A US soldier and a burning oil well - Iraq, 2003. Wikimedia.
The general airing of differences within the left over the past month has probably been a healthy (if sometimes fraught) experience overall. In that spirit, I wanted to engage with Sarah Ditum’s recent New Statesman article about Iraq and the British left. In summary, her argument is that a sense of being vindicated over Iraq led parts of the left to be satisfied with the superiority of being right, however powerless and impotent, and that this manifests itself now in support for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership bid. Here are the six problems that I perceive in her piece.
War is the absolute last resort, not a proactive policy tool
