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.
On Tuesday, Tom Ridge appeared on Rachel Maddow's show, and Maddow tried in vein to recruit Ridge for the position of Republican voice of reason on foreign affairs. The problem was that, at bottom, Ridge is a conservative. He's got better manners than Dick Cheney (as do pit bulls), but at bottom the belief structure is remarkably similar. He dutifully stands by the lies used to get us to invade Iraq. He blames bad intelligence, not the Bush Administration's determination to go to war. He says that other governments were fooled, too. And besides, he says, the Iraqi people are going to love their democracy so much some day, that all the people slaughtered along the way will be forgotten, and history will smile on George W. Bush, the Greatest President of All Time!
Okay, I made up that last bit about Bush. But the rest of it Ridge actually said, and it's all the very same sort of stuff that Cheney believes. There is no difference between the two aside from Cheney's lack of manners. After everything else was said and done, Ridge's ultimate defense of the Bush Administration was framed in terms of personal honor--a typical conservative frame:
I think it's a pretty radical conclusion to suggest that men and women entrusted with the safety of this country would predicate a decision upon any other bases other than to keep America safe. Later on, it may have proven that some of the information was inaccurate, but there were plenty of reasons to go into Iraq at the time; the foremost was weapons of mass destruction. That obviously proven to be faulty. But the fact of the matter is, at that time, given what they knew--and they knew more than you and I did--it seemed to be the right thing to do, and the decision was made in what they considered to be the best interests of our country.
Of course, the common sense meaning implied here--that a rational, empirical decision was made just prior to invasion based on more data than critics had--is simply, factually false. Not just the faultiness of the data, but it's fundamental irrelevance to the decisiomaking process were already known. We know this from the US Today story published on September 11, 2002, six months before the Iraq invasion, which reported that the decision to invade Iraq had been made within weeks of 9/11. ("Iraq course set from tight White House circle"). It quoted Condi Rice saying that there wasn't even a decision process involved:
The decision to target Saddam "kind of evolved, but it's not clear and neat," a senior administration official says, calling it "policymaking by osmosis."
"There wasn't a flash moment. There's no decision meeting," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice says. "But Iraq had been on the radar screen -- that it was a danger and that it was something you were going to have to deal with eventually ... before Sept. 11, because we knew that this was a problem."
Members of Congress weren't consulted. Nor were key allies. The concerns of senior military officers and intelligence analysts, some of whom remain skeptical, weren't fully aired until afterward.
STATE BLOGS
