‘Iraq: Blair's Mission Impossible’: A Rejoinder to Paul Hoggett

Paul Hoggett has published an analysis of Tony Blair's decision to support the United States in the invasion of Iraq that purports to examine the case made by Blair for action against Iraq and to demonstrate that:

In this rejoinder I will argue that this article does not correctly describe the case made by Blair and consequently does not demonstrate its basic propositions.

To begin with, it is somewhat surprising that Hoggett uses Timothy Garden Ash, Philip Bobbitt and Anthony Seldon to explain Blair's case for war, when Blair himself explained it many times, in terms somewhat different from those presented here. Thus, the manner in which Blair's case for war is described in this article is actually not the case for war as Tony Blair and Jack Straw articulated it themselves (Bluth 2004).

A major source of confusion arises from the use Hoggett makes of the term imminent. Blair never claimed that the threat from Iraq was imminent in the ordinary use of the term. The definition employed by Hoggett departs from the common usage of the term by describing a process perceived to be inevitable as ‘imminent’, introducing a serious element of confusion into an already confused debate. However, he says, ‘as the recent rehabilitation of another former pariah regime, Gaddafi's Libya, illustrates, there is nothing inevitable or predictable about history’ (Hoggett 2005, 419). This is true, but the relevance to the case of Iraq is not clearly established. Clearly there are serious, well-organised terrorist networks that seek to cause mass casualties and acquire weapons of mass destruction. That the elimination of such arsenals, in countries whose leaders cannot be relied upon not to co-operate with such networks and indeed are known sponsors of terrorists, is an essential part of a serious effort to prevent such proliferation is self-evident. The notion that ‘persuasion’ as in the case of Libya is practical in all such cases however is not self-evident and not supported by experience. Moreover, there was a long history of dealing with Saddam Hussein that suggested clear patterns of behaviour and there was no reason to believe that any significant change was likely, no matter what forms of persuasion or coercion would be applied, short of the elimination of the regime. Hoggett states:

This of course raises the question of what was a realistic stance towards the potentiality of the threat based on the information available prior to the war. Hoggett offers no evidence to suggest that the assessment of the Blair government was unrealistic. At numerous points in the article it is taken for granted that Blair in some way should have been able to ‘see’ that Iraq destroyed its WMD and that in some way the failure to see this was deliberate. But, this is based on hindsight and completely ignores the realities prior to the war.

The reality is that the arms control community and the intelligence community universally believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (i.e. chemical and biological weapons). Analysing the available facts at the time, and given Iraq's behaviour for over a decade, the most plausible conclusion was that Iraq had significant stockpiles and was continuing to develop weapons. If one is given the assessment that Iraq is likely to have five tons of VX gas and possibly 8,000 litres of anthrax, how would one evaluate the potentiality of the threat of the dimensions of possibility and uncertainty? The article ignores the fact that this was a dynamic process, involving an interaction between Iraq and the western powers. Iraq wanted the world to believe it had WMD. One of the basic failings of Hoggett's article is the fact that it is ahistorical, that it fails to see that the events of 2002–2003 are part of a process that was ongoing since 1991 and before. The reason why the belief that Iraq possessed WMD was so firmly entrenched was because this, essentially, was what the dispute with Iraq since 1991 had been about. As Vice-President Cheney put it, if Saddam Hussein did not have WMD, then why did he not resolve the issue and have sanctions lifted? Why did he forego $100 billion in oil revenues if the conflict with the west was about weapons and programmes that did not exist? That is the fundamental psychological dynamic that explains the events which led to war with Iraq.

The global strategic case is somewhat misrepresented here. It is true that Blair believed that the preservation of the ‘special relationship’ was part of a response to US unilateralism that sought to keep America engaged with the international community and international institutions. But, it is not the case that Blair ever claimed that this was a case for going to war; the case for war had to be made on its own terms. Hoggett's argument that Blair decided to follow Bush into war no matter what lacks empirical support, as evidenced by his failure to pinpoint the date when this decision allegedly occurred. The empirical facts are clear: no final decision was made until the order was given. There were various junctures at which a different route was conceivable; the failure to get UN 1441 would most likely have made it impossible for Blair to get parliamentary approval. In any event parliamentary approval was not a foregone conclusion. Moreover, the Iraqi regime was given a last chance. If Saddam Hussein had not decided to continue to prevaricate and maintain ambiguity about the weapons programmes (i.e. co-operate in procedure, but not substance), then war might not have occurred. Indeed, if the last-ditch attempt by Straw to produce criteria that would show compliance had been accepted then war could have been avoided. Although the strategic objectives pursued by the Blair government required regime change, the tactical approach meant that there was no final decision to go to war prior to the commencement of hostilities. One of the missing points of Hoggett's analysis is that the initial decision was not simply to go to war, but to confront Iraq over its failure to implement its commitments under the 1991 ceasefire agreement. Once the international community went down this road, Iraq always had the choice to comply. However, if Iraq did not comply, then events took on a logic that was hard to evade. In any case, the notion of the global strategic case is a projection of what Blair is believed to have been motivated by, rather than a reason for war given by Blair himself.

