Pinch me, I can't believe it!
EURSOC - Gilligan says “war was just”.
Collin May
22 March, 2004
The former BBC journalist who started the Hutton affair by claiming that the British government had sexed up WMD dossier that leading to the death of Dr Kelly now says the war in Iraq was just.
In an extremely candid and well written piece in last Fridays Evening Standard (the London daily that unfortunately doesn’t publish the whole article on the web)
Gilligan says:
“One year on (since the war began), however the most important fact is that nobody’s worst fears on that wakeful night have come true. The vast majority of us, Iraqis, journalists, and Tony Blair alike, survived. Fedayeen guerrillas struck the coalition with small numbers, but there was virtually no real fighting with Sadam’s regular forces. The bombing of Baghdad looked scary on TV, but it didn’t even begin to approach the daily tonnage dropped on ,say, Hanoy during Vietnam, London or any German city during the second world war.
‘Shock and awe’ lasted an hour and a half, rather than the promised three days. And with only a few ghastly exceptions, the targeting, in the capital at least, was very precise. Colleagues who arrived after the war was over kept asking us where all the destroyed buildings were.
There never was a military stalemate, a refugee crisis, a hundred thousand civilian dead…” He goes on: “That old doom-mongers favourite, the revolt of the “Arab street” across the Middle East, has remained as much of a mirage as any weapon of mass destruction.”
Gilligan is largely critical of Blair’s reasons for going to war, rather than the war itself. “Right war, wrong reasons” he says:
“More than anything else, what discredited the war was the rush to conflict, the need to claim Iraq as a pressing danger. From this need stemmed all the Government’s most famous tabloid half-truths and non-truths. No one I know ever doubted that Sadam had WMD, or could rebuild them quickly. It was a perfectly fair inference to draw from his behaviour, even, if it now seems to have been wrong. But no expert, spook, or politician I ever met, apart from a few New Labour androids, believed Iraq’s WMD were a threat “current and serious” enough to require military action in March 2003.”
It is a pleasure to read some fair and balanced reporting from an ex BBC man, particularly after the bashing he received during the Hutton affair, even losing his job. One wonders if he would be allowed to be so fair and balanced if he was still at the BBC.
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