Ian Willmore: Passing the hand grenade of responsibility

By Ian Willmore

There are few more unedifying sights than the spectacle of Britain’s ruling elite engaged in manoeuvres to protect careers and reputations after a public policy disaster. So the Iraq Inquiry bids fair to be one of the more unpleasant spectacles in public life over the last few decades.

As yet, not a single witness has had the guts to mount a robust defence of Britain’s decision to participate in the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. All, including those intimately involved in helping to make war a reality, have squirmed, evaded, passed the hand grenade of responsibility, and engaged in the verbal arabesques characteristic of the mandarinate when in a tight spot. It would be unfair to say that they were only following orders; many were issuing the orders and others were trying to guess what was required of them and act before being told.

Take Sir Jeremy Greenstock for example. He was the British ambassador to the UN in the run up to war. He used all his skill and knowledge to put the case for the invasion, such as it was, in front of the international community. But now he tells us that he thought the war “legal but of questionable legitimacy”, an exquisite distinction that does credit to his civil service training. He even warned the Foreign Office that he might have to “consider his own position” if war began without the elusive second UN resolution. But any consideration did not lead to action. He may have wrestled with his conscience, but he seems to have won an easy victory.

Or consider Admiral Lord Boyce. This resplendent figure is spending his retirement accusing the Government of failing the armed forces. He told the Chilcott Inquiry that he had been unable to prepare British troops properly for the invasion of Iraq because the Government did not want it known that the decision to go to war had already been taken. The Inquiry, which is displaying all the interrogative rigour of a chat over port and cigars at the Athenaeum, did not ask him how many deaths and injuries of British troops could be attributed to that failure. Nor did the Admiral think of warning the public of what was – or rather was not – going on.

Some of the braver officials involved even began to make private jokes as the war came closer. Sir Kevin Tebbit, then Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence, was told that the Department for International Development doubted whether the Iraqi people were poor enough to qualify for aid. “I remember saying to them at one stage: 'Well, if you wait a bit they certainly will be ... ' ". Almost worthy of Bird and Fortune. But of course the jokes were kept from the British public, just in case they didn’t laugh.

One trope common to those appearing at the Inquiry and to the propagandists for war in the media, is that the best judgement of those in the know was that Saddam Hussein probably had weapons of mass destruction. Somehow, the million people who protested against war on the streets of London were wrong when they refused to accept that Iraq was a threat to British security - even though they were subsequently right – “while informed” opinion was right to see a threat – even though it was clearly and catastrophically proved to be wrong. The ideological blindess of warmongers in Washington and London meant that all the clear evidence that Saddam had destroyed his mass weapons program after the first Gulf War (for example, the testimony of Iraqi defector Hussein Kamel, which was public knowledge well before the war began) was dismissed as false, and all the rubbish propagated by “intelligence sources” that informed the UK Government’s dossiers was accepted at face value. The civil servants and military officers now appearing at the Chilcott Inquiry are happy to hint that they understood the scale of the deception all along. But when it mattered, they were silent.

Let it not be said that we are setting these people too high a test. There were principled resignations over the Iraq invasion, politicians such as Robin Cook and John Denham and officials such as Foreign Office legal adviser Elizabeth Wilmshurst and US State Department official Michael Yoh. Yes, the final blame for the war rests with George Bush and Tony Blair. But the sorry parade of hand-wringing military officers and civil servants now appearing before the Chilcott Inquiry must not be allowed to escape responsibility. They had more than enough intelligence and information to draw the right conclusions, and many now say that they had private doubts and reservations. But they still helped the war machine rumble into action, and so the blood of thousands of allied soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis is on their hands too.