Nick Cohen has a profoundly disingenuous column in today’s ‘Observer’ defending the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He compounds his disingenuousness by citing Ian McEwan’s novel ‘Saturday’ to imply, in effect, that those of us who protested against the oncoming conflict on February 15 2003 were indifferent to the suffering of Iraqis under Saddam. The human cost of the Iraqi invasion and its aftermath has equalled and probably surpassed that of Saddam’s regime. No mention of the post 1991 siege and its impact on Iraqi society; no mention of the profound instability in Iraq to this day with bombings a daily occurrence. Most cynically, he brings into focus the current crisis in Syria and uses it as a stick to, he thinks, beat those opposed to Western military intervention. And yet Syria encapsulates all that is wrong with the ‘decent’ Left. No awareness that these regimes often have a social base and considerable popular support. That the groups who will succeed the deposed strongmen in the Middle East, as we’re seeing in Egypt, are not liberals or democrats or socialists but Islamists whose political objectives are diametrically opposed to the world view of Cohen and his ilk. That the West continues to put its geopolitical and economic interests above all other considerations, when it comes to this region. And that Western support for the despots from the 1960s to the present was and is a key factor in generating and sustaining the multitude of Islamist groups who are now contending in Libya, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. It’s laughable, in a very dark way, that for instance when the ‘decent’ Left was in its pomp in Britain 2003-2007 that the UK’s intelligence services were at the same time rendering people to Ghadaffi for torture. Cohen has obviously learned nothing since 2003. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/03/10-years-right-invaded-iraq
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