Wednesday, 13 June, 2007
Dear Steve Richards,
Your comment piece today is interesting, perhaps mostly for what it misses ('A courageous attack that will lead to reprisals', The Independent, June 13, 2007).
But first - you wrote:
"Blair exaggerated the significance of the intelligence on WMD."
That's sleight-of-hand journalism.
Take the Niger-uranium saga, for instance. As investigative reporter Neil Mackay of the Sunday Herald rightly said, this tawdry episode reveals: "one of the key strategies of the Bush and Blair governments: allowing information which the administrations knew to be fake and phoney to be aired in order to convince the US Congress, the British Parliament and the people of the UK and America, that they should support war."
Mackay added:
"The British government's claim that it had additional intelligence which proved that Saddam was seeking uranium from Niger was a blatant lie." (Neil Mackay, 'The War on Truth', Sunday Herald Books, 2006)
There's so much more that could be said to undermine your confused turn of phrase.
In any case, you've skirted round the glaringly obvious central issue: We must surely judge the invasion of Iraq by the same standards that were upheld at the Nuremberg war trials where it was clearly stated:
"To initiate a war of aggression ... is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, chief prosecutor for the United States at Nuremberg, noted at the time:"If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us."
What Jackson said about the United States applies similarly to the United Kingdom. And, make no mistake, the invasion of Iraq was a war of aggression, sold on a false premise.
Perhaps the failure of the Independent - and other major newspapers and broadcasters - to point out that the invasion was the "supreme international crime", and that Blair and their ministers ought to stand trial for war crimes, has something to do with the public's increasing scepticism of traditional sources of 'news' and narrow spectrum of 'comment'.
Finally, you write pejoratively of "the current extreme and dangerous cynicism about those we elect". The public scepticism about power, which you bemoan, also applies to the media that reports - or, more often, fails to report - on those elected. More accurately, this public scepticism is directed towards the damaging *policies* pursued by political leaders: policies which so often favour the few - elite interests - at the expense of the many, namely the public at large.
I look forward to hearing back from you.
Best wishes,
David Cromwell
===
Response from Steve Richards:
Thursday, 14 June, 2007
Dear David,
Many thanks for your note.
The intelligence was wrong. In advance of the war it became part of theargument used by those that supported the invasion (not by me-I was opposedfrom the beginning). Did Blair believe the intelligence? Probably he wasnaive enough to believe some of it. The more sophisticated Hans Blix didtoo.
By then Blair had no choice but to put the best possible public case forwar. He had made the commitment. What would have happened if he had opposedthe war? It would still have gone ahead, with the US even more detachedfrom the rest of the world. Look at Chirac and Schroeder-impotent in theiropposition and acquiring no more authority at home or abroad as a result.I stress again I was opposed to the war. A stronger figure than Blair wouldhave taken the less easy route and broken off from the US...but all routeswere treacherous for Blair in that period. For the media to scream 'liar'at every opportunity casts no light anywhere.
Cheers, Steve
===
Follow-up email to Steve Richards:
Friday, 15 June, 2007
Dear Steve,
Many thanks for responding. You still haven't addressed the central point put to you - let's return to that in a moment.
First, the intelligence. You now say: "The intelligence was wrong". But in your column you said: "Blair exaggerated the significance of the intelligence on WMD." So you're not even consistent in your revisionism of the historical record.
The facts are out there, courtesy of the Downing Street Memos and other sources. In a meeting chaired by Tony Blair in July 2003, Sir Richard Dearlove, head of the Secret Intelligence Service, said that "the facts and the intelligence" were being "fixed around the policy" of invading Iraq.
Brian Jones, Defence Intelligence Staff (1987-2003), reported that MI6 was required by the Government to extract as much information as possible from their limited sources in Iraq to construct a plausible intelligence case.
John Morrison, an adviser to the parliamentary intelligence and security committee and a former deputy chief of defence intelligence, said that when Blair made his claims of Iraqi WMD: "I could almost hear the collective raspberry going up around Whitehall."
Blair claimed that it was "absurd" to claim that any Iraqi WMD had been destroyed prior to the invasion. Hans Blix told the BBC in response: "No, it was not [absurd] and the inspectors had not really asserted that these things [WMD] existed. They had calculated material balances and they've said here [are] a lot of things unaccounted for, and it wasn't absurd that they had destroyed it."
Blix also said: "If anyone had cared ... to study what UNSCOM was saying for quite a number of years, and what we [UNMOVIC] were saying, they should not have assumed that they would stumble on weapons."
The testimony of those experts such as Scott Ritter, former chief UNSCOM weapons inspector, that Iraq had been "fundamentally disarmed", was largely buried by politicians and media commentators.
Carne Ross, a key Foreign Office diplomat responsible for liaising with UN inspectors in Iraq, said that British government claims about Iraq's weapons programme had been "totally implausible". Ross told the Guardian:
"I'd read the intelligence on WMD for four and a half years, and there's no way that it could sustain the case that the government was presenting. All of my colleagues knew that, too.
I could go on. In any case, alleged WMD was only ever a convenient casus belli, as Paul Wolfowitz admitted:"For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on."
The real issue is, as it has always been since the end of WW2, the US desire to shape the Middle East in its own strategic and economic interests.But back to the main point in my first email to you. The invasion of Iraq was a war of aggression; the "supreme international crime", judged by the standards of Nuremberg. But this stark fact has gone unrecognised in your journalism. Your evasion of the point in your response to me highlights your uncomfortable silence.
You claim, without justification, that "Blair had no choice but to put the best possible public case for war."The same logic applies to honour amongst Mafia killers. If a hit is going to go ahead, come what may, then any discomfort or dissent amongst the mafiosi is to be suppressed in order not to offend the capo - or worse, bring down his wrath.
You ask, "What would have happened if he [Blair] had opposed the war?"and declare with supreme confidence, and extraordinary powers of clairvoyance:"It would still have gone ahead, with the US even more detached from the rest of the world."
This is a line of defence that would not pass muster at Nuremberg.
We know from the Downing Street Memos that Blair had signed up to Bush's plans in early 2002. We know that Sir Christopher Meyer, the British ambassador to the United States, wrote in a March 18, 2002 memo:
"We backed regime change, but the plan had to be clever and failure was not an option. It would be a tough sell for us domestically."
We know that Meyer called for a "strategy for building support for military action", and warned of the "need to wrong foot Saddam on the inspectors."
We know, too, thanks to the diligent investigative reporting of Michael Smith of the Sunday Times, that there was a secret, illegal air war carried out in the cynical hope of a reaction from Saddam that would 'justify' a full-scale assault and invasion.
We know, in other words, that the US and the UK conspired to launch a war of aggression.
Blair has colluded in a monstrous crime - the supreme international crime, recall - that has led to the deaths of approaching one million Iraqis; untold numbers of maimed and wounded civilians; millions of refugees; the deaths of thousands of soldiers; the increased security threat to Britons everywhere; further destabilised the Middle East, including the very real threat of a new war on Iran.
Maybe, even now, you can be persuaded to reconsider your journalistic perspective.
I look forward to your response.
Best wishes,
David
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