Today, though, he seals the deal by renouncing the ‘War on Terror’. Overdue?

Quite probably, but better five days before the Texas thugs departs the Oval Office than any time after. But it was his rather striking argument that cemented my affection.

In a crucial paragraph Milly opines that:

The more we lump terrorist groups together and draw the battle lines as a simple binary struggle between moderates and extremists, or good and evil, the more we play into the hands of those seeking to unify groups with little in common.

Perfectly correct. Anyone witness to the absurd spectacle of sites such as Monkey Smashes Heaven or groups like the CPGB(ML) throwing their meagre weight behind the most murderous Islamists has seen only the least harmful examples of this tendency.

The Neo-Conservative myth makers rely upon an utterly baseless vision of their pet hate as a monolithic bloc of a religion, which only total capitulation to Western interests (ala Egypt) can redeem. That that is clearly not the case, and if this were to change the havoc would be vast. But policy based around this understanding risks distorting the truth to the warped NeoCon perspective, uniting the most extreme elements of multiple traditions.

Miliband has clearly taken British policy well away from such needless harmfulness, with sound alternatives proposed. As tempting as it is to indulge my inner cynic and declare this simply another instance of Atlanticist lapdoggery, I have to admit being deeply reassured by this article. A lockstep with Obama is no bad thing.

Labour are still a purge of James Purnell short of winning me back for good, but this article brings us closer than we’ve been for a long while.

This is not a tendency I am alone in noting, on this site Dave Osler stated: “Even its strongest supporters must be finding it difficult to mount a positive case.” and it is this I will explore today.

Firstly, It is fairly blatant that the IDF, which is causing the overwhelming majority of suffering and death (300+ to 1 says it all, really) and so they are left with either talking about the relatively uncommon event of a missile caused fatality. That’s fairly clearly never going to work since if it’s an anecdote war the Palestinians are, for once, heavily outgunning their oppressors.

So the second approach is perhaps their strongest: that of legitimacy. Endlessly distinctions will be drawn between the stateless terrorists and the state actors of the relative sides. Somehow efforts to “sap” the Palestinian resolve do not constitute “terrorism”. Military efforts to achieve political ends via militant force are distinguishable from those perpetuated by the true terrorists since the organisation of Hamas is one which is anti-semitic and genocidal, while the IDF is merely an army and must be considered a protective tool rather than an aggressive organisation.

(An interesting variant on this argument is the traditional “They started it” argument. Hamas breached the ceasefire, therefore Hamas had it coming. Unfortunately the blockade began on November 4th, with the Israelis thus ending the ceasefire prematurely.)

Of course this rather makes things problematic for those who advocate Two State Solutions seeing as Hamas would be in power if the Palestinian state was a democracy, and therefore the creation of a separate Palestinian state would simply be the creation of a Palestinian Defence Force with equivalent legitimacy to the Israli version. Which is why that is unlikely ever to occur.

This isn’t far away from the third line of argument: that each side has different motivations and therefore we must treat the actual consequences of their actions as substantially distinct bodies. The outcomes of Israeli policy and of Palestinian can not be compared directly and the context of the intent of the actors is of the highest importance.

In other words its a fairly twisted piece of deontology, which suggests that somehow the IDF is free from cause & effect while Hamas is not. Hamas must be held responsible for their (occasional) killing of civilians while the IDF are entirely at liberty to arrange raids where they know civilian death will occur. The amount of agony caused is an irrelevance so long as it is accidental. Inept execution of intent to kill is worth ending unconnected human life over.

How exactly this fails to distort entirely the meaningfulness of death and the value of a sentient being is utterly beyond me.

Furthermore this also often leads to the Israeli military being seen as ignorant blunderers, unaware of their own strength, hamfisted but well intentioned. This peculiar view is typified by this comment:

Palestinian suicide bombers directly targeted civilians. The IDF tries to kill military who unfortunately hide within civilians. Hamas tried to goad the IDF into responding in the hopes that civilians would be killed. The IDF responded and were in the propaganda cycle now.

So are we to understand that the IDF and its masters were all somehow unaware that assailing the Palestinians would bolster support for the Palestinians? That this would thus exacerbate the crisis and assure further footsoldiers for the Gaza Strip? Or are they simply unaware of the fact that massive loss of innocent life is occurring?

Strand four is the simplest: as we can not tell who has been killed and belongs to Hamas and who has been killed and does not, it is assumed that the IDF was successful in its discriminate use of such an indiscriminate weapon as large amounts of high explosive delivered from a great height.

Not, I think we can agree, the safest of assumptions. An interesting example of this depends upon bigotry: largely those killed have not been women or children, it is crowed.

Because, of course, any Palestinian in possession of a penis post-puberty is a Hamas missile launcher.

Naturally even when this is not accepted at all the standard line is to blame Hamas for their “perfidy”. What I am interested in is how a civilian based battle force could do anything but surround themselves with other civilians. They are not a distinguished military force in the official sense and it would be making themselves fairly obvious to present themselves in so blatant a way as purchasing distinct property.

