by A. N. Wilson
There was every reason to hope that Saddam Hussein would be toppled by Iraqis, and that, when this happened, the West could repair the cruel damage inflicted upon Iraq by oil sanctions.
Then came Curveball’s intelligence reports that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. Six months after he became Prime Minister, Tony Blair had remarked to the Liberal Party leader Paddy Ashdown, ‘I have now seen some of the stuff on this. It really is pretty scary. He is close to some appalling weapons of mass destruction…We cannot let him get away with it.’6
When Iraq had been invaded, and no WMD were found, it was easy to take the view that the fears had been foolish, or even that those intent upon a war with Saddam had simply invented, or at the very least exaggerated, the extent of the danger. It is only fair to stress that very many well-informed diplomats, politicians and observers of the Middle East, in the period from September 2002 to March 2003, believed in the existence of these weapons, and in the imminent danger of Saddam using them. Of course, the memory of those scuds in Tel Aviv, fired off towards the close of the First Gulf War, concentrated the minds of the pessimists. When a fifty-page document, ‘Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction–the Assessment of the British Government’ was published on 24 September 2002, there was mixed reaction. ‘Chilling reading’ for the Jerusalem Post. The Financial Times, however, found in the document ‘no compelling evidence that immediate military action is needed’.7
Again and again, Blair told the House of Commons that there were two reasons why war was necessary in Iraq: that Saddam would not comply with UN Resolution 1441, and that he possessed weapons of mass destruction which could destroy the enemy within forty-five minutes. Both these claims were questionable. The Iraqis did respond to Resolution 1441 with a 12,000-page dossier which was never made public. We do not know what it contained. Nor had Tony Blair or George W. Bush ever demonstrated in what ways the government of Saddam Hussein was in breach of UN Resolution 1441. Unlike some Middle Eastern states–Israel, for example, which is also in breach of several UN resolutions–Iraq did at least permit weapons inspectors into their country, and none of the WMD were ever found. That said, the UN weapons inspectors who had visited Iraq on 25 November 2002 were unable to account for six thousand chemical aircraft bombs, seven Iraqi surface-to-surface missiles and two Russian scuds which were known to be in Saddam’s arsenal, together with biological material capable of producing 26,000 litres of anthrax and 1.5 tons of VX gas. To exemplify the scale of the possible threat, the weapons inspectors noted that a mere 140 litres of VX could kill a million people.8 In spite of this lingering threat, Kofi Annan stated that the war against Iraq was illegal.
The war against Iraq was the one event for which Tony Blair will undoubtedly be remembered by history. It was a war which turned into a catastrophe, plunging the peoples of Iraq into a civil conflict which would last for a generation, a conflict which killed well over half a million people.
Britain had never fought a war in the past which was based upon intelligence alone. As it became clear what George W. Bush intended, millions of people all over the world took to the streets to implore the governments of Britain and the United States to think again. The overwhelming argument against the war was not pacifist or anti-Zionist or anti-American, though people of these persuasions joined the millions who marched. Most British people believed, correctly as it turned out, that an aggressive war fought by Britain and America would make a bad situation in Iraq much worse: it would destabilise an already wretchedly volatile region; it would increase the likelihood of tension between Israel and her Arab neighbours, between pro- and anti-Western Arab states; it would strengthen the hands of the Islamist extremists throughout the world; and it would, indeed, seem to be a justification of the worst paranoid fantasies of Osama bin Laden. For, if the USA and Britain, in defiance of the United Nations and against the advice of France, Russia, China and most other people in the world, led an invasion force against the Iraqis, how else could poor Muslims respond, other than by acts of terrorism?
Why did Tony do it? He denied that in 2002, when staying with George W. Bush on his ranch at Crawford, Texas, he had prayed for guidance, even though Christian author Stephen Mansfield, claiming he owed his story to White House officials, says that both men did pray together; and this story is backed up by a writer on Time magazine, David Aikman. In March 2006, Blair told a British television audience, when asked why he had gone to war on Iraq, ‘If you have faith about these things, then you realize that judgement is made by other people. If you believe in God, it’s made by God as well.’9 President Bush made no bones about having been guided by God to attack Iraq.
