Rewriting History (20/07/14)
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.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/article4121126.ece
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.
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.
