A couple of good articles on the reaction to Hutton – and one of them in the Guardian! Martin Kettle (via Andrew Sullivan) has this to say:
The reporting of Lord Hutton’s conclusions and of the reactions to them has been meticulous. The same cannot be said of large tracts of the commentary and editorialising – nor of much of the equally kneejerk newspaper correspondence. Much of this comment has been sullied by scorn, prejudice and petulance. The more you read it, the more you get the sense that the modern journalist is prone to behaving like a child throwing its rattle out of the pram because it has not got what it wanted.
Since in some quarters it has become almost obligatory to dismiss Hutton out of hand, it is necessary to reassert that the law lord did an excellent job in conducting his inquiry so briskly and transparently, and to stress that his report is overwhelmingly consistent with the evidence he received. This is especially true of what became the crux of the inquiry: the alleged sexing up of the Iraq dossier, Andrew Gilligan’s reporting and the dispute over the naming of David Kelly.
From the start, though, too many newspapers invested too heavily in a particular preferred outcome on these key points. They wanted the government found guilty on the dossier and on the naming, and they wanted Gilligan’s reporting vindicated. When Hutton drew opposite conclusions, they damned his findings as perverse and his report as a whitewash. But the report’s weakness was its narrowness, and to some extent its unworldliness, not the accuracy of its verdicts.
He goes on to be nasty to Rod Liddle, which is fine by me.
Michael Gove in the Times is also worth reading. On Saddam:
The truth about pre-emption, which should hardly need restating, is that you deal with the bad guys before they get their hands on the finished weapons they’ve spent their life straining to acquire. That’s why nuclear-armed North Korea is such a knotty problem. And that’s why we were better off tackling Iraq before France and Russia succeeded in their aim of getting sanctions lifted so Saddam could accelerate his mass murder business.
Is this the start of the Hutton backlash backlash?
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