It's time the anti-war set was called to account for its failed intelligence

Andrew Wilkie, after resigning from the Office of National Assessments, stated that invading Iraq was "dumb policy" because "is exactly the course of action most likely to cause Saddam to lash out, to use weapons of mass destruction, and maybe even play the terrorism card." Given that Saddam and his forces meekly capitulated, how could Wilkie have got it so wrong? Where was this flawed intelligence on Saddam's likely actions coming from?

A long line of Opposition MPs, repeating Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak's statement, claimed in Federal Parliament, that "Terrorism will be aggravated....instead of one Bin Laden there will be one hundred Bin Ladens". What was their basis for asserting this increase in terrorism? What direct causal link can they demonstrate between the liberation of Iraq and the proliferation of terror?

Journalist Simon Jenkins asserted that the US troops approaching Baghdad were confronting "a city apparently determined to resist", like "Napoleon in Moscow or Hitler in Stalingrad"; the type of city that would "seldom capitulate". Given the prompt collapse of Iraqi resistance, will he correct his article? What knowledge did he have of the Moscow or Stalingrad campaigns? Who did he rely on in order to form his Russian winter comparisons? The Iraqi Information Minister?

As the liberation was almost complete, Andrew Gilligan (BBC Defence correspondent) claimed that residents of Baghdad experienced their "first days of freedom in more fear than they have ever known before". This ludicrous statement should be questioned. What was the size of his sample? How did he compare the fear caused by Saddam's death squads with that caused by looting?

Robert Fisk and other art academics bemoaned the total devastation of Iraq's national Museum by looters who, they claimed, destroyed the collection with the tacit approval of the US. Now that the museum's director of research, Dr Donny George, has stated that only a "small percentage" of the collection was destroyed by looters (the majority was removed before the war), will they concede that their intelligence was wrong?

Of course they won't. None of the anti-war set will admit that opposition to the war was based on false and ill-conceived information.

But now that Robert Manne and others are attempting to rewrite the history of Iraqi Freedom, it is imperative that the anti-war movement is made accountable for its own shady intelligence.