by Ken Macdonald, Director of Public Prosecutions, 2003-2008, now a barrister in the same firm as Cherie Blair
The degree of deceit involved in our decision to go to war on Iraq becomes steadily clearer. This was a foreign policy disgrace of epic proportions and playing footsie on Sunday morning television does nothing to repair the damage. It is now very difficult to avoid the conclusion that Tony Blair engaged in an alarming subterfuge with his partner George Bush and went on to mislead and cajole the British people into a deadly war they had made perfectly clear they didn’t want, and on a basis that it’s increasingly hard to believe even he found truly credible. Who is any longer naive enough to accept that the then Prime Minister’s mind remained innocently open after his visit to Crawford, Texas?
Hindsight is a great temptress. But we needn’t trouble her on the way to a confident conclusion that Mr Blair’s fundamental flaw was his sycophancy towards power. Perhaps this seems odd in a man who drank so much of that mind-altering brew at home. But Washington turned his head and he couldn’t resist the stage or the glamour that it gave him. In this sense he was weak and, as we can see, he remains so. Since those sorry days we have frequently heard him repeating the self-regarding mantra that “hand on heart, I only did what I thought was right”. But this is a narcissist’s defence and self-belief is no answer to misjudgment: it is certainly no answer to death. “Yo, Blair”, perhaps, was his truest measure.
How effectively the Chilcot Inquiry, to which Mr Blair will give evidence in the new year, can expose any of this remains to be seen. Ominously for the former Prime Minister, his growing distance from power appears to be loosening some well-placed Whitehall tongues. It seems that the contempt felt by some mandarins for his fancier footwork around the weapons of mass destruction is finally showing in a belated settling of scores. Discretion is fading like toothache and the feast of revenge is as tempting as it is cold.
Yet the position of the inquiry panel is uncertain. So far, apart from some interventions by Sir Roderic Lyne, the former ambassador in Moscow, its questioning has been unchallenging. If this is born of a belief that it creates an atmosphere more conducive to truth, it seems naive. The truth doesn’t always glide out so compliantly; sometimes it struggles to be heard. Sometimes it takes cover in a shelter that is entirely self-serving.
Sir John Chilcot himself, a distinguished former Permanent Secretary at the Northern Ireland Office during the Troubles and finely tuned for years to the security services, will be key. Perhaps a great and brave struggle against instinct will be necessary. In British public life, loyalty and service to power can sometimes count for more to insiders than any tricky questions of wider reputation. It’s the regard you are held in by your peers that really counts, so that steadfastness in the face of attack and threatened exposure brings its own rich hierarchy of honour and reward. Disloyalty, on the other hand, means a terrible casting out, a rocky and barren Roman exile that few have the courage to endure. So which way will our heroes jump?
We must hope in the right direction — for it is precisely this privately arranged nature of British Establishment power, stubborn beyond sympathy for years in the face of the modern world, that has brought our politics so low. If Chilcot fails to reveal the truth without fear in this Middle Eastern story of violence and destruction, the inquiry will be held in deserved and withering contempt. This would be a serious blow to the integrity of the State. It would not restore trust.
For so many years this would not have mattered. Questions sufficiently critical and grand were decided at an elevated level, and in air more refined than most people would ever inhale. A besotted king could be skewered in the shadows and depart, or an illustrious commission twist and turn from any finding of government fault. And if the cost of the reasoning was ermine splashed in whitewash, the price would be willingly paid.
But it’s harder today and the tax on dishonesty is rising. Now our system has to prove itself again and again, it has to persuade people that it deserves their loyalty and support. Citizens believe deeply in a democratic right to know and they no longer acknowledge their unworthiness to enjoy its nourishment. Naturally, this is a less comfortable world for people in power, but it’s a much better world for everyone else. The real tragedy of Iraq, beyond all the danger and the terrible loss, is that it rendered any affair of the heart between government and people no more than a wisp, like a lie in the wind. It broke faith.
This is the gravity of Chilcot, and its broader meaning. A few months of their deliberations will tell us how well, through the solemn work of these illustrious individuals, each one of us, and therefore our country, measures up to a compromised past.
We have seen enormous acts of courage on the part of our men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan. The most heart-rending sacrifices have been made; many of them will become poetry and song in future years. But none of this sprinkles, as he might once have hoped it would, any starlight on Tony Blair. On the contrary, it is entirely the work of warriors thrust carelessly into death’s way by a Prime Minister lost in self-aggrandisement and a governing class too closed to speak truth to power.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Monday, December 14, 2009
Jonathan Steele: Blair's crime of hubris
by Jonathan Steele
www.guardian.co.uk
Tony Blair's boast that he would have sought to remove Saddam Hussein even if he knew Iraq's president no longer had weapons of mass destruction brings fresh evidence that he probably committed a crime in going along with George Bush's invasion. It also puts the spotlight on Gordon Brown, David Miliband and the rest of the Labour cabinet of the time.
Perhaps that was the purpose behind the former prime minister's extraordinary claim in his BBC interview with Fern Britton yesterday. Perhaps he wants to bring his colleagues down with him, for the nub of Blair's new case is that he could have persuaded the cabinet to go to war even if there were no Iraqi WMD. "You would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat", as he put it with his customary arrogance. Could he have succeeded? Would the cabinet really have been so weak that they dared not resist? The challenge to the Chilcot inquiry is to invite Blair's senior ministers to come before it and answer the same question: would you have gone along with an invasion, even if you knew Iraq was disarmed?
It is hard to see how there could have been any legal basis for an invasion if Saddam had been shown to have disarmed. UN security council resolution 678, dating back to 1990, on which the attorney general flimsily relied for his eve-of-war advice to Blair that the war was legal, justifies force only in the case that Saddam was not complying with demands that he disarm. Once it became clear Iraq no longer had WMD, resolution 678 falls away.
