I'm sorry McG That wasn't my quote, Don.
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The thing is, we can speculate about alternative histories, but it is speculation. You can't put the outxcomes in a balance and weigh them against each other. All you can hope to know for sure is what actually did happen. In many circumstances all options are pretty disastrous, and all you can do is try to guess which look as if they may be less disastrous.

But we do need to recognise that the road that was followed led to some very terrible things. The Holocaust as it transpired was one of those.

History doesn't allow reruns, but we can try to learn from it, and that means taking care to look at all the consequences that flowed from previous decisions, not just the ones that make us feel good. Maybe if our decision-makers had done that they wouldn't have been able to fool themselves that the war on Iraq was going to be, on balance, worth the suffering it would cause.