Irony, I think

Jim Nolan: Howard kinder to conservative leaders than history | Opinion | The Australian

Jim Nolan, one of the few Labor identities to strongly support the Iraq war, argues in this article how it was those on the Left side of politics who were originally pushing the Right in the US to "do the right thing" in the Middle East and elsewhere in the 1980's and 90's. He therefore is upset that it is the Right that is now claiming to have the moral high ground in removing dictators, preventing genocide, etc.

But his final point is his best:

Of course this would be all the more nausea-inducing were it not for the fact that just at the crucial moment of Bush Jr's conversion, the broad Left, which had been so morally indignant at Saddam's brutality through the '80s, went missing and has remained in a quagmire of irresolution and defeatism since.

It sticks in the craw that the intellectual Left has become so debased that a Tory Prime Minister can make a telling point at their expense by quoting the words of socialist intellectual George Orwell. They have become the Bourbons of modern politics, having learned nothing and forgotten nothing.