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The
demons of Tony Blair
By
Jonathan
Power
July 23, 2003
LONDON - It is unlikely that the judicial enquiry now
set up by British Prime Minister Tony Blair following the
apparent suicide of David Kelly, the senior expert on
weapons of mass destruction, will get to the bottom of
why Dr Kelly chose to die. The assumption that he was
angered on the one side by a BBC report that erroneously
overstated what he had said to one of its reporters or,
on the other, that he felt he was being made a fall guy
by the government doesn't add up. He clearly had doubts
about the government's case for going to war, but even
inside the ministry of defence he was no lone voice -
many of the generals advised against going to war.
As for the BBC, at worst the reporter "sexed up" what
Kelly told him, a hazard anyone who deals with the press
even occasionally is acutely aware of. And although the
government and parliament did throw the spotlight on him
they can hardly said to have overdone it. They didn't
threaten to fire him or cut off his pension rights, and
although his friends characterize him as a gentle and
honest man he worked in a field that was full of
mendacity. Presumably- and it is unlikely we will ever
know the full truth- he was a man who had many other
problems.
But once the air over this death has cleared what will
remain is that the Blair duped the nation just as
President George Bush duped America. They jointly made a
case that the world stood in imminent danger of a being
attacked by Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction
and to leave it a day longer- even three or so months as
some members of the Security Council begged, as they
sought to give the UN weapons inspectors more time to
finish their job- could not be countenanced. War had to
begin almost at once, and it did.
Now that the war is over and so far no weapons of mass
destruction have been uncovered Messrs Blair and Bush
have tried to re-pitch the argument. As Blair said,
speaking before the U.S. Congress last week, at the least
Saddam Hussein was a murderous tyrant and that was enough
reason to depose him. At worst, he was what he and Bush
had said about him- a possessor of weapons of mass
destruction and a man capable of forming an alliance with
Al Qaeda. In either case there need be no regrets or
apologies to be made.
It doesn't stand up with or without the death of Dr
Kelly. It has long been clear that Iraq lost most of its
capacity for offensive military action in the first Gulf
War. It lost its navy and 90% of its air force and was
never able to replace them. Its army was way under
strength and under armed. The UN inspectors had destroyed
more weapons than any of the bombing in the first Gulf
War, as President Bill Clinton often reminded us. The
nuclear weapons program that Iraq had started on was
uncovered in the early 1990s by the UN team and
dismantled. The chemical and biological weapons programs,
even if re-constituted, could only have been (by the
standards of modern warfare and the defensive
capabilities of western armies) quite primitive.
Ironically, the only real value of these incipient
weapons was that, in Saddam's eyes, they gave him reason
to think they frightened the West (thanks to the paranoia
of the neo-conservatives) and thus they worked as a
deterrent, giving him a negotiating card of value. There
is evidence that suggests that the sentence that has
sprung the hoo-ha over the British government's pre-war
assertion that "the Iraqi military are capable of
deploying chemical or biological weapons within 45
minutes" was a carefully leaked plant from Baghdad.
By attempting to inhabit the moral high ground,
arguing that he was helping save the world from an evil
doer of grand proportions, Blair, the former advocate,
got carried away with hubris and the simplicity of what
he regarded as a beautiful case and failed to use his
moral sensibility to look at the other side of the
argument:
* War is the bluntest of tools. Used again against
Iraq it would drive a country, already in perilous state
after years of continuous war compounded by severe
sanctions, over the edge. Moreover, the chances of
turning the face of the Middle East towards democracy
would, if anything, be made more difficult.
* War would unearth only small quantities of weapons
of mass destruction. (In fact less than the most of the
anti-war lobby thought.) The UN inspectors, given time,
would have nailed these down as they successfully did
after the first Gulf War. (The International Atomic
Energy Agency has just told us that 22 pounds of uranium
compounds have been looted from the country's main
nuclear complex in the post war chaos. Uranium that once
was under tight wraps in Saddam's day could indeed now be
in terrorist hands.)
* War would be another cause for immense bitterness
against the West right through the Islamic world. While
it is true that there has been less outpouring of anger
on the street than many of us supposed, the detailed poll
by the Pew organization shows how anti American public
opinion has become. This is the last thing the West needs
when there are people on both sides determined to whip up
public opinion into a "clash of civilizations".
* There was an alternative: make a deal with
Saddam - that in return for open access by the arms
inspectors and a loosening up of the internal repression
of the regime, sanctions would be lifted and Washington
would no longer demand, as it had for over a decade, his
stepping down. That would be left to internal forces.
Mr Blair and his conscience are for his maker to sort
out. But for the rest of us one thing is clear: on the
big issue of the war we were grossly and unnecessarily
misled.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2003 By
JONATHAN POWER
Follow this
link to read about - and order - Jonathan Power's book
written for the
40th Anniversary of
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"Like
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