In the course of an interview on Fox News with the Republican former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, Tony Blair claimed a "continual desire to sort of uncover some great conspiracy" lay behind the Iraq Inquiry. Here's the full interview with the blood-soaked war criminal:
As predicted earlier this week, the giddy excitement about Tony Blair's 'Judgement Day' at the Iraq Inquiry turned almost inevitably to disappointment today.
As expected, the level of forensic examination by the mild-mannered members of the inquiry was poor, even on the basics. Pulling their punches repeatedly, they allowed Blair to once again misrepresent the text of UN resolution 1441 to justify his decisions, even though it required Security Council endorsement for military action that was never forthcoming. They failed to follow up on alternatives to invasion, even though we know there were back-channel discussions about the prospects of exile for the Iraqi tyrant. They even allowed him to repeat without real challenge his preposterous exaggeration about the level of threat from Saddam, long discredited by what we know now about intelligence failings and by the absence of WMDs.
And Blair was entirely predictable too - still convinced that he always does the right thing, still repeating his 'rules of the game have changed' routine and saying yet again that he had no regrets. His was like a voice from the past, with a message that Blair will probably still repeat to himself as he one day shuffles around an expensive American retirement home in his dressing gown. The only thing that was a little new was expanding his new-found public embrace of the benefits of 'regime change' - never the justification when rallying supine Labour MPs back in 2003 - to include threats to Iran, which is well beyond the remit of the Inquiry. Quite how Blair intends to step back into his supposed role as Middle East 'peace' envoy after today's performance is a mystery.
We knew before today's hearing that the only way that Blair will ever face genuine scrutiny will be under the interrogation of a prosecution counsel - and let's be honest, that's incredibly unlikely. Whilst I entirely applaud the efforts of George Monbiot in setting up the website Arrest Blair and offering a a reward to people attempting a peaceful citizen’s arrest of the former prime minister, even George recognises this is largely symbolic. I suspect that Flying Rodent over on Liberal Conspiracy is right to say that Blair will "continue shambling around the world jamming great fistfuls of dollars into his pockets in the full glare of the public eye", hopefully jeered as a war criminal at every turn. But spending huge amounts of time and effort trying to get him into a courtroom in The Hague seems like a enormous waste of energy.
Whether he likes it or not, Blair's historical legacy has already been written, whatever the justifications he came out with today. The Iraq Inquiry is likely to do little more than add further damage to his reputation. But with war grinding on in Afghanistan and the possibility of new military conflicts in Iran, Yemen and even possibly Haiti, the anti-war movement also needs to be prepared to move on.
Don't get me wrong: in the event that Blair is picked up at an airport in some distant part of the world and incarcerated, I'll crack open a bottle and celebrate. But if he ends his days still forlornly proclaiming that he was always right, ignored and largely forgotten, an embarrassing reminder of a discredited and misguided era, then that too will be a satisfying punishment for a politician who so obviously adores the limelight.
Let's face it, the government has form when it comes to using excuses to try and prevent anti-war protests. Who can forget that in February 2003, Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell tried to ban the massive two-million strong rally in Hyde Park before the outbreak of the Iraq war, using the excuse of 'damage to the grass' and hiding behind advice from the Royal Parks - an executive agency of Jowell's Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Everyone knew it was political - and it is hard not to believe that the same is true of the decision by the Metropolitan police to refuse to allow protesters to demonstrate this Friday immediately outside the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in Westminster, when Tony Blair gives evidence to the Iraq Inquiry.
Previous protests have been held on the conference centre's grass forecourt, but the police are claiming that, whilst protests "would be manageable", the final decision "lay with the management of QEII and not the Metropolitan police". However, the centre's chief executive Ernest Vincent has told the Morning Star that it had had little input in negotiations, adding, "we are a commercially run organisation. The Iraq inquiry is but one event taking place on Friday and we have to respect all our occupants." This is of course incredibly disingenuous, for the QEII like Hyde Park is not private land but government owned and as the centre's website makes clear, it is another executive agency, this time of the Department for Communities and Local Government. Furthermore, as massive security has been laid on for Blair's appearance, costing as much as £250,000, the idea that other occupants of the QEII centre aren't likely to face a far from typical day on Friday unless protesters are kept as far away as possible is frankly laughable.
