Blair after Chilcot 4

In the same neck of the woods as this aforesaid gathering of expertise were the Guardian writers for whom Blair's thinking was revealed on Friday as leaving no room for complexity or subtlety. Ha binbags ha. The paper nearly all of whose journalists have for seven years shown themselves incapable of rising to the insight that one prominent mode of complexity and subtlety in the world is that a moral and political argument can have more than one side to it, so that it can be difficult to make up your mind; or that, even when you have, there are countervailing considerations to those which persuaded you, and that other people of a different mind may have been differently swayed than you were, and so may not be lying, deceitful, inept or wicked; and that the Iraq war, which divided opinion across the planet, was - nearly self-evidently - an issue of just this kind, setting the dangers of war against the horrors of continuing tyranny, opposing to one another different assessments of the likely consequences of a course of action and opposing these in turn to assessments of the likely consequences of another course action - these people, closed off from any inkling of such elementary facts of life, now preach complexity and subtlety.