MAYDAY:Blair chose chaos and bloodshed and lies.
socialist
http://www.sundayherald.com/41439
All The President's Men
Bob Woodward's explosive account of the run-up to invasion of Iraq reveals
how President George Bush's administration conspired to pursue military
action ... and how Tony Blair declined every chance to opt out
By Ian Bell
ON page 161 of Bob Woodward's book Plan Of Attack there is an arresting
passage. In August 2002, as America moved closer to a war its president
had been planning long before weapons inspections had been given a chance,
Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, was holding a private meeting at
his Long Island home with Jack Straw, Britain's foreign secretary. According
to Woodward, the pair had "some of the same concerns" about the unfolding
scheme for an assault on Iraq. Straw had come with the message that Britain
could not join the adventure "unless you go to the United Nations". This,
it seems, was useful to Powell in his attempts to restrain George W Bush
because the President "absolutely had to have Blair on board".
Later, with war looming, Prime Minister and President had an astounding
conversation. Bush was concerned that Blair's government could fall
because of its allegiance to America. "We don't want that to happen under
any circumstances," he is recalled as saying. Then the reactionary who
had dreamed up every pretext for war, who would wait nervously for the
decision of the Westminster parliament, so much did he need British
"cover", offered Blair a way out.
"If it would help, Bush said, he would let Blair drop out of the coalition
and they would find some other way for Britain to participate." Put aside
the revealing suggestion that the United States might "let" its little ally
do something, and you come to the most remarkable of Woodward's claims,
at least for British readers: Bush didn't simply offer to excuse Blair
from service, he made the offer three times in succession. We could have
been "peacekeepers or something", not the country whose participation in
the war was Bush's clinching excuse for invasion.
Woodward, famously, doesn't make stuff up. Much of his narrative is
clearly inspired by Powell, a man who appears to be seeking retrospective
justification for the Iraq debacle by getting his doubts on the record
first.
Nevertheless, the Washington Post journalist also interviewed 75
of the insiders involved in planning and starting the war and spent
three-and-a-half hours with Bush himself.
The crucial truth that emerges is two-fold. First, Blair could have
seriously obstructed, and perhaps even actually prevented, the stampede
towards war by withholding his support. Secondly, even if he could not
bear to alienate America to that extent, he could certainly have kept
Britain out of the mess.
Instead, he has twisted himself into knots time after time in ever more
fantastic efforts to justify himself. His reward has certainly not been
"influence": even on the ground in Iraq, American generals pay no attention
to their British counterparts. Meanwhile, the Middle East road map,
the aspiration he used to persuade so many Labour MPs to swallow their
doubts over the war, has just been turned into toilet paper by Bush and
Ariel Sharon. Blair, it would appear, was not consulted.
Instead, he has been sucked into the neo-con nightmare, little more than
a tool in a US election year while Iraq turns into a bloody shambles. The
insurgency there is not America's Vietnam - the guerrillas have no
outside army to aid them - but it could yet turn into the next worst
thing for Britain. Despite every diversion Blair attempts, it won't go away.
Nor has Bush heard the last of it. Woodward states, for one thing, that in
July of 2002 Bush demanded $700 million to pay for war preparations. Since
those funds had not been appropriated specifically by Congress, the only
body with the power to do so, this attempt to circumvent oversight will
certainly return to haunt the White House, as will the public hearings
into 9/11. From these it is now clear, as the International Herald Tribune
reported last Monday, that the "threat reports were more clear, urgent
and persistent than was previously known".
Despite that, Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, began
laying plans to attack Iraq, a country with no links to al-Qaeda, only
72 days after the Twin Towers fell. Shortly afterwards they roped in
Britain, a country whose Prime Minister may have warned the world about
Saddam Hussein, but a country which actually regarded Iraq as far less
dangerous than North Korea or Iran, at least before Bush decided to expand
America's presence in the Middle East.
Woodward concludes his book by attempting to ask this President how
history might judge the assault on Iraq. At first Bush suggests that it
might take a nice, long decade "to understand the impact and the true
significance of the war". Then the writer quotes one of Bush's neo-con
advisers, to the effect that "all history gets measured by outcomes".
"Bush smiled. \x{2018}History,' he said, shrugging, taking his hands
out of his pockets, extending his arms out and suggesting with his body
language that it was so far off. \x{2018}We won't know. We'll all be dead'."
It is the insouciance, not to mention the stupidity, of a man unaccustomed
to taking responsibility for his actions, a man too dumb to notice that
talk of death and dying after you have just inflicted a war on a country
isn't exactly tasteful. The betting must be, nevertheless, that Bush and
Blair will be judged long before the historians go to work. The mass of
evidence of duplicity and deceit is now inversely related to the number
of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction: there is a lot of the former,
damn all of the latter, and a reckoning is due.
Woodward's contribution is a telling one. Perhaps because of his status
in American journalism, perhaps because of his bland demeanour, he has
managed to persuade the conspirators to incriminate themselves. Even
Powell, who obviously thought he was using the author, is fed enough rope
to hang himself.
If he was so sceptical before the war about American and British
"intelligence" why did he never tell his President, or even the American
people, that the war could not be justified? If he knew that so much of the
"certain knowledge" emerging from Iraq and from Iraqi exiles was bogus,
why did he give a briefing to the United Nations that was, as they say
in America, a crock?
Anyone who still believes that Bush and Blair simply made honest mistakes
should skim through a few chapters of Woodward's book. The neo-cons in
the White House wanted their war and obliged the Pentagon and the CIA
to give it to them. Blair, for his part, might have lacked the expertise
to assess a weapons threat, even when none of his own advisers believed
a threat was imminent, but he should have been politician enough to
understand the people he was dealing with. When even Powell calls the
people surrounding vice-president Dick Cheney the "Gestapo office",
a smart Prime Minister should catch on.
No, the people who were sincerely in error were those who trusted
their leaders. The 45-minute claim was based on previously reliable
intelligence? So why, according to Woodward, did George Tenet, head of
the CIA, refer to it as the "they-can-attack-in-45-minutes-sh*t"? Why
did even the CIA, cooking up evidence in its own right, warn the British
against using the claim? Perhaps because, after Britain put the fantasy
into the public domain, Bush could happily quote it as fact "according
to the British government".
None of this, to state the obvious yet again, had anything to do with a
war on terror. The people who failed to act on those "clear, urgent and
persistent" threat warnings did manage to recruit a whole new generation
of terrorists, however, most of whom are busy learning their trade in Iraq
when they are not taking a knife to the heart of a city like Madrid. The
folly of Bush and Blair, a legacy for generations to come, is almost as
breathtaking as their mendacity.
The truth accumulates, nevertheless. Each fact drips on the carapace of
deceit and wears it down a little more. In America, at least, Woodward's
book begins to resemble the tipping point, the moment at which opinion
is reversed and loyalties shift. George W invented himself a war: that
is sinking in, slowly but surely.
Yet the man who might have prevented it, the man who could certainly have
kept his hands clean, chose chaos and bloodshed and lies. For Tony Blair,
too, the truth is becoming more dangerous with every passing week.
25 April 2004
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