SOCIALIST UNITY

This is an interesting debate, in which Chris Nineham of Stop The War does well to keep his composure in the face of red baiting and personal abuse from the unfailing Blair stooge, John Rentoul.

The news that Tony Blair is to donate his multi million pound advance and all proceeds from his autobiography to the Royal British Legion merely adds insult to the devastation his policies have contributed to in Iraq. No matter how much money he spends attempting to burnish his now tattered reputation, his lasting legacy to humanity is embodied in the picture below.

The crimes he committed will follow him to the grave. However, if there is any justice in this world, let us look forward to the day when they will also follow him into the dock at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

BBC News

The UN’s former chief weapons inspector Hans Blix has said it is his “firm view” that the Iraq war was illegal.

Hans Blix: “They should have drawn the conclusion that their sources were poor”

Dr Blix told the Iraq inquiry the UK had sought to go down the “UN route” to deal with Saddam Hussein but failed.

Ex-Attorney General Lord Goldsmith, who advised the war was lawful on the basis of existing UN resolutions, “wriggled about” in his arguments, he suggested.

Dr Blix said his team of inspectors had visited 500 sites but found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction.

As head of the UN’s Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) between 1999 and 2003, Dr Blix was a key figure in the run-up to the March 2003 invasion as he sought to determine the extent of Saddam’s weapons programme.

No smoking gun

Asked about the inspections he oversaw between November 2002 and 18 March 2003 - when his team was forced to pull out of Iraq on the eve of the war - he said he was “looking for smoking guns” but did not find any.

While his team discovered prohibited items such as missiles beyond the permitted range, missile engines and a stash of undeclared documents, he said these were “fragments” and not “very important” in the bigger picture.

“We carried out about six inspections per day over a long period of time.

“All in all, we carried out about 700 inspections at different 500 sites and, in no case, did we find any weapons of mass destruction.”

Although Iraq failed to comply with some of its disarmament obligations, he added it “was very hard for them to declare any weapons when they did not have any”.

Legal explanation

He criticised decisions that led to the war, saying existing UN resolutions on Iraq did not contain the authority needed, contrary to the case put by the UK government.

“Some people maintain that Iraq was legal. I am, of the firm view, that it was an illegal war.”

“Eventually they had to come with, I think, a very constrained legal explanation,” he said. “You see how Lord Goldsmith wriggled about and how he, himself, very much doubted it was adequate.”

Lord Goldsmith has acknowledged his views on the necessity of a further UN resolution mandating military action changed in the months before the invasion and that the concluded military action was justified on the basis of Iraq breaching disarmament obligations dating back to 1991.

But Dr Blix said most international lawyers believed these arguments would not stand up at an international tribunal.

“Some people maintain that Iraq was legal. I am of the firm view that it was an illegal war. There can be cases where it is doubtful, maybe it was permissible to go to war, but Iraq was, in my view, not one of those.”

He said he agreed with France and Russia, who argued that further UN authorisation was needed for military action.

“It was clear that a second resolution was required,” he said.

In the run-up to war, he said the US government was “high on” the idea of pre-emptive military action as a solution to international crises.

“They thought they could get away with it and therefore it was desirable to do so.”

Judgement questioned

While he believed Iraq “unilaterally” destroyed its weapons of mass destruction after the 1991 Gulf War, Dr Blix said he never “excluded” the prospect that it had begun to revive some form of chemical and biological capabilities.

At the age of 82, Hans Blix retains considerable stamina.

He came out of retirement a decade ago to lead the ultimately futile search for Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

On Tuesday, he gave evidence to the Iraq inquiry for three hours, before heading off to conduct a round of TV interviews.

The inquiry panel wanted to know what this mild-mannered former Swedish diplomat had made of Saddam Hussein’s behaviour.

“I never met him”, replied Dr Blix, “but I saw him as someone who wanted to be like Emperor Nebuchadnezzar…. utterly ruthless…. and he misjudged it at the end”.

Dr Blix trod a neutral path during the build-up to the Iraq conflict, but, in his evidence, he repeated much of what he has said on different occasions since 2003.

