Our blogs about
America's Wars
War on Iraq
War on Drugs
War on Afghanistan
War on Columbia
War on Philippines
War on Venezuela

MORE
Matrix Masters
Blogs
World Events
Katrina's Aftermath
US News
Bush Crime Family News
Science & Health
Earth News
Free Speech
News from Africa
News from Palestine
Bill of Rights Under Attack

Support Bloggers' Rights!

Lorenzo's
Random Musings
. . . about Chaos,
Reason, and Hope

Al Jazeera (English)
    Baghdad Burning Blog (by Riverbend, an Iraqi civilian girl)
            Dahr Jamail's Blog from Baghdad
                Imad Khadduri's blog "Free Iraq" (scroll down for English version)

Iraqi Civilian Deaths ... caused by Bush's unprovoked war

 

Only dopes get duped
by Brendan O'Neill - 4 July 2003
'Are we feeling duped yet?' asked an American website on 26 June, in an article about the failure to find the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that Bush and Blair told us posed a 'mortal threat' to the free world. The answer seems to be a resounding 'yes'. On both sides of the Atlantic, opposition politicians, commentators, anti-war activists and even military men claim to have been conned, misled or downright duped by Bush and Blair's pre-war claims. There is something distinctly disingenuous in all this dupe-talk. Weapons and intelligence experts were picking holes in Britain and America's evidence long before the war kicked off. In the USA, there were newspaper headlines like 'Evidence on Iraq challenged' and 'Doubts over administration's case' as far back as September 2002. Britain's main dossier of evidence was ridiculed six weeks before the war started, for having been plagiarised from a student's 12-year-old PhD thesis. Who could possibly be duped by such dopey claims?

Take Jane Harman, a Democrat Congresswomen from Los Angeles who sits on the USA's House Intelligence Committee. Harman has kicked up a stink in the USA by alleging that the Bush administration's claims about Iraq's WMD were 'based on circumstantial evidence rather than hard facts', and that she and other right-thinking Democrats might have acted differently over Iraq if they had known the whole truth. What a crock. This is a woman who over the past year has sat on the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security and now the House Intelligence Committee on Iraq. She had access to the bulk of the evidence on Iraq, in all its questionable glory. And she, like a majority of her fellow Democrats, voted for Bush's war resolution in October 2002. If Harman was duped, it can only be because she wanted to be.

Or consider Clare Short. Blair's former secretary of state for international development says she and the rest of Britain were 'duped all along' by Britain's dodgy evidence. Yet Short voted against an anti-war amendment (in other words, for war) in the Iraq debate in parliament on 26 February 2003 - two weeks after the press had labelled Britain's evidence as the 'dodgy dossier', and three weeks after the BBC reported that it had received an intelligence file marked 'Top Secret', which rubbished some of the Blair government's claims about Iraq. Maybe Harman, Short and the rest should bear in mind one of the meanings of the word 'dupe': 'a person who functions as the tool of another person or power.' Or perhaps they should consider American historian Carl Becker's wise words: 'One of the first duties of man is not to be duped, to be aware of his world.'

This is a shameful spectacle. The 'debate' over Iraq has been reduced to an evidence-based affair, where the only question is over which facts are true, which aren't, and who made up what. This is politics with the politics taken out - where principle and judgement have been replaced by technical squabbles, and where no one is prepared to take responsibility for what is going on in Iraq.


Only dopes get duped. And only cowards blame others for making them make bad political judgements.

posted by An Old Curmudgeon 2:21 PM