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.

…

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.

…

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