This week, hearings began in the official UK inquiry into Britain's role in promoting the Iraq War, chaired by Sir John Chilcot, hence known as the Chilcot inquiry. It's a weird feeling following them, since they take for granted a framework of facts that utterly demolishes the Versailles picture of the last 8 or 9 years--beginning with the fact that Bush was keen to overthrow Saddam well before 9/11--but at the same time (at lest so far) they're a form of damage control for the British, apparently calculated to air all the dirty linen that's already been seen, plus only a tiny bit more that's traceable to those at the top. Above all, Tony Blair's conduct must remain unwise, but nothing worse, no matter what the facts may be.
The chief result so far has simply been to confirm, somewhat clarify and fill out some of the information released over four years ago in the Downing Street Memos. At the same time, it's very much an establishment affair. So however embarrassing the basic facts may be, the proverbial stiff upper lip is preventing the mouthing of certain basic truths too uncomfortable for official Britain to bear, even as it nonchalantly skewers the official Versailles line with almost every breath. As a result, so far at least, one might well subtitle the Chilcot inquiry "Where the Poodles Wasn't." Thus, on Thursday, Julian Borger reported for the Guardian:
Chilcot inquiry: Tony Blair decided on Iraq war a year before invasion - envoy Julian Borger, diplomatic editor
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 November 2009 20.25 GMT
Tony Blair's government decided up to a year before the Iraq invasion that it was "a complete waste of time" to resist the US drive to oust Saddam Hussein, opting instead to offer advice on how it should be done, the former British ambassador to Washington said today.
Sir Christopher Meyer, testifying to the Chilcot inquiry into Britain's role in the war, made it clear that once the Bush administration decided to take military action, the Blair government never considered opting out or opposing it.
He said that the timing of the invasion was dictated by the "unforgiving nature" of the military build-up rather than the outcome of diplomacy or UN weapons inspections, which had not been given sufficient time. British officials were left "scrabbling for the smoking gun" - evidence for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction - as preparations continued.
Meyer, ambassador to Washington from 1997 to 2003, described a critical moment in March 2002, as Blair was preparing a visit to George Bush's Texas ranch.
New instructions were brought to the embassy by the prime minister's foreign affairs adviser, Sir David Manning.
The message from Downing Street was that the 11 September attacks and the subsequent US determination to oust Saddam were established facts, "and it was a complete waste of time ... if we were going to work with the Americans, to come to them and bang away about regime change and say: 'We can't support it'."
He rejected the suggestion that British policy changed to stay in line with Washington. "I wouldn't say it was as extremely poodle-ish as that," Meyer said, arguing Blair had long been a "true believer about the wickedness of Saddam Hussein".
Of course, believing that Saddam Hussein was wicked is like believing that the Sun rises in the East: (A) Neither belief is the least bit controversial or unusual. (B). Neither belief is justification for war under international law. And thus we are treated to the spectacle of discussing Tony Blair and his minister's long train of dissembling while struggling alternatively with, against, and in support of George Bush and his administration's long train of dissembling, all the while laying down fresh layers of further dissembling simultaneous with revealing unavoidable scattered bits of truth.
In short, they are all poodles now, for in order not to be, they would inevitably have to call for Bush and Blair's indictment as war criminals at the Hague.
In other non-news from the Chilcot inquiry, we learn that Bush wanted to overthrow Saddam well before 9/11, and we get further fleshing out how things changed after 9/11, until Britain finally agreed. Still, what's non-news for the rest of the world is still forbidden knowledge in Versailles, so it's worth taking note of, if for no other reason.
The collegial, rather than confrontational nature of the hearings has been widely commneted on.
Thus, at the mid-day beak of day one liveblogging the hearings for the Guardian, Andrew Sparrow wrote:
There was a remarkable amount of establishment chumminess to today's proceedings. At one point Simon Webb declared that two members of the inquiry were on a panel that interviewed him when he got an important promotion at the MoD. Anyone worried about a Whitehall stitch-up would have their worst fears confirmed and it is fair to say that the questions were not, by any means, hostile. But occasionally we did hear members of the inquiry ask questions that displayed some degree of scepticism, as when Lady Prashar wondered why there was such "urgency" about pursing Iraq, or when Sir Roderick Lyne suggested that the British might have "drifted" into agreement with the US.
Some skepticism!
At this point, Sparrow had just summarized the main substantive "revelations" as follows:
• In 2001, when George Bush became US president, the British and the Americans agreed that tackling Iraq through "containment" - using sanctions, no-fly zones and proposed weapons inspections - was not working terribly well. The British wanted to get the UN security council to pass a resolution changing the sanctions regime but the Americans were slightly less keen.
