Blair on CNN State of the Union from Jerusalem, earlier today. He says today's report of the Attorney General's July 2002 advice and threat to resign is not right - you don't say - but he will wait to give evidence to the Iraq Inquiry to elaborate.

Embedded video from CNN Video

It's quite busy at the moment, so if that link doesn't work, try this.

The subject is a serious one, of course, but what can you do when you come across passages like this in an article in the Mail on Sunday, by Clington Nobody, who got a dusty brush-off when he offered to give evidence to the Chilcot inquiry about how the postwar administration in Iraq wasn't handled very well?


Until now, that is.

My column today in The Independent on Sunday tries to provide an extended Rebuttal Service, but did not have space to note the wall-to-wall coverage of Sir Jeremy Greenstock's testimony on Friday that military action in Iraq was legal.

I think it is safe to say that the balance of opinion in the comments on the column was that my contribution to the debate was welcomed.

Nor did I have space to quote Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense, in full. I cannot find the complete transcript of his testimony to the House Budget Committee on 27 February 2003, three weeks before the invasion, on the internet. But here is the most embarrassing section from the Federal News Service on a subscription database:

That Peter Goldsmith, the Attorney General (right, before, and far right, after being monstered by the Mail on Sunday), wrote a note to Tony Blair on 29 July 2002 about the legality of possible military action in Iraq, as reported by the Mail on Sunday today, is new. Everything else about the report is known but exaggerated, sexed up, stripped of context and adorned with the playground "lie" allegation, which remains entirely unfounded.

Even Paul "Anti" Waugh makes the point that Goldsmith's memo was long before UN resolution 1441, which revived the authority of previous resolutions, giving Saddam Hussein a "final opportunity" to comply or to face "serious consequences". (He also continues our polite dialogue, referring to my article today, which, I must warn him, will do him no good with the headbangers at all.)

The Mail on Sunday summarises the substance of the Goldsmith memo, which it has presumably not seen, thus:

The Rebuttal Service is falling some way behind the tidal wave of misinformation, but allow me to note briefly an opinion poll on Thursday for Politics Home, which found that most of the public reflected back every cliché of the reporting of Chilcot:


As if to underline the point, a member of the BBC Question Time audience on Thursday night asked a question based on the assertion that the findings of the Chilcot inquiry "would be suppressed".

Can't be bothered to read all of Peter Oborne's column in the Daily Mail today, headed, "Who else is guilty in the greatest scandal of our times?" because I know the answer: Peter Oborne, and all the other journalist-spinners whose exaggeration, selectivity and distortion is far worse than anything they alleged of Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell.

But I did enjoy his description of the Chilcot inquiry as a "four-man panel". The inquiry has five members. It turns out that he has not left out Usha Prashar on the grounds that she is a woman, but Sir Roderick Lyne (right), on the grounds that he has forgotten about him.

At least my respected colleague Steve Richards offers some context to the decision to join the American invasion of Iraq in his column in The Independent this morning. But Alex Smith's paraphrase on LabourList is number 186 of my Questions to Which the Answer is No.

... is how mad and vain Tony Blair is. According to George Pitcher, Religion Editor of Telegraph Media. He is almost on to something, and suggests that the "worrying at the bone" of yet another inquiry into Iraq means that we are asking the wrong questions. Right there, George. So what are the questions we really want answered?

They turn out to be numbers 183, 184 and 185 of my Questions to Which the Answer is No, namely:


Cartoon: Martin Rowson, 2003

Peter Kellner, Consort of the High Representative, offers this gem of simplification in the New Statesman, where he was once political editor and I was once a reporter:

One advantage of being a true hardcore anti-war obsessive - I mean "doughty and dogged" - is that you do know a lot. Chris Ames realises that the reporting of the Iraq Inquiry is, as I suggested here, here and here, highly selective and biased:


But then I should acknowledge that Ames's Iraq Inquiry Digest, which I called a conspiracist website, is open-minded enough to carry a range of contributions, including one headed "Don't call Blair a liar", one that defended Blair and one that was originally headed "22 reasons why it was right to invade Iraq", although the Digest did change it to "22 things for the Inquiry to consider".

