Max Hastings is one of the foremost military historians in the English-speaking world. His multi-volume history of the Second World War is magnificent. Until recently, however, I had not known that he counted soothsaying among his many accomplishments.
How else, however, to explain his article in today’s Daily Mail in which the old boy outs himself as a first-class mind-reader. Hastings is responding to a presentation Alastair Campbell gave to an audience of PR types in Australia in which Mr Blair’s communications wizard, perhaps rather too glibly, noted that Winston Churchill frequently and deliberately peddled untruths during the Second World War. And yet his reputation remains higher than that of poor old Tony! Astonishing, I know, and Mr Hastings is right to suggest the comparison between the two Prime Ministers is fanciful to the point of being fatuous.
So far so fine. But Hastings is not content to leave it there. You see:
[N]o sensible person would ever compare operational deception of the enemy in a world war with the political deception of the British people to justify a military adventure — the mission Campbell executed for Tony Blair before the 2003 Iraq War.
[…] With regret, I bet my socks that the report of the forthcoming Chilcot Inquiry lets him off the hook, and fails to find grounds for putting Blair and Campbell in the stocks where they belong.
Chilcot, like a good civil servant, will waffle his way towards the usual conclusion of these vast inquiries: that the Iraq war was most unfortunate and should never be allowed to happen again, but that the Prime Minister and Campbell, his creature, could not reasonably be expected to know that they were lying.
But we know that they were lying, and that Campbell is a bad man.
No sensible person would make this comparison but Max Hastings would. And does.
It is silly to compare operations designed to trick the Nazis into thinking the D-Day landings would take place near Calais with the very public, exhaustive, debate on whether Britain should take part in military action against Saddam Hussein.
Hastings’ conclusions are another reminder that the Chilcot Inquiry is a pointless endeavour. Blair’s critics are beyond reason and any report that fails to reach the proper, obvious, widely-shared conclusion that Blair is a war criminal is obviously just another establishment cover-up. Or whitewash. Or smokescreen. The matter has been resolved, you see, and no daylight can penetrate the cave of conspiracy in which Max Hastings, and so many others, dwell.
How do we know that Blair et al were lying? Because “we know that they were lying”. Simples. And Alastair Campbell is “a bad man” so yah-boo, sucks to be you.
Of course, squawking “We were lied to” is an excellent means of deflecting responsibility for one’s own actions. My memory may be inaccurate but I believe the Daily Mail supported Operation Iraqi Freedom and it may be that Max Hastings once did too. But if they – we – were mistaken it wasn’t their (our) fault. Certainly not. We were the pure and innocent victims of a government-led conspiracy.
But if it is possible we were honestly mistaken about Iraq’s WMD ambitions (and much else) might it not be possible – just possible – Tony Blair and all the other governments around the world who trusted, if you will, in Saddam’s duplicity were also honestly mistaken? Apparently not.
No, you see Blair knew he was telling lies. How do we know this? Because it is obvious that Blair had to know that he was telling lies. And how is that obvious? Because it just is.
There were many arguments used to justify the war against Saddam and it is true that the prosecution case was not always made as sensibly as it might have been. Blair, for instance, was forced into the absurd position of arguing that regime change was not necessarily a war aim. It is also true that most – though not quite all – the arguments for the war have subsequently been routed by events. That does not mean those arguments were, or worse had to be, made knowing they were false.
Blair, whatever else you may think of him, is not quite the stupidest man to ever enter the House of Commons. The idea that he deliberately led Britain into war on a false prospectus is preposterous. And it is preposterous because if Blair knew the case for war was a House of Lies it stands to reason he might suspect this would be discovered and that said discovery would have a fatal impact upon his reputation. Why would he want to risk that? It makes no sense at all.
Of course, the absence of an extant WMD programme in Iraq has helped ruin Blair’s reputation anyway but that’s rather different from alleging that he knew there was no functioning WMD programme or that he knew he was peddling lies as part of some devastatingly effective attempt to hoodwink the British people.
None of that matters, apparently, because, hell, we know the truth don’t we? Which, in a neatly symmetrical piece of irony, means the Blair-haters make the mistake Blair himself made ten years ago. Namely, they have so willed themselves to believe in something that they can no longer countenance any alternative reality and no doubt can be permitted to shade or otherwise qualify their opinions. They want to believe too much in what they believe.
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