I Spy Government Paranoia

I could no more do without the Mail on Sunday than do without the Observer, but only more rarely do I see the Daily Mail. However, whenever I do, and even though Peter Oborne is now at the Telegraph, I find myself wondering where its detractors go to read Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Peter McKay, Stephen Glover, Melanie Philips when she sticks to social policy, or Andrew Alexander:

The WikiLeak documents confirm for the most part what might already be surmised: such as the frank views of U.S. diplomats about other nations, the belief that U.S. troops in Afghanistan were much more effective than the British etc.

It is certainly no great surprise that Bank of England Governor Mervyn King thought Cameron and Osborne were out of their depth on the economy just before the election. Many of us also felt that at the time.

Two revelations, in particular, deserve comment. One is that the Americans ordered their diplomats to spy on their rivals and allies to the point of even finding out their credit card details.

The other is that earlier this year, Nato, under prompting from the U.S., drew up a nine-division defence plan for Poland and the Baltic states against a Russian attack. No such attack, starting a Third World War, was remotely likely.

To these revelations we might attach the affair of the Russian ‘spy’ in the employ of a Lib-Dem MP. She seems to have been anxious to find out details about Trident renewal.

This is one of the problems about spying and imagining attacks (see and compare with the supposed threat of Saddam’s WMDs).

Once you start down that road, and especially once you have the spying organisations in place, the process acquires a momentum of its own.

In individuals, psychiatrists call it paranoia. It occurs in governments, too.

I think that we can see the real root of the hatred. Like Peter Hitchens over at the sister-paper, not only were and are Oborne, Wheatcroft, McKay, Glover and Alexander right about the neoconservative agenda in general and about the Iraq War in particular, but, no easily dismissed Trots or Islamists they, they were and are right for the right reasons.