The British left's retreat from snity

Con Coughlin:

Britain should never have gone to war in Iraq, should abandon its nuclear deterrent and should engage with states that openly support and sponsor international terrorism.

In other words, Britain should give up its position as one of the world's leading powers and allow genocidal dictators and rogue states to use violence and intimidation to achieve their invidious political goals.

That, at least, appears to be the vision being propagated by the authors of the three reports published yesterday that are highly critical of the British Government's involvement in the Iraq war and its aftermath.

"A Fair Foreign Policy", a study commissioned by the relief agency Oxfam which opposed the invasion of Iraq from the start, argues that Britain's influence around the world has diminished because of Iraq to the point that we can no longer take effective action to end humanitarian crises in places such as Darfur.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, meanwhile, concludes that the "lives and dignity" of ordinary Iraqis are "continuously under threat" because of the chaotic security situation that currently affects most of their nation.

And one of the main conclusions reached by the Left-of-centre Oxford Research Group, that renewing the Trident nuclear system would "send the wrong message around the world", prompted Brian Eno, the former Roxy Music keyboard player, to observe that the report was "the single most important contribution to understanding and coping with the future that I have ever read".

The publication of all three reports was, of course, timed to coincide with the fourth anniversary of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime, and they are almost unanimous in their condemnation of Britain's participation in Operation Iraqi Freedom, the military campaign to remove the Ba'athists from power.

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And yet these are the same organisations that argue, as Oxfam officials did yesterday, that Britain should be more interventionist in the humanitarian crises affecting countries such as Sudan and Zimbabwe.

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If you read the Guardian's description of the IRC report you see no condemnation of those responsible for the suffering, the enemy in Iraq. No they blame the US and the Iraqis for not stopping the enemy, never drawing a breath to discuss the wickedness if al Qaeda and the Sunni human bomb attacks on non combatants. This moral blindness discredits the organizations and papers like the Guardian who repeat this nonsense without placing it in context.

In Sudan and Zimbabwe the left has no difficulty recognizing who is responsible for the suffering, why can't they recognize it in Iraq? There is an enemy engaging in war crimes on a daily basis and these people don't care and the silly Guardian talks about how neutral the IRC is. In this case they are neutral to the point of moral blindness.