[A-List] UK state: Iraq crisis

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Now Hugo Young and the massed ranks of the Guardian are chiming in, calling
for an inquiry, alongside Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy. And Young
echoes Sunday Herald columnist Iain MacWhirter's resurrection of the Scott
Inquiry, Robin Cook's finest hour.

See http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/2003-June/026268.html

The speed with which this "growing unrest", as the BBC website calls it
today, is spreading is remarkable, considering that it was only last week
that the subject of Britain's entry into the eurozone and the new European
constitution that was the main item on the political news menu. One possible
answer for this sudden supplanting of the news headlines by the Iraq WMD
issue is that it derails the rightwingers' anti-euro agenda. For next
Monday, June 9, is the deadline when Gordon Brown is supposed to report on
his five tests for eurozone entry. And everyone expects him to say, with as
much pseudo-scientific objectivity as he can muster, that, overall, Britain
is better placed, economically speaking, outside the eurozone. Thus Brown's
importance as a major obstacle to the preferred strategy of the hegemonic
bloc makes him an ever more likely target of efforts to unseat him. But, as
argued earlier, Tony cannot do that. Therefore Tony must go. And the beauty
of the rapidly rising crescendo of "unrest" concerning Tony's performance
over Iraq is that it promises to keep Gordon's five tests off the news
agenda, possibly even by going as far as to unseat Tony in time for next
Monday. That would be sure to render Gordon's five tests redundant in terms
of news value, and a new prime minister could, in the name of cleaning
house, junk Tony and Gordon's policies (five tests most especially included)
in the quite legitimate pursuit of stamping a new, authoritative identity on
proceedings.

Fanciful? As Harold Wilson famously said, a week is a long time in politics,
and with MI6 furiously feeding journalists, Robin Cook and others, despite
the countermeasures of the CIA, it is not so far from the bounds of
possibility.

Michael Keaney

-----

WMD or not, Blair had already made up his mind

The PM was incapable of detaching himself from Bush's march to war

Hugo Young
Tuesday June 3, 2003
The Guardian

The infamous weapons of mass destruction were a crucial pretext for Britain
going to war against Iraq, but they were not the prime cause. They didn't
drive the strategy. The originating, compulsive, inescapable reason was
something different and, I think, more infamous. Unless we understand that,
it's impossible to make sense of the bitter flounderings of Tony Blair and
Jack Straw as they try to defend what is being exposed as a saga of
duplicity.

What lay deeper than the weapons and whether or not they existed was a twin
commitment. First, the American decision that, short of Saddam Hussein being
assassinated or going into exile, war was going to happen: a decision, it is
now clear, that had been made by last August at the latest. And second, the
visceral inability of Mr Blair to contemplate detaching this country from
whatever Washington decided. He did this in solidarity with George Bush on
September 11. But arguably it began to happen earlier, when he journeyed to
Camp David immediately after Bush's election, returning to pronounce him,
contrary to most popular impressions, a wise and balanced statesman.

Whenever it happened, the pledge to support Bush's world view became a
crucial limitation on our prime minister's independent judgment. It lay
behind every decision the British took. Yes, Blair helped persuade Bush to
take the UN route - but it's apparent that he never intended to do anything
other than follow along if and when Bush reneged on it. All those words
about war not being inevitable were for the birds. Yes, Blair urged delay,
but for a period whose main effect was to allow time to assemble the US and
UK armies for attack, by which time it was inconceivable, even when almost
invited to by Donald Rumsfeld, that the Brits would pull out. Yes, Blair
beat his head against the wall in defence of the case for Saddam possessing
biological/chemical/nuclear weapons that posed an imminent threat to the
UK - but he loaded the benefit of any doubt in favour of war rather than no
war.

