Sadness avoided

Former chief UN weapons inpector Hans Blix, interviewed recently on ABC TV, stressed that the US, with Britain and other poodle nations, would not have gone to war in Iraq in 2003 if they’d only listened to him.

Now we were also able to show them in January 2003 that there were errors in the intelligence... And in no case did we find any weapons of mass destruction... What we were able to do in that period however was to spell doubts about the evidence that the UK and the US had presented.

Yep, can’t really fault that analysis. Which leaves us with the poser: Why, after all, did the US and UK then go to war anyway?

Blix offers the following:

It was too late in the day I think for them to move off the military train. They had 250,000 men or more sitting in the desert and it would have been demoralising if nothing happened.

So, on Blix’s analysis, if the war hadn’t gone ahead, a whole bunch of (unspecified) people would have been terribly sad.

How brilliant that Blix should arrive at this conclusion, disdaining the overly simplistic explanation of US/UK overarching strategic geopolitical and mercantile objectives... for which they had long determined to go to war... and naturally cooked the intelligence in the first place...