Iraq - Distortions on Blair's war, again

Melanie Phillips takes the London Times to task over the continuing distortions about the war in Iraq. She concludes with this,

And Butler concluded:

'255. By early 2002, therefore, readers of JIC assessments will have had an impression of:

a. The continuing clear strategic intent on the part of the Iraqi regime to pursue its nuclear, biological, chemical and ballistic missile programmes.

b. Continuing efforts by the Iraqi regime to sustain and where possible develop its indigenous capabilities, including through procurement of necessary materiel.

c. The development, drawing on those capabilities, of Iraq’s ‘break-out’ potential in the chemical, biological and ballistic missile fields, coupled with the proven ability to weaponise onto some delivery systems chemical and biological agent.'

In other words, although Butler said that some of the intelligence directly before the war turned out to have been dodgy, and caveats warning of the unreliability of intelligence should have been recorded in the government's famous dossier but were not, any fair-minded person reading the totality of the intelligence Butler recorded would surely conclude that the intelligence services had maintained consistently that Saddam continued to pose a threat from WMD well before the summer of 2002, and that there has never been any indication that that intelligence was false.

In other words, this was pretty well the opposite of what Sieghart wrote. Yet her version is the one that is now generally believed. Thus ignorance, error and irrationality are now the order of the day.

Thanks to legacy media. But thanks to bloggers, like Melanie, we can expose their distortions.
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