Don’t Take the Law into Your Own Hands…

Brendan O’Neill takes a swing at antiwar legalists:

The focus on the pre-war intelligence and legality suggests that while some in the anti-war camp have technical quibbles about the current war in Iraq, they do not take a principled, political stance against Britain and America’s right to intervene abroad. That many of Blair’s critics have made intelligence failings and legal questions their main focus, rather than the war itself, indicates that their opposition is based more on tactics than principle. It is not that they are politically opposed to the intervention in Iraq, but that they were not convinced by the imminent nature of Saddam’s threat or the urgency of launching a war without first securing a legal ‘yes’ from the United Nations.

On the fundamental issue of intervention many of these critics cannot argue with Blair, because they fully accept the premise of his international mission to cure the world’s ills; they support Western intervention.

Procedural questions are important, if for no other reason than that they undercut all the pious braying about the “rule of law” and “democracy” Bush and Blair claim to be exporting. That said, O’Neill is absolutely right to nail intervention schizoids such as Robin Cook and Clare Short, who supported the Kosovo war, for their lack of principle. And don’t even get me started on John Kerry. What a profoundly dispiriting menu of political options in the great arsenals of democracy!