A theme of essays marking the 10th anniversary of the gigantic anti-war march in London has been that the government’s indifference to it proved that British democracy is fraudulent. This is not a great argument as politicians are not obliged to respect the wishes of the loudest contingent of the populace. Much of the British public, and, more relevantly, most MPs were in favour of the war. People who have made this observation, though, have wrongly jumped to the conclusion that this absolves the system. Norman Geras writes that the war “wasn’t a blow against the state of…democracy…in this country”; Alex Massie claims that it had “all the legitimacy it needed”; Rob Marchant insists that “democracy is fully intact”.
Now, I am no democracy fetishist. Wars are not made virtuous or wicked on the basis of their popular support in the aggressive nations. If the French decided tomorrow that invading Britain was a sensible idea it would not justify attack. Still, it seems to me that an intriguing question might be why the public and, indeed, parliamentarians decided that war in Iraq was necessary.
It was sold to us largely as an attempt to obstruct Saddam Hussein’s production and deployment of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The idea that he intended to and, indeed, was able to do this was reliant on the September Dossier – an assessment of the findings of the British intelligence services. This is infamous as being “dodgy” and that, if anything, is a generous description.
Alastair Campbell tried to claim that the dossier was the work of the Joint Intelligence Committee but this was misleading. The evidence that the spooks had come up with was limited and their opinions regarding it were often uncertain. A pack of spin doctors, though, had dressed the data up as being more substantive than it was and cloaked it in the rhetoric of certitude. As the admirable Chris Ames demonstrates, possible threats were presented as existing dangers, and indications of malice were adduced as actual proofs. Campbell himself was influential in this process: demanding that evidence be overblown, or, in his words, made “stronger”.
A notorious example is the claim that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes. This was inserted into the dossier after the spin doctors had placed their hands on it, and described as something Iraq may be capable of. A spook objected to its prominence “since it [was] based on a single source” yet it was not merely included but presented as something that Hussein was able to do. It was over evidence such as this that Tony Blair claimed that the dossier had “established beyond doubt” that the Baathist state had continued to produce and seek to develop weapons of mass destruction. The empty hands of the inspectors were, of course, soon to prove that doubt was the least that one should have been experiencing.
The government, then, did not offer citizens the evidence on which to base their views but seem to have made them the target of a PR campaign. This suspicion was bolstered by Major General Michael Laurie, director general of the Defence Intelligence Staff, who told the Chilcot Inquiry that its “purpose…was precisely to make a case for war, rather than setting out the…sparse and inconclusive intelligence”.
If this was dishonest, the presentation of the Dossier’s claims in the media was befitting of the most farcical of Communist states. The Sun, for example, roared atop one page that Britons were “45mins FROM DOOM”. Further down the page it bellowed that Hussein was “ONE YEAR away” from nuclear capability, while to the left a headline simply howled “GET HIM”.
The Daily Star, meanwhile, made its cousin appear to be a model of reserve with the front page headline: “Mad Saddam Ready to Attack: 45 Minutes from a Chemical War”. The Times and The Telegraph both had less deranged but nonetheless doom-mongering accouncements in their publications.
These events took place at the same time as an American campaign of warmongering that was even more bovine and feculent. Its fumes drifted into Britain. David Rose, who, before the invasion, was writing in The Evening Standard that “Iraq’s support for terror” made regime change “integral”, lamented five years later that a U.S. official had “told [him] time and again that Saddam really did have operational links with al-Qaeda”. ITN’s Washington correspondent, meanwhile, was to insist that, “As Dick Cheney…warned, Iraq may soon be armed with a nuclear weapon”. Well, if Dick Cheney said it…
This was also in an environment where people were extremely scared of terrorism. There was cause to be afraid of terrorism, naturally, but not on the scale that people were in that period. On the fifth day of 2003 police had raided a flat in Wood Green and arrested six men on suspicion of manufacturing ricin. I remember how scary it was to think of this toxin that could slay thousands in minute quantities. The papers, of course, affirmed these fears. The Sun wrote of a “factory of death”; The Mail warned of a “Poison Gang on the Loose” and The Mirror – which, it should be granted, was openly anti-war – showed a gigantic skull on its front page beneath the headline, “IT’S HERE!”
Such was the fear among some Britons in those months that army surplus stores were doing a brisk trade in gas masks. That this was directed towards Iraq is not a matter of supposition. In the middle of his fantastically dishonest speech to the UN Colin Powell cited the case as evidence of a “sinister nexus” between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. The problem was that there was that there was no ricin and no plot but one thuggish fantasist with cack-handed ambitions of manufacturing poisons. Moreover, within two days of the arrests government scientists had known there was no ricin. Why this did not filter out to the rest of us is an unanswered question.
