[Mb-civic] Blair cannot shed the burden of war

[Michael Butler]

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Blair cannot shed the burden of war
>By Philip Stephens
>Published: April 28 2005 20:44 | Last updated: April 28 2005 20:44
>>

Tony Blair cannot shed the burden. This is a sore that refuses to heal. As
the British general election campaign enters its final week, the nation's
news bulletins and headlines have been dominated again by the Iraq war. The
polls say Mr Blair will win a third term anyway, but the anger and passions
over the decision to remove Saddam Hussein have not dissipated. The paradox
here is that the longer they run, the more obvious it becomes that the
endless arguments over weapons of mass destruction and the legal grounds for
war serve only to confer a spurious precision on what is, in essence, an
intractable political disagreement. All the while, though, the controversy
gnaws away at the prime minister's personal authority.

The latest flare-up centres on the disclosure this week of previously
unpublished advice given to Mr Blair by Lord Goldsmith, the UK's
attorney-general, in the weeks before the war. The cautions and caveats in
the opinion offered by the country's senior law officer have brought renewed
cries that the prime minister wilfully deceived the country. The charge is
laid alongside earlier allegations that Mr Blair misrepresented the
intelligence about Mr Hussein's weapons programmes.

There is as much political cant here as principled criticism of the prime
minister. Michael Howard, the Conservative challenger for 10 Downing Street,
describes the new evidence as "devastating". Mr Howard, who has run an
essentially negative election campaign, alternating between warnings that
Britain is being overrun by immigrants and asylum seekers and attacks on Mr
Blair's character, supported the war. On Thursday, he said he had not
changed his mind. But Mr Blair, he insisted anyway, had lied both about
unconventional weapons and the legal advice.

The direct attack on prime ministerial integrity breaks with political
convention. The charge that Mr Blair is a liar has been plastered on
election posters the length and breadth of the land. Yet Mr Howard has been
as selective in the choice of his evidence as he alleges Mr Blair was in the
presentation of the case for war. Thus the Conservative leader quotes from
pre-war weapons intelligence given to Mr Blair which says that information
from Iraq was "sporadic and patchy". Mr Howard carefully omits, though, the
unequivocal assertion in the same document that "it is clear that Iraq
continues to pursue a policy of acquiring weapons of mass destruction and
their delivery means". The spooks, of course, turned out to be wrong. But
the fault did not lie with the government. To borrow a phrase coined many
years ago by Margaret Thatcher's cabinet secretary, Mr Howard's
characterisation of events is "economical with the truth".

Charles Kennedy, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, has been on firmer
ground. His opposition to the war has never wavered. Mr Kennedy has
refrained from claiming that Mr Blair deliberately deceived the nation. He
cannot expect to make it to Number 10, but he does intend to win more seats
for Britain's third party on May 5.

Visitors to Britain are startled by the stubborn intensity of the debate.
The war has been controversial in the US but the legality of George W.
Bush's decision has scarcely been questioned. Among Iraq's new leaders,
meanwhile, Mr Blair is seen as something of a hero. Barham Salih, the
country's deputy prime minister, said as much during a visit to London on
Thursday. Dr Salih judged Mr Hussein had been guilty of "a war of genocide"
against his own people in violation of the United Nations charter and had
represented "a definite threat to international peace and security". But for
the war's opponents, the views of elected Iraqis must not intrude on the
British debate.

Lord Goldsmith's advice, published in full by the government after this
week's leak, does explain Mr Blair's fevered attempts in the spring of 2003
to obtain a second UN resolution explicitly authorising war. Stripped of
legalese, the document concludes that while a reasonable case for military
action could be made without such a resolution, its strength would be
uncertain if tested in the courts. Ten days later, on the eve of war, Lord
Goldsmith removed the equivocations when he delivered a formal opinion to
the cabinet, arguing that events in the interim had shown Mr Hussein to be
in demonstrable breach of UN resolutions.

There is a legitimate debate to be had both about whether the country should
have been told more of the earlier doubts, and about what changed in the 10
days to make the attorney general quite so definite in his final opinion.
But ultimately it is an argument that cannot be resolved. International law
is not the same as holy writ. As Lord Goldsmith said in his initial advice,
if the grounds for military action were not as strong as he would have
liked, the same had been true before Britain had taken military action in
Kosovo. The only difference, it seems to me, is that the war to remove
Serbian troops from Kosovo had been a cause embraced by left and right on
the political spectrum.

At this point all the arguments collide with immutable reality. You can be
for or against the war. You can judge it a noble cause that has ended a
tyranny and planted the seeds of democracy in the Middle East. Or, you can
consider it an illegal adventure cynically calculated to cow America's
enemies and secure its oil supplies. You might also think it a just war, the
benefits of which have been dissipated by hopelessly inadequate
post-conflict planning. Or, for that matter, an unjust act which, by chance,
has had good as well as bad consequences. You can lament the thousands
killed during the past two years; and you can recall how many were
slaughtered by Mr Hussein's regime.

You can argue, too, about Mr Blair's motives. Was this a prime minister
willing to sacrifice all principle to maintain a special relationship with
Mr Bush; or was it one who judged that the world could not be secure for as
long as someone as dangerous as Mr Hussein remained? Was Mr Blair guided by
a Gladstonian moral compass or was he grandstanding on the international
stage? You can equivocate. Two years on, it is still possible to see the
good and bad in this war, to conclude that Mr Blair both had a strong case
for removing Mr Hussein and yet broke the bounds of propriety in its
presentation. What you cannot do is find certainty one way or the other in
the fine print of a legal opinion or in scraps of dud intelligence.

philip.stephens at ft.com
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