Getting Through to Blair?

Having seen that Tony Blair has been compelled to cancel signings of his autobiography due to anti-war protests not just in Britain but also in Eire, I began to wonder what it will take to shake his self-view that he was God's gift to this country?  I remember back to the time of the Bernie Ecclestone scandal of 1997 when the leading promoter of Formula One racing had given £1 million to the Labour Party and then his sport was was exempted from the ban on tobacco advertising.  Of course, being immune to scandal this did not compel Blair to step down, not even to apologise.  The perceptive impersonator and satirist Rory Bremner did an excellent impression of Blair at the time being forgiving to us, the public.  He said that he accepted that we made mistakes about what was right and wrong, but this time he was willing to understand that we were fallible and to forgive us and move on.  That sketch was incredibly perceptive of Blair's character.

I suppose you have to have utter self-confidence to succeed in politics and those prime ministers, like Major and Brown have suffered for it.  However, Blair's attitude seems completely untempered by any recognition that he is fallible and has made grave mistakes that have led to the death of thousands.  It seems ironic that he moved from a Church of England stance, which though not really fully Protestant has some truck with those elements of Christianity which believe in predestination such as Calvinism, more prevalent in Scotland than in England.  Under such a creed Blair could believe that his greatness was all part of God's great plan.  One would expect such an attitude from George W. Bush in a USA which still adheres to the myth of its 'manifest destiny', i.e. that it was always going to be the size and as powerful as it has turned out, hence their dislike of counter-factuals.  However, Blair is now a Roman Catholic and that brand of Christianity is one which is very aware of fallibility (if not always of the Pope) and allows more regularly for contrition and foregiveness.  Unlike Protestantism which has only grace by belief, i.e. you will get into Heaven if you believe in God; Roman Catholicism needs you to have both belief and to do good works if you are to get into Heaven.  However, as Graham Greene noted in much of his writing the ability in Catholicism to confess and be absolved regularly, can lead people to do bad things in the confidence that if they pay up quickly on Earth it will not affect their entrance to Heaven.

Blair did lots of things wrong in his premiership but the one that continues to haunt him is his compliance with George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq simply to control the fifth largest oil reserve in the World.  There were spurious claims about what a threat Saddam Hussein was to the planet, or more particularly the USA, but it was forgotten that a large part of his weaponry was sold to him by western powers when fighting Iran.  In many ways removing him was like the Americans removing General Noriega, he was one of their tools that they had tired of or for political reasons no longer needed.  It is certain that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 actually increased terrorist activity across the World and whilst it freed the Iraqis from one dictator it simply plunged them into a different kind of violence and depridation.  As I noted at the start of this blog, Blair has never waivered from his self-belief that everything he has done is right.  He was very fortunate that he was able to mutate the Labour Party into the Blairite Party.  His dislike of Brown was because he was of that previous party rather than being a Blairite.  On that basis he could never have reconciled with him.  No wonder Blair found Brown 'maddening' as he says in his autobiography, he would simply not accept that Blair was the best thing ever to happen in British politics and be a true believer in the Blairite cult.  It seems like that David Miliband will be the next leader of the 'Labour' Party and so the Brown phase will be seen in retrospect as an aberration from the growth of the Blairite Party.  I have regularly given examples of this, Gaullism and Peronism being two that always come to mind; Blair with his Christian Democrat approach is very much in that mould.  It is interesing that we are so concerned with 'fundamentalists' but forget that with Bush and to a great extent Blair, we had them already in power.

Right-wing commentators have argued that the protests against Blair have been orchestrated by political groupings.  They, like Blair, still do not understand how unpopular the Iraq war was and that it has lost supporters every month.  They forget the huge and the persistent protests against it.  Blair was the favourite Labour leader of the right-wing press and wealthy because he was so like them.  He did nothing to shake the Thatcherite legacy and avoided policies which actually helped what should have been the natural constituency of the Labour Party.  The cutting out of the ordinary people has continued under Cameron, in fact, as I will analyse next month, has sharpened and accelerated.  Again, looking back from fifty years in the future I am sure we will put Blair in the same category as Major and Cameron, Thatcherites who gave some superficial elements to the policy but continuing with what Thatcher established in the 1980s and not repairing any of the damage she inflicted.  Brown tried to reverse that trend, but the hostility to his attempt is apparent in the still virulent attacks in the media on him even now he has left office.  Their fear, of course, is that with Ed Balls or even Ed Miliband will come to lead Labour, so they keep trying to scare Labour supporters and the general public so that the Thatcherite-Blair trend can continue.  In many ways Thatcher has achieved in her legacy what she set out to do as part of her mission in the 1980s, was to move to a situation where the two main political parties would be close together in policy the way the Republicans and Democrats were in the USA, though these days many Americans might dispute their proximity.

Tony Blair's self-confidence is unnerving.  It is the kind of self-confidence generally found in dictators rather than rulers of democratic countries.  I suppose winning repeatedly in elections and seeing his successor just about fall has added to Blair's ego.  However, I also believe it is a real flaw within him and the fact that he was able to run Britain and believe constantly that only his view was the correct one, shows how vulnerable the UK is to dictatorship.  I kept hoping that he would see one day that he could be wrong.  However, it does not seem to be the case, and I am coming to conclusion that only when he is turned away from Heaven will he finally realise what he did.  Then, he will probably blame someone else.  I would certainly use Blair as a model for children warning them of the dangers of such arrogance.  As yet, he may not have paid the price (though interestingly on the 'Daily Telegraph' blog there is someone threatening to assassinate him), but I hope that these protests which stop him lording around bookshops, squeezing out just that little more adoration which he clearly needs like a drug, may begin to penetrate.  I hope in time that he will be disgraced and ignored, because the danger of Blair is not only what he wreaked on people, but the fact that he has become too much of a model for other politicians and the UK and the rest of the World cannot live safely when we have politicians who believe that their personal decisions are the work of God and thus beyond even questioning, let alone challenging.

Invading Iraq: Unwavering Politicians Are Dangerous

Strangely, seeing coverage of Tony Blair's testament to the Chilcot Inquiry into the UK's involvement in the war in Iraq, the one which is still going on, I found myself believing in divine vengeance.  I have noted in the past that many elements of the Bible as they have been filtered and interpreted by those in authority in the Middle Ages encourage a stable society.  The emphasis that vengeance is God's is a good way to stop vendettas and people taking the law into their own hands, but this week I recognised that it can also be a bit of a consolation to people who feel wronged.  The sense that 'well, I can do nothing to get back at him for what he has done, but he still has to face God's judgement'.