Apart from WMD there was no other conceivable foundation for an invasion. Using force to produce regime change on humanitarian grounds is not permissible under international law, and the attorney general told Blair as much in July 2002. Nor is there any way that the security council would have authorised it later on that year or in 2003.
Yet Blair in effect admits he and Bush planned to launch a war even if they knew there was no chance of getting UN approval. In cases brought before the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, political leaders who plotted large-scale illegal violence were described as collaborating in a "joint criminal enterprise". Here too is a fertile new field of inquiry that Chilcot must not duck.
Blair claims Saddam was a dictator with an atrocious human rights record and this was enough to want to remove him from being "a threat to the region". In addition to its illegality, this argument begs the "Why now?" question that opponents of the war raised in 2003. A White House fact sheet published in April 2003 recalled that Saddam's greatest killing took place in the 1980s (when he was an ally of the west). Hundreds of thousands died. By the end of the 1990s, according to Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, the annual death toll in his prisons and torture cells was in the hundreds. Grim though this still was, why the sudden urgency to stop it?
As for Blair's claim that the invasion was justified because Iraq is better off without Saddam and his vile sons, he would do better to consult Iraqis rather than rely on his blind judgment that he did what was right. They are the ones whose country has been plunged into chaos and destruction thanks to Bush and Blair, with millions made homeless and countless thousands dead. The latest of the regular polls of Iraqis, done for the BBC, ABC News and Japan's NHK in February this year, found 56% thought the invasion was wrong.
Blair made singularly little effort to open his mind to reliable facts before the invasion, either on intelligence about WMD or on the nature of Iraqi society and the consequences of a western invasion. He should have the humility to do some homework now.
www.guardian.co.uk
Tony Blair's boast that he would have sought to remove Saddam Hussein even if he knew Iraq's president no longer had weapons of mass destruction brings fresh evidence that he probably committed a crime in going along with George Bush's invasion. It also puts the spotlight on Gordon Brown, David Miliband and the rest of the Labour cabinet of the time.
Perhaps that was the purpose behind the former prime minister's extraordinary claim in his BBC interview with Fern Britton yesterday. Perhaps he wants to bring his colleagues down with him, for the nub of Blair's new case is that he could have persuaded the cabinet to go to war even if there were no Iraqi WMD. "You would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat", as he put it with his customary arrogance. Could he have succeeded? Would the cabinet really have been so weak that they dared not resist? The challenge to the Chilcot inquiry is to invite Blair's senior ministers to come before it and answer the same question: would you have gone along with an invasion, even if you knew Iraq was disarmed?
It is hard to see how there could have been any legal basis for an invasion if Saddam had been shown to have disarmed. UN security council resolution 678, dating back to 1990, on which the attorney general flimsily relied for his eve-of-war advice to Blair that the war was legal, justifies force only in the case that Saddam was not complying with demands that he disarm. Once it became clear Iraq no longer had WMD, resolution 678 falls away.
Apart from WMD there was no other conceivable foundation for an invasion. Using force to produce regime change on humanitarian grounds is not permissible under international law, and the attorney general told Blair as much in July 2002. Nor is there any way that the security council would have authorised it later on that year or in 2003.
Yet Blair in effect admits he and Bush planned to launch a war even if they knew there was no chance of getting UN approval. In cases brought before the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, political leaders who plotted large-scale illegal violence were described as collaborating in a "joint criminal enterprise". Here too is a fertile new field of inquiry that Chilcot must not duck.
Blair claims Saddam was a dictator with an atrocious human rights record and this was enough to want to remove him from being "a threat to the region". In addition to its illegality, this argument begs the "Why now?" question that opponents of the war raised in 2003. A White House fact sheet published in April 2003 recalled that Saddam's greatest killing took place in the 1980s (when he was an ally of the west). Hundreds of thousands died. By the end of the 1990s, according to Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, the annual death toll in his prisons and torture cells was in the hundreds. Grim though this still was, why the sudden urgency to stop it?
As for Blair's claim that the invasion was justified because Iraq is better off without Saddam and his vile sons, he would do better to consult Iraqis rather than rely on his blind judgment that he did what was right. They are the ones whose country has been plunged into chaos and destruction thanks to Bush and Blair, with millions made homeless and countless thousands dead. The latest of the regular polls of Iraqis, done for the BBC, ABC News and Japan's NHK in February this year, found 56% thought the invasion was wrong.
Blair made singularly little effort to open his mind to reliable facts before the invasion, either on intelligence about WMD or on the nature of Iraqi society and the consequences of a western invasion. He should have the humility to do some homework now.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
John Pilger: Normalising an epic crime
By John Pilger
www.johnpilger.com
More than anyone, it was Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who was Tony Blair’s ambassador to the United Nations in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, who tried every trick to find a UN cover for the bloodbath to come. Indeed, this was his boast to the Chilcot enquiry on 27 November, where he described the invasion as "legal but of questionable legitimacy." How clever.
Under international law, "questionable legitimacy" does not exist. An attack on a sovereign state is a crime. This was made clear by Britain’s chief law officer, Attorney General Peter Goldsmith, before his arm was twisted, and by the Foreign Office’s own legal advisers and subsequently by the secretary-general of the United Nations. The invasion is the crime of the 21st century. During 17 years of assault on a defenseless civilian population, veiled with weasel monikers like "sanctions" and "no-fly zones" and "building democracy," more people have died in Iraq than during the peak years of the slave trade. Set that against Sir Jeremy’s skin-saving revisionism about American "noises" that were "decidedly unhelpful to what I was trying to do [at the UN] in New York." Moreover, "I myself warned the Foreign Office … that I might have to consider my own position …."
