The Today Snort

Iraq a disaster? Only compared to some fantasy scenario where there would have been a successful Shia insurrection sometime in the unspecified future. David Aaronovitch apologises for his support of the war…sort of:

Many mornings begin with the Today snort: an almost indefinable simultaneous use of sinus and larynx, it is the audio equivalent of one of Jeremy Paxman’s eyebrows leaping off his head and making a bid for freedom among the studio lights. The snort says: “What you are arguing is ridiculous and everyone knows it.” So it is a snort on behalf of everyone. And, for a long time now, the snort has been deployed against those who argue that the invasion and occupation of Iraq are anything other than a disaster.

A far more elegant version of the snort was used in these pages recently by my colleague, Matthew Parris. “Nobody,” he argued, “seriously now thinks the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a good idea or is going anywhere useful.” The troops should be withdrawn straightaway. […]

In February 2003 Matthew wrote that he would be against a war in Iraq even if there was WMD, even if it was authorised by the UN, even if a liberated Iraq was then stable, and concluded: “I’m against war because it will antagonise moderate Arab opinion.” And the Iraqi people? To be massacred, shredded, gassed, beheaded, suppressed, starved, immiserated, terrorised and tortured because all of that would be less bad than antagonising moderate Arab opinion. An Iraqi democrat stands in front of an armchair anti- interventionist, and is invisible.

I do apologise. For Abu Ghraib and Donald Rumsfeld. For not understanding the insurgents. For the looting. For the dire planning. I apologise to the election workers assassinated, the police trainees blown up, the parents of children caught in crossfire and everyone else that the planners and executors of the invasion that I supported, and still support, may have let down by neglect or stupidity. I recognise their bravery and their determination to succeed despite everything.

But a disaster compared with what? Compared with Saddam and sanctions or Saddam and cyanide. And that — the thing that Matthew presumably preferred — was not a disaster? Snort.