They lie, they lie, they lie lie lie. We already knew that, but this is rather surprising in its sheer bare-arsed obviousness. Apparently, when Bush made his speech blathering about those “suspected mobile biological weapons labs” that turned out to be for filling weather balloons, the US government already knew from their own investigation of the vehicles that they were completely unsuited for anything WMDlike.
Not that it helps very much to know this, but it’s nice to have it on record, so we can tie it to the shaft of the icepick that eventually gets driven in to the cracking skull of neoconservatism. To understand it, I suppose, you’ve got to look at the historical context; summer 2003, just as we went over that sick-stomach heave of oh shitty shitty shit, we’ve really, really fucked up this time. That realisation was when the tenuous restraints on Alistair Campbell’s ego finally failed under air load, causing it to erupt like a polar bear from inside a cheap wardrobe and flip him into catastrophic instability and a war against the BBC. That was when the frantic demonisation of anyone who disagreed with the mad crusade in Iraq cranked up. It was a time for one of two courses – either dignified self-elimination (think John Profumo) or hardening into cultist fanaticism (think Powerline).
It will also come as absolutely no surprise to anyone with half a clue that the same people were at the bottom of the mobile-labs bullshit as were at the bottom of all the other WMD bamboozleology. It was the “Curveball”/Chalabi mob, that ever-reliable OC-192 link routing 10 gigabits a second of utter nonsense direct to the US/UK governmental group brain, aided as usual by the hyperfuckwit Michael Ledeen’s Italian spook mates.
One possible outcome of Berlusconi’s long-earned, richly deserved outkicking is, of course, that some clarity might emerge with regard exactly what motivation the Italian secret services had in cooking up the mess of chicken-fried bullshit used to sell the invasion of Iraq..