Chilcot’s Ills – They’re Multiplyin’
Chilcot’s ills/they’re multiplying/and he’s losing control…
So sang John Travolta to Olivia Neutron-Bomb in “Greece”, a satirical musical which celebrates the inanities of the Eurozone some 35 years ago now, just a couple of years after the start of the Chilcot Inquiry. Well, not really, but it feels like both matters have been going on for that long. I read in my Sunday Times last weekend that the Chilcot enquiry will not be able to report until June 2016 – at the earliest. The process appears to be reduced to a farce, but perhaps it was a farce from the off. The further delay appears to be for a number of reasons, but the most important one is that when the first draft of the Report was sent out senior figures in the military who had been criticised went berserk, because the report criticises them for decisions which were clearly the responsibility of the politicians. The article was based on research by author and investigative reporter Tom Bower, who has interviewed 180 senior figures from the armed forces, cabinet and civil service for a book on the Blair government.
To recap, the first report Blair was forced to commission was produced by former cabinet secretary Lord Butler (“the Butler Review”) who was asked to discover why Britain’s intelligence services had wrongly reported that Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons. To quote from Mr. Bower’s article: “Butler’s report was a model of impenetrable mumbo-jumbo requiring a diligent reader to disentangle the smokescreen contrived by Downing Street to protect Blair”.
The Butler Review did not see off the increasing disquiet, and there was political pressure for a further report with (to use the God awful modern idiom) a more “transparent” process. According Bower, notwithstanding the latter point the original plan, decreed by the then incumbent cabinet secretary Gus “God” O’Donnell, was to hold an inquiry in secret and then produce another vast, anodyne porridge of a report, more or less unreadable and blaming no one, in a strategy to deny the media any headlines or heads on polls. That entirely accords with what I would have expected. But Chilcot, probably understandably, bowed to pressure from the Press and independent voices in Westminster to make the process more open, and agreed to hold the inquiry (for the most part) in public. The first strand of O’Donnell’s “make smoke” strategy was thus, to extend the metaphor, blown away in that it allowed people to form a view on the rigour of the investigation, and that, Bower suggests, was not very intense. From what I saw, I tend to agree.
The problem was the nature of the panel appointed and the style of the inquiry. What lawyers tend to call “inconsistencies” (or lies, as the public call them), and “convenient lapses of memory” were never confronted by the polite, well-meaning but rather naive panelists. Chilcot had dispensed with lawyers in the alleged interests of speed and efficiency. Now, nobody likes lawyers. Even I think most lawyers are a bloody awful curse on God’s beautiful creation, but like wasps or slugs or carrion crows or bacteria from time they do have a useful purposes, provided they are sufficiently managed – like huskies being whipped in when they get out of hand. The decision not to appoint counsel to conduct examination may have saved a lot of money but it appears to have backfired badly now because in the first draft of the report figures have apparently been criticised on the basis of evidence and documents which were not put to them, and about issues upon which they were not challenged.
Another criticism of the draft report is, apparently, that it fails to understand the relationship between the military and politicians. Interestingly, as I read Mr. Bower’s article, the tone suggests that the first draft of the report focuses criticism on the military rather than politicians, and provoked the explosion above. Instinctively I suspect that this was always going to happen. We couldn’t have ministers criticised, could we? Not unless one was being hung out to dry as a sacrificial lamb. That might be dangerous if he or she had some dirty laundry to put in the public domain in revenge. The military, having carried a job they never wanted or believed in with almost exemplary courage, have rightly gone apoplectic. Another problem with the draft report is that in parts it is, frankly, incomprehensible.