Theoretically, the final decision lies in the hands of Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, John Denham - ironically, one of the few ministers to resign over the Iraq war. CND and Stop the War are both blaming government interference but it does look suspiciously like the decision to ensure that Friday's anti-war protest is kept out of sight of the QEII centre originated within Scotland Yard.
Channel 4 News reported yesterday on the decision by protest organisers to pull out of negotiations with the police and added that events on Friday are "the first major test of public order policing since the 'Adapting to Protest' review by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary". As I suggested when the first part of this review was published in July 2009, it is precisely because protesters have become disillusioned with the 'self-kettling' that comes with the severe restrictions imposed by the police that they have switched tactics, recognising that the Public Order Act 1986 does not make a protest without prior notification unlawful – its organisers may be guilty of an offence, but participants are not.
The HMIC review made much of the need to 'facilitate peaceful protest' and 'improve dialogue with protest groups' but it seems, as Stop the War have now discovered, that little has changed and severe restrictions are still standard practice for the Met. The SWP's Chris Nineham must be wondering whether it was worth all the bother - and worth the prospect too of shouldering all the responsibility.
Moreover, as long as the police choose to borrow heavily from the Tessa Jowell Book of Bullshit Excuses, it is hard to see why anyone else will do so either in the future.
Make no mistake - when Tony Blair walks into the Iraq Inquiry at the end of this week, it will seem as though the room temperature has dropped a degree or two.
There is a growing hype about this Friday's appearance of the former Prime Minister and it has started to remind me of another public inquiry that seemed to promise so much and ultimately deliver so little. The public ballot for seats and the fact that 3000 people applied for tickets has undoubtedly raised levels of anticipation. But I still feel there is a great deal of wishful thinking in some sections of the press, who believe that because "the pressure on Blair will be intense", suddenly the long-cultivated mask of hubris will fall and his testimony will produce some great revelation.
Onlookers may feel a sudden chill because the inquiry's main attraction on Friday has ice-water in his veins. If there has been a common thread running through Blair's personal statements on Iraq ever since the outbreak of the war, it is this: he has convinced himself that he always does the right thing. Blair told his party conference in 2003 that "he had no regrets and would do exactly the same again" and was still insisting that "I have no regrets about removing Saddam" in 2007, even after the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the carving up of the country into sectarian factions. Absolutely no regrets? None at all? In 2009 the message remained unchanged: in his now infamous interview with Fern Britton, Blair made it clear that he would have invaded Iraq anyway, even knowing that there were no weapons of mass destruction.
I would expect a less combative presentation than the one given by Alastair 'Comical Ali' Campbell in early January, but Blair is defending his reputation as much as answering questions about policy and decision-making. What we should expect is a reappearance of his “pretty straight kind of guy” routine, what Ben Macintyre of the Times in 2005 described as "implicitly asking his listeners to set aside notions of objective truth and believe in his sincerity". On the basis of inquiry chair Sir John Chilcot's refusal to ambush witnesses, this should lead to a great day out for the media but almost certainly little else. I wish it were otherwise, but for once I think Matthew d'Ancona in the Telegraph is right about something when he says:
The other area of hype is around the protests outside. The Times has gone into full bullshit-mode in reporting that "the demonstration will be the biggest test for Scotland Yard since the G20 protest in April last year when protesters caused millions of pounds of damage in the City" (we wish!) and is almost gleeful in its assertion that "Scotland Yard is preparing to use the controversial 'kettling' tactic". The Telegraph reports that intelligence officers (such a source of reliable information) "have picked up 'domestic chatter' suggesting his appearance warrants a high state of alert", whilst inevitably the Mail goes even further - Friday is potentially "a target for Muslim extremists raging at his decision to invade Iraq".
Blair is many things, but a stumbling, easily foxed witness is not one of them. There is not a single question the committee can throw at him that he has not answered in his head a thousand times.