I suppose what brought me to this kind of last resort when seeking justice is how unwavering Blair was.  I had always expected the politicians wheeled in front to the enquiry to say what they had done was right, and have actually been heartened by the legal officials and even Lord Goldsmith showing the confusing and uncertainty around the legality of the war.  What cut most deeply with Blair, however, was his total lack of regret for anything he did.  We always knew that he was arrogant, but this emphasised that now, even out of office and earning millions of pounds, he will not concede he has ever made a mistake.  I once attended a speech by former prime minister (1970-4) Edward Heath in which he reflected on his term in office, a very troubled period in British society and wryly he argued that it might have been bad but was nothing compared to what came later under Callaghan (1976-9) and Thatcher (1979-90).  Blair seems to believe that he ruled over a golden period in British history in which we, the public might have got things wrong but he was perfect in every way, and our problem was that we did not listen to him enough.  Blair is supposed to be a Christian.  He is now a Catholic, so I suppose he has been able to confess his sins and get absolution for them.  However, surely to be a Christian of any sort you must be able to reflect on what you have done and see your errors in order to repent and seek absolution.

Blair can argue that invading Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussain was the 'right' thing to do.  No-one would argue that Hussain was not evil and was killing many of his own people and using torture.  However, so are many other leaders around the world and we seem to be taking no efforts to depose them.  Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe would seem a good place to start as we know he does not even have the suggestion of weapons of mass destruction.  Yet, Blair does not take this line, so we end up with fudged explanations around misunderstandings about nuclear or chemical or biological weapons, some partial legal approval from the United Nations and the UK's connection to the USA.  Perhaps the motivations were this confused mish-mash.  However, if they were, this seems to suggest a weak, confused prime minister, that Blair certainly does not portray himself as.

Saying this, the concessions that Blair has allowed are that he never expected Al-Qaeda to become involved in Iraq after the USA had conquered it and neither did he expect Iran to destabilise the state either.  A student of GCSE level International Relations, could have told you to expect these things.  First of all, one of the reasons why George W. Bush emphasised the need to invade Iraq was because he felt it was a base of Al-Qaeda activity.  Of course, Hussain, was in fact an opponent of the movement, whereas Saudi Arabia, the USA's ally in the region has always been a place where Islamist terrorists have thrived.  The second point is that there was the example of Afghanistan.  When that had been destabilised by the Soviet invasion and occupation (1979-89) it opened the door to the Taleban to take power and created a regime in which Al-Qaeda was able to operate, probably not as this supposed international terrorist structure somehow resembling the fictional SPECTRE, but as an association of small radical groups connected by a desire for promoting Islamist regimes through terrorism.  In Afghanistan they were labelled the 'foreign fighters' and in many cases would be simply volunteers looking to fight to defend what they saw as the correct form of Islamist state that the Taleban had established.  So, there was a clear example of what was liable to happen in a primarily Muslim country once a superpower had invaded; it encourages religious fundamentalists rather than weakens them.

As for Iranian intervention in Iraq after the US invasion, again, a teenager who had read 20th century history, could have predicted this.  Even if this had not been a correct prediction, it was something the USA and its supporters should have prepared for.  Iran and Iraq were at war 1980-8 and have continued to have border tensions since.  Iran, itself a dictatorship, would never pass up the chance to keep Iraq weak and then to create a regime sympathetic to Iran if not a puppet state.  Knowing the Iranian regime as well as the USA does due to its bitter relations with the country since 1979, surely it could have been foreseen that the Iranians would not have stood by passively.  Their pursuit of nuclear technology suggests that the regime is not currently adopting a passive stance.  From the Iranian perspective, look at a map and see that Iran has Afghanistan to its North-East and Iraq to its West, two places that by 2003, the USA was militarily involved with.  Iraq under Hussain had been supported militarily by the USA, so is it no surprise that when the Americans are running it the Iranians would feel that they might be next on the list for invasion.  If Barack Obama had not won the US presidential election, perhaps they might have been.
 
What has not come out in the Chilcot Inquiry are the real motives for the war, rather than the mixed up approaches that were supposed to win public support.  This comes back to US concern about oil resources especially in the light of China's aggressive search for control of raw materials and a regime in Venezuela, the USA's prime short haul supplier of oil, that was unfriendly to US imperialism.  I think George W. Bush probably believed, as he was told that Al-Qaeda, the imagined organisation that gave so many of his authoritarian policies some form of perceive legitimacy, was in Iraq.  However foolish Bush was, as a former oil man, I imagine he must have seen the value of the USA holding Iraq.  Of course, this explanation for the war is the least palatable to the public of all of the excuses put forward and this is why it will not be heard at the Chilcot Inquiry or anywhere else public.

This then brings us back to Blair and his mish-mash explanation. for going to war.  He said there was no plot or conspiracy to bring about war, but the problem with the approach that was adopted was that it was a shabby collection of reasons.  At least, to some extent, admitting that neither the USA and especially not the UK was ready to go to war in terms of forces and equipment, he said a military build-up could not have begun without alerting Hussain to the potential of invasion.  I think Hussain probably had already seen the UN resolution and the weapons inspectors.  His country had been invaded by the USA and UK back in 1990-1 and it was clear they had been disappointed that he had not fallen at the time once they had expelled him from Kuwait.  So, Hussain was as ready as he could have been to face the invasion. This issue about trying to keep preparations low key, is something that Blair can be blamed for directly as it meant the UK forces were ill-equipped and this has meant far higher casualties than needed to be the case.  If you are going to be a militarist state in the way the UK has been in the 2000s you need a strong military and not to be involved in two wars on the cheap.  Skimping on equipment means paying a higher price in casualties.  For the British public this is on charge that Blair really needs to be held accountable for, because unlike with US global political approaches, he had direct control over it.  The excuse that decent preparation could have given the game a way is pathetic.

In fact, a strong, visible military build up would have helped remove Hussain.  By making him feel under threat and so keeping his military expenditure at a maximum, the West could have brought down the regime through economic chaos the way the USSR dissolved after years of sustaining its side of the arms race.  However, that would not have served the USA as there was no knowing who might have got control of the oil, possibly the country with the greatest foreign currency reserves in the world, China, though effectively supporting Hussain's regime financially as they are backing those regimes in Sudan and Zimbabwe.  All superpowers, including the USA, prefers to deal with dictatorships than democracies; China, however, has fewer qualms over human rights records.  Of course, ironically the USA's invasion of Iraq moved it into an era in which it adopted torture as an approach it was happy to use.