All in all, it seems a shambles. Perhaps that serves the Establishment well. The long grass is deep and wide at the moment. I suppose I feel a little bit sorry for Chilcot. The paper work must all be in a mess now, and after all, what was he supposed to do? Tell the truth? I don’t suppose the prospect of ending up like Dr. David Kelly holds out much appeal. As I have opined before, it has always seemed to me unlikely that “the Establishment” could ever permit an official criticism of a still living British Prime Minister and find that country went to war on a false and illegal basis. Here is what I think happened…
The decision to go to war was taken in Washington shortly after the dreadful events of 9/11. Saddam was an obvious target for a kicking, possibly as Bush Jr wanted to express some Freudian desire to out-do his father. To my mind it was abundantly clear that there would be a war against Saddam’s regime by mid-2002, and that Britain would play an active role in that war as America’s chief ally. I quiet clearly recalling saying as much to a retired US Marine Colonel I met on holiday in the summer of that year, and he agreed. The mood music coming out via the press was clear: it was to get the public ready for war. That mood music emanated from only one place – No. 10 and its spin doctors. It was clear to me that barring a miracle such as the death of Saddam and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, by early 2002 Tony Blair had in effect committed Britain to war with Iraq. Blair’s greatest strength is the ability to think and believe anything, at any time. He appears to be one of those annoying but effective sociopaths that utterly believe anything that comes out of their mouth.
Why did the Intelligence Services find that there was credible evidence of weapons of mass destruction? Possibly because they had to, and possibly because they were incompetent – or a combination of both. Anyway, anything else would have been unthinkable. There had to be evidence to justify the war to which the country had been committed. And we all know who was behind that “dodgy dossier” – back to No 10 again. You may remember that in the immediate run up to war the then Attorney General (Lord Goldsmith) had to change his opinion about whether it was necessary to have a further UN Resolution to make war legal. Of course he had to; Her Majesty’s government does not take the nation to war without legal justification, therefore he had to provide the necessary affirmative opinion.
Meanwhile, soldiers were denied vital equipment on the eve of the war because it was necessary for the government to play out the charade of there being no final decision. I believe it is called “plausible deniability” and is what happens when politicians value their reputations over the lives of soldiers (which are now the norm). And there was no proper plan for what happened afterwards. There appears to have been the assumption that the Iraqis would all join up with. And that, on the whole, is about all there is to it. The rest is detail. There is one caveat and I am happy to be shot at, corrected, re-informed or whatever because I still think there is a case that the war was, in fact, justified. Note I said justified, not legal, because in terms of the broad principles of International Law (whatever that is, which is a big question) it was probably illegal without a second UN Resolution. The argument which had force was, as I understood it, as follows:
First, Saddam Hussein is a brutal nut-job with a grudge against the rest of the world, and the West in particular, after he was given a very firm slap and shoved back in his box back in ’91. That was true. Second, he had chemical or biological weapons, and the capacity and will to use them, or pass them into the hands of terrorists who were intent on mass murder on as great a scale as possible. If these conditions had been true, as we were told at the time, then whatever the niceties of UN Resolutions, it was time to play “The Boys Are Back in Town” as loudly as possible and let slip the tanks and jets of war. But that was not true.
However, we now know that he did not possess the weapons of mass destruction. But to my mind there was always a third possibility, which was as follows. Saddam may not have had WMD, and knew full well that it would be crazy to possess them with a huge, technologically more advanced army parked on his doorstep, spoiling for a fight. But armies cannot be maintained in that state for long. If that army had been removed, it would have taken a huge logistical effort to re-assemble it again. It might even have been impossible to do that for some considerable time. What would Saddam have done if he had felt free of the threat of invasion? I think there is a fair case to be made that he was sufficient a psychopath to try to get away with anything he could at any time, and at the first chance he would have been churning out the WMD at the first chance he got, and did present a threat.
Over to you.
Later this week I hope to raise another question: Does the world in fact need a few more ruthless dictators like Saddam and Gaddafi?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oKPYe53h78&list=RD7oKPYe53h78#t=7
Gildas the Monk
TRACK CAPTAIN RACCOON DAY 5: http://jst.org.uk/track-our-ships/
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September 3, 2015 at 9:30 am -
The military, as well as the politicians, are worthy of criticism for their role in the Iraq war. As a military operation, the occupation of Basra was a shambles. I don’t like the way ‘the generals’ seem to have escaped blame as far as the public are concerned.
