Blair’s sham approach undignified

BRITISH Prime Minister Tony Blair’s perceived role as the restraining hand on a belligerent American shoulder readying for war with Iraq has been revealed for exactly what it was all along: public perception.

The mask slipped during a BBC Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman, when Mr Blair refused to rule out war without a new UN mandate if there was an “unreasonable veto” at the Security Council.

He said that if there were a second UN resolution, then people would be behind him, but if there were not, then there was a lot of persuading to do.

Mr Blair effectively declared that he would not be deterred from a military engagement with Saddam Hussein and it would come with, or without, the backing of the UN.

Despite rather weak assertions from President George W Bush that war was not inevitable, which lacked a certain authenticity, it was always initially presumed that Mr Blair might have exercised a restraining influence.

It has been, and still is, the view of the overwhelming majority of the UN members, including Ireland, that there should be no military intervention in Iraq not mandated by the UN.

Without such authority, Mr Blair, as he intimated, will have to rely on his powers of persuasion to convince people of the justice of his cause.

By now it should be glaringly obvious to him that those persuasive powers have been somewhat embarrassingly diminished by the spurious dossier on Iraq which he entered in the public domain as justification for a military intervention.

The intelligence reports Mr Blair proffered to convince a sceptical British public, anti-war rebels within his own party and the world at large, that military action against Iraq would be justified, have been revealed as having been plagiarised from the work of a university student, with other material culled from a six-year-old copy of Jane’s Intelligence Review.

The so-called dossier purporting to be an intelligence assessment of Iraq’s devastating potential, was also

referred to by US Secretary of State Colin Powell in his presentation to the Security Council on Wednesday.

He lauded it as “the fine paper that the United Kingdom distributed ... which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities”.

If Mr Blair’s only evidence is predicated on out-of-date information and academic articles, and a presentation by Mr Powell which did not convince

the UN of the imperative of attacking Iraq, then he is taking a considerable political gamble.

His demeanour is one of not brooking any opposition to dragging a reluctant country into a contrived war, which he is obviously preparing for, and has assumed an almost dictatorial aspect, benign though he would rather appear to be.

The refusal to allow a Commons vote before any military action is initiated against Iraq, is symptomatic of Mr Blair’s sensibility towards any criticism of the course he is intent on embarking upon.

Inane is the only way to describe Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon’s rejection of a call for such a vote. His reason, which was quite appropriately received with jeers, was that a vote in advance of war would risk robbing military operations of the element of surprise.

Possibly he believes the announcement he made at the same time that 7,000 RAF personnel and 100 aircraft are being deployed to join the other 30,000 troops on their way to the Gulf, will not be picked up by the Iraqis. If their intelligence sources are as reliable as the British ones, then he could be right.