Exit, pursued by the dead

I should really keep off the subject of Tony Blair for one simple reason: I despise him, I despise him so much, I despise everything he represents - the lies, the dissimulation, the phoniness, the general air of seediness and moral turpitude he brings to everything. I find it almost impossible to be dispassionate about this man and I do so hate my judgement being clouded by my emotions.

It’s not just him as a human being that I despise; I despise the degeneracy that he brought to government. If future historians try and pinpoint the moment when cabinet government died in this country I am convinced that they will alight on the Blair years. He appeared before the Chilcot Inquiry on Friday, set up to look into the exact reasons we went to war with Iraq in 2003, the latest stage in a seemingly endless process of self-reflection.

Amongst other revelations it turns out that in the twenty-eight meetings held by key figures leading up to the invasion only half were minuted. Cabinet ministers were also kept out of these discussions. It was all part of the Blair presidency. Never mind second UN resolutions, never mind cabinet agreement, never mind the consent of Parliament itself; no, for he had privately assured George Bush eight months before the invasion that “you can count on us.” It’s the contempt for the mechanics of government, for the constitution, for the way that British democracy works that fills me with the deepest disgust.

This is Blair’s second act. He appeared before Chilcot last January, hands shaking, sweating – much the same as this time – but with a generally gung-ho approach, singing je ne regrette rein to the gallery, filled with people who had lost relatives in his war. He’s clearly been reprogrammed, singing to a different sheet. This time he wanted to make clear that he regretted “deeply and profoundly” the loss of life. It is too late, as some in the audience shouted, it was always too late.

We should remember that most of our people died after the invasion, after ‘victory’, because in the rush to go to war there was an almost total lack of forward planning, little or no consideration as to how Iraq was to be occupied and restructured subsequent to the occupation. The troops we sent were simply not strong enough for the tasks allotted. There was no proper intelligence, no proper understanding of the internal religious and cultural politics of Iraq, with disastrous consequences. Let’s make no mistake about this: Britain suffered a serious humiliation in Iraq, our armed forces suffered a serious reversal because of Blair’s negligence and incompetence. In any other age he would have been indicted before Parliament. It’s rather a pity this is not any other age.

But if one dreadful war was not enough he, this Middle East ‘peace’ envoy (what exactly does he envoy over? who listens to him?), seems to be pushing for yet another, warning of the dangers from Iran. Yes, Iran is a danger precisely because of the 2003 invasion, which removed the one major obstacle to its regional ambitions. It was Blair and Bush who let this genie out of the bottle, impossible, I suspect, to put back.

In his Coffee House blog on the Spectator website Rod Liddle writes that Blair’s performance on Friday reminded him of some of Neil Young’s lyrics from a song called Ambulance Blues, penned seemingly as an attack on Richard Nixon. They fit our former prime minister so much better;

I never knew a man
Could tell so many lies
He had a different story
For every set of eyes
How could he remember
Who he’s talking to?
Because I know it isn’t me
And I hope it isn’t you

Nobody expects the Chilcot Inquisition!

I like old comedies, shows like Monty Python’s Flying Circus, full of anarchic humour. Watching Blair’s performance before the Chilcot Inquiry on the Iraq War reminded me somewhat of the Spanish Inquisition scene, the one where the old lady is threatened with such dire tortures as the cushions and the comfy chair!

It’s just so frustrating, that panel of old dogs with gummy jaws, whose toughest questions have all the force of the cushions and the comfy chair. Yes, we are repeatedly reminded by the chairman that the object of the inquiry is to get at the truth not to apportion blame. But how does one get to the truth without asking demanding questions; how does one get to the truth, in other words, without detailed cross-examination?

There he was, Blair, a perfect target, not at all looking like a former prime minister of this country, rather a shifty prisoner in the dock, his hands shaking according to witnesses. But then he got into his stride; then he produced what was obviously a rehearsed strategy. It was the same gung-ho approach as Alistair Campbell; defend everything and apologise for nothing. Yes, there he was, he might as well have sung Non, je ne regrette rien.