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September 3, 2015 at 10:15 am -
I sat at a table just before the off with one very senior ‘general’ who told us that he knew our people didn’t like it, but in a democracy we the military did what we were told by our elected masters and to get on with it and do the leadership bit expected of us. Did we see it as an ‘only obeying orders’ (the Nuremberg excuse), no. Think through how the public, then not now, would have taken senior resignations, our only alternative. How would our people who didn’t have the option of resignation taken their officers resigning in the days before a war.
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September 3, 2015 at 10:38 am -
DD – It’s ridiculous for ‘armchair generals’ to blame our military. There are always unplanned aspects of every military operation; all blame for any unexpected outcome must be levelled 100% at politicians who sanctioned the farce.
Not one single MP lost his/her life or was injured, fighting in that fiasco.
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September 3, 2015 at 9:44 am -
So was there real evidence that prior to 9/11 Saddam and the Taliban were in cahoots? No. The US had some justification beating up the Taliban but it made poor television – nothing to bomb but goats and mud and no chance of catching OBL. A PR disaster for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld. So invent a new bogeyman with unfinished business. No need to have a credible plan or strategy, anything that stirred up the Middle East would do.
Obviously the truth stinks so bad it can never be published, even if Chilcot ever gets published all the logical connections between the pieces will have been plucked out such that no-one who matters will ever face censure. Even better, by 2016 we will be coming up to the US elections and might out of a sense of political decorum hold off publishing till say 2017 by which time the British elections will be on the horizon.
The roots of the Iraq/Afghan disaster lay in the hubris that drove the dominant big business culture leading up to the year 2001, you could do anything you liked because you could. Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush were children of their time, Blair just wanted to play with the big boys.
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September 3, 2015 at 10:11 am -
‘First, Saddam Hussein is a brutal nut-job with a grudge against the rest of the world, and the West in particular…’
When the bill for all the weapons the west sold him arrived on his door mat, it’s not a surprise he would hold a grudge. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_aid_to_combatants_in_the_Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War)
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September 3, 2015 at 10:18 am -
“Bored Of The EnquiRINGS”. -Dildo Boggins
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September 3, 2015 at 10:26 am -
An excellent analysis, Brother Gildas, and, I fear, only too true.
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September 3, 2015 at 10:31 am -
So are the likes of Gus O’Donnell irredeemably corrupt and morally bankrupt or are they just incapable of understanding that the only way to get even close to honest government is to expose those govermental actions which cannot be justified to examination by the people ? Cover up simply means more of the same dishonesty.
As I understand it, civil ‘servants’ are not supposed to do things which are politically partisan. Does covering up for the lies and crimes of government ministers count as politically partisan actions or are they politically neutral actions as far as the Civil Service T’s and C’s and standing orders are concerned ? If the former then shouldn’t we be going after Gus O’Donnell too, to try to keep the Civil Service upper echelons honest ?
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September 3, 2015 at 11:51 am -
Perhaps above the principle of civil servants’ position of political neutrality, G.O.D. would claim there is an even higher principle of ‘the national interest’ – if it can be sold to the civil servant by some nameless, smooth-talking, silver-tongued, moral-free, purveyor of eventual honours, that it is clearly in the national interest to sustain a particular viewpoint, then that committed civil servant will use all his professional guile, cunning and tradecraft to portray and support that position.
I believe it’s Lord O’Donnell now……..-
September 3, 2015 at 11:41 pm -
Ah… the old ‘national interest ‘ ploy….
Funny how governments, particularly ones that have been in power for a while, manage to equate their own interests with the national interest. Delusion born of arrogance, I suppose… I’m good for the country so what is good for me must be good for the country.
