by John Gray
As with George W. Bush, however, there is no reason to doubt the reality of Blair’s faith. Like Bush, Blair thinks of international relations in terms derived from theology. To be sure this is not the theology of Augustine or Aquinas. It failed to persuade Pope John Paul II when Blair had an audience with him in late February 2003. Medieval Christian thinkers developed a rigorous theory of the conditions that must be satisfied before a war can be considered just, and the pontiff rightly believed they had not been met. The audience must have pained Blair, but it failed to shake his sense of rectitude. It was enough that he felt he was right. The scrupulous casuistry of medieval thinkers regarding the consequences of human action was of no interest. Good intentions are what matter and they are bound in the end to prevail. And yet these same ‘good intentions’ were promoted through ill-conceived and ideologically motivated policies, whose distance from any prudent assessment of facts he seemed unable to perceive.
The idea that the international system was moving towards global governance expanded the traditional purposes of war. The ‘international community’ could take military action whenever it was morally right to do so. Not only ‘rogue states’ that threatened the international system by developing weapons of mass destruction but also states that violated the human rights of their citizens should be the target of armed force. The aim was not just to neutralize threats – even pre-emptively. It was to improve the human condition. War was no longer a last resort against the worst evils but an instrument of human progress. In his speech in Chicago, Blair acknowledged that military action should be taken only when diplomacy had failed, and then only if it had a reasonable prospect of achieving its goals. Nevertheless he dismissed the views of those – many of them in the professional military in the UK and the US – who demanded that an exit strategy be identified before military intervention could be seriously contemplated. For Blair their caution smacked of defeatism. ‘Success is the only exit strategy I am prepared to consider,’ he declared.21 Later speeches show Blair accepting that military force alone cannot bring about the radical transformation in the international system to which he is committed. Addressing the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles in August 2006 Blair declared that the struggle against terrorism ‘is one about values’. He was reticent in specifying what these values might be; but whatever they were, he had no doubt they spearheaded human advance: ‘Our values are worth struggling for. They represent humanity’s progress throughout the ages and at each point we have had to fight for them and defend them. As a new age beckons, it is time to fight for them again.’22 Blair returned to the subject in January 2007, when he opined: ‘Terrorism destroys progress. Terrorism can’t be defeated by military means alone. But it can’t be defeated without it.’23
Lying behind Blair’s view of international relations is a view of America. Along with his fellow neo-conservatives in Washington Blair regards America as the paradigm of a modern society. Propelled by the momentum of history, it is invincible. In giving his backing to the Bush administration in Iraq, Blair was able to believe that he was aiding the cause of human progress while having the consoling sense of being on the side of the big battalions. Blair’s faith in American invincibility was misguided. America’s defeat by the Iraqi insurgency was in no way unexpected. The French were driven from Algeria despite prosecuting the war with extreme ruthlessness and being backed by over a million French settlers. In conditions more like those American forces faced in Iraq, the Soviets had also been driven from Afghanistan. The lesson of asymmetric warfare – where the militarily weak use unorthodox tactics against the seemingly overwhelmingly strong – is that the weak have the winning hand.
If Blair failed to heed these lessons, the reason was partly ignorance. A politician who has unusual intuitive gifts in divining the British public mood, he lacked the knowledge necessary to make well-founded judgements in international contexts. His record of success in domestic politics was based on banishing the past. He was led into the Iraq débâcle by the belief that history was on his side. Actually he knew very little history, and what he did know he refused to accept when it undercut his hopes. History was significant only as a record of human advance. To turn to it to chasten current ambitions was unthinkable, even immoral. Like Bush, Blair viewed history as the unfolding of a providential design, and a feature of their view is that the design is visible to the faithful. Others may be blind to the unfolding pattern, and in that case they may have to be guided. In Augustinian terms this is unacceptable, for only God can know the design of history. Here Blair has been the modern man he claims to be: for him a sense of subjective certainty is all that is needed for an action to be right. If deception is needed to realize the providential design it cannot be truly deceitful.
