Brian Barder's website

In a fit of absent-mindedness (aka sheer stupidity) I have just opened a seriously infected file (sent to me via Skype with a message purporting to come from a reliable Skype contact) which has played havoc with my computer, including disabling every known application that might have been able to clean it up.

So if you get a message on Skype purporting to come from me, on no account open the link in it to a zip (or any other) file:  and please don’t expect any new Ephems posts or comments or responses to your comments for a while.  I suspect that it’s going to be a question of reinstalling Windows and then a raft of programmes and applications and data files from back-ups.  The mind boggles.

Please don’t think it necessary (or desirable) to post messages of sympathy here.  Of course if you know of a quick and safe way to get System Restore Point working again (the virus has thoughtfully switched it off and it won’t switch on again), or how to change all the registry entries back to how they were yesterday, by all means let me know.  Meanwhile I’m going to absent me from electronic felicity a while.

Update (8 Feb 2010): Many hours of effort by myself and my state-of-the-art, chip-off-the-old-block computer guru have failed to remove the various nasties let loose in my PC by the vile virus that I idiotically unloosed — and the latest news of fresh disasters is that I have now found that I have a Trojan (html/Harnig.A) in my faithful laptop, too, and have no idea how to remove it.  I think I may feel a new computer coming on, but I can’t afford a new laptop as well.  Perhaps a few months without a computer at all will be good for the soul.  Cold turkey, anyone?

Brian

Tony Blair’s six hours at the witness table of the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry yesterday gave us a bravura performance, allowing him to display all the old familiar dramatic and forensic skills that got him out of so many scrapes during his years at No. 10.  The media this morning all comment on how nervous he seemed initially (those in the room apparently saw his hand shaking when he poured himself a glass of water), although I would have said only that he was tense to start with — as who wouldn’t have been?  But it didn’t take him long to recover the old charm, fluency and unquestioning self-confidence.

The performance, which is exactly what it was, revealed all the old familiar weaknesses, too:  the evasion of inconvenient detail by elevating the discussion to a grand, sweeping level of generality;  the reduction of all issues to a Wagnerian conflict between Good and Evil, with Blair (surprise, surprise) doughtily championing the former; above all, the constant justification by reference to his “passionate belief” in his own unvarying rightness of every decision, however badly flawed by inattention to the facts, or failure to heed contrary advice, or predictably disastrous consequences.  Self-belief is his trade-mark, and what makes him appear strong and decisive.  Contrary to the placards waved by the anti-Blair protestors outside the building, denouncing BLIAR!, he rarely lies, anyway in the strict definition of the word.  He says things that are not true or accurate, but he passionately believes them to be true when he says them:  there is rarely any obvious intent to deceive.  Challenged to defend his misrepresentation in the government dossier, and in the key house of commons debate on the eve of war, of the intelligence about Saddam’s WMD as definite and beyond doubt (when it was neither), he counters that it was definite and beyond doubt in his own mind, which was all that mattered — to him, anyway.  For Blair, as for Hamlet, “”There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

There’s no need to repeat here the textual analysis of yesterday’s Blair gospel very adequately undertaken this morning by the massed regiments of the commentariat and the bloggers.  But one key attitude was skilfully revealed by some insistent questioning, an attitude that reveals a huge amount about Blair himself and indeed more generally about New Labour: his attitude to risk.  When Sir Roderic Lyne, most tenacious of the Inquiry’s members, pointed out that Blair’s perception of Saddam Hussein as posing a potential threat to the whole world, including Britain, had not been shared by many other governments and people to whom Iraq was much closer and in principle more potentially menacing, Blair replied that –

you are right in saying, “If this and if that”, but you see, for me, because of the change after September 11, I wasn’t prepared to run that risk.  I really wasn’t prepared to take the risk….  given Saddam’s history, given his use of chemical weapons, given the over 1 million people whose deaths he had caused, given ten years of breaking UN Resolutions, could we take the risk of this man reconstituting his weapons programmes, or is that a risk it would be irresponsible to take?  I formed the judgment, and it is a judgment in the end. It is a decision. I had to take the decision, and I believed, and in the end so did the Cabinet, so did Parliament incidentally, that we were right not to run that risk, but you are completely right, in the end, what this is all about are the risks.

SIR RODERIC LYNE: Thank you.

RT HON TONY BLAIR: ….my judgment is you don’t take any risks with this issue.

[Chilcot Iraq Inquiry, 29 January 2010, testimony by Tony Blair,
http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/43909/100129-blair.pdf, pp. 90-91]

There’s no serious attempt to weigh the extent of the risk — related to hypothetical future developments rather than to any actual risk to Britain posed by Iraq in 2003, even if you believed at the time that Iraq still possessed some WMD — in relation to the harm certain to be done by launching a full-scale war, with all its predictable and unpredictable consequences for thousands of innocent (and guilty) people.  “You don’t take any risks with this issue.”

