Shouldn’t the peaceniks just shut up and move on?

After writing this I shall set out for Iraq. The Times is sending me there, I am enormously lucky to go, and hope to see as much as possible in the ten short days of my trip. The prospect has concentrated my mind on something which has vexed me and others who opposed the US–British invasion all through the year of trouble and tragedy that has followed. It is the question of whether we peaceniks are right to persist so doggedly in our criticism of the Prime Minister and the US President, and in our pursuit of their answers to unanswered questions about the reasons and justifications for war, now that that war is over.

After all, the occupation is a fait accompli. Few are more irritating than those who, asked where to go next, reply that we shouldn’t be starting from here. The search for ways of rescuing Iraq and its peoples from their new plight might be thought more urgent than raking over the coals of a row about whether we were right to rescue them from their old one. ‘If you really care about Iraq as you say you do,’ our pro-war critics sometimes complain, ‘shouldn’t you be burying the hatchet at home and thinking positively, as Mr Blair and the Americans are trying to do, about the best way of sorting out difficulties there? What do ordinary Iraqis care about Hutton, or Butler, or the 45-minute warning, or who said what to whom back here in Britain more than a year ago?’

We peaceniks nod sagely, for it is hard to disagree, but find ourselves picking again at the old sore of why Messrs Bush and Blair did it in the first place. Should we, then, kick the habit? Should we just shut up (as I hear some Spectator readers cry) and, in Mr Blair’s phraseology, ‘move on’? It may be presumptuous to speak on behalf of that wide and ragged band who describe ourselves as against the war on Iraq, but I honestly think I can.