So, what we got from Blair, was probably what we expected, though, I, like many headline writers was stunned by how unwavering Blair was in seeing himself as having done precisely nothing wrong.  I suppose unrepentance is the luxury of retirement.  The fact that he has gone on to be a Middle Eastern envoy on the basis of his career is sickening.  Blair's attitude is very like that of the politician he most resembles in policies and attitude, Margaret Thatcher.  She famously said 'this lady's not for turning' and saw any critics of her sledgehammer policies as 'moaning minnies'.  The UK likes politicians of this ilk and they serve long in office, whereas their more human successors, John Major and Gordon Brown are portrayed as weak and vacilliating.  However, for one, I would rather have a politician aware of his flaws because that means s/he is aware of their humanity.  Humanity is what connects them with not only the entire electorate, but more broadly people across the world.  It is fine to admit you have made mistake, but for some reason we want politicians who will never do this.  As a consequence we end up with policies, which may appear needful and strong at the start but usually end up leading to years of suffering for ordinary people.  To anyone who favours unwavering politicians, with no regrets at all, just like Tony Blair, I would point to the politician who took this to the extreme, who continued to blame everyone else for what ruin he had brought to his country and the world, right until his death: Adolf Hitler.

P.P. 01/02/2010: An interesting twist in this story comes from former minister Clare Short who is apparently going to claim at the Chilcot Inquiry that Gordon Brown, long Tony Blair's rival in government, was kept out of the inner circle that decided on the UK's involvement in the invasion of Iraq in 2003.  Short believes that on the back of the glory of the expected quick victory Blair would have moved to remove Brown from his position as Chancellor of the Exchequer effectively marking a coup against his rival and ultimately his successor.  We know that Blair postponed stepping down as prime minister as long as he could and went much later than Brown had been led to expect.  Brown did become prime minister, in 2007, as Blair had promised him back in 1994, but in harder circumstances and with the troubles in Iraq dragging on after the war and the UK still suffering casualties.

For Blair it seems the invasion of Iraq had the potential for a 'Flucht nach vorn', in the style of Fritz Fischer's explanation of the domestic reasons for the German triggering of the First World War, i.e. using overseas success to resolve domestic political pressures.  I was very suspicious when in his testament to the Chilcot Inquiry last month, Blair's henchman Alastair Campbell emphasised that Brown had played a full part in the discussions about war.  I did not see why Campbell made this emphasis and assumed he saw it as a chance to get a bit of revenge on Brown.  This may explain why Brown is happy to testify to the Inquiry before the election. 

Even if Short's accusation is exaggerated, it seems that Blair's arrogance was straying into a whole other field, and he saw domestic political gain to be had from the war, no matter what else he got from backing the USA's approach.  Perhaps it anticipated receiving the large popularity boost of the kind his heroine, Margaret Thatcher had received after the Falklands Conflict of 1982.  It shows that not only was he willing to play with Iraqi lives for personal political gain but British ones too.

The US Empire Expands - 19th Century Imperialism Lives On

Just when I thought we were beginning to witness a bit of maturity in US politics with the primaries for the Democratic candidate which seemed to suggest parts of the American public were putting aside some of the bigotry and narrow-minded attitudes that they have become renowned for, suddenly we find that with the last gasp of his regime George Bush is busily expanding the American empire. Of course the Americans have never liked to be categorised as imperialists because they feel they were the first nation to throw off imperial rule when they defeated the British in the American War of Independence. However, they were really no different from Japan which came from at least a degree of imperial control in the mid-19th century to begin carving out their own empire in China and elsewhere in East Asia. Of course a lot of people assume that imperialism is all about colonies with the country being totally controlled by the imperial power and settlement by that power. The old empires like the British, French, Belgian, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese did this across the world, but what people forget is that there are many forms of imperialism and it is some of these other forms that the USA carried out and is still, it seems carrying out today. Of course the USA still has clear imperial control over Guam in the Pacific and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean as those countries have their laws made in Washington, but the empire is expanding elsewhere in less controlling forms.

Before looking at different forms of imperialism, it is important to note one issue that I will come back to later that tends to be common to anywhere which is coming under any form of imperial control, that is 'extraterritoriality' which means that if you are from the imperial power or one of its friends, then you are immune to local laws no matter what you do in the country. This applies to all diplomats, but when there is imperialism going on it is extended to soldiers, business people and so on. This is always controversial as it means that people from the imperial state can commit what would be seen as crimes and get away with it or only be punished by the rules of their home country. Having extraterritoriality removed was a goal of Chinese nationalists and Communists right through the first half of the 20th century.

Imperialism breaks first of all into 'informal' and 'formal' imperialism. Informal imperialism is effectively economic dominance of a country and this was what tended to happen to developed societies in the 19th century for example in China, the Ottoman Empire and South America where states had shaken formal imperialism of Spain and Portugal by the 1820s only to come under informal imperialism from Britain and the USA. Informal imperialism is very common nowadays. Developing countries have their economies distorted so that they provide the resources that the Western world needs at cheap prices. Once it was things like fruit, sugar and coffee, increasingly it is becoming bio-fuels. Until they asserted their autonomy in the 1950s-70s even the rich oil countries of the Middle East were under such control. Interestingly like the Japanese 150 years ago, the Chinese are now turning from exploited to exploiters and carrying out informal imperialism not only in Africa but also Australia and Canada. The advantage of informal imperialism is that it is pretty cheap and does not look like imperialism, but this was the form that the British and the Dutch East India Companies began with in the 18th century in India and Indonesia, only later did it become more formal, state-run imperialism. The USA was carrying out informal imperialism in Central and South America from the 1820s onwards and moved into East Asia during the Cold War. Alongside states it ran informally there were ones like Cuba, Panama and the Philippines which it controlled more formally. In China whilst none of the colonial powers conquered the whole country in the 19th century they did rule directly over small areas or particular cities, especially the treaty ports, where their law rather than that of China prevailed.

Formal imperialism is when a country takes over the other country and runs its economy and foreign policy, though as I discuss below this may leave a lot of autonomy in the hands of local elites. There are various grades of formal imperialism.

Spheres of influence: with these you are not far away from informal imperialism. An example was Persia (now Iraq) in the 19th century and up to the end of the Second World War. Neither Russia/USSR or the UK actually took control of Persia but it was accepted that the Russians would be dominant in the North and the British in the South; Russian and British companies would be the ones getting all the contracts and in the case of trouble it would be the Russian or British who would intervene in their respective areas. To some extent the French still have this kind of relationship with much of West Africa and the French military intervenes if there is unrest. The British do this on a smaller scale, as with former colony, Sierra Leone. It is argued that during the Cold War Western Europe was effectively the US sphere of influence and Eastern Europe much more clearly the Soviet sphere of influence.

