Responsibility

I presume the analogy John is trying to make is this:

In the campaign leading up to the war on Iraq, Blair, Hoon, Straw and the rest claimed that they had incontrovertible evidence that Saddam Hussein was in posession of weapons of mass destruction. Evidence was produced which has since turned out to be either false or, at best, equivocal.

Nevertheless, all of the above have held on to their jobs by claiming that they were sincere in their belief that the evidence was what they said it was at the time of its presentation. All have claimed the “sincere but in error” defence since, or had that defence made in their name

Morgan is in almost exactly the same situation. His newspaper published photographs that he claimed were incontrovertible evidence of abuse of Iraqi detainees by British troops in southern Iraq. These photographs have since been shown to be fakes and he and his defenders have made exactly the same “sincere but in error” defence.

The parallels seem pretty clear.

In addition, in both cases, a pretty strong case can be made for the view that the evidence in both situations was massively weaker than it ought to have been and that both BlairHoonStraw and Morgan ought to have been more sceptical and held the evidence to higher standards of proof.

Furthermore, in both cases, it has been claimed, the protagonists were to easily prepared to accept the evidence because the evidence supported what they already believed to be the case — that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and that systematic or at least widespread abuse of detainees was taking place.

Where’s the difficulty in seeing the parallels?

[As a side-note, in the Morgan case the pictures were pretty unconvincing from the start. From the point of view of someone, i.e. me, who has an amateurish interest in photography it seemed pretty surpising that alleged snapshots taken in the back of a darkened lorry ought to look like they were taken by Helmut Newton with a Rolleiflex and several hundred watts of carefully positioned lighting. Snapshots taken in that kind of a context — either on a 35mm point and shoot or a consumer grade digital camera — don’t usually blow up to produce flawlessly sharp black and white prints of the size floating about on the television discussions following their publication.]

I’ll leave the finding the false statements by British politicians to others, but here’s a “nice long list”:http://www.lunaville.org/WMD/billmon.aspx of very dubious statements about WMDs by American officials, most of whom still have their jobs.

I took John’s point to be the quite sensible one that this isn’t a criminal trial, and different standards apply. When you’re in charge of a shooting war, you have to get it right. Intending to get it right, or not intending to deceive, or not “lying” (if that requires intent to deceive) is insufficient. If you start a war based on false information, you’re not doing you’re job and you should resign. That seems like the weakest principle of personal responsibility imaginable, but some conservatives it seems don’t believe in personal responsibility when it applies to them.

Oh, and if Greg Dyke is not a good enough example you always have Gavyn Davies. I believe Lord Hutton did not expect any resignations from the BBC and did not expect his inquiry, with terms set by the main, and legally trained, investigatees to be taken as a kangaroo court to try the BBC. (For what? Temerity?)

In any case, the honorability or otherwise of Greg Dyke is beside the point, the system controlling the BBC called some people to account for failure to meet a standard that is higher than that we demand of the intelligence services even though we are prepared to go to war on the word of the latter.

Ministerial responsibility is clearly dead.

Great post! You are hereby awarded another post-graduate degree in hindsight to add to the equally worthless ones you might already possess (I’m guessing you are more a metaphysician than a real physicist). Keep up the great work for the barbarians – they need all the help they can get before installing you as master of the universe (albeit a 7th century manifestation). Still, it’s much better than anything your talents have got you in today’s world – no?

I’ve noted on a couple of occasions that if you had tried to float a company on the London Stock Exchange on the basis of a prospectus as weak and poorly established as the prospectus for war, you would quite possibly have gone to jail and very probably been banned from the Exchange for life. But I think John’s analogy has a bit more punch.

The real difference is surely that Trinity Mirror’s American shareholders wanted Morgan to go; Blair’s American shareholders want him to stay.

With that said, I think it would have monstrous if Morgan stayed. I am really shocked that he should be in line for a payout of a million pounds. Spotting pictures like that as fairly obviously fake is one of the basic skills of tablo9id editing.

NICK

I foolishly wrote “glib.”

Your jocular “One has to laugh”, attitude about the plight of Coalition troops in Irag at this (for most of us) hair-raisingly uncertain WMD moment is so much more callous than I’d imagined when I typed that word.

My mistake.

Dan, I think that Nick’s amusement is not at the situation of American occupation forces in Iraq, but at you.

That is, he finds it funny that you think that one ineffectual, time-expired nerve-gas explosion which did not harm or kill anyone, is more important than armed uprisings, ambushes and suicide bombings killing hundreds of people.

I would prefer to weep, myself, but in any event it’s pretty clear that your interest in the well-being of Iraqis or American troops is insignificant as compared with your interest in transmitting conservative propaganda.

Thanks, mfb: you managed a piece of straightforward reading that dan did not.

dan: like I suggested, it’s a bit ridiculous of you to have a Eureka moment over the supposed ‘ugly reality’ of those two shells, when, had said shells been like 99.9% of those used in roadside bombs since the occupation began, they’d have led to the twisted-metal and broken-bodied reality that results from the detonation of high explosives. A plight that truly sickens me.

