The Straw man at the Iraq War Inquiry
To judge from the Times today, in his evidence yesterday to the Chilcot inquiry Jack Straw, who was Foreign Secretary at the time of the Iraq war, had grave doubts about its legality and had gone along with it only reluctantly. Once again, however, the driving media narrative that ‘Blair lied over an illegal war and now he’s in big trouble because everyone has blown the gaff to the Chilcot inquiry’ has wildly misrepresented the substance and significance of what Straw actually said.
From what he told the inquiry, Straw’s concern about the legality of any prospective war in Iraq appears to have centred solely on his belief that ‘regime change’ in itself could never be a legal basis for war but that this was the policy of the Americans:
...the policy of regime change in Iraq was one that went back to 1998 in an Act of Congress signed by Bill Clinton... What changed was not the policy qua the policy, but the decision, or the beginnings of a decision, that post 9/11 they should do something about it... we didn't share the policy of regime change as a purpose of our foreign policy with the United States. It wasn't our policy in 2002, it wasn't our policy in 2003 and there would have been no legal base for it ever to be our policy.
However, this did not mean that Straw believed there was no legal case for war in Iraq:
I certainly, and always had done, in the abstract and in reality, accepted that you could have a diplomatic strategy for a different purpose, which had to be backed by the threat or, if necessary, the use of force [my emphasis], but a foreign policy objective of regime change, I regarded as improper and also self-evidently unlawful...
Clearly there is a measure of incoherence here, in that it is hard to see how using force against Saddam could ever have achieved any result other than regime change. Moreover, Clinton, Bush and Blair were all committed to ‘regime change’ solely because Saddam was demonstrating over and over again that he was intent on remaining a threat to the region and thus the world. That was, after all, the reason why America and Britain went to enormous lengths over 12 fruitless years to get Saddam to conform to the UN resolutions that he disarm, and why they eventually went to war in order to enforce those resolutions --to ensure Iraq was indeed disarmed.
As Straw said about Blair’s speech in Crawford, Texas in March 2002 – the visit where Blair is accused of signing Britain up in secret to an illegal war –
...actually he is using language rather similar to that which I’d used about there was threat posed to the world by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
And as Straw went on to make crystal clear, Blair succeeded in talking the Americans out of regime change and signed them up instead to the route of coalition building at the UN in pursuit of the disarmament of Saddam; and crucially, Straw also thought that it was entirely proper for the use of force to be considered and used if such an attempt in pursuit of that particular aim failed. Thus Straw said:
I thought it was an absolute key part of our overall approach which was that we should deflect those in the United States administration who wanted to take impetuous military action against Saddam Hussein for the purpose of regime change and try and get to a point where the United States' own objective was not, in practice was not regime change qua regime change, but the disarmament of Iraq, and that indeed was what we got by the President’s statement in the United Nations on 12 September.
...we converged to achieve the policy objective that we wanted, which was the commitment by the United States to go down the UN route for the sole purpose, not of regime change, but of dealing with, ‘The threat that Iraq posed to international peace and security’.
As Sir Lawrence Freedman summarised and Straw agreed, whatever was in anyone’s mind about regime change per se was irrelevant. The actual cause for war was not regime change:
SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: Whatever the American administration may have thought about multiple arguments why regime change might have been a good idea, it now really had to be based on disarmament, weapons of mass destruction and noncompliance with a succession of UN Resolutions? This was the basis really for all the diplomacy of the next six months.
As for the threat from the supposedly non-existent WMD, Straw was again robust and unequivocal in support of the case that Saddam was still an unconscionable threat:
...during this period and especially from the expulsion or removal of the weapons inspectors at the end of 1998 we had this stream of intelligence about what Saddam was doing and the intelligence did not say he has packed up... this stream of intelligence that was coming through saying, ‘This continues to be a real problem’. After all, if we had not had that, we could have abandoned containment as well. We would have thought it was all absolutely fine.
