Blair & Iraq

By Ian Stewart

Antony Charles Lynton Blair gained the dubious distinction of being the first serving British Prime Minister to be questioned by police as part of a criminal investigation when he was interviewed in December 2006, January 2007 and June 2007 over 'cash for honours' allegations.

However, what will probably go down in the history books against his name was his decision to support the USA in the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, despite there being a strong body of advice from the lawyers employed in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Attorney General, that to do so would be illegal under International law. The latter, Lord Goldsmith, appearing to change his opinion three days before the first US missiles hit Baghdad.

Blair eventually admitted, in a 2006 interview with al-Jazeera, the English language Arabic television channel, that the invasion of Iraq had been a 'disaster'.

This is the man who stated :
'Mine is the first generation able to contemplate the possibility that we may live our entire lives without going to war or sending our children to war. That is a prize beyond value.'
Paris, 27th May 1997

'One state should not feel it has the right to change the political system of another or foment subversion or seize pieces of territory to which it feels it should have some claim.'
Chicago, 24th April 1999

'If we want a world ruled by law and by international co-operation then we have to support the UN as its central pillar.'
Chicago, 24th April 1999

Unlike Harold Wilson, one of his Labour Prime Minister predecessors, Blair, whilst meeting with George W Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas in April 2002, had agreed to give his total support to any possible invasion with 'boots on the ground'. On this occasion, the boots being those worn by British military personnel.

Wilson had, on several occasions, declined Lyndon B Johnson's request for the UK to become involved in Vietnam. As David Bruce, the US Ambassador to the UK put it at the time, [Wilson] was 'hotly accused by many British, including a formidable number of moderate Labour Parliamentarians, of being a mere satellite of the US, and of subscribing blindly and completely to policies about which he has not been consulted in advance'.

There were deep concerns expressed prior to the invasion of Iraq, both by the British public and a few politicians. Most notably the late Robin Cook who resigned from his positions as Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons on the 17th March 2003 in protest against the invasion of Iraq. Cook, an MP for 22 years, had previously held the post of Foreign Secretary and, at the time of his death (6th August 2005), was President of the Foreign Policy Centre and a vice-president of the America All Party Parliamentary Group and the Global Security and Non-Proliferation All Party Parliamentary Group.

In his resignation speech to the House of Commons, he expressed concerns which were shared by many.

'I cannot support a war without international agreement or domestic support'
'We cannot pretend that getting a second resolution was of no importance'
'Britain is being asked to embark on a war without agreement in any of the international bodies of which we are a leading partner, not NATO, not the European Union and, now, not the [UN] Security Council'

A major political scandal started with the involvement of the BBC reporter, Andrew Gilligan, who had, in April 2003, on the day US forces claimed to have entered Baghdad city centre, broadcast on the BBC World Service saying, 'I'm in the centre of Baghdad, and I don't see anything. But then, the Americans have a history of making these premature announcements.'

Back in Britain, on the 29th May 2003, Gilligan reported allegations that a dossier published by the British Government had 'sexed up' the military capabilities of Iraq in order to bolster the argument for going to war. In a live broadcast at 06.07 am on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, he claimed to have been told by his source that, 'the Government probably knew that the 45 minute figure was wrong even before it decided to put it in'. Subsequently, his general account of the conversation appeared to many observers to have been substantially corroborated by separate interviews given to two other BBC journalists, Susan Watts and Gavin Hewitt.

The Government began to demand that the BBC name the source for Gilligan's report but the BBC refused to do so. Dr David Kelly himself eventually revealed to his employers that he had spoken to Gilligan. Government press officers participated in an elaborate exercise to make his name public, providing clues to journalists and confirming Kelly's name to any who deduced it. One newspaper put more than 20 names to the Ministry of Defence press office before it confirmed David Kelly's. Regarding this operation, Alastair Campbell wrote in his diary : 'It was double-edged but Geoff Hoon and I agreed it would fuck Gilligan if that was his source.'

