Iraq was not a threat, and the invasion in 2003 was a distraction from the pursuit of Al Qaeda.

That’s the verdict of Baroness Manningham-Buller, who was head of MI5 from 2002-2007. It’s old news now that Tony Blair took us into war on a second front on grounds which were shaky at best. All the same, this bald statement from the former Director General of MI5 should be headline news, not for what it tells us about Tony Blair’s government or the ridiculous contortions of law and intelligence required to get us to war, but for the rugs it pulls from beneath some very large feet.

Back in pre-history, a journalist named Andrew Gilligan asserted that the government had ‘sexed up’ the dossier of published intelligence about Iraq. The government expressed its horror at the very notion, and Gilligan and the BBC were hauled across hot coals. The Hutton Inquiry found that the dossier had not been ‘sexed up’. Gilligan, the chairman, and the director general of the BBC all lost their jobs. The government used the incident as a stick with which to beat the corporation for years. The attempt to cut the BBC’s disobedient news arm down to a more manageable and biddable form continues to this day. (In the past, one prime minister was able to require that the BBC reorder the sequence of footage in the reporting of a riot to make it seem that rioters attacked police, rather than the other way around. Downing Street must long for the good old days.)

But the point isn’t the endless, tedious whinging of affronted politicians at a news organisation which is, in general, pretty solid.

The point is how we conduct inquiries.

Hutton found that the dossier had not been politically influenced. Butler found, in contrast, that more weight had been placed on the intelligence than it could bear. And here is Eliza Manningham-Buller saying:

“Iraq did not present a threat to the UK.

The service advised that [an invasion] was likely to increase the domestic threat and that it was a distraction from the pursuit of al-Qaeda. I understood the need to focus on Afghanistan. Iraq was a distraction.”

And you have Major General Michael Laurie, who was instrumental in drawing up the September dossier, who wrote to the Chilcot inquiry to say that the dossier had been compiled to make the case for war. Sir John Scarlett, in charge of the September dossier, wrote to Downing Street that there was an advantage in “obscuring the fact that in terms of WMD Iraq is not that exceptional.”

If you accept these statements, the question is not whether the intelligence was manipulated for political ends, but how this manipulation was done and at what point. What Eliza Manningham-Buller says appears sets the whole issue on its head: the dossier was not ‘sexed up’; if I understand correctly, it must have been edited or drafted so that what the intelligence services actually believed – that Iraq was not a threat – was hard to find in its pages, leaving only alarming discussions of Iraq’s supposed (and as it turned out non-existent) WMD capacity.

And yet we’re left to piece all this together from scraps. Despite Hutton, Butler, and Chilcot, and a smattering of other reviews, the mechanism of deception has not been exposed. The persons involved in turning black into white – terrifying the British public and parliament into a war which was (whatever you think about the pros and cons of humanitarian military intervention) unnecessary in terms of immediate self-protection and which may have made our security situation worse, and which has proved a massively costly adventure in terms of human life and hard cash – have not been called to account. Ministers and officials have been politely quizzed, and their good faith has been assumed. They have been invited to appear before kindly panels, not subjected to serious questioning on what is arguably the most serious question of our political era.

Our inquiries are toothless and ineffectual, and for as long as that remains the case our democracy is significantly weakened.

One thing is clear: this is no one’s fault. It is spontaneous badness.

That’s the message coming from politicians about the rioting in London. Nick Clegg called it “opportunistic theft”, which is probably true but entirely meaningless. Theresa May blamed it on “criminality”, which is like blaming war on violence – and she went on: “There are longer-term questions about when we see parents letting their children as young as that sort of age be out on the streets in this way.” Because as we all know, being a teen and walking along the street leads inexorably to rioting.

These kids, it seems, have just gone bad. We must all accept that this catastrophe has nothing to do with the closure of youth centres, the financial crisis, the institutionalised piss-take which is the banking bonus culture, or the unfairness of a post-Blair, Cameronite Britain with a massive rich-poor divide and no money to pay the bills. Of course. That’s just political correctness gone mad.

Clegg – never did a good man lend himself so thoroughly to a bad cause – asserted boldly that this unrest also has nothing to do with the killing of Mark Duggan, in which he is pathetically wrong. Of course it does. The connection is strained, tenuous, and blurry, but it is fundamental all the same. The rumour is that Duggan was killed wrongly, that he never fired a shot, that the bullet recovered from a police radio came from a police gun. It doesn’t matter, at this moment, whether that is true. It matters only that it could be – and sadly, however much faith you rest in the Met: yes, it could. That possibility plays into a sense of bone-deep unfairness about the way the country works – also not something which can be entirely denied – and that’s connection enough.

