Here we go again. At the first televised hustings, Jeremy Corbyn mounted his moral high horse and won much support for saying that the elephant in the room was Iraq. The invisible pachyderm usually refers to a subject that people keep schtum about. The truth is that barely a day goes by without people arguing about Iraq, although it is fair to say that Iraq and indeed wider foreign and security policy were hardly debated in the election campaign and so far not very specifically in the Labour leadership contest.

Corbyn has, to his credit, never wavered on Iraq and has supported the Kurds. He spoke in the House of Commons debate on recognising the Kurdish genocide in February 2013 and pointed out that he and Ann Clwyd had urged the British government to scrap its delegation to the Baghdad Arms Fair after the chemical bombardment of Halabja in 1988. Yet he helped lead the opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 although the Kurds explicitly asked for intervention and were, in their widespread and deep view, liberated from fascism by it.

At the hustings, Corbyn asked why Tony Blair had got so close to George W Bush and colluded with what he asserted was an illegal war. Blair is ugly and big enough to defend himself but Corbyn’s analysis is completely wrong. Blair had warned long and hard about Saddam well before Bush was in the running for president and when he argued against foreign entanglements. Far from being Bush’s poodle, Bush followed the analysis of Blair. As Blair might say, his position was worse than coat-trailing the president as he actually believed in overthrowing fascism.

Britain may have been a strong advocate of action against Saddam but the limits of our influence were illustrated by the Pentagon disastrously deciding to ignore substantial State Department contingency planning and do things on the cheap, with vast costs later. My argument is that the invasion was fully justified but the failures of the occupation, albeit in extremely difficult circumstances, gave succour to Sunni and Ba’athist forces to kickstart a deadly civil war.

Look, let’s be very direct. Very few people who took sides in 2003 will change their minds. I know that I am in a minority and always will be. But incantations of an illegal and immoral war, usually coupled with exaggerated death figures, still have much traction but are mere agitprop.

The tragedy is that Labour could and should have handled things very differently. Back in 2004 the Labour conference passed an NEC motion composited from a motion submitted by North East Derbyshire CLP and partly written by me. It acknowledged that those who honourably supported and those who honourably opposed military action in Iraq have united in support of the efforts of the emerging civil society in Iraq, including various parties, women’s groups and the new, secular and independent Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions which strongly supports the process endorsed by United Nations Security Council for a federal, democratic, pluralist, and unified Iraq, in which there is full respect for political and human rights. It urged support for the TUC’s appeal to raise funds to help rebuild the Iraqi trade union movement and its battle for workers’ rights and against privatisation. It urged party branches and members to support this appeal and the work of these grassroots Iraqi civil society organisations and for government departments to continue and expand their support for Iraqi non-governmental organisations.

Solidarity campaigns were initially active and included many antiwar unions such as Unison, which sponsored the first Labour Friends of Iraq delegation to Kurdistan in 2006, but they soon gave way to other priorities. Most of the founders of LFIQ opposed the war but happily worked with those who had backed it. If only more people had followed this example.

As I say, we are never going to agree on Iraq but it is not too late to put our differences to one side and give active support to Iraq and Kurdistan as it fights Islamic State. It would be great if the candidates were able to outline their differences and explain how they believe that the labour movement and the United Kingdom can play a positive role in supporting Iraqi and Kurdish democrats. No one needs to swallow their sincerely held views about the invasion but they should pull their fingers out in backing our friends and comrades in Iraq and Kurdistan.

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Gary Kent is director of Labour Friends of Iraq and has visited Iraq and Kurdistan 20 times since 2006 but writes in a personal capacity