There was no analysis of British interest in joining the invasion. Now I understand why
You need a big dose of cynicism to understand politics. Yet even though I regularly take my medicine, I was still deeply shocked by my colleague Steve Richards's recent account of the factors that propelled Mr Blair into the Iraq war. His article was published on these pages last Thursday. The decision was, Mr Richards wrote, "part of a New Labour approach to politics".
I quite see that we all come at problems with a particular mindset developed over the years. At the time I accepted the New Labour style in so far as I understood it, and I voted for Mr Blair in both 1997 and 2001. Steve Richards explained further: "When there are highly controversial policy areas, Labour worries hugely that the Conservatives might be on the more popular side. It is determined always to keep Rupert Murdoch's newspapers on board."
I am not so naive that I hadn't already come to see the justice of this observation. Recent memoirs by former ministers and Downing Street aides point in this direction. But just think what is described here: an inability to exercise leadership, a Labour government which spends its time in a perpetual funk. This a fraud on the electorate. When we elect a government, we assume that it will summon up a bit of courage from time to time. We don't choose it to do what the opposition would do or to take orders from a newspaper proprietor.
Then Mr Richards goes on to describe the political setting for the decision to go to war. With a cautious New Labour timidity, he wrote, Mr Blair must have weighed up the domestic situation. If he had opposed the war, he would have been in alliance with President Jacques Chirac of France and Chancellor Gerhard Schroder of Germany, while Mr Duncan Smith (Conservative leader) would be the one who supported the US. Mr Blair would have given up the space he had jealously protected as a new Labour leader. He would be back to the Neil Kinnock era, when a US President treated Labour leaders with disdain. He would lose The Sun, which would cheer for Britain's only war leader, Mr Duncan Smith.
Now I take Mr Richards's account to be authoritative. Apart from anything else, it solves a puzzle that I had when the fateful decision was taken. Why did I hear no analysis, I often wondered, of the British interest in joining the American invasion? I didn't mean by this advantages that might accrue to the Anglo- American relationship, or to the Western Alliance, or the world at large, but rather what mattered solely for Britain.
Why did the Prime Minister's speeches give no sign that such an exercise had been carried out, conducted coldly as it should have been, without sentiment? How could you put the lives of British forces at risk if you hadn't weighed the benefit for Britain alone, remembering always Lord Palmerston's injunction: "Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests." What were the precisely calculated British interests for which our soldiers, sailors and aircrews were being asked to die?
In the absence of a lead from the Government and in common with many other people I tried to work out the answer. If readers will forgive me for repeating myself, I wrote here in 2003, a month before the invasion, that we were faced with a genuinely difficult choice. Containment to enforce the UN resolutions on the one hand or invasion as an act of liberation on the other.
I noted that the second course increased the possibility of terrorist attacks within Britain. Furthermore it represented American revenge for September 11, which was not our business, and it demanded from the US a commitment from which it had repeatedly walked away – to that of nation-building. My conclusion was that a prudent reading of British interests would favour a continuation of containment through the United Nations, not war.
I didn't imagine at the time that Mr Blair was concerned only with party politics, even bringing into the balance, according to Mr Richards, that by staying close to the US he could never be accused of being anti-American and indiscriminately pro-European and that he would thus be better able to win a referendum on the Euro. That is what shocks me.
It has been bad enough knowing that British troops have lost their lives in a futile endeavour (see what is going on in Basra at the moment) that was contrary to international law and based on information that turned out to be false. It was hard to bear the attempts to deceive the British people with the dodgy dossiers. And now, additional dishonour, it turns out that the whole policy was based, so far as Mr Blair was concerned, on securing electoral advantage. Oh, the shame of it.
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