The Americans took responsibility for entering the northern parts of Iraq, and securing the northern city of Mosul, and Baghdad itself. The British troops, with immense skill and comparatively little loss of life, occupied Basra. The total Allied casualties for the war itself were 122 American and 33 British.10
Only a few pessimists had ever doubted whether the Americans and their allies would win the war itself. What was in doubt was what would constitute a victory. On 1 May 2003, George W. Bush announced that the war was over. But after that date, 20,000 American troops would be killed by the Iraqi resistance, and the country which they had come to liberate was in chaos. In Berlin at the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Army sent a senior Russian general to make sure that essential services would be restored for the civilian population once the war was over.11 In Basra, the British Army did manage to restore the power stations, but in American-administered Baghdad there were long periods without water, gas or electricity. The police forces were in disarray. For years–not for weeks or months, but for years–it was unsafe to walk the streets. ‘Paradoxically’, wrote the journalist Patrick Cockburn,12 who knew Iraq better than most over a period of over thirty years, ‘Iraq became so dangerous that journalists, however courageous, could not rebut claims that most of Iraq was safe without being kidnapped or killed themselves.’ Quite apart from the damage done to the stability of the Middle East as a whole, it had made America hated throughout the world. General William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, the largest US intelligence agency, called it ‘the greatest strategic disaster in American history’.13
The war and its aftermath showed New Labour in an ugly light. There was the affair of Dr David Kelly. He was a scientific civil servant who had met with a BBC journalist, Andrew Gilligan, to discuss the dossier asessing the threat posed by Saddam’s WMD. There were no witnesses to the discussion between these two men and the only evidence for what was said were some hastily composed notes by the journalist. Kelly was among those who believed that Saddam had WMD and that they represented a threat. He knew Iraq and he knew about chemical weapons. Much of the pre-war excitement, as we have seen, had been caused by Tony Blair claiming in the Commons that Saddam could make use of WMD within forty-five minutes. It was assumed that this meant he could reach the nearest British troops or bases, that is to say Cyprus, within this time-span. In the course of talking to Gilligan, Dr Kelly appears to have conceded that it might have been possible that the ‘forty-five minute claim’ had been added to the dossier ‘for impact’.
At 6.07 a.m. on the radio news programme Today, on 29 May 2003, Gilligan claimed that a British official who had helped to prepare the dossier now believed that it had been ‘transformed in the week before it was published to make it sexier’. This was not what Kelly had ever claimed. In all the subsequent inquiry and the report written by Lord Hutton in January 2004, the BBC’s editorial control was found to be ‘defective’ and Gilligan was censured for failing to be accurate. The chairman of the Governors of the BBC, Gavyn Davies, and Greg Dyke, the Director General, both resigned.
David Kelly, universally regarded as a man of intellectual seriousness and moral integrity, was given no support when the trouble broke. Quite the reverse. As soon as Gilligan made his unfounded, or at best highly exaggerated, claim on the Today programme, New Labou
r behaved with all the gentleness of Mafia thugs. Kelly’s cover was blown and he was obliged to appear before the Intelligence and Security Committee of the House of Commons where he was given a mauling by a backbench bruiser (Labour) named Andrew Mackinlay, who mocked Kelly as a government ‘fall guy’. Kelly went into hiding for a while to hide from the press, and when he returned home to Oxfordshire, his wife found him in a state of deep dejection. On 17 July 2003 he went for a walk, and next morning his dead body was found in some remote woodland. A coroner’s verdict decided that he had committed suicide by cutting his wrist and taking an overdose of painkillers. Subsequently, this verdict was questioned, and it was suggested that Kelly had been murdered either by Iraqis or by the British security services. Whether or not the conspiracy theory is believed, New Labour had been shown in its nasty colours. The war was regarded by the huge majority of the electorate as a disaster, and the instinct of Blair’s henchmen was to conduct a propaganda war with the press and the BBC and to find some scapegoats. Dr Kelly was indeed a ‘fall guy’. His death was said to have been shattering to Blair, who considered resigning. ‘Have you got blood on your hands, Prime Minister? Are you going to resign?’ Blair was asked this by a Mail on Sunday reporter when his plane touched down in Tokyo. Most unusually, Blair was silenced, lost for words–ashen, exhausted, beaten.14
Had the Iraq war been, as Bush appeared to claim, part of the War on Terror? It was hard to see this as especially logical, since to quote the ‘Iraq Options’ papers produced by the Overseas and Defence Secretariat of the Cabinet Office of 8 March 2002, ‘In the judgement of the JIC there is no evidence of Iraq[i] complicity with international terrorism. There is therefore no justification for action against Iraq based on self-defence to combat imminent threats of terrorism as in Afghanistan.’15
Saddam was a horrible dictator, but it was against international law to invade countries to depose their leaders merely because they were nasty to their own people. Many of the world leaders, certainly Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, could be seen as more worthy of such immediate attention.
