As UK broadcaster Mark Steyn (also an early supporter of the “war on terror”) now suggests, with hindsight, he could never now support a foreign military intervention without strategic goals nor a pathway to military victory.

Many of us are now far less enamoured of the USA than we once were. The late Leftist, albeit always a quirky one, Christopher Hitchens, was also a supporter of the Iraq War.

CRINGE

I wonder, if alive today, whether he, like Steyn, he would have cause to reflect on it all, and to cringe a little.

Tony Blair and George Bush are regularly called “war criminals” by many, and not only by opponents the Left.

We can all remember “Bush lied, people died”. Both of these things turned out to be true, unfortunately.

History has been far kinder to Howard. The Greens did ask the current Liberal leader, Peter Dutton, to say sorry for the Iraq War, and no apology has, so far, been forthcoming.

Rather, Michaelia Cash defended the decision, clearly sticking to the old Nationals warrior Ian Sinclair’s maxim, “never apologise”.

Most famously, Sinclair never apologised for once comparing Bob Hawke to Charles Manson.

Perhaps America’s inability ever to win a war these days is the reason they are getting other people to do the fighting now, as we see in Ukraine. They just provide the money and weapons. A case of strategic out-sourcing.

The occasion of the Iraq War anniversary is a useful time to reflect on the way in which issues of great moment can cause fundamental political and ideological re-alignments.

For example, one of the great divides now among conservatives in America is over the Washington war machine’s “endless wars”.

The libertarian wing of the American conservative movement, exemplified by Ron and Rand Paul, has always been on the side of isolationism as the default foreign policy position.

As US author Tom Woods notes about Paul Sr: “It’s funny how many positions Ron Paul was pilloried and ridiculed for what have since become things ‘everybody knows’.

“Dr Paul was a crank and a traitor for not supporting the war in Iraq. Now, everyone but the most bitter dead-ender admits what a horror show that was.”

Yep. The paleo-conservatives at The American Conservative, led by Patrick Buchanan, were never supporters of the Iraq or Afghanistan wars or any of the other recent US foreign entanglements either.

TAC is remembering the Iraq War this week: “Monday [last] marks the twentieth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. It is easy to forget with what monolithic enthusiasm the conservative movement endorsed the Bush administration’s push to overthrow Saddam Hussein and democratise Iraq – and how much has changed in the two decades that followed.”

On February 10, 2003, readers of The Weekly Standard were greeted with triumphant predictions from columnist Max Boot. The impending invasion of Iraq, Boot assured readers, would be a smashing success.

THREATENED

“In all likelihood, Baghdad will be liberated by April,” Boot wrote. “It may mark the moment when the powerful antibiotic known as democracy was introduced into the diseased environment of the Middle East, and began to transform the region for the better.”

Oops. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

The USA’s “endless wars” are also the subject of a strange new tendency, started by the old feminist Leftie and now a heroine of the COVID dissident movement, Naomi Wolf, to say sorry to your erstwhile ideological opponents for supporting earlier policies that you now realise were major blunders and/or morally wrong.

This is not the Ian Sinclair way.

Naomi Wolf’s heartfelt apology was to conservatives for not believing the innocent explanation of the January 6 2021 “invasion” of the US capital building.

Steve Deace at The Conservative Review has “come out”: “I believe in finding the victory in any situation. Perhaps that is especially true when apologising. So here I am, prostrating myself before God and country, Naomi Wolf-style.

“In fact, I see her humility and I am inspired to follow her example. I’ve learned my lesson. I wish to be made clean. And here’s the kicker: I have liberals to thank for it.

“They were stone-cold right about stuff like forever wars and corporate greed.”

Here is Tom Woods, again, on Deace: “He now describes the war in Iraq as the greatest foreign-policy disaster of our lifetimes, and the COVID response as the greatest domestic disaster.”

And Tucker Carlson of Fox News has his own regrets about Iraq:

“I’ve spent my whole life in the media,” said Carlson. “My dad was in the media. That is a big part of the revelation that’s changed my life: the media are part of the control apparatus.

“Not only are they part of the problem,” he continued, “but I spent most of my life being part of the problem, defending the Iraq war.

“I actually did that. I’ve had a million regrets not being more skeptical, calling people names when I should have listened to what they were saying.

“For too long I participated in the culture where I was like, anyone who thinks outside these pre-prescribed lanes is crazy, is a conspiracy theorist. And I just really regret that.”

Yes, indeed. And we can see that Tucker Carlson’s awakening is double-barrelled. It is about both futile wars and the role of the media as agents of narrative-support, aka propaganda.

ALLIANCES

It isn’t only attitudes to military entanglements that have created new alliances.

Just like the latter-day conservatives’ contrition over their former support of what turned out to be unjust and unprofitable wars, corporate greed, too, has brought into being fresh fissures and new ideological alliances.

Many conservatives, especially social and cultural conservatives, now see far more clearly than before, and find abhorrent, big business’s greed, its embrace of all things woke, its powerful reach into all of our lives, its abandonment of any semblance of customer service.

Equally sinister is the ever-growing crony capitalism we observe everywhere – seen now most clearly in the “public-private partnership” and “stakeholder capitalism” global governance model of the World Economic Forum and its corporate partners like Larry Fink of BlackRock.

Other Left-liberals, or at least those decidedly not of the Right, like online podcast stars Russell Brand, Joe Rogan and Glenn Greenwald, haven’t necessarily apologised for earlier positions, but they have evolved in response to new developments and these days break bread with those on the Right who have turned against the capitalist model that now confronts us.

Other, local, straws in the wind are the metamorphosis of One Nation’s Mark Latham, from Labor leader to anti-woke, pro-fossil fuel crusader.

There is a shared love of free speech and a loathing of cancel culture that is often at the heart of the new partnership. This version of the Left actually cherishes freedom!

Mark Latham, of course, would correctly point out that it isn’t him who has changed; it is his former Party.

This new finding of common cause – on some issues, at least – with former ideological opponents has been given massive impetus by the coming of COVID totalitarianism.

The astonishing inability of most on the Left to see the irony in its current rabid support for the smashing of civil liberties (and free speech in particular) in the name of Big Pharma’s corporate greed and power has taken us all by surprise.

Or to see the irony of standing idly by, without demur, over the past three years, while watching the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in human history.