http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5141246-103677,00.html
Comment
Blair still took us to war on a lie
To insist that the ends now justify the means is morally disgraceful
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Saturday March 5, 2005
Guardian
An Israeli conservative has said something sarcastic but apt about the
struggle in the Holy Land. Historically the Arabs were the world's great
warrior nation, while the Jews were the masters of debate and dialectic. But
in this conflict, "the Arabs have lost every battle and the Jews have lost
every argument".
It was a good line, and it's a useful distinction. Tony Blair now thinks he
can claim victory in Iraq - but having won his battles, he must not be
allowed to win the argument.
After Blair had forced his government, his party and his country into a war
which most British people did not want, Iraq was conquered, Saddam was
captured, and now elections have been held. And Blair could be forgiven for
thinking that he has won the argument. He says there is "a ripple of change"
in the Middle East ostensibly triggered by the new regime in Baghdad. There
is much triumphalist, and maybe hubristic, cheering and jeering from
supporters of the war, and even some former critics, Labour MPs and Guardian
columnists among them, have been saying sheepishly that the war may after
all have had a beneficial outcome.
But even if, and that is a pretty large "if", liberal democracy has been
established in Iraq, and every Arab nation is clamouring for representative
government, nothing about the causes of the war has been changed, except the
subject. Our prime minister is very good at changing the subject, but he can
only win his argument if the rest of us are prepared likewise to alter the
historical record, to accept a long campaign of obfuscation, and to forget
the simple fact that, although there might have been good reasons for the
war, the reasons Blair gave could not have been good, since they weren't
true.
Looking back, the crucial moment of Blair's imposture was not March 2003,
when the war began, but the previous September. He made our flesh creep with
claims about weapons of mass destruction ready for use within 45 minutes,
and the almost more disgracefully false claim that Saddam represented a
"serious and current" threat to British interests. And he got away with it,
because even sceptics asked the wrong question.
Instead of, "does Saddam really possess noxious weaponry?" the question
should have been, "is Saddam's weaponry, whatever it might be, the real
reason for the war on which this country is about to embark, or is it a
pretext, provided after Blair has already decided to go to war?" Which is to
say that the absolutely crucial question was and is: When was the decision
for war taken?
Grasping this was the climax of Hugo Young's career. "The great over-arching
fact about the war that Blair will never admit but cannot convincingly
deny," he said in a column shortly before his death, is that "he was
committed to war months before he said he was". Blair's deepest falsehood
was not so much the WMD claims as his pretence that he was "working for
peace" and had made no military commitment - when he had certainly done so
no later than his meeting with George Bush in Texas in April 2002.
Obfuscation took a new turn after no weapons were found. It was suggested,
wrongly, that this had been, at worst, an error in good faith. Mary Ann
Sieghart of the Times has said morosely that her friend Tony had assured her
personally about the existence of WMD. If that was risible, far more so is
the way in which she has since forgiven him. Blair "should be angry about
having been led into war on the basis of false intelligence", she writes,
and yet "not a single British spymaster has even lost his job". Can she
really believe that Blair sat helplessly while those malign spooks fed him
duff information?
What actually happened was very much in the spirit of Citizen Kane when his
newspaper was fomenting war in Cuba. "I could write your prose poems about
scenery," his correspondent cables, "but there's no war," to which Kane
replies, "You provide the prose poems, I'll provide the war." That was what
Blair said to John Scarlett, and to Lord Goldsmith also. The chairman of the
JIC provided prose poems in the form of intelligence which appeared to
justify the war militarily, as the attorney general gave his own in the form
of a opinion justifying it legally.
Some supporters of the war have been more honest than others, although the
"liberal hawks" still have difficulties. Michael Ignatieff says that he was
dismayed by the failure to find WMD, but now recognises that the case for a
"pre-emptive" war, against a tyrant who posed an "imminent danger", was
wrong anyway, and that "the honest case for war was 'preventive' - to stop a
tyrant with malignant intentions from acquiring lethal capabilities or
transferring those capabilities to other enemies".
That seems fair enough - until Ignatieff adds glumly that "the problem for
my side is that if the honest case had been put - for a preventive as
opposed to a pre-emptive war - the war would have been even more unpopular
than it was." Yes, that was indeed the problem for Blair, and it still is
for those who now say that the war might have done good whatever its
original rationale.
The Washington neoconservatives come out of the war far better than the
Labour MPs. Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle knew what they were doing, they
always wanted a war to destroy Saddam - and they are disciples of Leo
Strauss, who, following Plato's "noble lie", argued that "moral virtue" in a
mass democracy means "controlling the unintelligent majority". Tony Blair
also adopted the principle, even if he didn't spell it out like that.
No doubt politicians habitually sway from planned failure to unplanned
success, and the law of unintended consequences operates all the time, but
there is the separate fallacy of post hoc and propter hoc. Primitive peoples
suffering from drought put a maiden to death and the rains come. Did the
human sacrifice change the weather? Even if the war has changed Iraq from a
despotic to a constitutional regime, it is outrageous to justify it thus
when Blair had been advised that regime change would not provide a legal
basis for war, and specifically said that this was not the reason for the
invasion.
The arguments now being advanced are logically absurd, politically
disastrous and morally disgraceful. Nothing will alter the fact the war was
fought on a lie. If we concede that such means are justified by the ends, do
we deserve ever to be told the truth again?
· Geoffrey Wheatcroft's book, The Strange Death of Tory England, is
published this month
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