Crucially, he had serious doubts about the intelligence that lay behind the move to go to war.
In September 2002, he said he told Tony Blair privately that he believed Iraq “retained” some WMD, noting CIA reports that Iraq may hold some anthrax.

However, he said he began to become suspicious of US intelligence on Iraq following claims in late 2002 that Iraq had purchased raw uranium from Niger, which he always said he thought was flawed.

Since the war, Dr Blix has accused the UK and US of “over-interpreting” intelligence on weapons to bolster the case for war but he said the government’s controversial September 2002 dossier on Iraqi weapons seemed “plausible” at the time.

He stressed that Tony Blair never put any “pressure” on him over his search for weapons in Iraq and did not question that the prime minister and President Bush believed in “good faith” that Iraq was a serious threat.

“I certainly felt that he [Tony Blair] was absolutely sincere in his belief.

“What I question was the good judgement, particularly of President Bush but also in Tony Blair’s judgement.”

Inspection timetable

Critics of the war believe that had inspectors been allowed to continue their work they would have proved beyond doubt that Iraq did not have active weapons of mass destruction capability - as was discovered after the invasion.

Dr Blix said the military momentum towards the invasion - which he said was “almost unstoppable” by early March - did not “permit” more inspections and the UK was a “prisoner on this train”.

If he had been able to conduct more inspections, he said he believed they would have begun to “undermine” US-UK intelligence on Iraq’s alleged weapons and made the basis for the invasion harder.

The US and UK have always maintained that Saddam Hussein failed to co-operate fully with the inspections process and was continuing to breach UN disarmament resolutions dating back to 1991.

In his evidence in January, former foreign secretary Jack Straw said the regime had only started complying in the final period before the invasion “because a very large military force was at their gates”.

The inquiry, headed by Sir John Chilcot, is coming towards the end of its public hearings, with a report expected to be published around the end of the year.

from the Guardian:

Ed Miliband was living in the US and was not yet an MP at the time. “I was pretty clear at the time that I thought there needs to be more due process here,” he said.

“As we all know, the basis for going to war was on the basis of Saddam’s threat in terms of weapons of mass destruction and therefore that is why I felt the weapons inspectors should have been given more time to find out whether he had those weapons, and Hans Blix – the head of the UN weapons inspectorate – was saying that he wanted to be given more time. The basis for going to war was the threat that he posed.

“The combination of not giving the weapons inspectors more time, and then the weapons not being found, I think for a lot of people it led to a catastrophic loss of trust for us, and we do need to draw a line under it.”

From the Telegraph’s inteview with Ed Balls:

His greatest criticism is reserved for the Iraq war, which still saps Labour support. Mr Balls today becomes the first former Cabinet minister unequivocally to condemn the invasion, claiming the public were misled by “devices and tactics”.

“People always felt as if the decision had been made and they were being informed after the fact.” Though not yet elected as an MP, Mr Balls – as Mr Brown’s adviser – was party to top level discussions after attempts to get a second UN Security Council resolution failed.

“I was in the room when a decision was taken that we would say it was that dastardly Frenchman, Jacques Chirac, who had scuppered it. It wasn’t really true, you know. I said to Gordon: ‘I know why you’re doing this, but you’ll regret it’. France is a very important relationship for us.”

Although Mr Balls concedes that, had he been an MP at the time, he would have voted for the war on the basis of the facts provided, he now concedes that not only was the information wrong but the war unjustified.

“It was a mistake. On the information we had, we shouldn’t have prosecuted the war. We shouldn’t have changed our argument from international law to regime change in a non-transparent way. It was an error for which we as a country paid a heavy price, and for which many people paid with their lives. Saddam Hussein was a horrible man, and I am pleased he is no longer running Iraq. But the war was wrong.”

Ralph Miliband’s corpse is revolving at high speed.

At the Iraq Inquiry today, hapless Foreign Secretary David Miliband defended the invasion on that little known international law of nursery rhymes. Like a demented grand old Duke of York, Miliband explained that it would do to be seen to have “marched to the top of the hill of pressure” and then to march back down again.

Meanwhile, Armando Iannucci must be more than a little amused to witness Miliband auditioning as a comic actor for any future Iannucci projects.