It wasn’t me, guv.
The purpose of the Chilcot inquiry is to normalize an epic crime by providing enough of a theater of guilt to satisfy the media so that the only issue that matters, that of prosecution, is never raised. When he appears in January, Blair will play this part to odious perfection, dutifully absorbing the hisses and boos. All "inquiries" into state crimes are neutered in this way. In 1996, Lord Justice Scott’s arms-to-Iraq report obfuscated the crimes his investigations and voluminous evidence had revealed.
At that time, I interviewed Tim Laxton, who had attended every day of the inquiry as auditor of companies taken over by MI6 and other secret agencies as vehicles for the illegal arms trade with Saddam Hussein. Had there been a full and open criminal investigation, Laxton told me, "hundreds" would have faced prosecution. "They would include," he said, "top political figures, very senior civil servants from right throughout Whitehall … the top echelon of government."
That is why Chilcot is advised by the likes of Sir Martin Gilbert, who compared Blair with Churchill and Roosevelt. That is why the inquiry will not demand the release of documents that would illuminate the role of the entire Blair gang, notably Blair’s 2003 cabinet, long silent. Who remembers the threat of the thuggish Geoff Hoon, Blair’s "defense secretary," to use nuclear weapons against Iraq?
In February, Jack Straw, one of Blair’s principal accomplices, the man who let the mass murderer General Pinochet escape justice and the current "justice secretary," overruled the Information Commissioner who had ordered the government to publish Cabinet minutes during the period Lord Goldsmith was pressured into changing his judgement that the invasion was illegal. How they fear exposure, and worse.
The media has granted itself immunity. On 27 November, Scott Ritter, the former UN chief weapons inspector, wrote that the invasion "was made far easier given the role of useful idiot played by much of the mainstream media in the US and Britain." More than four years before the invasion, Ritter, in interviews with myself and others, left not a shred of doubt that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction had been disabled, yet he was made a non-person. In 2002, when the Bush/Blair lies were in full echo across the media, the Guardian and Observer mentioned Iraq in more than 3,000 articles, of which 49 referred to Ritter and his truth that could have saved thousands of lives.
What has changed? On 30 November, the Independent published a pristine piece of propaganda from its embedded man in Afghanistan. "Troops fear defeat at home," said the headline. Britain, said the report, "is at serious risk of losing its way in Afghanistan because rising defeatism at home is demoralizing the troops on the front line, military commanders have warned." In fact, public disgust with the disaster in Afghanistan is mirrored among many serving troops and their families; and this frightens the warmongers. So "defeatism" and "demoralizing the troops" are added to the weasel lexicon. Good try. Unfortunately, like Iraq, Afghanistan is a crime. Period.
www.johnpilger.com
More than anyone, it was Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who was Tony Blair’s ambassador to the United Nations in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, who tried every trick to find a UN cover for the bloodbath to come. Indeed, this was his boast to the Chilcot enquiry on 27 November, where he described the invasion as "legal but of questionable legitimacy." How clever.
Under international law, "questionable legitimacy" does not exist. An attack on a sovereign state is a crime. This was made clear by Britain’s chief law officer, Attorney General Peter Goldsmith, before his arm was twisted, and by the Foreign Office’s own legal advisers and subsequently by the secretary-general of the United Nations. The invasion is the crime of the 21st century. During 17 years of assault on a defenseless civilian population, veiled with weasel monikers like "sanctions" and "no-fly zones" and "building democracy," more people have died in Iraq than during the peak years of the slave trade. Set that against Sir Jeremy’s skin-saving revisionism about American "noises" that were "decidedly unhelpful to what I was trying to do [at the UN] in New York." Moreover, "I myself warned the Foreign Office … that I might have to consider my own position …."
It wasn’t me, guv.
The purpose of the Chilcot inquiry is to normalize an epic crime by providing enough of a theater of guilt to satisfy the media so that the only issue that matters, that of prosecution, is never raised. When he appears in January, Blair will play this part to odious perfection, dutifully absorbing the hisses and boos. All "inquiries" into state crimes are neutered in this way. In 1996, Lord Justice Scott’s arms-to-Iraq report obfuscated the crimes his investigations and voluminous evidence had revealed.
At that time, I interviewed Tim Laxton, who had attended every day of the inquiry as auditor of companies taken over by MI6 and other secret agencies as vehicles for the illegal arms trade with Saddam Hussein. Had there been a full and open criminal investigation, Laxton told me, "hundreds" would have faced prosecution. "They would include," he said, "top political figures, very senior civil servants from right throughout Whitehall … the top echelon of government."
That is why Chilcot is advised by the likes of Sir Martin Gilbert, who compared Blair with Churchill and Roosevelt. That is why the inquiry will not demand the release of documents that would illuminate the role of the entire Blair gang, notably Blair’s 2003 cabinet, long silent. Who remembers the threat of the thuggish Geoff Hoon, Blair’s "defense secretary," to use nuclear weapons against Iraq?
In February, Jack Straw, one of Blair’s principal accomplices, the man who let the mass murderer General Pinochet escape justice and the current "justice secretary," overruled the Information Commissioner who had ordered the government to publish Cabinet minutes during the period Lord Goldsmith was pressured into changing his judgement that the invasion was illegal. How they fear exposure, and worse.
The media has granted itself immunity. On 27 November, Scott Ritter, the former UN chief weapons inspector, wrote that the invasion "was made far easier given the role of useful idiot played by much of the mainstream media in the US and Britain." More than four years before the invasion, Ritter, in interviews with myself and others, left not a shred of doubt that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction had been disabled, yet he was made a non-person. In 2002, when the Bush/Blair lies were in full echo across the media, the Guardian and Observer mentioned Iraq in more than 3,000 articles, of which 49 referred to Ritter and his truth that could have saved thousands of lives.