Dominions: this is a very British mode of imperialism and is often a legacy of tighter control. It is for countries like New Zealand, Australia and Canada, that were heavily settled by Europeans so that the indigenous cultures almost disappeared and they are now considered 'White' countries. These states though independent in domestic and foreign policy retain the British monarch as their head of state rather than having their own president and they refer

Dependent Territories: these can be defined differently and have a particular technical meaning when talking about the UK. These are countries, often small ones, which effectively cannot subsist without the economic input of the imperial power. They run their own affairs but are heavily dependent on trade with the imperial power and may be compelled to be guided on things like defence and foreign policy. They may also provide military bases for the imperial power. Ironically this is what Cuba had become for the USA before Fidel Castro pulled off the revolution in 1958 and even then the US base at Guantanamo Bay remains a legacy of that imperial relationship that even Castro could not remove.

Protectorates: this was a common form of imperial rule over much of the British and other European empires in the 19th century, notably the Netherlands over Indonesia. It is not as expensive as a full blown colonisation and in theory the protectorate enters into an agreement for protection though in reality it was generally forced. Some people use the supposed voluntary entry into being a protectorate to compare that form of imperialism positively compared to the formation of 'Mandates' by the League of Nations at the end of the First World War which was imposed on these countries when they were removed from control of Germany and allocated to other colonial powers. However, the treatment was much the same in both cases. What distinguishes protectorates and mandates from colonies is that local rulers stay in control, though they have to deal economically with the imperial power like dependent territories and have their defence and foreign policy and often many other policies determined by the imperial state. Large areas of India such as Mysore, Hyderabad, the Rajput States and Baluchistan (now inPakistan) were such protectorates, under local princes rather than direct British control like the rest of India.

Colonies: in the British Empire these became 'Crown Colonies' to designate that control moved from the hands of companies, notably the East India Company which lost control of its parts of India in 1858 and they were run by the British government. The Belgian and German governments were also obliged to take over colonies started by companies in Africa in the late 19th century as it proved impossible for anything less than a state to run colonies. As the name suggests, the aim was generally for settlers from the home country to colonise the imperial territory. This generally happened far less than was expected as people preferred to emigrate to the Americas. However, there were notable exceptions such as South Africa, Kenya, French Indochina and especially Algeria, where by the time of independence 1 out of 9 of the population was European. In colonies the imperial power ran everything replacing government of the country by governors and the military and large chunks of the economy came under direct control of the imperial state. In extreme cases, as with Algeria for France, the colony effectively became part of the metropolitan country; in 1945, 12% of the members of parliament sitting in Paris were elected from the colonies. Other countries did not engage so closely with their colonies, though there were discussions in the 1950s about Malta returning MPs to parliament in London.

Right, so with terms established, why do I think the American Empire is expanding. Well, we all know, as I was predicting last year, that it is in Iraq. This is a country which was under the Ottoman Empire until 1918 but the Germans were attempting informal imperialism there in the 1900s. After 1918 it became a mandate of the British until gaining seemingly gaining independence in 1945 when it became a full member of the United Nations. The British had re-invaded the country in 1941 to suppress uprisings and presumably fearful of the country's oil falling into German hands. As we know the USA invaded Iraq in 1991 following its recapture of Kuwait (a state Iraq had claimed sovereignty over as early as 1961) and then again in 2003 to overthrow Saddam Hussein. It appeared that there were steps to Iraq again becoming independent, but it seems that it is not the level of independence it had up until 2003. Bush is negotiating for the USA not to just have a single military base in Iraq but 50 bases across the country. In addition US troops would have extraterritoriality but not simply to go about their business but to carry out arrests and military activities without referring to any Iraqi government. This is the kind of power Austria-Hungary asked Serbia to give in July 1914 and the Japanese demanded of China in 1937 which in both cases led to war. It is like the power foreigners had in Japan in the late 19th century which led to unrest in the country and a coup in 1867, the so-called Meiji Restoration. A new twist for the 21st century is that the USA wants control of Iraqi airspace below 29,000 feet (about 9700 metres). In addition to all this, US companies since the war have been the key economic players in the country and will continue to be so even if this so-called 'Strategic Alliance' is not signed and you can guarantee that the US will have an effective monopoly on sale of Iraqi oil.

Iraq is already a dependent territory of the USA and the agreement would solidify that. The ongoing military presence and the extraterritoriality plus the supposed 'agreement' smacks very much of a protectorate being formed. One could envisage this being 1888 rather than 2008 with the USA having overthrown some local despot, restoring some local elites but effectively running the country as their own. Certainly the influence of any other power, notably Iran, is being excluded. The USA has seen the Middle East as to some extent in its sphere of influence since the Eisenhower Doctrine of the 1950s, but what we are now witnessing is not a kind of 'new imperialism' talked about during the Cold War, this is simply reheated 19th century imperialism. People argued that the Cold War was a natural development in history and when it ended a certain phase was concluded, but to me, it appears that the Cold War was an aberration and in fact there are more continuities between the world in 1908 and 2008 than there ever were between 1948/58/68 even 1978 and today. Predictions of American, Russian (notice their colonial moves on the seabed of the Arctic and the UK doing the same in the mid-Atlantic) and China as dividing up the world seem more accurate now than ever. Imperialism is not dead, we are witnessing it occurring this very moment.

Prince Harry's Tour of Duty

Now before I launch into this post I must state a vested interest first, which is that I believe having a royal family is only a bad thing for the UK. They are expensive and the are part of the non-democratic political system that we have in this country. I do not see that happening to be the only available Protestant family in 1714 deemed fit enough to rule Britain qualifies you for being anything of use in 2008. That aside we come to more current issues. The British Royal Family have long had connections with the military. All of the mature members are colonels-in-chief of at least one regiment and they regularly visit naval and airforce units too. This is part of the military-nobility-Anglican clergy complex we have in the UK, because the Queen is also head of the Church of England and the senior noble in the country. Whilst monarchs have not led units to war for almost three hundred years, their children have seen action. One of the Queen's uncles died in an aircraft crash while in the RAF and her husband saw action in the Second World War; her second son, Prince Andrew was in the Falklands Conflict of 1982 where in fact given how badly things went for the British at some stages he could have been killed. One of her grandsons, second in line to the throne, Prince William was barred by the military from going to fight in Iraq as they apparently feared that he would make his unit a particular target, though given the regularity of death among British soldiers in Iraq they would still have faced a great risk with or without him. Now it turns out his younger brother, so third in line to the throne, Prince Harry had been serving for 10 weeks in Afghanistan but since the story broke was brought home.