I so wanted to be there also; I so wanted to conduct the kind of cross-examination of which the Chilcot worthies are incapable. So, former Prime Minister Blair, 9/11 changed the ‘calculus of risk’, to use your expression. Tell me, why was it necessary to attack a secular state actively hostile to terrorist movements like al-Qaeda? Did you not consider the possibility that removal of Saddam would immeasurably destabilise the whole region to the benefit of Iran? Were you not advised of the logistical and practical difficulties of invading and occupying a country like Iraq by a panel of academic experts in November 2002? Did you not then ignore that advice, saying that Saddam was ‘evil’? Would it be true to suggest that the invasion was based on a dubious value judgement, not on solid intelligence and practical politics?

Oh, I could go on like this. How I would loved to have tackled him on the bizarre logic of the March 2010 question; that weapons not there in March 2003 would have multiplied, nothing begetting nothing! The truth is simply told; the First Gulf War was absolutely necessary; the Second was a Bush war, unfinished family business into which a man, never fit to be Prime Minister, drew this country on the basis of half-truths, outright lies, shady deals and dubious manipulation. He misled parliament; he misled the nation. Hans Blix, the former UN weapons inspector, has compared Blair and Bush as latter-day ‘witch hunters’, only interested in such evidence as ‘proved’ their case.

The same day that Blair gave his evidence by some ironic coincidence BBC screened a repeat of Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain, the episode dealing with Suez. This was a foreign policy disaster that effectively destroyed Anthony Eden, a bear of very little judgement. Still, for all his faults, he had qualities of simple integrity and decency, entirely alien to Tony Blair. I’m convinced that future historians will judge Iraq to be a far greater mistake than Suez. Meanwhile, the ‘calculus of risk’ is immeasurably greater now precisely because of Blair’s Bush War.

Guilty Men

If the intention of the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War is to pin Blair like a butterfly in a case it’s not going to happen. Far less stupid that Alistair Campbell, his dog, I can predict exactly how he will perform: there will general expressions of contrition over dodgy dossiers and post-war Iraq, followed by a rapid occupation of the moral high ground- yes, removing Saddam was the ‘right thing’ to do, the sort of strategy that he pursued at the 2004 Labour Party Conference.

But we have another target that makes the exercise a little less threadbare. We have the Prime Minister, Dismal Gordon himself, who is scheduled to appear – joy of joys – before the General Election. It’s not Blair anymore; for me Brown is the real target. He is only appearing because he was taunted by Nick Clegg that he had something to hide. But now, anxious to prove the contrary, we will all be able to see - potential Labour voters will be able to see - that he does indeed have something to hide – himself.

We know from the evidence given by Campbell that Brown was closely involved in the decision to go to war, though this is a matter that he has never been confronted with in public. Jack Straw, in his shifty and self-regarding way, told the Inquiry that he could have ‘stopped the war’ by resigning as foreign secretary. It that was true of him then it was even truer of Brown, as Andrew Rawnsley said in The Observer. But he did something at the time that is entirely typical of his character and style of leadership: as a member of the cabinet he supported the war while having it put about by his toadies that he had ‘reservations.’ The key to this man, the key to our dear leader’s character is simple enough: when things get tough he gets lost.

If you opposed the war, then Brown is the man who wrote enough cheques that allowed it to happen. If you supported the war, but despaired of the aftermath, he was the man who did not write enough cheques; he was the man responsible for the fact that our army was under-resourced, not properly equipped for the task, the impossible task, which it faced. He is doubly culpable, therefore, an indictment that surely extends also to Afghanistan. Iraq may have been Blair’s War but it was Brown’s Disaster.

In the early years of the Second World War a book was published entitled Guilty Men under the pseudonym of ‘Cato.’ I’m sure some people will be familiar with this famous text but for those who are not it was an indictment of the policy of appeasement in which fifteen individuals are censured, from Neville Chamberlain downwards. It was a devastatingly effective polemic. We now have enough solid material for a new Guilty Men. Now, there’s a thought. :-))

Barking Mad

The dog barked. Alistair Campbell appeared before the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War defending his actions and the actions of his master. We should really be proud of the decision to go to war, he growled, a decision that cost the lives goodness knows how many innocent people, a decision that, in my estimation at lest, ranks high among the worst foreign policy disasters in this country’s history, far higher than the betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich.