... the case for taking Iraq seriously was in no sense based on intelligence alone. The intelligence supplemented what we knew already about the threat [my emphasis]. It went with the grain. There was no reason whatever to disbelieve the intelligence and I don't think there was a single piece of intelligence which said, ‘Actually, the judgments that are being made in the international community are all wrong’, and bear in mind that it wasn't only the Americans and the United States intelligence services which had intelligence from Iraq, but a number of other liaison partners, some from countries which, although they may have shared our perception of the threat, disagreed with our strategy quite profoundly. They were feeding this all through.
Nor did he believe that the legality of the war depended on a second UN resolution:
SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: Then you make a point very strongly in your statement and this has been confirmed by Sir Jeremy Greenstock that you did not believe that military action thereafter, in the event of noncompliance would depend on a second resolution. It would be desirable but it wasn’t dependent on that.
...RT HON JACK STRAW: I was not in any doubt about that... We tabled a draft, which was aimed to be self-contained, in the sense that, if very important conditions were met through failures by the Saddam regime, that of itself would provide sufficient authority for military action... It is there is no question but that they were in further material breach, whatever else that’s as plain as a pikestaff.
So whatever was the cause of Straw’s agonising over going to war, it was not that he thought the war was illegal or that the threat posed by Saddam was exaggerated or unproved. From his evidence, it seems that much of his concern consisted rather of doubts over whether the country would be convinced – and as he candidly told the inquiry, he was particularly concerned about the reaction amongst the many Muslims in his Blackburn constituency. That was why he came up with an alternative contingency plan to support any US attack but commit no British troops. But when it came to it, the reason he didn’t resign over the war was because he did not have a legal or otherwise significant argument against it.
The really startling aspect of Straw’s session at the inquiry has received (of course) no acknowledgment at all. That was the remarkable attitude displayed by one of the inquiry team, Sir Roderic Lyne.
Straw himself implicitly hinted at what was to come when he observed en passant to Lyne, who was then interrogating him:
... If I may say so, you were one of those, [British ambassadors at the time who strongly opposed the idea of war in Iraq] and absolutely right [that he should have been able to express his opinions in the Whitehall debate].
These contrarian opinions would appear to be -- from the assumptions behind Lyne’s questioning of Straw -- Lyne’s hostility to the war in Iraq on the astonishing basis that Saddam posed no terrorist threat to anyone but the Israelis (a point on which Straw seemed to agree) – whose own behaviour was responsible for the collapse of the Middle East ‘peace process’ and thus unhelpful to the cause of getting the Arab states on side:
SIR RODERIC LYNE: Now, Iraq had not hitherto been classified as a country from which one was getting international terrorism.
...RT HON JACK STRAW: It had certainly been involved in sponsoring terrorism against Israel. We knew that, but I don’t put that it was very serious, but it was confined to the Middle East.
SIR RODERIC LYNE: Support for the families of Hezbollah and so on?
RT HON JACK STRAW: Yes.
SIR RODERIC LYNE: So there wasn't really an argument that Saddam was helping the sort of terrorism that was being directed against us, certainly not al Qaeda. There wasn’t a scenario in which he or Iraq seemed likely to be a country in which terrorists would get their hands on weapons of mass destruction.
...RT HON JACK STRAW There was evidence, however, that Saddam was ready to sponsor terrorism when he thought it was appropriate.
To put it mildly! The idea that Saddam – a godfather of terror – was no threat to anyone outside the Middle East is extraordinary. His agents tried to assassinate the first President Bush. He provided a safe haven in Iraq for a string of terrorist groups including the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, as well as the Palestine Liberation Front and the Abu Nidal organization. He provided training in weapons, plane hijacking and even suicide bombing at a terrorist training camp at Salman Pak. As for Hezbollah, it is sponsored by Iran -- which declared war upon the west in 1979 -- and it has positioned terrorist sleeper cells throughout Europe and America. As a serial opportunist, Saddam was prepared to make deals with anyone if he thought it would further his regional ambitions. In 2008, the Wall Street Journal revealed some findings from a Pentagon report on Iraq’s ties to terrorism:
On the basis of about 600,000 items, the report lays out Saddam’s willingness to use terrorism against American and other international targets, as well as his larger state sponsorship of terror, which included harboring, training and equipping jihadis throughout the Middle East.
