On the Left defending Iraq’s “sovereignty”:
It’s peculiar to listen to lefties make “sovereignty” a sacrosanct issue, so that it is sinful to attack the “sovereign” state of Iraq. Without going into the merits of it, historically the Left has been against the concept of sovereignty. This is what broke up the Second International at the outset of WWI, in which the socialist parties had been expected to be “international” in the sense that Marx and Bakunin (a leader in the 2nd International) made the case that the working classes in France and Germany had more in common with each other than with their respective states. To the chagrin of the traditionalist Lefties, the socialist parties sided with their respective nation-states, rather than with the international workingclass movement. One of the very few socialist parties to uphold the anti-sovereign position was Lenin’s Bolsheviks.