Now there are so many things wrong with the whole incident. The first one is that the government gagged all British media to prevent it from reporting that the prince was serving in Afghanistan, naively believing that if the bulk of the British population did not know then somehow terrorists would not either; surely if they are as strong as we are told they have infiltrated every British newspaper, radio and television company. If al-Qaeda actually existed or were as sophisticated as the US government makes out, they would have known about Harry's destination before he left the UK let alone by the time he reached Afghanistan where Osama bin-Laden is supposed to be hiding and the Taleban that the British are fighting are supposed to be his ally. Anyone with minimal skill could get his picture from the internet and see him on patrol in Afghanistan. (Personally I think bin-Laden is tucked up safely in a nice discreet palace in Saudi Arabia protected by his wealthy family and friends). The gagging or probably more accurately, bribing as the media was promised exclusive coverage when he returned, was more about keeping it secret from the British public for fear of comment.

One reason why the British government does not want such attention is that they are receiving growing criticism. So, most of the British population accepted fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, though many did not, but there was an expectation from all that the British Army was professional and had the latest equipment. Yet at inquest after inquest we find that British vehicles have insufficient armour, British military police lack bullet-proof vests, that British soldiers are sent into night battles lacking even basic night vision equipment. We are trying to police the world on the cheap. I expect Prince Harry got all the equipment he needed, but if his mother had married some different man than the Prince of Wales, he or his equivalent could quite easily be killed by a poorly armed local guerilla just like scores of other British men and women.

The second problem is why was he brought back? Either he is a soldier and should serve as all other soldiers do or he is not and he should be kept for ceremonial activities like his grandmother. He cannot be a proper soldier and yet not be a proper soldier. It seems clear that he relishes the normality of service, but at the end of the day he is very different to his comrades just because of the bed he was born in. What would happen if you or I had a son or a daughter in Iraq or Afghanistan and I decided that it was a bit too dangerous for them, could I simply have them sent home? No. I would have to leave them there to get killed and maimed while serving in an ill-equipped force acting with no clear objectives. I do not wish any ill-will to Prince Harry or anyone in the Armed Forces, but what difference do you think it would make to British policy if he was killed or injured? It is sickening that the fate of one man could swing things in a way that the death of hundreds of 'ordinary' people cannot.

What this whole debate seems to have been around is the fate of a single man. What it should be about is what light that discussion throws on British involvement in both Afghanistan and Iraq and why the British government feels it has the right to censor coverage of issues that are impacting on so many families both in Britain and the countries we have invaded.

What Use is History?

I have just read 'Foundation' a short story by the London-based author China Mieville. He writes contemporary set stories with elements of both grim realism and also fantastical aspects. That story features a US building inspector who had served in the war in Iraq and was involved in burying Iraqi soldiers alive. As you read it, you think, that is grim but what is more shocking is that you find out it is true. Apparently 'The Guardian' reported in 2003 how US troops using tanks fitted with sand-ploughs had run over Iraqi trenches burying the soldiers alive.

Someone once said to me that they could see no point in anyone actually researching history at university because surely we now knew everything that had happened and surely there was nothing else to find. An old woman said that you needed to study history so that you could teach the children 'that we beat the Europeans and they should not be coming over here trying to take control' in a single sentence indicating her own ignorance of history. On the basis of the first woman's comments, there are many subjects we could simply stop researching. 'Why bother with geography? We know where everywhere is now.' ; 'Why bother with physics? We can all see gravity at work.'; 'Why bother researching religion? We know what God wants.' and so on. Yes, we could simply settle down being happy with what we have and not explore it any further. Yet, the World is not static as climate change, AIDS and fundamentalism show. Yet, even then, surely the past does not change, does it?

Well, to me it seems more that we only know a fraction of what actually went on. In the 1960s people started investigating 'everyday history' as they realised actually we knew quite a bit about what kings, queens and presidents did but very little about what the bulk of the population actually did in history, despite the fact that the very large majority of us are the ordinary people. We are the ordinary people of the 21st century and in decades let alone centuries to come we are going to be entirely forgotten as people study President Bush's actions and maybe those of Queen Elizabeth II. Already the Iraqi soldiers, young me choked to death in blind panic as sand was shovelled over them are forgotten.

In addition to the sweep of history literally neglecting billions of people's lives, much of history is hidden. Channel 4 began a series in 1991 called 'Secret History' which has looked at a lot of hidden bits of history, about scandals and things people even today do not want you talking about. Put the series into a search engine and you find scores of its programmes discussed at length online, examples include the fiasco of HMS Glorious in 1940 (shown 1997), about the Comet aircraft crashes of the 1950s (shown 2002) - provoked lots of controversy, the Charge of the Light Brigade fiasco (shown 2002), Ivarr the Boneless a disabled Viking leader (shown 2003), under-age recruits in the First World War (shown 2004), the so-called 'headless man' in the Duke & Duchess of Argyll's divorce (shown 2004), the story of Mary Seacole the often neglected black nurse in the Crimean War (shown 2005), one on wartime crime in the UK (when everyone now praises how the British all pulled together, in fact crime was soaring). One which became even more relevant was about how the British aerial bombing Iraqi insurgents in northern Iraq (then part of the British Empire) in 1920 with gas, something Saddam Hussein was to repeat 70 years later. Similar bombing in what is now Pakistan in the 1930s gave the RAF a distorted view of how effective aerial bombardment could be as German cities were a lot tougher than Iraqi or Pakistani villages.

Another resource I have been looking for is a long list with little one-page articles about serious strikes and unrest in British history, a lot of which gets forgotten about or pushed under the carpet. I came across it a few years ago: http://libcom.org/tags/world-war-1 is one interesting section about the early 20th century when the UK seemed to be in meltdown. The site does not tell you much about itself but it seems to be focused on labour history and in particular strikes and unrest; they have the anarchist icon of a half-black, half-red star at the top. They are apparently so-called 'Libertarian Communists' which is an impossibility. Communism by definition is based on strictures and constraints whether these stem from the economy, or from societal or political power and the rules they impose. Libertarianism is a right-wing tendency (as Communism is left-wing) and believes in the total freedom of the individual to choose what they want to do, so these two things cancel each other out. Consequently it may be a joke. Alternatively it may be a consequence of the same kind of attitude as the Nazis. 'Nazi' is the contraction of the German words for National Socialist. Again national socialist combines the left-wing element of socialism, with its emphasis on international co-operation and equality whereas nationalism is right-wing and emphasises the distinction of each nation and that some nations are more important and powerful than others. So Libcom sums up a similar contradiction.