In the small hope that they might lean against the vast weight of biased reporting of the Chilcot inquiry, here are Stan Rosenthal's 22 reasons:

( Read more... )

Daniel Finkelstein's advice to David Cameron on Islamic Schoolgate, or how to prepare for Prime Minister's Questions, is very sound, and provides my quote of the day:


Photograph: PA

There is just too much of it to try to rebut all the prism-reporting of the Iraq Inquiry. But it may be worth trying to do the lowlights.

David Grossman was terribly excited on Newsnight last night about all the "revelations" from yesterday's session, but as he listed them each could be ticked off from the Butler report of 2004.

The story that best fitted the anti-war narrative was probably the "Mandarins reveal that 10 days before Iraq invasion PM knew Saddam couldn't use WMDs". Or, as the Daily Mail headlined it across a two-page spread: "Blair lied and lied again." Or, in the real world: "Daily Mail lies and lies again." (Not that the l-word is desirable.)

None of this is new, and none of it is clear-cut, as the Inquiry witnesses made clear. Some of the intelligence suggested Saddam's biological and chemical weapons had been dismantled, some suggested that it had not. All of it suggested that Saddam had stocks of illegal weapons material which, if not immediately usable, could be rendered so.

The Mail also asks Question to Which the Answer is No number 182: "Will Greg Dyke and Gavyn Davies, respectively former director general and chairman of the BBC, have their names cleared?"

But there is just so much of it about. Part of the anti-war narrative is The Cover-Up, which is the basis of The Independent's front-page story (right). And the lead Opinion article, by my dear colleague Adrian Hamilton, is not his best. Along with all the rest of the whitewashers, he says that the Chilcot inquiry will fail to "answer the hard questions on the legality and responsibility for this defining episode of the country's recent history".

Well, I can answer those. The Iraq invasion was legal enough to mean that there has been no suggestion of any challenge to it in any court anywhere, despite the fears of Peter Goldsmith, the Attorney General, beforehand. It was more legal in one sense than the military action in Kosovo, which had no basis in United Nations resolutions at all.

And the responsibility lies with Tony Blair, his Cabinet and the rest of the 412 MPs that voted for the Government motion on 18 March 2003.

If Adrian has any further questions, he can make his way across the office and ask me.

As predicted, the coverage of Day One of the Chilcot inquiry into Iraq was heavily skewed towards the anti-war narrative. It was of course difficult to report an intensely dull session, which covered entirely familiar ground. Even the metaphor of the moment, the drum beats, was tediously familiar from press coverage of the issue for all of the past seven years. But it was the only remotely colourful thing that Sir William Patey, head of the Middle East department at the Foreign Office in 2001, said, so up in lights it went.

Of course, it had to be slotted into the meta-story, which I discussed yesterday, "The Search for the Smoking Gun", so it became the drums of war, heralding George Bush's determination to remove Saddam Hussein come what may, and Tony Blair's determination to support President Bush, whatever he decided.

So, The Guardian gave us "Iraq war inquiry: Britain heard US drumbeat for invasion before 9/11", although there was no prospect of the Bush administration invading Iraq before 9/11 changed American public opinion.

The Independent gave us "Iraq invasion discussed in 2001 – but was dismissed as illegal", implying that it was illegal in 2003 too, which is not remotely what Sir Peter Ricketts and his fellow witnesses said.

The Daily Mail combined the two, with "The illegal toppling of Saddam", and a commentary by John Kampfner, who used to be a sophisticated journalist and is now reduced to spouting anti-war, anti-Blair platitudes.

The Telegraph had "British officials heard 'drum beats' of war from US before 9/11".

Even The Times had the virtually identical "US ‘drumbeats’ about Iraq invasion were heard months before 9/11". The only difference was whether drum beat was one word or two (the right answer is two). At least it was balanced by a sane leading article, which noted that the lust for a judicial reckoning was a demand to "supplant the decisions of an elected government".

It would be a full-time job to be the Iraq Inquiry Misreporting Rebuttal Unit, and I haven't even got on to The Sunday Telegraph's surprising decision to give front-page prominence to yet another attempt by Andrew Gilligan to write "I was right all along".

He was not, and The Sunday Telegraph report, to which I will return, further undermines rather than repairs his credibility.

