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Did Tony Blair ever actually state that Saddam had WMDs which could be launched in 45 minutes? This has become part of the general mythology of the anti-war left; cast doubt on this at your peril, as the sneers drown you out: “Of course he did – that was how he persuaded Parliament to back him. All lies of course….”

Look at the parliamentary record on Blair’s speech back in September 2002 when he was introducing the government’s dossier on Iraq’s WMD programme (via Tim Blair):

It concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes, including against his own Shia population …

So the dossier states, yes, that Saddam had WMDs, and further that he had plans for WMDs capable of activation within 45 minutes.

Of course there’s still a problem with the WMDs. Where are they: in Syria?…or a fantasy in Saddam’s head? But this idea that Tony Blair claimed that WMDs capable of being launched in 45 minutes were in place at the time, and against the West, is not true.

raph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/01/25/wirq25.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/01/25/ixnewstop.html”>Telegraph (via Junkyardblog) it turns out that he believes some of Saddam’s WMDs ended up in Syria. Well, him and a good few others. The Syrians had a suitable refutation ready:

A Syrian official last night said: “These allegations have been raised many times in the past by Israeli officials, which proves that they are false.”

On top of all this Bush now wants to know where the WMDs are. As do we all.

I imagine this is all part of the plan to keep pressure on President Assad, who in the photo accompanying the Jerusalem Post piece does look a little less than resolute. But with the US election coming up, Bush is surely not about to launch these strikes (is he??).

re, with placards declaring “Sport Loves Greg” and “Come Back Greg”.

BBC Radio 4’s PM programme said that staff had walked out in London, York, Glasgow, Londonderry, Guernsey, Birmingham, Middlesbrough, Newcastle, Belfast, Swindon, Cardiff and Manchester.

Natalie Grice, NUJ spokeswoman at BBC Wales in Cardiff, said: “This is not about individuals. Broadcasters have demonstrated today their determination to defend the editorial independence of the BBC. BBC staff and their trade unions will not tolerate political interference.”

But the Hutton Report wasn’t about political interference: it was about the death of David Kelly, and the BBC accusation that the government had lied to the British people about WMDs. The report concluded that the government hadn’t lied, and that David Kelly was responsible for the death of David Kelly. To claim that this is about political interference is pure self-serving guff on the part of the BBC. Nor is it very edifying to see Greg Dyke now making it clear that he thinks he was right all along.

Julie Welch writes in the Guardian of her friend David Kelly, under the headline ‘Lord Hutton has done Kelly and his memory a great disservice’:

Right up to the day David Kelly killed himself, his line manager [in the MOD] was unaware of what the rest of us knew: that even before Andrew Gilligan misquoted him and his interaction with the press came under forensic examination, the 59-year-old scientist was deeply worried about the future – unsure even what his pension would be and whether it would be sufficient for his needs.

Lord Hutton is right when he says that David, and David alone, was responsible for cutting his left wrist with his boy scout’s knife. He is wrong in not putting a little context to that action. For those who knew and cared for him, there is only one conclusion: if David had not been parked in the MoD, he would probably be alive today.

There’s also another possible conclusion: if Kelly hadn’t talked off the record to Andrew Gilligan, who then twisted what had been said to him to produce his report about government lies, making it inevitable that Kelly’s name would come out, then he would probably be alive today.

The great woman gives a personal interview today in the Times.

And your dirty habits?

Dust in the corner of my drawers.

This is surely more than we need to know.

In the new post-Hutton world some are trying to cope with their disappointment. Clare Short simply doesn’t believe it:

It seems to me — despite Lord Hutton’s careful findings — that it remains the case that the Gilligan story was basically true, reflected what David Kelly said to him, and that Andrew Gilligan is guilty of nothing more than sloppy wording when he said that the Government inserted the 45-minutes figure probably “knowing it to be wrong”.

Her conclusion comes as no surprise at all:

I am afraid it remains my conclusion that through a series of deceits, half truths, and omissions, the Prime Minister got the UK into a war in support of America which has strengthened al-Qaeda, further destabilised the Middle East and increased the suffering of the people of Iraq.

