How is deposing a tyrannical regime 'a mistake – whatever the motivation'?

Salih singled out the left-wing Welsh MP Ann Clwyd, as one of few UK politicians who had remained morally consistent on the issue of human rights in Iraq and had championed the cause of the Kurds for two decades. It was Ann Clwyd’s powerful speech to the Commons that is credited with delivering the additional votes necessary to make the majority for Tony Blair.

Ann Clwyd has, since mid 2003, been Tony Blair’s special envoy to Iraq on Human Rights. In a wide-ranging interview in The Observer last December, Clwyd described how she had recently visited Hilla in Iraq – one of the many sites of mass graves of Saddam’s victims. Clwyd – like many of us – believed that the barbarity of the Saddam regime was so acute that inaction was not an option. Clwyd, a former Greenham Common anti-nuclear protester said: “I couldn’t have looked my friends in the face if I had opposed the war.”

She contends that it is the UN – not Tony Blair - that must look to its role and charter in the face of its abject failure to rein in Saddam’s genocidal behaviour and enforce its own resolutions.

Clwyd’s assessment chimes with the words of new Iraqi Foreign Minister, Hoshyar Zebari, an Iraqi Kurd. In his pre-Christmas speech to the UN, Zebari refreshingly avoided the usual diplomatic speak, reminding his audience that "The United Nations as an organisation failed to help rescue the Iraqi people from a murderous tyranny that lasted over 35 years. And today we are unearthing thousands of victims in horrifying testament to that failure. … The U.N. must not fail the Iraqi people again."

Can we expect a vigorous debate on these issues at Labor’s National conference – Ann Clwyd would have been an especially valuable guest speaker – or will it be more of the same lazy consensus which has persistently shrunk from confronting the real human-rights argument for intervention in Iraq? Will there be a ringing call for an overhaul of a sclerotic UN and a commitment of real resources and assistance to build a democratic Iraq? Or will Australian Labor retreat, to use Hitchen’s phrase describing the US Democrats, into a "facade of spurious unity" because other than token sympathy for the removal of Saddam will have the appearance of a concession to Howard?

Tony Blair, Ann Clwyd, Ramos Horta, Vaclev Havel, Baram Salih, Christopher Hitchens, now that’s a "conga line" any self respecting leftie should be proud to join.