Those Who Live in Glass Buildings

Those Who Live in Glass Buildings - The Strib doesn't know when to shut up, in its current editorial about the Kay and Hutton reports:

"Hutton investigated thoroughly the accusation that Blair and his colleagues manipulated British intelligence to make a stronger case for war. His conclusions on that narrow question appear well-reasoned, although he does seem to have gone quite 'beyond his remit,' as the British say, in attaching so much blame to one short broadcast comment by a BBC reporter. In the end, the British still put together a dodgy intelligence dossier on Iraq. That would seem a bigger deal than the BBC error, but you couldn't tell it from the Hutton report."

A state-supported press organ lied, and lied grotesquely. What's "Beyond the remit" about that?

Is the Strib nervous?

The editorial goes on:

The United States now needs a Hutton investigation of its own to determine just what the administration did as it sought to develop a case for war.

The record is fairly clear:

• Buried 3,000 dead
• Erased the specious, legalistic distinction between terror groups and their leaders, and the states that support them financially, logistically and morally
• Took out two of them.

You're welcome, Strib.

Seriously - this editorial is further proof of Berg's Law; No liberal commentator can simultaneously attack more than one of the four justifications for the Liberation of Iraq; to do so, they'd invalidate their own case. Iraq was a terror-supporting state (trying to de-link their amply-self-documented payments to Hamas from Al-Quaeda is worse than wrong, it's intellectually frivolous), it violated scads of UN resolutions, it was a human rights nightmare, and yes, at some point in the recent past it did have enough WMDs to use on Iranians, Shi'a and Kurds.

To fail to consider all four of these justifications is intellectually vacant.

Speaking of which:

Britain, conversely, needs a Kay investigation that can document just how wrong the British intelligence claims were, and there were some humdingers...The peoples of Britain and the United States both were sold a bill of goods. While it's nice to know Blair didn't deliberately do that, he still made a hugely important error, for which his administration should be called to account. That matters not only to the British; it matters to Americans as well.

Bill of goods?

IT'S INTELLIGENCE WORK! In the middle of a WAR, no less!

Two intelligence agencies (in league with many smaller ones) put together the evidence they had, and took their best shot at a conclusion. That evidence led the President and the Prime Minister to make the same conclusion that Bill Clinton and John Major and, for that matter, the UN made all the way through the nineties. As somebody noted, President Bush didn't reach any different conclusions than the Clinton Administration did - they just did something about the conclusions.

But to make the Strib's point, you have to forget the nineties. You have to forget the UN resolutions, you have to think of terror groups as insular groups with only incidental interaction - like it would never occur to Al-Quaeda, Hamas, Jamiyat-e-Islamiya, Hezb'allah, the ISI, and ten thousand Wahabbist extremists to give each other a phone call.

And you have to ignore all of that and 9/11.

Which the Strib does, when convenient.

Posted by Mitch at January 30, 2004 06:42 AM