There was at best a confusion, at worst a subterfuge, going on. The American neo-cons wanted to control Iraq and its oilfields. They also wished to teach rogue Arab states a lesson. It was certainly true psychologically that they would probably not have tried to sell such an idea to the American public had it not been for the assault on the World Trade Center and the massacre of over three thousand people in New York. But why this should have involved Britain, and why Blair should have been so anxious to go to war so quickly, remained a mystery. Was it a simple blunder, or had he in some mysterious way become an American neo-con? Certainly his contempt for British public opinion, and indeed for world opinion, became increasingly marked, as his hair became grey. His face was now so much televised that he regularly had lipstick and slap applied to his wrinkled skin. The eyes looked shifty and mad.
Tony and George Dubya’s war had led to much agitation in the Middle East. There was still no suggested solution to the plight of Palestine. The Israelis felt threatened and embattled, especially by the rocket and mortar attacks from Lebanon into northern Galilee, and in the summer of 2006, Israel invaded Lebanon. The attacks on Lebanese civilians shocked the world, however much the world sympathised with the plight of Israelis frightened by Hamas. But what scandalised world opinion much more than an understandable Israeli aggression was the silence of Bush and Blair until 750 Lebanese civilians had been killed and many homes flattened. Under the jaunty headline LET’S HOPE SCOTLAND HASN’T ABOLISHED CAPITAL PUNISHMENT, Neil Mackay in the Scottish Sunday Herald on 6 August reported:
The Lebanese government is working behind the scenes to bring Tony Blair before the Scottish courts, charged with war crimes for aiding and abetting the Israeli onslaught against Lebanon.
Ali Berro, the Lebanese government’s special adviser on legal affairs, is assisting Lebanese nationals living in Scotland, and their legal team, in their attempt to take the Scottish Executive and the UK government to court for allowing US aircraft to fly ‘bunker-buster bombs’ from America to Israel via Scottish airports.
Berro is providing the legal team, led by the Glasgow-based human rights lawyer Aamer Anwar, with detailed information about alleged Israel war crimes, and also forwarding information on the casualty rates of Lebanese civilians and the type of weapons being deployed by the Israeli army. In total, some 30 lawyers, including QCs, in Scotland and England are helping prepare the case against the government…
The team is accusing Blair of assisting Israel in carrying out war crimes against civilians, citing various pieces of international legislation, including the Geneva Conventions, which say that it is a war crime to aid and abet a nation carrying out attacks targeted against civilians.
Some 750 Lebanese civilians have died in the attacks–many women and children. Berro said: ‘Human shreds are scattered amid the destruction.’ He also outlined Israeli attacks on petrol stations, warehouses, electricity companies, places of worship, bridges, hospitals and ambulances.
Berro said the Israelis were using phosphorous bombs, and ‘sending ultimatums to the inhabitants of villages, waiting for them to get out and then hunting them on their way to safety’.