This disproportionate response to even remote and hypothetical risk is at the root of the most mysterious and unaccountable decision taken by Blair on Iraq — namely to abandon UN diplomacy and the weapons inspection process before they had had a chance to resolve the WMD problem peacefully, joining G W Bush in the attack on Iraq, even though not one of the conditions he had laid down (according to Blair’s own account and that of several other witnesses) for UK participation in American military action had been satisfied, namely that all peaceful means of resolving the problem must first have been exhausted, that war must be a last resort, and that the UN Security Council must have authorised the use of force:

[p. 127] [SIR RODERIC LYNE:]  At this really critical moment, and obviously a very
15 difficult moment in your life, you had reached the stage
16 where you weren’t going to get a second resolution,
17 military action was imminent. Now, you had been working
18 intensively for months, indeed for a year, to try to
19 create a supportive environment… but you hadn’t actually got
21 a clear and strong international consensus for this
22 action. Public opinion here in the UK was divided. No
23 really major progress had been made on the Middle East
24 peace plan…. We
25 hadn’t got the second resolution, and you were also…
starting to hear warnings from
2 people like Brigadier… Tim Cross,
3 who came to see you in Downing Street and saw
4 Alastair Campbell, I think, that the post-conflict
5 preparations being made by the Americans didn’t look at
6 all good.
7 At this point, you must, I suppose, have had some
8 pause for thought. Did President Bush at this point,
9 when you hadn’t really satisfied the preconditions you
10 wanted to achieve, offer to go it alone and offer you
11 a way out?
12 RT HON TONY BLAIR: I think the Americans would have done
13 that. I think President Bush actually at one point
14 shortly before the debate said, “Look, if it is too
15 difficult for Britain, we understand”. But I took the
16 view very strongly then, and do, that it was right for
17 us to be with America, since we believed in this too,
18 and it is true that it was very divisive, but it was
19 divisive in the sense that there were two groups. There
20 was also a very strong group in the international
21 community, in Parliament, I would say even in the
22 Cabinet, who also thought it was the right thing to do.
….
[p.130]  It was a really tough situation, yes,
15 and in the end, as I say, what influenced me was that my
16 judgment ultimately was that Saddam was going to remain
17 a threat and that in this change in the perception of
18 risk after September 11 it was important that we were
19 prepared to act, our alliance with America was
20 important, and, to put this very clearly, we had been
21 down a UN path that I genuinely hoped would work.
22 I hoped that 1441 would avoid conflict happening.

(Chilcot Iraq Inquiry, 29 January 2010, testimony by Tony Blair,
http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/43909/100129-blair.pdf)

“Even” in the Cabinet there was a “very strong” group that supported the war!  Well, who would have guessed it?

This inability to balance the scale of a specific risk against the drawbacks and dangers of the action necessary to avoid it is further demonstrated by Blair’s definition of the evidence of Iraqi non-cooperation with the weapons inspectors, which he insists constituted a sufficient ‘material breach’ to justify the invasion and occupation of the country:  namely Saddam’s failure to allow the inspectors to take Iraqi scientists out of Iraq to interview them elsewhere without risk of intimidation.  When it was pointed out to him that the chief inspector, Blix, had been reluctant to act in this way for fear that any scientist whom he invited to accompany him for interview outside the country might be killed, Blair replied triumphantly that this just showed what a vile régime Saddam’s had been — true enough, but not an adequate answer to the proposition that Blix’s reluctance made Iraq’s failure to pass this test of cooperation a flimsy basis for a verdict of material breach of Iraq’s obligations under the UN resolutions, a breach so serious as to justify war:

[A]ctually, if you look, both at the Blix reports and we can come to the detail of that and the Iraq Survey Group, [Saddam] was deliberately concealing documentation, and what is more, he was deliberately not allowing people to be interviewed properly.
(Ibid, p. 105)

And for this material breach Iraq was subjected to the ’shock and awe’ of bombardment, invasion and occupation, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were to be killed, and 179 British and 4,374 American servicemen and women were to lose their lives.  Operative paragraph 4 of resolution 1441 had required the Security Council, not the UK or US governments, to “assess” the situation in the event of a report of a further material breach by Iraq:  what assessment could have concluded that the gravity of this breach was sufficient justification for the abandonment of the weapons inspection and the immediate resort to war?

There’s a more general lesson to be learned from this ingrained habit of over-reacting to risk.  It has been characteristic of New Labour under Blair and Brown to be pathologically risk-averse.  The reaction to even the most limited threats of terrorism has been to rush into legislation, much of it designed to permit the imprisonment or house arrest of people who have not committed any offence but who the security authorities think might commit some terrorism-connected offence in the future: hence the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects without charge, trial or conviction for any crime, under the vile régime of Control Orders:  and the attempted deportation of foreigners who have lived blameless lives in our country, sometimes for years, on mere unproven suspicion of some indirect involvement with terrorism or other terrorist suspects.  The government has tried to legislate to permit the sectioning and indefinite detention of people suffering from indefinable and untreatable forms of mental illness — not because they have done anything to harm others or themselves, but because some committee of men in suits thinks they might do so in future.  The same government has introduced the even more vicious system of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs) under which those who have committed any of a huge number of offences, some inherently trivial, may be given a tariff or minimum sentence of imprisonment representing the punitive element in the sentence (for retribution, deterrence and rehabilitation) but who will not be released after serving the minimum sentence — sometimes just a few weeks — but will be kept indefinitely in prison until they can prove to another body of men (and women) in suits that they won’t re-offend if released.  Thousands of people are swelling our already grotesquely large prison population with little or no prospect of ever being released because they can’t satisfy naturally risk-averse parole boards with an unprovable forecast about their future hypothetical behaviour;  only around 3 per cent of those enduring this Kafkaesque, or Stalinist, form of preventive detention are being released each year, the rest being effectively punished indefinitely for offences they haven’t yet committed.  As a result, there are people still in prison years after completing brief minimum sentences for (e.g.) indecent exposure who have in effect been given life sentences. Iraq is attacked, its people slaughtered and its economy laid waste, not because it posed a threat to its attackers but in case it might do so at some unspecified time in the future.  “My judgment is you don’t take any risks with this issue.”