With the Iraq Inquiry closed until the New Year, its first four weeks of hearings having revealed little that we didn’t already know, we wait in anticipation for what the Inquiry chair Sir John Chilcott calls “the most senior decision-makers” – more than any other, the former prime minister Tony Blair. Nevertheless, I fear disappointment - that the Inquiry members will find themselves so bogged down with dossiers, legal advice and UN resolutions that they fail to vigorously challenge Blair on his latest justification for the invasion of Iraq.
Blair’s television interview on 13 December was more illuminating about the government’s motivations in the approach to the invasion than any of the civil servants who have testified at the Inquiry to date. His admission that Britain would have supported military action to remove Saddam Hussein regardless of the existence of weapons of mass destruction, because he was a “threat to the region,” has drawn what probably constitutes a sharp rebuke from the normally mild-mannered former head of UN weapons inspection Hans Blix, who has said that Blair has given a "strong impression of a lack of sincerity".
Quite so, although Blair’s inherent insincerity is also far from a surprise to most of us. What is interesting, however, is that Blair has finally admitted that British and US decision-making was neither defensive nor moral, as he has previously asserted, but purely strategic. It wasn’t for the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs, or to bring democracy in Iraq and it most certainly wasn’t because of the ludicrous attempts to link Iraq with Al-Qaida. The invasion was to protect Western strategic interests in the region – by which I think we can assume Israel would be highest on this list. No wonder no-one trusts Blair as a mediator in the Palestine conflict.
Just how much of a real threat Saddam posed in 2002, after years of crippling economic sanctions and in light of how close weapon inspectors were to showing after 700 inspections that there were no WMDs, is highly debatable. However, purely for argument’s sake, even if a desire for ‘regime change’ was in some way a legitimate strategic aim, it still doesn’t explain the need for an invasion and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. The UN Charter’s article 33 placed an explicit requirement on Britain and the US to “seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement... or other peaceful means of their own choice”. And as we now know, on the eve of war, Saddam was desperate to enter into negotiations and Bush and Blair could have achieved everything they demanded from him without a shot being fired.
We know that throughout 2002, Bush was claiming repeatedly that no decision had been made about the merits of invasion and that “should Saddam Hussein choose confrontation, the American people can know that every measure has been taken to avoid war” (there’s a useful summary of these statements on Think Progress). Blair said much the same in November 2002, suggesting that Saddam Hussein had to cooperate with the UN "but the choice is his - he can disarm peacefully, or be disarmed by force."
But we also know that these statements about the prospects for diplomacy were lies and that information was deliberately withheld from the public, emerging only in leaks long after the invasion had begun. In November 2003, the New York Times and Newsweek reported attempts by the Iraqis prior to the invasion to establish back-channel negotiations. These eventually led to promises to hold internationally-monitored elections within two years and even, astonishingly, to allow 2,000 FBI agents to enter Iraq and look wherever they wanted for banned weapons. According to Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former head of counter-terrorism, these proposals reached the White House but were "turned down by the President and Vice-President". Later still, in 2007, other reports circulated of an offer by Saddam to go into exile. This too was rebuffed. Despite increasingly desperate attempts by the Iraqi government to find diplomatic solutions to prevent war, the US and its allies appear to have gone out of their way to ensure war was inevitable, even though they obviously had Saddam over a barrel.
Anti-war activists have long been clear that the Bush administration rejected a negotiated agreement in Iraq, regardless of any concessions that were offered, because it was determined to secure unrestricted control over Iraq’s vast oil wealth and to pursue a foreign policy of global domination by means of military power. But if the Iraq Inquiry intends to maintain any credibility, it needs to probe Blair on his explanation for the failure of negotiations that would, by February 2003, have effectively meant ‘regime change’ without the bloodshed that followed.
If Blair cannot answer – and I find it hard to imagine how he can – then he stands branded as a war criminal not because of any disputed Security Council resolution or Attorney General’s interpretation of international law, but because he was an active participant in breaching the post Second World War settlement designed to end aggressive wars that is embodied in the UN Charter.
