I'm rather hoping someone amongst my readership will help me understand what is happening in the reactions to the stuff coming out of the YABII (that's Yet Another Bloody Iraq Inquiry for those that missed it) as I'm slightly confused.
A few years ago, when all that Hutton stuff was going on and the writing of dossiers was poured over in tiresome detail, one of the complaints from anti-war critics was that Blair et al had ignored caveats in intelligence and instead made statements of certainty from it. So, "intelligence suggests Saddam might have X" became "intelligence says Saddam has X".
Now we shoot forward to YABII, and we have mandarins referring to intelligence with caveats, and the critics are now doing what they said Blair did and ignoring caveats to create statements of certainty. So, "intelligence suggested Saddam might lack X" has become "intelligence said Saddam lacked X".
I mean, if it isn't bad enough that the nuance of the argument has been reduced to "ready to deploy" versus "oh you know what, it might take a couple of weeks to find some guys to plug things in, Imran, go onto yell.com an find me an electrical engineer mate!", we now have one side doing what it had previously accused the other side of doing.
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