In the superb film “In the Loop”, the hapless Minister for International Development Simon Foster remarks that for peace to prevail sometimes it is necessary to “climb the mountain of conflict.”

David Miliband may sense his political future is over and is looking for a new career in comedy. He should go far. After all, his whole political career has been just about the funniest thing modern British history has witnessed. If Ed Miliband should see fit to join him, the long search for the new Laurel and Hardy of comedy will at last be over.

Alistair Campbell was the spin doctor who spun us to war and as a result a great many innocent people died.

More here

Last night on the BBC’s Question Time programme, the Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips stated that back in 2003, every reasonable person thought that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

The same case was articulately made recently (rather bizarrely) by TV presenter Richard Madeley, who does rather a good job of defending Tony Blair, without having any obvious axe to grind.

But is this right? What judgement would a reasonable person have made based upon information available at that time.

It is a question of incontrovertible fact that Saddam Hussein had embarked upon a secret weapons programme after the Kuwait war. This was confirmed beyond doubt in October 1994 by the defection of Wafiq al-Sammarrai, former chief of Iraqi military intelligence, who revealed not only that Iraq had developed the VX chemical nerve agent, but that it had been successfully weoponised into operational missiles and warheards.

However, on August 7th 1995, Lieutenant General Hussein Kamel defected to Jordan, along with his wife, Rafhad, who was also Saddam Hussein’s daughter; and Rina, another of Saddam’s daughters. Kamel was one of the most powerful men in the Iraqi military, an intimate of Saddam’s innermost circle, and heavily involved in the secret weapons programmes. Indeed Kamel was so central to the government that for the previous ten years 73% of Iraqi government expenditure had passed through his personal office. Through Kamel’s cooperation with Western intelligence, and the information directly given to Rolf Ekeus, the chief weapons inspector, the WMD programme was rolled up in short order in 1995.

Ekeus was directed to the “chicken shed” in a farm near Haider, where he found half a million documents, as well as microfiches, computer disks and photographs. Kamel also provided information about the Iraqi “concealment mechanism” programme, which was the shadowy organisation dedicated to thwarting the UN weapons inspectors.

This meant that in 1995, Saddam’s covert weapons programme was completely compromised, and almost all information about it was in Western hands.  The continued presence of intrusive and emboldened UN weapons inspectors disrupted and disturbed any possibility of a new, covert  WMD programme of any scale being commenced. Indeed Hans Blix was adamant that the UN weapons inpectors were being effective. This knowledge was in the public domain when parliament voted for war in 2003.

Indeed, the testimony from Hans Blix was so persuasive to the effect that the regime of UN weapons inspections was working, we now know from the Chilcot Inquiry, that Lord Goldsmith required Tony Blair to sign a secret letter contradicting Hans Blix’s assessment: which became a crucial foundation of his advice that the war was legal.

Nevertheless, despite what was from Saddam’s point of view a catastrophic collapse of his WMD programme, American and British intelligence were telling us they were certain that this programme still represented a clear and present danger in 2002.

With the benefit of hindsight we know this wasn’t true. But would a reasonable person have believed these intelligence estimates at the time? What did we know about Western intelligence penetration of Iraq?

It was a again a fact entirely known in the public domain that the CIA had an extensive intelligence network in Iraq prior to 1996. But it is also known that in July 1996, following an abortive and botched attempted coup d’état initiated by the CIA, that more than 120 senior figures from the super-elite Special Republican Guard, the General Security Service, the Republican Guard and the regular army were arrested  as CIA spies; and this included the CIA’s most senior asset, Brigadier General Ata Samaw’al, the head of the B32 communications unit attached to Saddam Hussein’s personal office.

So while the CIA had indeed had considerable intelligence access up to 1996, from then the senior sources they had in the Iraqi military and government had become lost to them.

So in order for these claims of an extensive WMD programme still extant in 2002 and 2003 to be credible, we have to believe both that the programme was so secret that it was not known to Lieutenant General Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein’s son in law, and the man who knew all about the biological weapons programme; and also that the CIA had managed to recruit new intelligence sources since 1996 that were even closer to Saddam than Brigadier General Ata Samaw’al, the head of communications in Saddam’ personal office.

