So it is no shock that the anti-war side in Britain is in full-throated "debate" mode, calling even former Prime Minister Blair in to testify:
In London, something called “the Chilcot inquiry” has been investigating the process by which the country signed on to the Iraq invasion. For weeks, the usual bunch of shifty grandees have killed any potential awkward line of inquiry with the all-purpose brush-off, “You’ll have to ask Mr. Blair about that.” So finally they did, summoning the now reviled prime minister into the witness box to grill him on the “legality” of the Iraq invasion. Outside, protesters denounced “Bliar,” as his name is now universally spelled: “BLIAR LIED! THOUSANDS DIED!” Like a pedophile serial killer, he was smuggled into the building before dawn, lest the mob turn on him: “The People vs. Ex-Generalissimo Bliar”—or, at any rate, as near as his former comrades on the left seem likely to get to hauling him up before a war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
Give it up, people. We won. These people will still be waving their surrender flags for longer than die-hard Japanese soldiers held out in caves on Pacific islands after World War II. One can imagine their surprise when they finally emerge into the light to find their Lancet-induced visions of Mad Max-like Baghdad assaulted by an actual living and thriving city--perhaps with a Blair Blvd. where you drive under a giant "W" that replaced the crossed-scimitars that Saddam erected to honor the men who defeated the butcher Saddam.
But the loons won't give up their debate about launching the just and victorious war. Let me quote Mark Steyn's article at length here:
But, again, the legalistic obsession with the casus belli in Iraq is in marked contrast to Warmonger Bliar’s previous war. By the standards applied to Iraq, the Kosovo campaign was not only illegal, it was so illegal Blair and Clinton didn’t even bother to try to make it look legal. No attempt at UN resolutions there. They just cried “Bombs away!” and got on with it. And nobody minds.
Why? Because, for an advanced Western nation in the 21st century, war is only legitimate if you have no conceivable national interest in whatever war you’re waging. Kosovo meets that definition: no one remembers why we went in, who were the good guys, or what the hell the point of it was. Which is the point: the principal rationale was that there was no rationale. The Clinton/Blair argument boiled down to: the fact that we have no reason to get into it justifies our getting into it. Whereas Afghanistan and Iraq are morally dubious if not outright illegal precisely because Britain and America behaved as nation states acting in their national interest. And we’re not meant to do that anymore.
The cultural relativism of the dopier university campuses is to be applied globally.
That suits the enemy just fine. When he was facing a military commission, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed decided to cut to the chase and plead guilty: get those virgins ready, I’m on my way! When Obama scrapped the commissions and loosed KSM on the civilian justice system, the previously guilty man revised his plea to not guilty. So he’ll get a billion-dollar trial. And Tony Blair will be investigated to the end of his days. And don’t rule out one of those Khadr boys making it, if not to 24 Sussex, at least to the House of Commons.
The will to lose--long after we won in Iraq--remains strong on the Left. It makes it easy to see why our jihadi enemies assume God is on their side. Why wouldn't they believe that?
Truly, never in the field of human conflict have so many debated so long about so little.
