Blair will be "grilled for six hours" today, as the BBC puts it, concerning why we went into Iraq and what happened subsequently. Apparently the questioning is "likely to focus on the justification he gave for war in controversial government dossiers". But the reason we invaded Iraq is obvious and the discussion of government dossiers is a total distraction from the questions that should really be being asked.
We invaded Iraq because we believed that, through the 1990s, Saddam Hussein, having fought a war against us in the early 1990s, had failed to live up to what were effectively his surrender terms, and instead had preferred to thumb his nose at us. We believed that he had continued to build chemical and biological weapons and that he was attempting to develop a nuclear programme. He was a sponsor of international terrorism, sending cheques to the families of suicide bombers in Israel and the Occupied Territories. He had attempted to build a super-gun from parts exported from the UK and was rumoured to have plotted the kidnap or murder of George Bush senior.
Meanwhile he barbarically murdered his political opponents, including a particularly brutal putting down of the Shi'ites of southern Iraq, and we had found it necessary to maintain and enforce no-fly zones and engage in periodic bombing raids. We had been forced, as part of containing his aggression towards us and towards his neighbours - aggression that had resulted in deaths on a scale of millions - to impose crippling sanctions on his country, sanctions that made life very miserable for ordinary innocent Iraqis.
To this point, the tale I have told was completely common ground amongst world leaders. The Russians, the French, the Germans - all those who became oh-so righteous with their "told you so's" later agreed at the time that Saddam had been building chemical and biological weapons and developing nuclear weapons. It was for precisely this reason that they had supported the sanctions against him.
Now we come to matters as seen by the British and Americans, and not universally acknowledged. Saddam was a thoroughly unpleasant and dangerous individual, leader of a thoroughly unpleasant and dangerous regime. We had been weak in responding to his defiance in the 1990s, and our weakness had encouraged many other regimes around the world to believe that they, too, might be able to stand up against us because we had no will to defend ourselves and no stomach to put down our opponents. This contributed to an escalating series of attacks upon Western interests through the 1990s which, though Saddam was not believed to have been a direct participant in, his continued defiance undoubtedly encouraged. Indeed, since many of those attacking Western interests were believed to operate through cell structures and have little or no direct contact with leaders, Saddam's example and defiance was in many ways no less relevant to the growth of international terrorism than was the example and defiance of Al-Qaeda.
This period of weak, reactive appeasement saw its climax in the 9/11 attacks in New York. Following these attacks, the US in particular decided to move onto the front foot, encouraged by the activist interventionism of the Blair administration in the UK, in particular its successful leadership of ventures in Sierra Leone, Kosovo and Serbia. The very first target from this front foot venture was Afghanistan, since that was the actual source of the 9/11 attacks. The inevitable next target was Iraq. Advocates of the front foot strategy had further targets in mind - in particular Iran, North Korea and Syria, and perhaps also Libya. If there were to be any credibility whatever in dealing with these later matters, however, then Iraq had to be dealt with first.
That was why we invaded Iraq. For formalistic legal reasons connected to terribly outdated notions of "international law" (which is nothing more than a set of customs for how states deal with one another - who cares if something "breaks international law"? I really couldn't give a fig!) and because of difficulties in managing isolationist or pacifist or plain old appeasing Labour backbenchers, Blair wanted to go through the motions of attempting to obtain an explicit UN mandate for intervention. To do that, he had to attempt to set up specific arguments concerning the actual presence of weapons of mass destruction and actual threats upon British interests. But I don't believe he cared about any of that any more than I do. At the end of the day, the case I offered above is the reason he believed we should invade, it was the reason the Americans believed we should invade, it was the reason the Conservative parliamentary Party was overwhelmingly in favour of invasion, and it was the reason newspapers such as the Times and Telegraph and the smart journalists worth listening to, such as Michael Gove, were in favour of invading.
All this stuff about wars for oil and "Bush's poodle" and the bizarre fantasies of Michael Moore are as worthless as the raving graffiti on lavatory walls. And in this country the BBC has had a bizarre fixation upon issues such as the 45 minute claim in the "dodgy dossier" and what the Attorney General did or did not advise. These matters are irrelevant. I don't care about these things; Blair didn't care about these things; none of the Conservative MPs who vote for going to war in Iraq cared about these things. It is just possible that a couple of dozen Labour backbenchers cared about these things, so it would have been politically awkward if they had come out at the wrong moment. But the will of Parliament to invade Iraq was not contingent upon any of these matters.
Now, if there were not more important things to debate, then perhaps these matters would have their own, minor interest, exposing as they do some of the lies and spin that were the warp and weave of New Labour. But the truth is that they are a huge distraction, which has meant that the political class in this country has failed to engage with the real issue, or even, frankly, to be aware that the real issue exists.
Because the real issue is not that Saddam Hussein didn't have weapons that could threaten Cyprus, or that he couldn't threaten it in 45 minutes, or that someone somewhere suggested that invading Iraq might violate some norm of international behaviour or other. It's not even that Saddam turned out not to have WMD at the time of the invasion - for he could have had them earlier and disposed of them.
The real problem is that the whole core case, the matters upon which there was international agreement, the uncontested assumptions that drove Blair to believe that war with Iraq was appropriate and necessary and to seek to find a way to make it legal and acceptable - the whole core case was wrong. Following the first Iraq war, Saddam did not seek to defy the international community. He did not violate the key substance of the sanctions against him. He did not continue to build or refuse to decommission his chemical and biological weapons. He did not attempt to develop or build nuclear weapons. All these core beliefs, all the main allegations that placed him firmly in the target sights after 9/11 and made war with him inevitable, were false.
That is nothing, per se, to do with Bush jnr or Blair. The real questions here are for John Major and Bill Clinton. How was it that, on Major and Clinton's watch, the whole world came, for a decade, to believe that Saddam was defying us when he was not. Of course he attempted to build his ridiculous super-gun, but we wouldn't have invaded Iraq over that. Of course he diverted money from the oil for food programme, but we wouldn't have invaded Iraq over that. Of course he employed anti-Western rhetoric, but we wouldn't have invaded Iraq over that. We had sanctions on Iraq for a decade, we bombed Iraq regularly for a decade, we made Iraq a pariah state for a decade, on the basis that Iraq was defying us, and it was not.
This is the real story. It is the story of how our security services and our intelligence processes could completely let us down, not for a month or two, not for a year when we weren't really focused upon the matter, but for an entire decade under the spotlight of constant publicity and with constant backing by policy. If that can happen, what can we believe that our intelligence says? Is Iran really building nuclear weapons? Until we get to the bottom of what went wrong in Iraq, how are we to know? Did Korea really test an atom bomb? Does China really violate human rights? Is Belgium truly liberal and peaceful? Is Zimbabwe really an economic disaster? Did Columbus really discover America? How are we to believe anything at all if the entire world can be so deceived over Iraq for an entire decade?
This is one of the biggest stories of all time - the total material falsehood of what the whole world believed. And yet in Britain we focus on trivia about international law and dodgy dossiers and who prayed with whom. Let's address real questions - the big questions - first, and leave the trivia and fantasies to Michael Moore.
