Norm is disappointed.

Too many people have died in Iraq and too many people are dying there - and this is to say nothing of the wider social disaster that has overtaken the country, the numbers of the dead aside. . .

at the levels of mortality and suffering now involved I'm put off by expressions of scepticism of a form to suggest that while 600,000?+ deaths is not a credible figure there is some lower, though still very high, figure about which supporters of the war could feel relaxed. The situation has passed that point, whatever it might be thought to be. Too many have died and too many are dying.

Saying this, I do not intend, either, to imply that the battle in Iraq is lost, and that all hope of salvaging a half-way decent, or even just not totally disastrous, outcome should be abandoned. I fear this may be so, but am unwilling to give up hope even now because of what giving up hope is likely to mean in terms of the forces then able to claim victory in Iraq.

I am also not, therefore, signalling agreement with those who say that there is now nothing for it but to pull US and British forces out of Iraq, that no outcome could be worse than what will follow from leaving them there trying to hold the line. I'm not at all persuaded of that. It seems to me that even worse than the situation now obtaining is more than possible if an emergent civil war were to become an unchecked, full-scale civil war in the circumstances brought on by the witdrawal of Western forces.

Still, there have been too many deaths; there has been too much other suffering. It has lately become clear to me - and this predates publication of the second Lancet report - that, whatever should now happen in Iraq, the war that I've supported has failed according to one benchmark of which I'm in a position to be completely certain.

That is, had I been able to foresee, in January and February 2003, that the war would have the results it has actually had in the numbers of Iraqis killed and the numbers now daily dying, with the country (more than three years down the line) on the very threshold of civil war if not already across that threshold, I would not have felt able to support the war and I would not have supported it. 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.

I reviewed the few posts I made about war and Iraq etc., and find that my position then was a lot like Norm's current position. I stood aside. (See Compared To What? and Study War for examples).

Were we therefore wrong to support the war, those of us who did? In terms of what we hoped and what we thought likely, we obviously were - given how things have actually turned out. But on the basis of what could have been reliably foreseen, I think it's harder to say that. Only if the disaster was always foreseeable as the most likely outcome would I be convinced of it.

I have argued that war is always wrong, that it never has a good outcome. That doesn't mean pacifism - refusal to even defend against attacks - but it does mean that attacking others to achieve some objective hasn't worked in the past and so is unlikley to be a good policy. For example, fighting back against the Japanese in WWII was proper.

I have also argued that those who recommend diplomacy simply fail to grasp reality. Diplomacy is how the Baathist regime came into existence, and how it prospered, benefitting diplomats in material ways.

There's no solution. There never has been and never will be. Well, never is a long time. But not soon.