Yes.
As for a British soldier on leave who is heading off to fight IS on the ground, he, or even a civilian who did the same thing, is only doing what the Government wants him to do.
Precisely as those British citizens who are now fighting for IS did when they went there, which was when David Cameron wanted to send our Armed Forces in support of it.
Who was right about Kosovo, and who was wrong? Who was right about Iraq, and who was wrong? Who was right about Libya, and who was wrong? The same line is being drawn again.
For the first time since Kosovo, we are on the brink of sending military support to actual Nazis, complete with swastikas and black shirts.
Meanwhile, our long procession of wars in furtherance of Wahhabi tyranny and terrorism seems to be about to culminate in our war directly to defend their mothership, the Sunni monarchies in general and Saudi Arabia in particular.
For these, we propose to send the flower of our youth to be cut down and hacked to pieces. Or, at any rate, one side of us does.
For the first time since Kosovo, we are on the brink of sending military support to actual Nazis, complete with swastikas and black shirts.
Meanwhile, our long procession of wars in furtherance of Wahhabi tyranny and terrorism seems to be about to culminate in our war directly to defend their mothership, the Sunni monarchies in general and Saudi Arabia in particular.
For these, we propose to send the flower of our youth to be cut down and hacked to pieces. Or, at any rate, one side of us does.
One that side are still the wrong but the mysteriously unsackable neocon royalty such as Anne Applebaum and other "titans of the Loony Right".
Some of them have the effrontery to pretend to be left-wing, and even historically mainstream Labour figures, merely because they happen to have had Communist parents, or to have been Trotskyists at university, or to have bought themselves Labour Party membership cards (although David Aaronovitch has never even done that, Dan Hodges has given it up, and so on).
On the other side are still the right but, in what we are forced to treat as the mainstream, the scandalously almost unemployable Old Left and Old Right, sections of the traditional Tory Left and of the traditional Labour Right, deeper-thinking elements of the libertarian Right, those who have arrived at a form of libertarianism from a Trotskyist or workerist suspicion of the bureaucratic State (they, it must be said, seem to have very little trouble getting gigs), tendencies that have become the Greens and the Pirates, and heirs of these Islands' various Radical and republican traditions in all their populism and their pacifism.
We on the latter side can look like a ragbag. We often are a ragbag. But on repeated wars and on many other things besides, we as a ragbag have never been wrong. We are not wrong now, either. We are right. Again.
Some of them have the effrontery to pretend to be left-wing, and even historically mainstream Labour figures, merely because they happen to have had Communist parents, or to have been Trotskyists at university, or to have bought themselves Labour Party membership cards (although David Aaronovitch has never even done that, Dan Hodges has given it up, and so on).
On the other side are still the right but, in what we are forced to treat as the mainstream, the scandalously almost unemployable Old Left and Old Right, sections of the traditional Tory Left and of the traditional Labour Right, deeper-thinking elements of the libertarian Right, those who have arrived at a form of libertarianism from a Trotskyist or workerist suspicion of the bureaucratic State (they, it must be said, seem to have very little trouble getting gigs), tendencies that have become the Greens and the Pirates, and heirs of these Islands' various Radical and republican traditions in all their populism and their pacifism.
We on the latter side can look like a ragbag. We often are a ragbag. But on repeated wars and on many other things besides, we as a ragbag have never been wrong. We are not wrong now, either. We are right. Again.
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