I supposed if a politician with an eye for his place in history plans to blatantly ignore international treaties, ignoring the really big ones is one way to write oneself into the history books.
Now that Sir John Chilcot has made his opening statement and the world's press focuses on whether ithe Iquiry is actually in a position to pronounce on the legality of the war, it's worth reflecting on what 'our' invasion has achieved for the people of Iraq.
There's a good article in the Guardian by Sami Ramadani - and in Iraq, they are starting a rather different inquiry:
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi authorities are investigating large-scale fraud at Baghdad municipality where employees have stolen millions of dollars, officials said on Monday.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, facing an election next year in which a major theme may be an epidemic of corruption sweeping Iraq as it emerges from years of sectarian warfare, on Monday ordered an investigation into the fraud scheme.
Baghdad provincial council head Kamel al-Zaidy said on Sunday investigations so far had found that $20 million had been siphoned away by a gang cashing cheques in the names of fake employees at a bank branch inside the city hall.
"Billions of Iraqi dinars belonging to employees of the Baghdad municipality are being cashed each day through fake signatures," Zaidy told reporters.
"The case is huge. It involves a large network of people operating under the supervision of the mayor's office."
Zaidy, who is a member of Maliki's Dawa party, said the municipality run by mayor Saber al-Issawi, a member of rival Shi'ite political party the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, had arrested some people but had not gone after the ringleaders.
The mayor's office said it was tackling the fraud and had arrested 13 people.
Corruption has shot to the forefront as one of the gravest ills threatening Iraq's development as the bloodshed triggered by the 2003 U.S.-led invasion subsides.
The country, which is still rocked regularly by devastating bomb attacks, is trying to attract foreign investors to its massive oilfields and other areas of the economy. But corruption could be a deterrent to global firms which could be held liable in U.S. and European courts if they pay bribes.
Iraqis are increasingly frustrated by what they see as a prevalence of corruption, which they blame for the poor state of basic services such as water, electricity, and sewage system.
Earlier this year, former Trade Minister Abdul Falah al-Sudany was forced to resign in a scandal involving food imports. He denied any wrongdoing and is out on bail.
Transparency International this week placed Iraq fifth from the bottom in its index of perceived public corruption, out of 180 countries.
The Iraq Inquiry has named the first witnesses who will appear when hearings begin next Tuesday. The first five weeks of hearings aim establish the essential features of the UK’s involvement in Iraq between 2001 and 2009 and are primarily are senior officials and military officers who had "a key role in either developing advice for Ministers or implementing government policy, or sometimes both."
Of particular interest will be evidence from Sir John Scarlett, who chaired the Cabinet Office Joint Intelligence Committee from 2001 to 2004 and was then Director General of MI6 until this year. Next week, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's Permanent Representative to the United Nations until 2003, will be answering questions about developments in the UN in the approach to the war.
The timetable for the first week of hearings is:
Carne Ross, the UK's former Iraq expert on the UN Security Council, has told the Observer today that he believes having former Butler Review member Sir John Chilcot chair the Iraq inquiry is "like trying the same crime twice with the same judge and jury – not a credible standard for truth-seeking. Nor would a truth-seeker allow the inquiry's staff to be headed by the civil servant who was in a senior position in the foreign and defence policy secretariat of the Cabinet Office during Britain's military occupation of Iraq."
Ross testified at the Butler Review that "at no time did HMG [Her Majesty's Government] assess that Iraq's WMD (or any other capability) posed a threat to the UK or its interests." He also argued that alternatives to invasion, primarily targeting Iraq's illegal oil revenues across its south-eastern border with Turkey, were ignored. This testimony directly challenged assertions that the war was legally justified by Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction that could be "activated" within 45 minutes and therefore posed a threat to British interests.
The Observer also reports Philippe Sands QC, a barrister in Matrix Chambers and a professor of international law at University College London, who has said: "Having some familiarity with Sir John's questioning... it is not immediately apparent that he will have the backbone to take on former government ministers." Other (unnamed) legal figures have reportedly expressed their fears that Chilcot "will do a job for the government".
Read more here.
