Millions of words will be banged out today following Tony Blair’s appearance before the Iraq Inquisition yesterday, so it is a bit silly to write too much here. I’ll limit it to three observations that have the virtue of being honest, but run the risk of running counter to everyone else.
1. I think the war was wrong on every front: politically, militarily and morally. The premises as presented were false and it still appears that the Brits were too keen to be in Bush’s pocket. Nothing said so far in the Chilcot Inquiry has demanded a change of view on these matters.
2. The Inquiry is not a trial. Hectoring inquisition may satisfy the blood lust of would-be interrogators, but might also illicit less information than otherwise. Let someone talk: the more they say, the more words they use, the more holes they will potentially dig either by saying too much or too little. Shouting at people or questioning every detail is not necessarily the best way of getting to the truth. We must wait until the report is published to see what conclusions are being drawn.
3. Thank God the baying crowds or the foaming commentators don’t run the country. Blair’s appearance before the Inquiry Panel has been built up as a trial when it can be no such thing. The Inquiry is there to discover the truth – and they can only do this by looking at the matter from very different perspectives. This requires patience, attention and a willingness to hold judgement until all the evidence has been heard. Yet, already the Inquiry is being written off as a whitewash and a failure by the establishment to beat up one of its own.
I suspect (and in this I know I am not alone) that many observers will write the Inquiry off anyway, simply because it won’t say what they want to hear. For many people this appears not to be a search for the truth about Iraq, but a blood sacrifice on the altar of self-righteousness. Unless Blair is hanged, drawn and quartered, justice will not have been done. Unless someone pays, satisfaction will not have been engendered. Unless the baying crowds are given the corpse, they will never believe that the ‘truth’ has been identified.
I think the War was wrong and Blair’s government was wrong to pursue it the way it did. The consequences have been grim and a heavy price has been paid by people who aren’t well-protected western politicians. Blair has left a lot of questions unanswered – but the ‘unanswering’ has also given the ‘holes’ in the story a prominence they did not have before. There is time for this to be addressed, but the expectations of Blair yesterday were absurd.
Screaming – the way some are today – costs the comfortable commentators nothing. Some of those shouting the loudest have never had to make a decision of any broad import in their life – but obviously could have done better than Blair. And when the commenters on newspaper blogs (which make utterly depressing reading – self-righteousness and messianic belief in the unassailable infallibility of one’s own assumtions, prejudices, beliefs and opinions are clearly not the monopoly of Blair) resort to sneering about the comfort and affluence of Blair’s Saturday in a warm house (as many do), this just exposes the nasty face of envy.
Blair owes an apology. But I am not so sure that yesterday was the right time, the right context (an Inquiry) or that he was in the right role for that. But it is to be hoped that it will follow in time. In the meantime we will get more out of what happened yesterday from the forensic analysis of the engagement – and the patience to wait other pieces of the jigsaw.
January 30, 2010 at 11:28 am
The premisses were not false of course.
Even the proposition that there were WMD/materials there remains moot as some witnesses have said.
The insurgents used a chemical weapons shell as a simple explosive, and, while HMG didn’t relay on that as proof of the presence of WMDs at the time of the invasion, it makes clear that those who seek will not always what is there to find, especially in a country with avast desert, and gangs of combatants of various kinds stashing things away.
We can be glad that Libya and Iraq no longer have WMD programmes, hope that N Korea is becoming safer, and that Iran will be made, if that is necessary, to see the errors of her ways.
Blair was right, and we must remain vigilant.
I would find more respect for those who council peace at all costs (or nearly) were they to advocate Britain’s nuclear disarmament.
January 30, 2010 at 11:41 am
Nick,
I think you are quite right on this issue. I think that the ABC Rowan Williams got it right at the Memorial Service.
In the end, this was a decision taken by the whole government, “In Cabinet”, not just Tony Blair.
I believe that the war was wrong, but the services did the job they are paid to do, go where they are sent in accordance with Government policy. They might not have agreed, but they did their job.
The families of those both here and the Iraqi people who died or were maimed or lives destroyed by the process of the war are the ones who TB might think he owes an apology to – but his demeanour throughout has been one of ‘No Regrets’ therefore, it is unlikely to come any time soon.
January 30, 2010 at 1:20 pm
I actually think that Blair’s ‘performance’ has left many people wishing that he was still Prime Minister. It asks the question as to whether we want to have a PM who is confident and explains himself well to the average man so giving them confidence.
It is interesting that both Blair and Thatcher were revered when in power but maligned after it . Wasn’t that also the same with Churchill?
Is this a trait of the English?
January 30, 2010 at 4:52 pm
Robert, it is also true that some people love him just because so many other people hate him! But, he shows a type of leadership and charisma that is a bit lacking elsewhere (and I don’t just mean Brown).
January 30, 2010 at 6:39 pm
Nick
Thanks for this post – I do agree with all your sentiments in point 1 and yet find it interesting that people have lost sight of the fact that this is an enquiry and not a trial.
What we need is the truth – and does not always or necessarily mean that there is someone to blame.
We can but hope that we can gain stuff from this enquiry that will allow future governments to carefully consider their decisions, or employ a different decision making process.
February 1, 2010 at 9:40 am
All we can legitimately require of leaders is that they make honest judgements on the best evidence available.
My own provisional view ( and I will assess further evidence and listen to the Enquiry conclusions) is that whether he was right or wrong, his judgement was seriously and honestly arrived at.
There is something in his contention that one has to not only look at how things panned out in the light of the decision made, but what might have been the case had he decided otherwise and got it wrong.
The prospect of WMD falling into the hands of unstable regimes or terrorists is pretty horrific.
The unavoidability of making such difficult judgements is the reason we in the Church pray for our leaders each day whether we agree with them politically or not.
February 3, 2010 at 5:58 pm
Thanks so much for this. Many’s the time when, as a co-leader in my parish, I wish the local bishop was around to make all the difficult decisions for me. But he can’t and he ain’t. That’s why I’m here, trying to co-lead with a small ‘cabinet’, each of us hoping to encourage a yet wider ownership of our communal life. That’s why Tony Blair ended up, with his cabinet, making lonely decisions. Some of mine are wrong. Some of his, too. He and I both know, of course, that there’ll be millions “who could have done better”. I’d love to meet, maybe to hand over, to a few of them.
Special thanks, Martin Sewell, for “All we can legitimately require of leaders is that they make honest judgements on the best evidence available”, and for “The unavoidability of making such difficult judgements is the reason we in the Church pray for our leaders each day whether we agree with them politically (or religiously) or not.”
As Bishop Nick observed in Jerusalem today:
‘Pray for the peace of Jerusalem’ Psalm 122 has taken on new meaning and urgency for many in our group.
via Nick Baines’s Blog.
We must pray for peace in our “Jerusalem”, in our “vision of peace”
February 3, 2010 at 6:52 pm
[...] infuriate some nearly as much as others have been inflamed by Tony Blair himself. But we need to read / hear it. Especially this year. And maybe a quick trip round to our local (whichever) party office with an [...]
February 5, 2010 at 2:25 am
The House of Commons voted for the war, the first time such a vote had been held I believe.
Thanks to Gordon Brown no wars will be begun without such a vote in future: the law has been changed.
It seems to me that much of the carnage in Iraq arises out of the impact of modern life on the various forms of Islam, which have been at odds before.
To a fair extent this seems to parallel the battles between Catholic and Protestant, especially in the renaissance.
The pace of change is hard to accommodate to for westerners, whose societies have been changing exponentially since the first industrial revolution, still more insanely difficult for the east where these are being telescoped so dramatically.