Meanwhile Germaine Greer :

The evil genius that could have destroyed the world was eventually discovered hiding like a rat in a hole with so little fight in him that he didn’t use the one weapon he had, but nobody had time to investigate why well-informed world leaders so aggrandised this petty tyrant.

The Hutton inquiry, with its huge deployment of forensic intelligence, deflected the energy that should have rammed down the Blair Government’s throat the only question that really matters: why did Britain court complicity in the “shock and awe” campaign that unleashed massive violence against the civilian population of Iraq?

“Increased the suffering of the people of Iraq”? – “aggrandised this petty tyrant”? – “unleashed massive violence against the civilian population of Iraq”? These people clearly neither know nor care what Iraq was like under Saddam.

The French are cosying up to China.

President Chirac staged a lavish welcome yesterday for President Hu Jintao of China, as the French leader sought to enshrine Paris as Beijing’s favoured European partner and “counterbalance” to the United States.

Paris put aside qualms about the Chinese in order to shower honours on Mr Hu. To mark 40 years since President de Gaulle opened relations with the People’s Republic, France has declared 2004 the Year of China. In Franco-Chinese celebrations for the Chinese New Year at the weekend, the Eiffel Tower was floodlit in red, and 200,000 people, including Wang Qishan, the Mayor of Beijing, attended a parade down the Champs Elysées.

Perhaps the fact that there’s a gap in the order book after Saddam’s fall helped to dispel those French qualms.

Since Tiananmen in 1989 the EU has maintained a ban on exporting arms to China, but the French are applying pressure to change this. The NY Times points out that this push by the French comes at a time when China’s relations with Taiwan are getting particularly delicate:

There is some concern that lifting the embargo now would add a destabilizing note to Beijing’s relations with Taiwan, already strained by a plan put forth by Taiwan’s president, Chen Shui-bian, to hold a national referendum in March on whether to demand that China remove missiles facing the island and renounce the use of force.

China maintains that Taiwan is a province under its sovereignty and that the island’s political separation from the mainland is a historical anomaly left over from the country’s 1949 civil war. Beijing demands fealty to that position by all countries with which it maintains relations. President Jacques Chirac dutifully repeated his country’s commitment within hours of Mr. Hu’s arrival in Paris on Monday.

“France is attached to the principle of there being one China,” Mr. Chirac said when Mr. Hu raised the issue at the start of a four-day state visit, according to the French president’s spokeswoman.

President Hu Jintao was “Secretary of the Party Committee of Tibet Autonomous Region” from 1988 to 1992, and made his reputation with the ruthless way in which he dealt with separatist demonstrations.

Paul Berman’s conversation with an old left-wing friend is horribly familiar (via Arts & Letters Daily), though he’s a good deal more eloquent about it than I ever was. It’s like, all the points you should have made when you think about it later.

her, a senior member of Barak’s team at Camp David, about the future of the territories:

“Governing another people is bad for us in every way,” said Sher. “The question is, can we heal ourselves in a way that will preserve the Jewish nation for years to come? If we just withdrew, we would then be a country seeking to protect itself with the vast support of the international community.

“You have to ask, what are the alternatives? To stay in the territories for ever? The Palestinians want this as it will mean a demographic wipeout of the Jews. Making a negotiated peace? But a reliable partner for peace is still entirely theoretical.”

In the eyes of many in Britain and Europe, Israel’s attachment to the territories is ideological. But there is a more potent reason than ideology for its reluctance to withdraw. It is fear. It believes that to withdraw would leave it strategically exposed (particularly at Israel’s original nine-mile wide waist), and would announce weakness in the face of terror.

Sher’s reply to this is that withdrawal should be accompanied by a commitment from the Americans to take responsibility for guaranteeing security in the territories. Would this not be a reasonable price for the Americans to pay to guarantee the peace?

It’s not clear to me why the US would want to undertake such a thankless policing task, or how the Palestinians would react. Isn’t this what the UN is supposed to be for? But the basic idea is still compelling:

Given that every strategy has a lethal downside, the question is: what is the worst thing Israel has to fear? Is it war? It has fought and won wars. Is it terror? It is suffering terror now, and for the foreseeable future. What is surely worst of all is to lose its belief in itself and destroy its soul.

