LONDON, 3 September 2003 — The leading theorist of the big lie was Adolf Hitler. “The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed,” he wrote in Mein Kampf. This was his propaganda technique. A falsehood of sufficient audacity was “bound to have an effect on public opinion, even if not given total credence by a majority” (William Safire’s New Political Dictionary).
The most notorious exponent of the big lie in our modern world was Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose contention in the 1950s that 81 card-carrying communists were at large in the state department was later branded by the Senate as “the most nefarious campaign of half truths and untruth in the history of the Republic”.
Tony Blair is not in this league of mendacity, and I don’t suppose that when he set up the Hutton inquiry he had in mind for it a role as the great deceiver.
He saw it as the only way to clear the air after the unscripted shock, delivered to him on his Asian journey, of David Kelly’s death. Nonetheless, seen from a distance, as I watched it in August, Hutton has the features of a pretty big lie. It creates a huge furor. It fascinates a big audience.
It apparently brings to book some of the largest characters in the political class. Entire careers are said to be awaiting their fate. Yet, in reality, Hutton is little more than a brilliant, beguiling distraction from the questions on which the future of this government ought to rest.
The issues it is addressing are not unimportant. Dr. Kelly deserves a decent inquest, and he’s getting it. Every insight into the chaotic workings of a panicky government is a disillusion worth remembering for the next time. The BBC, which I was defending a few weeks ago, is now revealed as having made one or two stupid editorial decisions, for which it ought to have apologized. Billowing out from this comes the titanic struggle, for which some in government have long lusted, between the unelected corporation and they themselves, the elected democrats.
That edges us into the foothills of the big lie. But we move further up the slopes with Blair’s own excursions into hyperbole. It is he who has now given Hutton the character he probably did not intend at the start, by pinning his entire reputation to the judge’s verdict. Nothing, he said, could have done more damage to his integrity — indeed to the integrity of our country in the eyes of the world — than the suggestion that he had doctored the infamous dossier. It would be a resigning matter, he said solemnly. It was the foulest charge imaginable. Thus did Blair seek to persuade a gullible public that a narrow, ultimately trivial, matter is the alpha and omega of the greatest public scandal in half a century. And the Hutton inquiry is his proof.
I can think of several issues that damage Blair’s reputation as badly as, or worse than, the little matter of who advanced the claim that Saddam Hussein could launch a weapon of mass destruction in 45 minutes. Every inch of coverage of Hutton serves the purpose of obscuring them.
First, whoever wrote the dossier, it was an official government document. It was the government’s big statement of imminent threat, compiled by the best available officials and vetted for “presentational” effect by Downing Street.
Never mind the 45-minute detail, nobody denies that Blair’s personal circle had a large hand in the words that finally came out.
Yet the substance turns out to have been thinly based. This collective state paper was a bummer, just as some of George Bush’s contentions about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear readiness, likewise designed to scare a people into backing war, were conclusively shown (in the Washington Post, Aug. 10) to be falsehoods in which Tony Blair played his part.
We are told to be patient. It’s said evidence of WMD will be discovered, though I notice that the timescale now inches forward into years, not months. But the more time passes, the more incredible looks the official assertion that the threat to Britain from Iraq was “imminent”. We must take care not to let amnesia, a useful supporter of big lies, enter the frame.
Second, we must not allow the rationale for war to change. How would this have sounded last March? “We think Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, though we’re far from proving it.
We don’t think he has links with Al-Qaeda, or had anything to do with 9/11. But we are determined to get rid of him. We need regime change. We will risk British lives to that end, and then play our part alongside our faithful friend George Bush in rebuilding Iraq into a democracy.
It may be an expensive business, but it is our national duty.” That statement represents roughly the true assessment most politicians and intelligence people were making before war began.
If Blair had put it in those terms to Parliament and the country, does anyone think he would have secured national assent for what he wanted to do?
Plainly he didn’t himself. It would have been the honest pitch to make, but he didn’t make it. He didn’t level with the people. Maybe this is why, despite the efforts of Whitehall and himself before Hutton, the level of trust in him has plummeted. Maybe the big lie embodied by Hutton isn’t going to work.
Third, sooner or later it’s going to be time to look at the consequences of the war as well as its disputed beginnings. Here, too, is a larger question than who wrote which words into a dossier, and who misreported that shard of truth.
At some point, false assessments about what war would entail must come to judgment. Again, this cannot await a timeline being stretched ever further to suit the convenience of politicians. Elections supply their own terminal moment.
The consequences are beginning to look terrible. Iraq descends into terroristic chaos. Electricity and water continue to be unavailable across tracts of the country. Street and home security is totally unreliable. The coalition forces, expecting to be greeted as liberators, are reviled as ineffective and hostile occupiers.
These awakenings bear heaviest, of course, on the Americans. The misjudged condition of Iraq may yet have catastrophic political consequences for Bush at home. However, Blair, too, is caught. He led the country to war on a prospectus that turned out to be false, with results that may soon have to be judged, without exoneration, shameful.
To all of this, Hutton is a sideshow. It looks like working out conveniently. It gives insights into a process we haven’t seen before, though we’ve surely suspected them. We find we have a defense secretary as cauterized as he is evasive.
A fastidious judge will apportion a bit of blame all round. But there is a large mendacity behind it all. Small issues are talked into huge ones. A big lie remains unexamined.
This says that the war was unavoidable, that its motives were of the purest, that it was in the British national interest, that the people were told the truth about why it happened. Let Hutton not deceive us.
