Tony Blair is still giving his evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, but here are some of my thoughts so far. First, he struck me as remarkably nervous, especially in the first hour or so – he seemed to relax a bit after the first break – and even more strikingly, appeared to be positively bursting to get across the points he wanted to make. His agitation in that early session struck me as the reaction of someone who has been deeply wounded by the way he has been demonised – the particular anguish which comes from being vilified from telling the truth and seeing it twisted and distorted to such an extent that it become impossible to challenge what becomes mass hysteria. Second, at time of writing Blair has more than held his own. So much for all the feverish comments by media commentators that all the former mandarins who had given evidence to Chilcot and who suddenly discovered their principled opposition to the war were stacking up killer evidence against Blair which would achieve the deeply desired objective of leaving him unable to deny that he took Britain into an illegal war on a lie. Hour by hour today, however, Blair has calmly and reasonably swatted all these accusations aside. He has done it not by spin or evasion but by setting out what I at any rate remember very clearly were the arguments that were made at the time but which have been all but obscured in public debate by the rewriting of the history of the conflict that has occurred, along with conclusions at which any reasonable person would have arrived at the time from the available information. Thus the issue was not that Iraq was thought to have been involved in 9/11 – no-one had ever suggested this – but that 9/11 recalibrated as intolerable the risk posed by rogue states which were seeking access to WMD. This meant that Iraq, Iran, Libya and North Korea all had to be stopped; Iraq was first because it was in breach of UN resolutions to disarm and because Saddam had actually used the stuff on his own people. Thus he had not committed Britain to war at Crawford – on the contrary, he had persuaded Bush to go down the UN route – but had said merely that Britain would stand alongside America if the diplomatic route failed. Thus, far from being the reason people were persuaded that war was necessary, neither the now infamous dossier nor the ’45-minute claim’ caused the slightest ripple, apart from three newspaper headlines about '45 minutes', until the accusation was made by the BBC in May 2003 that Blair had inserted this claim as a deliberate falsehood. Thus he wrote that he believed ‘beyond doubt’ that Saddam had WMD because it was impossible not to conclude from the evidence from the Joint Intelligence Committee that he had it. He had gone to great lengths of obstruction and deception to prevent the inspectors from having access to the sites. The entire UN had believed he had it. -- the argument had been over what to do abouit it. Moreover, the Iraq Survey Group had discovered that Saddam had retained the capacity to restart these programmes at any time, thus confirming beyond doubt that he was failing to disarm and to show that he had disarmed – the case for war. In other words Blair returned us to reality. For which he will doubtless now be doubly damned. One final point: he repeatedly expressed his concern about the grave danger now posed by Iran. Could this have been a reproach that this terrible danger was not being dealt with adequately – whereas it would have been had he still been in Number 10? 
A class act
Saturday, 30 January 2010
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