Lies and Liability

Published in Labour Left Briefing (May 2005)

Glen Rangwala looks at how the revelations over the Iraq war during the election finally destroyed Tony Blair's credibility

The general election demonstrated conclusively that the Iraq war would forever sully the credibility of Tony Blair. With every new atrocity that occurs in that country, committed by either the dwindling Coalition or the unbroken insurgency, every new study into the well-being of the Iraqi people, and every new revelation about the decisions and deceptions that took British forces into the desperate morass, fingers will point back at the Prime Minister's responsibility for creating this political and humanitarian disaster. The scale of the conflict and the outrageousness of the fabrication with which it began are too great for it to move off the front pages for the foreseeable future.

Whilst Labour candidates were out on the stump on the day before the election, trying to talk about schools and hospitals, the new deal and the economy, the news agenda was dominated by a suicide bomber who killed 60 people in Irbil – a town that was out of Saddam Hussein's control and was overwhelmingly peaceful in the decade before the invasion. On the day of the elections, at least 23 Iraqis were killed in a flurry of bomb attacks in Baghdad. Soon after the elections, as Blair was trying to justify his new cabinet, a US assault on the town of Qaim, in the west of Iraq, killed around 100 Iraqis – the Coalition claimed they were insurgents, but the truth is far from clear – and caused 1,000 Iraqi families to flee their homes.

The most thorough survey yet conducted on Iraqi life since the invasion arrived soon after the election. The United Nations Development Programme found that average income in Iraq dropped by 44% in the year after the invasion – from £137 per person under the last year of economic sanctions, to £77 under occupation. The percentage of mothers who die in childbirth is now over four times greater in oil-rich Iraq than over the border in resource-free Jordan. 63% of Iraqis live in homes unconnected to a sewage system, resulting in a series of chronic diseases afflicting the population – that is in comparison to only 25% in a similar situation before sanctions were imposed on US instigation in 1990. The survey estimated that 223,000 Iraqis had chronic illnesses caused by the war. The number of women of working age who are in employment, a key indicator of female empowerment, is just 13%. Tony Blair will, and should, be reminded of this humanitarian and societal catastrophe every day he remains in his current position.

Iraq intruded mostly into the election campaign, though, for the new revelations about the manipulation of the law and the facts to justify the launching of the war. The minutes of a meeting from 23 July 2002 – eight months before the war began – between Blair, Alastair Campbell, Jack Straw, Geoff Hoon and the intelligence officials among others was leaked to the press. They had been written by a Downing Street policy aide, Matthew Rycroft, who was involved in the drafting of the September 2002 weapons dossier.

The clearest point from the minutes is that everyone involved in the discussion believed that the US had already decided to go to war with Iraq. Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, told ministers that his talks with the Bush administration had left him feeling that "military action was now seen as inevitable". Geoff Hoon guessed that the US would begin its invasion in January 2003. Jack Straw said that "it seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action".

The meeting went on to discuss the British role in the impending conflict. The three options laid out by the Chief of the Defence Staff, Michael Boyle, were all for different degrees of British involvement – from providing warplanes and bases (at a minimum) to contributing 40,000 troops. The meeting concluded that "we should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action", with the proviso that "we needed a fuller picture of US planning before we could take any firm decisions" on what exactly to contribute to the US war effort.

By 23 July 2002, then, it was clear that Blair not only expected the US to launch a war, but that the only options on the table were about how much the British would help. Nevertheless, on the very day after that meeting – 24 July – Blair told the House of Commons in response to a question from Diane Abbott that "we have not yet reached the point of decision … How we deal with [Iraq's weapons] is an open question". A few moments later, he said in response to a question from Tam Dalyell that "we have not taken the decision to commit British forces". Blair continued to tell the Commons and the public for the next eight months that he had not committed himself to invading Iraq, and that he was continuing to sift through the evidence before coming to a final decision. The minutes of the July 2002 meeting demonstrate that this process of public deliberation was no more than an elaborate charade.

The July minutes also reveal how the key players recognised that the information about Iraq's weapons was clearly dodgy. MI6's Richard Dearlove told Blair that "Bush wanted to remove Saddam … justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy". In other words, the Americans had already decided upon the excuse; they just needed to fabricate the evidence for it. Jack Straw added "the case [for war] was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran". In direct contrast with the position Straw provided in private, Blair continued to talk of a "threat" from Iraq. He told a press conference six weeks after the meeting that "Iraq poses a real and a unique threat to the security of the region and the rest of the world." The gap between these statements could hardly be wider.

Finally, the minutes make clear that the Prime Minister wanted to use the UN weapons inspectors not to check up on whether the intelligence was really correct, but to ease his political position. Blair told the meeting that "it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors … If the political context were right, people would support regime change".

The British ambassador to the US, Christopher Meyer, had already told Paul Wolfowitz in March 2002 that "We backed regime change, but the plan had to be clever …. It would be a tough sell for us domestically". By July, it was clear to the Prime Minister that that "tough sell" would involve using the UN as a pretext on an extended hoax to save his political credibility. With the lies told by Blair now out in the open, it is clearer than ever that Blair is a liability, not only to the government and the Labour Party, but given the consequences of the war, to the country and to international peace as a whole.

Author: Glen Rangwala

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