Mehdi Hasan: The bulletproof case against Blair
[Mehdi Hasan is senior editor of the New Statesman.]
On 25 February 2003, less than a month before the invasion of Iraq, and in one of his most important speeches as prime minister, Tony Blair stood up before the House of Commons to deliver a statement on Saddam Hussein and the crisis in the Middle East.
“I detest his regime," he said, in a passionate address to sceptical MPs on both sides of the house. "But even now, he can save it by complying with the UN's demand. Even now, we are prepared to go the extra step to achieve disarmament peacefully." He added, solemnly: "I do not want war."
It is perhaps on this single Commons statement that the entire case against Blair rests. Is it true that he did "not want war"? Could Saddam have saved his regime? As the Conservative former prime minister John Major - who supported the war - remarked in a BBC radio interview in January: "The suspicion arises that this was more about regime change than it was about weapons of mass destruction."
“Regime change" is a euphemism for the unilateral and often violent overthrow of a foreign government. Regime change is illegal under international law - and has become, in recent days and weeks, the chief focus of the Iraq inquiry led by the former Whitehall mandarin John Chilcot.
Black and white
Since the inquiry began on 24 November 2009, serving and former officials from the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence, Downing Street, the Joint Intelligence Committee, MI6 and the armed forces have given evidence in front of Chilcot and his colleagues at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in London. But have they added anything significant to what we already knew? Over the years, numerous revelations - including leaked official memos and minutes - have suggested that Blair, in spite of his repeated denials, signed up not simply to disarmament but to regime change in Iraq a full year before the invasion in March 2003.
“We spent a long time at dinner on Iraq. It is clear that Bush is grateful for your support and has registered that you are getting flak," wrote David Manning, Blair's foreign policy adviser, in a secret memo to the prime minister after dining with President Bush's national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on 14 March 2002. "I said that you would not budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a parliament and a public opinion that was very different than anything in the States."
Blair's decision "not to budge" in support of regime change was confirmed by a subsequent memo, this time from the then British ambassador to Washington, Christopher Meyer, to Manning. This summarised a conversation he had had with Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defence secretary, on 17 March 2002: "I opened by sticking very closely to the script that you used with Condi Rice. We backed regime change, but the plan had to be clever and failure was not an option."
By the time Blair went to discuss the issue of Iraq with Bush in Crawford, Texas, on 6 April 2002, regime change - and not just disarmament - seems to have become his settled, private position. Alastair Campbell's diary entry for 2 April 2002 notes that participants at one meeting "discussed whether the central aim was WMD or regime change", and that "TB felt it was regime change".
Asked at the Iraq inquiry on 30 November 2009 whether the Blair government had secretly committed to the US policy of "regime change", however, Manning replied with a Clintonesque flourish of obfuscation and redefinition: "It depends what you mean, I think, by 'regime change', because . . . if Saddam Hussein accepted the provisions of, as it turned out to be, UN Security Council Resolution 1441, the situation on the ground in Iraq would be so profoundly different that the regime would have changed itself."
One well-respected international lawyer, who asked not to be named, described Manning's tortuous position as "hopeless . . . complete crap".
In the run-up to the 2005 general election, Blair appeared on a television programme that I produced and, when confronted with the Manning memo by the interviewer, Jonathan Dimbleby, claimed that regime change had been a method of last-resort disarmament: "If you couldn't enforce the UN resolutions by any other route, then you'd have to go down the route of regime change."
Blair has continued to deny that he signed up to a US policy of regime change in Iraq long before the start of the war, despite evidence to the contrary uncovered in the various leaks and memos. In a television interview shortly after leaving office, in November 2007, he said: "It is complete rubbish that, when I went to see President Bush, I said, 'Right, OK, I'm up for it.' "
However, those who had discussions with him in the run-up to the invasion in early 2003 have their doubts. In a little-reported meeting at Downing Street with six of Britain's leading academic experts on Iraq in November 2002, Blair is said to have paid little attention to the logistical difficulties of invading or occupying Iraq, instead exclaiming: "But he [Saddam] is evil, isn't he?" Black and white. It was that simple. Blair seemed unable to engage with the complexities of Iraq, and eager to dismiss the doubts of the experts. "For Blair, Saddam was evil," said Hans Blix, the former chief UN weapons inspector, when I spoke to him...