What has changed? On 30 November, the Independent published a pristine piece of propaganda from its embedded man in Afghanistan. "Troops fear defeat at home," said the headline. Britain, said the report, "is at serious risk of losing its way in Afghanistan because rising defeatism at home is demoralizing the troops on the front line, military commanders have warned." In fact, public disgust with the disaster in Afghanistan is mirrored among many serving troops and their families; and this frightens the warmongers. So "defeatism" and "demoralizing the troops" are added to the weasel lexicon. Good try. Unfortunately, like Iraq, Afghanistan is a crime. Period.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Simon Jenkins: A very British inquiry: a chat in a Whitehall club
By Simon Jenkins
The Guardian
The Chilcot inquiry today met its first "hostile" witness, Sir John Scarlett, former head of MI6. Mastermind of Saddam's threat of weapons of mass destruction and thus architect of Tony Blair's case for the Iraq war, he entered the inquisition room like a small, well-bred bull, ready for battle. Within seconds he was wandering round the ring, lost and searching for a matador. The inquiry appeared to have gone on strike.
Scarlett duly droned for a third of his allotted time on the structure of the joint intelligence committee.
The inquiry members looked to the ceiling, gazed at their feet, even seemed to fall asleep. Scarlett teased them with tales of dossiers and spin, with murmurs of American pressure, aluminium tubes and the clear impression that weapons inspectors were spies. They barely noticed. He failed to mention Alastair Campbell or Tony Blair. He did all he could to cause a fight, but he failed. He walked out unmarked. Chilcot is an inquiry with much to prove.
For two weeks, the investigation into the alleged failures of the 2003 invasion of Iraq has dealt with processes and procedures. One elegant mandarin after another has paraded, well-rehearsed, before it. Rarely do more than a few onlookers grace the airless room, overwhelmed by infantile government security. At one session a group of bemused tourists declared it "at least better than the House of Lords". This may be merely a prologue to the star turn, Blair, who is not due until next year. But Scarlett was the star's apprentice, and the place was for once packed and expectant.
When pressed on being told to "firm up" the intelligence of weapons of mass destruction in 2002, Scarlett was left to declare blandly that that is what he did. When asked if there was any coercion from America, he said no.
When asked if perhaps the September dossier, and its 45-minutes warning, was confusing, he said probably. When asked if he might have disapproved of Blair's "without doubt" interpretation of it, he said maybe.
I never thought I would cry "send for a lawyer" but the inquiry desperately lacks a skilled cross-examiner, someone who at least knows the word supplementary. The inquiry's two historians, Sir Martin Gilbert and Sir Laurence Freedman, appear to be researching their next book. Lady Prashar is interested only in "clearing things up". The diplomat Sir Roderic Lyne occasionally leaps to inquisitorial life, but not when faced by the head of MI6. This was like a private conversation in a Whitehall club.
For all that, a picture is starting to emerge from Chilcot. It is of 2002 and an ever more lonely Blair, desperate to be "a serious player" on the world stage. He is trapped between what his Washington ambassador, Sir Christopher Meyer, eulogised as his "enormously close relationship" with George Bush, and British lawyers telling him an invasion would be illegal, British generals saying an occupation would be a shambles and cabinet colleagues thinking him mad. (I hope we hear from some of them.)
The inquiry so far has been dominated by two themes, the chaos of the American occupation of Baghdad, and the zeal of the Foreign Office to drive a stake through Blair's heart at the nearest crossroads, for destroying Britain's reputation in the diplomats' beloved Middle East. Rarely can Whitehall's finest have turned so savagely on a recent boss. The FCO's chief, Sir Peter Ricketts, was blunt: "We quite clearly distanced ourselves from talk about regime change," which Blair had mooted as early as 1998. His colleague, Sir William Patey, said that when Bush came to power, "we heard the drumbeats from Washington … and our policy was to stay away from that part of the spectrum. It had no basis in law." The illegality of the invasion is a leitmotif, yielding Chilcot's one inadvertent scoop, a leak of a letter submitted by the then attorney-general, Lord Goldsmith, to Blair in 2002. This declared that the invasion had "no legal basis for military action … as things stand you obviously cannot do it." When Blair ignored the letter and banned Goldsmith from cabinet, the attorney general reportedly threatened to resign and famously lost three stone in weight. Just two weeks before the invasion, Goldsmith was still warning the cabinet, as well as the chief of the defence staff, Admiral Lord Boyce, that British soldiers could be "arraigned before the international criminal court" if they went to war. This led Boyce to demand "unequivocal advice" that the war was legal. Goldsmith duly changed his mind. The then lord chancellor, Lord Falconer, has publicly dismissed the spin put on the letter as "totally false". Since he and Goldsmith cannot both be right, their cross-examination in the new year should be the next test of Chilcot's muscle. They should be forced to appear together.
The spilling of Blair's blood so far has come not from the inquiry but from the witnesses. Bush is portrayed as treating Blair as a patsy. One official after another has rubbished Blair's claim that intelligence indicated "beyond doubt" that Saddam had mass destruction weapons and intended to use them. Since the phrase was not Scarlett's, the finger points to Blair's Downing Street team. It remains to be seen how many will be called to give evidence. The Butler report on WMD intelligence omitted all mention of Blair's spin doctors.
The chief respite for Blair has come from his foreign policy aide, Sir David Manning, and from Meyer. The former offered a model display of graded loyalty to his boss. Manning stressed Blair's commitment to "the UN route", to giving the weapons inspectors enough time and to ensuring cover for public opinion back home. This contrasted with Meyer's evidence, that Blair had been gung-ho for regime change since 1998 and that his bond with Bush at the Crawford meeting in April 2002 was probably "signed in blood".