US Economics blogger Bill Bonner says that people will come to believe what they need to believe when they need to believe it; more and more it seems to me that he is right.
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September 3, 2015 at 10:40 am -
Captain Raccoon has finished teaching the Dutch a lesson (for their audacity in 1667 perhaps?) and is heading back towards Blighty – look out!
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September 3, 2015 at 10:58 am -
“Why did the Intelligence Services find that there was credible evidence of weapons of mass destruction?”
Because Saddam felt it expedient to let everyone believe he had them?
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September 3, 2015 at 11:26 am -
Even when Hans Blix said that was not the case?
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September 4, 2015 at 10:36 am -
The point is to think of Saddam as trying to be the top dog in the middle east. And also a megalomaniac even more delusional than Blair and Bush. Thus he has to act coyly like he has WMD’s in order to maintain face in the middle east with other countries around him. Obviously, since the west had declined to invade and topple him before, they wouldn’t now, and the invasion plans were all just political theatre. Or so he was probably thinking, whilst spinning out the WMD thing as long as possible.
Remember it isn’t just our politicians that are incompetent.
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September 3, 2015 at 11:28 am -
Isn’t all war just realpolitik – practised at the point of a lance? The notion that some ragtag-and-bobtail outfit in New York can transform such into a legal – “just”, “Holy”? – war is risible, is it not? The people who sit around that table include among themselves a good half who owe their positions to just such realpolitik but perpetrated within their own borders, and to the disadvantage only of their own people, and this is therefore not considered war. It is childlike to value in a moral or legal way anything that they have to say. It’s like going to the Pope for his blessing on a 12th Century crusade. Um…
Saddam’s connection to 9/11 was the connection of one playground bully to another. They are all bullies but if you hit just one in the mush, you send the same signal to them all. I’d have gone to Riyadh and torn down the House of Saud. That would have concentrated a few minds.
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September 3, 2015 at 11:37 am -
All very serious stuff and no doubt no different from what went on for centuries past, and not just here.
Never met him but still find the apparent character of Blair frightening. Persuasive people with enthusiasms in positions of great power are very dangerous. Add an apparent absence of self doubt….What we really need is for one or two of the involved but aggrieved to publish their memoirs, in Australia, say? I doubt there are many prepared to put pension & lucrative retirement sinecures at risk unfortunately.
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September 3, 2015 at 12:46 pm -
If I read this right. Ignoring all the politics that is there to make sure Blair doesn’t end up in the Hague, you are saying that it was right to invade because even when he didn’t have them he would have wanted some. What is happing in Iran as we speak. Even more blatant than Iraq. He was a bad man? Sure he is but there are lots worse than him, look at Mugabe.
Everyone wants WMDs now because when you have them nobody messes with you. It was obvious Saddam didn’t have them or they would have been talked about openly and threats made and they sure as hell would have been deployed when we attacked. It was a farce from beginning to end and totally unjustified when there were other ways of doing the deed. Despite him being a nutter we killed way more than he could ever have hoped too and opened up the world for many many more to die under the guise of the war on terror.
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September 3, 2015 at 6:06 pm -
Saddam was much worse than Mugabe. Mugabe perpetrated one massacre, Saddam several. Mugabe has not used poison gas on his subjects.
And there is still some vocal opposition in Zimbabwe, albeit under pressure.
Both bad men, but one worse than the other.To understand why Bush decided to invade Iraq, read Douglas Feith’s book “War and Decision”. He gives an eye-witness account of what happened in Washington, he was on Bush’s staff, and I think his account is reasonably accurate.
The British disaster in Basra was basically caused by the Iranian government.
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September 3, 2015 at 1:03 pm -
I don’t see the need for Chilcot et al.