And had Ezzedine Salim been confronted by your ‘ugly reality’, the result would have been a somewhat embarrassed suicide bomber heading to Abu Ghraib, for whom I wouldn’t have shed many tears.

MFB wrote: “it’s pretty clear that your interest in the well-being of Iraqis or American troops is insignificant as compared with your interest in transmitting conservative propaganda.”

That was particularly uncharitable, MFB. You could, after all, have entertained the possibility that anyone still worrying about WMDs being unleashed against Coalition troops in Iraq (whether amateurishly or not) is simply misinformed or alarmist.

Instead you instantly assumed I was more interested in transmitting “conservative propaganda” than I was about the lives of my own friends and relatives deployed in Iraq. That’s unfortunate. Especially since at no point did I make light or confess wanting to “laugh” about the danger of conventional I.E.D.s.

As for the explanation that Nick was merely making fun of my (apparently sidesplitting) worries about WMDs being unleashed against Coalition troops, as opposed to making fun of WMDs actually being unleashed against Coalition troops, I’m afraid I feel only marginally better. But I appreciate the thought.

NICK: if you can’t imagine any difference in the degree of harm unleashed by WMDs, versus the harm unleashed by conventional explosives (as horrible and craven as they are), then I honestly don’t know how to persuade you that there is a difference–and therefore a legitimate reason to fear the former even more than the latter.

dsquared: I did indeed compare “printing a photograph” libeling British troops with “starting a war”–with the monstrous regime of Saddam Hussein.

As did John Guiggin, in case you’ve forgotten.

We may certainly disagree about the wisdom of initiating that war, but don’t, in your eagerness to reaffirm your aged opposition to its initiation, entirely overlook the point of my original comment–which was that the ominous assumptions of the Daily Mirror and the British Government were employed against very different objects.

Equating those two objects, after all, does a deep disservice to one of them.

Armando,

Since neither I, nor the “international community” (including the UN and those nations which objected to removing Saddam Hussein’s monstrous and deceptive regime by force), would agree with you that the threat Saddam Hussein’s regime represented should be described as “the smallest risk” or a “rhetorical threat,” your characterization of my comments is inaccurate.

It’s exactly what and who the Daily Mirror and the British Government were assuming the worst about that’s at issue here.

If you believe that an infamous mass murderer and pathological liar should rightly be given the very same benefit of the doubt as the British military–if you see no substantive difference between those two objects of suspicion–you’ll naturally concur with John Guiggen’s comparison between the two.

If you don’t, you won’t.

None of the above, by the way, has anything whatsoever to do with demanding that elected governments are held accountable for their actions.

That’s what elections are for.

There’s no such check against libelous journalists. Only the marketplace and the civil law courts offer any remedy for the actions of newspapers like the Daily Mail.

Which is why recognizing precisely who and what they’ve chosen to assume the worst about is so important.

I still have a problem with your equating government intelligence dossiers and newspaper photographs. As soon as the photos came out they were recognised as false – no such thing happened with the dossiers. Even the axis of weasels pretty much agreed that they were an accurate account of what was known. If any government official needs to resign it’s Chirac for promising to veto a second enabling resolution UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!

Armando

We’ll apparently have to agree to disagree about more than one thing if you truly see no difference between assuming the worst about tyrants like Saddam Hussein and assuming the worst about the British military.

In my case, I think it’s incumbent upon governments to assume the worst about the former, and disreputable for newspapers to assume the worst about the latter.

Weird it may be, but there you go.

Dan, sure.

The claim was made before the war that Saddam posed a great threat in terms of WMD: Blair assured us that the evidence to support this claim was strong. Somehow, to see this as flawed and, in my view, either incompetent or deliberately misleading is to think the worst of the Blair. By this rubric, I can never criticise the government, because even when they are clearly mistaken, one can always say that Saddam was worse.

But perhaps you are right. The position that coalition troops engage in torture and Saddam didn’t have WMDs is so loony, barking and anti-american that we should dismiss anyone who even suggests it.

NICK:

Just to ensure that I’ve grasped your argument, here’s a summary of it: you consider it “dense” to worry about sarin gas (one drop of which is lethal) being unleashed against Coalition troops, and consider it “intellectually dishonest” to refer to sarin gas as a WMD, because it isn’t as massively destructive as a nuclear bomb? And, further, because no Coalition troops have yet been killed by exposure to it?

If the above is an accurate summary of your thinking, I’m sorry to inform you that your thinking is deranged.

I hope, more for your own sake than mine, that I misunderstood you.

thanks for the juvenile clarification, Nick.

Turns out I understood you well enough. You don’t worry about the threat of sarin gas attacks on Coalition troops or even consider such worries a part of “reality.” Further, you think worrying about sarin gas attacks even after Coalition troops have suffered such an attack remains “delusional”…because no troops became ill or died in that attack.

We’re apparently communicating from very different “realities,” and as strange and unprecendented as that is, the law of diminishing returns has set in.

Besides which, you’re really creeping me out now.