Man of straw

Tuesday, 25th March 2008

There was only one thing worse than the astounding and disgraceful bias displayed by John Humphrys on the Today programme this morning (0810) when he interviewed the Justice Secretary Jack Straw about Iraq — and that was the astoundingly lamentable response by Straw himself. Humphrys came out with a stream of prejudice against the Iraq war: Parliament was given false and misleading information about the threat from Saddam, he had never posed any threat to us, there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction, the war had been a total and unmitigated disaster — and then the astonishing claim that

many more people have died since the war than died under Saddam Hussein

which as Con Coughlin has pointed out is demonstrably untrue:

If you bring together the number of Iraqis who died during the wars Saddam started in Iran and Kuwait, plus the victims of his various genocidal campaigns he waged against the Kurds and Shia you get a figure approaching one million. By contrast the official Iraqi estimate of fatalities during the past five years is about 150,000.

But Straw didn’t correct this falsehood. Nor did he correct the false claim that Saddam had posed no threat to the free world. He could have referred to the evidence that has recently emerged of Saddam’s multitudinous connections with international terrorism (see posts below). He could have said that the claim that ‘we know’ Saddam had no WMD is untrue, that various official reports since the war (such as the interim report by the former chief weapons inspector David Kay) have revealed evidence of WMD programmes under Saddam, and that the belief that since no weapons stocks have been found none ever existed is irrational. He could have said that the fact that mistakes were made after the invasion did not negate the necessity for toppling Saddam in the first place. He could have said that to ask whether the war in Iraq is a disaster is as fatuous as asking in 1940 whether declaring war on Hitler had been a disaster. He could have said that what Humphrys inescapably would prefer would be for Saddam to be still in power in Iraq, probably with a nuclear weapon to rival the nukes being developed by Iran.

But he didn’t. Instead he came up with toe-curlingly lame responses which made him sound as if he was defending a war which he no longer supported — and maybe never had done from the start.

Surely this — given Jack Straw’s history of, ahem, rock-like principle and consistency—cannot possibly be the case?