Iraq Inquiry Digest

Comment from chris lamb
Time June 24, 2012 at 3:20 pm

If what was meant was that the Foreign Office Legal Advisors’ advice, which directly contradicted the US ‘revival argument’ version of legality, should have been brought before Cabinet for its deliberation, this was more than ‘casting doubt in some circumstances’. The Legal Advisors’ countervailing advice would have been that Article 39 had not been properly complied with, the Council had not corporately decided whether a breach of the ceasefire had occurred and there were no powers under the UN Charter for unilateral initiation of force. In other words, it would have pointed to the illegality of the action.

It mystifies me why MPs have stepped this up as an issue now when curtailing the legal advice to achieve this outcome clearly underpinned the meeting between Goldsmith and Straw on 13 March 2003. Campbell’s note shows that Goldsmith was under similar pressure from both Blair and Straw over the content of the legal advice and how it was to be presented.

If the Chilcot Inquiry is not noting all this and reassessing its report (if need be) to incorporate all this, it will be yet another reason for public confidence in Chilcot to be forfeited.

On unanswered questions about the Iraq invasion, MPs should occupy themselves in determining, on various grounds including not least the legal advice expunged earlier from Cabinet, whether the Resolution they paased on 18 March 2003 for the invasion was, in fact, legal.

On a different note, here is an interesting article in today’s Mail on Sunday raising new evidence about breaches in international humanitarian law over the treatment of Iraqi civilian detainees in 2003;

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2163799/UK-soldiers-beat-innocent-Iraqi-men-black-ops-jails-new-secret-justice-law-means-torture-hidden-forever.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

Comment from chris lamb
Time June 24, 2012 at 3:43 pm

After reading the Independent account in the previous posting, there should be a recall of the Chilcot Inquiry to establish the factual chain of events between the 11 and 17 March 2003 and resolve certain inconsistencies between Campbell’s diary entries and Simon MacDonald’s note of the meeting between Straw and Goldsmith on 13 March 2003 where they appeared to agree to present a version of Straw’s already drafted paper for the Parliamentary Select Committee on Foreign Affairs to Cabinet on 17 March. Campbell’s diary contends that a one page paper had already been worked out with Blair and his advisors on 11 March.

The Independent extracts can be found in the second of the links given in John Bone’s last comment in the previous posting.

Comment from andrewsimon
Time June 24, 2012 at 10:40 pm

Alastair now offers us Free research for anyone minded to follow up Independent on Sunday non-story splash via his blog. He uses the following examples to try to pour cold water onto the fresh little inferno he just (re)ignited:

e.g. when Sir Roderic Lyne asks: ‘so no one at any stage asked you to restrict what you said to cabinet to the fairly limited terms in which you presented this to cabinet?’ And Goldsmith replies ‘No.’

(dealt with above)

e.g. (the paper suggests TB stopped him speaking to Cabinet) ‘I do recall telling Cabinet, “well, there is another point of view,”but this is the conclusion that I have reached’

So he didn’t actually give them the other point of view? Plainly not!

e.g. ‘I was there. I was therefore in a position to answer all questions. I was in a position to say that my opinion was that this was lawful… I did say that there was another point of view, but they knew that very well in any event.’

Being in a position to answer questions is not the same as actually answering them.

eg ‘The cabinet I’m sure knew that there were two points of view because that had been well travelled in the press. The caveat was you need to be satisfied that there really has been a failure to take the final opportunity. That, of course, was something which was right in the forefront of cabinet’s mind, I have no doubt, and I’m sure was mentioned by the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary and others in the course of the debate. So I think the issue was well understood.’

So the cabinet was supposed to take an opinion based on what is printed in the newspapers rather than from the Attorney General himself?? And how well travelled in the press was precise legal advice about the exact pros and cons of it all anyway? I seem to remember several legal eagles being against but not anyone (not involved) for.

eg “There were a number of cabinet ministers there who had actually seen….I knew had seen the whole of the minute, for example, of 7 March, although things, as you rightly say, had moved on.”

So who had actually seen the earlier advice? How big a number of ministers? What was their take on the change of emphasis? Was this ever mentioned anywhere else? Or is the number just two – these being Blair and Straw? Three? Hoon as well?

e.g. ‘Was it lawful? That was a necessary condition. Then they would need to consider whether it was the right thing to do. That’s what they then went on to debate, and I sat and listened as they went through the issues of the effect on the domestic community, the effect on international policy, what would this do in terms of the UN and so forth. So they were looking at much bigger questions of ‘is it right?’ Not just ‘is it lawful’.

So was the discussion simply framed in terms of whether it was ‘right’ or not? I question which was (or at least should have been) the biggest question – legality or doing the ‘right’ thing – even then was the ‘right’ thing actually about simply removing Saddam – or was it more about blindly following the US no matter what it wanted to do?

