In any case, I still don’t see where this gets us. If it were established that WMD disarmament were in fact essential to Blair’s (or Bush’s) case, what then? Remember, all those UNSC resolutions required SH to to disarm verifiably, which he certainly did not do. And this too is not some post-bellum rationalization: Condoleeza Rice wrote an article that ran in several major newspapers prior to the invasion saying, in effect, that we all know what real, verifiable disarmament looks like (she used Ukraine and South Africa as examples) and Saddam ain’t doing it. By early 2003, the trust had long since run out.

On your last point, if it can be shown that the word “intelligence” in both statements refers to precisely the same thing, that looks rather damning for Blair. Out of context, it’s difficult to say.

You ask where that leaves us and wonder whether Blair is politically vulnerable. No he isn’t. He has the great good fortune that the opposition is useless. If Peter K wants to back his prediction that Blair will be re-elected he will find that the bookies are not offering generous odds. But Blair’s credibility has suffered and so have the prospects for international cooperation even in cases where it is really warranted.

As to lies, you must have very demanding standards if you don’t regard the statement quoted by Kenny in the previous thread as a lie: “The intelligence picture… is extensive, detailed and authoritative.” That statement was clearly false, since the JIC had told him their intelligence was “limited.” Only a fool or a liar would translate “limited” into “extensive, detailed and authoritative” and Blair is not a fool.

Did he, now? Who left that impression, Saddam who repeatedly and publicly denied having WMDs, or the Coalition, who repeatedly and publicly insisted he did?

Oh, fuck right off, and take your drunk Rothmans-smoking stalkee with you. Is ‘Gulf of Tomkin’ a taunt, too?

Chris’s point is separate, and seems to be correct, though to what end I’m not sure. Maybe Blair did believe (as Bush did, and I do) that the war was justified by an overlapping set of strategic and legal factors, but in making his case to Parliament he made disarmament the most important rationale; if SH disarmed, Britain would not invade. Okay, point made; to Blair, WMDs were the most important issue. Where does that leave us? Perhaps it makes Blair politically vulnerable, since Saddam apparently really did disarm prior to the invasion, while (for reasons of his own) managing to leave the very strong impression that he still had various WMDs. Who knows, I don’t vote in UK elections so I haven’t thought about it much.

Regarding thread degeneration, when we start seeing phrases like “bizzare messianic idiocy” and “moral supremacist prejudices” (not to mention “flying fuck”s) zinging back and forth, the real debate is over.

The hell we have. Two years from now, when we still have 100,000+ troops camped out in Iraq, I hope you’ll ask their family members whether they’ve “moved on.”

The way I understood it is Saddam was bluffing. Even George Tenet of the CIA said it was a “slam dunk” case.

After 9.11 the government should err on the side of caution, Hans Blix be damned.

Meanwhile the Kurds and Shia finally named a cabinet without Iraq devolving into a mad theocracy as the anti-war folks predicted.

Meanwhile Syria pulled out of Lebanon after a 29-year occupation.

Blair will be reelected, I predict.

George, it is a liitle ungracious to complain about a thread which only exists because Chris Bertram corrected you about Blair’s case for war. Nobody seems to be disputing that without the alleged WMD threat, that case would have collapsed. Since you have more-or-less conceded the point – “the words of Blair that you reproduce do not put the enterprise in a good light” – what are we supposed to be discussing? The usual complaints about “The Left” and suchlike?

You suggest that Blair was mistaken to put such emphasis on WMD, but without that excuse not even Lord Goldsmith would have been prepared to say the war was legal. Bush didn’t need to worry about such things, but Blair did.

The suggestion that anyone of consequence on the Left was enamored of Saddam Hussein, and wanted him protected, in the runup to either Iraq War is pathetic. But do thrash away at that straw man—you look so tough and shrewd.

We all were assured in the most patronizing way possible that the US Government knew exactly where the WMD were located, and that they knew much more about the situation than the rest of us could possibly imagine. The problem is that they were lying. Many people on the left and the right believed them—I mean, how could anyone outside of the intelligence community really prove otherwise? I happened not to believe them, but I know plenty of rational people who did.

As for high-level politicians and policy-makers on the Left, I imagine that most believed that that Bush & crew were lying, but understood that an invasion was going to happen anyway. The “high-minded” reason for not opposing it was to give the impression of a unified government as our troops entered battle. The politically expedient reason—i.e., the one that really mattered—was that it was easy to predict a relatively quick military victory, which would leave the naysayers looking weak and unpatriotic, at least in the runup to elections. If and when it all went to hell later, the Left leadership could always just say that Bush lied to them.

The problem with the Left’s rather cowardly calculus, so far, is that so few Americans seem to care that Bush lied to us. We kicked ass on the godless heathens, found Saddam (but not Osama), toppled a statue, got Iraq its election, and now we’ve moved on to other things.

This is one of the troubling things about many of the complaints on the left. When it comes time to actually do something, the complaints are suddenly abandoned as too provacative.

“A prominent Israeli MP said yesterday that his country’s intelligence services knew claims that Saddam Hussein was capable of swiftly launching weapons of mass destruction were wrong but withheld the information from Washington.

“’It was known in Israel that the story that weapons of mass destruction could be activated in 45 minutes was an old wives’ tale,’ Yossi Sarid, a member of the foreign affairs and defence committee which is investigating the quality of Israeli intelligence on Iraq, told the Associated Press yesterday. . . ”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1140459,00.html