Posted by The Editors
on November 2, 2009, 5:21 pm, in reply to "Re: Paxman on Iraq - "we were hoodwinked""
John, we'be heard that before...
David Aaronovitch wrote in the Guardian of Iraq‘s alleged weapons of mass destruction:
"If nothing is eventually found, I - as a supporter of the war - will never believe another thing that I am told by our government, or that of the US ever again. And, more to the point, neither will anyone else. Those weapons had better be there somewhere." (Aaronovitch, ‘Those weapons had better be there...,’ The Guardian, April 29, 2003; http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,945551,00.html)
Alas, four years later:
“When Tony Blair became Leader of the Opposition in 1994, he... knew little about foreign policy. What he did have was a series of instincts about how the Major Government and the international community had handled affairs in Bosnia, and he wasn't impressed. Ever the anti-fatalist, once in office he was inclined to see such problems as requiring a solution. And passing across his desk in autumn 1997 were a series of intelligence reports concerning the dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, and his weapons of mass destruction. ‘We cannot let him get away with it,’ he told Paddy Ashdown that November.”
(Aaronovitch, ‘Tony Blair: The war? I believed in it, I believed in it then, I believe in it now,’ The Times, November 17, 2007;
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/the_blair_years/article2886677.ece)
Aaronovitch claimed he would never beleve Blair again, but here he claimed that "passing across his desk in autumn 1997 were a series of intelligence reports concerning the dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, and his weapons of mass destruction". As was obvious to just about everyone else in 2007, that wasn't true - there was nothing passing across Blair's desk to prompt his propaganda campaign, except perhaps orders from Bush.
Carne Ross, a key Foreign Office diplomat responsible for monitoring UN arms inspections in Iraq, said in 2005 that British government claims about Iraq's weapons programme had been "totally implausible". Ross told the Guardian:
"I'd read the intelligence on WMD for four and a half years, and there's no way that it could sustain the case that the government was presenting. All of my colleagues knew that, too." (Richard Norton-Taylor, 'WMD claims were "totally implausible",' The Guardian, June 20, 2005)
John Morrison, a former deputy chief of defence intelligence, commented on Blair‘s warnings of “a current and serious threat to the UK”: "When I heard him using those words, I could almost hear the collective raspberry going up around Whitehall." (Richard Norton-Taylor, 'Official sacked over TV remarks on Iraq,' The Guardian, July 26, 2004)
But Aaronovitch was happy to believe in 2007:
“The nightmare was the confluence of WMD with terrorism... and Saddam's continued defiance of UN resolutions seemed to confirm intelligence reports of continuing WMD capacity.” That was Blair's invention - nothing to do with reality.
We can expect much the same from Paxman as from Aaronovitch.
Eds
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