When people, whether in Parliament or in the streets, decided to endorse the invasion of Iraq, then, they did it not merely in the context of fears of widespread, devastating terrorist assaults but a concerted effort to direct these fears onto the personage of Saddam Hussein. This was a deceptive attempt to manipulate citizens at their most vulnerable. One can draw no conclusion other than that it was a blow to democracy, and a fairly injurious one, which makes what legitimacy the war ever had spurious.
He whose advisers present only that information which is convenient to their aims – or, indeed, simply make it up – is not much of a ruler. And, more particularly, they who promote an invasion on dishonest premises; carry it out with brutal recklessness and observe the ensuing carnage from a distance would shame any people and political system.
February 17, 2013 at 8:14 am
Very good, and very comprehensive.
On the issue of democracy: I certainly didn’t expect the protests to prevent the war, but I did kind of think the sheer scale of them worldwide would force those pushing for it to pause and reconsider, however briefly, whether they might be about to do something crazy. It was plain that the PM 100% believed his own propaganda, but it didn’t seem fanciful to imagine that both those around him and those fighting his corner in the national media might reexamine their presumptions.
Well, that went down as another one of my amazing Nostradumbass predictions. What we got instead was a lengthy – and still ongoing – campaign to depict everyone who attended as a nutter or a quisling. I can only imagine this is still necessary in order to keep wars on the table in future, since it certainly serves no purpose in an argument that was long since utterly lost by those pushing the line.
(It’s also fun to compare and contrast the relative narcissism of people who said “let’s not have a war” with a political class who thought they were the vanguard of freedom, creating an Arc of Democracy or whatever it was).
And you’re making a good and vital point here about pre-war attitudes. I’ve had various folk demanding that I acknowledge that “lots of people supported the war” in the past few days, to which you have to respond – in large part, because of the massive, deliberate and successful attempt to fearmonger them into supporting it. People I know really did think that Iraq was capable of nuking Britain, you know.
Another one I like is – if we hadn’t pushed on and invaded Iraq, Saddam would’ve been emboldened and tyrants strengthened. I mean, forget what actually happened re: massively strengthening Iran. If Saddam would’ve got a lift, that would’ve been down to the people who intentionally created a massive crisis out of nothing in the first place, not the people who objected to a war to avert that non-existent crisis.
But hey, this is all old news. It was an absolutely absurd moment in time, one that should’ve beshat several thousand reputations beyond salvation, but clearly our system doesn’t work like that. It’s just sad that this stuff still needs to be said.
February 17, 2013 at 12:30 pm
Cheers.
I either didn’t know or had forgotten how Blair reacted to the march. It turns out that it was to say that Saddam Hussein was a bad man. A very bad man. A total bastard. There was, though, not a word on how he could be sure that removing him would lead to his replacement with something better. I picture him as a surgeon, standing over a patient, revving up a chainsaw as he drones on about how very bad tumours are.
February 17, 2013 at 4:38 pm
To be fair to Tony, that weak jumble of non-sequiturs is actually considerably more rebuttal than I remember him offering at the time. All I remember is that time he said he was glad Britons could protest, because Iraqis couldn’t. It was one of those foot-through-the-TV moments, as I recall.
February 17, 2013 at 4:44 pm
Yes, I think this is an important point about pre-war attitudes that is often overlooked. People were being forcefed lies about Saddam for months – those Sun headlines are toe-curlingly embarrassing – and even if Blair would have gone to war anyway cos Saddam is teh worst etc, it’s still the case that his Govt’s propaganda effort was entirely based on Saddam’s threat to the UK – it had nothing to do with how nasty he was to his own people. surely that tlels us something – Alastair Campbell is not stupid – surely it tells us that the British public would certainly not have cared enough about the evilness of Saddam for it to outweight the desire to go to war against myriad other dictatorships.
That speech is pretty upsetting in hindsight, not least the idea therein that this is the equivalent of not intervening in Abyssnia. Witness:
terrorism and rogue states with Weapons of Mass Destruction [...] are answerable to no democratic mandate, so are unrestrained by the will of ordinary people.
The conflation of the two is bad enough, but the evidence of the ‘will of the ordinary people’ in Britain is that they believed their govt’s lies and thought war was a good idea. It turned out that they’d been totally deceived, and I’m with Owen Jones on this, it was those fabrications, above all, that caused the general disbelief in anything politicians say post-2003. Remember David Aaronovitch’s ‘prediction’ – something whch he totally failed to live up to, but many others surely did.
