See for yourself the Document they are all talking about. See more now ! After severe disasters, prophecy shows Britain and USA will prosper! Alastair Campbell, the man who helped burnish New Labour's public image, is doing more than anyone else alive to discredit it. Sitting through his evasive and unrepentant rants yesterday, a feeling of weary revulsion crept up on me. I say that as someone who supported the war and still defends the decision to rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein. The pro-war case has it tough enough without the added liability of Mr Campbell. To the lengthy arguments about whether Mr Blair supported regime change and toldGeorge Bush as much in advance, I register a vast lack of surprise. Regime change was the best reason to rid Iraq of its destabilising henchman leader. It does not seem to me a hanging offence for Mr Blair to indicate that he would support the US in removing Saddam if he did not disarm. What Mr Campbell and his Number 10 allies did, however, was shift the argument, because they concluded that this case was unlikely to convince the wider public. That is the big wrong he cannot admit. It explains almost everything about the lamentable performance yesterday. The stubborn arrogance on display was like all the worst bits of the Blair years in one performance: laddish, cocky and evasive. I do not believe that either he or Mr Blair knew that Saddam had already discarded his chemical weapons stocks. The sheer crestfallen disbelief I witnessed among ministers and in the intelligence community when they failed to materialise speaks against that theory. Yet it becomes clearer with every investigation that Mr Campbell presided over deliberate exaggerations in the WMD dossier. Asked if the phrase “beyond doubt” should have been used when, as Lord Butler's earlier inquiry had concluded, the actual evidence was “limited, sporadic and patchy”, he denied that this meant that Parliament had been misled. If this is not misleading, then what is? Something is either beyond doubt, or it is not. If there is a grey area, then it is in doubt and that should be acknowledged. The executive summary of “headlines” from the dossier was crafted under the communication chief's instructions, to play down any doubt at all. Opponents or believers in the war, he set out to make fools of us all. This was the day the Chilcot inquiry, which has been a bit herbivorous so far, finally discovered an appetite for red meat. The academic Lawrence Freedman repeatedly asked about the changed timeline of the dodgiest bit of the dossier: the claim that Saddam's weapons could be fired on UK targets inCyprus in 45 minutes. All the evidence has shown this was deployed to provide maximum media impact, though it contained at least one inaccuracy which was not corrected at the time. Mr Campbell alone stands by it: “I cannot see it any other way.” Of course he cannot. Either he is in complete denial, or he has more cynically decided that it is better to stick to a “No surrender” position and tough it out. All politicians and aides should beware the mindset to which he has succumbed. If something was part of a procedure set up to enhance Government's ability to get its case across, it must therefore be right. Andy Coulson, beware it does not happen to you over in camp Cameron. It is catching. One thing Mr Campbell has done this week is raise the stakes severely for his old boss. Mr Blair has already turned in one spectacularly bad performance in his single domestic interview about the inquiry. A former adviser sighs that “Tony has been out of the national debate for too long” and admits that he “misjudged the language and approach” in his bullish sofa interview with Fern Britton. People of my views will have more understanding than most for his insistence that his decision to go to war was justified. But on two major counts — the over-selling of the case on WMD and the abysmal management of the aftermath — huge failures do need to be acknowledged and the continuing failure to do so is toxic. It has sown distrust of politicians and the reliability of the Government's word in the most serious matters a country can face. Watch carefully the upcoming evidence of the Number 10 ex-chief of staff, Jonathan Powell. Once he was as gung-ho as the rest of Camp Blair but my impression now is that he might well give more nuanced evidence about the handling of the conflict. We can only hope somebody does. Some tensions about the rights and wrongs of the war will never be resolved. The Dutch ruling on the undertaking will please those who want military adventures they don't like rendered simply “illegal”. That conveniently rules out the need for further debate or nuance. But international law is too pliant and unreliable a tool to be the last resort. Also, with due respect to the key witnesses, Philippe Sands and Hans Blix, one is a lawyer whose antipathy to the war is well noted, the other was angered by President Bush's determination to truncate his weapons search. Other senior inspectors, like David Kay took a different view. He thought that the cat and mouse game with Saddam had run its course — and had no doubts about Saddam's continuing intentions to acquire more weapons outside international agreements. In the end, responsibility lies not with the lawyers trading precedents, exceptions and interpretations. It lies with leaders. That is a heavy burden, as I'm sure Mr Blair knows now. It isn't one that can simply be shaken off with the kind of breezy nonchalance we saw at the inquiry yesterday. Mr Campbell averred that Britain should stop “beating itself up” about Iraq. An unsparing scourge of the weaknesses of others, he is strangely gentle with himself. He could think of nothing that was badly done in the run-up to the war. How glib and self-forgiving and utterly thoughtless. Only he cannot see it.
Thursday, 14 January 2010
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