At last: an admission from a senior member of the government that it lied through its teeth and misled the public in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, back in the early spring of 2003. Or at least that’s how I read Gordon Brown’s comments about the way in which New Labour used intelligence reports about Saddam Hussein’s military threat to the West. Perhaps I am misinterpreting our next Prime Minister, or simply overstating the case, as usual. I’ve rung Gordon to clarify but neither he nor any of his monkeys have got back to me yet.
Brown is widely reported to have said the following: ‘I would like to see all security and intelligence analysis independent of the political process and I have asked the Cabinet Secretary to do that.’ This was interpreted as a swift poke to the eye of the current Prime Minister and, as the Daily Telegraph put it, ‘an attempt [on the part of Brown] to distance himself from Mr Blair’s disastrous Iraq legacy’.
But it is a little more even than that, surely. The fact that Gordon Brown has asked a civil servant to ensure that in future intelligence reports remain independent from the political process implies that they are not independent now. In other words, they are and have been open to manipulation, exaggeration, overstatement and distortion by the government. Further, Brown’s aspiration that such security analysis should be independent in future and that ‘mistakes were made’ in this context by the government suggests that this — or something like it — is precisely what he accepts happened in the lead-up to the war against Iraq.
In which case a bouquet of flowers should be on its way now from No. 11 to the residence of the former BBC Today programme reporter Andrew Gilligan for the persecution and vilification which was occasioned when he said pretty much the same thing. If you remember, he was hounded out of his job and had his reputation as an award-winning correspondent sullied for having suggested that the government ‘sexed up’ the intelligence information. And another bouquet should be winging its way to Greg Dyke and the then Today programme editor Kevin Marsh. Interflora do this special deal for really big occasions where you can send some champagne and chocolates along with the flowers: I think Gilligan deserves at least that. It’s only 60 quid or so and you’re allowed to append a very short message to the lilies and roses, etc., usually something like ‘Love you to bits Pixiewings from Bob xxx’. That would be going too far, I reckon — a simple ‘We lied — sorry about your job, Gordon’ would suffice. And maybe the reporters and correspondents who heaped the ordure on Gilligan and the BBC at the time — yer Kettles, yer Aaronovitches and their ludicrous mid-Atlantic cousins, yer Steyns and yer Shawcrosses — might send round to Gilligan a hamper from Fortnum & Mason (even though he only eats crisps).
My guess is that the very last people who will admit they were staggeringly, horribly, catastrophically wrong about Iraq are the neocon or Blair-groupie journos. Even though Blair has admitted the situation in Iraq is a ‘disaster’ (without accepting responsibility for having caused it, natch) and even if he were later to hold up his hands and say, ‘Yeah, OK, I’m a pretty straight kind of guy, but Alastair messed with that dossier’, the journos would still be cleaving to their original line that the invasion was wholly justified, maybe not on the original grounds that Saddam was about to nuke or gas us all, but on new grounds they’ve just made up. They will be the last to say that they were wrong. David Aaronovitch wrote in 2003 that he would never vote Labour again if no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq; but somehow he has been able to extricate himself from this sticky little wicket (it would take too long and be wholly pointless to explain quite how). I suppose it’s all because the journalists are less answerable to history and public opinion than their political heroes and more vulnerable to attacks of grand hubris.
I rang No. 10 Downing Street when I read Gordon Brown’s statement and some glib little monkey refused to say anything apart from the usual disingenuous drivel. ‘It has always been the government’s policy to treat security reports objectively,’ he intoned. But Gordon’s statement to the press would seem to imply that this hasn’t, in the past, been the case, I said. ‘Then you must talk to Gordon about that,’ came the response. The Hutton inquiry — whitewash though it largely was — stated that the government ‘left the impression that there was fuller and firmer intelligence [about Saddam’s weapons] than was the case.’ And Hans Blix, the UN weapons inspector who pleaded with Bush and Blair not to invade, said the British Prime Minister ‘exaggerated’ the threat. ‘Oh,’ said the No. 10 monkey, ‘we don’t want to rake over those old coals.’ No, I bet you don’t. Nor Jonathan Powell’s warnings at the time, in an email to Alastair Campbell and Sir David Manning, that the intelligence reports suggested that ‘there was no imminent threat’ of any kind from Saddam.
Gordon Brown voted for the war, of course. He was pretty quiet about the whole business in public and we were led to believe from the usual Westminster gossip that he was deeply concerned and not 100 per cent supportive, etc., etc. But when push came to shove he did not resign from the Cabinet or risk being sacked for voicing such doubts in public, à la Clare Short and Robin Cook. When push came to shove he was instead behind the Prime Minister four-square. He had much, much less excuse for having been pro-war than, for example, David Cameron. He was eventually inveigled to make public statements of support for the invasion both before and after Baghdad had fallen. I wonder what he really thought at the time.
I suppose we will not know until his diaries are published. If he admits now that he was against the war all along, he will look cowardly, opportunistic and unprincipled for not having said so at the time. If he says he was for it, then he can be blamed for catastrophic misjudgment and also for having connived with misleading the rest of us. His statement this past week is about as far as he can go without being destroyed, one way or another. I suppose we should not be surprised that it is, in the end, somewhat self-serving.
