Cursed are the peaceniks

James Delingpole gives both barrels to the ‘pea-brained’ isolationists who fill the papers — even The Spectator — with their defeatist snivelling

Anyone who has ever smoked will be familiar with that awful sinking feeling you get when, one by one, your fellow nicotine-addict friends start to quit. United you feel strong, happy, immune to the finger-wagging of health fascists and probably even to lung cancer, secure in the knowledge that for all their minor defects, tabs are basically great and possibly better than sex. But as the number of smokers in your circle dwindles, so too does your morale. You feel depressed, insecure, let down. You start wondering whether maybe it’s not time that you too did the cowardly thing and went over to the other side….

At the moment I’m feeling much the same way about the Iraq war. The analogy isn’t quite perfect, because whereas I recognise that stopping smoking makes very good sense, no one is ever going to persuade me that the Iraq war was a mistake. But I’ve definitely experienced a similar sense of hurt, confusion and betrayal at that growing number of hacks who once understood, like me, why the war was a right and noble cause, but who have now been panicked by events such as the Abu Ghraib prison scandal into snivelling, breast-beating recantation.

One day the U-turner is Vanity Fair’s David Rose in the Evening Standard; the next it’s Martin Wolf in the Financial Times and Johann Hari in the Independent; then Mary Ann Sieghart and Anatole Kaletsky in the Times. And let’s not even mention the embarrassing bout of craven peacenik-ery which has broken out not just in the Mail, but also in our very own Speccie.

For me, the final straw came when — as I so often do at difficult geopolitical times — I turned for consolation to the weblog of Andrew Sullivan and found that even this wise, articulate, principled defender of the war had suddenly come over a touch wobbly.