"Don't know much about history..."

The Guardian gleefully announces a scoop. Back in 2002, during the deliberations about WMD in Iraq and all that, someone in the British Foreign Office sent around a memo. All sorts of chaps in the office wrote comments on the margins of it. One of the comments was the usual drivel about how Israel also flaunts international law with its nuclear program. (This is factually not true, but some canards never die, irrespective of their factual basis). Someone else then filed the memo away, and never told the press that Israel had been castigated. So the Guardian is now agog - both because Israel was castigated by an unidentified FO chap, and because someone tried to hide it.

So far, not worthy of a post on this blog. What is worthy, however, is the list of other comments added to the original memo by various chaps in the FO, regarding other countries. If you read them all it becomes clear that there are officials in the British Foreign Office, high up enough to be able to scribble their reveries on important internal documents, whose grasp of the history of the 20th century is tenuous at best.

Or maybe this isn't blogsworthy either. My apologies.