A tragic loss - the man who was proven right in his own lifetime

FEW politicians resign from Cabinet on grounds of principle. Most are only proved right about their issue of principle after their deaths.

Even though he was only 59 when he died suddenly last Saturday, the former British foreign secretary, Robin Cook, was one of those proven right in his own lifetime.

I remember working at home on St Patrick’s Day 2003 with BBC television on in the background showing live coverage of the House of Commons debate on the Iraq war. There is something about the internal architecture of the chamber which makes any big occasion in Westminster memorable.

This debate, however, was particularly remarkable not least because it occurred in circumstances where tens of thousands of British troops were already massed with those of the United States on the borders of Iraq.

It was a debate which contained many quality parliamentary contributions touching not only on whether British forces should be deployed in the war, but also on some of the wider international issues of our time, including the battle against terrorism, the implications of an international order where there is only one superpower, and the relationship between the west and the Arab world. Its intensity reflected the extent to which the issue of the Iraq war had raised strong passions in parliament, in the country, and particularly within the Labour party.

By early evening it was clear Robin Cook, then leader of the Commons, had resigned from the cabinet on the issue of the war but, true parliamentarian that he was, he was determined to make his first statement about the resignation in the chamber itself rather than in the media. Too often grand parliamentary speeches hyped in advance disappoint, but this was not one of them.

Cook’s speech was about 2,500 words long and took about 15 minutes to deliver. He did so to a hushed chamber with every word he uttered carried live not only on the British channels but also on most of the international news channels, including CNN. It was a riveting occasion.

His was a dispassionate, forensic deconstruction of the case which Tony Blair and others had advanced for war in Iraq. Although the war itself was inevitable at that stage one felt as Cook finished that the last word had been said, that somebody had cogently advanced the reasons why so many, who were not pacifist or serial anti-Americans, saw the war as unjustifiable, dangerous and likely to prove counter-productive.

The background to Cook’s break with the Blair government on this issue is well recounted in a book he published a year later called The Point of Departure.

It is an entertaining, remarkably restrained and well written account, and stands as the definitive insider’s memoir of New Labour’s second term which came to be increasingly dominated by Tony Blair’s determination to go to war in Iraq.

Incidentally, for any politics or biography wonks heading for a holiday in the coming weeks, it’s a cracker of a read. The full text of Cook’s resignation speech is included at the back of the book and now, more than two years later, it still reads well and eerily prescient. Cook started by complimenting the prime minister, Tony Blair, and the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, for struggling so hard to try to get a second resolution at the UN, but then wondered why they were at this point pretending that getting the second resolution was of no importance.

He debunked the suggestion that France, which in the days before his speech had been derided widely, was the only country which had wanted more time for inspections to work and reminded MPs that other significant powers, including Russia and almost all members of the UN security council wanted Hans Blix and his team, who at that stage had been allowed back into Iraq, to be given the time necessary to finish their work.

Cook also pointed out that the Bush-Blair obsession with going to war in Iraq had eroded the wide-ranging coalition of nations against terrorism which had supported tackling the Taliban and al-Qaida only a year earlier.

His main point, however, and the one which proved so prophetic, was that there were no compelling or urgent reasons for military action. The Blair case for the war had been made on the basis that Saddam - who, like so many other dictators, posed a threat to his own people - could be distinguished and singled out for pre-emptive attack by US-British forces because he posed a clear and present danger to the wider world.

COOK, who after all had access until that moment to cabinet-level intelligence, stated bluntly in his resignation speech: “Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term - namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target.”

He argued that if Saddam had biological toxin and battlefield chemical munitions (and it was not at all clear that he had), they were in his possession since the 1980s when US companies sold Iraq some of the components for them.

Cook warned that the threshold for war should always be high, but in this instance it had just not been met.

He pointed to the irony of basing a military strategy on the argument that Saddam’s forces were weak and the war would not take long, yet justifying pre-emptive action because Saddam apparently posed such a grave threat. Cook was also acutely conscious of a strong sense of injustice in the Muslim world and, in particular, a sense that when it came to enforcing compliance with UN resolutions, there seemed to be one rule for the United States’ ally, Israel, and another rule for the rest.

The note Cook struck was in tune with that of the large majority of the British public (and indeed of the Irish public) who felt Saddam was a brutal dictator, but were not persuaded that he was a clear and present danger. They wanted inspections to be given a chance and they suspected that the agenda for war was being pushed by a Bush administration with an agenda of its own.

In the two years since Cook spoke, the intelligence on which Blair based the case for war has been shown to be shoddy, and of course it has been revealed that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction.

Even the legal case advanced by the British attorney general to support going to war has been torn to shreds. The doctrine of pre-emptive strike has been undermined by the failures of the intelligence on which it was based.

Life for Iraqis has improved little. They may no longer be subjected to the cruelty of the Saddam regime, but Iraq has paid a high price in life and injuries not only during the initial invasion but also in the years since, and their country is now a theatre for daily terrorism against the US and the new government in Baghdad. With no signs of the war against insurgency being won and the Pentagon accepting this week that much of the funds earmarked for reconstruction have had to be diverted to security, Iraq faces a dangerous and unstable future.

Meanwhile, Britain itself faces direct attack from home-grown terrorism and struggles to define its relationship with its Islamic community. It is indeed a tragedy that Robin Cook’s intelligent and restrained voice will not be available to contribute to these debates.