In one of the best-known passages in Irvine Welsh's 1993 novel Trainspotting, already firmly enshrined in most dictionaries of quotations, the Scottish junkie Renton remarks that, "Some people hate the English, but I don't. They're just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonised by wankers. We can't even pick a decent culture to be colonised by." Fintan O'Toole feels somewhat the same about the lies we were told about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
I can't work up any outrage about the fact that governments who had decided to go to war a long time previously told lies in order to justify their decision. It's what they do. Wars and lies go together like Laurel and Hardy, Astaire and Rogers, Charlie McCreevy and the economic bungling.
What is rather galling, however, is that our Government agreed to be lied to by idiots. Our leaders couldn't even find a decent set of liars to be fooled by.
Take the now-infamous set of forged documents which purported to show that between 1999 and 2001 Iraq had attempted to buy 500 tonnes of uranium oxide from Niger. While most people have absorbed the fact that these documents were fakes, many may not realise just how stupid the fakes actually were. Though they played a crucial role in convincing the US Congress to give George W. Bush a blank cheque for war, and in making the Iraqi threat seem immediate and terrible, they were astonishingly crude.
It took the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) a few days to confirm that the documents were bogus, but only a few hours to smell a whole nest of rats. The agency had been given about half a dozen letters and other communications, supposedly between officials in Niger and Iraq, many of them written on letterheads of the Niger government. The problems were conspicuous.
One letter, dated October 10th, 2000, was signed with the name of Allele Habibou, a Niger Minister of Foreign Affairs and Co-operation, who had been out of office since 1989. Another letter, allegedly from Tandja Mamadou, the President of Niger, had a signature that had obviously been faked and a text with inaccuracies so glaring that, as one senior IAEA official told Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker, "they could be spotted by someone using Google on the Internet". Another official told Reuters last March: "I'm not a (handwriting) expert but when I looked at it my jaw dropped."
The letterhead on one of the documents referred to Niger's long-dissolved Supreme Military Council. The error is the equivalent of getting a letter in 2003 from Vladimir Putin under a letterhead of the Soviet Union. The Niger constitution of 1965 was invoked, even though it had been superseded long ago. Several dates in the documents did not match the stated day of the week - a fact that could be checked on any calendar. Words in French, which is spoken in Niger, were misspelled. The alleged amount of uranium involved was utterly unrealistic, given that the production of Niger's uranium mines is pre-sold to the European nuclear industry.
All of this was in the public domain by March 7th last, when the IAEA issued its statement. It would not have come as news, of course, to the British and US governments, who were already well aware that the key claim that Saddam was seeking uranium for nuclear weapons was bogus. But it must, surely, have been a deeply shocking revelation to Bertie Ahern, Brian Cowen and Mary Harney.
Yet, a fortnight after the forgeries were exposed, Mr Ahern was still telling the Dáil that "The Iraqi regime has defeated all efforts to make sure that it surrender these weapons." He claimed that Saddam had "continued with his old ways" of acquiring and concealing WMDs. "Conflict,"he said, "could have been avoided if Saddam Hussein had complied with the long-standing demands of the UN Security Council that Iraq surrender its weapons of mass destruction. The simple fact is that he refused to do so."
Mary Harney claimed that Iraq "maintained weapons of mass destruction". Brian Cowen said that Saddam "defied every effort to disarm him peacefully". All of these claims were made, of course, to justify the policy of allowing the US to use Shannon Airport for troop transports.
What we need to know now is what evidence the Government had for these claims. Why did it ignore the uncontested confirmation from the Niger forgeries that a crude campaign of mass deception was under way? Did it have independent sources of information, and if so what were they? Did it ask for briefings on the supposed evidence from the US and UK? Did it wonder whether people who couldn't even forge a few documents convincingly could actually reconstruct a complex society like Iraq?
Or did it know that extremely dodgy claims were being made? I suspect the answer is that the Government was more concerned with appeasing the Bush administration than with informing the Irish people and parliament. It wanted to be fooled because recognising the truth would have been too much trouble.