Reading Fiasco is a strange experience, as I keenly remember many of the public debates and incidents recounted in the book and thinking to myself, “We knew all of that at the time–how is it that people think this is a revelation?”  Of course, not everything in Fiasco was public knowledge, but it is shocking to find that on every important point the early antiwar critics on left and right had the main problems pegged from early on in 2002.  Back then, pre-blog, I was a frenetic writer of letters to the editor, and I finally managed, after the war had begun, to get a letter published inside the enemy camp, so to speak, at The Economist.  Here is a letter I wrote to The Economist, published 31 July 2003:

Your continued defence of the war is grounded on the assertion that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was “dangerous” (“The case for war revisisted”, July 19th). Dangerous to whom? In light of the conviction of several former weapons inspectors that Iraq was substantially disarmed after 1998, the burden of proof has always been on those advocating intervention.

Yet The Economist has always given the pro-war arguments every benefit of the doubt and hawkish assumptions far more credibility than the evidence warrants, and in so doing has lent support to governments that have probably swindled the public and started an unnecessary war. Lacking in every hawkish argument has been the common-sense understanding that the chance of massive and overwhelming retaliation would deter any third-rate state from an attack.

You say that if George Bush and Tony Blair lied “it would be a huge scandal and would destroy their governments’ credibility for future interventions overseas.” What is Vice-President Dick Cheney’s claim that Iraq had “reconstituted nuclear weapons” if not an outright lie? What of Mr Bush’s claim that there was “no doubt” of the existence of the weapons that now cannot be found? Finally, considering the American public’s confusion over the real relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda, what else other than lies can you call Mr Bush’s repeated claims about Iraq’s “harbouring” members of al-Qaeda?

Maybe western intelligence agencies are so amazingly incompetent that they cannot provide correct information properly to inform a policy of pre-emption, in which case such wars are even more dangerous and wrong. Or perhaps the governments of Britain and the United States made a host of false statements without any suitable explanation for these errors, in which case a responsible democratic society must assume that the governments have lied and in so doing have abused their powers.

Daniel Larison

Albuquerque, New Mexico