In short, the claims were never credible. And the more we hear now about the real state of intelligence, the clearer it is that Tony Blair could never have believed them credible.

This reminds me of the argument made by the utterly useless North Swindon Labour MP, Michael Wills, that if Saddam had no WMD, then it was inexplicable that he would thwart the weapons inspectors. But that is only inexplicable if you have no insight whatsoever into human psychology, or indeed the art of misdirection.

Obviously Saddam received a lot of kudos from the widespread belief that he was a cunning fox defying the Great Satan; and the sanctions that were causing appalling suffering throughout his land were a mere inconvenience to him; and indeed the efficient and largely equitable rationing organised by the Ba’ath party to mitigate the sanctions actually helped the government’s popularity! What is more, Iraqi national security could only be enhanced if its foes were tricked into believing that it DID have a retaliatory WMD capability.

In truth no-one in the corridors of power, neither in Whitehall nor the White House,  seriously believed that Iraq posed a military threat, or that they had a WMD capability; these were fairy tales spun to hide the rapacity and wickedness of their true agenda of waging aggressive war for reasons of imperial vanity, power-lust, and geo-political strategy.

By now the entire nation is aware that tomorrow Tony Blair makes his much anticipated appearance in front of the Chilcot Inquiry into the war in Iraq. Less well known is that on the same day Lance Corporal Joe Glenton will be appearing in front of a Judge for the preliminary hearing of his court martial for refusing to return to Afghanistan and subsequently speaking at an antiwar demonstration and to the media in defiance of military orders.

Thus we have the contradiction which sits at the heart of the past 9 years of war and mayhem which largely defines the past 13 years of New Labour in government, most of it under the leadership of Tony Blair. It is the difference between that layer of privileged, white, rich members of a war mongering ruling class – the likes of Blair, Straw, Goldsmith, and others – who were able to take the nation into an illegal war and as yet have suffered no legal consequence, and someone like Joe Glenton, a man of no wealth and privilege but with the courage to oppose what he knew to be morally wrong and who faces going to prison.

In what has already been one of the most explosive weeks in British politics in living memory, testimony has been heard outlining the framework of lies, subterfuge, and deceit that surrounded the government’s decision to join the Bush administration in going to war. The messianic fervour with which Blair committed the nation to this military fiasco had long been articulated by the antiwar movement and in the pages of the progressive and left wing press. However, hearing it confirmed first hand by a selection of foreign office lawyers, mandarins and ex-government officials over the past week or so has brought the entire British legal and political system into disrepute.

Even before Blair makes his appearance in front of Chilcot, it is clear that he committed Britain to military action alongside the United States as far back as 2002. It is also clear that the use of UN Security Council Resolution 1441, giving the then Iraqi government a final opportunity to disarm, was insufficient on its own to sanction the subsequent military action of 2003. This is confirmed by statements given by representatives of the Security Council when 1441 was passed unanimously by 15 votes in favour. The US ambassador to the UN at the time, John Negraponte, said:

‘This resolution contains no “hidden triggers” and no “automaticity” with respect to the use of force. If there is a further Iraqi breach, reported to the Council by UNMOVIC, the IAEA or a Member State, the matter will return to the Council for discussions as required in paragraph 12.’

Furthermore the British UN ambassador at the time, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who co-sponsored the resolution, said:

‘We heard loud and clear during the negotiations the concerns about “automaticity” and “hidden triggers” — the concern that on a decision so crucial we should not rush into military action; that on a decision so crucial any Iraqi violations should be discussed by the Council. Let me be equally clear in response…there is no “automaticity” in this resolution. If there is a further Iraqi breach of its disarmament obligations, the matter will return to the Council for discussion as required in paragraph 12. We would expect the Security Council then to meet its responsibilities.’

From the aformentioned it is clear that both the British and US only managed to get their resolution passed after providing reassurance to the other member states of the Security Council that any military action would need to be sanctioned via a second resolution if Iraq was found to be in material breach of its obligations to disarm as set out in 1441. By the time it became certain that the French and the Russians were intent on vetoing any such second resolution, Blair had already decided to go along with the Bush administration’s prior decision to go to war regardless of the UN and/or international law.

