MELANIE PHILLIPS: THE IRAQ WAR INQUIRY DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.VERDICT FIRST…EVIDENCE NOWHERE
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/5715516/iraq-war-inquiry-derangement-syndrome-ctd.thtml
Iraq War Inquiry Derangement Syndrome (ctd)
Tuesday, 19th January 2010
As Iraq War Derangement is ramped up daily to fresh pitches of irrationality and hysteria in the media coverage of the Chilcot inquiry, Nick Cohen’s article in the Observer is a must read. His conclusion, watching the latest attempt to nail Tony Blair for the crime of ‘taking us to war on a lie’ of which the appeasement crowd have known for a certainty that he is guilty since before Saddam’s Baghdad statue fell and that Blair, not Saddam, is the real war criminal, is spot on:
The fifth disappointment in a row will drive them closer to the edge. Sir Oliver Miles, former ambassador to Libya, has already predicted that the inquiry will be open to accusations of ‘whitewash’ because two members of the Chilcot panel are Jews. He’s not alone. I have had an allegedly left-wing journalist say the same to me. Once, he would never have allowed Jew obsessions to infect his thinking. Now, his battered mind was wide open to racial fantasies.
The mental deformations appeasement brings should not be underestimated. People don’t just placate their enemies, but become them by adopting their ideological mannerisms and foibles. For years, we’ve had the notion that democracies are the “root cause” of every Islamist atrocity accepted in polite society. You must now prepare yourself for the return of the Jewish conspiracy theory to supposedly honourable discourse. Indeed, if you look around, you will find it is already there.
It has been obvious from the start that, all too often, if you scratch the surface of a ‘Blair lied people died’ merchant you very quickly find the certainty that the real problem in the world is Israel and that the war in Iraq was all cooked up by the Jews and their proxies. The barmy ‘Israel and the Jews are the real problem’ trope was in fact on show as early as 9/11 itself.
Nevertheless, the irrationality currently on daily display in the reporting of the Iraq war inquiry headed by Sir John Chilcot is simply astounding. Material which has been round the block several times already is being breathlessly reported as yet another nail in Blair’s political coffin. In the Sunday Times, we had yet again Jack Straw’s advice to Blair, just before Blair met George W Bush at Crawford in April 2002, that war in Iraq had legal ‘elephant traps’ and that he wouldn’t get it through Parliament. The Sunday Times misleadingly claimed that this memo said war in Iraq would be of
dubious legality
whereas what it in fact laid out was Straw’s advice on what was needed to meet the test of legality.
Moreover, as I noted here in my previous observations on the inquiry:
The legality of the eventual war in Iraq rested however on a series of UN resolutions, the last of which — Resolution 1441 which reactivated the earlier ones – was not passed until November 2002. So the fact that regime change may have been deemed ‘illegal’ in the spring of 2002 is totally irrelevant.
The claim that at Crawford Blair secretly pledged Britain to a war that he denied to Britain at the time had been decided upon has been repeated over and over again in the reporting and comment on Chilcot – as here, here, here, (more confusedly) here, and most luridly, here:
It is a constitutional outrage, a case of ‘sofa government’ gone mad, that Blair, Campbell and Straw should have put the Armed Forces of this country secretly at the disposal of a foreign power.
But this is all utterly misleading and absurd. It is just not true to say Blair committed Britain to war at Crawford, because there was no decision to go to war. It was always a last resort; and if diplomatic pressure had worked and forced Saddam to comply with the UN resolutions ordering him to show he had disarmed, there would have been no war.
What Blair actually said to Bush was that he would support a war as a last resort if it came to it, but he thought the diplomatic route had to be exhausted first. There was no contradiction there. Are people really saying that neither Britain nor America should have discussed contingency planning for war if the diplomatic route were to break down? Are people really saying that no Prime Minister can ever offer his support to another country on any issue before he puts it to Parliament?
And in any event he did put it to Parliament as he always knew he had to do. Without Parliamentary approval, Britain would not have gone to war in Iraq.
Now look at the way the evidence given yesterday by Blair’s former chief of staff Jonathan Powell is reported in the Guardian:
The government had been ‘wrong’ to believe that Saddam possessed a WMD programme and had been ‘wrong’ in its estimate of how many troops would be needed in post-invasion Iraq
• Blair put Whitehall on a war footing for a second time a few years after the invasion after being warned by two of his most senior advisers that Britain and the US were ‘near to strategic failure’ in Iraq
• Dick Cheney, then the US vice-president, told Blair in person a year before the invasion that British military support was not necessary
• Downing Street made clear to the then attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, shortly before the invasion that he would have to give a definitive view on the legality of military action.
