Regular readers will probably remember that a lot of tips for posts come from my parents who – true to their generation's skill set – clip news articles and other interesting stuff and send it to me by mail for further consideration. As a lot of the information that comes to me in this way is not avaialbe online it is actually quite useful. That in particular applies to the endless analysis of the Iraq War by Dutch pundits, clippings where my father does not spare the ink to underline the words ‘failure’, ‘unilateral’, ‘disaster’, ‘more deaths’ and of course ‘Bush’. You see, he and I had our cordial dispute about the war in Iraq almost as soon as the preparations for it were put in place in late 2002.

It has become de rigueur for many right-of-center commentators to start penning mea culpas for supporting the war and a lot of them are quite frankly, insincere or somewhat politically expedient. At the same time the hardcore ‘stay-the-course’ punditry is digging itself in deeper with totally uninformed and highly partisan exhortations. To be frank, I have not done either but so far have decided to say nothing at all which of course is equally questionable.

So where to go from here? Absent any cogent argumentation from either my Dutch or American sources, it is refreshing to see that some Brits somehow get it and are able to wage a healthy debate about Iraq. And remarkably, these are two men from the left, one who has rescinded his support knowing what he knows now to a retroactive neutrality, the other in response reiterates a position of support, fundamentally unchanged since early 2003.

Norman Geras wrote earlier this month:

Had I been of mature years during that time, I hope I would have supported the war against Nazism come what may, and not been one of the others, the nay-sayers. The same impulse was at work in my support for the Iraq war. Even so, I am bound to acknowledge that, though I never expected an easy sequel in Iraq, much less a 'cakewalk', I did not anticipate a failure on this scale, and had I done so, I would have withheld support for the war without giving my voice to the opposition to it.

While that is a balanced and well-written response, it appears to be one that is pretty much risk-free. Oliver Kamm, in a comprehensive post entitled In Defence of the Iraq War takes a far riskier approach by offering his support for the war by revisiting and reinforcing its original rationale. This centers around the failure of Saddam-containment and the prospects of an unleashed rogue nation led by the next generation of Baathist tyrants, Uday and Qusay. Like Norman’s post you should probably read it in its entirety, but I will excerpt Kamm’s awareness of the lonely place he has staked out for himself:

I have appeared on some of these programmes debating, respectively, allegedly progressive and also High Tory opponents of the Government’s foreign policies. One thing on which my fellow interviewees and I, and everyone reading this, will be able to agree is that if the defence in the broadcast media of Tony Blair’s foreign policies is left to me, then Tony Blair is in trouble.

I could avoid all effort and position myself conveniently between Geras and Kamm, or even better, argue that it was better still to wait for James Baker’s report and hide in the media fracas that will no doubt follow its release. Both options would absolve me from providing some clarity and in our journey to find it I believe that, in spite of the grotesque failure of coalition operations, Kamm’s rationale stands, even after three bloody and terrible years.