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Alastair Campbell will one day regret defending Blair
Robert Fox: While Campbell protested his and Blair’s innocence, Dutch report exposed the truth
Alastair Campbell gave his Edith Piaf act to the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war yesterday. Despite his protestations about regretting rien in his role in preparing the infamous dossier for going to war and being less than transparent with parliament, press and public, he may yet come to repent of his studied performance of facetiousness before the committee.
He said he stood by "every single word" that appeared in the crucial dossier on Saddam's weaponry which appeared in September 2002. This was the dossier accompanied by the alarming headline in the Evening Standard, '45 Minutes from Destruction', about whose provenance Campbell, the self-confessed master of spin and rainmaker of news in Tony Blair's Britain, claimed to know nothing.
Campbell's technique was that of the great Geoff Boycott at the crease - block everything and hope to bore the opposition into error and capitulation. This mode of play had served him well through previous inquiries, after all.
Interestingly, those closest to him in the media at Westminster thought he had done pretty well again. The problem was that Campbell thought he was strutting his stuff only at the annual amateur dramatics in the village hall of village Westminster – and no further.
However, as in the best of plays by Ibsen or Chekov, something happened offstage during his performance that dramatically changes the complexion of what he was or was not owning up to. While he was protesting that Tony Blair, honourable as Brutus, acted with the deepest sincerity and the best of intentions, a high-powered inquiry headed by a former Dutch supreme court judge, Willlibrord Davids, reported that the Netherlands and its allies had no excuse under any interpretation of international law for going to war in Iraq in March 2003.
In particular, the Davids Inquiry focused on a letter sent by Tony Blair to Jan Pieter Balkenende, the Dutch prime minister, urging him to join the war coalition led by America and Britain. In the letter Blair allegedly argued that Saddam was a menace who must be checked by force urgently. The Davids Inquiry was not allowed to see the letter as it was recalled by the UK because it was deemed confidential to the British prime minister and it is against protocol that it should be disclosed.
However in Dutch constitutional practice a prime minister may not keep such documentation and information to himself in matters of war and peace. He is bound to make full disclosure to his foreign minister at least – and in turn to his sovereign.
This is the third inquest into the Netherlands' participation in the Iraq war in 2003; though the Dutch didn't join the invasion, they sent troops in support and to help with the occupation. This is the harshest judgment of the Iraq war so far, and comes from a legal system and tradition of men like Hugo Grotius, a founding father of the modern concept of international law.
As a result, Campbell's stonewalling yesterday may have done him and those he worked with in government little good – and in fact quite a lot of harm. There was no regret about claims that Saddam was an immediate threat. There was no regret either about the way he and Blair didn't fully level with the public and parliament about the early written pledge to George W Bush, by April 2002 and possibly earlier, that the UK would commit a division of troops alongside the US if it came to a scrap in Iraq.
In the 1956 Suez crisis, prime minister Anthony Eden had to quit once it became clear he had lied to parliament about a secret pact with France and Israel to invade to take back the Canal Zone from Egypt. For almost a year before British troops went into Iraq on March 20, 2003, Blair and his team did not fully disclose their decisions and judgments to voters, parliament, or even Cabinet colleagues.
Secretly generals were told to prepare for action in late summer 2002, yet they were not allowed to fully equip and train for the fray for fear of alerting the British people that their prime minister had already crossed his Rubicon and had decided to commit his country to fight if Uncle Sam so demanded.
Yesterday Campbell astutely conscripted the present prime minister, Gordon Brown, into the whole Iraq enterprise, stating that Blair consulted Brown on all the major issues. Even so the main attractions in this most theatrical of inquiries are Campbell and Blair, the Jeeves and Wooster of this blackest of political farces.
The Campbell performance, masterly in its own way, has ensured that unlike the Hutton and Butler inquiries, the report from the Chilcot panel will not be the last word. There is now too much information, well attested and sourced and from all kinds of places, to give the Blair team the benefit of the doubt. Campbell's parting jibes as he left the hearing that this is all largely got up by the media were beyond risible.
Many of his colleagues in government past and present must be cursing his avalanche of eloquence yesterday, for his torrent of words warned friend and foe alike that he is a weapon of ultimate self-deception and that this is far from over. ·
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These evil men are responsible for countless thousands of deaths they should be cooling their heels in the Haig and face charges of crimes against humanity.
Get with the programme friends : the Blair mafia is untouchable. They have made it so, we have allowed it, and we continue to let them big it over us. Blur continues to rake it in from a myriad of UK sources that pay big bucks to cosy up. We lose and they win. Whatever the verdicts there will be no punishments metered out that cannot be subverted with the connivance of the Cockeyed Optimist and his lickspittle Labour lackeys. We got what we deserved.
Campbell has the look of a man in deep but still pretending he's waving not drowning. So does his former boss. They convince only those who have a lot to lose if their masks were to drop and they were to admit the truth. No wonder Campbell, like Blair, has latched on to Christian references in his defence. Scoundrels abuse the bible almost to the same extent as they do patriotism. We await some ghastly plea from these two scoundrels that they were acting for "the people" of Britain. Not in our name they weren't, and they'll feel better when they own up.
The Iraq war (part two) was the culmination of the USA-UK's decade-plus siege that was laid after Iraq war (part one).
Blair and Bush jnr. were merely the last in a succession of Prime Ministers and Presidents, inheriting rather than instigating the war.
Protecting them was huge swaithes of establishment figures on both sides of the Atlantic, including many media corps and all four major political parties.
Campbell, even Blair, were mere bit players in an onging global struggle for control / influence of major resources, notably petroleum.
Campbell can sneer and jibe at the media because they have been a damp squib at best, putty in his hands to this day.
If the media, and the inquiry, were at all serious about this, they would focus exclusively on the elephant in the room:
there were no weapons of mass destruction.
Blair, Bush, Campbell, Scarlett, Manning, Cheney, Powell, Washington `Post, New York Times, The Sun, the Telegraph, the BBC, CIA, MI6, the UN... were WRONG. All of them.
The Dossier was full of crap, as was the mass-meida that reported it.
Andrew Gilligan, David Kelly, Paxman for crying out loud, all accepted that Iraq had WMD.
So where do we start holding whom to account for that mass-deception?
We don't.
End of.
That's why this inquiry, like its predecessors, is a preposterous pretension given to pointless presumption.
Anyone remotely interested in finding out that Iraq had no WMD in 2002 just had to read Scott Ritter's "War on Iraq", then look for any credible refutation of its claims.
That's what I did, and far from refuting him, the evidence presented to the public by the British and American governments actually added wieght to his claims when carefully analysed.
So enough of this mass-deception that WMD was ever seriously accepted as the reason for war. If Iraq, or any other state, was a serioius WMD threat, the last thing Bush and Blair would have done was to attack them! Like their predecessors, they only attacked those whom they thought were weak and easily defeated.
Logic alone exposed the preposterous pretence of that argument.
So what are we waiting for? Blair and Campbell and a few others should be charged.
I can think of no other way to express it - what a complete c*nt. And for the first time I can recall, I share Peter Simmons' sentiments above, 100%.
Charlie (Lord) Falconer said he thought Campbell had been honest and open. Who could disagree? (Don't email, you'll crash the web).
As arrogant as ever, Campbell should be in the dock with Blair, Brown and Hoon at The Hague. But all those who allowed themselves to be convinced bear responsibility, it was transparently obvious all along that Blair was lying and that he and Bush had already decided on war. Parliament could still have stopped it, but became complicit.