ATTRIBUTING the Liberal Democrats’ election successes to their stance on Iraq, Charles Kennedy asserted: “We have stuck to our principles and argued our case and I think we have won new respect and new-found support as a result.” Even those sympathetic to his conclusion will be taken aback by his premise. On this issue no party has exhibited greater elasticity in argument and error in forecasting.

Before the war, Mr Kennedy argued for the “better alternative” of continued containment of Saddam Hussein; after it, he called for the tyrant’s arraignment for war crimes. Yet containment would have meant Saddam’s continuation in power today, tomorrow and — by dynasty — a generation hence. In the Cold War, the West contained the Soviet Union because military confrontation risked annihilation. War in Iraq carried no such risk: as peace activists are wont to declaim, no WMD stockpiles have been found.

The Liberal Democrats’ insistence that Tony Blair took us to war on a false prospectus coexists uneasily with their earlier apprehension that Saddam would launch his WMD if attacked. Jenny Tonge, then Lib Dem International Development spokesman, advised: “Saddam Hussein is unlikely to sit in his bunker and recite John Benjamin [sic] — ‘Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough/Baghdad’. If he has the capability, he will attack his neighbours, probably Israel.”

As bad predictions go, this was impressive but pipped by Charles Kennedy’s insistence that: “Any war will cause a refugee crisis of huge proportions.” Any other war, perhaps, but not this one: Iraqi civilians, able to distinguish between a war on Baathist totalitarianism and a war on them, stayed put.

MR KENNEDY’S was a culpable misjudgment, for it was a counsel of inaction when it was within our power to shorten a people’s suffering, but at least it was within the bounds of decency. Paul Marsden, the Lib Dem Health spokesman, sneered, a full fortnight before Saddam’s fall: “The war is not going as planned . . . The cheeky blighters in the Iraqi Army and militia won’t give up and are resorting to outrageous tricks such as refusing to come out into the open desert to be slaughtered.” The notion that using civilians as human shields is not cheeky but immoral has some headway to make.

A predilection for overstatement has unhinged party thinking on diverse subjects ever since. . “The risk of global recession is staring us in the face. Some analysts are even starting to warn of the risk of an economic ‘ice age’ where markets stagnate and growth disappears,” said Matthew Taylor, Treasury spokesman, in March 2003. “The same [Bush] doctrines could equally be applied by India vis-à-vis Pakistan, or in any dispute where a state feels threatened. It is throwing a match into a barrel of oil,” worried Baroness Williams of Crosby, the Lib Dem leader in the House of Lords, shortly before India and Pakistan agreed to talks to resolve the Kashmir dispute. “[Blair’s] only political support came from two leaders, Aznar in Spain and Berlusconi in Italy,” lamented former MEP Nick Clegg this month, hopeful that his audience would not have heard of Denmark, Portugal, the Netherlands or central Europe.

Through all this it has been possible to stake out a liberal position on Iraq that anticipated the costs of war, the difficulties of postwar reconstruction, and the potential disaster of juridical shortcuts and the abrogation of prisoners’ rights, without gainsaying the importance of regime change. Sweeping democratisation of the Middle East is a chimera, but creating a functioning Iraqi administration capable of defending itself — and by extension, us — from Islamist terrorism is not. Meanwhile, straddling divergent populisms, the Liberal Democrats give honest opportunism a bad name.

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