Cowards in the face of Iraq

I don't really normally have much time for the team around Spiked magazine, but Brendan O'Neill hits the nail firmly on the head when he notes that, for the Labourites, their care is not for the people of Iraq but their own positions of power:

'In the ranks of the Labour party, and among its supporters in the press, many are covering their backs on Iraq by claiming they were conned, misled or downright duped by Bush and Blair's pre-war claims. They seek to blame Blair and his coterie of advisers for the war in Iraq, when in truth a majority of Labour MPs voted for the war and most of the Labour party membership went along with it with a kind of shoulder-shrugging indifference to what its consequences might be. Never has Labour members' slavish acceptance of the leadership's line been so deadly as it was in 2002-2003. Those who claim to have been duped should bear in mind the words of American historian Carl Becker: "One of the first duties of man is not to be duped, [but] to be aware of his world."

Harman is disavowing responsibility for Iraq in a desperate bid to save Labour's skin. She says: "Party membership has halved and people are disillusioned ... The symbol of that has been our foreign policy, particularly Iraq." She is opportunistically distancing herself from the Iraq debacle in order to gain credibility amongst the disorientated members of her party. Gordon Brown is attempting a similar trick. His proposal to allow critics of the war to demonstrate outside parliament is largely a sop to Labour party members, an attempt to show them that, although he also backed the war to the hilt, he's a little bit apologetic so please, please forgive me!

Others are urging Brown to go further. They have called on him to "lance the boil of Iraq" in order to save Labour from oblivion. John Harris, author of So Now Who Do We Vote For?, has complained that "no one under 25 [will] join the Labour party until it [has] lanced the Iraq boil". Note this is not a demand to end the war and occupation, much less to challenge future military interventions; rather it is a call to squeeze the "Iraq boil" that sits like an ugly, pus-ridden blemish on the most important thing of all: Labour's reputation. The concern is to save Labour, not Iraq.

Writing in the Guardian before the last general election, Madeleine Bunting was even more explicit. She called on Labour under Brown to execute a "surgical strike" and "lance the Iraq boil before the left is irrevocably split": "Lance the boil and let Blair pay the price for Iraq. Prime Minister Gordon Brown would then reposition the line on Iraq ... It would liberate the next election from endless questions about trust that have dogged Blair's political career. It would give a fresh impetus to New Labour's political project, which would give it a fighting chance of two more terms."

Some on the Labour left are clearly more concerned with "liberating" British politics from pesky questions about Iraq than they are in liberating Iraqis from endless western meddling. The reduction of Iraq to a "boil" - how inhumane! - sums up what is motivating much of the Labour-left criticism of Blair over the war: a self-serving desire to repolish Labour's image, and thus secure re-election, rather than a desire to kickstart a debate about war and democracy.'