Reuters reports that former Prime Minster Tony Blair will face questioning in January next year during public hearings at the Iraq Inquiry, according to its chair.
"We will use the first five weeks of hearings to help establish a reliable account of the essential features of the UK's involvement in Iraq," John Chilcot said in a statement. The Inquiry panel will start by hearing from senior officials and military officers who advised ministers, helped shape government policies or communicated them.
"That will give us a clear understanding of how policy developed and was implemented; and what consideration was given to alternative approaches," Chilcot said, adding the committee would consider the legal basis for war.
"Early in the New Year, we shall begin taking evidence from ministers (including the former prime minister) on their roles and decisions." A spokesman for Blair has said he would cooperate fully with the inquiry.
Chilcot has not yet said whether Gordon Brown will be called to testify but has said that he hoped the Inquiry would deliver its conclusions by the end of 2010.
The first public hearings of the Iraq Inquiry will take place on Tuesday 24th November at the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre, opposite Westminster Abbey in London.
Hearings will continue until 17th December and resume after the Christmas break, during the week of 4th January 2010. They will continue until early February. This is a incredibly tight schedule, in line with Sir John Chilcot’s statement that hearings will not take place during the general election, but already suggest severe restrictions on the evidence that will be held in public.
Protocols relating to the conduct of the Inquiry have also been published its website. These include:
The Iraq Inquiry has appointed General Sir Roger Wheeler, a former Chief of the General Staff, as its military advisor.
A summary of his career is available on the inquiry website, but something is strangely missing - the fact that Wheeler is also a director of Aegis Defence Services, which was set up in 2004 by Tim Spicer, who previously ran Sandline International (and whose mercenaries infamously destablised Papua New Guinea).
Aegis is a private security company that has $293 million-worth of contracts in Iraq with the US Department of Defense. In 2005, More4 News revealed "trophy" videos showing Aegis contractors in Baghdad firing upon civilian vehicles.
Is someone who is part of a company that has directly profited from the war in Iraq really a suitably 'independent' advisor to the Iraq public inquiry?
For more on Aegis see also:
Nation Builders and Low Bidders in Iraq
Security Firm Falls Short on Safety Audit
Dog of war builds £62m business on Iraq
The panel holding the official inquiry into the Iraq war began a series of meetings today with families of some of those who lost relatives in the conflict.
These pre-inquiry meetings will be held in London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Bristol and Belfast. Fifty families have agreed to take part in preparatory discussions to identify what the Inquiry's priorities should be and to allow the panel hear about any particular concerns they may have.
The Scotsman reports testimony to the Inquiry panel today from retired Lieutenant Colonel Colin Mildinhall, whose son Tom was killed in Iraq and who said:
Somehow, I get the feeling that finding myself in total agreement with a former senior army officer suggests a difficult time ahead for the government and supporters of the Iraq war.
I would particularly like the Iraq Inquiry to look at the whole representation of intelligence, how it was used or misused in the approach to this war.
I believe this country has been badly let down and been lied to. I would like to see some accountability.
The prime concern I have is over the legality of the war to start with.
There has been nothing new on the Iraq Inquiry since early September, then its chair Sir John Chilcot announced that he had written "to veterans groups, service charities and Regimental and Service Associations seeking their views on what the priorities of the Inquiry should be." An announcement about public hearings is expected later in October, but meanwhile it is interesting to see that a website called 'Iraq Inquiry Digest' has been set up to monitor and comment on the investigation.
Its supporters include MPs from the three Westminster parties, Rose Gentle of Military Families Against the War, whose son Gordon was killed in Iraq, Dr Glen Rangwala (who is editor of Labour Briefing and who discovered that Downing Street's 'dodgy dossier' was plagiarised from a postgraduate student's thesis) and the journalists Peter Oborne and Michael Smith, who published the Downing Street documents. The website is supported by Index on Censorship and openDemocracy.