Blair's lack of influence in Washington is becoming ever more stark. Only the possibility that he might lose a Commons vote on going to war seems to have moved Bush to attempt another UN resolution. As the aid department's Sir Suma Chakrabarti said yesterday, he and his colleague could not believe America's lack of concern for the UN, indeed for world opinion, believing that "rationality would break out at some stage". It did not. The Americans did not care what their allies did or did not do. It was Blair who seemed desperate, according to the deputy chief of the defence staff, Sir Anthony Piggott, to do "something meaty on the ground".
Blair's eagerness seems to have cost Britain all leverage. Meyer was forced by Lyne to confront the central question, whether Blair could have avoided going to Iraq without damage to British interests. Meyer's answer was yes. Bush even phoned Blair to suggest he could "sit out the war", while the Pentagon's Donald Rumsfeld was happy to go in alone. But Blair wanted too much to be there. So far, said Meyer, "we had underestimated the leverage at our disposal". Now it evaporated.
Meyer has been the undoubted star of the show so far. In a startling but unnoticed revelation, he mentioned that Blair refused even to use his good offices with Bush to lobby for relief from tariffs on Britain's special steel or seek domestic slots for Sir Richard Branson's Virgin planes. Blair was hugely popular but his clout in Washington was exhausted. Thanks to him the pre-Iraq phase was an awful episode in British diplomacy. No wonder the Foreign Office wants history to free it of blame.
More serious was the frustration clearly faced by the army. Admiral Lord Boyce told the inquiry that he was banned by the defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, from actively preparing for invasion since it might suggest Britain was not serious about seeking the abortive UN resolution. In the understatement of the inquiry, Boyce said he found this ban, just months from a putative invasion, "very frustrating". He could not even talk to his own head of logistics. Boyce added that he found the whole American approach "anorexic", largely because of "disfunctionality" between departments in Washington. He himself had sometimes to act as go-between. This led to the Americans being desperately understaffed on the ground when trouble began in late-2003. While the lack of post-invasion planning is hardly news – there is a shelf of memoirs on it – Whitehall's desperation to put its warning of chaos on the Chilcot record is palpable.
The FCO's Iraq expert, Edward Chaplin, spoke of neo-con Washington's "real blind spot", indeed its "touching faith", that there would be "dancing in the streets after the invasion … all sweetness and light". Major General Tim Cross, stationed in Baghdad, said he told Blair that post-war planning was "chaotic", but Blair just stared. On his arrival in the city after the invasion, Cross told of his "amazement" at the shambles that greeted him. Entire government departments were being run from single tables in Saddam's palace corridor, those in charge changing by the week.
The purpose of this inquiry remains obscure. Its tales are familiar to those who have followed the war, and such interest as exists comes largely from hearing the old tales from the horses' mouths. Sir John Chilcot treats witnesses like a therapist with a nervous patient. The absence, at least so far, of any Iraqis, Americans, foreigners of any sort or even British politicians has become glaring. If this is to be a first rough draft of history, it is so far a highly partial one.
Chilcot emphatically rejects being cast as a court, let alone a foretaste of a Nuremburg trial. It is a far cry from the scrutiny of America's Capitol Hill or the milder forensic thrust of a Hutton or a Butler. This appears as a very British inquest, an intrusion into the private grief, or perhaps the self-styled triumph, of one man, Tony Blair.
But who knows? Perhaps still waters yet run deep.
The Guardian
The Chilcot inquiry today met its first "hostile" witness, Sir John Scarlett, former head of MI6. Mastermind of Saddam's threat of weapons of mass destruction and thus architect of Tony Blair's case for the Iraq war, he entered the inquisition room like a small, well-bred bull, ready for battle. Within seconds he was wandering round the ring, lost and searching for a matador. The inquiry appeared to have gone on strike.
Scarlett duly droned for a third of his allotted time on the structure of the joint intelligence committee.
The inquiry members looked to the ceiling, gazed at their feet, even seemed to fall asleep. Scarlett teased them with tales of dossiers and spin, with murmurs of American pressure, aluminium tubes and the clear impression that weapons inspectors were spies. They barely noticed. He failed to mention Alastair Campbell or Tony Blair. He did all he could to cause a fight, but he failed. He walked out unmarked. Chilcot is an inquiry with much to prove.
For two weeks, the investigation into the alleged failures of the 2003 invasion of Iraq has dealt with processes and procedures. One elegant mandarin after another has paraded, well-rehearsed, before it. Rarely do more than a few onlookers grace the airless room, overwhelmed by infantile government security. At one session a group of bemused tourists declared it "at least better than the House of Lords". This may be merely a prologue to the star turn, Blair, who is not due until next year. But Scarlett was the star's apprentice, and the place was for once packed and expectant.
When pressed on being told to "firm up" the intelligence of weapons of mass destruction in 2002, Scarlett was left to declare blandly that that is what he did. When asked if there was any coercion from America, he said no.
When asked if perhaps the September dossier, and its 45-minutes warning, was confusing, he said probably. When asked if he might have disapproved of Blair's "without doubt" interpretation of it, he said maybe.
I never thought I would cry "send for a lawyer" but the inquiry desperately lacks a skilled cross-examiner, someone who at least knows the word supplementary. The inquiry's two historians, Sir Martin Gilbert and Sir Laurence Freedman, appear to be researching their next book. Lady Prashar is interested only in "clearing things up". The diplomat Sir Roderic Lyne occasionally leaps to inquisitorial life, but not when faced by the head of MI6. This was like a private conversation in a Whitehall club.