In Britain, the Butler Report said that contacts between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi Directorate General of Intelligence had dated back over four years between 1998 and 1992, with al-Qaeda seeking toxic chemicals and other terrorist equipment. Although British intelligence in 2001 judged there to have been too much distrust for practical cooperation, by 2002 it decided that ‘meetings have taken place between senior Iraqi representatives and senior al Qaeda operatives. Some reports also suggest that Iraq may have trained some al Qaeda terrorists since 1998.’ By March 2003 it noted that ‘senior Al Qaeda associate Abu Musab al Zarqawi has established sleeper cells in Baghdad, to be activated during a US occupation of the city.’
If Sir Roderic, a former ambassador to Russia, really did think Saddam was no threat to anyone but the Israelis (who were, he appears to think, asking for it anyway) then it’s not surprising that he had opposed the idea of war in Iraq. Yet although other members of the inquiry have been slated for having prior form by supporting Blair/the Iraq war, no such criticism has been levelled at Sir Roderic Lyne. I wonder why.
Finally, Straw also provided a very sharp anecdote about Dr Hans Blix, the head of UNMOVIC who was so opposed to war in Iraq. Describing how the prospects for building a consensus for war in the Security Council fell away, Straw related how an UNMOVIC report in March 2003 furnished 29 separate chapters of such alarming unanswered disarmament questions about Saddam that Straw himself was taken aback by the seriousness of the threat in Iraq. Straw went on:
When I had this private meeting with Dr Blix and Simon McDonald and Jeremy Greenstock were there I said to him, ‘I have just read this. I have read every word of this document’, and he said to me, ‘That's more than I have done’. I was astonished by this. Those of us absolutely astonished that here was the head of UNMOVIC, who hadn't read this document which was about to go to the Security Council... I went to the Security Council, and, to add to my astonishment, no document. It only became available and again I have checked on this, at the end.
In other words, on the brink of the Iraq war Blix failed to present to the Security Council his own report -- the details of which may have swayed the Security Council to support the case for war. That’s quite a charge; but you will fail to find it in the press reports of Straw’s evidence, because it doesn’t fit the narrative of ‘Blair’s illegal and mendacious war’.
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Melanie Phillips is a Daily Mail columnist. She also writes for the Jewish Chronicle and is a panellist on BBC Radio Four's Moral Maze. Her most recent book is 'The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth and Power', published by Encounter.
For a complete set of Melanie's articles click here
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Barry Larking
January 22nd, 2010 4:08pmA long and throughly absorbing post. The information regarding Dr. Blix at the conclusion of this analysis is extraordinary. I cannot understand why it has not received more attention in the media. But then, I failed 'O' level Irony.
logdon
January 22nd, 2010 4:31pm"From his evidence, .... he was particularly concerned about the reaction amongst the many Muslims in his Blackburn constituency."
And he was a British Foreign Secretary!
And he is now, even worse, our Justice Minister!
Held hostrage by his fiefdom and constituents who hold the reins of his career what hope do we have against the likes of the Muslim Police Assoc, the MCB, Anjem Choudary or any other tin pot Islamist group intent on subversion?
elixelx
January 22nd, 2010 5:57pm10, 20, 50 years from now, when our children granchildren hold yet another inquiry into the Iraq War, the bones of Bush and Blair will be disinterred and hung from the Capitol and Traitors' Gate...Not now, but someday!
Of course, by then, a democratic Iraq will have put up a statue to Messrs B&B in Saadon Square in Baghdad, but the crazy dogs pursuing them, today, yesterday and tomorrow, baying for blood, will have passed on their blood lust to their unholy whelps. It's NEVER going to stop!
For two honourable gentlemen there will be no relief from the thirst for revenge of hoi polloi.
It will matter NOT A WHIT that the Iraqis themselves are grateful for what was done in their name; that the unforseen end justified the painful means; it will only matter that History judge these two--and judges them to be Liars and Killers!
Michael
January 22nd, 2010 6:25pmflogging. a. dead. horse.
