26 words.

That is, vae victis has always been the motto.

Bill Kristol and the other neocons have often bragged about their ability to “move the goalposts” of acceptable political discourse. The Iraq war was meant to bring about an epochal shift, in America and beyond.

The Decents knew, and intended to position themselves as the only legitimate leftist intellectuals on the new playing field. Even the presence of a few token anti-war Eustonites is to be seen in the light of this.

In the face of the illegality of this war of choice, of the disaster it has led to, are people going to stop breathing down their necks, just for the sake of not being “smug”?

I haven’t been watching dsquared specifically, but I got the impression that he evolved from “not this war now” to “no wars of aggression ever”, or IOW, from “calibrated views” to “no matter what”.

Well, yes, probably. The mores around these things are difficult. The Iraq war was obviously a very bad idea when it started, and it was obviously going to go wrong. Some of those who said so would have said so no matter what. Others actually calibrated their views to something close to the reality. They have been proved right, and continue to be proved right. I suggest, for example, that you read dsquared’s writings in the lead up to and beginning of the war. Continuing to be right, as things go along, and continuing to get flack for it, one must be tempted to point backwards and say, “Ah, but look, I was right last week, and the week before, and…all the way going back to the beginning and, well, you were wrong”. This is bound to sound smug. Whereas “Look, I know I’ve been wrong, spectacularly so, over and over again about this thing, but now I really am right” is bound to sound silly. If you want to condemn, say, dsquared, for being smug, well, despite roger’s absolutely proper condemnation of smugness in this situation, he must surely be a little bit smug, but there but for the grace of God and but for my inability to analyse the situation with judgment and accuracy, go I, and you too.

What is uniquely destructive about Euston is that its supporters simultaneously claim to support the cause of human rights and humanitarianism while attacking its ‘actual existing’ institutions.

On the one hand Amnesty International, the UN and humanitarian agencies are maligned as useless’, ‘biased’, ‘accomplices to mass murder’ etc. but, on the other, the Eustonites arguments for humanitarian interventions, in certain circumstances, discredit genuine humanitarians by associating these with the cause of liberal imperialism.

It is a modern day version of Trotskyist entryism.

‘Nich Cohen, lately responsible for a lengthy published rant deriding the left for its opposition to the war in Iraq, has been given a dressing down by his mother for being politically incorrect. Well, it was more than that actually. She gave him a slapping.

Mum Maggie was seriously upset at being called a Stalinist in the opening pages of nasty Nick’s book. Not least because, when the Cohen family last gathered together to enjoy a jolly Christmas, cowardly Nick failed to mention the reference, or even the book.

Maggie, a lifelong leftie, could not contain her feelings when she next saw her son. Although diminuitive to Nick’s beanstalk proportions, she let him have one round the chops. “In all the years they were growing up I never hit the children,” Maggie recently told friends. “Now I have to go and do it when he is grown up.”’

Sometimes, Luis. There’s no monopoly on smugness in all this mess. For the record, I got a couple of things seriously wrong about five years ago, not that anyone’s asked. As of May 2002, I didn’t think Hitchens was going to go so far as to support war in Iraq, let alone degenerate to the point at which he would call the Dixie Chicks “fucking fat slags” a year later; later that year, I mistakenly identified Michael Walzer as a member of the prowar left, and I regret that to this day, because Walzer is, of all the Euston signatories, the one I respect most (he was also remarkably gracious in informing me, in the fall of 2002, that he considered the war foolish and unnecessary); and most of all, I would never have believed on May 13, 2002 that on May 13, 2007, the New York Times’ lead headline would be “Civilian Deaths Undermine Allies’ War on Taliban”. I was kinda hoping that the “allies” would understand the importance of not losing Afghanistan to the Taliban all over again. But apparently they had other ideas.

I took my little swipe at Ignatieff above, though, because I think the people who applied the idea of “humanitarian intervention” to this pre-emptive war managed to trash the principle they were championing. (Likewise Jean Bethke Elshtain, who argued that Iraq was a “just” war. Though Walzer, who wrote the book on the subject, knew better.) The fact that the Eustonites now have themselves a series of YouTube episodes on “intervention after Iraq” is a little galling—though, with a tip of the hat to Daniel in 31 (with whom I disagree on Kosovo and Budweiser both), not quite so galling as that line about “picking over the rubble.” Especially since the rubble is still bouncing as we speak.

The opposition is pissed off;

Ergo I am right.

That’s a nifty logical argument, isn’t it?