John Lloyd, columnist for and ex-editor of the New Stateman, has resigned from the magazine because of its position on the war. You have to pay for the whole thing at the New Stateman, but the Guardian runs excerpts from it. The Guardian deserves credit for running it, because it is blistering.

A large part of the British left - and the left elsewhere - has made a fundamental mistake. In opposing the invasion of Iraq, it has shown itself incapable of thinking through not only the nature of the world as it is today, but also its own claims to be the leading force in making the world better. The more vehement sections of the left have succumbed to the comfort of violently rhetorical attacks on the US and have led the world in creating an image of Tony Blair and the Labour government as US poodles, incapable of articulating a British national interest.
The crimes of Saddam Hussein's regime - its support for terrorism, its aggression toward its neighbours and its brutality against its own people - are dismissed either by referring to the left's own past protests against it, or to reminders that a slew of western, especially American, political and corporate leaders did business with, and supported, that regime.
. . .
Will the end of the war and the effort to rebuild decent government in Iraq change the view of the left? It would seem unlikely: the anti-US reflex is too ingrained, the dislike of Blair too great.

Why would I weep? The Left has been disgusting for nigh on three centuries, now. We should all be used to it.

The left has been tested and found wanting. More importantly, the left has been exposed. No tears here.

It's true that opposition to the war from the British and European left needs no deep examination - it's informed so clearly by axiomatic anti-Americanism that there's really nothing very interesting there to talk about.

Opposition from the American left is a slightly more interesting subject. Apart from the plainly obvious instinct for deep, flagellating self-loathing that flavors most arguments of the far left, I think Christopher Hitchens (another journo who jumped his magazine's ship over its silly stance) has hit the nail on the head in arguing that a large part of the American left has become a status quo force. Their instinct is to avoid commitment to policies that could distract them from their precious and narrow domestic agendas by bringing in unwelcome foreign distraction. It's not so much that they don't care about the Iraqi people (although they don't much), it's that they fear the consequences to their comfortable lives and set attitudes should the US continue to stir the hornets' nest in confronting various and dangerous dictatorships and theocracies. Their basic instincts, in other words, are conservative.