Deception has been integral at every stage of the Iraq war. In Chapter 4 I will consider the process through which war was engineered in America. Here it may be sufficient to consider some of the key episodes of disinformation that enabled British involvement in the war. In the run-up to the invasion Blair always insisted publicly that its goal was not regime change – which he knew to be legally unacceptable as a ground for attacking the country – but the threat posed by Iraq’s supposed WMD. A document was circulated titled Iraq’s Programme of Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government (published on 24 September 2002 under the title Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government). The document – which came to be known as the ‘dodgy dossier’ – claimed to be an authoritative statement based on intelligence concerning Iraq’s capabilities and intentions regarding WMD; but it contradicted earlier intelligence assessments. In March 2002, a report to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), which brings together information from all of the UK’s intelligence services, concluded that there was ‘no evidence that Saddam Hussein posed a significantly greater threat than in 1991 after the Gulf War’. Moreover, while the dossier claimed to be based on intelligence sources, 90 per cent of it was copied from three published articles. In the case of one of them the meaning was changed to imply that Iraq was supporting Islamist terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda – a claim for which there was no basis, and which evidence of enmity and suspicion between the two rendered highly implausible.24
Like Bush, Blair has focused on intelligence failures as being among the chief reasons for the difficulty of prosecuting the war. In fact a recurrent feature of the conflict has been that intelligence findings that ran counter to claims made in support of the decision to go to war have been ignored or suppressed. In February 2003 a leaked document from the UK Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) acknowledged that there had been contact between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi regime in the past but noted that any relationship between them foundered on mistrust. ‘[Bin Laden’s] aims are in ideological conflict with present-day Iraq,’ the report concluded.25 The report contradicted the claim that Saddam cultivated contacts with the group that organized the 9/11 attacks – a claim central to Blair’s defence of the attack on Iraq as part of the ‘war against terror’. An earlier report, the ‘Iraq Options’ paper produced by the Overseas and Defence Secretariat of the Cabinet Office on 8 March 2002, surveyed the evidence and concluded unambiguously:
In the judgement of the JIC, there is no recent 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.26
This report and others show that Britain’s intelligence agencies were repeatedly tasked to find evidence for links between Saddam and al-Qaeda. Unable to find any such evidence and unwilling to invent it, they reported that none existed. The only effect their reports had was that Blair shifted the case for war to arguments about WMD, where intelligence could be more easily manipulated.
In this instance, as in others, the problem was not defective intelligence. It was that intelligence was disregarded when it did not support the case for war. Blair had no use fo
r intelligence based on facts. He was only interested in ‘faith-based intelligence’ – as a former arms-control expert who used to work for the American Department of State, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, described the way intelligence is viewed in the Bush administration.27 One of the administration’s key proponents of faith-based intelligence headed the Office of Special Plans – an ad hoc organization set up to screen out inconvenient intelligence, which will be examined in Chapter 5.
Secret planning for the invasion seems to have started in America months or weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks late in 2001, and it was clear to Blair that Bush meant to go to war in Iraq from the time he visited Bush at Camp David in April 2002. A memorandum from the foreign secretary Jack Straw, which was sent to Blair on 25 March 2002 in preparation for the visit, noted that while it seemed clear Bush had made up his mind, the case for war was thin – Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. Despite this advice Blair gave his full backing to Bush when the two met at Camp David. At a meeting held at 10 Downing Street at 9 a.m. on 23 July 2002 whose details were subsequently leaked in the ‘Downing Street Memo’, Blair was told by ‘C’ – the head of the Secret Intelligence Service MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, who had recently had talks in Washington with the head of the CIA, George Tenet – that military action against Saddam was ‘seen as inevitable’ and ‘the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy’.28 Partly in order to placate opinion in the Labour party, Blair persuaded Bush to go to the UNto seek a second resolution authorizing military action. Yet at a meeting in the White House on 31 January 2003, Bush made it clear to Blair that he meant to go to war regardless of the UN’s decision, and Blair again promised Bush his full support.29 He also rejected an offer from Bush that could have spared Britain from full involvement in the war. In March 2003, fearful that Blair’s government might fall, Bush gave him the option of British forces not participating in the invasion. Blair dismissed the option and insisted he was fully committed.30 However, in the House of Commons Blair maintained the pretence that war could still be avoided right up to the crucial vote on 18 March (two days before the war).
Blair’s complicity in deception in the run-up to war has led to him being seen as mendacious. This is a misreading. It is not so much that he is economical with the truth as that he lacks the normal understanding of it. For him truth is whatever serves the cause, and when he engages in what is commonly judged to be deception he is only anticipating the new world that he is helping to bring about. His silences serve the same higher purpose. Blair has remained silent regarding the abuses that occurred at Abu Ghraib and he has dismissed well-sourced reports that American planes have used British airports to implement the policy of ‘special rendition’ in which terrorist suspects are kidnapped and transported to countries where they can be tortured. Blair’s stance on these issues must by ordinary standards be judged to be thoroughly dishonest, but it is clear he believes ordinary standards do not apply to him. Deception is justified if it advances human progress – and then it is not deception. Blair’s untruths are not true lies. They are prophetic glimpses of the future course of history, and they carry the hazards of all such revelations.