Isaac Bickerstaff
January 22nd, 2010 6:46pmThere must be a circle in hell for the apologists where they sift perpetually the doings of the great and the good, their endless self-exonerations and buck-passings, for the slightest particle of evidence amongst the ordure that what the great and good did was Right, and that the apologist was against all probability on the side of Truth.
King Prawn
January 22nd, 2010 7:01pmI remember this blog that Melanie made in 2006. The frightening aspect is the comment regarding the Al Queda men caught in possession with 20 tons of Sarin.
http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/001665.html
alan stoddart
January 22nd, 2010 8:13pmBlix always believed that Saddam had some weapons right up until the start of the war.
If Saddam had remained in power he would be heading down the same road Iran is now with nuclear development...Iran's nuclear R&D was conducted under the noses of the IAEA who had no idea of the progress and extent of that development.
Iraq and Iran both armed with nuclear weapons...do you think Saddam might have chanced his arm and nuked his greatest enemy and Shia rival?
David Raynes
January 22nd, 2010 9:04pmA lot of words but to what effect?
It is plain that Straw who allegedly objected to joining the army cadets at his school, would always have had a great distaste for war.
Apparently he managed to overcome his disataste in pursuit of his career and Ministerial car. Not surprising.
A lot of what is said above is dancing on pins.
There is no room for pin dancing NOW over 45 minutes. It is admitted it was a "mistake".
It was 45 minutes that gave rise to the Evening Standard
headline, it was THAT DEVICE which mislead over possible strikes on Cyprus (or MUCH more importantly) Israel.
It was that convinced me and many others including many MPs that government must know something they could not tell us and was why I supported the war.
I trusted, as I was entitled to do, Blair as Prime Minister. I was wrong.
Blair lied, it is that simple. Very soft almost non existent intelligence was presented as hard, very hard intelligence.
When Powell said he had trouble with "the concept of hard and soft intelligence" he was being
disingenuous.
He must know because of his access, that there IS such a thing as hard intelligence.
If war was really necessary many people could have been persuaded by honest argument.
What is absolutely unforgiveable is that parliament and people were persuaded by dishonest argument.
Tiberius
January 22nd, 2010 9:22pmThat is indeed the justification for going to war with Iraq.
However, there is a lot of noise coming from the back of the room; such as:
- a major counter to Iran was removed when Saddam was deposed.
- the security situation in Iraq after hostilities ceased was neglected.
- Campbell sexed up the Sept 2002 dossier in order to get a PLP majority to go to war. To have a majority only because of Conservative support would have been politically dangerous for Blair.
James Murphy
January 23rd, 2010 12:34pmMichael Hear hear! - Consider that dead horse well and truly flayed, stripped to the bone, dismembered by ants and trodden into oblivious dust. I mean, let's have an inquest about the 2nd world war and the Great war and the Boer war and the Charge of the Light Brigade and the .....
JOHN ROOSEVELT
January 23rd, 2010 12:51pmDavid Raynes wrote:
"If war was really necessary many people could have been persuaded by honest argument.
What is absolutely unforgiveable is that parliament and people were persuaded by dishonest argument."
Mr Rayne's convictions over such lofty matters does take one's breath away.
My goodness, we do have a reputable bunch in Parliament, after all!
One does wonder, however, if Mr Rayne's has ever heard of the MP's expenses scandal.
I would suggest, rather, that - with regard to our political class in general - in fact b..sh.t baffles brains and his assertions are either gobsmackingly naive or downright disingenuous.
Neil Craig
January 23rd, 2010 1:11pm"Saddam was demonstrating over and over again that he was intent on remaining a threat to the region and thus the world"
No Melanie he wasn't. Saddam was stuck in a dirt poor country made so by western sanctions with Kurdistan de facto independent & much of the south a no go zone for his military because of western air control. This air control was costing us a few tens of millions annually & could have gone on indefinitely. Iraq was certainly no longer in a position for any sort of military confrontation with its neighbours - Iran, Syria, Turkey or Saudi (it might have held up against Jordan but that is no sign of strength).
