It Bears Repeating

I don't belive John Lloyd covers any new ground in this piece from this weekend's Financial Times, but it bears repeating...just because:

{...}Its basis is the belief that a state requires security and retains interests and that any effort to impose a different politics on states of whose politics one disapproves is, as Henry Kissinger put it, international relations as social work.

This belief has found increasingly powerful challengers in the past two decades. They included such diverse elements as non-governmental organisations (NGOs), especially Amnesty (based in the UK), Human Rights Watch (US) and Medecins sans Frontieres (France); the liberation theology movement within Catholicism, most powerful in South America; Soviet-era dissidence in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself; the anti-apartheid struggle incarnated in the figure of Nelson Mandela; and a strong, if disguised, trend among journalists to act as the canaries-in-the-mine for oppression.

{...}It is a sad spectacle. Liberals and leftists who spent decades demanding that something must be done to end all sorts of repressions and foreign horrors, and denouncing theirs and other governments for refusing to end them, now denounce the British and US governments for having removed one of the great monsters of the late 20th century because blood was shed (and is still being shed) in the course of it. This isn’t debate about the manner of waging war: it is a smug, I-told-you-so (or I didn’t tell you but I am now) blast against apparent failure - usually oblivious to the consequences of that failure, especially on the ideals and practice that liberals and leftists claim to have espoused.

That the invasion of Iraq, as well as occasioning a long-running terrorist war, should, as the American scholar Thomas Cushman recently pointed out, also have “liberated a people from an oppressive, long-standing tyranny; destroyed an outlaw state that was a threat to the peace and security of the Middle East and the larger global arena in which terrorists operated, sponsored materially and ideologically by Iraq; brought the dictator Saddam Hussein to justice for his genocides [of the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs, as Human Rights Watch documented] and crimes against humanity; prevented the possibility of another genocide... restored sovereignty to the Iraqi people; laid the foundation for the possibility of Iraq becoming a liberal republic”, has no place in the charge sheets that liberals and leftists bring to bear against Bush and Blair.{...}