It is almost invariably the case that whenever anyone favoured by the Guardian-reading classes chooses to accept an honour from Her Majesty the Queen the air is thick with suggestions said chap (for it is usually a fellow) has somehow “sold out”. This time it’s Armando Iannucci. Well so what? His own explanation – that it was polite to accept an OBE – is all anyone could desire.
But that doesn’t excuse this Twitter-spat with Alastair Campbell. Oh sure, Iannucci scores a hit – of the palpable variety – with WMD. But by then he’d already lost the argument.
Of course Iannucci’s trite suggestion Bush and Blair marched into Iraq “for no reason” may be the settled view of the majority of British people these days. It’s certainly, I think, the mainstream view at the BBC and, I think, the Daily Mail. In each place Tony Blair is reviled to a degree that makes George W Bush’s enduring unpopularity seem a tiny thing indeed. Bush, by this way of reckoning, was an embarrassing, best-forgotten anomaly. Blair was much worse because he was supposed to be better than this and, by god, he was one of us wasn’t he? It made the betrayal (as it was seen) all the worse.
Perhaps it is pedantic to point out that, actually, far from going to war in Iraq “for no reason” the campaign suffered from a surfeit of justifications. Some of these were conflicting and not all of them stood comparison with the purity of driven snow. Nevertheless these justifications existed and most of the time most of them were honestly held.
To believe otherwise requires one to credit an international conspiracy of historic proportions that suckered everyone. You may struggle to remember that most people accepted Saddam was up to no good. That this is forgotten does not mean it was not true at the time.
Pre-war discussions have been revised and revised to the point at which they cease to bear much resemblance to what actually happened between the autumn of 2001 and the spring of 2003. That many, perhaps most, of the arguments made by the pro-intervention side have been corrupted by subsequent events does not mean those arguments must have been made in bad faith. On the contrary there was much too much certainty (I reproach myself for this too) and much of it is embarrassing to recall today. It can’t be wished away, however.
Moreover, the suggestion that there was “no reason” for the war assumes it was possible to know then what we know now. This is rarely the case and was not so then either. True, some people doubted the seriousness of Saddam’s WMD programmes but that, at the time, was a minority view.
Was it worth it? It’s hard to make that case now. But at the time matters were different and it does no-one, far less the truth, any favour to pretend they were not. Perhaps it is a narrow point to insist that, even if mistaken, the reasons for the war – and for Blair’s belief in the importance of dealing with Saddam – were real and varied. Nonetheless, accuracy demands these reasons be acknowledged, not wished away as though the war was simply the product of boy-soldiering for the damn lark of it all.
Paradoxically, Iannucci’s assertion there were “no reasons” diminishes the impact of the blunders made in Mesopotamia. Farce is not the same as tragedy and satire, by presenting the argument as one made by knaves or the consequences of a conspiracy between politicians either malignant or foolish, is too glib to offer a persuasive account of what really happened. It’s fun but it’s not serious.
Was Iraq worse than a mistake? Probably, but not in the way Iannucci suggests. All the more reason, then, to recall the past honestly. The public was evenly divided on the merits of the case for war but that argument, however flawed or cooked the evidence for it subsequently seemed, still enjoyed a parliamentary majority. Pretending that it didn’t or ignoring the actual reasons for the war is much too shallow a response to a story from which few emerge with much credit.
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