Despite their bizarre political approach (and I cannot accept that they use 'working class' but do not tolerate 'middle class' as a term, they say it has no economic basis so is illegitimate, but you could have always said that about the working class which in itself was so economically diverse as to be meaningless), anyway, despite this the articles do not seem to be pushing much propaganda and are a good start for finding out about bits of hidden history. Interestingly they adhere to the guidelines of 'The Guardian' for submitting articles and they seem to be written by people outside the group itself which may explain their quality. It is good to see these kinds of parts of history mention, though I must say that things such as the Liverpool General Strike of 1911 and the Etaples Mutiny of 1917 now get a lot more coverage than they once did and this seems to be one of the wonders of the internet and history teachers looking for something a bit more radical to include in their lessons. The Libcom site lists a lot of events that you can then search for specifically and then turn up the single topic articles that are out there (again often from left-wing radical groups, so bear that in mind as you read) on these topics.

While looking for the Libcom page surprisingly I did find a current Ministry of Defence document about the UK's 'resilience' to such things these days. I do not know if it is the sort of thing they should have freely accessible online by just searching, but maybe it is just another sign of the government's current data security problems! It was written in 2002 so I guess it is probably felt to be out of date. However, if you want to write a novel it might have some good ideas about how the UK expected to resist (I imagine given the date the focus was Islamist terrorism) attacks or internal unrest in the early 2000s. See: http://www.ukresilience.info/upload/assets/www.ukresilience.info/defencecontrib.pdf This turns out to be part of UK Resilience, a body I have never heard of, but is apparently part of the Cabinet Office, that rather odd bit at the centre of government. The website is apparently aimed at 'civil protection practitioners', a job title I have not heard of, maybe it is a career to get into as the site lists all the things the government is currently seeking to scare us with. The homepage is: http://www.ukresilience.info/ Apparently it uses the 'UK government access key system' but unless somehow my computer has been equipped with that, it is currently not working as I am busily wandering around the site (with its wonderful acronyms such as CONOPS - UK Central Government Concept of Operations, apparently). As I say there is always a lot of secret corners out there and sometimes you can accidently shine your light into one. Go and have a look.
There are probably hundreds more corners of history in Britain, let alone across the world which have been forgotten, distorted or concealed. If we persist with faulty history then our perceptions of the present and our expectations for the future are distorted in a way which is unhealthy for our societies.

Why the USA Scares Me

Living in the UK people for some reason always feel we are in danger of being dominated by others. In the Cold War many believed the USSR had a desire to overrun the UK and that they would fight a guerilla war to stop this. Given the economic difficulties of the UK and the USSR throughout that era, I doubt it would have made much economic sense, but it was what people feared. Since 1973 when the UK joined what was then called the European Economic Community (EEC) and is now the European Union, many people constantly complain that our country is increasingly 'controlled from Brussels' with most of the focus on keeping EU rules for tinkering with our quirky systems of measurement and keeping the pound as the currency. The argument does not go beyond that and never addresses the broader economic and political questions, beyond complaint about Polish immigrants though they are generally lumped together with asylum seekers. There is a sense always that there is a British identity focused on the eccentricities of the UK in the 21st century, the loss of which, will mean the end of freedom in the UK. This takes no recognition of the massive changes that have gone on in British society since the late 1970s (probably more extreme than anywhere in western Europe) or the fact that freedom is more at risk from the government's erosion of civil liberties throughout the 2000s.

So where does the USA appear in this equation? Many people see it as a defender of democracy and certainly of the capitalist form of economics, though I would argue the EU certainly has an equal role in the latter. Due to the long historical connection between the USA and UK we probably get more US culture and hence attitudes flowing into our country than any of our neighbours and at various times France and (West) Germany have sought to shake off such influence. In the UK no politician can be seen to be hostile to the USA and so damage the 'special relationship' even when we have no need for US military bases on our soil (if we ever had a genuine need for them in the first place). The UK presents itself as retaining a key role in policing the World, but actually when you look at it, it cannot do this independently of the USA. This has been the case probably since 1941 though it was not put to the test until 1956 when the Americans opposed British intervention in Egypt.

Now for much of the 20th century the USA has managed to go off and have ill-advised wars without involving the British. There were British troops involved in the Korean War 1950-3 but fortunately that was comparatively short. The influence of Prime Minister Clement Attlee dissuaded the Americans from using atomic weapons which many millions of people in the world should be grateful for. The UK (bar a few individuals working with the Australians or later directly for the Americans) managed to stay out of the Vietnam War. What it was unable to do was to avoid the overall Cold War paranoia. This brings me to the first period when the USA scared me. It was during the terms of office of President Ronald Reagan. Like the current President Bush, Reagan was a man so lacking in talent that he should have been barred from holding high office. People portray him as the man who ended the Cold War and I have even seen a website arguing that if he had not been elected president in 1981 we would still be in the Cold War, that is utter rubbish; if he had died following the assassination attempt in March 1981 actually the Cold War may have ended a lot sooner. Especially in his first term of office (1981-1984) he brought the world closer to nuclear war than it had been at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. He diverged from the steps to detente that had occurred in the 1970s (not helped by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979) but started adopting the jargon of the 'empire of evil' rather than seeing the Soviets as humans too and with no appreciation that by the mid-1970s their economy was in melt-down.

What was so alarming about Reagan and this has been an aspect which contributes to making the USA so frightening how, is his high degree of self-righteousness, and his belief that in the case of nuclear war the 'elect' (including himself) would be lifted clear of Earth by God and then brought back down to a new Eden that would rather be like the world following the end of the Deluge at the time of Noah. You cannot have the most powerful man in the world so detached from reality and with so little concern for billions of people living on this planet and not be afraid. Consequently through the 1980s I would awake to a loud bang fearing Reagan had triggered a nuclear war to bring about the new Eden. I was just grateful that living near a NATO computer base that we would be hit by one of the early missiles (in the UK we only had a 4-minute delay between war starting and missiles hitting the country, being only the size of Rhode Island there was nowhere to run to) rather than face a lingering death in the irradiated wreckage of what had once been the UK. Reagan also brought fear to Latin America by backing dictatorships in El Salvador and Honduras that were involved with the murder and horrific torture of their citizens and by sponsoring and arming rebels in Nicaragua too.

Right, you may say, well Reagan has long been out of office and is now dead, surely you cannot be worried about the Americans. Well, we have a US President who seems even more incompetent than Reagan. Since the 1980s fundamentalism has been growing across the world (in part because people feel they have so little to direct their own fates) and in the USA as in Iran, it has taken control of the political system. George W. Bush's attitudes are shaped by it. This means that the self-righteousness is back in full force, the sense that the Americans are so special that the policies they carry out are holy and cannot be wrong. Of course these policies are not applied, say to eliminate dictatorship across the world, but bar in Afghanistan (which I increasingly believe was invaded simply to have a war) has more to do with securing raw materials, notably oil (there may be raw materials in Afghanistan, something like uranium that the general public are currently not aware of) and to provide big contracts for US companies which have made billions out of rebuilding Iraq. At the moment it looks like Bush is gearing up for a war with Iran without even having tidied up in Iraq; the same language is being used as in 2002-3.