During Blair’s decade in office British government changed in character. All administrations aim to present a positive image of themselves, and some have departed from truth in the process. Where Blair was unique was in viewing the shaping of public opinion as government’s overriding purpose. The result was that whereas in the past lies were an intermittent feature of government, under his leadership they became integral to its functioning.31 Writing about the role of lying in Soviet politics, the French political thinker Raymond Aron observed:
In the exact, strict sense of the word, he who consciously says the opposite of the truth is lying: Lenin’s companions were lying when they confessed to crimes they had not committed, and Soviet propaganda was lying when it sang of the happiness of the people during the days of collectivization …
On the other hand, when the Bolsheviks, the Communists, call the Soviet Union socialist, must we say that they are lying? … if they recognize the difference between what socialism is today and what it will be when it conforms to its essence, then they are not, in the strictest sense, lying, but rather substituting for reality [something that can be described as] ‘pseudo reality’: the meaning that they give something in terms of a future they imagine as conforming to the ideology. Despite everything, Sovietism becomes a step along the road to socialism, and hence a step toward the salvation of mankind.32
If there is an historical precedent for Blair’s methodical disregard for truth it is in the Soviet era, when a generation of western communists represented the USSR as a stage on the way to universal democracy. Believing they were serving an invincible cause, these fellow-travellers were ready to ‘lie for the truth’ by portraying the Soviet system not as it was in fact but as it would inevitably – so they believed – become. It was absurd to describe the Soviet Union as a democracy. It is no less absurd to suggest that Iraq is an emerging liberal democracy and to refer to the country as the place in which the war against global terrorism is being won. In factual terms Iraq is a failed state, and insofar as there is anything like democracy it is working to produce Iranian-style theocracy. In the same way, facts tell us that the US-led invasion has turned the country into a training ground for terrorists. Blair did more than conceal these facts. He constructed a pseudo-reality that aimed to shape the way we think. As in the Soviet case, the pseudo-reality failed to withstand the test of history. The hideous facts of life in Iraq refute the post-modern dogma that truth is a construction of power. If they have yet to penetrate into Blair’s awareness they have entered that of American voters, and as a result he is condemned to live out his days as the redundant servant of a failed administration.
The political environments in which Blair and Bush came to power could hardly be more different. Blair could not mobilize popular religious belief behind him as Bush did, and a neo-conservative intellectual movement supporting his messianic foreign policy began to develop in Britain only towards the end of his period in power. Yet there was a kinship between Bush and Blair. The combination of a shallow but intense religiosity with a militant faith in human progress that defines Bush’s world-view also shaped Blair’s. Blair and Bush interpreted the history of the past two decades – the only history they knew – as showing that humanity had entered a wholly new era. Like Thatcher at the end of the 1980s, they interpreted the collapse of communism not as a setback for western universalism – which it was – but as a sign of the triumph of ‘the West’. Lacking any longer historical perspective, they understood the challenges of the early twenty-first century in terms of the triumphal illusions of the post-Cold War era.
Blair and Bush came at the end of a period of ascending utopianism in western politics. For them human progress was axiomatic; but it was never understood only in the terms of secular thought. Both practised a missionary style of politics, whose goal was nothing less than the salvation of mankind.
4
The Americanization of the Apocalypse
We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand.
Thomas Paine1
The murder of thousands of civilians on 11 September 2001 brought apocalyptic thinking to the centre of American politics. At the same time it re-energized beliefs that form part of America’s myth. The Puritans who colonized the country in the seventeenth century viewed themselves as creating a society that would lack the evils of the Old World. Established on universal principles it would serve as a model to all of humankind. For these English colonists, America marked a new beginning in history.
In fact there are no such beginnings, and the sense of bringing into being a new world that has been present in America from the time
the first English settlers arrived to the present day is not new or uniquely American. It is a current of the millenarian ferment that passed from medieval chiliasm through the English Revolution. The sense of universal mission that is such a prominent feature of American politics is an outflow from this ancient stream.
The state that emerged from the American war of independence adapted the traditions of English government to the conditions of a struggle for national self-determination and rendered them into the language of universal rights. The American colonists and those who later turned the country into a self-governing republic imagined that governments could be created by an appeal to first principles. In reality both their principles and their belief that history could be started afresh were inheritances from the past.
FROM PURITAN COLONY TO REDEEMER NATION
We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people – the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.
Herman Melville2
The Puritan colonists who came to New England brought with them many of the prophetic beliefs that had fuelled the English Civil War. For them, the colonization of the New World was itself an apocalyptic event. John Winthrop’s famous sermon of 1630 to the English Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in which he described New England as a ‘city on a hill’ embodying a new contract with God, was probably delivered in England, before the colonists set off, rather than on board ship as was once thought. Winthrop’s sermon was clear that the colony that was about to be established marked a new era in history; but he also warned of the dreadful fate that awaited it if it strayed from virtue: