Remember the Chinese purges? Well, the rehabilitation process under way in the United States and Britain is astounding to behold.
Tony Blair, an erstwhile friend of Hosni Mubarak, is voicing very contradictory opinions on the state of Egypt; Alastair Campbell is trying to reinvent himself as a media pundit; Donald Rumsfeld blames everyone else for the fact that no weapons of mass destruction were ever found in Iraq; and Colin Powell, who squirmed his way through a United Nations Security Council session in making George Bush’s case for war, professes to be shocked that no one told him Curveball was a liar.l
The collective mendacity of this Gang of Four (or five, if you add Dick Cheney) is breathtaking. It is clear that an attempt is being made to rewrite history, and to some extent the media is complicit in this. Coverage of the Iraq war and the circumstances leading up to it was not, as one prominent hack told me, British journalism’s finest hour.
Witness the Guardian’s interview with Curveball, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, the Iraqi dissident whose “intelligence” the Bush and Blair governments found useful in drawing up a dodgy dossier to convince the world that Iraq posed an immediate threat to Western civilisation.
The Guardian, and to a greater extent its sister paper the Observer, were among many British newspapers to back the war, though many of its journalists were more than sceptical of the WMD 45-minute scenario. Across the country, journalists on many newspapers were barred by their editors from stating their opinions in the newsroom, let alone explaining in print why they objected to the war. The Guardian’s Curveball story lets it, and other papers, off the hook in that it too can now say, “this is why we backed the war – this man lied”.
But the so-called Curveball was under suspicion as a reliable source long before the invasion, at a time when many names and ideas were being bandied about in the Bush administration’s attempt to justify a course of action it had already decided upon and which it knew it could pursue with the full support of Blair’s Britain, with complete disregard for the opinions of other members of the United Nations.
Curveball’s mentor was Ahmed al-Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, who was deeply mistrusted by the CIA but touted as a future puppet president by Cheney and Rumsfeld. Chalabi was heavily promoted at the time through full page profiles in papers like the Wall Street Journal, which other papers around the world were then suckered into reprinting, with no reference to Chalabi’s dubious background or alleged connections with Iran. The CIA view won out in the end, but Chalabi still made it to vice president before losing his seat in the 2005 elections, bouncing back as a services minister, before falling back into disfavour for banning hundreds of Sunni candidates in the 2010 elections. But he is still there.
As the former CIA analyst for the Soviet Union, Melvin Goodman said, “what the Bush administration did was try to round up as many people as they could who would make the case for them”.
In light of CIA warnings at the time, it is risible for Powell now to claim that he was hoodwinked. Many of us remember watching his hopes as a potential US presidential candidate dissipate with that embarrassing performance at the UN Security Council. It may be apocryphal, but Powell was said to have been overheard at the time telling the late Robin Cook that he hoped “this won’t blow up in our faces.” Well, it did.
As for Blair, his last session before the Iraq Inquiry was telling in that he was less at ease than he has ever been before a camera. It is possible that the memory of his Freudian slip in a pre-invasion interview by Jeremy Paxman in Newsnight still preys on his mind. When pressed to explain why he was so sure Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction, Blair said: “Well, what there was, was evidence… I mean this is what our intelligence services are telling us and it’s difficult because, you know, either they're simply making the whole thing up or this is what they are telling me.”
Except that many in intelligence were opposed to the war and blame Alastair Campbell for the dodgy dossier. But Campbell appears to have happily brushed off his role in taking Britain to war, and is becoming almost as ubiquitous as Jamie Oliver on television. In fact, the two are appearing together in Oliver’s Dream School, where the former spin doctor – or Blair’s Goebbels, as George Galloway likes to call him – will teach children politics (the mind boggles). He is also appearing with Anne Robinson, while Andrew Neil sees him as a “fine guest” on the Daily Politics. Well, all the above deserve each other, and, if we can take the rehabilitation process a step further, we might look forward to seeing Campbell on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here -- preferably stumbling about in the dark in Helmand province, or somewhere in Iraq.
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