Hoggett states that ‘the first major public airing of the case for waging war against Saddam Hussein the oppressive tyrant occurred at Labour's spring conference in Glasgow on Saturday 15 February 2003’. This is yet another indication of the failure to analyse and take seriously what Blair actually said during his many statements on Iraq. Indeed, the ‘moral case’ appeared in practically every speech, starting in April 2002, and was exemplified of course in the ‘Human Rights Dossier’ which, unlike the WMD dossier, has been completely ignored by Blair's critics. Moreover, even the WMD dossier contained numerous references to the massive human rights violations by the Iraqi regime.

So, what was the case for war? It is truly astonishing that despite the fact that Blair and Straw made this case in practically every speech on the subject, most commentators still seem to be unaware of it.

First of all, the threat was articulated thus:

After 9/11, all states with clandestine WMD programmes had to be considered a threat and had to be confronted about their activities in this field.

The obvious question is how such a threat assessment justifies the use of force. The answer given by Blair was that this was a serious threat which needed to be addressed; that it needed to be addressed urgently because it could not be predicted when it would materialise (e.g. terrorists could obtain WMD from Iraq at any time); that the only alternative way of addressing this threat, namely containment and peaceful disarmament, was not viable and the former was morally unacceptable; and that the Iraqi people should not be asked to endure this inhumane regime any longer.

Hoggett seems to be missing a critical element, namely that the rejection of containment was not based only on an assessment of its viability, but also of its moral dimension. To put it another way, containment was killing more Iraqis than any war was ever likely to, so much so that some scholars have referred to sanctions on Iraq as weapons of mass destruction. This was fact, not just potentiality. Containment was not only breaking down, it was a graver injustice than war. This is the heart of the argument that critics of the war need to address. Failure to remove this regime would have left the greatest mass murderer of recent times to continue murdering and torturing his population, while at the same time making Blair complicit in this. This is the psychological issue that this article completely fails to address. Moreover, to describe the defence of the right not to be murdered and/or tortured as modernising, or to invoke the images of imminence, theology or salvation as part of the delusional psychological landscape that prompted intervention seems to look for abstract explanations where none are needed. It reflects a complete failure to understand the phenomenon of the Hussein regime in Iraq. The true horrors of Hussein's rule in Iraq defy description. Not to want to stop this regime is equivalent to lacking the basic elements of human decency and compassion. What is remarkable about the public and academic debate is that this aspect has been lost in the debate about when Blair said this and did the other. Advocates of containment, for example, have, to my knowledge, never fully explained how they justified the notion of leaving Saddam in place to continue to murder his own people, or what alternative policies they advocated to deal effectively with this situation. Containment has always been about securing our well-being at the expense of others. In the case of the Soviet empire it might be argued that there was no other practical policy. In the case of Iraq, Blair believed that there was. That is the fundamental reality of this issue which Hoggett misses entirely.

One of the peculiar elements of this article is the assertion at various points that ‘Blair lied’, although it remains unclear what he lied about. To prove that Blair lied in some form or other has now become a cottage industry, but the evidence indicates that Blair presented the issues fundamentally as he saw them. ‘Lies, evasions and half-truths’ are common when one is trying to convince someone, but in this case it is more surprising how closely Blair stuck to what he believed to be the truth (in contrast to his US counterpart). The one concrete ‘lie’ discussed by Hoggett relates to the question of Iraqi WMD capabilities when it was surprisingly revealed after the war that Blair and Straw were unaware of the fact that the ‘45 minute claim’ related to short-range delivery systems. However, when one considers all the claims that Blair and Straw made about Iraqi capabilities, none of them include any statements about longer-range capabilities, but rather focus on the threat in the region, especially to the Iraqi people themselves. They never claimed that Iraq could attack Cyprus, or Britain for that matter. So this issue is more of a curiosity, an ignorance of technical detail. It did not actually affect the way in which they portrayed the threat or Iraqi capabilities.

Consequently, the central argument of Hoggett's article fails entirely. First of all, the case made for war by the Blair government is not correctly presented. The article assumes that Blair deceived himself about the Iraqi threat, especially the WMD capabilities. But, four inquiries have found that Blair gave a reasonable account on the basis of the intelligence available to him, and this article does not present any evidence to the contrary. Moreover, the article does not present the policy choices with regard to Iraq realistically. The choice was essentially between the continuation of containment, or dealing with the Iraqi threat and its homicidal regime. The article fails to realise the centrality of the rejection of containment as a practical and morally acceptable policy to the argument that Blair presented. Hoggett characterises my work as ‘a sophisticated apologia’ for Blair (Hoggett 2005, 419). My point is not that one should support the case that Blair made, but rather that one should actually understand it and judge it on its merits.