David Cameron the NeoCon

Last week I wrote approvingly about an article by Matthew Parris. I quoted what he described as an extract from a speech by William Hague:

The parallels with the rise of Nazi-ism go further ... If only, some argue, we withdrew from Iraq, or Israel made massive concessions, then we would assuage jihadist anger. That argument ... is as limited as the belief in the Thirties that, by allowing Germany to remilitarise the Rhineland or take over the Sudetenland, we would satisfy Nazi ambitions ...

We’re all in this together ... standing with those brave democrats in Iraq who are trying to rebuild their nation ... Should representative government ... take root in Iraq, [jihadists] will not only have been defeated in one key battle, they will also find that an alternative path has been established in the Middle East which gives its people the hope, prosperity and freedom they deserve.

And then I quoted Parris's comment that "This stuff is pure Pentagon".

This week Parris begins his column as follows:

A mistake appeared in this column last Saturday. Quoting remarks from a hog-whimperingly neoconservative speech about jihadism made at the Foreign Policy Centre in London nine months ago — a speech that compared doubters over the Iraq war with the appeasers of Nazism — I speculated that, though David Cameron himself had said little on this, he too was probably a hawk on Iraq. Calling the speech “pure Pentagon”, I attributed it to William Hague, now Shadow Foreign Secretary.

I apologise to him. I should have checked. Indict me of incompetence, however, but not of sexing-up my argument. Inadvertently I had sexed it down. The speech was Mr Cameron’s.