Tim Blair

LEAVE IT OUT

The SMH's Paul Sheehan compares the real world with Media World, where omission syndrome is rampant:

The invasion of Iraq has provided a paradise for omission syndrome, and the latest fabrication is that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq at the time of the invasion, thus the entire premise for the invasion was wrong, was almost certainly known to be wrong before the war began, and politicians have lied to us.

Everything about this mantra is a half-truth, and I write this as someone who opposed the invasion of Iraq (in columns on February 6, 24 and March 31). I have not changed my mind. In recent days the anti-war, anti-Bush, anti-Howard hunting pack has leapt upon the admission by Dr David Kay, a war hawk sent to Iraq by the Bush Administration as chief investigator for weapons of mass destruction, that "we were almost all wrong" about the threat from such weapons in Iraq.

While his admission has been given prominence, omission syndrome required that other significant observations by Kay be ignored, such as his testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee on January 28 when he said: "Let me be absolutely clear about it, Iraq was in clear material violation of [UN Resolution] 1441. They maintained programs and activities, and they certainly had the intentions at a point to resume their [weapons] programs. So there was a lot they wanted to hide because it showed what they were doing that was illegal.

"... I think the world is far safer with the disappearance and the removal of Saddam Hussein. I actually think this may be one of those cases where it was even more dangerous than we thought. I think when we have the complete record you're going to discover that after 1998, it became a regime that was totally corrupt ... in a world where we know others are seeking WMD, the likelihood at some point in the future of a seller and a buyer meeting up would have made that a far more dangerous country than even we anticipated..."

Those lines haven’t run in any Australian report to date (apart from this Andrew Bolt column), at least so far as I’m aware. Sheehan concludes:

This latest campaign is the biggest media world try-on in this country since the children overboard crusade, when omission syndrome presented the carefully narrow narrative that the Howard Government lied about a child being thrown overboard from a boat people's vessel and used the lie to help win an election. Omitted from this version of events was that every child on the boat - 76 of them - ended up in the water, forced off a scuttled boat in an act of reckless brinkmanship. This was moral blackmail at its worst, and the tactic was rejected, emphatically, in the real world, even as it was endorsed and embraced in Media World in an attempt to turn the election.