Rewriting History
Robin Cook has become the first minister to resign over Iraq - BBC report 17 March 2003
I enjoyed this piece by Hugo Rifkind in The Times which jumps all over the place in considering the political fall out from Iraq, but does so in a good humoured way while pointing out that people like Boris Johnson are talking 'cowardly rubbish' for publicly disowning an invasion they once supported.
The same is true of many people in the Labour Party, close allies of Tony Blair at the time, who now pretend that they were duped into supporting military action against Iraq, as if the MPs who voted in the House of Commons were tricked or misled by some mysterious conspiracy.
Which is a load of old bollix if you ask me, because it there was some conspiracy going on then it certainly didn't blindside Robin Cook who was the only top rank politician to oppose the invasion of Iraq on a point of principle - and for his principles Cook resigned as Labour's Foreign Secretary at the time.
Now it may well suit Boris Johnson and many Labour politicians these days to portray themselves as useful idiots who were only too keen to swallow the Labour Government's view about the urgency and scale of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, but the truth is that Boris & Co went into the House of Commons' voting lobbies with their eyes wide open.
And to suggest otherwise is political cowardice if you ask me, combined with the rewriting of history on a grand scale.
Blair’s war poisoned everything, not just Iraq
By Hugo Rifkind - The Times
The former PM may be right about Saddam. But the 2003 invasion has made intervention impossible everywhere else
Here come the same old battles, rolling around again. It’s not just the odd ageing Baathist who never stopped fighting the second Iraq war, is it? Years from now they’ll hold re-enactments of the unresolved rhetorical war before the unresolved bloodier real one — enthusiasts dressing up as Tony Blair and George Galloway, back before the former started having orange skin and the latter stopped having grey hair. Droning on and on and on.
I did not believe at any point in the long, phoney war that preceded the invasion of 2003 that it was a sensible thing to do. This wasn’t what I wrote about at the time (celebrity haircuts and amusing surveys were more my beat) so I find myself, probably fortunately, with no printed record of precisely why. Doubtless it was nothing terribly sophisticated. Yet I still marched. We all marched.
Little marches, time and time again, but also that big march. Remember? Little snapshots come to mind. The way that, although everybody I knew was descending on Hyde Park, Oxford Street seemed to have no fewer shoppers than on any other Saturday morning. That was confusing. And the crocodile of Muslim kids in green bandanas that charged through us chanting in Arabic, sending white liberal humanists scattering in bemused alarm. That was also confusing.
Most of all, though, I remember the powerful sense, the knowledge, really, that none of it would make any difference. It wasn’t a depressing sensation. I’d like to be able to say otherwise, but I’d be lying. In fact, it was a relief. Almost empowering. “Well, that’s my arse covered,” you could say to yourself. “I’ve done my bit. Not in my name.”
People aren’t honest, that’s the thing. Maybe they think they are, but they aren’t. Hindsight makes hypocrites of us all. One of the more contemptible stances struck today is by people who supported the war and now disown it, but want to do so without quite admitting that they were wrong. Boris Johnson advanced this sort of case inThe Daily Telegraph yesterday, using lots of terribly Boris-ish phrases such as “hopelessly naive” and “fondly imagined”. The only error these people made in supporting the invasion, they’d have you believe, was trusting that various other nincompoops wouldn’t balls up the aftermath. It’s cowardly rubbish. They supported smashing the regime. That was the point. And the aftermath is what happens when you do.
I wish I could claim I understood that at the time, but that wouldn’t be true either. “We told you so!” some trill today. “We bloody knew it!” I don’t remember that they did. I remember them alleging malice, pride and duplicity. I remember a whole bunch of utter guff about Halliburton and oil, and I remember fevered debate about whether we, the West, had the right to remake the world in our image. I don’t remember predictions of chaos, sectarianism and failure, though. Were there many? Either way, I’m pretty certain that’s not what we were marching about.
If Tony Blair remains in tortured denial about his failure to foresee the disaster of Iraq, then the bitter truth is that he’s not the only one. In fact, if you overlook the Sir Cliff Richard skin and David Icke eyes, our messianic former PM’s remarks this weekend were fairly sane and even almost right. Iraq under Saddam was not so different from Syria under Assad and there’s no reason to presume it would have handled the Arab Spring very differently.
Only almost right, though. Because invading Iraq didn’t just change Iraq. It changed everything. It was the zenith of latter-day interventionism. It followed British successes in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and Sierra Leone. Never, before or since, has the United Nations been involved in more peacekeeping operations than it was between the first and second Iraq wars.
Since Iraq went south, intervention has been toxic. Everything that has happened throughout the Arab Spring has happened with all the nastiest of nasty buggers making the calculation that meaningful western intervention was not a prospect worth worrying about. Gaddafi thought it in Libya, admittedly wrongly. Assad thought it in Syria, and was not wrong at all. The same goes for his jihadist foes, first in Syria and now across the border.
Personally, I’m deeply wary of any intervention in the Middle East. It was the Iraq war, though, that made putting western boots on the ground — or the West getting involved at all — mean finding somebody to bomb, and bombing them. In a nutshell, it made intervention synonymous with regime change. It made it mean the wilful introduction of chaos, in the blind hope that a new chaos would be preferable to the old.
