Tony Blair's appearance today before the Chilcot enquiry represents yet another significant moment for those pursuing WMD deceit, but the Times this morning suggests they are likely to be disappointed:
There is very little reason to go over this well-trodden ground again. The desire to do so appears to be based on the assumption that the inquiry is only ever the right question away from uncovering the deceit that must lie beneath. As each successive witness emerges without any such revelation, critics scratch their heads and denounce the inquisitors for the feebleness of their questioning. Critics are assuming the existence of a bombshell, then denouncing the inquiry for its failure to find one.Thus Blair is likely to deflect, spin and obfuscate, but utter a bare-faced lie?
There is a simpler explanation. There is no bombshell. There is just a parade of people, politicians, advisers and civil servants, at varying stages removed from power, recalling the nuances of an agonisingly difficult decision. The suggestion that the conflict was founded on a deliberate lie, a widely held belief, is hard even to make sense of. No serious politicians would make a case in public that they knew to be untrue, in the certain knowledge that they would be found out. The truth is always murkier than that.
Of course, for Tony Blair's detractors Chilcot has provided plenty of ammunition, but a smoking gun seems as elusive as the weapons of mass destruction themselves.
2 comments:
Well sadly I think he has now given us another smoking gun to go with all the rest, good news for us hard pressed smokers I suppose.
His reason for going to war - that the calculus of risk had changed after 9/11. A bizarre and illogical viewpoint let alone a strategy.
Also he admitted that he had misled Parliament and the country when he said in the sexed up dossier that the threat from Saddam was growing. He now says it wasn't it was the *perception* of the threat that was growing.
He might have given a fairly brauva performance but a brauva worm struggling on the end of a hook is still a worm struggling on the end of a hook.
The more I read of his statement the more interesting it gets.
I think he will be recalled.
Thanks, Observer.
No point in going over it all again here, I suppose, but like the various inquiries and seemingly endless debate on the topic in the last few years, Chilcot seems unlikely to tell us anything substantial that we didn't know already.
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