Dopey Dupes

Spiked's Brendan O'Neill has a pithy column about British and American pols and public figures who are complaining that they were "duped" by phoney evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Snippets:

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.

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In truth, if opposition politicians were so easily duped, it is because they always took a tactical approach to the question of invading Iraq, rather than a principled one. The coalition's critics are in no way opposed to the West's right to sit in judgement on Iraq and to decide what should happen there—they would simply have preferred that Iraq had been invaded with the blessing of the United Nations and by a truly international force, rather than by Bush and his British sidekicks. It was the anti-war politicians' own absence of principle that allowed them to be swayed by such unconvincing evidence.

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Only dopes get duped. And only cowards blame others for making them make bad political judgements.
Read the whole thing here.