The Global Fuck-Up; Or, Why Only Fools Were "Fooled Into War" posted by Richard Seymour

One of the most persistent cries from the pro-war lobby in the newspapers and magazines has been that, while there may be no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, almost everyone believed there were. The UN, France, Germany, Britain, America, Russia - everyone was convinced that Saddam had some capability about which he was not being entirely honest. William Shawcross wrote indignantly to the Spectator a while back to make exactly this case in response to Stephen Glovers' suggestion that the media apologise for lying about WMDs. The Senate intelligence committee report would appear to buttress those conclusions - depending on whose interpretation you avail yourself of. Republican Senator Pat Roberts says that the war was justified on humanitarian grounds and, anyway, just about every other intelligence agency in the world made the same mistakes the CIA did:

"While we did not specifically address it in our report, it is clear that this group-think also extended to our allies and to the United Nations and several other nations as well, all of whom did believe the Saddam Hussein had active WMD programs," Mr Roberts said. "This was a global intelligence failure."

The phrase "groupthink" will probably set Alex Jones on edge, as it happens to be one of his favourites. But the other word for that is "ideology"; although I am fairly confident that much of the hype about Saddam was cynically purveyed by Western political leaders, it is occasionally true that rulers must drink of their own poison. And so, when Democrat Senator Jay Rockefeller says of the same report that "we in Congress would not have authorised that war ... if we knew what we know now", you can either take it as a lame excuse for opportunistic Democrats to extricate themselves from their moral clusterfuck with the Bush administration, or as a serious admission that the US political elite was deceived by its own bullshit.

And when Rockefeller says

"The committee's report fails to fully explain the environment of intense pressure in which the intelligence community officials were asked to render judgements on matters relating to Iraq when the most senior officials in the Bush administration had already forcefully and repeatedly stated their conclusions publicly," argued Senator Rockefeller.

you can either see this as a partisan snipe at Bush administration officials or a frank admission that Democrats failed to see what was in fact self-evident. Why does it only occur to Mr Rockefeller now that the CIA were operating under political pressure? Wasn't this self-evident from the prioritization of the Special Operations Command, or the constant sniping at the State Department from neoconservatives anxious to get to war? (Newt Gingrich wrote and under-famed article for Foreign Policy magazine in which he complained that the State Department was undermining Bush by not supporting his dogmatic assertions about Iraq).

It is transparently obvious that this report exculpates the Bush administration, and the cowardice of the Democrats who signed the report even though they now insist they think it should have gone further up the chain of command is so familiar as to be merely banal. As The Guardian reports:

The report found CIA analysts had been right to be sceptical over reports of a link between Baghdad and al-Qaida. That scepticism however, was not reflected in the claims made by senior White House officials, particularly vice-president Dick Cheney.

Examination of that discrepancy, as with everything else dealing with the administration's role, was put off until "phase two".

However, although the report is clearly as dilute in its conclusions as it possibly can be, and although the headline has become "global intelligence failure" (which is a nice strategy for pardoning one's own failings), the net effect of this has been to completely undermine the case for war as put by Bush and Blair.