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Only dopes get duped

by Brendan O'Neill


'Are we feeling duped yet?' asked an American website on 26 June, in an article about the failure to find the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that Bush and Blair told us posed a 'mortal threat' to the free world (1). The answer seems to be a resounding 'yes'.


On both sides of the Atlantic, opposition politicians, commentators, anti-war activists and even military men claim to have been conned, misled or downright duped by Bush and Blair's pre-war claims.


There is something distinctly disingenuous in all this dupe-talk. Weapons and intelligence experts were picking holes in Britain and America's evidence long before the war kicked off. In the USA, there were newspaper headlines like 'Evidence on Iraq challenged' and 'Doubts over administration's case' as far back as September 2002 (2). Britain's main dossier of evidence was ridiculed six weeks before the war started, for having been plagiarised from a student's 12-year-old PhD thesis (3). Who could possibly be duped by such dopey claims? ...