Robin
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I'm not sure what you mean about "standing up". If you suddenly find yourself to be a member of a war cabinet it's hard to wrestle your leader to the ground without hard evidence against the case for war.
Had they known at the time that the WMD report had been massaged there might have been more internal opposition but hindsight is 20/20. It sounds like you were saying those members of his cabinet who disagreed with him should have been openly disloyal and fought it out in the commons instead of resigning.
Why would they? The case for war was made based on the intelligence available. The fact that the intelligence was faulty wasn't known at the time. Are they to magically read something in it differently?
Maybe I should say 'questioning' rather than 'standing up'.
Yes what turned out to be inaccurate intelligence was presented to the cabinet and this was what they acted upon but the criticism is that the cabinet should have not taken the intelligence presented to them at face value with such ease. You are about to invade a country, is no one questioning the evidence?, seriously assessing the severity of doing this regardless of what they know to be true?
They let Blair all too easily roll into Iraq because he believed in Bush's mission, it is the cabinets job to challenge or at least offer some grounded guidance/judgement rather than simply being yes men.
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