One of the great strengths and also great weaknesses of the British Way of doing things is that, and correct me if I’m behind the times, were ‘Call Me Dave’ to wake up tomorrow (yeah I know, ‘Cameron’ and ‘wake up’ in one sentence is a dichotomy) and decided , for reasons known only to his neurologist, to declare war on, say, Outer Backwardstan then there is nothing any one can do to prevent him rainy down mega-death upon the OuterBackwardstanis. Royal Prerogative and all that. Sure our new touchy-feely-chillaxing PM would want to ‘ask’ parliament but that’s just him arse covering because he is wetter than a pair of naff shorts on a Cornish beach.
So why do we need Cilcot at all? Right or wrong Mr.T.Blair took us to war, it was his ‘call’ and his to shoulder any blame or glory. Was he right to go to war? Only time will tell…a lot of time. Was Maggie justified in going to war over the Falklands- ask any Brit and they’ll answer ‘YES!’-it’s still too recent for a ‘sane’ or detached assessment. Most Brits and 99.9% of Germans probably think that Chamberlin was justified in starting WW2…and that was 70+ years ago. Look what happens whenever anyone here dares to suggest that ‘Dresden’ maybe wasn’t, you know, really such a good move. ‘Revisionism’ is cosnidered unpatriotic.
There is much to be said for locking all and every ‘political’ document pertaining to whichever war, along with a ‘Statement Of Truth’ written in blood before 3 high court judges from every politician or civil servant involved, away in some vault for a century or so. Let historians sort it out….they are quite good at that kind of thing.
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September 3, 2015 at 4:33 pm -
Aren’t we still waiting for the inquiry into that business down Hastings way?
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September 3, 2015 at 6:27 pm -
No, the results of that were published publically ages back…with the usual gallic flair :http://hastings1066.com/pics/tap1.jpg
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September 3, 2015 at 1:03 pm -
politicians’ “heads on polls”. A perhaps unwitting, but delightfully apt typo.
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September 3, 2015 at 1:26 pm -
There’s some distinctly musical segways creeping onto this blog lately, I notice…
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September 3, 2015 at 2:48 pm -
I heard a rumour, and so far as I can tell, ’tis only rumour, that Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi ended up on the West’s hit list because they were seriously planning to take their currencies onto the gold standard as well as refusing the almighty petrodollar.
Source: http://ellenbrown.com/2011/04/16/libya-all-about-oil-or-all-about-banking/
Interesting, n’est-ce pas?
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September 3, 2015 at 6:11 pm -
Ghaddafi would be on our hit list for his support of the IRA, if nothing else.
The no-fly zone did prevent endless bombing of civilians such as Assad has been carrying out in Syria. It saved a great many Libyan lives. -
September 4, 2015 at 6:48 am -
Absolute bollocks. Any theory regarding the gold standard is utter conspiratardery.
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September 4, 2015 at 2:54 pm -
‘Absolute bollocks’ Duncan? Seriously? I’m not so sure. These rumours have been circulating in financial circles for some time, and it is a matter of public record that both the dictators in question were actively pushing for a new gold standard as far back and probably before 2007/8. Whereas the wild tales of a threat from WMD seem ever more “conspiratardery”, even if you don’t discount Saddam spending millions on Bull’s ‘supergun’.
As for the Libyans, they received their spanking back in the late 1980’s over arms sales to the Irish Nationalists. While I believe there is more than one cause for the conflicts in question, this goes way beyond one ‘dodgy dossier’ which was Blair and Bush’s icing on the cake (or over egging the public pudding) for a casus belli. Like the causes of the First World War, the Iraq and Libyan wars should keep the historians busy.
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September 3, 2015 at 6:39 pm -
It took hundreds of years before most Western countries reached stable democracies and in living memory some were still military dictatorships, why we expected ME countries who went from the Camel to the Jet on the huge rises in oil prices and OPEC to develop overnight when freed from their dictators instead of reverting to their tribal loyalties. They will have to work things out for themselves eventually, meanwhile we all pay the price.