During Lord Goldsmith’s testimony, the key question of when and why, as the then attorney general, he changed his opinion on the legal basis for military action was answered. He stated to the inquiry that he was swayed by legal arguments in favour of military action under 1141 that were made to him by lawyers acting for the US government. He was also swayed by mounting pressure from British military commanders at the time for clarity on the legality of military action prior to committing British forces. Yet the day before Goldsmith’s appearance the former chief legal adviser at the Foreign Office, Sir Michael Wood and his then deputy, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, testified that in their opinion the war was illegal. Sir Michael Wood further testified that the foreign secretary at the time, Jack Straw, firmly rejected legal advice to this effect, citing the ‘vagueness of international law’ as his reason for doing so. It is testimony which sits at odds with Straw’s own testimony, during which he claimed to have wrestled with his decision to support the war up until the last moment, depicting himself as a man conflicted and ridden with doubt all the way through. 

The precipitate withdrawal of Hans Blix and his inspections team from Iraq just before the war began should also be recalled - for it gives lie to the justification for war given by both the US and British governments as being motivated by the need to disarm Iraq’s stockpiles of WMD under the provisions set out in 1441. The fact is that Blix and his inspections team were withdrawn when it became apparent that there were no such stockpiles of WMD in Iraq and that the stated basis for taking military action was about to be rendered untenable. Arising from this is confirmation that the objective of both the US and UK governments from the very beginning was regime change, in clear violation of international law.

Since leaving office, Tony Blair has become an extremely wealthy man. He is currently a senior advisor to J P Morgan Bank, reputedly earning $500, 000 a year, and advises Zurich Financial Services on climate change. He has also enjoyed a lucrative career as an after-dinner speaker, earning up to $250,000 per speech. It was recently reported that he’s been booked to give a series of private speeches to Lansdowne Partners, a London-based hedge fund which made millions betting on the collapse of Britain’s banks during the credit crunch. The co-founder of the fund is a major donor to the Conservative Party. Such are the wages of sin.

Whatever the outcome of the Chilcot Inquiry, the verdict of the people and of history has already been passed. The war which devastated Iraq and left millions dead, maimed, traumatised and destitute was clearly illegal, not to mention immoral, waged with the objective of asserting US hegemony in the region through the control of Iraq’s oil and with it the ability to break the monopoly of OPEC over oil prices.

As we watch Blair’s appearance in front of Chilcot, listening to the testimony of the man who has come to embody the venality, dishonesty and ruthlessness of the British establishment, perhaps we can take comfort from the example of Joe Glenton. Here is someone who, motivated by his conscience and a desire to make sense of the carnage he was being ordered to participate in, joined that noble and proud tradition of men and women who throughout history have dared to say no.

It is something which no court martial or prison sentence will ever be able to take away from him.

————————————————————————————————–

NB: Stop the War are organising a protest against Blair outside the Chilcot Inquiry on Friday. The timetable is as follows:

8.00: PROTEST STARTS AS BLAIR ARRIVES
A delegation including Iraqi citizens and grieving military families will deliver a statement and the People’s Dossier of questions for Tony Blair to Sir John Chilcot.

9.00-10.00: NAMING OF THE DEAD CEREMONY
When Blair’s testimony begins, names of Iraqis killed in the war will be read by novelist A.L Kennedy, Musician Brian Eno, actor and director Sam West, actor and director Simon McBurney, playwright David Edgar, Lancet editor Richard Horton, former UK ambassador Craig Murray, Iraqi author Haifa Zangana, comedian and author Alexei Sayle, actor Miriam Margolyes, and more.

10.00-11.00: SPEECHES, READINGS AND PERFORMANCES
Including by many of those participating in the Naming the Dead ceremony.

12.00-13.00: PERFORMANCES
Lowkey, King Blues and other Musicians.

13.00-14.00: MILITARY FAMILIES NAMING OF THE DEAD
Members of military families who lost loved ones in the Iraq war will read the names of all 179 British soldiers who died.

16.00: PROTEST AS TONY BLAIR LEAVES THE INQUIRY
Let Blair know that there must be no hiding place for mass-murderers.

Venue: Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre, Broad
Sanctuary, Westminster, London SW1P 3EE