[email protected] <
[email protected]> wrote:
Power corrupts:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FwpS_JAWcAA6QkE?format=jpg&name=medium
On 28 April 2003, just weeks after the fall of Baghdad, Sir John Scarlett,
the chair of the joint intelligence committee, went into the office of Tony Blair’s press secretary, Alastair Campbell. “How difficult would it be if it transpired we do not find evidence of Saddam’s weapons of mass
destruction programme?” he asked.
With post-Saddam Iraq already tipping towards civil war, and the casus
belli apparently evaporating, Campbell replied: “Very, very, very difficult.”
By then it was already obvious that the choice to go to war had turned into
one of the most controversial decisions taken by a post-1945 British prime minister, but Campbell could not have foreseen how deeply British politics
was to be shaped by Iraq over the next 20 years. It was to tear at
successive Labour leaders, weaken the intelligence agencies and paralyse
the process of authorising the use of force overseas.
Rather than prompt a sober re-examination of the true influence UK prime ministers had on US administrations, it instead took Britain further from
the centre of Europe.
Above all, it poisoned the well of trust in British politics. The committee
on standards in public life, set up in 1994 by the then Conservative prime minister, John Major, in response to sleaze, was good at showing that the British historically have never regarded politicians as fountains of truth
(a Mori poll in 1983 found only 18% of the public said they generally
trusted politicians to tell the truth, falling to 11% in 1993).
The Iraq war was a different order of scandal; politicians were not caught
with their trousers down or fingers in the expenses till, but instead
allegedly doctoring the truth in an attempt to justify war.
--
Spike
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
