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Dragging Britain Into An Illegal War. The Tony Blair Way

December 13, 2009

Dragging Britain Into An Illegal War. The Tony Blair Way Christopher Lee writes: So, former Prime Minister Tony Blair says he would have gone to war in Iraq even if the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) really had not existed – which they hadn’t. Iraqi WMD has all along stood for Weapons of Mass Disappearance. Blair knows that. Has always known it.

He now says he went to war to get Saddam Hussein. He did not say that publicly at the time – although some of us close to the briefing process knew that was what he meant. He was doing it for George, and George felt that way. Thus Blair came close, even crossed the line between honesty and trust: he was dishonest with the rule of law we sign up to and he betrayed the trust of the people.

The arrogance of Blair verges as a despicable act mainly because so many people had enormous hopes in him when he came to power in the UK in 1997. The Tories had fallen into the slough of disrepute and, in a couple of incidents, of ill-repute. We were to discover, that PM John Major, so squeaky clean and cultivating the image as one who wanted to lead a nation back to more modest and honourable times (cricket teas on the village green and spinsters cycling to Evensong) was in fact giving another MP a right seeing to across the desk and couch of the PM’s rooms at Westminster.  Along came Blair, and for many voters, including those who had previously voted Conservative, here was hope.

Here was a man with a sparkling eye and sense of leadership to vote for.

Blair reformed the idea of the Labour Party. He got the Party die-hards to dump its Clause 4 Constitutional article that said the aim of any Labour Government was to take much into Common Ownership – that is nationalize it. It was such a tenet of the Party that it was written on the back of the membership card of every Labour supporter.

It went into the dustbin of outdated ideas. Public ownership was never again to be part of the Labour Agenda. To prove it, the Party was rebranded New Labour. A new lamp for an old political light. No more public money to go that way. Within a few years public money went back into the railway system. Just this year, public funds were poured into the banks – partly to pay £million bonuses to the directors who had buggered the banks anyway – not Blair’s doing of course, but the decision of a government from which he jumped ship just in time, or so he would believe.

For the past three weeks, the Iraq Inquiry has heard from witnesses, including heads of the intelligence community, the bureaucracy and military in the UK, who have collectively distanced themselves from the Tony Blair decision to go to war; that war is seen as increasingly illegal and more pertinently, one which the people who voted for him, did not wish to go. We know why he did it. The political theatre in the UK was increasingly too small for Blair. He went to America after

9/11 and was received as a prince who, if he had been born in the US, could have at that stage run successfully for the White House .

Instead, he went to the White House and fingered the gold lame of American presidential privilege and was enchanted by the Bush Camelot where the Merlins rigged votes to get their boy elected. (And they dare criticize Hamid Karzai?)

Next month, Blair will, indirectly, be explaining (justifying?) all this when he too appears before Sir John Chilcot’s Iraq Inquiry. Two of the committee, Sir Roderic Lyne and Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman, know their stuff (the other two may come into their own when the report is written, but not as interrogators). Lyne and Freedman know the answers to the questions they ask. Equally, so far the witnesses have understood that those two know the real circumstances of Blair taking the UK to Bush’s war; their role is to bring those facts into the open. They know too that whatever the rights and wrongs of the Iraq War of 2003, Blair had few principles about taking a reluctant nation into the conflict. It was nothing about WMD or Al Qaeda (Saddam distanced himself from Al Qaeda) nor the threat to regional security posed by Saddam. Just like getting rid of Clause 4 and the promises and illusions of the 1997 General Election, it was all about Tony Blair. He will not be the last Prime Minister to mislead the nation simply because he had come to believe that he was bigger than the people he led and that he was above the Parliament in which he sat. There’s a phrase heard around Whitehall: whatever Tony wants, Tony gets. Maybe the Chilcot Inquiry is about to say Not Anymore.

The portrait painter Fiona Graham-Mackay, she of the famous Lord Carrington portrait (now there’s a man who could give a master-class in political honour), says she has studied Blair right from the 1997 General Election campaign. It was in the eyes, she says. These were the eyes of a man who in the shaving mirror sees only his created image – not the truth.

Maybe that’s too deep for most of us, but trust her judgement. Good portrait painters understand vanity and there we have the portrait of Tony Blair. Most of us have a vanity somewhere. Most of us are never in the position to mislead a nation into going to a wretched war in order to satisfy a vanity that is so rich that six, nearly seven years on, he can say in all his own innocence, forget what I told you in 2003, just accept that I was right. It’s a bit like Clause 4. It had to be got rid of because it did not fit Blair’s image of himself. When he told the BBC that whatever the reason, he was going to George’s war, we saw Blair inventing another image. We could say that he was getting his point in before he meets the Chilcot interrogators. The difference, of course, is that they are very honourable people; Blair will be outnumbered.

It’s an event to which we should look forward to.

– End –

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