Absentionists

Could the so-called "decent left" have come up with a more preposterous pivot out of their support for the Iraq war than their prophet, Norm Geras has managed, quoted approvingly by Andrew Sullivan? --

[Geras] Measured, in other words, against the hopes of what it might lead to and the likelihoods as I assessed them, the war has failed. Had I foreseen a failure of this magnitude, I would have withheld my support. Even then, I would not have been able to bring myself to oppose the war. As I have said two or three times before, nothing on earth could have induced me to march or otherwise campaign for a course of action that would have saved the Baathist regime. But I would have stood aside.

[Sullivan] That's where I am too.

So in addition to bravely keyboarding young British and American men and women to victory in Iraq, and now declaring this approach a disaster, they now declare that they don't even have the bravery, with hindsight, to have taken the opposite position. And in fact it's the war opponents who were making the more difficult moral choice -- to weigh the evil of Saddam against the horrors of a new war, to make an affirmative decision to be against the war, and get painted as objectively pro-Saddam by the 2003 incarnations of Geras and Sullivan. If anyone really wants the sobriquet "decent left", doesn't an honest weighing of moral consequences sound like what it should mean?