If the Hutton report taught me anything, it was that you shouldn't put any faith in government inquiries to get to the truth and to expose wrong-doing. As a leftie, I really should've known this already, but I must confess that late last year, I had hoped that the inquiry into the suicide of British weapons inspector Dr. David Kelly would find fault with Tony Blair's government for the circumstances which led to his death. I believe that Hutton would have seriously weakened the Blair premiership if it had made even a rudimetary nod towards reality.
Instead the report was a travesty of justice, castigating the BBC for not meeting the highest standards of accuracy, but expecting no such standards whatsoever from the British government itself. The reporter Andrew Gilligan was lambasted for essentially slightly over-playing his hand with his "sexed up" claim, or put another way, for alleging a little more than he could prove. Yet the report contained not one word of criticism over the government's use of the infamous 45 minute claim, even though Blair himself had long since retracted the allegation.
So I won't be getting my hopes up when another peer, Lord Butler, delivers his report this week into the use of intelligence by the British government in the run-up to the Iraq war. The Butler report may be another whitewash, it may be a fudge, or it may be a stinging and fatal rebuke to the Prime Minister. Whatever the case, we will all know soon enough so what's the point in speculating?
But even if Butler finds no fault at all with Blair's pre-war use of intelligence, the time has come for the British Prime Minister to fall on his sword.
Let's presume, just for argument's sake, that Blair didn't manipulate the intelligence he recieved on Iraqi WMD in order to bolster his case for war. Let's presume, just for a second, that he broke with the habit of a lifetime and didn't spin the facts to achieve a policy goal. Let's presume that all he did in the run-up to the war was to present the evidence he had in a balanced manner. In other words, let's presume that in portraying Saddam's regime as an imminent threat, Blair made an honest mistake.
Even if I accepted all these presumptions (and I don't for a second), I would still say that Blair should go. Even if he was entirely genuine about his fear of Saddam's WMDs, there comes a time when an error, even an honest error, becomes so great that the man at the top must, if he has any honour at all, resign.
The Iraq war is an error of this magnitude. Let's review the wreckage. Iraq has been "liberated" but those pesky stockpiles haven't turned up. Unless they do, Blair's case for war lies in tatters. In the meantime, thousands of Iraqi civilians, many of them women and children, have been killed. Dozens of British soldiers have also lost their lives. British taxpayer'smoney, which could be spent at home, is sucked up by the war machine in the Gulf (those Cruise missiles don't pay for themselves, you know). Finally, by associating himself so closely with the neo-cons on the Potomac, Blair has alienated his country from the Muslim world and from many EU partners.
In the light of such a catastrophic policy failure, Blair must, if he has any honour, make his way to Buckingham Palace forthwith to tender his resignation as Prime Minister of the UK. Yeah, I know what you're thinking, appealing to Blair's sense of honour is about as likely to succeed as appealing to Jurgen Klinnsman's sense of fair play.
But, there was a time not so long ago, when government ministers understood that a cock-up of sufficiently large size was a resgining matter. I think this attitude started to change around Black Wednesday in 1992. That was the day on which the pound fell through the floor on the international currency markets. In spite of pissing away his country's foreign currency reserves like a sailor on shore leave, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Norman Lamont did not offer his resignation. Instead he tried to brazen it out and was only finally sacked when it was clear that he had become a liability.
Since then, British cabinet ministers of both parties have tended to react to the exposure of serious political failings on their part with the question "can I tough this out?", and not the more pertinent, "should I tough this out?"
For Blair the reply to the first question is "probably". The answer to the second is "definitely not".