To Bliar Or Not To Bliar

After slipping in (and out) through the back door, Tony Bliar gave six hours evidence last Friday to the Chilcot Enquiry. To say that he was given an easy ride would be the understated equivalent of the claim that Saddam could launch WMDs in 45 minutes. Federer had a harder time against Tsonga in the Australian Open semi-final.

Nervous at the start, until it was clear that the Chilcot panel was the anti-thesis of the Spanish Inquisition, Bliar predictably re-hashed all his usual defences of “his decision to invade Iraq” – as if Bush Junior’s vengeful decision to invade, and Cheney’s greed-based commercial decision to do so, were incidental to the plot.

At the time of the invasion in 2003, the possession of WMDs by Saddam, and related violation of UN resolutions, was the pretext used by Bush and Bliar to justify the war. Leaving aside the highly questionable legal basis for the invasion (dealt with in an earlier blog), and ignoring the dodgy dossier and assorted other “evidence” of WMDs, there are some facts worth remembering.

In 2003, the UN inspectors had asked for more time to inspect having failed to find WMDs by March; second, the UN inspectors had not cited Saddam’s Government for UN violations. As we now know of course, Saddam had destroyed all Iraq’s WMDs years earlier and there were none left and none found; ipso facto, Iraq was not in violation of any UN resolution on WMDs in 2003. However, Saddam was found guilty until proven innocent by the US and UK Governments, the war (aka capital punishment) followed the kangaroo verdict….there is unlikely to be a re-trial.

Often cited by Bliar’s apologists and the man himself is the sincerity of his belief at the time that Saddam did have WMDs, and that because he thought he was right, the decision to go to war was justified. Ignoring the fact that many credible politicians and organisations at the time challenged the evidence on WMDs, just because Bliar claims he believed he was right is no excuse for his decision and sets a dangerous precedent. Doubtless, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Pinochet, (the list is endless) all held their deadly views sincerely, shall we excuse them too?

Bliar is well aware that the invasion was sold (I should say spun) to the public on an entirely false basis. Therefore, in the years since, he has sought to retrospectively justify the war using two other basic approaches – which he hardly used at all in 2003. One is linked to so-called, “regime change”; Bliar told Chilcot, “The decision I took-and frankly would take again-was, if there was any possibility that he [Saddam] could develop weapons of mass destruction, we would stop him”. In relation to this argument, the Wall Street Journal today editorialised that, “Listening to him, we are reminded why he ranks with Margaret Thatcher as a pre-eminent statesman of post-war British politics,…” I doubt Thatcher or many in the UK would agree with those sentiments.

By 2003, Iraq was heading rapidly towards being a financially bankrupt failed State. Its only potential source of revenue, which could have underpinned its development into a real threat to the West and its neighbours, laid deep underground – and Iraq, even now with Western investment, is a long way from being able to exploit its oil resources to the extent that would have been necessary to justify Bliar’s speculation.

Bliar’s “Saddam was a bad man” argument is no justification for the war. In 2003, Iraq did not present a clear and present danger to the US or UK; and there was absolutely no evidence that it would do so in the future. Bliar cannot retrospectively justify the decision to invade Iraq on the speculative grounds that Saddam might have become a problem later; using these criteria, we would have been at war with all sorts of regimes for the past 50 years. In any event, the 1980s, when the UK and US Governments sided with Saddam and helped build up the Baath Party in an effort to help Iraq beat the then “common enemy”, Iran, would have been the time to worry about whether Saddam might become a future problem.

The other argument Bliar used relates to 9/11. He said to Chilcot, “The point about this terrorist act was that over 3,000 people had been killed on the streets of New York, and this is what changed my perception of risk: If these people inspired by this religious fanaticism could have killed 30,000 they would have.” [Of course, we know that Bliar (and Bush) are no strangers to religious fanaticism.] The self-serving attempts (led by Cheney) to link Saddam with bin Laden were debunked a long time ago; the Chilcot panel’s already tarnished credibility was finally trashed altogether by their failure to nail Bliar on this line of argument.

Blair spun himself and New Labour to power, and nothing much has changed. You can take the man out of the aspiring rock star, but you can't take the disappointed rock star out of the aspiring man. The seeds of Blair's policy on Iraq were rooted in his vanity and his intoxication with his own position and with US power, and not in any deep moral conversion. By aligning himself so closely to Bush's "War on Terrorism" and by sharing with him the world stage, and basking in the adoration of the US Congress, Blair left himself with nowhere to go when the Bush fundamentalists switched tack to Iraq and WMDs.

The US-UK attack on Iraq played into the hands of fundamentalist extremism everywhere. It weakened reformist movements in Iran and throughout the Middle East, and spawned a whole new generation of martyrs and terrorists. It won't bring democracy or stability to Iraq in this decade, any more than the lines drawn by the UK and French on the maps which created Iraq more than five decades ago, achieved stability then. The Iraq war has strengthened terrorism not weakened it; in fact, the war diverted critical US and UK military and intelligence resources away from a real fight on terror and has left us with today’s critical terror situations in Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan.

In conclusion, perhaps the most reprehensible aspect of Bliar’s attendance last Friday was his failure to publicly recognise the sacrifices made by our servicemen and servicewomen in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even when invited by Chilcot to add some final statement at the close, he remained defiant and arrogant, and silent. The families of lost soldiers were in the audience and, whatever the rights and wrongs of the war, these soldiers did their duty and paid the ultimate price. Bliar should have thanked them and honoured them; the fact that he did not will ensure that his coveted legacy will be irrevocably destroyed, and rightly so.