Post by Salem6 on Feb 25, 2004 10:40:48 GMT
Tony Blair is unable to grasp why his deceit will never be accepted
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Tuesday February 24, 2004
The Guardian
On the question of Iraq, Tony Blair isn't so much a deceiver as someone who simply has no grasp of objective truth. The pretexts he has used over the war were so flagrant that it's hard to sympathise with anyone who ever believed them. And even the angry arguments over what the PM really knew about "45-minute" weapons are empty, since they assume that WMD were the real reason for the war. It is - and a year ago was - entirely clear that this was not so: as clear as the truth was at Suez, the episode that Iraq so much resembles.
In one of the searing columns he wrote in the last months of his life, Hugo Young put his finger on "the great over-arching fact about the war that Blair will never admit but cannot convincingly deny".
This was that "he was committed to war months before he said he was". That is so, but there is more to it. The observable fact is that the decision for war was taken not only before Blair says it was, but for reasons other than those he gave. "Attack my decision," he says, "but at least understand why I took it." Most of us do understand all too well.
No conspiracy theory is needed to explain this war; there is no arcane mystery lurking here. A group of politically formidable and ideologically zealous Americans have wanted a war of revenge to destroy Saddam Hussein for more than 12 years. Some of them - maybe to their credit - have been publicly advocating "regime change" by force for more than six years. Where's the secret?
They came to power with George W Bush, and we now know from Paul O'Neill, Bush's first treasury secretary, that they were planning to attack Iraq from the moment the new administration took office in January 2001. The murderous attacks on September 11, although in no sense a casus belli for war on Iraq, provided an opportunity.
Whatever the ulterior motives in Washington, Blair's motive was his conviction - his only real foreign policy - that he must support the US at all times. He justifies this on the logically curious grounds that "It would be more damaging to long-term world peace if the Americans alone defeated Saddam than if they had international support." Not only was "his" decision for war thus not taken when and why he said it was, it wasn't even his.
In his defence, it has been said a little desperately that the government may have exaggerated the case for war, but that's what governments always do when wars begin. On the contrary, they have always done the opposite, with one crucial exception. Aberdeen was PM when the Crimean war began, and he hated the war so much that he felt personally sullied by it. Salisbury was PM when the Boer war began, and thought privately that he had been manoeuvred into a needless war "all for people whom we despise".
In the last century we fought two great wars, the first of which may now seem inevitable if tragic, the second, both inevitable and righteous. On both occasions the British government went to war with intense reluctance and, if anything, sexed down, as one might say, the case for hostilities, until pushed forward by parliament and public, which is the exact opposite of what happened last year.
The great exception was Suez, the comparison that so sharply illuminates Iraq. In 1956 the British and French wanted to destroy Nasser, who had kicked out the British army and seized the Suez canal, and had encouraged the rebellion in Algeria. There was even a more respectable case for regime change, as with saying that Saddam was a murderous tyrant.
Although Nasser wasn't that, he was a demagogic dictator whose execution of the Islamist Sayyid Qutb in 1966 lit a fuse that has at last terribly exploded. But London and Paris would not avow their true reasons, and instead concocted an elaborate plot: Israel would attack Egypt, and the European armies would then intervene between the combatants.
Rarely has anything been seen at once as underhand and as transparent - until Iraq. The Suez plot was hatched when the conspirators met secretly at Sèvres; the equivalent was Blair's April 2002 visit to Bush in Texas, when the decision for war was communicated to him, along with the ostensible reasons he would be expected to advance.
For all Peter Mandelson's simulated outrage, Blair now seems more relaxed. He brushes aside questions about whether he knew before the war that "45 minutes" referred to battlefield rather than strategic weapons with a revealing insouciance, still claiming that the war was "the right thing to do", while almost admitting that his earlier justifications were never meant to be taken seriously.
