I read a lot, I watch a lot, I go to talks a lot, and yet I still can’t do any of these things in sufficient quantity (let alone quality) to claim I have a grip on everything that is `going down’ in Conspiracy Theory research. Thus I’m fascinated by this review-cum-commentary on Ron Suskind’s book The Way of the World.’
Suskind quotes Inkster (who liaised with key Iraqi defector Tahir Habbush, head of intelligence no less) as saying, quite clearly, that both the Bush and Blair regimes knew, before the invasion, that Iraq had no WMDs. Again, no surprise here, and backs up a point we at 9/11 cultwatch have long made, that the fabrication of WMD evidence leading to a spurious war is in itself a sufficient reason, if you are so inclined, for both Blair & Bush to be arraigned as ‘war criminals’–you don’t need imaginary fairytales about 9/11, the War in Iraq is sufficient to make them (metaphorically) swing from the yard arm.
This is, of course, a Conspiracy Theory (it, at least, presents a rival to the received view that the UK and USA administrations went into Iraq believing there were WMDs being produced and stored by Saddam Hussein’s regime), but because it’s a widely held Conspiracy Theory we’ve begun to treat the official account as the epistemically dubious one and, and this seems important, we don’t like other (epistemically dubious?) Conspiracy Theories to detract from the one we all seem to agree upon.
I’m sure there’s more to be said about this but now is not the time; I have to get ready to teach the last lecture in my `Conspiracy Theories’ course.