15 July 2004

AL QAEDA & IRAQ

The Right is using its oxygen to hammer Blair's "credibility". It has become confused by the war because of hatred for Blair. It has lost sight of the fact that if it is serious about being in Government again, then it will need to engage in similar problems to Iraq, and it should not be trying to undermine the case for serious action against very dangerous enemies. It should be trying to undermine the EU and UN - not the case for war. Blair's lack of credibility is obvious to the media and the public - claims that somehow the Tories were duped into supporting the war relies on the idea that they believed what he said before last year, a disastrous error if true. We assumed that Blair misled people all the time - that's what he does. That was obvious a decade ago. The Tories should use their oxygen to make different arguments, not chime with the anti-war media which will get them nowhere.

Credit to the Independent - their front pages are very well thought-out propaganda and ought to be emulated by the right-wing press.

Here are some of the things that ought to be highlighted by those who supported the Iraq war.

"...it would be premature to reach conclusions about Iraq's prohibited weapons...it would be a rash person who asserted at this stage that evidence of stocks of biological or chemical agents, or even of banned missiles, does not exist or will never be found."

"[Saddam] was carrying out illicit research, development, and procurement activities, to seek to sustain its indigenous capabilities...was developing ballistic missiles with a longer range than permitted under relevant UN Security Council resolutions..."

"The JIC made it clear that the al-Qa'ida linked facilities in the Kurdish Ansar al Islam area were involved in the production of chemical and bilogicial weapons". (Butler then says that they were beyond the control of the Iraqi regime, but there is substantial evidence Butler does not cite, including from among captured Iraqi intelligence officers, that Iraqi intelligence were actively cooperating and funding these sites.)

"Contacts between al-Qa'ida and the Iraqi Directorate General of Intelligence had dated back over four years." The JIC concluded that: "meetings have taken place between senior Iraqi representatives and senior Al Qaida operatives. Some reports also suggest that Iraq may have trained some Al Qaida terrorists since 1998. Al Qaida has shown interest in gaining chemical and biological (CB) expertise from Iraq,but we do not know whether any such training was provided. We have no intelligence of current cooperation between Iraq and Al Qaida and do not believe that Al Qaida plans to conduct terrorist attacks under Iraqi direction" [Different than "cooperation".] Zarqawi has established sleeper cells in Baghdad,to be activated during a US occupation of the city. These cells apparently intend to attack US targets using car bombs and other weapons. (It is also possible that they have received CB materials from terrorists in the KAZ.) Al Qaida-associated terrorists continued to arrive in Baghdad in early March".

There is far more evidence of connections between Al Qaeda and Saddam than Butler reports.

Back in 1998, when the hero of the Left, Clinton, was in charge, the Justice Department’s indictment of Bin Laden said: "Al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the government of Iraq."

Biological agents, nuclear weapons programmes, and long-range missile programmes - have all been found in Iraq after the war.

Unsurprisingly, we have never seen the BBC news refer to this, and the Today programme failed to ask Clinton about it yesterday.

The Right is using its oxygen to hammer Blair's "credibility". It has become confused by the war because of hatred for Blair. It has lost sight of the fact that if it is serious about being in Government again, then it will need to engage in similar problems to Iraq, and it should not be trying to undermine the case for serious action against very dangerous enemies. It should be trying to undermine the EU and UN - not the case for war. Blair's lack of credibility is obvious to the media and the public - claims that somehow the Tories were duped into supporting the war relies on the idea that they believed what he said before last year, a disastrous error if true. We assumed that Blair misled people all the time - that's what he does. That was obvious a decade ago. The Tories should use their oxygen to make different arguments, not chime with the anti-war media which will get them nowhere.

It is also an error for the Right to defend the civil service uncritically against "political appointees". Who thinks the level of competence in Downing Street would rise if Campbell had less influence and Clare Short or Robin Cook had more influence? In dealing with important questions, who thinks that Cabinet members other than Blair and Brown are as capable as Campbell? The fact that Labour’s "unelected advisors" are deceitful is a separate question from competence. The Right will need to change the civil service structure substantially itself and it is short-sighted to defend it uncritically now. The Right should remember Hoskyns’ book on the early years of the Thatcher revolution and the fact that it would have been impossible without breaking through civil service structures designed to keep in place a failing conventional wisdom. Blair is right to say that the current machinery of Government needs changing. His problem is he doesn’t know how to do it without building in deceit.

A serious foreign policy for the Right will be extremely hard in the long-term if the UN continues to have moral credit among the intelligentsia: the CP should be using the oil-for-food scandal to undermine the UN’s moral authority.