This congenital aversion to risk is not, I believe (passionately or otherwise), driven mainly by any rational fear of the implications of the risk materialising, still less by a rational cost-benefit analysis of trying to avert it.  Ministers, the heads of the security and police services, parole boards and sometimes even judges and magistrates are far too often frightened of being blamed for having done nothing to avert or pre-empt a risk which then materialises.  Faced with an offender who has completed his punishment and is applying for release with promises of good behaviour if his application is approved, the parole board will naturally act on the calculus that if they release the applicant and he promptly re-offends, they will be blamed for failing to foresee the new offence;  whereas if they reject the application and return the applicant to his cell for another few years until he can apply again, the risk to themselves is nil.  (Never mind that rejection runs the risk of a monstrous injustice to the applicant:  that’s unprovable, since no-one can ever know what would have happened if he had been released.)  Similarly, it’s far safer to invade Iraq and overthrow its government than to leave it in place with the risk that it might develop nuclear weapons at some future time and rent them out to some terrorist gang for use in Regent Street, W1;  we’ll never know if that would have happened or not.  The motto is: mind your back.  Never lay yourself open to the charge that you have done nothing in the face of an identified risk, however remote or trivial. Pass yet another law enabling you to lock up foreigners with bushy black beards and back-packs.  Apply your sledge-hammer to every nut.  Public acknowledgement that some risks simply have to be accepted, if the only action to avert them carries heavier penalties than accepting them, ensures that you will be crucified by the tabloids and that your candour will be exploited by an unscrupulous Opposition.  Play safe!

Such is the governing philosophy of cowards.

Brian

The academic and historian Professor Geoffrey Warner has kindly authorised me to publish on this website a short but meticulously researched paper comparing the evidence given to three official inquiries — Butler, Hutton and now Chilcot — about the famous (or infamous) warning in one of the two Iraq dossiers that Saddam Hussein could have WMD ready for launch within 45 minutes of giving the order. The comparison identifies some notable and suggestive inconsistencies from which Professor Warner draws an equally interesting and irresistible conclusion.

Professor Warner’s paper, “Alastair Campbell, Jonathan Powell and the 45-Minute Warning”, is at

http://www.barder.com/alastair-campbell-jonathan-powell-and-the-45-minute-warning.

It’s a useful advance brief for those planning to watch and listen to Tony Blair’s evidence to the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry on Friday, 29 January 2010.  (For the same purposes please also have a look at http://www.barder.com/2334 before Friday.)  Today’s evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry by Sir Michael Wood, Elizabeth Wilmshurst and David Brummell has been very gripping, and some of the documents that were dramatically declassified during the morning session are fascinating.  All these are available on the Iraq Inquiry website, itself a model of how to make available to all of us with internet access a huge mass of vital information, much of it only recently declassified.

I will be glad to pass on to Professor Warner any comments on his paper that may be posted here, all of them welcome.

Brian

This week the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry starts to hear evidence on, among other things, the legality or illegality of the Iraq war.  Among the key witnesses will be Sir Michael Wood, at the time the Foreign Secretary’s principal legal adviser:  Elizabeth Wilmshurst, then Wood’s deputy, who resigned because she could not accept the Attorney-General’s formal advice that the war would be legal, contrary to her own opinion that it would amount to “the crime of aggression”;  the then Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, who had expressed serious reservations about the legality of military action in his private advice to the prime minister on 7 March 2003 but then appeared to have dismissed those reservations when he declared that war would be legal in his published opinion of the 17th, just 10 days later;  Jack Straw, then Foreign Secretary (and so the main recipient of the advice of Michael Wood and Elizabeth Wilmshurst), who is to return to the Inquiry to discuss legality; and, of course, next Friday 29 January 2010, Tony Blair, in what may be the last of his starring roles.

The issues in this debate are complex, especially for non-lawyers and those unfamiliar with the arcane language and procedures of the UN, especially the Security Council.  It’s a sign of terminal egotism to quote one’s own earlier writings, but looking back at what I wrote on this blog back in April 2005, when the main relevant documents had either leaked or been released, I seem to recognise what might serve almost as a brief for the Chilcot Inquirers when they start to question this week’s key witnesses.  So with all due apologies, I am re-posting my article of 29 April 2005 immediately below.  Those equipped with exceptional stamina may also care to read the second part of the article, which deals with some other related issues.  That is at http://www.barder.com/194.    Here’s Part 1.  The passages now in bold type seem to me of special interest as Lord Goldsmith’s own explanation of the apparent change in his opinions between 7 and 17 March 2003, and one that has not been widely mentioned in recent commentaries.

