Blair and Bush must be held to account

We were lied into a bloody and unjust war, says Correlli Barnett. The US and UK behaved like international vigilantes Suddenly Tony Blair's role in manipulating the United Kingdom into George W. Bush's war on Iraq has dropped out of the newspapers and television — no doubt to vast sighs of relief in No. 10. The Downing Street spin-doctors have certainly been urging us to `draw a line' under the Hutton inquiry and 'move on'. They want us to forget the damning evidence presented to the inquiry about the devious role played by No. 10 (and Blair himself) in the framing of the 2002 dodgy dossier and the leaking of Dr Kelly's name.

But we must not fall for this. We must never let Blair evade his responsibility for Britain's entanglement in the needless war on Iraq and its continuing horrendous aftermath. And horrendous it is. Some 250 people have already been killed this month, while Iraq's political future remains thickly fogged in confusion and factional dissent. British troops will be stuck there for years to come.

In former times a chief minister responsible for getting Britain into such a disastrous mess would have faced impeachment. Today there have — so far — been enough toadies and ministerial hacks to ensure Blair's parliamentary survival. This is why the rest of us — opposition parties, the media, the British public — must not let him escape. We must continue relentlessly seeking the truth as to exactly why, and exactly when, Blair committed Britain to George W. Bush's expansionist Middle East ambitions.

Tony Blair's own favourite justification for war, Saddam's alleged WMD, has been deflating like a perished old balloon. Firstly, Dr Brian Jones (former head of scientific analysts in the Defence Intelligence Staff) has testified that the objections of intelligence experts to the misleading claims in the draft 2002 dossier about Saddam's WMD capabilities were simply ignored by those who (like Blair in his lurid foreword to the dossier) wanted to make as strong a case for war as possible.

Secondly, Blair himself, wrong-footed by an astute parliamentary question, has blurted out the extraordinary admission that when, in March 2003, he won the backing of his party in the House of Commons for war by means of a passionate speech about the looming threat from Saddam's WMD, he did not know that the WMD in question were short-range battlefield weapons, and not (as everyone assumed) missiles capable of hitting the British bases on Ojprus. This confes sion could hardly be more damaging, because it was on the basis of such grotesque ignorance that Blair took us to war.

The WMD case for war has unravelled still further since Blair's admission. David Kay, the retiring head of the Iraq Survey Group, has told a Senate committee in Washington that he believes that no WMD will ever be found, and that probably none has existed since the early 1990s. This statement makes total nonsense of Colin Powell's elaborate presentation to the UN Security Council back in February 2003 that supposedly offered visual proof of vast Iraqi arsenals, factories, mobile laboratories and whatnot. So we now have a committee set up in Washington by President Bush to investigate the discrepancy between such pre-war claims and post-war realities, and the parallel Butler committee set up later in London.

True to his native slipperiness, Tony Blair has imposed on the Butler committee the tightest possible terms of reference. They are not to touch the key issue — when, and for what true reasons, Blair decided to commit Britain to George Bush's pre-emptive war.

In the meantime, with Saddam's alleged WMD now a busted flush, Blair and his spokespeople have been belching out a smokescreen of alternative justifications for the war. The least convincing is Blair's still repeated 'passionate belief' that he was 'right'. Usually when someone persists in proclaiming they are 'right' in defiance of the facts, we think of them as having gone a bit potty.

Well, then, does not Saddam's record of aggression against his neighbours prove that he was a general threat to the Middle Fast and world peace? No, it does not. His stalemated war against Iran dates from the 1980s. His invasion of Kuwait dates back to 1991: this time a crushing defeat. Since then he has been closely monitored by Anglo-American air surveillance, complete with periodic destruction of his radar and flak defences. The truth is that when Bush and Blair were planning their pre-emptive war in 2002-03, Saddam posed no kind of general threat at all.

But then, surely the war was justified (so proclaim Bush and Blair and their mouthpieces) because the overthrow of Saddam has made the world a safer place? This is arrant nonsense. The rate of terrorist car-bombings around the world has quickened, not slowed, since the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq. In fact, that occupation has simply opened up a new flank vulnerable to attack, as we have seen all too horribly this month. Moreover, the elaborate security measures being taken by airports and airlines in the West, including the repeated cancellation of flights, hardly offer proof that the world is a safer place.

Well, what about the liberation of the Iraqi people from Saddam's monstrous tyranny? Won't that do as a justification for war? No, it will not, because the nature of another sovereign state's internal regime is not the business of either Britain or America. To admit the opposite principle that pre-emptive war is legitimised by moral and political disapproval would be to open the way to international anarchy.

That leaves the hoary old reliance on UN Security Council resolution 1441 of November 2002 as justification for the war: a justification still trotted out by Bushite and Blairite sympathisers. They also make great play with four antecedent UN resolutions over the period 1991-99 which Saddam failed to obey, claiming that these breaches in themselves give a clear legal basis for attacking Iraq. It does, however, weaken this claim that no one has proposed invading Israel because of her refusal to comply with other Security Council resolutions about her occupation of Palestinian territory.

If, then, America and Britain did indeed attack Iraq because of unenforced UN res olutions which have spent up to 12 years on the shelf, it would mean that they went to war simply on a disputable legal technicality. Some justification!

In regard to resolution 1441 itself, we must remember that only the Security Council can authorise armed action to enforce its resolutions. Resolution 1441 did not authorise such action. France and Russia would not have agreed to it otherwise. They made it clear that such authority must be reserved for a further and explicit Security Council resolution. Moreover, it is not true that France was opposed to any such resolution at any time — only that she was opposed to the attempt by America and Britain to foist their own draft on the Security Council, in March 2003, when Hans Blix and his team were doing good work and wanted more

time. Since the American military timetable precluded further delay, the British and American governments chose to go to war anyway, allegedly to enforce resolution 1441. But to do this without the Security Council's specific authorisation rendered them nothing better than international vigilantes.

All this — coupled with what we now know about the dodginess of the intelligence in regard to Saddam and WMD — must call into question the advice of Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General, to Blair & co that a war against Iraq would be legal.

As the evidence now stands, it seems clear that Blair did take Britain to war illegally, and that he did so because of a secret agreement with George W. Bush reached sometime back in the summer of 2002 or even earlier. Only the fact of such a secret agreement can explain why Blair drew such convenient conclusions from such obviously uncertain intelligence. So it does seem plain enough that he took us, the British people, into a war on which he had long ago decided in secret. This would mean that the prospectus for war which he offered to Parliament and people in March 2003 must indeed have been false.

That Blair should now be so deeply afraid of a searching public inquiry into such matters is therefore perfectly understandable. But such an inquiry we must have.