Longtime readers will recall how annoyed and appalled I was that Voodoo Histories (£17.99! in all good bookshops, somewhat cheaper on Amazon, Alan Beattie's "False Economy" is probably a better read for the money) didn't deal with the Iraq War, and specifically didn't deal with how it fits into Dave's worldview about government dodgy-dealing, general non-existence of. Here we get the
Happy Shopper version.
Apparently opponents of the war are "implacable in their interior knowledge of the wrongness of the conflict". Oh Dave. Oh Dave, Dave. At this late date, are you really hoping to convince anyone that the Iraq War wasn't a bloody horrible mistake? The bed is shat, it cannot be unshat, and in five minutes the hotel manager will be here and there will be no reasoning with him that shitting the bed actually represented a better outcome than the alternative possibilities.
Fair do's for mentioning the very obvious point about the fact that there was a conspiracy (under any reasonable meaning of the term) to trick up the war into happening (credited to Jon Snow at the Hay Festival, although it was also the key point of Johann Hari's review). But having set the hare running, Aaro signally fails to catch it. He waffles about the Hutton and Butler inquiries, and then sets out as his main argument ... that everyone believed what the government said in 2002, so they couldn't have been lying? I really don't get it here and suspect that the copy has in some way got mangled.
What clearly went on in 2002 was either that there was intentional deception, or that the government believed that Saddam had WMDs, and therefore because it believed this, thought it was a gamble worth taking to portray the evidence as much more conclusive than it was. That's the sort of thing that people go to jail for if they do it in a set of accounts; if this isn't "lying", then there were no liars in the executive suite at Enron.
Aaro himself, notoriously, was persuaded by the government case to make a massive investment of credibility points into a decidedly subprime vehicle (the parallels between the September dossier, in which poor quality underlying material was layered, structured and given the imprimateur of a supposedly neutral agency to create the illusion of AAA status, and the CDO market, are perhaps fertile ground for someone more desperate for a column than myself). Unlike the investors in Bernard Madoff's funds, however, he seems determined to defend the very people who swindled him. Nice one.
And then we end up with the old chestnut, "errors of postwar planning". As if any inquiry into the Decent doctrine of "war first, plan later" is going to come out looking good for the reputations of those people and pundits who kept telling us that the Iraqis were crying out to be invaded?
Basically, my point here is that
Thomas Friedman already wrote this column, three years ago.