Nick Cohen on America's child soldier

I got this comment some days ago and very grateful I was too. It showed how the sheer stupidness of our own Nick Cohen has crossed the Atlantic by way of his drooling admiration for Sarah Palin who "sent her son to fight in" Iraq. I just didn't realise how ludicrous Nick Cohen had become. He has a reputation for drinking hard and then trawling and commenting on blogs, sometimes using false names and equally false allegations. Did I mention that already? But now he seems to be hitting the sauce in the day time and writing his Observer column in the same state and spirit as when he surfs. See this on Sarah Palin:

a Christian, conservative anti-abortionist who proved her support for the Iraq War by sending her son to fight in it

He just can't let go of that war he has staked his whole being on. How, asks that blog I linked to above, did she send her son to a war? War is for grown ups, believe it or not. Britain sends sixteen year olds to fight and technically, they need their parents permission. But can even a British teenager be sent into a war he or she doesn't want to fight? Surely if it comes to using children as soldiers, America would use an African, not an Alaskan, proxy.

But Old Nick was pleased with that line and thought himself on a roll so he came up with another little gem, still trying to ride his hobby horse, the war on Iraq:

English leftists made the same mistake of allowing their hatred to override their judgment after the Iraq war. If they had confined themselves to charging Tony Blair with failing to find the weapons of mass destruction he promised were in Iraq, and sending British troops into a quagmire, they might have forced him out. They were so consumed by loathing, however, they insisted that he had lied, which he clearly had not.

Eh? Suppose they had confined themselves to charging that he hadn't found WMD in Iraq. He didn't find them because the idea that Iraq had them was a lie. The lie and the failure to find the object of that lie were the same thing. And if Blair had gone, what then? We'd have got the pro-war Tory leader, David Cameron, or the not anti-war present incumbent, Gordon Brown. Blair was saved, for a time, by the lack of alternative to him, not by what Nick Cohen sees as his integrity.

Lest we forget, Nick Cohen's article was about how others have lost the plot.