Thus, it is unsurprising that the world feels dangerous with a country that seeks to start a war every 3-4 years. The last person to get away with that was Benito Mussolini in the 1920s-40s in Greece (twice) and Ethiopia and ultimately he was executed. What is infuriating is not only is US policy so geared to these policies but somehow we (especially in the UK) are constantly being told we should support it and see that it is right. What enabled that forced sympathy was the attacks on the USA on 11th September 2001. Now I am not going to go into any conspiracy theories on this, though it is clear that the Bush family and Osama bin Laden's extended family were in friendly contact. What infuriates people in the UK is that after 2001 the Americans keep suggesting that they have suffered more than anyone else and so this gives them a special right to behave how they wish in the world. Now, even for Israel, home to the Jews who lost over 6 million people in the space of five years, this argument is wearing thin. For the USA such an argument has no strength (or it should have none). Growing up in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s we were regularly exposed to terrorist atrocities by the IRA. I witnessed one in 1999 in East London and had a friend who was standing very close to two bombings in London and Manchester. Other parts of Europe, notably Spain, witnessed similarly regular attacks and other countries such as France, West Germany and Italy were not spared.

These attacks led to deaths and maimings and also altered how our society behaved. I remember being separated from my parents when we visited the Tower of London so that we could each be searched for explosive devices and inside is a plaque where people were killed by a bomb in the 1970s. Attacks even reached the Houses of Parliament where the war hero Airey Neave was blown up and the royal family as Earl Mountbatten was blown up on his yacht. British policy in Northern Ireland was harsh, but at no stage did the British assert the right as a result to go round attacking who they chose, and particularly not simply for economic gain. We could easily have said that the IRA was being funded from Libya so we needed to invade Libya and take over its oil wells. The Vietnamese could easily claim reparations from the USA for the constant bombing of the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s (there are estimated to still be more landmines in the country than there are people) and the use of chemical weapons which are still causing severe birth defects thirty years on. By being so bullish about the attack on them rather than presenting it in the context of suffering that terrorism has long caused in the world, the Americans have shown how self-centred they are and how they continue to think they are better than anyone else. It ends up with such a patronising position that is communicated to the UK that somehow we know nothing about global politics, that we know nothing about true suffering from terrorism and so we should give up any rational objection to how these things are being handled to those people who know about these things, i.e. the fundamentalist right-wing in US politics.

I accept that faith is about believing whole-heartedly that you are right in what you believe. However, I am always afraid of those who will accept no questioning of their actions and have no ability to see anyone else's perspective. I wish I could find online an image of the 1960s cartoon which shows an an American man dressed in a jumpsuit made of the US flag saying it is a wonderful outfit suitable for church, school, leisure, work and then next to him a smaller, Vietnamese man draped in the oversized outfit saying 'It doesn't fit'. That cartoon is not only as applicable today as it was 40 years ago, it is applicable to the UK as much as it is to Iraq, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Somalia, the Philippines, Cuba, etc. You may argue, well, surely my concern about fundamentalist attitudes should extend to the 'other side', and it does, I do fear an Islamist suicide bomber, London has experienced these as well as other countries. However, it is an issue of scale. Even if al-Qaeda existed, which it does not in the form people seem to assume, then it lacks a fraction of the military might that the USA has. The US military could still wipe out the whole world either via nuclear, chemical or biological weaponry if it chose or some combination of these; it might even be able to do it with the conventional weapons it has. People would live on, but like the Vietnamese during the late 1960s it would be in tunnels and bunkers. That is the enduring strength of the US and why with their current obsessions, misapprehensions and self-righteousness I find them as frightening today as I did in the early 1980s.

The Murder of Dr. David Kelly, 17th July 2003

I recognise this blog awkwardly straddles the three blog genres: anger management, journal and scrapbook but its intention was always to get things out of my head and into cyberspace as somewhere to hold what I am thinking, a kind of 'brain dump' and because I felt (maybe arrogantly, you tell me) that other people might be interested in thoughts and opinions I have on various things. Early on I promised to say something about the murder of Dr. David Kelly in 2003. Now, for non-UK readers I apologise for what must seem a rather parochial British story, though there does seem to have been quite a lot of interest about it at the time in the USA. One reason for this, is that his murder can be seen as part of the real take-off of the steps to make the UK (and USA) less democratic and more authoritarian in nature. These steps, pushed on vigorously by President Bush and Tony Blair (and now by Gordon Brown) have all been linked to the war in Iraq (which was actually about controlling oil supplies rather than terrorism) and their sense that they needed to be in much stronger control of their countries so they could promote the conservative Christian attitudes that they subscribed to.


You may say that why am I blogging about a 'current affairs' event of four years ago? There is a lot of excellent material about the event on the internet and a number of good programmes about it have followed in the UK and elsewhere in the intervening years and continue to be made. My attention to it comes now because I feel that people need to be reminded about it. It certainly marks a milestone Britain turning its back on democracy, a process which continues now even though Blair has been replaced by Brown: legitimate protests are increasingly being suppressed by anti-terrorist legislation which followed the 11th September 2001 attacks in the USA and then the invasion of Iraq which UK and US politicians tried to link.


You might say that the world is full of conspiracy theories, no-one in the public eye is killed or dies naturally without people speculating about the cause. In the case of David Kelly though, evidence that he was murdered seems overwhelming. Accepting that he was murdered then demonstrates that the British state continues to use extra-legal execution (it has long done this against people like IRA operatives) but now not only against people who are clearly committed to violence, but also against its own employees (Kelly was a leading civil servant) who have done nothing violent. Kelly ironically supported the war against Iraq, he was just unwilling that that war be started on the basis of a lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, notably in the area of Kelly's specialism, biological weapons. (No-one disputes Hussein was tyrant who had and used chemical weapons; ironically the British were the first to use aerial bombardment of poison gas in Iraq in the 1920s, so-called 'punative missions').


How do we know Kelly was murdered? The Hutton Report of May 2004 made no attempt to even question the explanation put around that Kelly had killed himself. The Inquiry into the death only looked at 75 of the 300 statements taken from people about the incident. As it is, anyway, the evidence simply does not add up. It was clear to pathologists that the body had been moved between him dying and it being found; he had died lying flat on his back but was found propped against a tree. Local police set up the incident tent usually put over where the body was found, not around the tree but in a nearby field.