And just another thing – on the whole ‘you didn’t march much after the war started’ thing. I’m sure a lot of people wanted to avoid such a RUSH into war – to make sure that it was both legal but also that it was justified. I’d be willing to bet that 0.0001% of the marchers were actually supportive of Saddam – but the majority believed that the war was not worth his remova, especially not on the grounds Blair was selling it, and especially not in the hands of obviously corrupt people like Cheney and Rumsfeld. It was the rush, the certainty, the zealotry of people to get on board with this that were the real problem for many, surely.
And this zealotry is still a massive problem. Those people who still maintain Blair really just hates tyrants, even as he picks up his Kazakhstan cheque, simply have NOT done the kind of soul searching they claim their opponents lack. They didn’t care, and still don’t care, about the people who actually instigated the war – Rumsfeld et al, the profiteers; they don’t care about the effect of it either, otherwise they wouldn’t quibble with the numbers of dead (I still can’t quite believe that Aaronviitch does this) and they wouldn’t pretend that sanctions were less preferable (which, at root, is Aaro’s intention in asking people to ‘accept that their solutions would have caused deaths too’ – even though it is totally obvious from history that the cons of this war far outweigh the pros).
February 17, 2013 at 5:47 pm
I love the way that those who protested against the war, and especially those who marched against it are accused of being “narcisstic”, “self-indulgent”, “self-righteous” etc. by the “Decent left”, ie those who pretty much define themselves by their own moral superiority.
Mind you, the worst ones are those Decents (and there are some) who say they opposed the war themselves. I can take people saying “people who take the opposite position to me on this issue are plain wrong” – I get it, they have strong feelings on the subject and we’ve probably all been guilty of this at times. But people who are saying “well I took this position for the right reason but pretty much everyone else on the same side was unprincipled” are just wankers.
February 17, 2013 at 6:20 pm
On a comment at Stumbling and Mumbling, our old friend EJH links to an IPSOS Mori poll from just before the invasion. (I remembered this but didn’t remember the link.) It shows that just before the invasion only a quarter of people thought that the UK should take part in the invasion if inspections were still in progress and there was no new UN resolution.
http://www.ipsos-mori.com/newsevents/ca/287/Iraq-The-Last-PreWar-Polls.aspx
So it really wasn’t true that the majority of people supported the invasion under the circumstances in which it happened (which proponents of the invasion usually fail to mention). If there was a peak in support just after the invasion it was because people presumed that Blair must have had some other evidence to back-up his assertion that it was an established fact that Iraq had WMD. They probably also presumed that the AG had a good argument to back up his assertion that it was legal. It’s been all downhill since then as no WMD were found, the occupation was a disaster, and each new Inquiry and leak exposes another layer of dishonesty.
Politicians may have to take decisions that go against public opinion, but you would expect them to have their story straight on why they are right and to have thought through the implications. The damage to democracy comes from the constant changing of the narrative of why it was right to invade Iraq, the lack of depth in any of these narratives and the way that reality eventually proves them to be wrong.
February 17, 2013 at 9:44 pm
Guano -
Hrm – in a post about pro-war bullshit I may have inadvertently regurgitated pro-war bullshit. Apologies if so. I was basing the assertion on the statistic dated 18.3.03 here but I can find no record of the poll in question and, yes, the more detailed figures in the Ipsos MORI study contradict them. I will change that sentence to a more ambiguous one in line with your comment. Thank you.
Andrew -
I agree (and, to my shame, remember making such a sentiment myself). To assert or imply that George Galloway being an old meanie is more important than a war that was asserted on dishonest grounds and caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands is to admit to being, at best, morally blinkered.
Organic Cheeseboard -
I agree. I think it has a lot to do with people growing more and more upset about Europe, immigration and the financial crisis but no one event has done more to promote cynicism. To think that there was a time, before 2003, when millions of people were actually enthusiastic about such an odd bloke as Anthony Lynton Blair.
February 18, 2013 at 6:08 am
Those polls: the interesting thing is how the results fluctuate and probably give different results according to the question. It is hardly surprising that there was support for the invasion at the time, as that is what happens and people would assume that Blair was telling the truth when he said that he knew that Iraq had WMD. We have a problem because he was lying, and nobody did anything when it became clear that he was lying.
February 18, 2013 at 11:53 am
Indeed!