Augustus
January 23rd, 2010 1:20pmAll things considered, it seems preposterous to suggest, as much of the mainstream media has decided to do for the last couple of years, that Bush, and by extension Blair, decided to go to war on a lie. This popular refrain can easily be debunked by asking: If Bush knew
that there were no WMDs existing
then why would he send 150,000 troops there only to expose his 'lie' by the invading troops and the large contingent of accompanying media? There is also the fact that people seem to ignore UN Resolution 1441 which clearly established that Iraq possessed WMDs. A resolution which had been approved unanimously by the member nations. If Bush lied he was joined by most, if not all, the prominent Democrats in the months leading up to the invasion. Bush and Blair were not the only ones by a long chalk who were convinced that Saddam posed a very real and grave threat to both the ME and the world at large.
Kiran
January 23rd, 2010 4:24pmBlix behaviour does not surprise me. The western intelligentsia have sunk into a complacent pacifism where there is nothing in the world worth fighting for. The aggressor must be persuaded (mostly by appeasement) to desist from aggression. Any excuse must be found not to fight. I remember, with disgust, the sight of Tony Benn rushing over to Baghdad on the eve of the 2003 invasion to shake hands with Saddam and show the world that we should come to a compromise with this monster.
A cliche which is often trotted out by those who wish to blame the West for all the world's evils is that we armed Saddam because he was a useful tool to use against the Iranians. This is a lazy distortion of the facts. Between 1973 and 2002 the vast bulk (around 57%) of Iraq's military hardware was supplied by the USSR/Russia. During this period the USA supplied about 0.46% and Britain 0.2%. The second biggest supplier, incidentally, was France which makes their opposition to the war look less humanitarian than self-interested.
To refer to an earlier controversial war - I believe that the people of South Vietnam were betrayed by western pacifists determined to prove that the war was an unwinnable and futile act of American imperialist aggression. As is so often the case with pacifists the focus was only upon western guilt. The wishes and the fate of the South Vietnamese people seems to have been of no real importance to the 'Not in my name' brigade.
King Prawn
January 23rd, 2010 5:29pmBarry Larking - Comments were made about Hans Blix's failure to present his report to the UN Security Council until after the meeting had ended. That report included a number of unanswered questions concerning Saddam's biological weapons.
Yet Blix is now seen as a guiding light amongst the anti-war mob when his behaviour was, in fact, very questionable.
David Raynes - The 45 minute comment concerned how long it would take an order from Saddam to the launch of a missile.If a UK Prime Minister was to order the launch of a missile that launch would take place within 5 minutes.
The question is, did Saddam have the missiles in place. The answer was yes. We all saw those missiles that the UN Inspectors found just before the War started. Under UN Resolutions, Iraq was only permitted missiles with a range of 150 miles. The missiles found had a longer range than that.
Also the facilities for making biological material for said missiles was in place. It would not take them long to produce the requisite material.
There are a number of unanswered questions that Chilcot should be asking:-
1. General Georges Sada said that the 20 tons of Sarin discovered upon the capture of an Al Queda cell in Jordan in April 2004 came from Iraq. Where did that Sarin come from?
http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/001665.html
2. Sada also translated a tape of meeting between Saddam's officers where it was stated that the Russians and the French were helping Iraq with the biological weapons.
How much help did the French and the Russians give Iraq?
3. During the war, Coalition Troops were finding brand new gas marks amongst the captured Iraqi troops. Where did they come from?
JOHN ROOSEVELT
January 23rd, 2010 7:57pmKiran wrote
January 23rd, 2010 4:24pm
"Blix behaviour does not surprise me. The western intelligentsia have sunk into a complacent pacifism where there is nothing in the world worth fighting for. The aggressor must be persuaded (mostly by appeasement) to desist from aggression. Any excuse must be found not to fight."
Nothing new, here, I'm afraid...Britain and appeasement have been bedfellows - consistently at least since the 3's..and not only with regard to Nazi Germany. Just take a look at UK Mandatory policy after the Peel Commission Report of 1937. The FO wanted to throw the Balfour Declaration on the dustbin of history as oil was becoming more relevant in their cosying up to the dynasts of the Middle East...at the Jews', and ultimately the Palestinian Arabs', expense.
