LONDON, 2 November 2004 — The foul political atmosphere in Britain at present recalls the close of the 1980s when the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher evoked widespread horror by announcing that she meant to go “on and on”. Current Prime Minister Tony Blair has merely signaled his determination to fight a further general election — with a view to serving a third term of office before making way for a successor. So extreme is public disenchantment with Blair, however, that he is rapidly becoming quite as reviled as Mrs. Thatcher ever was. It is safe to say that the commonest reaction to the news that he intends to remain in office for five more years was dismay.
Memories remain vivid of the House of Commons speech given by the prime minister before the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in which he warned that Saddam Hussein was presiding over a weapons program that was “active, detailed and growing”. Tony Blair has delivered many impassioned speeches, but this was perhaps the most impassioned, the most earnest and compellingly dramatic, of them all. With his eyes blazing, he proclaimed his unshakable belief that failure to take immediate action against Iraq would have catastrophic consequences.
Yet it is now certain that the intelligence to which Tony Blair was privy never came near to justifying his stomach-curdling rhetoric. Nor is it any longer in doubt that the British government did its utmost to place the most alarming possible interpretation on the evidence about Iraq’s military capacity. The verdict of the Iraq Survey Group that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq at the time of the invasion might have been expected to prompt some show of contrition from the prime minister for giving a wholly misleading impression of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. But far from appearing to regret his extravagant claims, Tony Blair demands to know why he should apologize for helping to topple a death-dealing tyrant. The world, he insists, is a safer place without the former Iraqi leader — though it is not clear how far his conception of the world includes Iraq itself, a country which — as we are made daily more aware — has been plunged into a state of terrifying chaos.
The former Director General of the BBC Greg Dyke and its former Chairman Gavyn Davies are bound to find Tony Blair’s unapologetic posture especially galling. For in the aftermath of the Hutton enquiry into the death of the scientist, David Kelly, both resigned their positions, acknowledging that they bore ultimate responsibility for the BBC radio broadcast in which defense correspondent Andrew Gilligan alleged that, in order to make the case for war, the British government deliberately doctored intelligence. With some reason, Dyke and Davies feel that they were bullied into resigning over an allegation that would appear to have been broadly accurate. Not a few fellow countrymen share their outrage that BBC was obliged to make an abject apology for being more or less right when the government — despite having been demonstrably wrong — has been officially cleared of blame. The fact is that while heads at the BBC rolled, there has been not a single government or intelligence service resignation over the misrepresentation of the grounds for taking military action. Is this the sort of democratic lesson that Tony Blair is so eager to teach the Middle East?
Appalled that Blair has not had to answer for his overblown scare-mongering, Gavyn Davies deplores the nonexistence in Britain — in contrast to the US — of the constitutional machinery which could be mobilized to hold a delinquent government to account. To many, it is a particular source of outrage that the legal basis for Britain’s involvement in the war furnished by Attorney General Lord Goldsmith has never yet been published. The attorney general had maintained that British participation in the war would be illegal without a second UN resolution. Yet in the event (having delegated the precise wording of his ruling to a professor of law), Lord Goldsmith declared that military action was legitimate after all. That the Foreign Office’s deputy legal adviser, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, resigned over the issue was a compromising circumstance in itself — quite apart from the government’s blatant refusal to publish what Goldsmith wrote. Davies envies the checks and balances built into the US Constitution, and it may be that if Goldsmith’s ruling ever comes to light it will not be in Britain but in the US with its Freedom of Information Act.
An old friend of Tony Blair’s, Goldsmith is believed to have been leaned on by the prime minister. If so, he was hardly by himself. Many of Blair’s ministers — along with much of the parliamentary Labour Party — allowed themselves to be bamboozled into backing a war they never really wanted. It could of course be said that Washington in turn leaned on Blair.
Certainly, British troops would never have seen action in Iraq at all but for the US. Yet, as the broadcaster James Naughtie suggests in his new book, The Accidental American, Blair’s zeal to identify himself with the US war effort sprang from his own Christian faith, from his rabid conviction that Saddam Hussein was not merely the embodiment of evil but a grave threat to the survival of civilization. The truth is that the mounting debacle in Iraq owes much to the crusading fervor with which Blair committed Britain to the war — in the process affording the administration of President George W. Bush what it would otherwise have lacked — an ally credible enough to demonstrate to the world at large and the American public in particular that the US was not acting unilaterally.
Many in and outside the Labour Party are recoiling at the British government’s decision to let British troops in Iraq be used to relief American forces.
The gesture could likewise be seen as a political favor to George W. Bush, fighting as he is to be re-elected today and anxious to rebut the accusation of his Democratic opponent, John Kerry that he has left America without friends. At the same time, there is growing public anger that Britain’s unbending leader is able to ride roughshod over public opinion. How remote now seems the spring day in 1997 when Blair came to power, with many happy to accept his presentation of himself as a straight-talking public servant.
— Neil Berry is a free-lance journalist based in London.