There are other modes of intervention. Or at least there used to be. Mr Blair’s dire counterfactual history — in which Saddam was left alone — might well be one in which Iraq was no more stable. But it would also be one in which “peacekeeping” had not come to sound like an Orwellian term; in which humanitarian corridors were politically feasible; in which “no-fly zone” was not a euphemism for a bombardment and in which western instincts were not, by the rest of the world first and foremost, considered suspect as hell.
Iraq was a bad war, fought for bad reasons, which was destined to end badly. We should be chastened by the way that very few of us, even those vehemently opposed, actually managed to engage with why. And as for Mr Blair, he may be quite right that a world in which Saddam had been left alone would still be pretty ugly. But I wish we lived in it.
The former PM may be right about Saddam. But the 2003 invasion has made intervention impossible everywhere else
Here come the same old battles, rolling around again. It’s not just the odd ageing Baathist who never stopped fighting the second Iraq war, is it? Years from now they’ll hold re-enactments of the unresolved rhetorical war before the unresolved bloodier real one — enthusiasts dressing up as Tony Blair and George Galloway, back before the former started having orange skin and the latter stopped having grey hair. Droning on and on and on.
I did not believe at any point in the long, phoney war that preceded the invasion of 2003 that it was a sensible thing to do. This wasn’t what I wrote about at the time (celebrity haircuts and amusing surveys were more my beat) so I find myself, probably fortunately, with no printed record of precisely why. Doubtless it was nothing terribly sophisticated. Yet I still marched. We all marched.
Little marches, time and time again, but also that big march. Remember? Little snapshots come to mind. The way that, although everybody I knew was descending on Hyde Park, Oxford Street seemed to have no fewer shoppers than on any other Saturday morning. That was confusing. And the crocodile of Muslim kids in green bandanas that charged through us chanting in Arabic, sending white liberal humanists scattering in bemused alarm. That was also confusing.
Most of all, though, I remember the powerful sense, the knowledge, really, that none of it would make any difference. It wasn’t a depressing sensation. I’d like to be able to say otherwise, but I’d be lying. In fact, it was a relief. Almost empowering. “Well, that’s my arse covered,” you could say to yourself. “I’ve done my bit. Not in my name.”
People aren’t honest, that’s the thing. Maybe they think they are, but they aren’t. Hindsight makes hypocrites of us all. One of the more contemptible stances struck today is by people who supported the war and now disown it, but want to do so without quite admitting that they were wrong. Boris Johnson advanced this sort of case inThe Daily Telegraph yesterday, using lots of terribly Boris-ish phrases such as “hopelessly naive” and “fondly imagined”. The only error these people made in supporting the invasion, they’d have you believe, was trusting that various other nincompoops wouldn’t balls up the aftermath. It’s cowardly rubbish. They supported smashing the regime. That was the point. And the aftermath is what happens when you do.
I wish I could claim I understood that at the time, but that wouldn’t be true either. “We told you so!” some trill today. “We bloody knew it!” I don’t remember that they did. I remember them alleging malice, pride and duplicity. I remember a whole bunch of utter guff about Halliburton and oil, and I remember fevered debate about whether we, the West, had the right to remake the world in our image. I don’t remember predictions of chaos, sectarianism and failure, though. Were there many? Either way, I’m pretty certain that’s not what we were marching about.
If Tony Blair remains in tortured denial about his failure to foresee the disaster of Iraq, then the bitter truth is that he’s not the only one. In fact, if you overlook the Sir Cliff Richard skin and David Icke eyes, our messianic former PM’s remarks this weekend were fairly sane and even almost right. Iraq under Saddam was not so different from Syria under Assad and there’s no reason to presume it would have handled the Arab Spring very differently.
Only almost right, though. Because invading Iraq didn’t just change Iraq. It changed everything. It was the zenith of latter-day interventionism. It followed British successes in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and Sierra Leone. Never, before or since, has the United Nations been involved in more peacekeeping operations than it was between the first and second Iraq wars.
Since Iraq went south, intervention has been toxic. Everything that has happened throughout the Arab Spring has happened with all the nastiest of nasty buggers making the calculation that meaningful western intervention was not a prospect worth worrying about. Gaddafi thought it in Libya, admittedly wrongly. Assad thought it in Syria, and was not wrong at all. The same goes for his jihadist foes, first in Syria and now across the border.
Personally, I’m deeply wary of any intervention in the Middle East. It was the Iraq war, though, that made putting western boots on the ground — or the West getting involved at all — mean finding somebody to bomb, and bombing them. In a nutshell, it made intervention synonymous with regime change. It made it mean the wilful introduction of chaos, in the blind hope that a new chaos would be preferable to the old.
There are other modes of intervention. Or at least there used to be. Mr Blair’s dire counterfactual history — in which Saddam was left alone — might well be one in which Iraq was no more stable. But it would also be one in which “peacekeeping” had not come to sound like an Orwellian term; in which humanitarian corridors were politically feasible; in which “no-fly zone” was not a euphemism for a bombardment and in which western instincts were not, by the rest of the world first and foremost, considered suspect as hell.
Iraq was a bad war, fought for bad reasons, which was destined to end badly. We should be chastened by the way that very few of us, even those vehemently opposed, actually managed to engage with why. And as for Mr Blair, he may be quite right that a world in which Saddam had been left alone would still be pretty ugly. But I wish we lived in it.
