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An Unusually Conscientious War Supporter

Britain is a democracy. And so, contrary to protestations, the war was done in all our names, and we cannot waive our responsibility with a placard. But some of us – the invasion enthusiasts – are more responsible than others. We stoked the will to war. Today I am haunted by a picture I saw […]

Britain is a democracy. And so, contrary to protestations, the war was done in all our names, and we cannot waive our responsibility with a placard. But some of us – the invasion enthusiasts – are more responsible than others. We stoked the will to war. Today I am haunted by a picture I saw last year, not quite inadvertently, on one of those ghoulish atrocity websites, of the body of a girl with her head staved in.

What have we done? This week, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff accused Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld et al of “daydreaming”, and perhaps he is right. It is easy to say, looking back, that the principle was good but the practice was bungled. But it is not enough to have a vision of liberty without an understanding of the mission to get there. For two years we have struggled to make the practice conform to the principle, and the time might be approaching when we must accept that the principle was always impractical, and the project should never have been attempted. ~Danny Kruger, The Daily Telegraph

This is one of the few columns of the limited remorseful war supporter genre to emerge in the last two years, and it is certainly one of the most honest and thoughtful. It is definitely the only one I know of that acknowledges the special moral responsibility of war supporters who publicly urged the start of hostilities. Of course, Mr. Kruger reverts to the usual optimistic cant at the end, but there is at least the sense that his optimism stems from a sincere desire not to have defended completely futile and immoral war rather than the usual indifference to the consequences. What is lamentable is that there is simply so little evidence of such pangs of conscience among most war supporters here. Among these there is an obsessive certitude about the rightness of a war that, by all our traditional standards, would normally be denounced if someone else were doing it. Mr. Kruger’s unease with the war is as refreshing as its virtual uniqueness is disheartening.

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