Dr David Kelly, one of the world's foremost biological weapons experts and a former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, was then called to appear before the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee which had been charged with investigating the scandal. Two days later, on the morning of 17th July 2003, Kelly was working as usual at home in Oxfordshire, responding to many supportive e-mails sent by his friends. At about 15:00, he told his wife that he was going for a walk, as he did every day. He appears to have gone directly to an area of woodlands known as Harrowdown Hill about a mile away from his home, where he allegedly ingested up to 29 tablets of painkillers (co-proxamol, an analgesic drug). He then allegedly cut his left wrist with a knife he had owned since his youth. His wife reported him missing shortly after midnight that night, and he was found early the next morning.

The Hutton Inquiry, a public inquiry into the circumstances surrounding his death, ruled that Kelly had committed suicide, and that he had not in fact said some of the things attributed to him by Gilligan. It concluded, controversially, that the MoD were obliged to make Kelly's identity known once he came forward as a potential source, and had not acted in a duplicitous manner.

The following day, 28th January 2004, the entire front page of The Independent was covered with a single word in giant letters :

WHITEWASH

Unusually, no coroner's inquest was ever held into Dr Kelly's death ! Nicholas Gardiner, the Oxfordshire coroner, initially opened an inquest but Lord Falconer, then the Lord Chancellor, ruled that Lord Hutton's inquiry would fulfil, 'the function of an inquest'. Thus the verdict of suicide was provided by the Hutton Inquiry which had been commissioned by Tony Blair.

Hutton concluded that Dr Kelly had died from a loss of blood after cutting his wrist with a blunt gardening knife, having earlier taken a cocktail of painkillers. Hutton requested that Dr Kelly's medical records, including the post mortem report, remain classified for 70 years. And that appeared to be an end to the matter.

But in December 2009, six senior doctors applied to the Attorney General, Baroness Scotland for permission to go to the High Court for a new inquest, or the resumption of the previous inquest, because they were convinced that the original verdict of suicide was unsafe and should be overturned. They argue that the bleeding from Dr Kelly's ulnar artery in his left wrist was 'highly unlikely' to have caused his death and that a number of studies have shown that it is unusual for a patient to die from a single deep cut to the wrist.

In response, in January 2010, Hutton wrote to the Ministry of Justice, 'I consider that the disclosure of the report to doctors and their legal advisers for the purposes of legal proceedings would not undermine the protection which I wished to give to Dr Kelly's family, provided that conditions were imposed restricting the use and publication of the report to such proceedings.'

The Butler Inquiry of 2004, which carried out its review in private, was called for by Tony Blair after mounting pressure caused by the failure to find any WMD stockpiles in Iraq, the US decision to hold an inquiry and remarks of the former UN Chief Weapons Inspector, David Kay.

The Prime Minister had said that the judgement on whether the intelligence available had justified military action was one for politicians, not the inquiry. Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy refused to be involved in the inquiry from the start because of that restriction. Conservative leader Michael Howard later withdrew Conservative support, saying inquiry chief Lord Butler's view of its remit was 'unacceptably restrictive'. Mr Kennedy demanded the government publish the Attorney General's advice on the legality of the war.

On the 14th July 2004, the review published their findings. To the dismay of the government, its main conclusion was that key intelligence used to justify the war with Iraq has been shown to be unreliable. It also claimed that the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) did not check its sources well enough and sometimes relied on third hand reports. It criticised the use of the 45 minute claim in the 2002 dossier as 'unsubstantiated', and said that there was an over-reliance on Iraqi dissident sources. Overall it said that 'more weight was placed on the intelligence than it could bear', and that judgements made had stretched available intelligence 'to the outer limits'.

In November 2009, Sir John Chilcot opened the Iraq war inquiry in London. Initially looking at Foreign Policy in the build up to the war and the quality of intelligence about Saddam Hussein. The question is . . . Will we hear the truth this time ?