• Britain thought at the time that Iraq's WMD programme was a threat. But it was not seen as the most serious threat to the country.
• Some elements in the Bush administration were talking about regime change in Iraq before 9/11. But this meant an opposition-backed coup, not an invasion, and it was not the policy of the state department, which was in charge of Iraq policy. Britain was not in favour.
• After 9/11 American policy changed. The Pentagon took charge of the war on terror and by late November the Americans were talking about a "phase two" that would follow the invasion of Afghanistan. The British did not change policy at this point, but they recognised that American willingness to tolerate the risks inherent in the containment strategy was reducing.
There was one mini-revelation. Sir William Patey, the head of the Middle East department at the FCO at the time said that he had proposed regime change in an internal Foreign Office document written at the time (before 9/11, I think). He said that it was rejected because there was no legal base for regime change. This sounds significant, but Tony Blair always accepted that an invasion to secure regime change would be illegal.
All this is quite shocking to Versailles, but hardly any sort of news in Britain, more on the order of fleshing out officially what everyone already knows.
Back to the clubbiness theme, at days end, Sparrow added more of the same:
Anyone expecting to witness a forensic courtroom grilling will have been disappointed. "No one is on trial," Chilcot said in his opening remarks, and he was certainly right about that. The tone of the exchanges was distinctly clubby. It sounded less like a public inquiry, and more like an in-house Whitehall post mortem that just happened to be taking place in front of the cameras.
Don't call Blair a liar By Chris Ames - Last updated: Wednesday, November 25, 2009
by Chris Ames
Sky's Mark Stone has put his finger on what I think is going wrong (already) with the Inquiry:
The Inquiry committee appeared not to follow up some obvious questions. An example. One of the panel, Sir Roderic Lyle, referring to a statement Blair made in 2003, asked the following:
"Would you regard the Prime Minister's statement in December 2003 that 'the Iraq Study Group [tasked with finding WMD after the invasion] has already found massive evidence of a huge system of clandestine laboratories' as corresponding to advice you were giving to ministers?"
The response from Tim Dowse was, somewhat sheepishly: "I did not advise him to use those words."
But then - nothing from the panel. They did not ask whether the advisors told the PM to back off from words which were clearly out of kilter with the advice they were giving him.
So here is Blair saying something completely untrue, and officials know it was untrue. But it's just left, very politely. You can't call the former prime minister a liar, even implicitly, whatever the evidence shows. Mistakes were made. No-one is to blame.
For a bracing "meanwhile, back in reality land," also writing in the Guardian,
Scott Ritter reminds us:
In short, Saddam had been found guilty of possessing WMD, and his sentence had been passed down by Washington and London void of any hard evidence that such weapons, or even related programmes, even existed. The sentence meted out - regime termination - mandated such a massive deployment of troops and material that all but the wilfully blind or intentionally ignorant had to know by the early autumn of 2002 that war with Iraq was inevitable. One simply does not initiate the movement of hundreds of thousands of troops, thousands of armoured vehicles and aircraft, and dozens of ships on a whim or to reinforce an idle threat.
President George Bush was able to disguise his blatant militarism behind the false sincerity of his ally Blair and his own secretary of state, Colin Powell. The president's task was made far easier given the role of useful idiot played by much of the mainstream media in the US and Britain, where reporters and editors alike dutifully repeated both the hyped-up charges levied against Iraq and the false pretensions that a diplomatic solution was being sought.
The tragic final act of the farce directed by Bush and Blair was the theatre of war justification known as UN weapons inspections.
Having played the WMD card so forcefully in an effort to justify war with Iraq, the US (and by extension, Britain) were compelled once again to revisit the issue of disarmament. But the reality was that disarming Iraq was the furthest thing from the mind of either Bush or Blair. The decision to use military force to overthrow Saddam was made by these two leaders independent of any proof that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction. Having found Iraq guilty, the last thing those who were positioning themselves for war wanted was to re-engage a process that not only had failed to uncover any evidence Iraq's retention of WMD in the past, but was actually positioned to produce fact-based evidence that would either contradict or significantly weaken the case for war already endorsed by Bush and Blair.
Which, at bottom, is yet another way of saying, "We're all poodles." Anyone who's not a poodle would have noticed the gaping holes of logic that one could drive a tank division through.
In America, this is all quite unthinkable, and so no one thinks about it. In Britain, they do things with a bit more finesse. I was somewhat reminded of an Intel commercial: "Our damage control isn't like your damage control." No one gets called a traitor, grave mistakes are openly admitted, and nobody says, "We'll all be killed!" Still, damage control it certainly is. No one is going to the Hague, that's for damn sure!
STATE BLOGS