For all that, a picture is starting to emerge from Chilcot. It is of 2002 and an ever more lonely Blair, desperate to be "a serious player" on the world stage. He is trapped between what his Washington ambassador, Sir Christopher Meyer, eulogised as his "enormously close relationship" with George Bush, and British lawyers telling him an invasion would be illegal, British generals saying an occupation would be a shambles and cabinet colleagues thinking him mad. (I hope we hear from some of them.)
The inquiry so far has been dominated by two themes, the chaos of the American occupation of Baghdad, and the zeal of the Foreign Office to drive a stake through Blair's heart at the nearest crossroads, for destroying Britain's reputation in the diplomats' beloved Middle East. Rarely can Whitehall's finest have turned so savagely on a recent boss. The FCO's chief, Sir Peter Ricketts, was blunt: "We quite clearly distanced ourselves from talk about regime change," which Blair had mooted as early as 1998. His colleague, Sir William Patey, said that when Bush came to power, "we heard the drumbeats from Washington … and our policy was to stay away from that part of the spectrum. It had no basis in law." The illegality of the invasion is a leitmotif, yielding Chilcot's one inadvertent scoop, a leak of a letter submitted by the then attorney-general, Lord Goldsmith, to Blair in 2002. This declared that the invasion had "no legal basis for military action … as things stand you obviously cannot do it." When Blair ignored the letter and banned Goldsmith from cabinet, the attorney general reportedly threatened to resign and famously lost three stone in weight. Just two weeks before the invasion, Goldsmith was still warning the cabinet, as well as the chief of the defence staff, Admiral Lord Boyce, that British soldiers could be "arraigned before the international criminal court" if they went to war. This led Boyce to demand "unequivocal advice" that the war was legal. Goldsmith duly changed his mind. The then lord chancellor, Lord Falconer, has publicly dismissed the spin put on the letter as "totally false". Since he and Goldsmith cannot both be right, their cross-examination in the new year should be the next test of Chilcot's muscle. They should be forced to appear together.
The spilling of Blair's blood so far has come not from the inquiry but from the witnesses. Bush is portrayed as treating Blair as a patsy. One official after another has rubbished Blair's claim that intelligence indicated "beyond doubt" that Saddam had mass destruction weapons and intended to use them. Since the phrase was not Scarlett's, the finger points to Blair's Downing Street team. It remains to be seen how many will be called to give evidence. The Butler report on WMD intelligence omitted all mention of Blair's spin doctors.
The chief respite for Blair has come from his foreign policy aide, Sir David Manning, and from Meyer. The former offered a model display of graded loyalty to his boss. Manning stressed Blair's commitment to "the UN route", to giving the weapons inspectors enough time and to ensuring cover for public opinion back home. This contrasted with Meyer's evidence, that Blair had been gung-ho for regime change since 1998 and that his bond with Bush at the Crawford meeting in April 2002 was probably "signed in blood".
Blair's lack of influence in Washington is becoming ever more stark. Only the possibility that he might lose a Commons vote on going to war seems to have moved Bush to attempt another UN resolution. As the aid department's Sir Suma Chakrabarti said yesterday, he and his colleague could not believe America's lack of concern for the UN, indeed for world opinion, believing that "rationality would break out at some stage". It did not. The Americans did not care what their allies did or did not do. It was Blair who seemed desperate, according to the deputy chief of the defence staff, Sir Anthony Piggott, to do "something meaty on the ground".
Blair's eagerness seems to have cost Britain all leverage. Meyer was forced by Lyne to confront the central question, whether Blair could have avoided going to Iraq without damage to British interests. Meyer's answer was yes. Bush even phoned Blair to suggest he could "sit out the war", while the Pentagon's Donald Rumsfeld was happy to go in alone. But Blair wanted too much to be there. So far, said Meyer, "we had underestimated the leverage at our disposal". Now it evaporated.
Meyer has been the undoubted star of the show so far. In a startling but unnoticed revelation, he mentioned that Blair refused even to use his good offices with Bush to lobby for relief from tariffs on Britain's special steel or seek domestic slots for Sir Richard Branson's Virgin planes. Blair was hugely popular but his clout in Washington was exhausted. Thanks to him the pre-Iraq phase was an awful episode in British diplomacy. No wonder the Foreign Office wants history to free it of blame.
More serious was the frustration clearly faced by the army. Admiral Lord Boyce told the inquiry that he was banned by the defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, from actively preparing for invasion since it might suggest Britain was not serious about seeking the abortive UN resolution. In the understatement of the inquiry, Boyce said he found this ban, just months from a putative invasion, "very frustrating". He could not even talk to his own head of logistics. Boyce added that he found the whole American approach "anorexic", largely because of "disfunctionality" between departments in Washington. He himself had sometimes to act as go-between. This led to the Americans being desperately understaffed on the ground when trouble began in late-2003. While the lack of post-invasion planning is hardly news – there is a shelf of memoirs on it – Whitehall's desperation to put its warning of chaos on the Chilcot record is palpable.
The FCO's Iraq expert, Edward Chaplin, spoke of neo-con Washington's "real blind spot", indeed its "touching faith", that there would be "dancing in the streets after the invasion … all sweetness and light". Major General Tim Cross, stationed in Baghdad, said he told Blair that post-war planning was "chaotic", but Blair just stared. On his arrival in the city after the invasion, Cross told of his "amazement" at the shambles that greeted him. Entire government departments were being run from single tables in Saddam's palace corridor, those in charge changing by the week.
The purpose of this inquiry remains obscure. Its tales are familiar to those who have followed the war, and such interest as exists comes largely from hearing the old tales from the horses' mouths. Sir John Chilcot treats witnesses like a therapist with a nervous patient. The absence, at least so far, of any Iraqis, Americans, foreigners of any sort or even British politicians has become glaring. If this is to be a first rough draft of history, it is so far a highly partial one.
