British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Cabinet allies have been briefing that “Peter is still comfortable” with the advice he gave the government before the Iraq war. Surely Attorney General Lord Goldsmith must be anything but comfortable because the issue of his change of heart in the run-up to war in Iraq has the potential to unify all streams of opinion on the war.
Whether you were for or against the invasion, whether you believe the results have been broadly beneficial to the Middle East or an unmitigated disaster that will go on costing innocent lives does not matter. This issue is about the way Britain is governed and Tony Blair’s use of the political machine to mold and distort the advice of civil servants and intelligence chiefs. About this, everyone should be concerned, regardless of their stance on the war or, indeed, Conservative leader Michael Howard’s brutal sacking of his Deputy Chairman Howard Flight which temporarily saved Labour from further squirming last week.
The Hutton inquiry and Lord Butler’s review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction established beyond doubt that in the year before the invasion a tightly knit group at Downing Street controlled, finessed and manipulated the advice and information supplied by the executive to the prime minister, ostensibly so that he could decide whether to go to war.
We now know that he had already made up his mind and was merely seeking to make the case. We have the former ambassador, Sir Christopher Meyer, on record, saying that the subject of Iraq was first brought up at a dinner in Washington DC between Blair and Bush within a fortnight of the Sept. 11 attacks. Blair’s commitment hardened at a meeting with Bush in Crawford, Texas, the following spring, six months before the September dossier was presented to the British Parliament.
At the dinner in Washington, regime change in Iraq was mentioned. Whether Blair signed up for it then is uncertain. He may have said something on the lines of, “We’ll talk about that after you have sorted out the Taleban in Afghanistan.” At the very inception of the Iraq project, regime change was the principal driving force, not the disarmament of Saddam, though that of course would quickly become the pretext for action. From that moment the full weight of Blair’s presidential power would come to bear on the problem of bending civil servants’ will and winning the vote in Parliament.
This history may at times seem rather wearisome but it is crucial to an understanding of why the issue about legal advice is so important. Back in 2002, it was Blair who persuaded George Bush to go through the UN because that was the only way he could make an attack on Iraq acceptable to the British public. Neoconservatives in the Bush administration were actually against the strategy and believed that in the wake of Sept. 11 the world’s only superpower was entitled to attack Iraq without bothering about those issues of legitimacy which so obsessed the British. Indeed they have subsequently argued that if their case had been limited to regime change and not concerned with WMD, they would not now have to answer for the inconvenient lack of weaponry in Iraq.
In a country where legal advice on these matters still counts, Blair could not possibly have backed America without arguing that Britain was in some way menaced by Iraq. That case had to be proved and demonstrably ratified by the Secret Intelligence Service and the government’s legal advisers before a vote in Parliament.
This is where the issue of trust turns. In his desperate need to oblige America “for what may indeed have been an honorable misconception of his country’s interests” Blair bludgeoned the machinery around him until it gave him the answer he wanted. This is absolutely clear in the evidence that was submitted to Lord Hutton about the way the September dossier was compiled. If you read all the emails between John Scarlett — then head of the Joint Intelligence Committee — the Secret Intelligence Service and Campbell, there is no doubt about the nature of the impulse which drove these communications. “As I was writing this,’ says Alastair Campbell in an emailed critique of the dossier to John Scarlett on Sept. 17, 2002, “the prime minister had read of the draft you gave me this morning, and he too made a number of points.”
Scarlett, now head of SIS, made the required amendments and signaled as much in an e-mail to Campbell. The drive to get the answer Blair needed for softening up Parliament with the dossier was complete, and I defy anyone but the trusting Lord Hutton to reach any conclusion other than the one which says that the whole process was run by an editing committee of two — Blair and Campbell. The dossier was indeed “sexed up” in countless ways.
You don’t have to be a peacenik to see that when Chief of the Armed Forces Adm. Sir Michael Boyce required an unequivocal statement on the legality of the war and Attorney General Lord Goldsmith was still wobbly on the whole matter, that similar pressure was brought to bear. We do not yet have the paper trail that Hutton’s inquiry produced, but it’s beginning to surface, principally with the redacted paragraph from the letter written by the Foreign Office legal adviser Elizabeth Wilmshurst which makes clear that between March 6 and March 17 Lord Goldsmith changed his advice “to what is now the official line.”
What is wrong with the attorney general changing his mind in a period when events at the UN, in Washington, London and Baghdad were moving so rapidly? Any good lawyer is nimble in these circumstances, and Lord Goldsmith is an exceptionally good lawyer and a very clever man. The only problem with this argument is that nothing had materially changed to cause the total transformation in his stance. On March 6, Lord Goldsmith shared the Foreign Office view that the war would be illegal without a second UN Security Council resolution, yet by March 17 he is writing in a parliamentary answer that Resolution 1141 alone is legal justification. What caused this swing? Was it Campbell? Did Blair get on the phone and speaking as a lawyer to another to show how Peter could be comfortable?
Until the full version of the correspondence between No. 10 and Lord Goldsmith is published, along with every note and minute from every lawyer concerned, the only conclusion to draw is that he was got at by Blair in the same way that Scarlett and the whole intelligence community were.
Neither Butler nor Hutton have had much to say about Blair’s moral character. But Lord Butler said that “the informality and circumscribed procedures” over policy making on Iraq “risk reducing the scope for informed collective political judgment”.
The issue of Lord Goldsmith’s advice is about the trustworthiness of the prime minister and not about the war. Though Blair is apparently bewildered by such accusations, the evidence accumulates that in the ruthless suppression of the executive’s prudence and wisdom, he betrayed our trust and his duty to good governance. That is an issue for all of us, and will remain so until Blair leaves Downing Street.