But the dog barked; it did as it was expected, it performed as it was trained to perform. After all one does not expect any moral sense, any sense of guilt, from a dog, does one? The secrets and lies, the dodgy dossiers are all behind us now, a dog’s mess; it happened, people died; we should be proud.

I have a question. How could a man of Campbell’s calibre, a man who held no elected office, ever have been involved in the high counsels of this nation? How could he have been involved in one of the most important decisions of this century when even cabinet ministers and members of parliament were excluded? Even more important, why was the propaganda machine he operated allowed such licence, such scope and such wide-ranging influence? I have no ready answer other than to say it is another sign of the degeneration of government under this present Labour ministry. I wonder what Walter Bagehot, the classic commentator on the operation of the British constitution, would have made of the way the game is played now

We should be grateful, I suppose, for two small crumbs that came out during the dog’s ‘interrogation’: that Gordon Brown was closely involved in the war game, as much as he would now like to distance himself, and that Blair promised Bush that if the invasion went ahead that “Britain will definitely be there”, effectively usurping the powers of the monarch and parliament, taking upon himself forms of dictatorial authority. At no point after was the parliament or the nation informed of this shabby assurance, that its approval had simply been ‘assumed.’ The invasion of Iraq was like justice in the Old West: give the accused a fair trial and then string him up. There is no doubt at all in my mind that this war was, by all standards of morality and law, an illegal act of aggression, the consequences of which are likely to be felt for decades yet.

How politics and public life have been cheapened and traduced over the past dozen years by Labour, Labour of the Iraq War and Labour of the Expenses Scandal. How parlous now the legitimacy of our democratic process. The country can only take so much abuse, our democracy can only take so much abuse, and Labour has abused it beyond measure, with damage levels far greater now than they were in 1951, 1970 and 1979, the previous years when the country was liberated from the control of these incompetents.

I try to be optimistic about the future but I am not sure if the country fully understands just how badly governed we have been since things could only get better in 1997; it may take decades for a full realisation to mature. Meanwhile, will we ever again believe a prime minister who tells us that we face a ‘credible’ threat from a foreign power? If one is of a mind to tell a lie just make sure that it’s a big one, a piece of advice that Blondie Campbell might very well have taken from another national leader, another lover of dogs.

Weapons of Mass Deception

I was wrong about the Chilcot Inquiry into the causes of the Iraq War, at least in part. I said it would add nothing new to our understanding of the Iraq war, an ill-conceived adventure that cost so many lives. But it has; it has added to our understanding of Tony Blair, of the motives, of the character and of the attitude of this morally debased man before he has even had a chance to appear.

We now know, by his own admission, that Weapons of Mass Destruction were not vital to the war; it was merely a ‘technique’ used to persuade Parliament and the nation beyond that the invasion of a sovereign state was justified. We now know that he would have invaded Iraq anyway, though he would have used a different set of arguments, a different technique of mass deception.

Last month I wrote a blog on Chilcot, headed Just another Toothless Dog, in which I said;

In order to get support for the invasion Blair lied to both the Parliament and the nation beyond. Forms of news management and propaganda were introduced by Alistair Campbell, his thuggish aid, which would have shamed even Doctor Goebbels. There was absolutely no threat at all to our national security from Iraq and Blair knew there was no threat; this was not an exercise in self-deception. Lying was used as a deliberate and sustained political strategy, possibly for the first time ever in our history, at least on such a scale. Parliament wasn’t just ‘mislead’; Parliament was manipulated and deliberately deceived

Well, I honestly never expected that we would receive an open admission of these simple truths. I try to be as objective as I can in these matters, but I cannot think of this man other than with the deepest contempt; contempt for his cowardice, his hypocrisy and his utter lack of moral backbone. He now recognises that the WMD argument no longer holds so he shifts ground, presumably in anticipation of his appearance before Chilcot in the New Year.

