It has been evident for years that Blair misled public on Iraq
Monday November 23 2009
Tensions over the first full enquiry into the invasion of Iraq, which starts its hearings in London tomorrow, have been heightened by the leak of secret military documents which show a devastating picture of deceit and incompetence on the part of Tony Blair and his government in the run-up to the war.
The reputation of Blair and of successive UK governments will also be under pressure tomorrow from the publication of a Human Rights Watch report on complicity in the use of torture to obtain information from terrorist suspects.
It is clear that many senior figures in the armed forces have the utmost contempt for the way in which the invasion of Iraq was carried out and that some of them have deliberately leaked documents to the media to ensure that the enquiry, headed by John Chilcot, cannot get away with sweeping awkward evidence out of sight and producing a bland Whitehall whitewash.
The journalist who reported on the secret files for the 'Sunday Telegraph' is none other than Andrew Gilligan. He was with the BBC back in 2003 when he had a fateful off-the-record chat with a UN weapons inspector David Kelly. That triggered the chain of events which culminated in the apparent suicide of Kelly, followed by the Hutton enquiry.
It has been evident for several years that Blair deliberately misled the public and many of his colleagues about what was happening in the months before the invasion finally took place.
It is also no secret that the planning for the invasion was chaotic and that no serious work was done on how to consolidate military success once the fighting was over.
The new documents show just how much of a 'Dad's Army' exercise the invasion turned out to be, with some soldiers provided with a mere five bullets each to go into battle and some having their weapons confiscated by airport security because they were travelling on civilian planes.
Critics of Tony Blair are hoping that the Chilcot enquiry, which will be streamed live on the internet, will effectively become a trial to see whether or not he was guilty of a war crime by deliberately hyping up the fragmentary and unreliable evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
Chilcot himself is determined to avoid the enquiry becoming a quasi-court but he is going to find it difficult to avoid. The whole process may take as long as two years and Blair is not expected to give evidence until next spring, just as the general election campaigning will be getting under way.
The start of the enquiry coincides with the intense debate at Westminster about Afghanistan. The only tangible outcome from the inauguration of President Karzai last week seems to have been that Hillary Clinton became infatuated with the charms of the foreign secretary, David Miliband, in a bizarre mirror image of the way his predecessor, Jack Straw, fell for her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice.
Straw squired Rice around his constituency but never expressed his private feelings in public with the same uninhibited gusto as Clinton on Miliband: "If you saw him it would be a big crush -- I mean he is so vibrant, vital, attractive, smart -- and he's so young."
You would find it hard to get Peter Mandelson to enthuse like that about Miliband at the moment. Downing Street spindoctors are having to deny that Mandelson would like to emulate his grandfather, Herbert Morrison, and take over as foreign secretary. Mandelson had hoped Miliband would quit the Commons to become the EU's high representative.
But after the cosy pre- dinner carve-up of top jobs in Brussels, that carriage on the European gravy train is now occupied by Cathy Ashton, whose pay, at £239,000 (€265,270) a year will be 23pc higher than Gordon Brown's.
Even though Ashton has been the EU trade commissioner for the past year or so, her elevation caused astonishment at Westminster. Until now, her husband has had a far higher profile than her. He is Peter Kellner, a fluent political analyst who has written for numerous newspapers and who has developed a lucrative career in opinion polling.
- Nicholas Leonard
Irish Independent