"Perfidious Albion" has always had appeasement as but one of its many guises.
Isaac Bickerstaff
January 23rd, 2010 8:04pmI am not clear what this "John Roosevelt" is asserting. Our politicians (he argues) are so easily corrupted with small-change perks and so very stupid that they would approve a war simply on the say-so of ministers (suitably smeared in bullshit)? What follows? That a dishonest argument for a dishonest war is best? An honest argument for a dishonest war? If an honest war, why not an honest argument? Or no argument required since Parliament is so corrupt? - and war should be waged simply on the diktat of the executive?
hippiepooter
January 24th, 2010 12:30amAnother magisterial tour de fource. What an asset to this country MP is!
Michael
January 24th, 2010 12:50amAugustus - a resolution based on arguments supported by what eventually transpired to be faulty intelligence and the 'mis'interpretation of intelligence that would later be disproven by investigations on the ground. And so we go on, round and round and round till we all meet in the middle and start again.
BrianN
January 24th, 2010 10:15amI found it almost beyond belief that a National figure could torture logic, ethics and language in such a repulsive way. It's clear that Straw is incapable of either forming or articulating an ethical position. Presumably MI5 ruled out waterboarding and so we are bothered by this saps incoherent ramblings.
One treasures a Daniel Hannah.
In the Wilderness in America
January 24th, 2010 11:18amAugustus and Kiran
Bravo! Some lucidity amidst the fog of Bush and Blair bashing. Such anti-Iraq war zealots as John Kerry and Hilary Clinton said repeadedly that Sadam was a threat and that we should invade Iraq. No one in the mainstream media ever asks them about that.
As far as the pacifists go in America, their whole argument is based on a bumper sticker: "Bush lied, people died." That statement is totally false. Even if the intelligence was wrong (that's an assumption that is not based on the facts, but even so), then why would Bush not protect the U.S. and its allies when all of the intelligence agencies and many partners in Europe and the Middle East came to the same conclusion as US intelligence? Pacifists will not fight over anything even real threats and even when their freedom to be pacifists is threatened.
One last question: If Tony Blair lied and was responsible for sending his country into a war based on a lie, and if Geoge Tenet, the CIA Director before and during the Iraq War, was incompetent, then why would John Kerry and Hilary Cinton both vote for Medals of Freedom for both of these individuals?
Shaun Harbord
January 24th, 2010 1:01pm"Clearly there is a measure of incoherence here" - too true but not just by Straw but by MP as well.
arnoldo
January 24th, 2010 2:00pmDavid Raynes,
The mistake that Straw referred to was the failure to make clear that the 45 minute period applied to battlefield weapons only.
Saddam had missiles that could reach Cyprus in the 1991 Gulf War, so there was nothing startlingly new about the Evening Standard headline - except to those who swallow everything the papers tell them. In any case if it had taken 450 minutes to prepare the missiles, then the recipients would not really have noticed the difference!
Not many were duped, however, since only one person mentioned 45 minutes in the debate following the publishing of the dossier in September 2002.
As for the debate that took us to war on March 18th 2003, not one single person mentioned it!
Talk about a non-issue.
David Raynes
January 24th, 2010 2:33pmJohn Roosevelt sneers at my remarks about the lies. Interestingly he does not deal with the actual lies and deception, the perjury to parliament. That is a peculiar form of debate but no matter. The lies and deception are still plainly going on as evidenced by Powell and his utterly silly remarks about hard & soft intelligence. I remind John that I supported the war. I have since concluded that everything that Blair did on this subject, supported by the likes of Campbell and Powell, was designed to deceive parliament & public. It was designed to deal with the question that most sensible people were asking at the time "Why now". To misrepresent the reasons for war, to misrepresent the intelligence. I am absolutely confident that history will decide that analysis is correct. Chilcot may not put it quite so bluntly but it will be very surprising if they do not come up with something like that. If they do not, the boil will not be lanced. The jury of the British public has reached a majority decision.