By Michael Faulkner – 02.07.2010
On January 29th former Prime Minister Tony Blair
made his long-awaited appearance before the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war.
It was a media event. During the week preceding his appearance the committee
had questioned former foreign secretary Jack Straw, two former top Foreign
Office lawyers, Sir Michael Wood and his deputy, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, and
former attorney general, Lord Goldsmith. On the vital question of the legality
of the war, Straw was equivocal and evasive. Wood said he regarded the war as
illegal and Wilmshurst, who had resigned in protest two days before the
invasion of Iraq, went further, denouncing it as a crime of aggression.
Goldsmith gave no convincing explanation for having changed his opinion
expressed on March 7th 20003 that there was no legal basis for the
war, to the view expressed on the 17th of March, immediately prior
to the invasion, that the war would be legal. He admitted to having had
discussions with US lawyers in Washington but denied that he had been subjected
to any pressure.
Goldsmith had prepared the ground for Blair. A moment’s
reflection is sufficient to lead to a pretty obvious conclusion, namely that
Goldsmith was very unlikely to go before the committee and say “I actually
continued to believe that without a second security council resolution the
invasion of Iraq would be illegal, but I felt under pressure from Blair and the
army chiefs to provide them with a cover of legality for what they were
determined to do, so I pretended to change my mind.” On the basis of all the
available evidence before the committee and in the public domain, this is
plainly what happened. But to have admitted it Goldsmith would not only have
exposed himself as a spineless wimp, but would also have made it impossible for
Blair and his accomplices such as Straw, Hoon and Campbell to continue their
mendacious dissembling. Therefore,
in a phrase that he had obviously rehearsed beforehand in anticipation of the
question, he dismissed such a suggestion as “utter nonsense.”
Now to Blair. The slightest knowledge of the man should have
made plain that unless he were to be subjected to the most thorough and
skillful interrogation by expert lawyers, he would run rings around the
inquiry. As there are no lawyers on the committee, and as it includes one
person who wrote Blair’s 1999 speech supporting military intervention and
another who thought that Bush and Blair might be compared to Churchill and
Roosevelt, it is hardly surprising that this is exactly what he did. He seized
the initiative from members of the committee and shifted the terms of the
inquiry to suit himself. In reporting the session journalists have made much of
Blair’s “bravura performance”, analyzing his gestures, his mannerisms, his
intonation. Present at the inquiry were members of the public as
non-participating observers. Many of them were the relatives of soldiers killed
in Iraq. A silent, angry audience,
they were waiting for some sign of contrition, of regret for the deaths of
their loved-ones, and, hopefully for some form of apology. They hoped in vain.
Blair and his accomplices, like their US neoconservative counterparts, take
their cue from John Wayne who characteristically quipped “Never apologize
– it’s a sign of weakness.”
Many of his critics regard Blair as a liar. The posters
carrying his caricature under the label “Bliar”. that first appeared on the two
million strong anti-war march in 2003, appeared again in the hands of the two
hundred or so demonstrators outside the Chilcot inquiry. But it is not quite
that simple. Blair is worse than a liar. There is reason to think that he
actually believes what he says and that he is either untroubled by any
inconsistencies in his acts or utterances, or persuades himself that there are
none. What drives him is belief – a strong belief that the opinions he
espouses and the conclusions he reaches are right and that such beliefs amount
to knowledge of the truth, regardless of any evidence to the contrary. It is likely, though not certain, that
Blair’s self righteousness and self-certainty are associated with his religious
faith. In assessing his performance at the Chilcot inquiry it may be worth
examining his Manichean belief system rather more carefully.
