In the Times, Oliver Kamm makes deserved mincemeat of General Sir Michael Rose, the former army top brass who has said in a TV documentary fronted by Martin Bell that Tony Blair should be impeached over the Iraq war:

Perhaps Mr Bell recalls his 1996 judgment of Sir Michael’s service in Bosnia: ‘By the time he left, there was little muscular or robust about the force he led, or his leadership of it.’ Sir Michael’s performance caused the greatest rift in transatlantic relations since Suez. That record does not invalidate his criticisms now. But Sir Michael’s judgment of the impact of his hypothetical resignation indicates a rare confidence in the way others see him.

Sir Michael argues, conventionally, that the Government misled the Commons over Iraq’s WMD. He also practises a conventional omission. Nowhere does he refer to 9/11. Those attacks inevitably changed policymakers’ perception of strategic risk. The foundations of postwar security policy — deterrence and containment — had been undermined in a morning.

Sir Michael holds Mr Blair responsible for not testing flawed intelligence. He gives no advice on how to do that beyond waiting till the intelligence is confirmed or refuted. That was the route Sir Michael chose in 1994 when he disastrously played down reports that Gorazde was about to fall. No prime minister can afford to be so mistaken.

Saddam welcomed 9/11 and sought a WMD capability in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions. Intelligence about current capabilities was wrong, but Iraq did possess dual-use facilities that, according to Charles Duelfer of the Iraq Survey Group, could quickly have produced chemical and biological weapons. Saddam was a sponsor of terrorism, and remained the most likely route by which Islamist groups could obtain WMD. How to weigh those factors was a political judgment, not a perfidious wangle.

Quite so. Sir Michael’s comments may strike rational folk as idiotic beyond belief; they may marvel that such a senior military type should be mouthing the same poisonous inanities as the far left, which in a time of war might be thought to be distinctly treacherous. The terrible thing is that he is far from alone. A large swathe of the British establishment now think just like this. The scale of such a suspension of rationality, logic and truth throughout the British political, intellectual, religious, military and intelligence world in Britain is simply terrifying at a time of such desperate global peril. They just don’t get it.