I can see it now, the final flowering of the hints he has laid down ever since the Labour Party conference the year after the invasion; that ridding the world of Saddam was the ‘moral’ thing to do, the right thing to do, the thing that harmonised most with his ‘Christian conscience.’ There will be no mention, of course, of the huge death toll that followed in wake of this ‘moral’ decision.

Oh, make no mistake: I think the world is a better place without Saddam Hussein, just as I think it would be a better place without Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong-il, Robert Mugabe, Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro and Colonel Gaddafi, all repellant dictators. But by what right do we remove one piece on the board only to retain the others? More specifically, what gave Blair the right to remove Saddam, who at no point represented a threat to the security of this country, only to do deals with Gaddafi, who did represent such a threat? We remove Saddam only to shake hands with the butcher of Lockerbie. It makes no sense other than in terms of the most depraved forms of realpolitik imaginable.

I sometimes wish that I did believe in God, in a final court of divine retribution, because Blair has so much to answer for, so many souls demanding justice.

Empty Apologies

I’ve blogged in the past about the fashion, both fatuous and vain, for contemporary politicians to apologise for the tragedies and mistakes of the past; over things that happened well before they were born or over which they had no control (The Joker in a Gay Mood and No Point in Apologising for the Past). I’ve had further thoughts about this, inspired in part by Rod Liddle’s latest column in The Spectator, and in part the leaks from the Iraq Inquiry reported in The Sunday Telegraph.

Liddle’s reflections have been brought on by the latest round of apologies, that over the British children sent out to Australia last century, where they often suffered abuse and neglect. Brown has taken it upon himself to say sorry, just as he said sorry over the past persecutions suffered by homosexuals. It is, Liddle says, the quintessential example of the modern apology: a politician who is not remotely contrite apologising for something for which he had not the vaguest responsibility and for which, therefore, he cannot be blamed. A non-apology apology, then-an apology for something someone else did, and what’s more, did in the best of faith.

I suppose it might be of some comfort to someone somewhere that, given this trend, they can expect an apology for present injustices and wrongs, injustices and wrongs committed by the present government, in, say, fifty or a hundred years from now, delivered by politicians as yet unborn, though they will most likely not be around to enjoy the experience. I personally would like our dear Prime Minister to apologise for a more immediate enormity, one from the not too distant past: namely his Party’s close and potentially treasonable ties with the old Soviet Union. I don’t expect that any day soon, though; maybe in fifty or a hundred years. Never mind: what about an apology that would not cause the government too much distress, perhaps over Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries or Edward I’s expulsion of the Jews?

Tony, Not the Euro President, Blair led the way here, apologising for the Irish Potato famine, for slavery, even for the treatment of the Maoris! But let’s look at the thing, the one thing, he really needs to apologise for-the Iraq War. Did you read the report in the Telegraph? Did you read how he lied to Parliament about the planned invasion; how our troops were sent often half-prepared; how there was absolutely no thought given to a post-war strategy? The full human cost of this dreadful tragedy has yet to be quantified, but hundreds of thousands of innocent people died for Blair’s vision, for Blair’s mendacity.

Casting my mind over the past hundred years I cannot think of a similar enormity by a British Prime Minister. Even Anthony Eden’s Suez adventure is nothing in comparison. Yet this man, who, so far as I am concerned, might very well be indicted at The Hague for war crimes, was being considered for the Presidency of Europe. I’m sure the Inquiry will produce a lot more evidence of the enormities that Blair, the peace maker, committed in the Middle East, evidence depicting a situation that positively demands some genuine contrition and a truly meaningful apology. Alas, it’s an apology that will never be made. Never mind; there is always the dissolution of the monasteries, the expulsion of the Jews and on and on.

Blackwashed, or how stupid does one have to be to be a member of the British Parliament?

Do you know the answer? I most certainly don’t. Is there a specific qualification in stupidity, a standard one has to attain before being considered for elevation to our benighted legislature? Is it the fault of the party machine, the leadership, or is it a local problem, attributable to constituency associations? Oh, there are so many questions and no answers.

