Back Towards The Locus

David Aaronovitch’s substantial point – even if the inquiry was held publicly, many would hold its scope to be insufficient – is correct. The next step, in my opinion, should be to evaluate the validity of that position; for Aaronovitch, however, it’s to throw out a lot of nonsensical gas…

For six years now – and, of course, it can be understood – the war’s critics, unconfronted with the alternative reality that their preferences would have bestowed upon the world, have had it all to themselves.

Or, to put it less artfully, the war’s been hell.

The war was “immoral”, “illegal” (so why no prosecutions in all that time?) and fought under a “false prospectus”.

He’s got a non sequitur for every occasion, hasn’t he. An illegal act is one that breaks the law, not one that leads to prosecutions.

Claims of up to two million dead in Iraq have been bandied about and believed.

So? I can’t find any prominent group or commentator that’s advanced this number, and if some do then, well — so? Some people are wrong; the Bear’s a Catholic; Popes shit in woods etc.

Any of the inquiries into events leading up to the war have been dismissed as whitewashes, essentially for failing to give the answer that critics want; that answer being that there was a deliberate and wicked attempt to fool the peoples of America, Britain and the world into war.

Replace the highlighted words with “criticised” – because, of course, there’ve been critiques, not dismissals – and “think is true” – because it’s bad faith to assume that all critics have an emotional attachment to their claims – and this sentence would be relatively accurate. It is, of course, entirely valid to criticise things that contradict your perception of reality – as long as you’ve good reasons to do so, anyway.

The Hutton inquiry, of course, wasn’t about that. But critics wanted it to be and when – as had seemed to me fairly inevitable – Lord Hutton (all of whose evidence was heard in public) criticised the BBC for running a wrong story and refusing to correct it, he was excoriated. Often by people who had never (and still have never) read his report.

Who cares? The behaviour of some of Hutton’s accusers isn’t an arbiter of his correctness.

Then came Lord Butler of Brockwell, who looked at intelligence failures in the run-up to the war. He did criticise the Government, and how its “informality” had “reduced the scope for informed collective decision making”. But this is what Lord Butler’s committee said about the evidence: “We have reached the conclusion that prior to the war the Iraqi regime… had the strategic intention of resuming the pursuit of prohibited weapons progammes, including, if possible, its nuclear weapons programme… In support of that goal [it] was carrying out illicit research and development and procurement, activities… [and it] was developing ballistic missiles.” Not whitewash maybe, but “mandarin understatement” said the more intelligent critics.

Indeed, and it was criticised – note: not dismissed, crit-i-cised – for inaccuracies in assessing the dossiers and “artful rendering[s] of the truth” in evaluating pre-war intelligence.

Lord Butler’s was the consensus in 2001-03, or as Sir Menzies Campbell put it on publication of the September 2002 dossier: “We can also agree that Saddam most certainly has chemical and biological weapons and is working towards a nuclear capability.” Or Robin Cook, writing in February 2001: “We must not be deceived. Saddam still threatens his neighbours. Unchecked, Iraq could develop offensive chemical and biological capabilities, and develop a crude nuclear device in about five years.”

So the “lies” weren’t lies at all…

The truth of the dossiers – and the intentions of those behind them – aren’t even slightly dependent upon the opinions of people. Factual analysis, however, shows that they – and the promotion that followed them – were palpably deceptive, and that their composition was very deliberately dishonest.

I’m not entirely sure what Cook’s assertion is doing there: it’s just kind of — hanging around, looking eccentric.

…leaving just one extant charge of culpable dishonesty – that Mr Blair and Mr Bush secretly decided on war in 2002, come what may. I went into this at length with those I interviewed for a series on the Blair premiership in late 2007. Sir David Manning, his foreign affairs adviser and later Ambassador to the US told me that Mr Bush had agreed with Mr Blair that, were Saddam to comply fully with international obligations, there would be no need for invasion because they would have effectively “crated the guy”. There was no prior hidden compact.

Shorter David Aaronovitch: Of course they weren’t lying – this guy says so!

The irony of the discussion on an open inquiry, is that I think Mr Blair would probably be the star turn, pointing out some of the above and that, as a consequence, critics would declare another whitewash.

It is the kind of disingenuous nonsense he’d be likely to spout, isn’t it.

After writing this column, Aaronovitch went away to talk about how important the commentariat remains.