Part I: Was the Iraq war legal? Reflections on the Attorney-General’s advice to the prime minister

April 29th, 2005

The main importance of the 13-page ‘advice’ of the Attorney-General on the legality (or lack of it) of going to war against Iraq without a second UN resolution authorising it, given to the prime minister on 7 March 2003, lies in the harsh and unforgiving light it sheds on the same Attorney-General’s ‘opinion’, published 10 days later on the 17th, in which he set out his apparently unreserved and categorical view that even without a second resolution, the war would be legal. It’s not that he ‘changed his mind’ in those intervening 10 days. On the 7th, he set out the arguments for and against legality, warning that the arguments against might well prevail if the issue came to a court, and laying down the conditions needing to be satisfied if there was no second resolution but the war took place and an argument had to be constructed for its lawfulness. Contrary to widespread speculation before the full text was at last released on 28 April 2005, the 7 March 2003 advice doesn’t come down on one side or the other as to legality: it sets out the arguments on both sides, and concedes that “I accept that a reasonable case can be made that resolution 1441 is capable in principle of reviving the authorisation in 678 without a further resolution”, about as guarded a conclusion as can be imagined from even the most recklessly confident lawyer (which by all accounts Lord Goldsmith is not). By the 17th, the attempt to secure a second resolution has collapsed (not because of any French threat to veto it, but because a clear majority of the Security Council’s members disagreed with it): Lord Goldsmith has asked the prime minister whether his test for the legality of a war without that resolution is satisfied – i.e. that “there are strong factual grounds for concluding that Iraq has failed to take the final opportunity. … we would need to be able to demonstrate hard evidence of non-compliance and non-cooperation. … the views of UNMOVIC and the IAEA will be highly significant in this respect”: and Mr Blair has replied[1] that that test is indeed satisfied, meaning that he has “strong factual grounds” and “hard evidence” that Iraq has failed to get rid of its WMD, despite a report by the chief UN weapons inspector on the 7th that Iraq has begun to cooperate, that a number of missiles have been destroyed, and that the inspectors still can’t find any WMD. We now know, of course, how much credence should have been attached to Mr Blair’s “hard evidence” that Iraq still had WMD and had failed to comply with UN resolutions requiring Saddam to get rid of them.

In the light of Mr Blair’s assurance, then, the Attorney-General at last comes off the fence and declares that in his independent, unpressurised opinion the war will be legal. Ignorant of the overwhelming doubts, qualifications and warnings in the advice of ten days earlier, the Cabinet, parliament and much of public opinion accepts this categorical declaration of legality, and Britain goes to war.

Ministers are thus correct in arguing that the Attorney-General did not “change his mind” between 7 and 17 March 03. What did happen was that he finally made up his mind. But there remains a fatal inconsistency between the 7 March advice and the 17 March opinion: in the first, Goldsmith acknowledges the highly arguable character of the case for legality, warning that the contrary case will be regarded by many as at least equally strong, and indeed quite likely to prevail in a court of law (and this is regardless of the strength or otherwise of the ‘evidence’ of Iraqi non-compliance). In the second, he sets out the argument for legality shorn of any warning that it is highly debatable and that it might well be rejected if the issue were to come to court. The point about inconsistency is lucidly and powerfully set out in an article in the Guardian of 29 April 2005 by Lord Goodhart, the LibDem spokesman for constitutional affairs. It’s obligatory reading for those who want to find a way through the fog of allegations and counter-allegations about the probity of the prime minister’s conduct in this affair.

There are perfectly sound reasons for insisting that in general the advice of the Law Officers to the government should not be published: the possibility of publication could well inhibit any Attorney-General from giving frank and politically inconvenient advice on intensely controversial issues, an essential part of his functions. But there can be no excuse for having withheld from the cabinet, parliament and the country the fact that Goldsmith had advised the prime minister in such clear language that the case for the legality of a war without a second resolution was so iffy that if it had to be argued in court, it might well fail. The Attorney-General’s ‘opinion’ of 17 March was stated as if the arguments for legality were firm and unambiguous, thus providing a reliable legal basis for going to war – and the cabinet and parliament accepted it as such. Yet the secret advice of the 7th shows that it was nothing of the sort. Lord Goldsmith had been unwilling to go further than saying that he accepted that “a reasonable case can be made that resolution 1441 is capable in principle” of being interpreted as reviving the authority for the use of force given by the Security Council ten years earlier in the completely different context of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

Just as the secret intelligence evidence for Iraq’s WMD was deliberately misrepresented by the prime minister as being firm and conclusive when in fact he knew it to be patchy and sporadic, so the Attorney-General’s opinion that the war would be legal was deliberately misrepresented by the prime minister as firm and conclusive, by his suppression of the all-important caveats and warnings in the 7 March advice. Neither the flimsy intelligence nor the hesitant and qualified opinion on legality justified a decision to go to war. The extent of the flimsiness of the intelligence and the qualified nature of the legal justification were concealed from parliament and the country, and probably even from the rest of the Cabinet, in order to secure endorsement of a decision which Mr Blair had actually taken a year earlier at his fateful meeting with President George W Bush. Suppressio veri, the suppression of the truth, is morally indistinguishable from lying.

There are two other interesting and significant aspects of the 7 March advice that are worth airing. I discuss them in Part II [below].

