Adrian Hamilton: Don't be deceived by Blair and his apologists

No, no, no. Tony Blair cannot be allowed to leave No 10 with yet another rewriting of history and yet more attempts to lay the whole blame for Iraq on the lack of a post-invasion strategy.

The latest rewrite comes in Channel 4's two-part documentary to be aired this weekend. In it, we are told, Blair warned Washington of the need for a proper occupation plan as early as a year before the actual invasion, and kept repeating his concerns. It was not, in other words, that Blair and his advisers didn't think about the problem, it was just that the Americans took no notice of them.

To this shameful attempt by Blair's inner circle to relieve themselves of the charge of ignorance and put the blame on the Prime Minister for proceeding, despite their advice (Peter Mandelson is one of the chief stiletto wielders in this scenario), we have yet another version of events from the man himself.

Speaking to the Commons Liaison Committee on Monday, Blair pronounced that the real failure of the Iraq invasion came in August of the invasion year (2003), when the insurgents blew up the UN headquarters and the international community pulled back in fear. So the fault wasn't with the Americans, it was with the pusillanimous allies in Nato.

Now, admittedly, this was said as part of a presentation in which the Prime Minister managed to say that he had never been for a referendum on the European constitution in the first place, despite the fact that the promise to hold one was entirely at this initiative (it was a neat trick to wrong-foot the Tories and gain favour with Murdoch). He then went on to say that he thought that the constitution rejected by the French and Dutch was a perfectly good one, in spite of the fact that he was setting out a series of "red lines" that the British couldn't (but did) compromise on.

That the Prime Minister is becoming increasingly loopy as he heads for the exit says something about him and the extraordinary way he distances himself from his own decisions, as if they were made by a mysterious "other" who had no choice at the time. But it should not be allowed to divert attention from the fundamental issue of Iraq, and why it was such a horrendously wrong decision.

Blaming it on the lack of a US post-invasion plan is convenient, because it neatly absolves Britain of any blame and gives us the added warmth of being able to say that we told you so.

But it also neatly evades the central problem: it was not the post-invasion plan that was to blame so much as the decision to invade in the first place. It broke every convention about non-interference in another's affairs. It led us to wage war without the sanction of international institutions. It induced us to intervene in the most volatile region of the world without the faintest understanding of what we were setting off.

Blair and his apologists have tried to make a case that the decision to invade Iraq was the logical conclusion of a policy of humanitarian intervention that started with Kosovo and the Iraqi Kurds and went on to Sierra Leone. But in all those cases, there was a present and immediate threat to an indigenous people (and British troops in Sierra Leone). In Iraq's case, there was no such threat. It was a ramshackle state, weakened by sanctions and ruled by a dictator who was brutal but emaciated. It was sanctions, not his most recent actions, that were doing the damage to his people.

If the object of the exercise was to remove the regime, then one would like to know what alternatives were considered to effect this more peaceably. But such a question was never asked. Nor, as far as one can make out, did anyone ever seek to find out what were the conditions in Iraq and, therefore, what effect an invasion would have. Nor, indeed, did they consider what impact a decision might have in the Middle East, more generally, and the wider Islamic world.

The questions that Sir David Manning, Blair's Foreign Office adviser at the time, asked of the Americans were straightforward issues of how to manage the occupation, not what the Iraqis themselves might need, or think. And why? Because the object of the exercise, the enterprise that Tony Blair signed up to, saying that he believed in it as much as President Bush, was aimed at reshaping the Middle East through western force. It was not to help the Iraqis, as such. They were regarded as just the passive beneficiaries of Anglo-Saxon "humanitarianism".

This is why Britain needs a proper inquiry into the whole sorry story - not to apportion blame (we all know that it was Blair who pushed the project), but to answer just how it came to be that we waged war in the first place, neither coming clean with the public as to the reasons, nor taking any advice as to what we were letting ourselves in for.

Sir David Manning's evidence makes clear what we all suspected, that Blair signed up to the invasion nearly a year before it happened, knew it was virtually unstoppable but kept telling the public it was not. It also makes clear that we gave it our full backing, despite concerns, and despite the fact that, according to Condoleezza Rice, we were given a way out.

There's plenty here for an inquiry to establish, not least so that we can't be led down this particular path again. What it will not do is give cover for those who supported the war and now excuse themselves by saying it was only US incompetence that led it to go so wrong.

a.hamilton@independent.co.uk

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