As reports in the media suggest that Sir
John Chilcot will decline to set a timetable for publishing his report
after almost six years, reports also say that the blame for the whole sorry
saga will be spread
around ministers at the time and members of the security services, as well
as former prime minister Tony Blair.
The undue delay in publishing the report appears to be due
to those people who have been criticised in it, being allowed to see drafts of
the report and issue rebuttals which are then considered for inclusion in the final
version of the report. These negotiations will not be made public.
Chilcot is a Whitehall mandarin, and so will couch the
language of the report, and any criticism of individuals in mandarin speak.
That is, it will say very little in plain English about who was at fault and
by thinly spreading around the blame amongst numerous individuals, will water
down any censure of, in particular, Blair himself.
There were of course many who aided and abetted Blair in his
(successful) attempts to railroad through justification for the invasion of
Iraq, with exaggerated and at times completely made up intelligence on Iraq’s
chemical weapons capability. Who can forget the infamous ‘dodgy dossier’ that
Alistair Campbell, Blair’s chief spin merchant, copied from a student
dissertation on the internet?
We have already had investigations and reports into the Iraq
war. Lord Hutton,
ostensively investigating the death of government chemical weapons scientist
David Kelly, also opened the lid on events leading up to the Iraq war.
Hutton’s report was a whitewash, but the open inquiry itself displayed the
evidence for all to see, and the public made their own minds up, despite
Hutton’s perverse verdict. I knew the game was up for Blair’s spin operation
when, listening to a football radio phone in show, a caller accused the referee
of ‘doing a Hutton’ when the official missed a clear cut penalty in the match.
Then there was Lord Butler’s review of
the use of British intelligence in the decision to invade Iraq. Butler is
another Whitehall mandarin and even though his review concluded that key
intelligence used to justify the war with Iraq had been shown to be unreliable,
his careful language did not blame any specific individuals.
Just by reading the newspapers at the time I could tell that
it was highly unlikely Iraq possessed chemical weapons (overlooking the fact
that we had sold some to them in the 1980s), and even if they did, they wouldn’t
be effective as they were too old. And Iraq would be crazy to even try to use
such weapons against the might of the US military.
We also had the shifting justification for war as the claims
of WMD started to unravel. We were doing it because Iraq was harbouring
terrorists, had a bad human rights record, to help the women of Iraq, to bring
democracy to the middle east and so it went on. It finally settled on that
Saddam Hussein was removed from power, even though regime change had been fiercely
denied all along.
The whole episode was a complete disaster for Iraq, and
indeed the rest of the region, as we see today with ISIS rampant in Iraq and
Syria and the whole region in turmoil with militias fighting for control of
different countries, and terrorism there and in the west far worse than it was
before this foolish and mendacious affair. Hundreds of thousands of people
killed, for what?
Although Blair and US President Bush had their accomplices
in prosecuting this illegal war, the buck should stop with them. Perhaps Bush
was too stupid to realise, but Blair must have known that the ‘intelligence and
facts were being fixed around the policy of removing Saddam’ as the Downing
Street memo stated, but continued to lie to justify the invasion. The blame
should be laid where it belongs, with Bush and Blair, anything else is a
distortion of the truth.
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