Tony Blair’s claims about the legality of the second Iraq war and the intelligence justifying it “took a pounding” this week. Jonathan Powell, Blair’s former Chief of Staff, admitted that Britain had gone to war only on the ‘assumption’ of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), says Tim Shipman in the Daily Mail. Blair, due to give evidence to the Chilcot inquiry next week, claimed in the foreword to September 2002’s ‘dodgy dossier’ that intelligence ‘has established beyond doubt’ that Saddam had WMDs. Sir John Chilcot himself has said that Attorney General Lord Goldsmith “came under ‘heavy pressure’ to declare the war legal despite doubts that UN Resolution 1441” justified the invasion.
This week’s other “star turn” was Geoff Hoon, says Andrew Gilligan in The Sunday Telegraph. “Fresh from his rebel status”, there was a possibility he would be frank about the “astonishing failures” of the war. Not likely, says The Times’s Ann Treneman. Hoon is like Macavity, but “not as much fun”. When asked if he was at a meeting at Chequers just before Blair visited Bush in Texas in April 2002, he replied, “Actually, I wasn’t”. When asked about press reports headlined ’45 minutes from doom’, he explained he was in Kiev, as though “packhorse” were the only means of conveying information. Hoon, like other ministers, “never put his foot down or insisted when he could and should have done”, says Peter Riddell in The Times. He portrays himself as a “victim of circumstances rather than their master”. Other people failed to order the necessary body armour in October 2002; Blair stopped the MoD making adequate preparations for war, and Gordon Brown deprived the MoD of funding.
Well, there was no surrender from Alistair Campbell, says Gilligan. He was “manning the last operational gun as HMS Tony slipped beneath the waves of overwhelming evidence”. But his evidence simply “isn’t credible”. As Chris Ames said on the Iraq Inquiry Digest website, the irony of is that Campbell seems to be “managing the short-term headlines” at the expense of the longer-term verdict on himself and his former boss.
But what’s the point of it all? asks Nick Cohen in The Observer. The war’s opponents will never convict Campbell or the Labour leadership. Their central allegation, that the war was ‘illegal’, is “unsustainable”. What do Nick Clegg et al mean by an illegal war? Their use of the word suggests Blair’s critics believe the Ba’athist regime, guilty of genocide and under UN sanctions, was a legitimate government that should be “entitled by law to treat the country as its private prison”. The best they can hope for is a “mild condemnation of the former PM for relying on flimsy evidence”.
One thing Chilcot is achieving is a “new disaster” for Labour, says Polly Toynbee in The Guardian. Brown “wrongly reckoned that shining a searchlight on Tony Blair’s greatest error” would make him look good by comparison. In fact, the damage will be to those still in power. The pre-election timing couldn’t be worse. Even the “bullying braggadocio of Alastair Campbell and the self-certainty of Tony Blair seem preferable to those now weaselling out of their own responsibility”.