For the full text of the Attorney-General’s advice of 7 March 2003 on Iraq war legality, in readable form, not requiring you to download a PDF file, please see http://www.barder.com/politics/international/attorney/advice-7-march on my website. The original is available (in a poor photocopy of the typescript, in PDF format) on the No. 10 Downing Street website[2].

Brian Barder
http://www.barder.com/ephems
29 April 2005

Up-dates, 24 January 2010:

[1] Not only did Mr Blair reply giving Lord Goldsmith the assurance he had requested:  Lord Goldsmith also flew to Washington and received a similar assurance from the State Department.  It seems to have been these assurances that Lord Goldsmith relied on to justify omitting the doubts and reservations expressed in his 7 March opinion from the much shorter, published opinion of the 17th, 10 days later.  But this of course in turn depends on an interpretation of Security Council resolution 1441 as authorising any UN member state to make its own unilateral finding of fact about Iraqi behaviour as warranting resort to the use of force without any need for a second resolution of the Council endorsing and authorising it.  The pros and cons of that controversial interpretation, including what we now know to be the government’s arguments for it, are discussed in detail in the first part of my blog post at http://www.barder.com/194 (the second part of the post quoted above).

[2] The photocopy of the Attorney-General’s advice of 7 March seems no longer to be available on the No. 10 website.  But it’s there on the Guardian’s website, at http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2005/04/28/legal.pdf (PDF file).

Brian

In your heart you know he’s wrong….

….but at least he’s better-looking than Gordon

[Hat-tip: http://mydavidcameron.com/]

In its report of the secret letter of 25 March 2002 (a year before the US-UK attack on Iraq) from Jack Straw, then Foreign & Commonwealth Secretary, to Tony Blair, warning the prime minister of the likely pitfalls involved in any future military action against Iraq, the Sunday Times of 17 January 2010 includes a pregnant sentence:

The document clearly implies that Blair was already planning for military action even though he continued to insist to the British public for almost another year that no decision had been made.
[http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6991087.ece]

The implication of this is obvious, and reflects an extraordinarily widespread misconception on the part of commentators on the Iraq affair and current evidence about it to the Chilcot Inquiry:  it seeks to persuade us that if a government undertakes contingency planning for a possible future course of action, it must have taken a firm decision to adopt that course of action, and if it denies that any such decision has been taken, those denials are lies.  The fallacy in this proposition should be obvious.  According to the Guardian, John Witherow is now in his 13th year of editing the Sunday Times, the longest-serving editor in the history of Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspaper empire.  Did Mr Witherow not read his newspaper’s front page story before it was published, and if so didn’t this particular sentence strike him as not entirely kosher? Would the Sunday Times have allowed such a shoddy comment to appear on its front page when Harry Evans was its editor?

Tony Blair and Jack Straw are open to devastating criticism of numerous aspects of their records on Iraq;  the assertion that they, and some of their colleagues, may even be guilty of war crimes, is by no means far-fetched.  In such a situation, it’s surely a sad waste of precious ammunition to challenge Blair’s denials (until the last moment) that any decision had been taken to commit UK forces to the attack on Iraq on the absurd grounds that planning for possible participation in military action had begun a year earlier.  Nor are those denials in any way inconsistent with Blair’s conditional promise to George W Bush that Britain would take part in military action alongside the Americans if peaceful means of resolving the Iraq problem had been tried and had failed, leaving the use of force as the only remaining option.

The real and central charge against Blair, Straw and all those who connived at the UK decision to take part in the attack on Iraq is that peaceful diplomatic means of resolving the problem had not been exhausted when that fateful decision was taken in March 2003:  the UN weapons inspectors could and should have been given more time to determine whether Iraq actually possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction.  The use of force, in other words, was not the last resort.  It was hopelessly premature.  Because it was premature and not a last resort, a clear majority of members of the Security Council, including three of the five permanent members, were not willing to authorise it.  Without that UN authority, it was illegal under the UN Charter and thus contrary to international law: in the damning words of the Foreign Office’s deputy legal adviser, it amounted to “the crime of aggression”.

Banging on about the theory that Blair had taken a firm decision to use force a year before the invasion, or that his promise to Bush that Britain would do so was unconditional, is illogical, contrary to the evidence, and an unwelcome distraction from the real issues — which are grave enough, in all conscience.

Brian

When I commented in question-time after a recent London club discussion dinner about Tony Blair’s pre-Iraq prevarications[1] over the conditions in which he would commit Britain to war, the distinguished speaker (I later learned) murmured to his neighbour that “this chap is obsessed with Iraq”.  Well, maybe I am.  It may be a lot of water under the bridge now, but considering that this was probably the biggest and bloodiest blunder in UK foreign policy since the charge of the Light Brigade, it seems to me that it remains important to discover how and why the disaster occurred.  Too many key questions remain unanswered.

In The Observer of 20 December 2009 Blair’s biographer Dr Anthony Seldon said he didn’t think Tony Blair should apologise for having taken us to war.  Well, I don’t think he should, either;  but I do think he should explain why he did it when he did.  I submitted the following letter to The Observer for publication on the same day, a few hours before leaving for a three-week family holiday in Ethiopia.  I discovered some time later that the letter had been published, essentially unchanged, in the issue of The Observer of 27 December 2009.  The text as submitted reads:

Sir,

Anthony Seldon (All that I admired about Tony Blair is being destroyed by his lack of humility, Dec 20) criticises Tony Blair for various misjudgements in his handling of the Iraq war, but mysteriously does “not believe that he should apologise for the fact of taking the country to war.”  True, apologising would be meaningless, but Mr Blair clearly owes the Chilcot Inquiry an explanation of his catastrophic decision to join the US in attacking Iraq.