Read entire article at New Statesman
On 25 February 2003, less than a month before the invasion of Iraq, and in one of his most important speeches as prime minister, Tony Blair stood up before the House of Commons to deliver a statement on Saddam Hussein and the crisis in the Middle East.
“I detest his regime," he said, in a passionate address to sceptical MPs on both sides of the house. "But even now, he can save it by complying with the UN's demand. Even now, we are prepared to go the extra step to achieve disarmament peacefully." He added, solemnly: "I do not want war."
It is perhaps on this single Commons statement that the entire case against Blair rests. Is it true that he did "not want war"? Could Saddam have saved his regime? As the Conservative former prime minister John Major - who supported the war - remarked in a BBC radio interview in January: "The suspicion arises that this was more about regime change than it was about weapons of mass destruction."
“Regime change" is a euphemism for the unilateral and often violent overthrow of a foreign government. Regime change is illegal under international law - and has become, in recent days and weeks, the chief focus of the Iraq inquiry led by the former Whitehall mandarin John Chilcot.
Black and white
Since the inquiry began on 24 November 2009, serving and former officials from the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence, Downing Street, the Joint Intelligence Committee, MI6 and the armed forces have given evidence in front of Chilcot and his colleagues at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in London. But have they added anything significant to what we already knew? Over the years, numerous revelations - including leaked official memos and minutes - have suggested that Blair, in spite of his repeated denials, signed up not simply to disarmament but to regime change in Iraq a full year before the invasion in March 2003.
“We spent a long time at dinner on Iraq. It is clear that Bush is grateful for your support and has registered that you are getting flak," wrote David Manning, Blair's foreign policy adviser, in a secret memo to the prime minister after dining with President Bush's national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on 14 March 2002. "I said that you would not budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a parliament and a public opinion that was very different than anything in the States."
Blair's decision "not to budge" in support of regime change was confirmed by a subsequent memo, this time from the then British ambassador to Washington, Christopher Meyer, to Manning. This summarised a conversation he had had with Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defence secretary, on 17 March 2002: "I opened by sticking very closely to the script that you used with Condi Rice. We backed regime change, but the plan had to be clever and failure was not an option."
By the time Blair went to discuss the issue of Iraq with Bush in Crawford, Texas, on 6 April 2002, regime change - and not just disarmament - seems to have become his settled, private position. Alastair Campbell's diary entry for 2 April 2002 notes that participants at one meeting "discussed whether the central aim was WMD or regime change", and that "TB felt it was regime change".
Asked at the Iraq inquiry on 30 November 2009 whether the Blair government had secretly committed to the US policy of "regime change", however, Manning replied with a Clintonesque flourish of obfuscation and redefinition: "It depends what you mean, I think, by 'regime change', because . . . if Saddam Hussein accepted the provisions of, as it turned out to be, UN Security Council Resolution 1441, the situation on the ground in Iraq would be so profoundly different that the regime would have changed itself."
One well-respected international lawyer, who asked not to be named, described Manning's tortuous position as "hopeless . . . complete crap".
In the run-up to the 2005 general election, Blair appeared on a television programme that I produced and, when confronted with the Manning memo by the interviewer, Jonathan Dimbleby, claimed that regime change had been a method of last-resort disarmament: "If you couldn't enforce the UN resolutions by any other route, then you'd have to go down the route of regime change."
Blair has continued to deny that he signed up to a US policy of regime change in Iraq long before the start of the war, despite evidence to the contrary uncovered in the various leaks and memos. In a television interview shortly after leaving office, in November 2007, he said: "It is complete rubbish that, when I went to see President Bush, I said, 'Right, OK, I'm up for it.' "
However, those who had discussions with him in the run-up to the invasion in early 2003 have their doubts. In a little-reported meeting at Downing Street with six of Britain's leading academic experts on Iraq in November 2002, Blair is said to have paid little attention to the logistical difficulties of invading or occupying Iraq, instead exclaiming: "But he [Saddam] is evil, isn't he?" Black and white. It was that simple. Blair seemed unable to engage with the complexities of Iraq, and eager to dismiss the doubts of the experts. "For Blair, Saddam was evil," said Hans Blix, the former chief UN weapons inspector, when I spoke to him...