CAIRO, 2 March 2004 — As the British case for war looks ever more tenuous, the mostly male establishment battens down the hatches accusing anti-war whistleblowers of impugning the reputation of the country. In the corridors of Whitehall there is little soul searching as to the ethics of invading a sovereign — and as we now know nonaggressive country — Iraq, but much talk revolves around the recent pronouncements of Clare Short, a former Cabinet minister who believes moral imperatives should override the longevity of the Blair government.
Short felt the prime minister played her like a harmonica when she threatened to quit on the eve of the invasion labeling Blair’s conduct “reckless”. Instead of admonishment, he crooned that she was an indispensable team member and promised that the UN would play a dominant role in postwar Iraq. To the disgust of her fellow anti-war Members of Parliament, Short stayed on but she couldn’t shake off a sense of betrayal that the prime minister had not got the promised second Security Council resolution. When the UN was all but excluded from postwar Iraq, the lady took up the cudgel in a one-woman crusade against her former boss. Hours after her resignation last May she announced Blair should prepare for “an elegant succession”. She was later to accuse Blair of secretly plotting with Bush to wage an inevitable war while pretending to his Cabinet colleagues that conflict would be a last resort. Her most stinging salvo was her description of the PM as “messianic, right-wing and shallow”. Although she cuts a lonely figure — and according to Blair’s former spinmeister Alastair Campbell a “bitter” one — due to her former impeccable reputation, she’s a credible thorn in Blair’s side. And so when she recently announced on radio that the British government had been bugging the office of Kofi Annan — not a would-be terrorist or criminal but a person charged with the interests of all UN member countries — she was generally believed. Indeed, it didn’t take long for former UN weapons inspectors Hans Blix and Richard Butler to back up her claims while former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Ghali waxed lyrical about “the good old days” when he was forced to hold sensitive meetings amid the cacophony of the UN’s staff canteen.
In an attempt to put a gag on Blair’s diminutive detractor, Cabinet Secretary Andrew Turnbull sent a warning fax to his former colleague demanding she desist from her claims and quit giving interviews. Short’s feisty reaction was to wave it around in front of ITV cameras before launching a verbal attack on the missive’s author. This could hardly have been the response Turnbull had anticipated but it turned out to be in the lady’s favor as Downing Street, fearful of turning Short into a martyr, quickly distanced itself from Turnbull’s implied threat.
But Clare Short isn’t the only female putting a spoke in the government’s murky case for war. Katherine Gun, a former translator with GCHQ, the British government’s eavesdropping center, blew the whistle on a request from the US that Britain should cooperate with its secret surveillance operation on delegates to the UN from six countries considered “swing votes” in the war’s run-up. Gun wrestled with her conscience before making public what she considered unconscionable behavior on the part of the US. The translator maintained her expose was designed to avert an illegitimate war but she was, nevertheless, charged under the Official Secrets Act. When her savvy defense team demanded sight of the British attorney-general’s advice to the government as to the legality of the invasion, the crown prosecution threw up empty hands and the case collapsed. This advice, issued by Lord Goldsmith, has only been made public in part, the government refusing to publish the entire document despite increasing demands to do so. Goldsmith initially said that going to war without a resolution following on from 1441 would be illegal, but when that second resolution remained elusive, he changed his tune at the eleventh hour going against the tide of almost every legal brain in the land.
Watch out for more feminine fireworks when leading barrister and Labour Peer Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws shortly launches her book entitled “Just Law”, which reveals that in the lead-up to war, Britain was told by the US to “get yourself some different lawyers”, meaning those willing to give hawkish advice. This message from the US apparently came after Foreign Office lawyers had warned of the war’s illegality, among them Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the FO’s former deputy legal advisor, who eventually resigned her post in protest.
Can these women be compared to Hanoi Jane the negative nickname for former actress Jane Fonda who during the Vietnam War traveled to that beleaguered land to hobnob with the enemy? Or could they be likened to Tokyo Rose, a Japanese-American who broadcast propaganda on behalf of the Japanese government during World War II? After all, their revelations are hardly in the interests of the prevailing British government, which if found to have conducted an illegal war could be liable for a mountain of claims, not only from British soldiers but, presumably, also from the families of Iraqi victims. There are different ways of looking at this issue. In the short term, the women aren’t doing Britain any favors, especially with how the country is perceived overseas. However, in the long run they are setting parameters for future British governments, whose officials will no longer be able to act with impunity. If one takes into account the “dodgy dossiers”, one of which was lifted from a student’s 12-year-old thesis, the other containing the spurious 45-minute claim, which “forgot” to mention battlefield weapons only, along with forged documentation concerning an alleged Iraqi bid to buy yellow cake from Niger, any intelligent person is bound to harbor doubts as to the legality of that war.
If the war was illegal — at least from a British stance where “regime change” cannot be a cassus belli (cause for war) — and if it took Short, Gun and Baroness Kennedy to highlight its illegality, then so be it. As long as there are gutsy women like these around, civilization will mean more than a superficial veneer polished faithfully by doddery old boys in pinstriped suits.
— Linda S. Heard is a specialist writer on Middle East affairs and can be contacted at [email protected]