Now look at what the inquiry transcript reveals Powell also said:
…the whole point was that Saddam had cheated, was caught out when his son-in-law defected. Had to confess to the biological programme. The inspectors went back in to try dismantle that, and the inspectors at that time had concluded that there was still a large amount of material that hadn’t been decommissioned. I note, for example, on 6 September 2002, when Blix came to see the Prime Minister, he said that Saddam had not met his obligations for full and frank disarmament. There was no evidence he had destroyed his biological weapons. 10,000litres was still unaccounted for of anthrax, and there could be much more. So there were reasons to believe he still had weapons of mass destruction.
…SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: But in terms of the point that was made regularly in speeches and so on, how much was this about a country that was in violation of Security Council Resolutions which might have been on quite modest matters, and how much was it about the fact that this was a potential direct threat in terms of being prepared to use these weapons?
MR JONATHAN POWELL: It was both. He was a potential threat and he was in breach of the Security Council resolutions, so we could do something about it…. The danger of Saddam was not that he was going to strike us tomorrow, but that, if we left him unchecked, if the UN gave up on him, he would then be able to hit us.
… Because our argument was that he was a threat in the longer term, that we had to this ties in with my point about no imminent threat. In other words, he wasn’t about to send a missile to Cyprus, but, if we left him alone, he would be able to develop these weapons and use them.
… I’m saying that he was a threat, that we had to deal with him. He was in breach of the UN Resolutions. We had finally got the inspectors back in and we now had to make sure that they really disarmed him and demonstrated that they had disarmed him. That was the urgency, not the urgency of 45 minutes and the rest of it.
Powell also told the inquiry that as early as 2001 containment of Saddam was ‘dying’; sanctions weren’t working. The meeting at Crawford, however, was designed to persuade the Americans away from taking unilateral action against Iraq and to go down the UN route, an aim in which Blair was successful. But as for the claim — made by Sir Christopher Meyer — that Blair had given an unconditional commitment there that Britain would support a war in Iraq regardless, Powell said:
Yes, that’s a misunderstanding that I noticed had been put to this committee a short while ago. I was at Crawford, David Manning was at Crawford, Christopher Meyer was not at Crawford. He was at Waco, about 30 miles away… There was no undertaking in blood to go into war on Iraq. There was no firm decision to go on war. In fact, if the record which was sent to Christopher Meyer of that meeting says Bush acknowledged the possibility that Saddam would allow inspectors in and let them go about that business. If that happened, we would have to adjust our approach accordingly. So it was absolutely clear we were not signing up for a war on this, we were signing up for going down the UN route and giving Saddam a chance to comply.
BARONESS USHA PRASHAR: But military options were discussed?
MR JONATHAN POWELL: I don’t recall them getting into any sort of discussion of military options. We agreed that a cell could go to CentCom and discuss the planning that was going on there, but I don’t think we talked about military options. I think the Prime Minister’s message to the President was: if you are going to do this, you have got to do it in the most intelligent manner possible, like after Afghanistan, like after 9/11. You have got to put this on a political track. You have got to build support. You have got to go down the UN route. You have got to exhaust that UN route and you have got to give Saddam a chance to comply. That was his message again and again at Crawford.
… But being with the Americans didn’t necessarily mean going to war. The Prime Minister said repeatedly to President Bush that if Saddam complied with the UN Resolutions, then there would not be any invasion and President Bush agreed with him on that. I noted down three particular occasions in April 2002 at the meeting in Crawford sorry, April 2002 at Crawford, at Camp David on 7 September of that year and a phone call in October, and, again, as late as 19 February 2003. So the Prime Minister was saying, ‘We are with you. We need to go down the UN route, but that does not necessarily mean war. It may well be that Saddam could comply well short of war’.
But of course, none of this alters the fact that as we all know beyond a shadow of a doubt, Blair secretly committed Britain to an illegal war on which he lied to the British public – and unless the inquiry concludes as such, its members will be consigned along with him to the first circle of hell.
Verdict first, evidence nowhere.
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