Saddam coming back to bite Blair

ENOCH POWELL came up with some nasty stuff during his long political career. But there were a few diamonds on the dungheap. The best was his observation that all political careers end in failure.

Next Thursday, Tony Blair will steer New Labour to its third election victory. But unlike the previous romps, this will be grim, hollow and pyrrhic.

To be sure, a victory is a victory. But there are victories and there are victories. The legendary French climbers Maurice Hertzog and Louis Lachenal made the first ascent of an 8,000-metre mountain when they scaled Annapurna in 1950. But they paid an appalling price in the process. Caught in a storm when descending, both sustained frost-bite so serious that it necessitated the amputation of all their fingers and toes.

For Blair, next week’s election will signal the beginning of the end. In the same moment he is elected for an historic third term, the question that will form on the lips of his supporters and rivals is how long will he last?

It’s been a horrible week for Labour and for Blair. Just when the party thought it was in the home straight of a third election canter, the past came back to haunt it.

And it was the one issue that has defined and bedeviled Blair’s second term: did he mislead the electorate on the justifications (both evidential and legal) of going to war?

You need to go back to 1997 to see how far Blair’s star has waned. Then the Conservatives ran a negative campaign, ‘Demon Eyes’, that is considered a classic of its kind. It was based around a poster that superimposed devil’s eyes onto Blair’s face.

Brilliant though it was, there is a school of thought that believes the campaign backfired. Blair had no track record to speak of then - he had never before held ministerial office - and the subliminal message (what you see is not what you get) had no purchase with the punters. There was no reason then to quibble with Blair’s self-assessment that he was a “pretty straight guy.”

Eight years later, Demon’s Eyes seems to be right on the money. The crisis caused by the leaking of the legal advice of the Attorney-General Lord Goldsmith to Blair in the run-up to the invasion in March 2003 was a further bodyblow to his already tarnished credibility.

The 13-page document isn’t exactly seaside reading. It is dense, complicated, technical and full of close lawyerly-language. But the problem for Blair is that the AG does not make out the clear legal case for going to war that was later claimed by the British Government - and indeed by Goldsmith himself. It is peppered with doubt and with conditionality.

Goldsmith says that the safest legal course would be to secure a second UN Security Council resolution (it didn’t happen, as we all know). If the US and Britain went to war without a resolution, he continues later, he would not be confident that a court would agree with the British Government’s view that it had a “reasonable case.”

In the final paragraph, Goldsmith cautions: “Regime change cannot be the objective of military action.” He also refers to proportionate measures.

Prophetic words. Regime change was indeed the name of the game. And there was no proportionality. The WMD argument was just a colouring device, an excuse to get rid of Saddam. Blair’s defence now is the world is a better place without Saddam. Not wishing to reheat tired old arguments, but that wasn’t the basis on which he sought backing for war.

There are two other interesting passages amid the tangle of Goldsmith’s legalese. He refers to previous military action taken by Britain on the basis of a reasonably arguable case (ie a bit on the dodgy side). But then says it must be recognised that “the degree of public and parliamentary scrutiny of the legal issue was nothing like as great as it is today.”

Elsewhere, he name-checks Ireland, saying it is one of the countries who made clear that a further resolution of the UN Security Council would be required to authorise the use of force.

All the slippery and slidey language the Irish Government used to disguise its true motives over Iraq can’t hide the fact that it would have backed a second resolution based on flawed and discredited intelligence. It’s a pity too that public and parliamentary scrutiny in Ireland remains nothing like as great as it ever was.

Iraq will never be the same issue here. But the Government has never been properly challenged on its lack of honesty and open-ness over Iraq.