Age bin

To get the best out of John Roskam’s article on why Australian soldiers should stay in Iraq, perform the preliminary exercise of going through and changing the word “critics” – as in ‘critics claim the invasion was based on a falsehood, and that the results of military intervention in Iraq have only gone from bad to worse’ - to the words “people who were right”, and the words ‘Bush’, ‘Blair’, and ‘Howard’ to “people who were wrong”. That done, the line “It is now irrelevant whether an invasion that occurred three years ago was justified or not” may now need a second look. Is it really irrelevant that we were lied to by blundering incompetents? I would have thought that past lies cast many doubts over current assurances, and past stuffups detracted from present confidence. It seems all sides now agree that everything has gone horribly wrong; why is it so hard to agree that those who got us into this mess are less qualified to tell us how to get out of it than the people who were right all along?