March 22, 2003

The World as We Know

The World as We Know It

As my two most recent Meanderings demonstrate, I have been opposed to the commencement of hostilities between the United States (aka “the Coalition”) and Saddam Hussein (aka “Iraq”). Now that those hostilities have commenced, I would like to make it clear that I am opposed to the cessation of those hostilities before the completion of the objectives of the Coalition. In other words, now that they are in there, they need to finish the job.

Today there were anti-war rallies across the UK, most notably in London. In an attempt to repeat the 750,000-strong march before the war, protest organisers managed to bring together 200,000, according to generous estimates. (Not as generous as the 500,000 claimed by the organisers, of course.) I’m not suggesting that 200,000 people is a small turnout. That’s a lot of people against the war. It does demonstrate that 550,000 fewer people felt as strong as they did the first time around.

Just like the leader of the Liberal Democrat party, Charles Kennedy, I voiced principled objection to the war, but now that Parliament has voted and backed the action in a sizable majority, it is time to unite. I note that the liberal democrats in both houses of the US Congress agreed with unanimous resolutions to support the war effort. This is one of the few times I have ever agreed with liberal democrats in either the UK or US meanings of that term.

If I believed that the war against Saddam is immoral, I would not care about the voice of the majority. That is the belief and view of some of the protesters. I just believe that he war is inadvisable and unsupportable in international law. If international law has just evolved in a significant way, then we will have to live in the world as it has become.

I hope that Saddam is replaced by a workable and stable political solution for the Iraqi people.

Posted by david at March 22, 2003 04:04 AM
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