What governments learned from the Iraq War - to prevent independent media from questioning the pretexts for war.

What governments learned from the Iraq war was not that such wars are stupid and wrong, but that measures must be taken to prevent an independent media from questioning them in future.

Let me explain.

A month and more after I published my first exclusive story about the censoring of official reports into the alleged poison gas atrocity at Douma, Syria, most major news organisations have not followed it. Reuters, to their credit, did confirm that one of the documents on which I relied, an...