Now I am not going to act apologist for this bunch of low-life theocrats but I do wonder if distinguishing themselves physically from their cover isn’t expecting a little too much of these asymmetric warriors.

Which leads us back to an earlier point: either it is acceptable to “punish” Palestinians for their political views, to cow them into backing someone less hostile to Israel, to back state terrorism which sees these individuals as a collective to be battered and converted via attrition, or else hundreds of innocents are dying in an accident everyone is capable of predicting and continuing to.

Anti-war sentiment, meanwhile, has swollen. The increasing crescendo of dissent was easily the largest single factor in driving Blair from office and without this ultimate, unforgivable betrayal there is little doubt that Labour would be in a far better position than their current predicament. Had Michael Howard opposed the War, there’s a sliver of a chance that he would be Prime Minister today, but it is unquestionable that Labour would have taken an even greater pounding.

As it is, the Conservatives’ inability to attack Blair properly upon the war -attacking the fashion in which it was conducted rather than the war itself – has hindered them greatly, and their failure to provide the opposition expected of them ensured that it has taken another few years and a total re-branding for them to grasp the public consciousness.

Whereas previously a deep commitment to opposition had filled many with conviction to end it (the largest protest in British history serves as an obvious indication of this much), the abatement of this apoplexy has been accompanied with the broadening of anti-war views. It is now only the die-hards of the Decent left (who SES finds too irritating that we censor all mention of them) that keep the line firm. Most of the Guardianistas, all of Hari and the rest, have abandoned their former backing and grown contrite. Matthew Parris described this process as the sinking of the good ship Neo-con almost two years ago. By now the process is through. A scattered handful remain, fit only for being subjected to ridicule by radical socialists and squabbling over which Presidential candidate to back: all out behind the war and back the reactionary or throw your chips for Obama and his progressive vigour on all matters, bound to crush your love-child underfoot.

But this division is of greater significance than the group it tears apart: for in America one party’s de facto leader is a man who reckons that the war is “One that should never have been authorised and should never have been waged.” Now there is a position which there is no mistaking the conviction of. Although he has since mixed this stance with a displeasing nationalist smudge of the suggestion that Americans should “Stop rebuilding their country and start rebuilding our own” his core position seems sound.

As heartening as this is, should we not pause for a moment to reflect upon how strange it is that no such voice exists within Britain? Or rather, no such firm tones and intentions are anywhere matched by the actual possibility of the speaker coming to power. The Labour Party are of course crippled over this issue by their own conduct, with Brown incapable of speaking out over the issue as the inevitable retort “Where were you with these words when it mattered?” would snap him. The Conservatives are led, once again, by a war backer and he shows no signs of revoking his former position. So far as can be determined, the line is jingoism as usual, despite the vast requirements that this makes upon the state which the Tories supposedly want to reduce the role and size of. Funny how rightists always overlook military spending, even for totally superfluous and massively expensive measures such as Trident. Or, for that matter, the equally useless and even more pricey Iraq War.

The Liberal Democrats used to be a bastion of war opposition, as well as a sponge for disaffected Labour voters in 2005. But at present they are led by Nick Clegg, who seems to follow Menzies Campbell (who had a considerable amount of foreign policy experience) in issuing a muffled silence over the matter. He may well be firmly opposed to the invasion and subsequent occupation, but as of yet I have heard not a word of it from him.

The Greens and the BNP are or were against the war. The Scottish exception is a substantial one, but strictly local (or if the SNP get their way, strictly foreign). George Galloway got a seat out of it (before the “Coalition” he rode collapsed multiple times). But this is scant consolation. In 2004 the Green Party of America was against the war and secured beneath a single percentage point in the presidential election and no national seats anywhere. Now the head of the Democratic Party, which claimed both houses in 2006 largely on the back of weariness of the war, and the most likely candidate to win opposes it strongly. That is the sort of four year progress I would anticipate of Britain. That would match the groundswell towards war opposition which has occurred in that time.

But, as I ask whenever someone suggests an “Anyone but Miliband” candidate claiming Labour victory, where is the name? Nobody in British politics shares a vigorous opposition to the War and the possibility of ending up anywhere important. Even the aforementioned most-likely-next-Labour-leader has done a grand total of nothing to end the war in his position of Foreign Secretary. Nobody inside the government or out seems up to the task and after the massive swing towards opposition this is not so much puzzling and disappointing as baffling and intolerable. Must the war serve only as a hindrance for those who backed it and never as an opportunity for those that did not? Is there no one willing to seize the chance to end it immediately and ride with this willingness to power?

If not, we shall have to settle into the awkward position of being substantially to the right of America. At best we shall be dragged out along with them. So perhaps we should take heart in noting that, either way, the jingoist nationalists will be mildly humiliated. Which is scant consolation.