Thoughts from London

The man who led Britain to war won’t say sorry
If it is not one thing, it is another. That is what makes Iraq a story without an end, in the foreseeable future at least. That is also what makes it such an increasingly heavy cross for the evangelist Tony Blair to carry, though he would like to drop it and turn his back on the whole sorry episode, despite all the pretence about democracy.

Now another Iraq story has come to haunt him. This time it is the deployment of British troops, the Black Watch, from its current position in Basra in southern Iraq which is under British control, to somewhere close to Baghdad which is a far more volatile region.

While this is likely to expose the British troops to great security risks largely because they could be identified with the high-handedness of American soldiers, Tony Blair insists that this was essentially a military decision and operationally necessary.

But most people here, and opinion polls indicate it, consider this is a political decision intended to buttress Blair's transatlantic cousin President George W. Bush under siege in the presidential election due on November 2.

Blair and his cronies in the cabinet including Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, argue that it is indeed connected with the election, but not the US election. It is an attempt to make Iraq safe for the January election there that would set up an independent Iraqi government.

Few people here believe him, just as the British public and people round the world are growing tired of President Bush and his rhetoric about making the world safe by ousting Saddam Hussein, as a recent international media poll showed.

Blair's faith in Bush and himself and the perceived righteousness of their cause, have dragged him deeper and deeper into a morass of his own creation. Even if he admits the errors of his way to himself in a rare moment of contrition, he will never do so in public.

Why? Because he wants the public to believe that he is above making mistakes and that they should have faith in his judgement to lead them to the promised land of New Labour.

Here is a leader who just cannot say sorry for leading a country into war on claims that are increasingly proving hollow and at a time when the British people were overwhelmingly against it. Tony Blair's constructions are such that he will come to the brink of saying sorry but will not take that crucial last step.

From the first months after the terrorist attack on the US, Bush and Blair had targeted Saddam Hussein. It is known from leaked documents that as far back as April 2002, Blair had agreed to back the Bush plans to oust Saddam.

Yet in the run-up to the war, the Blair government was saying that war was not inevitable. When UN weapons inspections and other reports were increasingly pointing to Saddam having no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and least of all stockpiles of it, Blair kept postponing the day when he will be exposed by suggesting we all wait for the report of the US- run Iraq Survey Group (ISG).

If Blair expected the ISG report to save his skin then it was a terrible mistake. The ISG not only failed to find any WMDs but also could not even find any on-going plans to revive the production of such weapons. Yet Blair and his beleaguered war mongering ministers are not beyond clutching at straws. They pointed to some remarks in the report that Saddam was hoping to revive the programme once the UN sanctions had been removed or were undermined by Saddam's own manoeuvres.

But this is not how Blair presented the imminent danger of Saddam to the region and indeed to British interests. In an address to the nation at the beginning of the war last year, Blair said that the threat posed by the Iraqi dictator "is real, growing and of an entirely different nature to any conventional threat to our security that Britain has faced before."

Whether Blair lied to parliament and the nation, as some people believe even more strongly now, or misled the country by pepping-up available intelligence or relying on false intelligence, is not the question now, important though it certainly is.

Could a prime minister who has already announced that he will serve a third term if Labour wins the next election, be relied upon to make justifiable and legitimate decisions on behalf of the country instead of ones that are self-serving?

Domestically, Blair's policies which are more right of centre than the Labour leadership would wish to admit, have not been the great success that government rhetoric would have us believe. That is very much like President Bush's nonsensical statements about the US economy that he thought he could revive by granting tax cuts to his cronies and the rich.

Even if he would like to improve his domestic record before facing an election in less than one year, Iraq is proving to be a millstone that he cannot shed.

As though his record on Iraq is not dangerously suspect enough, media reports say that he is planning to have a special Iraqi section in the new year honours list to thank all those bureaucrats and intelligence officials who helped take this country to war on totally false or misleading information.

Long before Bush and Blair unleashed their military might on Iraq, the intelligence used to justify war was strongly suspected of being false or uncertain. Now we know for certain that the intelligence was wrong.

Shortly before this month's Labour Party conference and at the conference itself Blair said that he would be very happy to take "full responsibility for information that has turned out to be wrong. It is absolutely right that, as we've already done, we've apologised to people for the information that was given being wrong."

The funny thing is that there appears to be no record of his having done so. Then at prime minister's question time in parliament earlier this month Opposition leader Michael Howard asked Blair to say sorry.

After all it was Blair who said Saddam had WMDs that could be launched within 45-minutes of an order being given, a claim that Foreign Secretary Jack Straw formally withdrew a day earlier. "Will he now say sorry?" asked Howard, not really expecting an apology. If Howard had been wrong on some other issues, he was not wrong now.

"I take full responsibility," said Blair as though he was finally going to mention the S-word. But then it happened."… and indeed, apologise for any information given in good faith that has subsequently turned out to be wrong. That is entirely proper. I have already done that."

When pray? But never mind. What the people will never accept is a prime minister who now wants to honour those who presented him with false or wrong intelligence on which a country was led (or misled) into war and in which nearly 70 soldiers have died and others are likely to meet the same end. Has any leader the right to send his citizens to death to satisfy his vanity?

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