According to the evidence already given to Chilcot, and as Blair had consistently stressed to Bush, it was a condition of UK participation in the war that it must have the prior approval of the Security Council, which Blair manifestly failed to get.  The FCO lawyers had warned that attacking Iraq without UN authority would “amount to the crime of aggression” and the Attorney-General[*] warned until the last moment that the legal justification for war was at best shaky.  Two of Blair’s most senior and trusted advisers have told Chilcot, and must have told Blair at the time, that in their view the weapons inspectors should have been given more time before any resort to military action, as the inspectors themselves had asked.  The military have confirmed that our forces could have disengaged right up to the last moment.  None of the conditions for UK military action stated publicly by Blair on television and elsewhere had been satisfied.  A clear majority of Security Council members and of our EU partners thought the use of force at that time would be premature.

Blair would have had ample justification for holding back.  Was it that he feared bitter accusations of cowardice from Bush and the loss of his matinée idol status with American public opinion?  The Iraq Inquiry, and all of us, including Dr Seldon, are entitled to know why, at the supreme crisis of his political life, our prime minister and a supine Cabinet took our country into an illegal, premature, unnecessary and disastrous war when he could so easily have declined to do so.  All his other blunders, described by Dr Seldon, were relatively insignificant compared with this.

Yours sincerely
Brian Barder (HM Diplomatic Service, 1965–94)
[*] In my letter as submitted and published, I erroneously attributed this warning to the Lord Chancellor instead of the Attorney-General.

I have written previously that evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry suggests that although in his dialogues with President G W Bush, well before military action began, Blair seemingly committed Britain to joining the Americans in using force against Iraq if and when that became necessary and unavoidable, he appears to have attached to that promise the proviso, explicit or implicit, that the use of force must be a last resort, to be undertaken only when all other methods of securing Iraqi disarmament had been tried and had failed, and only if it had been authorised by the UN Security Council as required by the UN Charter under international law.

It’s possible to ask how he could have made even such a qualified promise to a foreign head of state and government without the prior agreement of his Cabinet, and no doubt that question will be put pressingly to him when he testifies to Chilcot.  But as I argued in my letter to The Observer (above), the more important question is surely why Tony Blair agreed to commit Britain to take part in Bush’s war with Iraq when war was manifestly not the last resort;  when the possibility of a peaceful resolution of the problem by allowing the weapons inspectors more time had still not been by any means exhausted;  when UN Security Council authority for the use of force at that time could not be obtained because a clear majority of the Council thought the use of force then would be premature; and when our major EU and other partners and allies were strongly opposed to starting a war at that time.  In other words, not one of Blair’s conditions, apparently communicated in advance to Bush, for joining the US in military action against Iraq had been satisfied when the attack began.  Yet we went to war anyway.

Why?

Tony Blair still owes us an explanation.  Only when we get it can we make the final judgements about how it all happened and which of our political and other leaders were more or less to blame.  Then and only then it will be time to move on.  Meanwhile I’m not the only one ‘obsessively’ concerned to get some answers.

[1] Prevarication:  a statement that deviates from or perverts the truth; that is intentionally vague or ambiguous; the deliberate act of deviating from the truth.  [WordWeb]  Nothing to do with delay (procrastination).

Brian

It’s disappointing that the Chilcot Inquiry didn’t focus relentlessly on the gaping hole in Alastair Campbell’s defence of his and Blair’s record in Iraq, summed up here:

“When it came to it, when the diplomatic process clearly was not going to resolve the issue, post [UN Security Council resolution] 1441 and when the French pulled the plug, then military action became the only means of response.” [Transcript, Campbell evidence to Chilcot, p.41, lines 17-20]

This grossly misrepresents what happened.  The diplomatic process (i.e. the UN weapons inspection backed up by UN threats of force if Iraq failed to cooperate with it) could still have “resolved the issue” if the premature and illegal US-UK attack on Iraq hadn’t pre-empted it.  A sizeable majority of the Security Council wanted to give the inspectors more time, for which the inspectors themselves had asked. The transcript of President Chirac’s famous TV interview shows that France never “pulled the plug” (i.e. never said “never”) as UK ministers have subsequently repeatedly claimed – a deeply misleading excuse that Alastair Campbell has now repeated. Blair would have been fully justified in disengaging from the US military action, even at the last moment, on the grounds that diplomacy and the UN weapons inspectors still had a chance of resolving the issue without blood needing to be spilled.  The indictment against Blair (and his cabinet colleagues) is that the war was not the last resort.  Campbell, in his evidence, wrongly and repeatedly said in effect that it was.

