Last week, British news bulletins were forecasting possible parliamentary defeat for the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair over a motion calling for a full inquiry into Britain’s part in the Iraq war. Such media background noise helps Britain to keep up the pretence that it remains a functioning democracy, a country where ministers can be held to account and errors of judgment exposed to proper public scrutiny.
In the event, the government survived the motion comfortably enough. And to be sure, few could have expected any other outcome, so familiar has the spectacle become of Tony Blair evading all responsibility for his catastrophic mistakes. Otherwise engaged, Blair himself declined even to attend the debate. With characteristic high-handedness, the prime minister left the business of explaining the government’s position to his servile foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett. The official government line is that the time is not yet right to hold a “backward-looking” inquiry into the conflict. An inquiry, she declared, would send the wrong signal to the “insurgents” and the Iraqi people and undermine the morale of Britain’s armed forces. You would hardly guess that what is at stake is the most controversial British foreign policy decision of modern times, one whose baleful geo-political fallout is likely to be still afflicting the Middle East and the wider world years after Tony Blair has left office.
The truth is that the need for an inquiry into the war in Iraq could not be more urgent. It is precisely because of concern about the morale of British troops that such an inquiry ought to be launched. The head of the British Army, Sir Richard Dannatt, recently made clear that things cannot go on as they are; with Britain’s relatively small army being stretched to the limit in both Iraq and Afghanistan, there are growing fears that Britain may soon not have an army left to worry about. Those fears have scarcely been allayed by this week’s news that the British Army is facing a severe recruitment crisis. On top of this, there is the question of what purpose is being served by the continued presence of British troops in Iraq. Is the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq making any sort of constructive contribution to the country’s future? What are Britain’s long-term objectives in Iraq? Does the British deployment there amount to anything more than acquiescence in US foreign policy? The refusal by the British establishment to examine these questions betokens the loss of British independence and a betrayal of national intelligence. It represents the triumph of Tony Blair’s intuitive authoritarianism, as typified by the phrase he has often employed to shut down further discussion of contentious issues: “I just happen to think that...”
A BBC website poll has indicated that 85 percent of the British public consider holding an inquiry about Iraq to be highly desirable. However, the prime minister who once proclaimed his respect for the wishes of the people has turned out to be entirely contemptuous of their wishes, and the same may be said for much of his party. What is maddening to opponents of the war is the chronic failure of the parliamentary opposition to keep the issue of Iraq alive. Having ardently backed the war in the first place, the Conservative Party’s current attacks on the government for its handling of the conflict inevitably appear compromised; even some of his own party feel that the Conservative leader David Cameron’s demand for an inquiry smacks of political opportunism. For their part, the Liberal Democrats had the chance to capitalize on their original principled anti-war stand — and proceeded to waste it.
The shaming fact is that there would not have been a House of Commons call for an inquiry at all but for the urging of the Welsh and Scottish minority parties, Plaid Cymru and the Scottish Nationalists. Small wonder if there is a deepening crisis of confidence in the democratic process in Britain. Small wonder, either, if membership of political parties has shrunk dramatically, with the finances of Labour Party in particular in complete disarray and all three main parties reduced to seeking loans from wealthy donors.
This November marks the 50th anniversary of the Suez crisis, the ignominiously aborted invasion of Egypt by Britain in concert with France and Israel, and there are echoes of the events of 1956 in the latest British Middle East debacle. Possibly democracy in Britain was in rather more robust shape at that time; unlike Tony Blair, the then British prime minister, Anthony Eden, who had portrayed Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser as a new Hitler, was forced from office by the Suez crisis, though it may be that his downfall testified less to the vibrancy of British democracy than to British subservience to the United States. It was Suez after all that first exposed Britain’s imperial decline, its new status as a mere appendage of the US, albeit that Britain was then pressured by the US to withdraw from military action in the Middle East rather than to take part in it. What indisputably links the present crisis with Suez is the determination of the British government to ensure that no lessons are learned from a disastrous foreign policy with roots in racist attitudes towards the Arab world.
Interviewed for a BBC television documentary on Suez, one former British soldier said that at the mention of Suez, he thought of death; hitherto hidden archive footage showed the remains of Arabs who had been blown apart being shoveled onto lorries. But so successful was establishment obfuscation of what happened that to this day there is little general public awareness of what a bloody affair Suez actually was.
The refusal to hold an inquiry about the Iraq war continues an old story of official British evasiveness. However, Iraq has become a much larger crisis than Suez and today’s vastly expanded media has ensured that most people have already drawn their own conclusions about the carnage which Blair and US President George W. Bush have created in that tormented country. In Britain at least, few are paying attention any longer when ministers tastelessly cavil about the true figure of Iraqi dead. And there is widespread disdain for neoconservative ideologues, such as the writer Douglas Murray, who persist in asserting that their bellicose doctrines bear no responsibility for the horrors of the Anglo-American occupation while also maintaining that it is both helping Iraq to recover from decades of brutality and improving Western security.
The trouble is that the damage has been done. As the chaos in Iraq threatens to turn into a much larger catastrophe, there is scant comfort for the war’s opponents in the ever-mounting evidence that its supporters have proved monstrously misguided.