Blair is supposed once to have expressed an interest in
philosophy. If so, he must have abandoned it before giving any consideration to
questions of knowledge and belief. He is on record as saying “I only know what
I believe.” This is miserably muddle-headed and at an intellectual level is
risible. But it probably helps explain his strong sense of kindred spirit with
G.W. Bush whose thought processes seem similar. Blair’s dubious talent lies in
his ability to persuade some people that the truth value of any statement is
somehow dependent on the depth of conviction with which it is uttered, or upon
the self-proclaimed sincerity of the person uttering it – or, perhaps on
the identity of the person uttering it. Trawling through his testimony, one constantly
comes across expressions of this sort: “I believe (of Saddam Hussein) he threatened not just the region but the
world…it was better to deal with his threat, to remove him from office.”; “I do
genuinely believe that the world is safer as a result.”; “But I genuinely
believe that if we had left Saddam in power, even with what we know now, we
would still have had to have dealt with him.”
When asked if he thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass
destruction, he said: “I did believe it. And I did believe it beyond doubt.”
These statements illustrate the point. Saddam Hussein did not threaten the world. On the basis of no evidence,
Blair chose to believe that he did. To say the very least, the evidence that
Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, was not beyond doubt, but
Blair chose to believe that it was. It brings us back to his claim that he only
knows what he believes. Belief, unsupported by evidence, is not knowledge. To
claim that it is, is to substitute knowledge for faith – and that is the
realm in which Blair operates.
Blair, like many others, is prone to denounce as “fascist”
regimes he doesn’t like and believes to be ripe for “regime change” by Britain
and the US. At the Chilcot inquiry
he referred to Saddam’s Iraq as semi-fascist. He regards the Iranian regime in
the same way and intimated to the panel that he would support regime change by
invasion there also. The opponents of the Iraq war were in no doubt about the
brutal, repressive nature of Saddam’s regime and no-one can seriously doubt
that the Iranian regime is also very repressive, though, unlike Iraq, it is an
Islamic theocracy. But there are many very repressive regimes in the world.
Saudi Arabia is more repressive than Iran. Pakistan and Afghanistan are hardly
models of democratic tolerance. Certainly Saddam’s regime had some features
common to the European fascist states of the 1930s and 40s, but it far too easy
to use the label to justify regime change by military intervention. Ahmadinejad
is a thoroughly unpleasant, dictatorial demagogue, and Holocaust denial is just
as repellent coming from him as it is when it comes from European neo-Nazis and
anti-Semites. But Ahmadinejad is not Hitler and Iran is not Nazi Germany. And
while on the subject of fascist regimes, Franco’s Spain, solidly supported by
the United States and the West as a cold war ally was nonetheless genuinely
fascist. No attempt at regime change there. South Africa under Apartheid was a
racist tyranny which for 46 years oppressed the majority of the population and
operated a system of vicious racial categorization similar to that in Nazi
Germany. It was sustained by the US and the West and supported with arms in its
wars against Angola, Mozambique and Namibia.
Anyone with real knowledge of fascism is reluctant to use
the term in the slap-dash way common to those who prefer emotive invective to
serious political discourse. Whatever he is, Blair is not a fascist. Neither is
Bush. But one of the characteristics of fascist dictators was their profound
belief that they were right in everything they said and did. Contrary to the
mistaken view that Hitler was an atheist, he was in a peculiar way profoundly
religious. He wrote in Mein Kampf that he believed he was doing the work of the
Almighty. His Director of Communications, Josef Goebbels, was fond of parading
his “profound beliefs” to his captive listeners. On one such occasion, the defiant
“Total War” speech to a hand-picked audience in the Berlin Sportpalast following
the rout of the 6th Army at Stalingrad in 1943 which led to
Germany’s total defeat, he told his enraptured audience that they should
prepare themselves for total war against the Bolshevik hordes. He profoundly
believed, he said that victory could and would be won. Furthermore, he
revealed, the Fuhrer had told him personally that he also profoundly believed
the same thing. That was good enough. The hand-picked audience raised their
right arms and cheered the Director of Communications to the rooftop. The rest
of the population kept their thoughts to themselves. Those inclined to mistake
their own beliefs for knowledge – beware.