The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Alan:

I think of myself as moderate or centre-left. I supported Afghanistan. I hated the enterprise of Iraq, as much for its hubris and impracticality as anything else. The grand colonial empires all fell because ultimately colonial rulers could not make decisions effectively for their colonial 'wards'. The white man's burden was already obsolete in 1900. Trying to revive it in 2003 was always an absurdity in terms of practical outcomes.

The war party's passionate declamations that the enterprise of Iraq would be different because it would be different was just rhetoric they never explained and certainly never thought out.

They were warned of almost everything that has gone wrong in their new raj on the Tigris. They chose not to think about these warnings. Now their sole justification for continuing their project is that anything else is unthinkable.

There's clear historical evidence that the British and French governments regarded a French defeat in 1940 as unthinkable. Sadly...

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