Chilcot emphatically rejects being cast as a court, let alone a foretaste of a Nuremburg trial. It is a far cry from the scrutiny of America's Capitol Hill or the milder forensic thrust of a Hutton or a Butler. This appears as a very British inquest, an intrusion into the private grief, or perhaps the self-styled triumph, of one man, Tony Blair.
But who knows? Perhaps still waters yet run deep.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Craig Murray: Iraq Inquiry: The First Big Lie
by Craig Murray
Craig Murray was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004.
www.craigmurray.org.uk
Sir John Chilcot was just ten minutes in to the first public session of the Iraq Inquiry when he told the first big lie - and a lie which, when examined, exposes the entire charade.
"My colleagues and I come to this inquiry with an open mind."
That is demonstrably untrue. Three of the five members - Rod Lyne, Martin Gilbert and Lawrence Freedman - are prominent proponents of the Iraq war. By contrast, nobody on the committee was in public against the invasion of Iraq. How can it be fine to pack the committee with supporters of the invasion, when anyone against the invasion was excluded?
Let us look at that committee:
Sir John Chilcot
Member of the Butler Inquiry which whitewashed the fabrication of evidence of Iraqi WMD. The fact is that, beyond doubt, the FCO and SIS knew there were no Iraqi WMD. In the early 1990's I had headed the FCO Section of the Embargo Surveillance Centre, tasked with monitoring and preventing Iraqi attempts at weapons procurement. In 2002 I was on a course for newly appointed Ambassadors alongside Bill Patey, who was Head of the FCO Department dealing with Iraq. Bill is a fellow Dundee University graduate and is one of the witnesses before the Iraq Inquiry this morning. I suggested to him that the stories we were spreading about Iraqi WMD could not be true. He laughed and said "Of course not Craig, it's bollocks". I had too many other conversations to mention over the next few months, with FCO colleagues who knew the WMD scare to be false.
Yet Chilcot was party to a Butler Inquiry conclusion that the Iraqi WMD scare was an "Honest mistake". That a man involved on a notorious whitewash is assuring us that this will not be one, is bullshit.
Bill Patey (or "Sir William", as they call him) is a witness before the committee this morning. Doubtless between Sir John and he, they will manage to steer round the fact he knew there were no WMD.
Funny thing is that, just as with Sir Michael Wood and his view on the legality of torture intelligence, Bill Patey is also an extremely nice man. When you unleash the evil of aggressive war, the corruption of your own body politic is one of the consequences.
Sir Roderick Lyne
Last time I actually spoke to him we were both Ambassadors and on a British frigate moored on the Neva in St Petersburg. Colleagues may have many words to describe Rod Lyne, some of them complimentary, but "open-minded" is not one of them.
If the Committee were to feel that the Iraq War was a war crime, then Rod Lyne would be accusing himself. As Ambassador to Moscow he was active in trying to mitigate Russian opposition to the War. He personally outlined to the Russian foreign minister the lies on Iraqi WMD. There was never the slightest private indication that Lyne had any misgivings about the war.
From Uzbekistan we always copied Moscow in on our reporting telegrams, for obvious reasons. Lyne responded to my telegrams protesting at the CIA's use of intelligence from the Uzbek torture chambers, by requesting not to be sent such telegrams. Somewhat off topic but amusingly, he also responded to my telegram warning about Alisher Usmanov and his growing influence in the UK, saying that Moscow had never heard of the man - one of Putin's closes oligarchs.
An open mind? Really?
Sir Lawrence Freedman
Lawrence Freedman is the most appalling choice of all. The patron saint of "Justified" wars of aggression, and exponent of "Wars of Choice" and "Humanitarian Intervention". He is 100% parti pris.
Here is part of his evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution on 18 January 2006:
The basic idea here is that our armed forces prepared for what we might call wars of necessity, that the country was under an existential threat so if you did not respond to that threat then in some very basic way our vital interests, our way of life, would be threatened, and when you are looking at certain such situations, these are great national occasions. The difficulty we are now facing with wars of choice is that these are discretionary and the government is weighing a number of factors against each other. I mentioned Sierra Leone but Rwanda passed us by, which many people would think was an occasion when it would have been worth getting involved. There was Sudan and a lot of things have been said about Darfur but not much has happened...
...Iraq was a very unusual situation where it was not an ongoing conflict. If we had waited things would not have been that much different in two or three months' time and so, instead of responding either to aggression by somebody else, as with the Falklands, or to developing humanitarian distress, as in the Balkans, we decided that security considerations for the future demanded immediate action."
An open mind? Really?
Martin Gilbert
Very right wing historian whose biography of Churchill focussed on Gilbert's relish for war and was otherwise dull. (Roy Jenkins' Churchill biography is infinitely better). Gilbert is not only rabidly pro-Iraq War, he actually sees Blair as Churchill.
Although it can easily be argued that George W Bush and Tony Blair face a far lesser challenge than Roosevelt and Churchill did - that the war on terror is not a third world war - they may well, with the passage of time and the opening of the archives, join the ranks of Roosevelt and Churchill. Their societies are too divided today to deliver a calm judgment, and many of their achievements may be in the future: when Iraq has a stable democracy, with al-Qaeda neutralised, and when Israel and the Palestinian Authority are independent democracies, living side by side in constructive economic cooperation.
Statesmen for These Times by Martin Gilbert...
An open mind? Really?
Baroness Prashar
Less known, and my cynical side says she ticked the female and ethnic minority boxes. But a governor of the FCO institution the Ditchley Foundation - of which the Director is Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the UK Ambassador to the UN who presented the lies about Iraqi WMD and was intimately involved in the lead in to war. So very much another cosy foreign policy insider.
