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After weeks of detailed evidence, Lord Hutton’s final report into the death of Dr David Kelly has become almost irrelevant – at least as far as the court of public opinion is concerned. Despite the elaborate choreography of government evidence, the basic facts are now incontrovertible. And they are completely damning of the decision to go to war with Iraq, and very damaging for the credibility of Blair and his government.
The government wanted to limit the scope of the inquiry, but inevitably it has burst the bounds of the immediate circumstances of Kelly’s death. The central issues can be summed up like this: a) Did government ministers and their aides, alone or in co-operation with intelligence services, manufacture or distort evidence about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)? b) Did the government, and Tony Blair, Alistair Campbell and Geoff Hoon in particular have a strategy for ‘outing’ David Kelly as the source for Andrew Gilligan’s story about the ‘sexed up’ dossier? And c) did BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan, or the BBC more generally, make false claims about what Kelly had said and lie about government distortion of the facts about WMDs?
That there was a strategy to ‘out’ David Kelly has been all but admitted by government officials. Thanks to the unlikely device of putting Alistair Campbell’s dairy into the public domain, we now know that Campbell was desperate to expose Kelly as the source. There were two inter-twined motives – first to punish Kelly, and second to get him to deny the story that the government and/or Campbell had ‘sexed up’ the so-called dodgy dossier, inserting the false claim that Iraq could launch WMDs within 45 minutes.
It is now absolutely clear that the Ministry of Defence and Downing Street told journalists that they would ‘confirm or deny’ names put to them as the potential source, and indeed the Independent got it in one question. It has also become clear, through his own testimony and others, that Tony Blair was at least complicit in this strategy. The government hung Kelly out to dry, and they regarded it as apt punishment for his ‘disloyalty’. That contributed massively to his death.
Second, it is now obvious to all but total Blairite loyalists that the government’s claims about Iraqi WMDs was false through and through. In one sense, the ‘45-minute’ claim was just the tip of a massive iceberg of lies, but of course it did add spice to suggest that civilians in the West were under some kind of imminent threat of biological or worse attack. The government’s defence on this has essentially been that they relied on advice from the intelligence agencies, primarily MI6, and they were just conveying what they considered to be good intelligence. John Scarlett, head of the Defence Intelligence Committee, has backed up his masters’ story on this – and doubtless a knighthood waits in the wings. But the whole story is ridiculous, for several reasons.
First Scarlett’s disavowal of disquiet among the intelligence services about the contents of some of the dossiers does not ring true. It seems clear that there has been alarm among sections of the security services and the top military brass at Blair’s headlong rush to support Bush all down the line. This disquiet has reflected concern about the discrediting of their intelligence, but probably also fears that participating in war against Iraq would increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks in Britain, not lessen it.
More generally, those in the upper echelons of the state’s security apparatus must have been concerned about the adventurist drift of Bush’s military policies, and the possibility of landing Britain in more and unpredictable military operations.
Second and more importantly, the government’s claim that they were just echoing the advice of intelligence experts is a plain absurdity. One hapless Labour backbencher was put up on Newsnight to claim that this was a question for ‘specialists’ and not a ‘political’ question! Since when, anyone with the least knowledge of history will ask, has war and peace been a technical and not a political question? Obviously the apparatus of dossiers and reports was part of a giant political campaign to whip the House of Commons and the British people into support for war.
I n fact, on the last two days of the Inquiry, the government’s lawyers reversed their line on this, saying of course Ministers had an input into the dossiers, because, well they had overall political responsibility!
Public opinion is in any case much less concerned about the detailed arguments about who wrote what, and more convinced by the fact that absolutely no weapons of mass destruction have been found, after six months of searching – not to mention Hans Blix’s assertion that Iraq’s WMDs were probably destroyed a decade ago.
The final piece of the jigsaw is the role of the BBC. This has been of course a huge diversion engineered by Alistair Campbell to take the heat off the government – the Guardian’s comment and opinion editor Seamus Milne describes it as a “displacement activity”. Because of the tense atmosphere that surrounds the renegotiation of the BBC’s Charter, and attempt by Rupert Murdoch’s empire to get the government to even further downgrade the role of public service broadcasting to the benefit of BskYB, the Corporation has run scared in front of Alistair Campbell’s onslaught.
In the latter stages of the Inquiry BBC bosses distanced themselves from Andrew Gilligan’s reports. Whatever the precise wording of those reports and especially the most controversial one at 6.07 in the morning (!), he has been consistent in saying that Kelly told him that Alistair Campbell was responsible for ‘sexing up’ the dodgy dossier. Newsnight science editor Susan Watts told the Inquiry that Kelly had told her it was the Downing Street press office and that Kelly said “I take it for granted that this is synonymous with Alistair Campbell”.
The net result of all this is that Hutton will probably attribute some blame on Andrew Gilligan and the BBC, by way of being ‘even-handed’. Galling though it is to see Campbell’s anti-BBC crusade having some success, the overall balance sheet of the Inquiry for the government has been utterly negative. For the Inquiry has gone alongside the crisis in Iraq and increasing evidence of mass resentment – and resistance – towards the Anglo-American occupation. US soldiers are shot almost daily, and the American military in retaliation carries out reckless and random attacks on civilians. The evidence that the US is preparing to put the Iraqi under the tutelage of its own giant corporations is irrefutable. Meanwhile the lives of most ordinary Iraqis are dominated by the fight to survive economically, while criminality and violence – especially against women – are endemic. The growing fiasco and quagmire of the occupation is the background to a growing understanding that the war was fought on false grounds, and that the British people were systematically lied to. The Hutton Inquiry has shown that loud and clear, day in and day out. It is a disaster for the Blairites.
One fascinating revelation has been that Foreign Secretary Jack Straw argued that British troops not actually participate in the invasion. Straw’s pre-war nervousness is understandable. The smug glee which abounded in Whitehall when Saddam’s army collapsed and victory was achieved has been replaced by a stark realisation that the war was a political calamity. Now the anti-war movement has to turn its political vindication into a massive push to use the Iraq occupation crisis into further defeats for Bush and Blair’s militarism.