There is now no absolute moral position. It was clear, in my view, that we
should not have gone into Iraq. We did so on the understanding that there
were 'weapons of mass destruction'.
In other words, we were arguing from self defense. There were no weapons of mass destruction. The justification then changed to regime change because of the viciousness of Saddam's
regime, but there are various moral arguments to be put about
that. However awful, Saddam was not causing the wholesale massacres of, say, the
Sudan, or the complete destruction of an economy, like Mugabe. Yet we went
ahead. Cynics would say that it was for other reasons. Moral authority might
say that there is at least a moral equivalence here, and there were other
things on the agenda. What has transpired is near civil war, and an
almost impossible situation. Those who went in never had a strategy for getting
out.
A moral response has to be to stay in where you can protect
vulnerable people, stay in where a legitimate government wants you
there, but recognize that it is not up to us to decide how other countries run
themselves-we cannot impose our style of democracy, however much we
would like to and think it right.
The real message of Iraq is that we are
arrogant and think we know it all. We do not, and we have caused immense
distrust of the west, of western values, and of the US and the UK in
particular- and we should apologize to the Iraqi people for that.
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