So what did go wrong in Iraq?

The Iraq war was wrong from the start. No sooner had the military embarked on their armed invasion in 2003 than the propaganda war was all but lost.

“I’m surprised they didn’t find weapons of mass destruction”, commented a friend to me recently. “Well, there weren’t any”, I replied. “That’s not the point”, he said, “They could easily have invented them”.

In other words, the big lie wasn’t big enough.

It was Adolf Hitler who, in Mein Kampf, first made known the propaganda technique of the ‘big lie’. Goebbels later explained, “The English follow the principal that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.”

The propaganda wars in Britain and the US took different forms. In the US the emphasis was on regime change, to get rid of a bad guy. That wouldn’t have worked in Britain, and so Tony Blair had to emphasise the supposed military threat coming from Saddam’s war machine.

Before the outbreak of hostilities, Bush and Blair managed to coordinate policy. The now famous Downing Street Memo revealed some of the wheeler dealings behind this coordinated policy. The head of Britain’s external military intelligence service, Sir Richard Dearlove, had reported, on returning from Washington, that the US regime was fitting the facts around the policy. They invented the weapons of mass destruction.

However, once in Iraq, they had to coordinate two propaganda policies much more intimately. They had to pedal the myth that they were bringing democracy to Iraq, whilst at the same time justifying their invasion on the grounds of weapons of mass destruction.

To carry the lie through on weapons of mass destruction, they would have needed to have found them. Yet Britain was very much the junior partner, and the US had its own ideas. They sent in Hans Blix. The easiest option for the US was to let Hans Blix search hard for weapons of mass destruction and finally have to accept that there had been some sort of intelligence failure. They had still needed to get rid of a bad guy, and that had been the real justification for the intervention.

In Britain, however, that could not work. Blair was left out on a limb. All he could do was to try to convince the British people that he had really believed that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and hope that the people would understand when that turned out not to be true.

Then, as the unthinkable became thinkable, he would move on to sow the seeds of peace and democracy in other ways, whilst his accomplice and supposed cabinet rival could credibly take over the onerous burden of restoring peace and democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan, and of bringing the troops home to friends and family, believing that they had been risking their lives in fighting for a worthy and honorable cause.