The current argument about WMD, in other words, is proceeding on a false
premise. We're asked to believe that if we, the British, had doubted the
existence of the weapons, we would not have gone to war. Every time Straw
embarks on another of his tortuous assertions that WMD did and do exist,
though they've not yet been found, the corollary is that we were always
capable of acting differently. The truth is that we had a prior, if
unadmitted, commitment to stick with Bush, come what may. So we became
impaled on an American analysis that ranked the weapons as a quite secondary
pretext.

This was to be suspected at the time, but has now become indisputable. Paul
Wolfowitz reveals that the discovery of WMD was merely a "bureaucratic"
detail, necessary to broaden support for the war. Rumsfeld admits that he
doesn't expect to find any WMD, and blithely claims this doesn't matter. The
entire US performance through autumn and winter at the UN can now be starkly
seen as a sham, conducted to keep Blair and a few others sweet. Washington
needed one faithful ally, and was prepared to go this far to secure him, no
doubt mindful of his frequent, self-abnegating assertion - the strangest
diplomatic axiom ever laid down by a prime minister - that British policy
must be guided by the need to protect Washington from isolation.

I don't doubt Blair's sincerity in wanting to persuade himself and the
voters, as well as the soldiers he sent to war, that the threat posed by
Saddam's WMD was the total reason for the conflict. He does sincerity very
well, as we saw again yesterday in his raging dismissal of Clare Short's
painful charges. He does it well because he cannot believe otherwise.

He needed those WMD last autumn, to keep the right side of international
law. He needed them in March, when he discussed openly with colleagues the
chances of his having to resign if he lost the Labour majority for war in
the House of Commons. His entire life depended on persuading enough MPs that
the weapons were a real and present danger, 45 minutes away. He needs them
today, to deflect the uproar in the Labour party. He has every reason for
sincerely believing in his own sincere belief that the weapons will be
found.

So strong is his sincerity, however, that he has tried to underpin it by
bending the language and the truth. The first sign came a few weeks ago,
when Straw started shifting tenses. Instead of saying that Iraq contains
weapons of mass destruction, the foreign secretary began to blur "has" into
"had", to cope with the inconvenient possibility that the weapons had been
destroyed some time before war began. Yet if the past tense is all we can
now be sure of, what is left of the claim that Saddam posed an imminent
threat to Britain's national security?

More blatant was Downing Street's serial exploitation of MI6 and GCHQ
material in ways quite disrespectful of the health warnings that invariably
accompany intelligence reports to ministers. They became raw facts for
manipulation by a government machine that has spent six years treating all
facts - speeches, statistics, meetings, journeys, policy commitments - as
the beginning of a propaganda spin. A cautious sceptic might have doubted
whether MI6 material too could have been devoured into this maw: it belongs,
after all, in a secret world with its own rules. But when thinly veiled MI6
rebuttals of Downing Street assertions appear on the BBC - a practice
seldom, if ever, seen before - one understands the price that is being paid
to defend Tony Blair's sincerity.

One response to this dismal history is to agree the need for a public
inquiry. We need a fair judgment on how much deception was involved in
setting the war in motion, with all its dangers and deaths. Did soldiers die
in a cause falsely described from the start? The issue seems at least as
serious as the collapse of the Matrix Churchill trial in 1992, which led
John Major to set up the arms-for-Iraq inquiry. There could be no more
independent judge to investigate it than Lord Richard Scott.

But that would merely be the forensic side. The bigger question is about
Blair's political judgment. What happened over Saddam's weapons gives the
most striking recent insight into the cost of policies that start from
thraldom to Washington. Whether or not they existed during the run-up to war
turns out to have been irrelevant to Bush, and to have mattered to Britain
only as cover for a war policy into which we were ineluctably trapped months
before.

The trend predates Blair, of course. It has been in the DNA of prime
ministers for 60 years. But Blair takes further than any predecessor a
refusal, in the field of defence and foreign policy, to mark the smallest
distance between himself and a hard right president from whom, in most other
respects, he should be alien. Believing in his influence as much as his
sincerity, he now sees it in ruins.