Seems like the English are giving more time to the foxhunting issue than to Blair's Iraq performance
Oh come on... This is just a fight for normal decent standards. Victory will be when foxes have the vote of course. I'm not sure what the fox perception on Iraq is though. They seem to be entirely focused on local issues. Apart from banning the heinous crime of fox hunting, I hear they don't think much of battery hen farming either. They believe chickens should be free to range during the day and only kept locked up in coops at night..
Tony B still seems to be stuck in the woods on Iraq..
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Why Blair can't issue the Mother of All Apologies
Simon Jenkins
timesonline.co.uk
Play for time. Delay, bob, weave. Leave the opponent no chink, never retreat, feint, jab, deflect blame, force the enemy into error, deny non-existent accusations with passion. Never apologise. The arts of political spin are as old as Demosthenes. But they have rarely been deployed more effectively than by the present British Prime Minister, as witnessed before the Commons Liaison Committee yesterday.
Tony Blair’s subject was his abiding obsession, Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Not for him the “Pentagon-lite” gambit, the pretence that they no longer matter, that real men shoot first and summon lawyers afterwards. Mr Blair is a lawyer. For him, Saddam’s arsenals remain the casus belli in Iraq because that is what international law requires. They must exist. They do exist. They are fragments of the True Cross, sacred relics of Mr Blair’s holy global empire. Believe in them and you shall be saved.
Britain is only beginning to see the measure of this leader. Accuse Mr Blair of claiming two plus two equals five and he will slay you. He was misheard ... five was just a ballpark figure ... adding one to four is standard legal practice. He will protest that the Joint Intelligence Committee had double-sourced the five, while both the twos were dodgy. A Downing Street maths czar is in place and we should shut up until he reports. It is Mr Blair’s belief, indeed his passionate conviction, that time would prove two plus two equals five. Anything else is frankly, honestly ... you know ... preposterous.
Common sense holds that looming over Mr Blair’s sleep must soon be the Mother of All Apologies. The apology is not for invading Iraq but for his stated reason for invading, for a truly historic deception of the Labour Party and the public. In which case, his wisest course might be to keep the doctrine of atonement on the backburner. Yet he unleashes his aide, Alastair Campbell, to taunt the BBC and demand an apology from it for some detailed inaccuracy about the preparation of intelligence dossiers. Mr Blair thus turns a pinprick into a knife fight.
In the light of last night’s statement by the Ministry of Defence, the BBC made a tactical error. It should have issued a modest “Berlusconi” apology for so upsetting Mr Campbell. It should have admitted a failure of anonymous source vetting and banned its reporters from “sexing up” their scoops for the tabloid press. Having removed that mote from its own eye, the corporation could have turned its opticians on the beam in Mr Blair’s, his unleashing of his two mountains of Iraqi-weapons tosh last September and February. Instead, the BBC allowed Downing Street to keep to its chosen agenda of BBC-bashing. It also gave the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee cover for partially exonerating the Government.
Apology is the new political cult. To public figures it is a talisman of failure, an invitation to self-mutilation. To the media an apology is the equivalent of a hanging at Tyburn. Apology makes no difference to the facts of a case. It respects some concept of guilt and innocence but is rarely seen with its philosophical partner, forgiveness. To a politician this is dangerous. The apologiser may not be trusted again. Once guilt is admitted, closure may require resignation. Small wonder politicians share the instincts of lawyers: never apologise. Mr Blair yesterday did not allow a smidgeon of doubt to show in front of the jury. Even the slightest apology would have implied guilt.
In politics, apologies are clearly for wimps. I demand no “apology” from the dupes who claimed last year to “know” of Saddam’s imminent threat to the West, who claimed to know that he “must be neutralised” before he could suddenly unleash chemical warheads on Israel and Cyprus. I demand no apology from those who ridiculed the UN weapons inspectors or spread patent nonsense about Niger uranium deals, satellite-detected weapons dumps and “known” links between Saddam and al-Qaeda.
The world has for a decade been crowded with disorientated Cold Warriors in search of someone to bomb. They have arms programmes to justify. They have think-tank contracts to protect. They have terrorist threats to hype because the big money these days is in security. Foreign policy has become tabloid, dumb. It is shrill not because the stakes are so high but because, since the end of the nuclear menace, they are so low.
One-time peaceniks now bask in Mr Blair’s blandishments. Peter Hain, of all people, dismissed anti-war demonstrators as so much rabble. Clare Short defended cluster bombs. On Monday a former civil rights enthusiast now minister, Chris Mullin, wriggled and squirmed to support the Guantanamo Bay imprisonments, the first case in modern history of a British government refusing its citizens defence against a foreign kangaroo court. It is horrible to see what ambition does to a man.
The Iraq imbroglio is now imposing a huge burden on the consciences of many of Mr Blair’s colleagues. But to Mr Blair it is open and shut. He remains adamant that a military threat from Saddam Hussein to the British people justified his decision to invade Iraq last March — and he accepts that only that threat was legal justification. He yesterday half-distanced himself from some of his intelligence, by references to “intelligence at the time”. But unlike his radio spokesmen, he did not dodge the question. The evil of a regime and the virtues of removing it may be benefits of invasion. They could not legitimise it, whatever Americans say. To some of Mr Blair’s friends the September dossier might wisely be left gathering dust on the shelf of history. To Mr Blair it remains Holy Writ.
It is to Mr Blair’s credit — and his risk — that he regards validating that dossier as essential. Pressed time and again, he did not say that the weapons issue was dead or trivial, or that we should concentrate on lauding the freedom of the grateful people of Iraq. That may be a line adopted by his fans, and by sceptics who would rather concentrate on how to get out of Iraq than on why we got in. To Mr Blair that is dishonest. He had put the case and now the case must be proved.
My guess is that Mr Blair will try to leave this file open. Half the world’s press have found no weapons. A top Pentagon team found no weapons. Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, does not believe there are any weapons. Mr Blair ignores them all. He is awaiting his latest Godot, the Iraq Survey Group which, he admits, has “barely started work”. Anything for the Prime Minister is better than a return of the UN inspection team. They are experts. They threaten to expose the September dossier, expose the failures of British Intelligence and bring closure and thus shame to this whole issue.
Mr Blair will not give up because he cannot. He will forever have a George Smiley on this case. Whatever he finds, a rusty rocket case, a suspect caravan, a can of baking powder, a bit of old tubing, will acquire iconic status. In old age, I suspect we shall still see Mr Blair, perhaps in flares and beads, wandering Glastonbury Tor with a metal detector, muttering “weapons of mass destruction”.
From the moment that Mr and Mrs Blair dined with Bill and Hillary Clinton at the Pont de la Tour restaurant in 1997 and fell in love with the American presidency, the path to British compliance in the conquest of Iraq was inevitable. Britain under Mr Blair would follow Washington wherever its interventionist zeal might take it. There would be none of Harold Wilson’s measured distancing from America during Vietnam. There would be none of Ronald Reagan’s measured distancing from London during the Falklands War — when there was no nonsense about standing “shoulder-to-shoulder” against naked aggression by an evil dictator.
Mr Blair bought into sanctions against Iraq. He bought into containment. He bought into the bombing of Baghdad. He bought into the humiliation of UN weapons inspection and the rush to war. He bought this much of the American ticket. Yet Mr Blair refuses to join America in holding that invasion needs no further legitimacy and its justification no proof.
The Prime Minister is a legal perfectionist. He will make no Mother of All Apologies. There will be no “closure” on weapons of mass destruction. They will be found in Iraq if Hell has to freeze over first. Mr Blair knows something nobody else knows. |
