This is a cross-post from Jacobinism
In response to news that the al Qaeda splinter group, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), had seized control of Mosul and surrounding territories in Northern Iraq, the Timesjournalist David Aaronovitch summarised the desperate situation [£] as follows:
Isis [now] loosely controls a big stretch of territory in eastern Syria and western Iraq and has captured millions of pounds of cash in Mosul banks and tonnes of Iraqi military equipment donated or sold by the United States. It threatens the existence of a unitary Iraq, the safety of the Kurdish autonomous region and the stability of the whole area.
These same events prompted Owen Jones to publish his own article for the Guardian, which began like this:
I have encountered no sense of vindication, no “I told you so”, among veterans of the anti-war protest of 15 February 2003 in response to the events in Iraq.
The first thing one notices is that this sentence looks very silly indeed sitting beneath a headline which flatly declares: “We anti-war protesters were right: the Iraq invasion has led to bloody chaos”.
Secondly, Jones’s use of the term “veterans” to describe peace activists just a week after commemoration of the Normandy landings is unfortunate, to say the least. D-Day veterans are the survivors of a mission in which thousands gave their lives in defence of democracy. By contrast, those peaceniks (including Jones himself), valorised with this term in Jones’s article, merely marched through London in lawful demonstration against government policy, and at no risk to themselves whatsoever.
You can read the rest of Jacobin’s post here