So, in short, the committee - all appointed by Gordon Brown - have been very obviously picked to provide a complete whitewash. They are people whose attitudes and mindset lead them to accept the war as justified without the need for conscious connivance on their part. But if conscious connivance should be required, they are just the boys for it.
Craig Murray was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004.
www.craigmurray.org.uk
Sir John Chilcot was just ten minutes in to the first public session of the Iraq Inquiry when he told the first big lie - and a lie which, when examined, exposes the entire charade.
"My colleagues and I come to this inquiry with an open mind."
That is demonstrably untrue. Three of the five members - Rod Lyne, Martin Gilbert and Lawrence Freedman - are prominent proponents of the Iraq war. By contrast, nobody on the committee was in public against the invasion of Iraq. How can it be fine to pack the committee with supporters of the invasion, when anyone against the invasion was excluded?
Let us look at that committee:
Sir John Chilcot
Member of the Butler Inquiry which whitewashed the fabrication of evidence of Iraqi WMD. The fact is that, beyond doubt, the FCO and SIS knew there were no Iraqi WMD. In the early 1990's I had headed the FCO Section of the Embargo Surveillance Centre, tasked with monitoring and preventing Iraqi attempts at weapons procurement. In 2002 I was on a course for newly appointed Ambassadors alongside Bill Patey, who was Head of the FCO Department dealing with Iraq. Bill is a fellow Dundee University graduate and is one of the witnesses before the Iraq Inquiry this morning. I suggested to him that the stories we were spreading about Iraqi WMD could not be true. He laughed and said "Of course not Craig, it's bollocks". I had too many other conversations to mention over the next few months, with FCO colleagues who knew the WMD scare to be false.
Yet Chilcot was party to a Butler Inquiry conclusion that the Iraqi WMD scare was an "Honest mistake". That a man involved on a notorious whitewash is assuring us that this will not be one, is bullshit.
Bill Patey (or "Sir William", as they call him) is a witness before the committee this morning. Doubtless between Sir John and he, they will manage to steer round the fact he knew there were no WMD.
Funny thing is that, just as with Sir Michael Wood and his view on the legality of torture intelligence, Bill Patey is also an extremely nice man. When you unleash the evil of aggressive war, the corruption of your own body politic is one of the consequences.
Sir Roderick Lyne
Last time I actually spoke to him we were both Ambassadors and on a British frigate moored on the Neva in St Petersburg. Colleagues may have many words to describe Rod Lyne, some of them complimentary, but "open-minded" is not one of them.
If the Committee were to feel that the Iraq War was a war crime, then Rod Lyne would be accusing himself. As Ambassador to Moscow he was active in trying to mitigate Russian opposition to the War. He personally outlined to the Russian foreign minister the lies on Iraqi WMD. There was never the slightest private indication that Lyne had any misgivings about the war.
From Uzbekistan we always copied Moscow in on our reporting telegrams, for obvious reasons. Lyne responded to my telegrams protesting at the CIA's use of intelligence from the Uzbek torture chambers, by requesting not to be sent such telegrams. Somewhat off topic but amusingly, he also responded to my telegram warning about Alisher Usmanov and his growing influence in the UK, saying that Moscow had never heard of the man - one of Putin's closes oligarchs.
An open mind? Really?
Sir Lawrence Freedman
Lawrence Freedman is the most appalling choice of all. The patron saint of "Justified" wars of aggression, and exponent of "Wars of Choice" and "Humanitarian Intervention". He is 100% parti pris.
Here is part of his evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution on 18 January 2006:
The basic idea here is that our armed forces prepared for what we might call wars of necessity, that the country was under an existential threat so if you did not respond to that threat then in some very basic way our vital interests, our way of life, would be threatened, and when you are looking at certain such situations, these are great national occasions. The difficulty we are now facing with wars of choice is that these are discretionary and the government is weighing a number of factors against each other. I mentioned Sierra Leone but Rwanda passed us by, which many people would think was an occasion when it would have been worth getting involved. There was Sudan and a lot of things have been said about Darfur but not much has happened...
...Iraq was a very unusual situation where it was not an ongoing conflict. If we had waited things would not have been that much different in two or three months' time and so, instead of responding either to aggression by somebody else, as with the Falklands, or to developing humanitarian distress, as in the Balkans, we decided that security considerations for the future demanded immediate action."
An open mind? Really?
Martin Gilbert
Very right wing historian whose biography of Churchill focussed on Gilbert's relish for war and was otherwise dull. (Roy Jenkins' Churchill biography is infinitely better). Gilbert is not only rabidly pro-Iraq War, he actually sees Blair as Churchill.
Although it can easily be argued that George W Bush and Tony Blair face a far lesser challenge than Roosevelt and Churchill did - that the war on terror is not a third world war - they may well, with the passage of time and the opening of the archives, join the ranks of Roosevelt and Churchill. Their societies are too divided today to deliver a calm judgment, and many of their achievements may be in the future: when Iraq has a stable democracy, with al-Qaeda neutralised, and when Israel and the Palestinian Authority are independent democracies, living side by side in constructive economic cooperation.
Statesmen for These Times by Martin Gilbert...
An open mind? Really?
Baroness Prashar
Less known, and my cynical side says she ticked the female and ethnic minority boxes. But a governor of the FCO institution the Ditchley Foundation - of which the Director is Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the UK Ambassador to the UN who presented the lies about Iraqi WMD and was intimately involved in the lead in to war. So very much another cosy foreign policy insider.
So, in short, the committee - all appointed by Gordon Brown - have been very obviously picked to provide a complete whitewash. They are people whose attitudes and mindset lead them to accept the war as justified without the need for conscious connivance on their part. But if conscious connivance should be required, they are just the boys for it.
Friday, December 4, 2009
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.
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.
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