If only PD James had been on the Chilcot committee. After six hours of watching Tony Blair effortlessly deflect and disarm his interrogators at the Queen Elizabeth II centre on Friday, how could one not be struck by the contrast with the courteous evisceration that James recently performed on the BBC’s director-general?
Instead of the pointless Baroness Prashar of Runnymede, whose style is to scowl, put on a cross voice ... and then ask the most puffball questions imaginable, we could have had Baroness James of Holland Park, who under a patina of deceptive deference would have used her novelist’s grasp of human psychology to get to the heart of a matter that goes beyond military strategy and mere politics.
For although the former prime minister continues to make as compelling a case as could be made for a war of choice based on gamma-minus intelligence, there remains the issue of character. Why did Tony Blair so ache to be the inseparable best buddy of George W Bush, and to join in a US campaign that was predicated on the imaginary idea that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and the destruction of the World Trade Center? I once asked an old friend of Blair’s a question along roughly these lines and received a stunningly cynical response. “Tony”, he laughed, “is like a girl who wants to go to all the best dances.”
So although Blair was right to tell Chilcot that the Anglo-American relationship was a vital one, with a remarkable record of achievements in the name of freedom, it is clear that a raging desire to be a glittering player on the global stage also impelled him forwards into the limelight. This newspaper provided a glimpse of the ham actor’s vanity in Blair a decade ago, when it published a memo in which the prime minister, as he then was, demanded “eye-catching initiatives [with which] I should be personally associated”.
None of this means Blair is at all insincere in his belief that Saddam was a uniquely evil ruler who had to be removed in the interests of global peace and harmony, or even in his original conviction that the intelligence about the Iraqi leader’s “weapons of mass destruction” was good enough to base a war on. He genuinely believed both those things; besides, who couldn’t agree with Blair’s description of Saddam as “a monster”? The point, however, is that Blair’s messianic moral imperative and his craving for a leading role on the international stage dovetailed perfectly — and conveniently.
His earliest moment on the domestic political stage had been to fight a hopeless byelection in Beaconsfield — especially grim for the young Labour candidate Blair because it was conducted towards the end of the Falklands war. He could never forget the impact made on voters by Margaret Thatcher’s personal identification with a successful military campaign. Later, Tony Blair was also seared by the memory of how Neil Kinnock as Labour leader was humiliated on his visit to America by a President Reagan unwilling to give the time of day to any opponent of his friend Margaret. This, too, is the realm of psychology, rather than just politics.
In fact Blair’s debacle over Iraq — it did, eventually, cost him the leadership of his party — has distinct echoes of Thatcher’s progress from hubris to nemesis. In her case the triumphs over General Galtieri and Arthur Scargill — battles that other leaders would have shirked — led her to scorn as the usual defeatists those who said that the poll tax (or the war on rates) would be a political death trap. Similarly, Tony Blair’s wars in Sierra Leone and against the Serbian oppressors in Kosovo had been successes entirely attributable to his singular force of personality. Who needs a cabinet?
Yes, the one aspect of Blair’s conduct in government that the Chilcot committee absolutely nailed was his complete contempt for almost all of his colleagues. This was nothing to do with some need for secrecy involving military matters; we know that it was always the style of Blair to make policy announcements that came as a complete surprise to the cabinet minister notionally responsible. This is what lay behind the acid comment to Chilcot by Lord Turnbull, the cabinet secretary at the time of the invasion of Iraq, that the government’s decision to back the American campaign of “shock and awe” was “a prematurely achieved consensus”.
That consensus was too premature for the late Robin Cook; and when Blair told Chilcot that “you would have been hard pressed to have found virtually anybody who doubted [Saddam] had WMD and WMD capability”, I imagined the shade of Cook shaking his chains. In his resignation speech Cook told MPs: “Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term ... It probably still has biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions but it has had them since the 1980s.”
It turns out that the intelligence dossier’s claim that Saddam had non-conventional weaponry ready for use “within 45 minutes” referred only to such battlefield chemical weapons. By definition, however, a battlefield weapon is not one of “mass destruction”. The only time my jaw dropped during Blair’s performance on Friday was when he observed of this crucial terminological discrepancy: “I did not focus on it a great deal at the time.” It is exactly that sort of blithe response that gives substance to the view that the WMD issue was merely whipped up to provide the legal pretext for removing Saddam Hussein.
Yet I know from my own experience that Blair genuinely believed, or had made himself believe, in the immediacy of the threat. I happened to be in 10 Downing Street on the day — a month after the invasion — that the US claimed to have discovered a “mobile biological weapons laboratory”. The reaction I witnessed was not surprise, but calm confidence that the intelligence would now be seen to be accurate. As we later learnt, the so-called “bio-weapons trailer” turned out to be solely for the production of hydrogen to fill artillery balloons, a mere fart in the desert.
Yet accepting, as I think we ought, that Blair firmly believed his own intelligence dossier does not let him off the hook. If you were the mother or father of one of the 179 British soldiers who died in the Iraq campaign, this would be a particular torment: the Americans were going to invade anyway, and did not require, even by their own admission, any assistance from the British.
So when Blair says: “If I had backed away and the Americans had also backed away and the conflict had not happened, Saddam would still be in charge,” any bereaved British parent would be able to see the hole in this self-inflating argument. Even if Blair had “backed away”, the Americans certainly wouldn’t have: Saddam Hussein would have been blasted out, regardless of any decision or action he took. The conflict would have “happened” quite independently of Blair, hard though it may be for him to accept that.
At the end of his six hours before Chilcot, Blair made an emotional peroration about a much lower infant mortality rate in post-Saddam Iraq. His concluding argument, therefore, was that thousands of Iraqis are alive today who would not have been, had the country not been invaded by US and British troops. That may be true, as a standalone statistic; but when one considers how many more thousands died because of that invasion, as chaos and civil war filled the sudden vacuum of power created by an incompetent occupier, it was an extraordinarily insensitive remark.
On the other hand, how else could Tony Blair maintain his preternatural self-belief? This goes beyond mere self-esteem; to admit to any regret would be to suggest that British soldiers had died, and been horribly maimed, in vain. He will never accept it. He cannot.
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Dominic Lawson writes a weekly column for the Sunday Times and also contributes book reviews and interviews. He won many awards as a newspaper and magazine editor and in his spare time wrote an acclaimed book about Grandmaster chess, The Inner Game.
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