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September 3, 2015 at 8:16 pm -
Therein lies the difference – when the Western nations were going through their own lengthy turmoils of adolescence with their local civil wars and insurrections, there was no-one else around able or willing to pick up the pieces or provide support to the damaged and displaced: those ‘collateral damage victims’ just had to make the best of it, find a way of getting on with their lives in the same area, sometimes taking generations to recover and eventually, usually only their descendants, would enjoy the fruits of the process.
It may be ‘tough love’ to remind folk of that, but that’s how real progress and development happens – just running away, or being encouraged to run away, isn’t a positive or constructive response to the root-cause issues in the long term.
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September 3, 2015 at 7:16 pm -
It was always an impossibility that Saddam had WMD.
The whole point of possessing such weapons is predicated upon the principle of non-belligerence: that is to say “I’ve got them so you can’t attack me, or I might use them”.
That is their purpose.
Therefore, the moment the allied forces attacked, their argument for such action went up in a puff of logic.
QED. -
September 3, 2015 at 7:59 pm -
In one sense, it doesn’t really matter when Chilcott reports, or what he says. A large section of the public and the commentariat already know what they think, and are merely waiting for Chilcott to confirm their thoughts. If he doesn’t, they’ll cry “Whitewash!” – and they’ll do that even if Chilcott has uncovered and reported truths not generally publicly known yet. They already know whom they wish to crucify, and many of them won’t be deflected.
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September 3, 2015 at 8:22 pm -
I agree, but we, the baying mob, are unlikely to be offered a choice between ‘Jesus’ Straw and ‘Barabbas’ Blair.
The key issue will be the political timing and, in the immediate future, there doesn’t seem to be any opportune gaps in which to ‘bury the bad news’, so the long grass looks like staying occupied for some time yet.-
September 3, 2015 at 8:44 pm -
Some time around the holding of the EU referendum would probably be a good time to aim for.
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September 4, 2015 at 12:33 am -
Anyone that’s read UNSC 678 knows the 2003 war was legal especially after Hans Blix told the UN that Iraq was in breach of UNSC 1441. Just like Iraq had been in breach of all the ceasefire resolutions. In law the 2003 war was a continuation of the 1991 war that had never been formally ended. When a ceasefire is broken by one side, guess what often happens.
Blair was negligent, possibly criminally negligent not to challenge the intelligence reports with “are you just telling me what you think I want to hear?” And he very much had been played by the USA that, as Gildas says, wanted the war ever since 9/11 and probably before.
As for Chilcott what an inept waste of space who’s mismanaged the whole inquiry to report process.
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September 4, 2015 at 4:06 pm -
But of course, if flagrantly disregarding UN Resolutions guaranteed ‘legal’ corrective miltary intervention, then we should have expected Britain, the US and others to have invaded Israel more than once. Seems quite odd that they haven’t, really…….
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September 4, 2015 at 11:47 pm -
Because unlike Iraq, there’s no UNSC resolution that allows let alone calls for a legal attack on Israel. It’s all in the wording.
BTW I didn’t say the war was moral, but it was legal. Also it is possible for the war to be legal but some of the actions leading to it to be illegal. Confused? We will be.
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September 4, 2015 at 6:55 pm -
No mention of oil ? After all, as someone said around Gulf War I , following the invasion of Kuwait, if Kuwait grew carrots, no one would give a damn.
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September 4, 2015 at 11:01 pm -
If Kuwait had grown carrots, Iraq wouldn’t have invaded it in the first place.
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September 6, 2015 at 5:37 pm -
Insane or stupid? The previous Potus and UK PM invade Iraq to seize/prevent the development of WMD (no mention of anything nuclear other than dirty bomb and chemical/bio weapons, so small WMD) then thirteen years later the next Potus and his UK and EU fanclub hand Iraq’s neighbour with a similarly pugnacious bent and oftrepeated destructive intentions, the money and the means to develop the ultimate WMD.
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