thanked Michael Fisher, so it's his fault really.
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