The alternative to war was simple: defeat
By Mark Steyn
(Filed: 03/02/2004)
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If I were a resident of the United Kingdom I would not pay
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There is something repulsive about a subsidy culture so secure that a publicly funded organisation can pay its chief executive £500,000 a year off the backs of widows and spinsters. If the BBC wants to throw away million-dollar salaries, it should do so on its own dime.
So, in that spirit, I hail the many stellar BBC "personalities" who are said to be threatening to quit the corporation. Go for it, Jonno! Sky beckons! Carlton awaits! And the Beeb can go back to paying 17 and sixpence a shift like it did in the good old days, so lovingly recreated in my colleague Sarah Sands's marvellous sepia-hued Ovaltine and Marmite sandwich of a column the other day.
Incidentally, apropos that full-page ad from Beeb bigshots in Saturday's paper, no self-respecting journalist should put his name to a statement such as: "Greg Dyke stood for brave, independent and rigorous BBC journalism that was fearless in its search for the truth." "Fearless in his search for the truth" sounds like something the announcer intones in a dark brown voice over the opening theme of a Fifties cop show: it's fine for Perry Mason or Eliot Ness in The Untouchables, but it's less credible applied to Greg Dyke, who was positively blasé in his search for the truth. That's why, nearly a month after the offending broadcast, he still hadn't bothered to listen to the tape of it and he offered the corporation's unconditional support to Gilligan without making sufficient effort to determine the accuracy of his allegation.
For all the self-puffery about fearless truth-seeking, that non-act of Dyke's is the central act of this drama. Why bother checking the story when it fits not only your own general assumptions but those of everyone you meet at dinner parties? Last June, I quoted Peter Worthington, the Canadian columnist and veteran of the Second World War and Korea, who likes to say that there's no such thing as an unpopular won war, and I noted that British public opinion seemed weirdly determined to make their Iraq victory an exception to that rule. And so it's proved. If I understand correctly, the people seem inclined to accept Lord Hutton's findings on the very narrow, technical, legalistic point of whether Mr Blair personally clubbed Dr Kelly over the head, dragged him out of the house and killed him, but they're furious that the good Lord declined to broaden his remit to the wider "underlying" issues, such as whether everyone's sick of Blair and, let's face it, his sucking up to that warmongering moron Bush is the final straw.
I certainly wouldn't want to live under New Labour, but, even so, with so many other available cudgels with which to beat Blair, I would caution against using the notion that he "misled" Britain into war, tempting though the scenario evidently is for Michael Howard. As things stand, it seems unlikely that WMD will be found in Iraq. Doesn't bother me. In these pages a few days after 9/11, I stated that I was in favour of whacking Saddam pour encourager les autres. There was no sharper way to draw a distinction between the new geopolitical landscape and the September 10 world than by removing a man who symbolised the weakness and irresolution of "multilateralism". He was left in power back in 1991 in order, as Colin Powell airily conceded in his memoirs, to keep the UN coalition intact. Lesson number one: don't form coalitions with people who don't share your war aims.
If the Gulf war was a cautionary tale in the defects of unbounded multilateralism, the Iraq war is a lesson in the defects of even the most circumscribed coalition. The Americans settled on WMD as the preferred casus belli because it was the one Blair could go along with: as one of his Cabinet ministers told me, they were advised that a simple policy of regime change - the Clinton/Bush line - would have been illegal. So they plumped for WMD. American and British intelligence were convinced Saddam had 'em, as were the French and Germans. Saddam thought he had 'em. So did his generals. It's believed that they were ordered to be used against the Americans as they galloped up to Baghdad from Kuwait. But when Saddam got there, the cupboard was bare. Strange, but apparently true.
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Anyone who's really fearless in his search for the truth
can read David Kay's conclusions: it's a much more
interesting story than "Blair lied!"
So Saddam didn't have WMD. Conversely, Colonel Gaddafi
did. And hands up anyone who knew he did until he
announced he was chucking it in. The only way you can be
absolutely certain your intelligence about a dictator's
weapons is accurate is when you look out the window and
see a big mushroom cloud over Birmingham. More to the
point, it's in alliances of convenience between the
dictatorships and freelance groups that the true horrors
lie - and for that you don't need big stockpiles, just a
vial or two of this or that. You can try and stop it day
by day at the gate at Heathrow, but, even if you succeed,
you'll bankrupt the world's airlines.
The Left is remarkably nonchalant about these new terrors.
When nuclear weapons were an elite club of five relatively
sane world powers, the Left was convinced the planet was
about to go ka-boom any minute, and the handful of us who
survived would be walking in a nuclear winter wonderland.
Now anyone with a few thousand bucks and an unlisted
number in Islamabad in his Rolodex can get a nuke, and the
Left couldn't care less.
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The Right should know better. If he wants, Mr Howard can have some sport with Mr Blair. But, if he aids the perception that Blair took Britain to war under false pretences, the Tories will do the country a grave disservice. One day Mr Howard might be prime minister and, chances are, in the murky world that lies ahead, he'll have to commit British forces on far less hard evidence than existed vis à vis Saddam.
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Conservatives shouldn't assist the Western world's self-
loathing fringe in imposing a burden of proof that can
never be met. The alternative to pre-emption is defeat. If
you want a real "underlying issue", that's it.
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telegraph.co.uk. |
