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First, threat inflation. In the Foreword to the dodgy dossier of September 2002, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote: Saddam Husseins military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them. This turned out to be fake news but vital to rally the party, parliament and the nation behind the decision to go to war. In time the Imperial College London model of March 16, widely discredited already, may come to acquire a notoriety equivalent to Iraqs dodgy dossier. Similarly, Neil Fergusons claim of 5,10,000 deaths in the UK and 2.2 million in the US will be judged the equivalent of Blairs 45 minutes to Saddams WMD. As of yesterday, the global death toll from Covid-19 was 3,88,416. Scaled up to todays population, the 1957/ 1968 Asian/ Hong Kong flu killed 3.0/ 2.2 million people.

Similarly, to gain public backing for the degree of state intrusion into peoples private lives and control over nations economic activities the immediacy, gravity and magnitude of the coronavirus threat had to be made apocalyptic. As Walter Scheidel reminds us, SARS-CoV-2 is not remotely as lethal as the Spanish Flu of 1918-19 that killed the fit and young as virulently as the elderly and infirm. It infected 500 million people and killed 50 million, equivalent to 220-250 million dead today. Yet authorities did not close down whole societies and economies in 1918. In other deadly pandemic episodes also we suffered but endured. To overcome these hesitations of history and experience, the threat from SARS-CoV-2 had to be inflated to beyond all previous calamities in order to panic countries into drastic action.

Second, very thin evidence. The infamous Downing Street Memo of July 23, 2002, noted that President George W Bush was determined to go to war and military action was seen as inevitable. But British officials did not believe it was legally justified, so the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. Similarly, instead of evidence-based policy, many governments have resorted to policy-based evidence to justify the lockdown. Third, the denigration of critics querying the evidence. Those who questioned the lack of evidence to invade Iraq were demonised as apologists for the Butcher of Baghdad. Those who ask for evidence to justify the biggest expansion of state power in Western political history are shamed as wanting to kill grandparents.

The fourth parallel is in the dismissal of collateral harm, as described last month, as exaggerated, speculative, without evidence, motivated etc. Yet evidence continues to mount that Yamraj has six different non-corona alleyways through which to claim his growing mass of victims during the lockdowns.

The fifth echo is theres no clear exit strategy. Instead of a quick victory in Iraq followed by consolidated democratic regimes in a stable region and an orderly withdrawal, the US found itself in a quagmire and eventually went back home an exhausted and vanquished conqueror. Almost all lockdown governments are now struggling with public justifications to declare victory and lift the lockdown. Modellers still want none of it and the apocalyptic warnings are back, despite mounting evidence of no spike in cases and deaths in countries and US states that have ended lockdowns.

Another resemblance is mission creep. One big reason for the self-created exit trap is that the original mission of flattening the curve so the health system could cope with a slowed spread of the virus, has morphed into the more ambitious but impossible mission of eliminating the virus. Good luck with that. Finally, like the US media in 2003, many mainstream media commentators today have abandoned critical inquisitiveness to become cheerleaders for the war on corona.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Corona and the Iraq War: The response to the coronavirus crisis has seven disturbing echoes of the 2003 Iraq W - Economic Times