While the desire to see Tony Blair held accountable over his lying about the Iraq war is understandable, it only gives part of the picture. It is impossible for just one politician, no matter how egoistical, to force the state machine to implement a policy it was really opposed to. In the state, power lies in the bureaucracy due to its permanency. While politicians come and go, the bureaucracy and its officials remain. Their management over information, process and progress ensure that the politicians, who come and do, are controlled by their ever so civil "servants."
And so it is with Blair. He was staunchly supported by his Civil Service advisors at the time and since. At the Hutton inquiry, Sir David Manning, the PM's former foreign policy adviser, Sir Richard Dearlove, Head of MI6, and Sir David Ormand, the PM's Security and Intelligence Co-ordinator, supported Blair and backed up the integrity of his decisions.
While elements of the ruling elite were unhappy with the prospect of war (and this was reflected in the media), the upper echelons were not. Given this, are we really to believe that if Blair had been at odds with the opinions of the upper reaches of the state bureaucracy or the heads of big business that he would have forced them to back him up? Or that another set of politicians would make a different decision unless forced to by the threat of meaningful direct action from the general population?
Blair threatened us to vote for him by raising the spectre of Michael Howard as PM. If Blair really gave a toss about that possibility then he should have done the honourable thing and simply resigned. But the irony of New Labour threatening us with the argument that by not voting for them we will let the Conservatives in by the back door should not be lost. After all, the conservatives marched in through the front door in 1997 and voting for them yet again simply encourages them.
The number of babies born in Iraq with birth defects has risen by a fifth over the last two years. Iraqi physicians are blaming the increase on pollution and on depleted uranium shells used by the US military and still unrecovered in the south of the country.
Adil Abdul Mahdi, one of Iraq's vice presidents, was in Washington at the end of April. US sources have revealed that he has been asking the White House for permission to give the Ministry of the Interior to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (his own party). He is said to have given the Americans assurances that if they agree, the Ministry would not adopt policies that contradicted the security plans of the US military in Iraq. Those assurances must have been forthcoming, as that party did get the Ministry.
So, just to stress the obvious, "democracy" in "sovereign" Iraq involves going to America and asking the Bush Junta for authorisation on who gets which posts.
When some of the legal arguments given to the government were leaked to the Guardian at the end of April, some interesting facts were discovered.
The Attorney General told Blair that it was for the UN security council, not him, to decide whether Iraq was complying with UN resolutions on disarmament or not. Pretty obvious, really. You cannot say you are upholding the authority of the UN if you ignore it. Which Bush and Blair did, as it was they, not the UN, who took that decision. Lord Goldsmith changed his mind over that particular issue after visiting George Bush's lawyers in America. True sovereignty at work!
Then there was the wonderful reasoning expressed by those involved. TTThe Attorney General eventually ruled that war could be legal if Downing Street was sure Saddam was not complying with UN resolutions. Blair, not the UN or UN weapons inspectors, promptly said that he was sure that this was the case and this satisfied the attorney. In other words, the war was legal simply because Blair said it was!
Then we have the Attorney General stating that Blair would need "hard evidence" of non-compliance. The UN weapons inspectors led by Hans Blix were reporting that Saddam's regime was doing the opposite -- there was an increasing degree of Iraqi cooperation -- and that no illegal weapons had been discovered. Consequently, they asked the UN for more time. A request Bush and Blair unilaterally ignored.
Blair had the cheek to say that evidence released by the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, on March 15 2003 had shown that Saddam was in clear breach of his UN disarmament obligations. Except that the UN weapons inspectors had found no such evidence. We now know who was right and how weak Blair knew UK intelligence actually was. Given that all this transpired the same week that the US finally admitted that Iraq had no WMD (and that they had not be secreted away to Syria, as some US hawks had invented) we can conclude that the reason why Bush and Blair went to war when they did was precisely to stop the inspectors from finishing their work. For if they had, then they had no excuse for war and, perhaps, the Iraqi people, seeing how weak the dictator actually was, may have risen in insurrection (as shown in 1991, this was the last thing the US wanted).
It is clear that Blair handled the Attorney General's advice pretty much the same way that he handled the intelligence on Iraq. He simply stripped out the caveats and so, like the lawyer he his, could convince himself he was telling the truth while lying through his teeth. And he wanted us to "move on" and not judge him by his record but by his promises on the future!
Such is the nature of capitalist democracy. We have the "power" to elect a handful of liars who get to do what they want for five years and then ask us to think about giving them another chance. No wonder people do not vote, they are simply passing judgement on a political system designed to ignore them and their wishes.
Jalal Talabani, the new Iraq President, warned that if foreign troops were to be withdrawn at this point it would risk provoking civil war. He also insisted that Iraq is not occupied! Clearly the war was worth it. The Iraqis are discovering the joys of "representative" democracy just like we have here -- a system where the representives represent no one but themselves and expect the people to accept it.
At the end of April, General Richard Myers tried to reassure the American people that the US military was beating the insurgency in Iraq. He pointed out that the number of attacks in Iraq was about 50 to 60 and that was about the same as this time last year. It is worth pointing out that April 2004 Iraq as well as the insurgent attacks there was heavy fighting going on between US forces and the Mahdi Army and an aborted assault on Fallujah.
Is Myers really asking us to think that because things have not changed in a year, that the Iraq situation is getting better?
The number of dollars it used to cost for the six-mile taxi ride from Central Baghdad to Baghdad International Airport last November.
What it now costs to travel down the "Road of Death." Which puts the positive pronouncements of the occupying powers of "success" in Iraq into sharp context.
Source: New York Times Iraq correspondent Dexter Filkins.