It’s interesting that Alastair Campbell (for whom in many ways I have a lot of respect, perhaps perversely) carefully avoided basing his allegations about the French position on the famous TV interview given by President Chirac on 10 March 2003, a few days before the US, UK and a few others abandoned the diplomatic effort and went to war:  an interview that has constantly been misquoted and misinterpreted ever since, as the transcript shows.  Instead, Campbell referred to secret Anglo-French talks which he had attended at the time.  Without being able to see the record of these talks, and being unable to know even who took part in them, none of us is in a position to question Campbell’s assertion that in the talks the French defined their position in a way that made it fruitless either to give the inspectors more time to complete their work or to hope that if the inspection definitively failed, the Security Council would be prepared to authorise military action against Iraq in order to compel compliance with the Council’s own mandatory resolutions, without a French veto or No vote.  All we can say is that as late as 10 March, the French President set out his government’s position in the famous television interview at considerable length, in exhaustive and subtle detail:  and nothing that he said indicated a determination to ‘veto’, or even to vote against as part of a Security Council majority (which would not constitute a veto) any resolution to authorise force against Iraq at any time in the future in any circumstances.  On the contrary:  Chirac several times pointedly reminded the interviewer that France was by no means a pacifist country.  It’s also worth reminding ourselves that everything said by Chirac in the interview precisely corresponded with the views of a solid majority of Security Council member governments at the time.

Of course it’s possible that in Mr Campbell’s secret talks the French took an irrevocably negative position, totally different from that defined by their President publicly on 10 March, indeed so negative as to justify Washington and London in embarking on a ferocious military attack on and invasion of Iraq without a vestige of authority from the Security Council as required under international law.  But that seems, on the face of it, rather unlikely.  And if the position of France was that defined in the Chirac television interview, Mr Campbell really ought to stop using France as an excuse for an action that was unwarranted, illegal, in breach of our Charter obligations, unnecessary, premature, opposed by much of the world including some of our closest allies and partners — and without question not the last resort.

Update (21 January 2010):  Professor Geoffrey Warner, in a comment on this blog post (below), has questioned my interpretation of the Chirac interview, quoting a passage from the transcript in support of his (and Alastair Campbell’s and Jack Straw’s and Tony Blair’s) opposite interpretation.  In a long response I have quoted back several other extracts from the Chirac interview which in my continuing view support my (and many others’) interpretation, namely that Chirac never said Never, only Not Now. My exchange with Professor Warner is at

http://www.barder.com/2300#comment-91331.

Brian (back from Ethiopia)

Ephems will shortly be intermittently AFK* for a variety of reasons so please don’t expect any blog posts or responses to comments for a while.

Meanwhile we sit and shiver in sub-zero London and wonder whether our daughter in snow-bound New York is going to make it onto her flight to Heathrow.  Global warming?  Pah, humbug.  Lord Lawson must know something that we don’t.

Many thanks to all those of you who have contributed to lively debates on this blog during the year, and especially those who have challenged my more opinionated and partisan posts.  No-one has so far convinced me that our peculiarly British form of preventive detention (Indeterminate sentences for Public Protection or IPPs) can be justified under any civilised system of justice;  or that Tony Blair didn’t mean it when he appeared to say that if he had known that there were no WMD he would have had to think of a different, equally bogus, reason for attacking Iraq;  or that we’re doing more good than harm in Afghanistan or that if we withdrew all British forces tomorrow, the Pakistan régime would collapse, handing over its hydrogen bombs to al-Qaeda (I don’t see the Americans pulling out just because the British did); or that if we all try hard enough we can prevent the planet warming up to more than 2 deg.C;  or that Tony Blair is a middle east peace envoy when he very obviously isn’t;  or that Labour promised a referendum on the Lisbon treaty (or, even if it did, that any government of sound mind would have dared to hold one); or that when government spending is keeping the economy alive (just) pending the long awaited renaissance of demand and supply in the private sector, cutting government spending is a jolly wizard idea — don’t they teach them economics at Eton?;  or that Britain will sink beneath the waves if we don’t pay off our national debt within three weeks of the next election;  or that al-Megrahi should have been left to rot in his Scottish prison until he died — or that there’s no room for doubt about his share of guilt for the Lockerbie bombing;  or that Tony Blair — why do I keep coming back to the old rogue? — would have made an absolutely spiffing President of Europe, even if such a job existed, which it doesn’t;  or that if we keep on fighting the War on Drugs, we’ll eventually win it, any more than we did in Iraq or will in Afghanistan; or that everyone in the country watches a programme called, weirdly, “Strictly”, or that anyone I know watches ‘the X Factor’.  But on all these great matters, Ephems’s meat and drink in the past year, I readily acknowledge that I could be wrong, and on some of them I hope I am.

So I wish a happy Christmas to those visitors to this site who are of a religious disposition and members of the appropriate sect, and jolly holidays to the rest: and to everyone, my best wishes for a much better year in almost every respect than 2009 has been.  It’s a relief to say goodbye to this low dishonest decade (no, I know 2010, not 2009, will officially be the end of the decade, but at least 2009 marks the end of the Noughties.  Good riddance to it!).

*AFK: Away from Keyboard (but you knew that really).

Brian

Does Tony Blair realise that in a couple of sentences in a religious affairs interview with one Fern Britton on television, he has blown what’s left of his defence on the Iraq war out of the water?

