The poison in the body politic

On Tuesday Tony Blair appeared before the House of Commons liaison committee and told it that he now accepted a further inquiry (after Hutton) was needed.

I think it is right, as a result of what David Kay has said - and the fact that the Iraq Survey Group now probably won't report, in the very near term, its final report - that we have a look at the intelligence that we received and whether it was accurate or not.

Blair said two other things as well. He said that...

whatever is discovered as a result of that inquiry, I do not accept that it was wrong to remove Saddam Hussein or that the world is not a better and safer place without him.

Further...

He said he would not subcontract the political decision to go to war to the inquiry.

He was 'pessimistic that the latest inquiry would lift the suspicion hanging around his government':

I have got no doubt that if this fresh inquiry into intelligence does not reveal the result that some people want then they will call for another inquiry until they get the result they want, unless it says the war is not justified.

It turns out, in fact, that the Prime Minister's pessimism wasn't sufficiently deep there. Those 'some people' whom he refers to don't need an inquiry, one way or another. They already know everything. For the rules of the current political game have become transparently clear. Before Hutton reported, it was a cast iron certainty that, had he had anything critical to say about Blair's government, it would have been trumpeted every which way but softly. After he reported, and because he didn't have much critical to say of it - whitewash! Had Blair not then agreed to a further inquiry about the quality of the pre-war intelligence and its use, this would have been very bad for him: not permitting something that was now quite clearly an issue of grave importance to be properly investigated. So Blair did agree to an inquiry, and it was very bad for him. Why? Because here was the man who had said so many times how confident he was that WMD would be found, acknowledging that there might be a problem with respect to that earlier confidence. Shouldn't Blair have some credit for being willing at last to acknowledge it? Come on, don't be a halfwit.

You've heard about a bad hair day. Well, there's also a bad Blair day, and in the relevant quarters every day's a bad Blair day. Those are the rules of the current political game.

What they now dictate is that it doesn't really matter what this new inquiry by Lord Butler delivers. If it's what 'we' want, we'll take it; but if it isn't what we want, we're saying right from the off that the inquiry's no good. You think I joke? Not at all. Read Jonathan Freedland:

Well, we won't get fooled again. Critics of the war should not wait till this latest inquiry into Iraqi WMD is over before they voice their misgivings - only to be accused of questioning the ref's credentials after the match.
.....
Of course, I could be misjudging the process entirely. It might deliver a report that at last gets to the truth of how we came to fight a war over weapons that did not exist. If it does, that will prove a pleasant surprise. Until then, we should remain watchful and wary.

At the bottom of all this is something very simple. It's not, essentially, about the quality of the intelligence on which the case for war was argued, nor even about the use - or misuse if there was - of this intelligence by politicians. I will come back and defend that judgement in due course. What it is about is something disclosed unintentionally in a report, not about Britain but about Israel, by Chris McGreal yesterday (credited to him in the paper version, though not online). The report tells of an Israeli MP saying that Israel's intelligence services knew the pre-war claims about Iraqi WMD were wrong, and it goes on:

However, questions over the quality of Israeli intelligence are unlikely to concern the public as greatly as in Britain and the US. Israelis overwhelmingly welcomed the overthrow of the Iraqi leader.

That's precisely it: they overwhelmingly welcomed the overthrow of the Iraqi leader. The anti-war critics, on the other hand, or - taking all due care not to include anyone who doesn't wish to be included - some very large proportion of the anti-war critics did not welcome this, and seemingly they still don't, because if they did, it would have had some effect in mitigating their fury and resentment that their opinion on the war did not prevail. But that fury and resentment is if anything larger and more voluble than ever now. I have already offered my own hypothesis as to what one of the psychological mechanisms underlying this reaction may be, so I won't belabour it again. I will merely repeat it. There is a certain moral discomfort at work here: a moral discomfort at having been in the camp favouring a course of action which would have left the torture chambers and the rape rooms in operation to this very day, and beyond it for who knows how long; when a supposedly idiot, right-wing, Republican president and his compliant prime minister friend moved to rid the world of a monster. The two of them must be made to pay for this - for their upsetting of the right and proper order of political vice and, more crucially, virtue, as seen in Hampstead, Islington, Didsbury and their US equivalents. (In which connection, see also this - via Harry.)

