In my last post, commenting on Tony Blair’s moral case for war against Saddam, I accepted Blair’s claim that Saddam’s war of aggression against Iran, involving the extensive use of poison gas and the loss of hundreds of thousand of lives was an indefensible crime against humanity. But it can be defended, as witness this counterargument:

Opposition to communism and the rampant Islamic fundamentalism of the Ayatollah Khomeini might actually have required an expedient war. The real world must never intrude into Quigginland. All must be black and white, no room for shades of grey or difficult moral choices where evil will be done either way – we simply avert our eyes and ignore the evil flowing from the choice that our ideological prejudice dictates should have been taken.

OK, I cheated a bit. In the original, this was a defence of the US alliance with Saddam in the war against Iran, and had the phrase expedient alliance in place of expedient war. Still the defence works just as well for Saddam as for Reagan and Bush Sr, and the basic point is pretty clear. If you want to justify a war against Iraq don’t do as Blair did and invoke considerations of morality. Above all, don’t do as Quiggin did and try to assess what a moral case for war would really involve.

PS: In the continued absence of Haloscan, Ken and I have ratcheted up the thermostat, to make up for the absence of the redhot barbs that normally fill our comments threads. Civilised discussion will resume shortly.