And another thing
If I hear one more person say ‘the whole world believed’ Saddam had WMD (as Peter Hain does in the video in the post below), I’m going to go around saying the whole world believes they have a really tiny knob. Even if that person is a woman.
The whole world believes Peter Hain has a really tiny knob.
Posted on June 25th, 2007 at 10:28am under Iraq
This has been an increasingly used argument by New Labour ministers, and it’s complete and utter bollocks. Robin Cook in his resignation speech said that he didn’t think that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in the sense in which the dossier said they had, as in ready for battlefield use, and he should have known seeing as he saw the same intelligence as all the others did.
How hard is it to provide any number of print references from before 2003 in which people explain authoritatively that the Iraqis definitely did not have, or were unlikely to have, WMDs?
It’s a common pattern in nearly all establishment scandals, is it not? Everybody says, basically, “we believed this because other people believed it”. Maxwell pensions, miscarriages of justice, what you will. So everybody shifts the blame around until it lies nowhere in particular. And in each case, it’s actually clear that:
1. there were always plenty of well-informed people saying differently regardless of the supposed consensus ;
2. people in positions of power and authority are supposed to be able to think for themselves rather than just say “Sir Humphrey believed it so I believed it too”.