In Tuesday's Guardian there was a leader calling for a much broader inquiry than Butler's; its breadth such as to allow the very thing Tony Blair wasn't willing to yield, a judgement about the political decision to go to war. That leader concluded:

Without such a full accounting, the poison injected by Iraq into British public life cannot be drawn. Without it, there will be no final reckoning.

A follow-up editorial on the same topic yesterday argued very much the same thing; and it is also the reason why Charles Kennedy, for the Lib Dems, has declined to cooperate with the Butler inquiry. He has said:

it would not answer the "fundamental question the public want addressed": the political judgment to go to war.

Blair is right not to concede on this, as I'll come to in a moment. But if British public life (and not only British) has been poisoned recently - a view I share - it ought to be recognized that there are more poisons than one. Central amongst these has been the unwillingness of so much of the anti-war party to accept the outcome of democratic processes over the Iraq war, to accept that there could be another reasonable view than theirs; and the unrelenting animosity, sometimes venom, directed against those who led the US and Britain to war and those who supported them. Blair is right not to concede what Kennedy and the Guardian, amongst many others, are asking for, because the political divisions that have been in play in all this can only be resolved, if at all, only be negotiated, gone beyond, whatever, by the further unfolding of legitimate democratic political processes. The key question at issue is not something that a small committee has any business declaring on, as if there could be some authoritative decision like that, over a major, world-dividing, political question. In any case, if a committee of this sort were to be given the go-ahead and then to declare the 'wrong' way, that would be just another whitewash. So, pragmatically, for Blair to concede it would be folly.

I end with an immodest proposal. Actually, it's not immodest. I just call it that because, as it comes from me, it's unlikely that anyone who matters in all this will pay a blind bit of notice. To venture it as though somebody would, may suggest delusions. I don't have them; well, not about my influence in this matter, anyway. Here are the assumptions behind the proposal.

1. The questions of who might have been to blame for the death of David Kelly, and of whether Tony Blair or any of his ministers lied in that affair, are putatively settled by the Hutton inquiry.

2. The Butler inquiry has a remit that is adequate to the job it needs to do. There are now legitimate questions in the public domain both about the intelligence there was concerning Iraq's WMD and the political use which was made of that intelligence. The inquiry's remit includes these terms of reference:

[T]o investigate the accuracy of intelligence on Iraqi WMD up to March 2003, and to examine any discrepancies between the intelligence gathered, evaluated and used by the government before the conflict, and between that intelligence and what has been discovered by the Iraq survey group since the end of the conflict.
.....
To make recommendations to the prime minister for the future on the gathering, evaluation and use of intelligence on WMD, in the light of the difficulties of operating in countries of concern.

It is obvious that a credible interpretation of 'evaluated and used' in the former paragraph and of the similar phrase in the latter paragraph permits a thorough investigation of whether there was anything amiss - in any sense of that word - regarding the intelligence in the run-up to war. The fact that so many anti-warriors are howling over the terms of reference establishes, for me, that what they want in advance is something that can politically condemn Tony Blair and the decision to go to war, and that they will not be satisfied with any less. That is, they want a political adjudication (and in their own favour) and not an impartial inquiry into the facts of the case, whose conclusions might then inform people's various judgements. This is why I said earlier that the current anti-war furore is not essentially about the intelligence and its use. If that were really the issue, there would be more willingness to accept the terms of reference of the Butler inquiry.

My proposal: let that inquiry - with or without the Lib Dems, with its present or some modified personnel - do its work and produce its report; and let the political process take its course on that basis, and on the basis, as always, of everything else. Parliament and the electorate can then make their judgements about where we've all been as they respectively see fit.

I doubt that this is quite how things will pan out. There are too many who are bent on spreading, rather than drawing, the poison.