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Iraq inquiry is
vital step in relations with Middle East
Alastair
Campbell, once Tony Blair’s main man who proved his loyalty to the next potential EU President by describing Gordon Brown as having “psychological flaws”, is now the adviser and confidant at this Prime Minister’s ear.
He has advised Gordon Brown that he’ll never please the people who’ve already decided Tony Blair acted illegally in going to war with Iraq, so whether the inquiry is held in public or private is an irrelevance.
He’s half-accurate in his analysis. Those of us who stuck to the facts on who said what and when, on the matter of Blair and Bush agreeing to go into Iraq before the UN had sanctioned such aggressive action, remain convinced that the two Bs acted illegally.
Exhaustion
If Prime Minister Brown is hoping the passage of time will have fuzzed our memory of the details and produced a level of Iraq exhaustion, he shouldn’t.
The House of Commons was assured by Tony Blair on March 18, 2003, when he sought support for going to war without the UN’s mandate that it had proved impossible to obtain the UN’s support “because one permanent member (France) of the Security Council made plain in public its intention to use its veto whatever the circumstances.” This was not true.
President Chirac said if the weapons inspectors (remember Hans Blix?) told them they couldn’t guarantee Iraq’s disarmament, “In that case it would be for the Security Council and it alone to decide the right thing to do. But in that case, of course, regrettably, the war would become inevitable. It isn’t today.”
Also, the attention surrounding the Attorney General’s advice to Blair’s Government on the legality or otherwise of the plan to invade Iraq diverted the public gaze away from the resignation of the very experienced and internationally respected Civil Servant Elizabeth Wilmhurst, Deputy Legal Adviser in the Foreign Office. She said, “I cannot in conscience go along with advice which asserts the legitimacy of military action without such a resolution (of the UN).”
Reasons
But Alastair Campbell’s dismissal of the importance of having a public inquiry misses the essential reasons for openness. Hundreds of British families lost loved ones or saw their lives drastically changed because of injuries sustained in Iraq. They deserve to know the truth, as do the families of the unknown thousands of Iraqis killed or injured in the war.
The UK lost international trust and its reputation for wise and fair foreign policy dealings over Suez. the decision to invade Iraq was of The same magnitude of stupidity and chicanery. The naivety of Chamberlain’s Munich miscalculation set in train a world war and a decades’ long division of east and western Europe that was mirrored across the globe during the cold war.
Blair and Bush’s illegal war created a division between Muslim and non-Muslim communities across the world that will probably last as long, with all that implies for terrorist outrages and expensive preventative measures. These are resources that should be used to alleviate hunger and poverty, to name but two of the priorities subverted by governments due to the need now to defend innocent people against the consequences of engaging in illegal war.
Truth must be heard and justice carried out, not just by UK and American citizens in whose name war was waged, but also by the victims of these decisions. This won’t repair the damage done to international order or even make anyone feel better about the UK’s disastrous departure from international legality. But it might lay the foundations for a new understanding and cooperation between the aggrieved nations of the Middle East and their aggressors.
That’s worth admitting our mistakes in public for.
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Margo
MacDonald