It is not that the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza are illegal. Under international law, land seized as a consequence of self-defence in war is legitimately held while the enemy refuses to make peace. But legality is not the point. The bottom line is existential vulnerability. If Israel hangs onto the territories, the Jews will be outnumbered. It cannot and should not rule another people. It cannot wait for 20 years for negotiations to begin. It should unilaterally give up the territories.

The fear that giving them up would hand a victory to terror is a very real one. But it is possible to turn this argument on its head. For withdrawal effectively forces a state on the Palestinians. It therefore does not give terrorists victory if their goal is not a Palestinian state at all but the destruction of Israel. It is rather to frustrate their goals, call their bluff and so defeat them.

In yesterday’s Observer there was a review by Neal Ascherson of “Hope and Memory” by Tzvestan Todorov. (Black Triangle has already posted on a review of the same book by John Gray in the Independent.) I’m not in a position to provide a detailed critique of the book having only browsed through it in my local bookshop, except to say it seems to be one of those Paris-centred works where if you head west from Calais it’s water all the way to Japan. But what caught my eye was the review’s conclusion, quoting Todorov: ‘democracy brought to others through the barrel of a gun is not democracy.’

The obvious response is: tell that to the Germans or the Japanese. But it does encapsulate a certain European world-weariness about what the US is supposed to be doing, particularly in Iraq. It also implies that Iraq is part of some master plan: just a phase in the continuing imposition of US-style government on the rest of the world. What should really happen, apparently, is that countries should be allowed to develop how they want, at their own speed.

But the whole point is that we simply don’t have the luxury to sit back and watch as other societies work out their own answers. That’s no longer an option. Technologies spread (fundamentally because people want access to the opportunities it brings, not because it’s imposed by ruthless international corporations) and technology now includes not only TVs and medicine and computers but nuclear and chemical weapons. So it would be fine to make these grandiose moral judgements about imposing democracy if every society was isolated from every other one, but that ain’t the way it is. And having deposed a murderous tyranny such as Saddam’s, precisely what sort of government would Todorov et al. recommend? Democracy seems to go fairly well with technological advancement, as well as having certain intrinsic values of its own. I mean, do they have a better idea?

Postscript: I was just watching a BBC2 programme “Private Life of a Masterpiece” on Goya’s “The Third of May 1808” – the famous firing squad image. At the close of the programme, after talking about how influential the picture had been in providing that iconic image of the brutality of a conquering army (in this case the French under Napoleon) against the heroism of local people (the inhabitants of Madrid), the commentary was arguing for the continuing relevance of the picture, even today, when “democracy” was being imposed by force of arms on poor suffering locals (picture of the toppling of Saddam’s statue). They can’t help themselves, can they, the BBC? Those poor locals, so happy under Saddam….

Here’s that old anti-war standard again, from Kathryn Flett’s TV Review in the Observer, where she quotes Robin Cook:

‘The real reason [the Government] were keen to take Britain to war was not because they thought Saddam was a threat but because they wanted to demonstrate to George Bush that we were a reliable ally.’

I don’t believe this for a moment. Firstly, given Blair’s support for action in Kosovo, it’s clear that he is by instinct an interventionist. Secondly, this conceit of poodle Blair is tiresome: a position similar to the one Harold Wilson adopted towards the US action in Vietnam would have been perfectly feasible, and Blair as a keen European would have considerably enhanced his position within the EC if he’d come up with some carefully calculated remarks to the effect that while he respected Bush’s keenness to set things right by force, we Europeans had more experience with this sort of thing blah blah. He would also surely have been able to carry his party: a few defectors to the Tories (Ann Clwyd?) wouldn’t have been sufficient to overturn the government’s majority in parliament. But most significantly, it was always clear from his language, from his whole attitude, that this was a course of action Blair felt was right – and I have to say that for me it was refreshing to see a British Prime Minister acting from principle.

I don’t know if Cook still has political ambitions, but I’d imagine he has – he can hardly want to end his parliamentary career as The Embittered Gnome. In which case his comment is deeply cynical. Moreover I don’t think he believes it himself: it seems calculated in a this-will-hurt-Tony-the-most sort of way.

When Labour came to power in 1997 Robin Cook was one of the brightest stars on the new Front Bench. I wouldn’t vote for him now if he was running against Jacques Chirac.