International legislation, which Berro said was breached by Israel, included The Hague Convention, The 1948 Convention Against Mass Killings and The Geneva Conventions.
Azam Mohamad, one of the Scottish-based Lebanese nationals taking the case against the Scottish Executive and the UK government, said: ‘We took this action as US aircraft are going through Prestwick Airport with bombs bound for Israel that will be used to shell our families. We want to stop those bombs.’
Mohamad, the director of Glasgow’s Middle East Society, added: ‘We are shocked that Tony Blair has allowed aircraft carrying bombs bound for Israel to come through this country. These weapons are illegal as they are used to kill civilians. I cannot find words to explain my unhappiness at Blair’s decision. If we get a chance to take Tony Blair to court, we will do so.
‘Blair is helping terrorism because what Israel is doing to Lebanon is terrorism–they are attacking and killing civilians. He is utterly in the wrong.’
It was presumably with a view to righting the effects of his Middle Eastern activities while Prime Minister that there emerged in his post-ministerial role Tony Blair, the peace-broker between Israel and Palestine. In this task, in so far as his other tasks as memoirist, banker, lecturer and expert on climate change permitted, he had an uphill struggle.
27
Islamists
In July 2007, Gillian Gibbons, a fifty-four-year-old teacher, left her job in Liverpool as deputy head of a primary school. Her marriage had come unstuck, she was a keen traveller and she wished to do some good in the world. Accordingly, she took a post as a teacher in Khartoum, at the Unity High School, a British school founded by a Church of England bishop in 1902, and catering for the children of expatriates and oil workers in the Sudan, as well as for the children of the Sudanese professional class. In September, when she began her new job, Gillian Gibbons met a teddy bear. It was brought in to class by one of the children, aged seven, and it was decided to make this toy the focus for a group diary. Each weekend a different child would take the bear home and write a diary of its impressions. This is standard practice throughout British primary schools. All that was needed was for the children to choose a name for the fateful stuffed creature. There were votes cast for Abdullah the Bear and Hassan the Bear, but in the end the children decided to name the toy Muhammad. An exercise book was selected for the creature’s supposed reflections. A drawing of a bear was stuck on the cover, together with the legend, ‘My name is Muhammad’. Alas! The drawing offended one of the more conservative teachers at the school who lodged a complaint with the theocratic civil authorities. None of the Sudanese parents, whose children wrote up the experiences of the controversially named toy, saw fit to complain. But in November 2007 the police seized the incriminating exercise
book and interviewed the current guardian or tenant of the teddy. Drawing a bear, and adding the legend ‘My name is Muhammad’, infringed Sharia law. The school was temporarily closed and angry mobs gathered outside it shouting slogans. Sharia law had been adopted in the Sudan in 1983. There is no specific law in the Koran which forbids people to name toys after the Prophet. Although Islam is traditionally iconophobic, there is not even a specific injunction in the Koran against having pictures of Muhammad. As for whether an all-merciful God would consider Himself threatened by the drawing of a seven-year-old child, it is not worth inquiring. The unfortunate Gillian Gibbons was imprisoned, and the horrible prospect of the likely penalties for her crime–forty lashes–was gleefully rehearsed, both by the Islamist mobs in Khartoum and those other addicts of sadistic punishment, the British journalists at home. After a week in prison, she was released–‘pardoned’–but no British diplomat or politician was aggressive enough to suggest that it was not the teacher, but the Sudanese government, who had committed an offence.1 Imagine Lord Palmerston’s reaction to such an outrage!
Given the fate of Salman Rushdie’s Japanese translator, or of those in different parts of the world who attempted to print or propagate matter which the adherents of Sharia law deemed offensive, it would be a brave publisher who commissioned an author to write the Adventures of Muhammad the Bear, but they would make for interesting reading. John Betjeman’s Teddy, in Archibald and the Strict Baptists, had a taste for the more austere forms of Protestantism, and it might have been the case that the Khartoum bear had been an Islamist who resented its profane nomenclature at the hands of the infidel–or, as Islamists called the non-believers, the kaffir.