In the Guardian on Saturday there was a letter signed by seven academics, which started with the claim:
[I]n the UK there has been only limited opportunity for public debate on Iraq.Between them the signatories combine much legal expertise and so may be expected to have some training in the precision of meanings. Did none of the seven hesitate before agreeing his signature to a letter containing this preposterous statement? The substance of their letter is the call for an independent inquiry into the legality and the conduct of the Iraq war, and the actions of coalition forces during the occupation. I'd think it likely that one should construe 'public debate on Iraq' in the quoted claim as carrying a hidden ending something like this: 'which comes to the right kind of conclusion'.
In a letter to the Daily Telegraph on the same day, another academic wrote:
Toppling Saddam was not a matter of the wrong intelligence. The point of the war was to state boldly - as only wars can - that America, and the allies it could muster, were prepared to wage war on the basis of flimsy evidence... [T]he war was deliberately the product of weak intelligence, rather than the unfortunate by-product of it.The writer's subject is politics. So if this was the point of the war, Bush and Co must have been thinking all along, 'Jeez, I hope no WMD turn up', and they must be rejoicing at the flak they've been taking because none have.
Only letters to the press. Only letters to the press. But then this is only a blogpost.