Whatever he said a year ago, Blair is today close to using Stanley Baldwin's defence (as put in his mouth by the cartoonist Low): "If I hadn't told you I wouldn't bring you here, you wouldn't have come." Nor would we. Only someone for whom "integrity" and " deceit" have no real meaning would fail to understand why we mind.
wheaty@compuserve.com
www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1154580,00.html
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Tuesday February 24, 2004
The Guardian
On the question of Iraq, Tony Blair isn't so much a deceiver as someone who simply has no grasp of objective truth. The pretexts he has used over the war were so flagrant that it's hard to sympathise with anyone who ever believed them. And even the angry arguments over what the PM really knew about "45-minute" weapons are empty, since they assume that WMD were the real reason for the war. It is - and a year ago was - entirely clear that this was not so: as clear as the truth was at Suez, the episode that Iraq so much resembles.
In one of the searing columns he wrote in the last months of his life, Hugo Young put his finger on "the great over-arching fact about the war that Blair will never admit but cannot convincingly deny".
This was that "he was committed to war months before he said he was". That is so, but there is more to it. The observable fact is that the decision for war was taken not only before Blair says it was, but for reasons other than those he gave. "Attack my decision," he says, "but at least understand why I took it." Most of us do understand all too well.
No conspiracy theory is needed to explain this war; there is no arcane mystery lurking here. A group of politically formidable and ideologically zealous Americans have wanted a war of revenge to destroy Saddam Hussein for more than 12 years. Some of them - maybe to their credit - have been publicly advocating "regime change" by force for more than six years. Where's the secret?
They came to power with George W Bush, and we now know from Paul O'Neill, Bush's first treasury secretary, that they were planning to attack Iraq from the moment the new administration took office in January 2001. The murderous attacks on September 11, although in no sense a casus belli for war on Iraq, provided an opportunity.
Whatever the ulterior motives in Washington, Blair's motive was his conviction - his only real foreign policy - that he must support the US at all times. He justifies this on the logically curious grounds that "It would be more damaging to long-term world peace if the Americans alone defeated Saddam than if they had international support." Not only was "his" decision for war thus not taken when and why he said it was, it wasn't even his.
In his defence, it has been said a little desperately that the government may have exaggerated the case for war, but that's what governments always do when wars begin. On the contrary, they have always done the opposite, with one crucial exception. Aberdeen was PM when the Crimean war began, and he hated the war so much that he felt personally sullied by it. Salisbury was PM when the Boer war began, and thought privately that he had been manoeuvred into a needless war "all for people whom we despise".
In the last century we fought two great wars, the first of which may now seem inevitable if tragic, the second, both inevitable and righteous. On both occasions the British government went to war with intense reluctance and, if anything, sexed down, as one might say, the case for hostilities, until pushed forward by parliament and public, which is the exact opposite of what happened last year.
The great exception was Suez, the comparison that so sharply illuminates Iraq. In 1956 the British and French wanted to destroy Nasser, who had kicked out the British army and seized the Suez canal, and had encouraged the rebellion in Algeria. There was even a more respectable case for regime change, as with saying that Saddam was a murderous tyrant.
Although Nasser wasn't that, he was a demagogic dictator whose execution of the Islamist Sayyid Qutb in 1966 lit a fuse that has at last terribly exploded. But London and Paris would not avow their true reasons, and instead concocted an elaborate plot: Israel would attack Egypt, and the European armies would then intervene between the combatants.
Rarely has anything been seen at once as underhand and as transparent - until Iraq. The Suez plot was hatched when the conspirators met secretly at Sèvres; the equivalent was Blair's April 2002 visit to Bush in Texas, when the decision for war was communicated to him, along with the ostensible reasons he would be expected to advance.
For all Peter Mandelson's simulated outrage, Blair now seems more relaxed. He brushes aside questions about whether he knew before the war that "45 minutes" referred to battlefield rather than strategic weapons with a revealing insouciance, still claiming that the war was "the right thing to do", while almost admitting that his earlier justifications were never meant to be taken seriously.
Whatever he said a year ago, Blair is today close to using Stanley Baldwin's defence (as put in his mouth by the cartoonist Low): "If I hadn't told you I wouldn't bring you here, you wouldn't have come." Nor would we. Only someone for whom "integrity" and " deceit" have no real meaning would fail to understand why we mind.
wheaty@compuserve.com
www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1154580,00.html