I have recently started reading the international bestseller “The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, by the journalist Robert Fisk. It is both highly interesting and filled with Fisk’s usual level of wrath. While reflecting on some of the issues raised within the book, chiefly the arrogance with which Western powers have been known to treat international law, I was absent-mindedly browsing the BBC News website. Aside from ranting to myself at the usual unnecessarily high number of grammatical and spelling mistakes, my attention was caught by the live Iraq inquiry session that was available to watch.
I have to admit, as a politics student, I have not perhaps kept myself as informed with the proceedings as I should, largely for these reasons: I don’t believe it will provide us with any breathtakingly exacting examinations of key figures. I didn’t believe it was likely that Tony Blair would break down under the force of questioning and reveal, sobbing, that George Bush swore he would fist him with a cruise missile in the Oval Office if he didn’t go along with the proposed invasion.
This turned out to be an accurate prediction. Tony Blair gave an accomplished performance; anybody who has had the dubious privilege of hearing the man speak live will understand he is an extremely skilled orator. The other reason is that, if this did happen, there is no guarantee we would ever hear about it. If the information is deemed to be “sensitive”, it “must be heard in private and not released into the public domain”. The criteria for determining whether the information can be suppressed is if “it would, or would be likely to, cause harm or damage to the public interest”. This includes, but is not limited to, if it could affect “national security, defence interests or international relations” or “make public commercially sensitive information”. To me, it seems that leaves plenty of room for the suppression of inconvenient information. To those who consider this view unduly cynical, I point to the Serious Fraud Office’s investigation into the 1988 Al Yamamah arms deal between Saudi Arabia and BAE Systems. In 2006, years after the investigation began under a cloud of allegations concerning a £20 million slush fund used to bribe Saudi officials, Lord Goldsmith announced that the investigation was being discontinued. Rumours abounded in the media, including in the Daily Telegraph, that the Saudis had threatened to pull out of an ongoing deal, again with BAE, concerning the sale of Eurofighter jets that was reportedly worth billions and secured thousands of British jobs.
Returning to the evidence given by Tony Blair, his initial argument rests on the premise that “If September 11 hadn’t happened, our assessment of the risk of allowing Saddam any possibility of him reconstituting his programmes would not have been the same”. Perhaps a slightly more revealing quote is from Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary at the time, who stated “Objectively, the threat from Iraq has not worsened as a result of September 11. What has, however, changed, is the tolerance of the international community, especially that of the United States”.
This is, to my mind, the key issue as to why the war happened. The United States felt it had to make a statement to reassert its dominance after the first attack on the mainland United States since the British burned half of Washington in 1814. It also seems likely the Neo-Conservatives, who to a worrying extent determined the President’s foreign policy decisions, hoped that a clean democratic transformation could take place, changing a problematic state to an exemplar of stability in one the world’s most troubled zones.
Any other arguments put forward were largely window-dressing to assuage the concerns of those who felt that “because we can” didn’t constitute an acceptable legal argument. Similarly, Mr Blair felt it was the right course of action to take, and as he admitted to that sternest of interrogators, Fern Britton, he would have been happy to use any argument to convince the people of Britain that we should go to war. This being the case, the inquiry will not provide us with much that intelligent commentators could not have guessed already, and so far very little unequivocal statements of legality have emerged, Sir Michael Wood’s evidence being the honourable exception. Do these scintillas of information justify the expense of the inquiry? The answer, sadly, is probably not. For those of you who want real, direct action, log on to www.arrestblair.org for a chance to do something that will make even less of a difference, but might at least earn you a few quid.
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