Pardon me for starting the new year in a foul humour, but I have a dose of the heebie-jeebies. I can’t help it. When I think about the confederacy of swine, patsies and dunces who supported the war on Iraq, my blood runs cold.

I don’t know which of the three specimens is worse.
The swine knew that George Bush and his cronies were being dishonest but pretended that they believed him and flew the flag as if their lives depended on it. The patsies didn’t know for sure, for sure, whether he was being dishonest or not, but chose to believe him irrespective – and yerra anything they could do to help, along the way, they would.
And the dunces? Well, they were stupid enough to believe Bush and Blair and all the rest of them – and to buy into the notion that the two Bs were embarking on something honourable and decent and for the good of the world in general and the Iraqi people in particular.
Which has to amount to one of the biggest heaps of horseshit you could ever be asked to swallow – and yet swallow it they did. No wonder there’s a stink about the place.

So which is worse? It has been clear for a long time to people of very ordinary intelligence and even a modicum of objectivity that the pretext of the Weapons of Mass Destruction was a hoax. Saddam didn’t have any.
It has also been clear that there was a deliberate distortion of the intelligence to which both the US and the British governments were privy. The Iraqi dictator had no aggressive or expansionist intentions whatsoever, nor was there any likelihood of him using what minimal chemical weapons might still have been at his disposal, unless he was attacked first.
Now, however, these same conclusions are being reached by institutions and individuals who might be expected to take a cautious and conservative, pro establishment line. The lies, it appears, are beginning to come home to roost.
So, what do the swine make of the charge levelled by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace that officials of the Bush administration systematically misrepresented the danger of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction; that the threat assessments of the Bush government were deeply flawed; and that the conclusions of the intelligence community had been deeply politicised?
What do the patsies make of the assertion in the same report that that there was no evidence to support the notion that Iraq would have transferred WMD to Al-Qaeda – and much evidence to counter it?
Perhaps they, and the dunces too, might refer to the testimony of a certain Mr. Paul O’Neill, who worked as Treasury Secretary in George Bush’s government for almost two years and knows the workings of the inner cadre in the Bush administration very well. What he has to say confirms in virtually every way the conclusions to which critics of the U.S. led war have been saying since Bush first began to up the ante in relation to Iraq. According to Mr. O’Neill:
• Preparations to attack Saddam were on the agenda of the new President and his closest confederates from the time Bush took up office.
• At the very first meeting of the National Security Council, the discussion revolved around finding a basis for toppling Saddam. “That was the tone of it: the President saying ‘Go find me a way to do this’,” O’Neill said, in a TV interview.
• In the 23 months he had served with the administration, he had never, Paul O’Neill said, seen anything that he would characterise as evidence of the existence in Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.
But surely September 11 was a factor? Was it not after that outrage that it became clear that Saddam was a threat?
Long before that murderous piece of terrorism took place, according to O’Neill, the US had developed plans for peace-keeping troops in Iraq, war crimes tribunals and – surprise, surprise – dividing up Iraq’s oil wealth. A Pentagon document dated March 2001, and in preparation for some considerable time before that, included an oil exploration map and lists of outside oil companies.
Paul O’Neill’s assessment of the President’s reign was scarily in line with the most paranoid assumptions of his fiercest critics. Describing Bush as disengaged at cabinet meetings, he said that there was no free flow of ideas or open debate. George Bush, he added, was like “a blind man in a roomful of deaf people.”

Meanwhile, in Iraq, U.S. soldiers continue to die. The number now is over 500 and rising. These individuals have been sacrificed knowingly by Bush and his administration – knowingly especially in the sense that there was no threat to the U.S. from Saddam Hussein.
With all due respect, these soldiers have not died the noble or heroic death that their families might like to believe. Brave and idealistic many of them may have been, but the American casualties represent just a small percentage among a far greater number of victims of the cynicism, brutality, greed and hypocrisy of the government, and in particular the President, of the most powerful country on earth.
It’d make you sad, and it’d make you mad – but there is no other logical conclusion to come to, given what we know.
Of course the swine will remain in denial – their ideology will not allow it otherwise. But it will be interesting to watch how the patsies react as the flow of revelations becomes a flood.
And as for the dunces? Is there even a possibility that they might have learned something about black propoganda and the capacity of Governments to lie and deceive?