Iraq Inquiry Digest editor Chris Ames wrote in the Guardian yesterday:
As this is a citizens' resource, we are also extending an open invitation to anyone who has information, including people who are providing information to the inquiry, to pass it to us. We are particularly keen to hear from anyone who knows of any attempt to mislead the inquiry or to withhold information. There is no doubt that this has happened before, and information given to previous establishment inquiries never saw the light of day.It'll be interesting to see whether anyone from inside the establishment takes up his offer.
What do we know about the Iraq Inquiry members? We know they were hand picked by Gordon Brown, for one thing, and that they won’t be hearing evidence from witnesses until later this year. So while we wait, its worth idly speculating why Brown chose the five establishment figures who will eventually hear testimony from, amongst others, Tony Blair.
One of the pursuits that three of the five Inquiry members share is involvement in the Ditchley Foundation, an organisation that promotes Anglo-American relations and whose Director is Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the UK Permanent Representative to the United Nations in the approach to the Iraq war and a likely witness at the Inquiry.
According to his biography on the Iraq Inquiry website, former ambassador to Russia Sir Roderic Lyne is a governor of the Ditchley Foundation, as well as Deputy Chairman of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House). This places him right at the heart of the transatlantic defence establishment, a position he shares with Sir Lawrence Freedman, Professor of War Studies at King's College London and Official Historian of the Falklands Campaign.
Freedman has spoken at events organised by the likes of the Royal United Services Institute and Chatham House (which he was a Council member of between 1984 and 1992) and at the Council on Foreign Relations and the World Affairs Council in Washington DC (see footage of an address to the WAC here). He was a participant at a Dichley Foundation event in early May 2009, organised in conjunction with the RAND Corporation, on the “military’s role and function in the 21st century”, which was attended by a variety of Ministry of Defence and NATO officials.
Intriguingly, Freedman told the World Affairs Council that “the only lesson of history is that there are no lessons”, which does rather raise questions about the inclusion of two historians on the Inquiry panel.
Crucially, Freedman was a regular government advisor and a key architect of the ‘Blair doctrine’ on the use of military action for ‘humanitarian’ intervention. He told the BBC’s Michael Crick that in 1999, a memo he wrote for Downing Street formed the basis of Blair's famous Chicago speech , which relied almost entirely on his proposals. John Kampfner’s book 'Blair’s Wars' confirms this, saying that Freedman was asked to provide "a philosophy that Blair could call his own", complete with benchmarks defining when countries should intervene in the affairs of other nations.
Baroness Prashar is another Ditchley Foundation governor, along with Lyne and intriguingly, Peter Mandelson, David Miliband, NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson and… hang on a second, how did Liberty’s Shami Chakrabarti end up on this list?!
However, there is little to tell from the Baroness’ record as a cross bench peer what her views are on issues other than human rights and equalities, as she seldom votes or speaks in the Lords.
Which leaves the historian Sir Martin Gilbert, who appears to have no connection to the Ditchley Foundation but is controversial for different reasons, notably claiming that TE Lawrence (‘of Arabia’) was a Zionist and importantly in the context of the Inquiry, his suggestion that Bush and Blair “may well, with the passage of time and the opening of the archives, join the ranks of Roosevelt and Churchill.” We can only look forward with exasperation to the quality of his questions to Blair!
Finally, the chair of the Inquiry, Sir John Chilcot, has his own baggage. He is a career diplomat who has close links to the intelligence community and was a former Staff Counsellor to the Security and Intelligence Agencies and the National Criminal Intelligence Service. More importantly, he was a member of the Butler Inquiry that exonerated the government on the intelligence about on Weapons of Mass Destruction, effectively said that everyone seemed to be innocent and suggested that the ludicrous claim that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger was "credible".
So there we have it, five carefully selected individuals with a variety of links to the military and foreign-affairs establishment.
If you don't want to know the result, put your head in your hands now...
"If someone were foolish or wicked enough to tell a serious untruth in front of the inquiry like that, their reputation would be destroyed utterly and forever. It won't happen."Lying about Iraq? Who would dream of doing that? Perish the thought! And what's the difference between a serious untruth and a minor one?
Random Blowe is the personal and political blog of Kevin Blowe, a campaigner based in Newham in east London. 
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