AS ANY inept DIY bodger could tell you, whitewash,
applied carefully and thinly will last years. Too thick and it will flake
off in no time." (Letter to the Guardian, 29 January)
The long awaited report by ‘Lord’ Hutton on the ‘Kelly
affair’ was so blatantly and crudely one sided that it has produced a
massive public backlash against the ‘exonerated’ Tony Blair and his crony
Alistair Campbell.
The ‘collateral’ damage to the government and its
legal hit man, Hutton, is unprecedented in its scope and intensity.
Polls
taken a few days after in newspapers and in TV programmes show that three
times as many people were prepared to accept the BBC’s version of the
truth as that of the government.
Blair’s personal rating in the ICM poll
in the Guardian was minus 17 points, with 55% of voters unhappy with his
performance.
Support for the war has dropped by six points, with
less than half of voters now in support. Contrary to Hutton, 45% of voters
believe the prime minister lied over his claim that he did not authorise
the leaking of Dr Kelly’s name.
More people believe that Blair should have resigned
than those who supported Greg Dyke resigning as the head of the BBC.
An avalanche of criticism and condemnation has rained
down on Hutton. Even pillars of the establishment, such as Lord Rees Mogg,
former deputy chairman of the BBC, have waded in, declaring: "I don’t have
any confidence in Hutton."
Many capitalists luminaries like this, unlike
the socialist and the Socialist Party, did have confidence that Hutton,
one of their kind, would act fairly and ‘judiciously’.
Criticism
BUT WHY should this scion of the aristocratic Unionist
ascendancy of Northern Ireland act any differently than he did? He was a
defending barrister of soldiers at the discredited Widgery inquiry set up
after the Bloody Sunday massacre in Northern Ireland in 1972. Moreover,
there is a long standing tradition of ‘inquiries’, judicious or otherwise,
being used by governments, usually Tory governments, to cover up their
crimes and misdemeanours.
The difference this time is that the inquiry was
public, shedding light into the dark corners, the intrigues, dirty
dealings and dishonesty of capitalist governments and their state.
The documented evidence overwhelmingly pointed to the
guilt of Blair on the key issues. This showed that the intelligence
evidence was changed by Blair and Campbell, that (a) they colluded in the
‘outing’ of Kelly who was alleged to have taken his own life, and (b) that
the notorious 45-minute claim was altered to give the impression that
Britain could be attacked by Saddam’s non-existent weapons of mass
destruction at 45 minutes notice.
The original title of the intelligence dossier –
"programmes of weapons of mass destruction" – was altered. The word
‘programme’ was eliminated.
Both Blair and Bush are now falling back on this word
as justification for the war. But this and Hutton’s report cut no ice with
the British people, outraged at this colossal cover up. In their millions
they protested in the last year against the war and its effects. Tens of
thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, as well as troops, estimated at
55,000 by John Pilger, together with British, US and other troops, died
for what a Tory, Max Hastings, has called a "war on a false prospectus".
It is this massive anti-war feeling, together with the
fact that Britain is no longer a deferential society, which explains the
indignation of Hutton and Blair. The gloating of Blair and Campbell the
day after the report undoubtedly reinforced the sense of public outrage.
One Labour apparatchik triumphantly declared of Hutton: "Make that man a
duke." Instead of this, however, the report and its author have been
discredited in a matter of days.
Massive anti-war feeling
BLAIR HIMSELF, rather than basking in the afterglow of
this ‘triumph’ came under pressure to emulate his buddy, Bush, in
declaring, ‘it wasn’t me, guv, it was the intelligence spooks who got it
wrong’. Up to now, like the character in the famous Monty Python sketch
who declares that the parrot is still alive despite all the evidence,
Blair has insisted that WMDs, or at least ‘programmes’, will be
discovered. But now David Kay, Bush’s own hunter for WMDs in Iraq, has
concluded what we and others consistently argued before the Iraq invasion,
that Saddam’s WMDs do not exist. He has declared: "We were all wrong."
This ‘we’ refers to Blair, Bush and their pro-war
supporters and, yes, they did get it wrong while the millions who marched
against the war, and who still oppose the war and its consequences, were
right. If the ‘intelligence community’ got it wrong it shatters the whole
premise of the Bush doctrine of ‘pre-emptive strike’.
Will Blair and Bush, therefore, follow the example of
Dyke and Davis at the BBC and ‘fall on their swords’, resign? Not a bit of
it. Bush is preparing to set up another "inquiry into US intelligence" and
the information allegedly supplied to him on WMDs. Blair is to follow
suit, thereby hoping to deflect responsibility for the war onto the
‘un-intelligence community’ in Britain and the US.
This manoeuvre, however, is fraught with difficulties,
perhaps more for Blair than Bush. Bush hopes that his congressional
supporters can delay the results of such an inquiry until after November’s
presidential elections. If Blair concedes an inquiry, again narrowly
restricting it to intelligence issues and not the overall reasons for war,
than it is likely to report well before a general election is called.
Alternative
THOSE WHO opposed and demonstrated against the war, as
well as the dead and mutilated victims in Iraq, have no need for anymore
whitewashes, cover ups in the form of more US and British ‘inquiries’. No
trust in capitalist governments to honestly and democratically examine
their own actions, particularly on the most crucial of events, going to
war!
If there are to be any more ‘inquiries’ let them be
convened by the organisations of working class people in Britain and the
US and, moreover, on the broad general reasons for this war and the
culpability of capitalist politicians, and not on this or that aspect,
which can allow the perpetrators of the Iraq adventure to go unpunished.
Blair and Bush and their cronies unleashed a war not
for ‘liberation’ in Iraq, but for the imperialist plunder of Iraqi
resources, particularly oil. They have created devastation and terrible
suffering for the peoples of Iraq and the world.
They should be driven from office. But the alternative
is not their capitalist critics, whose concern is not for the British or
Iraqi people but in defending their own system and preventing similar
adventures in the future which could endanger this. The real alternative
is a new mass party of the working class, pledged to oppose war and
militarism by establishing a new democratic socialist society.
