Was the onset of this war a surprise? We now know, thanks to a deeply reported article by the Guardian’s central and eastern Europe correspondent, Shaun Walker, that both the CIA and MI6 had amassed troves of deep intelligence about the impending war and were issuing dire notices to their allies about the inevitability of an invasion by Putin. Those warnings were all but ignored in key European capitals. Why? In large part because US and British intelligence were considered untrustworthy after the extraordinary intelligence debacle in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Walker’s reporting cites a “heated” conversation between an unnamed European foreign minister and Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state at the time. “I’m old enough to remember 2003,” the foreign minister informs Blinken, “and back then I was one of those who believed you.” John Foreman, then Britain’s defence attache in Russia, is also quoted. “The reluctance to trust us was definitely a legacy of Iraq,” he said, explaining: “If you’re showing people things and they still don’t believe you, you’ve got a problem.”

We should pause to remember exactly what this means. In the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, US and British intelligence services prioritized pleasing their political leaders over gathering certifiable facts. Iraq, as we also now know, did not possess weapons of mass destruction, the reason cited hundreds of times by George W Bush and his top officials for going to war. (The Center for Public Integrity counted at least 935 false statements made in the two years following September 11 by Bush and his top officials regarding the supposed threat Saddam Hussein posed to the national security of the United States.) But the intelligence agencies kept telling us that Iraq had them.

*We didn’t realize that if we started bullshitting storms into hurricanes in our forecasting that when a real hurricane came people would no longer believe us! How could we have known? I propose we write a children’s parable about the moral of the story here! Would Kash Patel help us write it I wonder? The name could be something like “The Forecaster Who Cried Hurricane!”.