Kelly was supposed to have died through slitting a vein in his left wrist. Not only is this difficult to do, but the injury was not severe enough not to have clotted quickly (this is why most people who try to commit suicide this way do it in a warm bath to keep the wound open; trying to kill yourself this way is rarely successful anyway). Someone who has bled to death leaves a lot of blood around, there were very few traces around the body. He was also supposed to have over-dosed on 29 tablets of Co-Praxamol, but only half a tablet was found inside him; there was no evidence of vomiting and even taking 29 would not have guaranteed his death. Remember Dr. Kelly was one of the UK's leading microbiologist he was not an ignorant teenager. Co-Praxamol is only available on prescription in the UK (though freely available in the USA) and there was no record of Kelly being prescribed it. Numerous doctors have written to newspapers outlining while they remain unconvinced with the diagnosis of suicide.


So, if he was murdered why is this a problem and how does it relate to the government? Well there were three men found with his body led by a Detective Constable Graham Peter Coe, though it is believed that he actually works for MI5 (the UK's secret internal security force). The existence of the third person keeps on being denied though he was seen by many witnesses. He immediately went to Kelly's house and took away numerous documents that have never been returned. Interestingly in all that evidence no-one found a suicide note. Nine out of ten people committing or trying to commit suicides leave notes that can be found. Ironically when I asked a journalist I had seen in the company of (now Sir) Stephen Lander, (Director-General of MI5, 1996-2002; Eliza Manningham-Buller was the director-general 2002-April 2007), about whether it had been done by them, the journalist said if it had been then they 'would have done a better job of it'. We know that there are often rogue agents and units working inside all intelligence services, but if that had been the case, why did the government go to such efforts to quell speculation?


Why did Kelly have to die? Throughout his career Kelly had been involved in investigating biological weapons across the world from Russia to South Africa. He was a weapons inspector in Iraq after the 1990-1 Gulf War and visited the country 37 times. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize as a result. He went there again in 2003 and spoke to journalists that he was not finding evidence of weapons of mass destruction. In contrast, prime minister, Tony Blair was telling Parliament that there was evidence that the Iraqis not only had such weapons but they were in a position to put them into use within 45 minutes of attack. Much of the evidence came from distorting an essay they found on the internet rather than the solid evidence Kelly was bringing back to the contrary. Of course, no such weapons have ever been found in Iraq, but the British and Americans concerned about control of oil resources across the world, especially with the change in the Venezuelan government to being unsympathetic to the USA and vigorous Chinese efforts to secure oil resources across the world had to take control of Iraq. They knew they could not simply say this. They could not use a moral justification, i.e. that Hussein was a tyrant as that would oblige them to invade many other countries which are friends to the UK and USA, so they had to fall back on the approach they have been using since 2001, that there was a serious threat that needed to be staunched.


Kelly, apparently angered by the government distorting his evidence spoke to the journalist Andrew Gilligan. Kelly thought that he was not the only source of Gilligan's information and this may have in fact been the case as he had not been alone on his inspections which were UN run. The government released Kelly's name to the media as a way to dismiss Gilligan's story (and that of another journalist, Susan Watts) and in fact it had the opposite effect, bringing it more into the public view. However, Kelly had already been interviewed twice by his employers at the Ministry of Defence and then by the Intelligence & Security Committee, this is one of the so-called 'select committees' of the British Parliament made up of politicians from all parties which investigates events on particular topics.


Kelly was a member of the Baha'i faith. There are apparently 6000 believers of the faith in the UK, with a large percentage among civil servants, because it is quite an intellectual religion. It condemns suicide. It also emphasises truthfulness and for a man like Kelly, it must have been terrible to realise that despite his assurances to the Iraqi people he had met on many occasions, that if they complied with inspections there would be no war, that the country was still going to be attacked and tens of thousands of ordinary Iraqis would die as a result. However, Kelly never discussed suicide with his wife or friends he was in contact with on the day of his death. He did speak of 'many dark actors playing games'.


The involvement of the British government has been confirmed by former intelligence agents. It was known in the civil service that Kelly was in line to be killed and a security barrister (lawyer), Michael Shrimpton had been told this days before the killing. He believes that the murder was carried out by French external intelligence agency, DGSE, who are renowned for direct action, for example against Greenpeace protestors; seemingly President Jacques Chirac's government did not want Blair's sympathetic government in trouble. I am not convinced by the French involvement and think it was more domestic. It does seem clear that whoever carried out the killing, MI5 tidied up afterwards, though elements within the organisation were unhappy that it had been done. Lieutenant-Colonel Crispin Black, on the Defence Intelligence Staff until 2002, portrayed the Hutton Report account of things, as ridiculous.


We know Tony Blair was incredibly arrogant, he also felt himself to be on a mission from God. He may have had no qualms about ordering the murder of a non-Christian. He may not have ordered it directly, as Hitler is supposed never to have ordered the Holocaust. Instead he might have simply let it be known that Kelly was a pain to him. This is very similar to King Henry II and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas a Becket. He was killed by knights who felt they were acting on the king's orders though no direct command had been given. Throughout his time in office, Blair felt those that disagreed him were foolish and simply lacked the intelligence to understand what he intended. Someone with clear intelligence and evidence to back up his case, combined with a clear moral stance and a wish to treat the Iraqi people fairly might have been too difficult a concept for Blair to stomach. Above all, Kelly made Blair look a fool, I think the greatest offence Blair felt was against his vanity. In addition the killing of one British scientist, hundreds of British troops and thousands of Iraqis was nothing compared to a secure oil supply. Another fear, might have been, that Kelly not only knew about Iraq but many other countries' secrets that now that he had been thrown into the spotlight by his employers he may have chosen to bring into the open.


The thing is, to begin to operate in this way, killing a man who was simply telling the truth, is opening a door that it is difficult to close. Now the British regime has a taste for this, what is to stop them doing it again? It fits neatly with the rapid erosion of civil liberties. Now if you are too high profile to be locked up without charge they will murder you. It is clear that they need to practice more though, so at least they can do a convincing job of it next time. Though, given that they have effectively got away with it and the world will have soon forgotten Dr. David Kelly and what he stood for, maybe they will not bother. The 17th August 2003 is not the day democracy died in the UK, but it is the day a worthy man was murdered and so the day that liberty in the UK contracted a terminal illness.

P.P. 18/08/2010: There are very, very few things that the coalition government has done right, but one of these rare activities is to announce a re-investigation of the murder of Dr. David Kelly.  I imagine this is largely motivated more by a desire on David Cameron's behalf to embarrass the 'golden boy' Tony Blair as it is by any desire for justice.  According to tabloid headlines last week, only 1 in 5 of the population now actually believe Kelly committed suicide.  While I doubt any enquiry will actually get to the truth of what happened, I hope, at least, it may make those working for the government a little less confident about carrying out assassinations, at least of British citizens.