A CURE FOR THE NEW STATESMAN BLUES
A good piece by Henry Porter in Sunday's Observer on Doves and Hawks and who owes what sort of apology to whom.
But it was not just the hawks who made a choice. The doves did, too, and although at the time it seemed a safe bet that to opt for peaceful means in Afghanistan was to claim a kind of de facto high ground, it turned out to be the less courageous choice and now demonstrably the wrong one...It may have been that the doves had the world's best interests at heart, but there was an anti-American agenda in the peace party which was abhorrent if only because these people would never talk about any other nation in the they did about the US. The US is, after all, a democracy and its citizens were, after all, victims of a bewilderingly violent attack...
To my mind the most serious mistake of the peace party was its failure to stand up for the democratic achievements of the last 100 years and for the reign of liberal values in which we all thrive and indeed possess the freedom to debate the enormous issues that now face the world. That is still something worth fighting for and I am unembarrassed by saying it.