Comment from Anthony Miller
Time June 25, 2012 at 12:42 am

It seems disrespectful of Campbell to be putting this new information in the public domain so long after the end of the hearings … to say the least. But then the man is a bucket of shamelessness.

Putting pressure on Goldsmith? I dont think much was needed. For one thing he and Tony were old mates…. Although John Prescott noted with an uncharacteristic level of understatement that Peter “was not a happy bunny” I doubt much “pressure” needed to be brought to bear. In a similar way I doubt much pressure needed to be brought to bear on the Cabinet for them to do a collective pontius pilate and dump all blame on Goldsmith by not asking for the can of worms to be opened. The bottom line was Tony Blair had made it clear that the only alternative to backing his war in Iraq was regicide*. He would have been fatally politically weakened anyway by such a U-turn even if he did not resign. But basically Tony Blair held the whole cabinet to ransom in order to get his war. They in turn swallowed this poison reluctantly as they were afraid disposing of the PM would fatally weaken the party’s chances at the next election. This action bought the administation more time but the slow poison of the decision to go to war in Iraq inevitably did bring an end to Tony Blair’s rule … and indeed the Labour government. It still haunts politics today. A major plank of Ed Miliband’s campaign against David was “I’m too young to be guilty for the war”.

*or whatever else you call disposal of a PM

Comment from John Bone
Time June 25, 2012 at 10:29 am

In the extracts of the diaries published in the Guardian last weekend, Jack Straw is quoted as saying that for the USA the invasion of Iraq was a war of choice. This is the crux of the matter. George Bush made little effort to hide his belief that the USA had the right to start wars where and when it wanted and the British political elite had no easy way of dealing with that. It was difficult for them to take a distance from the Americans yet it was also difficult to persaude the British public of the wisdom and legitimacy of the USA’s new military doctrines. The invasion of Iraq was therefore sold to the public as a war of necessity. Matters were coming to a head in February and March 2003 when the USA prepared to invade Iraq while inspections were still going on and there was no UN mandate. There were too many questions to be resolved in too little time. How could the UK not go to war after all the bombast of the previous 6 months? Yet how could the UK go to war when weapons’ inspections were still in progress?

The Labour Party had left Blair to deal with this dilemma. This was the way that New Labour worked: MPs and loyal members repeated the talking points coming from the leadership, while other members were marginalised. Only a few MPs (such as Peter Kilfoyle, quoted in the Independent) had been asking obvious questions from the beginning, such as “what do we do when the US wants to invade without a UN mandate?” Most of Blair’s colleagues had been too trusting of Blair and believed that he could avoid this dilemma, until the last minute when what they had hoped to avoid was staring them in the face. The Cabinet should have had a discussion about the various possible secenarios (and the legal implications) six months previously. They had accepted Blair’s assurance that he would get a second resolution (instead of insisting on a plan for a scenario where he didn’t) and it was too late to start debating it in March 2003 (when it was obvious that there wasn’t a plan).

A couple of lessons (for me) are that
- the UK has to be much more open about its relationship with the US
- political parties have to be open to questioning of their leadership, and the press has to be more distant from political leadership to break the echo chamber effect that led to the crisis of March 2003.

However, as I have said before, the lessons one learns depends on the questions that one asks. I don’t know if Chilcot will come up with those lessons because they derive from questions that he feels that he cannot ask.

Comment from Anthony Miller
Time June 25, 2012 at 12:12 pm

The timing is very interesting. Could it be that Campbell is stating this now because he has recieved a salmon letter and decided that he no longer has any choice other than to hang Blair out to dry?

Comment from Anthony Miller
Time June 25, 2012 at 12:19 pm

Mr Bone,

I see where you’re coming from but for MPs to be more questioning of their leadership they need grass roots members to fall back on for support. The problem is that there hardly are any in any of the main parties. Both the main parties are more or less staffed by professional full time politicians. Most of whom have done nothing but politics their whole lives. Therefore they are afraid to stand up to the Cabinet/PM not only because they have no support from below but …in many cases … if they were to lose their seats there is nothing else that they can actually do…

http://insidecroydon.com/2012/06/20/why-join-a-political-party-that-does-not-allow-you-to-vote/

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Time June 25, 2012 at 1:03 pm

[...] that Blair set out to mislead not just the British public but his own Cabinet.”  Journalist Chris Ames (Iraq Inquiry Digest) notes differences in accounts and concludes, “If the Inquiry does not address this, it will have no [...]

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Time June 26, 2012 at 12:58 am

[...] that Blair set out to mislead not just the British public but his own Cabinet.”  Journalist Chris Ames (Iraq Inquiry Digest) notes differences in accounts and concludes, “If the Inquiry does not address this, it will have no [...]