Soul-searching

Knowing what we know now, would you have invaded Iraq?" As James Fallows has pointed out in The Atlantic, this is an absurd question to ask anyone who held a position of national responsibility in 2003 or is seeking such responsibility now.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/05/the-right-and-wrong-questions-about-the-iraq-war/393497

But that doesn't absolve the rest of us, by whom I mean me, from embarking on a little soul -searching. What were my feelings at the time as we drifted towards war? It would be comforting to say that I no longer remember what I felt then but the harsh truth is that I can remember only too well. On the one hand, I thought very strongly that right was on "our" side and that Saddam Hussein had to be taught a lesson. I felt angry and betrayed by the French refusal to side with the US and Britain, and I was bewildered and upset, like many but not all of my generation, when so many (a majority?) of my fellow citizens came out against the invasion of Iraq. I did believe very strongly, and I still do, that America was and is on balance a force for good in the world.

That's on the one hand. On the other hand, there was the little matter of WMD. Even at the time, I was aware of our failure to unearth these weapons. My goodness, I said to myself, Saddam has hidden them very well! Just the same, I was unable to rid myself of the thought that there was nothing to stop the UN from continuing its inspections. Needless to say, such scruples did not weigh very heavily in the balance, and were soon balanced by the tide of vituperative rhetoric directed at the hapless Hans Blix. 

The terrible truth is that in many cases we tend to believe what we want to believe, and not to consider what we don't want to consider. If this is true of the open societies of the West, how much truer is it of a country like Russia?

One final point. Those who quite rightly foretold the folly of the Iraq adventure should avoid the temptation of thinking that "everything would have been different if only....." History does not stand still just because we decide NOT to do something. The Arab Spring and its consequences, for example, had little to do with Iraq.