The spectacle of rioters organising themselves through Twitter and Facebook has led to comparisons with the Arab Spring, usually followed closely by a denial – these riots are too selfish, too ugly to be related to the uprisings in Egypt and Syria. Once again, wrong: they are related, albeit at the most basic level. Any moment of civil unrest begins with a shrugging, a throwing off of restraint. In Egypt, conditions had become intolerable not only for the ‘squeezed middle’ everyone in the UK is so concerned about, but also for a working class without hope or opportunity who had been striking on and off for five years. The Egyptian revolution was a population responding at last to a sense of impossible unfairness, the difference being that the burden lay across everyone and the response evolved over years into something more constructive. What we’re seeing in London is the phenomenon of rejection in the raw, a growling explosion without direction or intent, confined to a specific section of the population rather than spread throughout it – although that may change if economic conditions continue to get worse.

The only sensible response has come from Mary Riddell of the Daily Telegraph, who puts the whole thing in context: As Galbraith wrote, “memory is far better than the law” in protecting against financial illusion and insanity. In an age of austerity, there are diverse luxuries that Britain can no longer afford. Amnesia stands high on that long list.

Without Riddell’s article – for which she has, inevitably, been roundly denounced by readers – you’d think that this was one of those remarkable outbreaks of insanity so beloved of politicians everywhere – causeless, incomprehensible wickedness, divorced from social life and the environment, the upshot of deranged minds acting under the influence of drugs and bad influences, crime for the sake of crime. Except that there’s so much of it that even if this were spontaneous vice, you’d have to ask what it was that made London abruptly turn on itself in this way.

And then there’s Kit Malthouse.

At the other end of the scale is Kit Malthouse, a deputy mayor in charge of policing. He blames the London riots on ‘feral youth’. I can only assume that they breed feral youth in places where there are feral parents, that there’s a whole issue of ferality which scientific studies have shown is linked to criminality, resulting on some occasions in random acts of senseless disorder. Perhaps that’s what happens when you allow feral people – from the Latin for ‘wild beast’ – to live in your nice cities… Because if that isn’t the case, then Malthouse should lose his job for using this word to describe human beings.

In general, I’m not a big fan of wailing at word choice. I think it simply causes people who hate other people to come up with a new term of abuse, a sly and acceptable one which means the same thing. But ‘feral’ is all but a synonym for ‘sub-human’. It implies that these are people you can do nothing with, that they’re worthless and inimical. For a person in public office to use it in this discussion – which is already fraught with subtexts about race, class, and poverty –  is beyond inappropriate. When the dust settles, we’re going to need to do something to make sure this doesn’t happen again, and the kind of initiatives which will come out of notions of ‘feral’ people are not going to help. They’re just going to stigmatise and exclude, creating a permanent enclave of people regarded both by the outside and by themselves as without hope and unfixable – which is what got us here in the first place.

[Edit: this.]

[Edit 2: rejigged para 2 for clarity of spleen.]

Egypt, June 20th.

From the files of News I Made Up

ElBaradei Victor In Facebook Poll

In an informal poll conducted through the Facebook social networking site, Mohamed ElBaradei emerged as the leader in the Presidential race in Egypt.

The poll was organised through the Facebook presence of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, and has been criticised as unrepresentative.

However, a spokesman for the SCAF said:

Our Facebook presence is totally democratic. We have Liked many people. We Like Barack Obama, for sure. We also Like Eric Clapton and the Church of Mormon, they are so friendly. Also the muffins are great. But we do not like Lady Gaga. This has nothing to do with her lewdness. It is just that her music is sucky! Total suck. Made entirely from suck. We Like Minogue. The blonde one. She is made from awesome. What? Who the hell is Cher Lloyd? Well, yes, okay, we will Like her, too.

Some commentators have wondered aloud whether the new Egypt will Like the State of Israel’s page, but the spokesman refused to be drawn.

Israel has not yet made a Friend Request. We visited their page and there is great internal debate within the SCAF Online Team about whether we Like them or not. It is like dating! Is it cool to make the first move? But we love that guy with the amazing electric car thing going on. He can so entirely come to Egypt and electrify our transport system. What is his name? Agassi. That dude rocks. So we figure, if they have more like him in Israel, we should be golden.

But not Lady Gaga. She sings like a baby.

Mohamad ElBaradei could not be reached for comment by this journal.