Jewish Chronicle, 12 March 2004

It is an odd fact that, despite his reputation for supremely manipulative political skills, the Prime Minister has made such a poor fist of selling his case for the war against Iraq.

Those who are anti-war may say it’s because he took the country to war on a lie. But for those like myself who believe Tony Blair told the truth, it is a tragic mystery that he has not presented the case more cogently.

Last weekend in his Sedgefield constituency, he re-stated facts which have been all but obscured about why we went to war. It was not because of the 45 minute claim, which was actually barely mentioned. It was not because Iraq posed an imminent threat; he had said in terms it did not.

The real fear, as he said at the time, was that tyranny, terrorism and chemical, biological or nuclear weapons might become lethally combined. The key point was that the free world faced a new type of threat from people who were demonstrably prepared to behave in ways previously deemed unthinkable. That became clear on 9/11, which simply altered forever the balance of risk; and in Iraq, Blair’s judgment call was that this risk could not be taken.

It was a brilliant, lucid and persuasive presentation. Yet it was downplayed in the media because no-one wanted to hear it. People decided long ago that Blair lied about the reason for war, and there are now no facts — apart from the discovery of WMD in Iraq —which will convince them.

In large part, this is due to a general and corrosive cynicism about the Prime Minister. The years of spin mean many people now won’t believe a single thing he says, and assume he acts in bad faith.

But the more immediate reason was a fundamental error Blair made in the run up to the war. The case for military action was legally, morally and strategically solid. But the public didn’t buy it. They didn’t trust President Bush, they didn’t like acting without UN approval, and they didn’t like the doctrine of pre-emptive strikes.

In the face of this hostility, Blair panicked. He threw all his efforts into obtaining a further UN resolution which would give an unequivocal green light for war. This was to prove a disastrous mistake. The legal case — as set out in the Attorney General’s published opinion — was already soundly based on the combination of the three existing UN resolutions.

But there was so much uproar around the attempt to get the new resolution that, when this failed, people assumed that without it the war was illegal. But that doomed resolution was not legally necessary. It was rather a political manoeuvre. And when it foundered, the political fall-out was so catastrophic that the war itself became de-legitimised.

This was compounded by the failure to discover any WMD in Iraq. In a climate of rampant hostility and suspicion, this was held to prove no WMD had ever existed. This was absurd. Even countries which opposed the war were certain Saddam was still in the business of producing WMD. Yet so greatly has history been rewritten, it is now even being suggested that Saddam posed no threat at all.

It is surely hard to exaggerate the role played in all this by the BBC, which has filtered every development through an anti-war prism. Whether by repeatedly asserting no WMD ever existed, or giving the misleading impression that the Attorney General’s opinion was never published, or failing to report that the weapons inspector Dr David Kay had uncovered dozens of clandestine biological weapons programmes, the BBC has fuelled the impression that the war was a gigantic con-trick.

As a result of all this, the country is in the grip of a profound suspension of reason and logic, in which falsehoods have been reinforced so often that actual facts are now viewed with disbelief.

Undeniably, the doctrine of pre-emption is controversial. Too few have grasped that we face a totally new type of threat requiring different structures, laws and conventions. As the American analysts David Frum and Richard Perle say in their book An End to Evil, the UN charter recognising the right of self-defence against armed attack is useless in dealing with, say, Syria arming Hezbollah which has attacked America in the past, or Pakistan giving nuclear technology to North Korea which threatens America in the future.

As they observe, we face an aggressive ideology of world domination from militant Islam. The stakes are too great to wait for it to strike first. If President Clinton had not decided to wait when Osama bin Laden was expelled from Sudan in 1996, the thousands who died on 9/11 might have been spared.

But with irrationality and cynicism rampant and growing at home, the danger is that the west will indeed wait, until it is once again too late.

Posted by melanie at March 14, 2004