I suppose we have come to live with their stupidity, to accept it as yet another irksome fact of life. But what I object to is when Members of Parliament assume that the rest of us are as stupid as they are. How else does one explain the whole expenses mess, the outrageous claims made on the taxpayer, in the first place? I suppose they thought they had got away with that, assuming that we would never find out that they were making criminally fraudulent claims for non-existent mortgages, as well as for kit-kats, porno, church collections and duck houses. But now they have compounded the offence by their new commitment to ‘openness’, publishing their claims online. Indeed, they are so ‘open’ that most of the details, the kind of information that would enable one to make the appropriate links, have been blacked out, or redacted, to use the favoured jargon word.

I suppose whoever is responsible for this was mindful of the words of Joker Brown, ‘The Best Man for the Job’, when he said that “Transparency to the public is the foundation of properly policing this system.” Black, it seems, is the new transparency. To have learned nothing and to have forgotten everything: now, that really is the measure of true stupidity!

Speaking of transparency isn’t it wonderful that the ‘Best Man for the Job’ decided that the Iraq inquiry should be held in secret? After all, what better way to get people to trust the objectivity of the final report on the lies, half-truths and dissimulation that took us into England’s worst foreign policy disaster since Suez? Oh, but it seems that he has already had second thoughts on that particular point, at least in the limited and half-hearted way that we have come to expect from this wretched man. Better the full truth than yet another whitewash…or should that be blackwash? :-))

The Disaster of Iraq

This is a piece I wrote in response to a question on one of the social networks I belong to. I think it's woth preserving here.

OK, I really don’t want to comment on the particular issues you have raised about Saddam’s rule in Iraq, or his attributes as a father (though you might want to check how Uday, the eldest son, turned out), and I certainly don’t want to say anything about American domestic politics!

In fact I’m going to sidestep your specific question altogether and address the grander issues. In other words, it’s not so much that the execution was wrong; it’s that the whole adventure in Iraq was wrong. It was ill-judged, badly conceived and dreadfully executed, something you clearly agree with, judging on the basis of some of the points you have made in your submission.

Worse than that, far worse, it upset the balance of power in the region to the immeasurable gain not of America and England, but Iran, always a far greater source of terrorist plotting than Iraq. The point is that no matter how dreadful Saddam was as a dictator, and he was pretty dreadful, he was at least a secular dictator, one who offered no encouragement to terrorism or religious fundamentalism. His regime served as an effective counter to Iran, always ensuring that one would keep the other in check in the grand game of strategic chess.

The point is that Iraq, as a nation, was shaped around some crucial tensions; that between the Sunni and Shiite Muslims, that between religion and secular politics; and that between the Kurds and the Arabs. Saddam, in his own inimitable fashion, kept all of these pressures under control. The main effect of the western invasion has been to uncork the bottles, letting these genies free.

Now instead of a strong secular dictatorship there is a weak democracy, haunted by its unresolved tensions. A large part of its population in the south is probably more loyal in political and religious outlook to Teheran, not Bagdad. Quite frankly, I don’t believe that Iraq will ever be a stable democracy in the western sense of the term. More broadly, and even more pessimistically, I do not believe that Islam and democracy are compatible at all.

There are other issues, other things opened up by the invasion that you might not have been aware of. Did you know, for instance, that women under the rule of Saddam enjoyed a relatively free lifestyle, in that they had many of the same opportunities as men? They were not required to wear the burqa or the headscarf. Now in the south around the city of Basra women have been murdered for being considered ‘too western’ by the Shiite militias. Female athletes have been threatened with death for appearing ‘immodest. The whole thing, quite simply, is a nightmare.

As far as terrorism is concerned we, both your country and mine, took our eyes away from the main threat in Afghanistan during the Iraq adventure, allowing the Taliban to make a major comeback in the process. My country has now left Iraq, your country is to follow. Sadly, I think it is then that the real monsters will emerge.

Bush and Blair had access to the best possible advice on all of the strategic issues I have raised here. Yes, they had access to good counsel, and then they simply ignored it. The Owl of Minerva always flies at dusk.