‘”If you had known then that there were no WMDs, would you still have gone on?” Blair was asked. He replied: “I would still have thought it right to remove him [Saddam Hussein]“. Significantly, Blair added: “I mean obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat.”‘ (Guardian, 12 December 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/dec/12/tony-blair-iraq-chilcot-inquiry)

Some of the evidence already given to the Chilcot Inquiry on the Iraq war has sought to distinguish between, on the one hand, President George Bush’s concentration on régime change as the main purpose of invading and occupying Iraq, and, on the other hand, Tony Blair’s realisation that compelling Iraq to obey UN resolutions requiring Iraq to get rid of its Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) was the only objective capable of securing UN authority for the use of force. He also appeared to understand that UN authority might well be a necessary condition for getting the support of parliamentary, media and public opinion in the UK and the rest of the EU for going to war.   Admittedly this version of events doesn’t explain why Blair, having failed to secure UN authority for the use of force, nevertheless went ahead and committed British forces to fight alongside the Americans in the attack on Iraq;  more than one Chilcot witness has pointed out that when UK efforts to get UN approval failed, Blair still had the option, even at that late stage, of refusing to allow British participation in the US military action on the perfectly honourable grounds that his proclaimed condition for participation — UN authority — had not been satisfied.   Blair was forced to try to square this circle by devising a far-fetched and almost universally unconvincing legal fable according to which Security Council resolution 1441, read with earlier UN resolutions passed in the context of the first Gulf war, contained an implicit authority for using force against Iraq without the need for further UN authority.  As Hans Blix, the senior UN weapons inspector at the time, writes in the Guardian of 14 December 2009:

In these circumstances [the UK] developed and advanced the argument that the war was authorised by the council under a series of earlier resolutions. As Condoleezza Rice put it, the alliance action “upheld the authority of the council”. It was irrelevant to this argument that China, France, Germany and Russia explicitly opposed the action and that a majority on the council declined to give the requested green light for the armed action. If hypocrisy is the compliment that virtue pays to vice then strained legal arguments are the compliments that violators of UN rules pay to the UN charter.
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/dec/14/blair-iraq-regime-change-inspections]

So all this depends on Blair’s fundamental position that WMD and what was still widely believed to be Iraq’s failure to get rid of them were his, and Britain’s, justification for the war.  Blair had repeatedly acknowledged that in international law war could not be justified by the desire for, or desirability of, régime change.  He had even claimed, until the last moment, that Saddam Hussein could still save his régime and continue to rule Iraq if at that eleventh hour he were prepared to comply with the UN’s demand that he disarm. (That must have caused some consternastion in Washington!)

Now, in his religious affairs interview, he admits for the first time what so many had always suspected:  that even if he had known at the time that in fact Saddam had no WMD, he would still have “thought it right to remove him”:  and, even more damningly, that in that case “you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat.”  Never mind that by his own admission, without the WMD justification the Security Council would never have authorised a war — the Council wouldn’t even authorise it at that time even when there were still apparent grounds for believing that Iraq had WMD.  In his interview with Fern Britton Blair never mentions the question of international law or the absolute obligation to act in accordance with it.

A letter by a certain Ronnie Paris in the Guardian on 13 December 2009  sought to defend Blair’s reply to Fern Britton on the grounds that Blair had only said he would still “have thought it right to remove” Sadam even if he had known that Saddam had no WMD — not that he would necessarily have agreed to take part in military action to remove him in those circumstances.  But Blair’s admission that without WMD and disarmament as justification for war, he “would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat” makes it clear that he would still have gone to war to remove Saddam:  if he had meant only that he would have thought it right to do so but would not have taken any military steps to achieve it, why would he have needed to think up and deploy “different arguments” for removing him?  In any case, the theme running through the whole interview echoes a familiar Blair mantra:  “In the end, you’ve got to do what you believe is right.”

The only possible conclusion to be drawn from Tony Blair’s reply to Ms Britton is that his real purpose in committing Britain to the war was régime change (just as régime change was George W Bush’s openly avowed purpose — illegal, but at least honest);  that he based his campaign for UN approval on WMD only because he knew it was the sole legal justification for the war that the Security Council might eventually recognise and approve, even though by their haste in resorting to war Bush and Blair forfeited any hope of UN legitimacy;  and that had he known or believed that Iraq had no WMD (as of course turned out to be the case), he would still have gone to war, having dreamed up some other excuse for it, the nature of which, six years later, Mr Blair has apparently not yet worked out.

The mystery, therefore, is why Blair should have made this suicidal admission in an interview given just a few weeks before he’s due to give evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry, and soon after some at least of the evidence to the Inquiry had offered him a partial defence against one of the most damaging accusations against him (namely, that his very early promise to Bush of UK participation in an eventual war against Iraq had been recklessly unconditional;  it’s now clear that Blair did impose a correct and proper condition for British participation in the war, i.e. that it should have UN approval in advance, although it’s still not clear just how clearly that vital condition had been spelled out to the Americans).  Now Blair has deprived himself of any credit or defence even on that count.

Perhaps the explanation, as so often with Tony Blair, is the simple one:  his infinite capacity for convincing himself of his own rightness, which he sees as the sole justification and indeed criterion for action.  He can’t accept, apparently, that even his judgement is fallible:  that he is capable of being wrong:  that he ought to listen to those who disagree with him about the rights and wrongs of what he wants to do:  and that the leader of a democracy has an absolute, unqualified obligation to obey the law.  Deciding what you believe is “right” and then devising arguments that can be used to justify your decision is a sure recipe for disaster.  He still, evidently, doesn’t get it.

Brian