"...what war would you have been in favour of ???"

Gareth's question sounds simple, but the more you think about it, the more complicated it becomes.

Is it to be answered in terms of "what would you actually have done if you had been back there at the time, with no more information about the future than anyone else?" Or "what would you do if you were transported back in a time machine knowing what you know now?" Or "what would have been the best thing to have done?"

And are you imagining yourself as someone in a position to make the big decisions, or just as an ordinary bod having to decide what to do yourself, in a context where the big decisions are made by other people out of reach? (There are plenty of people who go off to fight in wars they don't think should ever have started, on both sides.)

They all have different answers, and most of them I couldn't begin to supply. Fortunately we don't have to worry about those fantasy questions involving time machines, where we have to decide whether to choose a time line involving a war in 1939 that leads inexorably on to horrors such as Auschwitz, and speculating whether an alternative timeline might conceivably involve something even worse. (Inviting us to say "Hell, let's not play this game - lets pop on back to 1914 and stop the Archduke getting assassinated and getting us into this mess in the first place...")

What we have to do in the real world is make what seems to us the best judgement on the basis of the information available. In the present context that means, as Gareth says, concentrating on the problem in hand "The problem now is to rebuild Iraq, and the rest of the Middle East." True enough.

But "making the best decision on the basis of the information available" is at the heart of it - and that is why it really does matter if the people who make decisions on our behalf lie to us and lie to themselves. It isn't carping to try to find out the truth, because finding out the truth about things like that is our only hope of ensuring that we are collectively in a better position to sort out the truth from the lies next time. Truth matters. Anything that distorts the information on which me make our judgements undermines our ability to make the right judgements.