Not In My Name

So what are we to make of the increasingly shrill denunciations of B-liar as the day for his appearance before Chilcot approaches? Yesterday's Guardian had Bryan Gould suggesting that the real reason for the Iraq war was Blair's vanity. Nothing to do with getting rid of one of the vilest regimes the world's yet seen, which in its short disastrous life attacked one neighbour, Iran, invaded another, Kuwait, conducted a genocidal campaign against its own Kurdish population, and kept its citizens in a permanent state of abject terror thanks to a particularly sadistic secret police and the permanently busy torture chambers run by Saddam's psychopathic sons - and that's not even starting on the issue of non-compliance with UN Security Council resolutions, the whole WMD business, the unsustainable farce of the UN Oil-for-Food programme (remember that?), or the need to repay our debt to the Iraqi people for the failure to follow on to Baghdad following the First Gulf War, when the Marsh Arabs paid the terrible price for our betrayal....no, the only possible explanation had to be Blair's self-important need to see his name in the history books.

If that was some kind of reductio ad absurdum of the way the Chilcot Inquiry's been used by failed second-rate politicians to stick their daggers into the ex-Prime Minister, now today's piece by George Monbiot offers the same for those journalists and commentators who've been beating the anti-Blair drum ever since Saddam's overthrow: arrest him for war crimes ourselves!..."we won't let an illegal act of mass murder go unpunished".

It's beyond me, this outpouring of hatred. Mass murder? Apart from the personal abuse for that rarest of beings, a principled politician (and no, I didn't agree with all of Blair's principles), there's this constant need to make the worst of it: to inflate the casualties - it's always "over a million", though the most reliable estimates suggest a real figure of between 100,000 and 150,000 - the overwhelming majority, of course, killed by "insurgents", ie ex-Baathists, al-Qaeda-related thugs, or Iranian-inspired Shi'ite terrorists - and the assumption that had we not got rid of Saddam everything would somehow have turned out just fine: the internal divisions within Iraqi society would have healed themselves by magic and Saddam himself would have turned to Sufi mysticism, so that the problems we've seen since - the bombings and all the rest - are set against a base rate of zero, an alternative history where nothing bad ever happens.

Presumably Gordon Brown set up Chilcot with the hope of scapegoating Blair for what's seen as an unpopular war. As it happens the invasion and the overthrow of Saddam's Baathist regime went relatively smoothly, and the predicted violent resistance from the loyal Revolutionary Guards never materialised. The Iraqi people were indeed delighted, on the whole, to find themselves rid of their oppressor. The problems started, as we know, with the follow-up, when it emerged that little thought had been given to post-Saddam re-building, and the situation was allowed to deteriorate disastrously until General Petraeus and the "surge" pulled the situation round. And now we get this:

Gordon Brown yesterday offered a foretaste of his evidence to the inquiry when he said it had been a “mistake” to fail to prepare adequately for the reconstruction of Iraq....

Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary at the time of the invasion, warned Gordon Brown, then the Chancellor, that cuts in military spending would mean cancelling orders for helicopters in September 2003. He asked Tony Blair to intervene but the Chancellor refused to budge.

So there may have been an element of, um, mis-calculation in Gordon's plans there.

And when the enraged mob, encouraged by Guardian journalists, corners Tony Blair and enacts its ghastly vengeance, all I'll say is, "Not in my Name".

Comments

[Bob-B]

As you say, those who opposed the overthrow of Saddam are committed to 'the assumption that had we not got rid of Saddam everything would somehow have turned out just fine'. However, they rarely state this assumption, and they never seem to defend it. If overthrowing Saddam was so obviously a bad idea, you would think someone could explain how the alternative would have been better, but nobody seems to try. Funny that.

[alvin lucier]

If I had ten pence for every time I have been told the question "What would have happened had we not invaded" was 'irrelevant', I'd have about £18