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The Politics of Mass Destruction

Oh God. And still the Hutton Enquiry fumbles along. Accompanied by a feeding frenzy in the media. New revelations every day, and not a one of them in the slightest bit conclusive. No matter who I listen to or read, the suspicion lingers that in the end Hutton will apportion blame equally on both sides (government and BBC), mutter a little about what a tragedy Dr Kelly’s death was, and urge everybody involved to try harder next time.

I could be wrong. But what can you do when an endless succession of ministers and civil servants and spymasters show up at the enquiry (heck, some of them even ‘testify’ via telephone links) and dissemble through their teeth? Who’s going to prove them at fault?

Meanwhile, just to muddy the water even more, the government has been subtly working at changing its position ever since the war ended. To the extent that people are now beginning to believe it was OK to go to war for any number of reasons other than the alleged ‘weapons of mass destruction’.

I went on the anti-war march. I was as furious as the other two million about the Bush administration’s motives (overt and covert). At the time there was only one thing that made me doubt my own motives for marching – and that was the supposed ‘immediate threat’ from Saddam’s weapons. Make no mistake: the Blair government was pushing the idea big time in the run-up to the war. They had to: they needed to scare an electorate into compliance.

Now they’re claiming there were other reasons. Now they’re claiming that it doesn’t matter that those weapons have never been found. Now they’re suggesting that it’s not important that the pre-war dossier on Iraq’s WMD was beefed up in some ways.

Of course they are. They want us all to do the convenient thing and quietly forget that those weapons were the primary apparent motive for prosecuting the war.

Many thousands of people died in that war. They’re still dying. And the Middle East looks more and more like a destabilised muddle. There may have been many good reasons for the US and UK to destroy Saddam’s regime, but those were not the reasons we were given. From the word go, it was suggested to all of us that we had to go to war because Saddam was about to use his ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ - a phrase so ubiquitous that it’s now permanently embedded in our synapses.

That’s why the ‘sexing-up’ of the dossier is important – irrespective of whether Dr Kelly ever used those exact words. All the evidence coming out of the Hutton Enquiry suggest that this is exactly what happened. If it did, we fought the war on a false premise – and the responsibility for those thousands of deaths goes to the highest level of government.

The Prime Minister. The Minister of Defence. The Ministry of Defence officials. The Intelligence Services. All blandly implying that they somehow didn’t know exactly how the dossier got altered, or why. All ducking the responsibility.

But hang on a minute. These are Civil Servants and elected politicians holding the highest offices in the land. At that level, there’s no excuse for not knowing. Not knowing is tantamount to incompetence (an observation that applies more forcibly the closer you get to the top). Which leaves us drawing one of two possible conclusions about our leaders and the dossier-that-took-us-to-war:

1/ They’re lying.

2/ They’re not fit for the job.

Either way, it’s time for go. At least that would be the honourable thing to do...