Blair’s admission that he would have invaded Iraq even without any evidence of WMD and would simply have found some other rationale to justify it really says it all. Presumably this confession comes at this time in order to preempt the obvious question when he appears before the Chilcot inquiry next month: “Since you were advised by MI6 and the JIC that evidence of Iraqi WMD was patchy and uncertain, how do you justify invading Iraq?” But getting his retaliation in first in this way opens him up to the even more serious charge that, whatever the evidence might indicate, he was determined for his own reasons to take Britain to war and was quite prepared to fall back on whatever other arguments he might be able to construct to persuade Parliament and the public. In other words, exactly as was said about the Bush Administration in the leaked Downing Street memo of July 2002, the facts were created to fit the policy which was already predetermined. This raises several key questions. Would he have got away with it if he had told the truth about the evidence then made available to him or come up with some other explanation to justify war? How can power be made properly accountable so that one man, any future Prime Minister, cannot deliberately dupe the nation into going to war on false pretences? And what actually were his real motives that led him repeatedly to lie to get his way?

If he had told the House of Commons, either in the debates in the autumn of 2002 or in the critical immediate pre-war debate on 19 March 2003, the precise evidence data made available to him by the intelligence services, there can be no doubt that, with the fragmentary nature of the evidence on WMD revealed, he would not have won a majority in the vote. If he had used some other rationale as he is producing now (“the notion of Saddam as a threat to the region”), there can equally be no doubt that it would not have passed muster. Indeed it was only the sexing up of the dossier on WMD, particularly the claim of deployment within 45 minutes, that gave it bite and credibility.
How do we stop this duplicity ever happening again? It has now been established in statute that no Prime Minister can take the country to war without a vote in Parliament. But that is clearly inadequate as a means of ensuring the accountability of the PM when in this case there were indeed votes in the House in 2002-3. What was missing was the truthful revelation of the evidence by which alone a vote could be genuinely assessed. That again raises wider questions. The Intelligence Services Committee, which is responsible for supervising the work of MI5/6 and the JIC, does receive intelligence reports, but cannot reveal them if covered by a security classification. Anway the members are all hand-picked by the PM himself. What is needed is an independent officially approved person (perhaps the Information Commissioner) to determine whether the disclosure of certain intelligence data would genuinely put national security at risk; if not, all such relevant reported evidence at a time of national crisis should be disclosed. Also the members and chair of the ISC should be appointed (or atleast ratified) by Parliament, not the PM.
What were Blair’s real motives? Obviously there can only be conjecture about this. His declared motive has constantly changed (WMD, Saddam’s murderous regime, democracy in the Middle East, and now the threat to the region), which like a constantly changing alibi makes one sceptical. But there are some clues. We know that throughout his premiership, his overweening ambition was to be a big player on the international stage. We know that he regarded hugging close the US President, whoever he was (even as utterly different as Clinton and Bush) was a prime goal for him, almost irrespective of where it led, whether supporting Clinton over Monica Lewinsky or settling a deal in blood with Bush over invading Iraq 11 months before Parliament or the British people were consulted or assented. And then there was oil. Oil, together with establishing a US military platform in the Middle East, was undoubtedly the real motive for the Bush neo-cons. Perhaps Blair, with his sense of world policeman morality, was not far behind.

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