You have to admit. Life would be more fun with Alan Johnson as prime minister. Events Dear Boy, Events, spots this comment about Belle de Jour in AJ's interview in the New Statesman:

It is the Hutton inquiry all over again. Almost all the reporting of the Chilcot inquiry will be through the anti-war prism of liberal journalists. So, when we get to the end of it and the committee comes to reasonable conclusions based on the evidence, the balloon will go up, because the report will seem to be at odds with the daily reporting of proceedings.

This reporting will be dominated by the idea that there is a big secret that is being concealed from us, a smoking gun that "explains it all". This is a symptom of the anti-war psychology, which so strongly disagrees with the decision made by Tony Blair, the Cabinet and the House of Commons that it seeks constantly for a hidden reason for it. Oil. Poodledom. Some kind of sinister swearing of loyalty in a ceremony probably involving Blair signing in blood (hence the antis' obsession with "when did Blair commit Britain to war?").

This sets the tone for so much of the coverage, from Brian Jones in the Standard to David Blackburn at Coffee House.

The impartial BBC news tonight had Huw Edwards declare "there are still big questions to be answered". No there aren't. Everything important is known, with the kind of disclosure of official documents in the Hutton inquiry that would normally have taken 30 years or longer. And Nicholas Witchell's report of the day's proceedings summed up: in 2001 the British Government concluded that regime change in Iraq lacked a legal basis. This is meaningless: the British view was always that regime change was inadequate legal basis for military intervention; that was why the legal basis was Saddam Hussein's failure to comply with UN disarmament resolutions. Witchell's conclusion may have been meaningless, but it insinuated to the casual viewer that the Iraq invasion was unlawful.

Much of the coverage is not going to be as measured as the BBC's. Paul "Anti" Waugh gives a flavour, with his brilliantly observed but bitterly hostile report of Day One:



Of course, none of those entrenched on either side is going to change, but there are a lot of open-minded people in the middle, who do not pay much attention to politics (as Daniel Finkelstein said the other day, this is not ignorance but efficient use of time), and who form generalised impressions about issues such as this that are shaped by the prevailing wind of media bias.

For that reason, it is worth challenging the myths of the antis, and I shall try to make my small contribution here over the next year.

She said today, of the Iraq inquiry, which opens tomorrow:


Always had a lot of time for her.

Photo: The Mirror

Question to Which the Answer is No: number 181 is asked by CentreForum:

Much excitement about about a hung parliament after one opinion poll showing the Conservative lead down to six points. My esteemed rival Andrew Rawnsley even devoted his column yesterday to the subject.

As Nick Robinson suggests, we should remember Twyman’s Law of market research:


All the same, we can dream, can't we? Especially those of us who want to see Gordon Brown replaced by David Miliband or Alan Johnson before the election. (Interesting, was it not, that Brown was reported to have tried twice to persuade Miliband to take the Europe foreign affairs job? That suggests that the Prime Minister is aware that Miliband is a threat to his position.)

But what would NIck Clegg do if no party had a majority in the House of Commons?

Disappointing to see that my own newspaper, The Independent on Sunday, asks number 180 in my series of Questions to Which the Answer is No, in the form of the headline on Oliver Miles's shabby article previewing the Chilcot inquiry into Iraq, which starts on Tuesday.

For all the time that I have disagreed with the editorial policy of the Independent titles - that is, since late 2002, when it became clear that Simon Kelner, then the editor of The Independent, was opposed to military action in Iraq under any circumstances - I have continued to argue with my colleagues that they should avoid the language of "lies" and "war crimes" in characterising those with whom they disagree.

For a long time, even after Michael Howard debased the language of political debate by using the l-word during the 2005 election campaign, the dignified part of the anti-war movement, including the Independent titles, seemed to recognise the wisdom of linguistic restraint. Sadly, those restraints seem to be weakening, even as it should be becoming more rather than less obvious that such language is unjustified. In seven years now no one has substantiated the assertion that Tony Blair or any of his officials or ministerial colleagues lied; and I noted some time ago that even Philippe Sands had admitted that there was no realistic prospect of bringing any action against any of them under international law. Indeed, no such action has even been successfully begun.

Is it really necessary to explain the difference between a war crime and something that is, in someone's opinion, contrary to international law? War crimes include genocide, and no sensible person accuses Blair of that, and waging a war of aggression, which is what is usually meant by the extreme anti-war faction in this case (although the aftertaste of genocide often seems to be deliberate). How anyone can compare the German invasion of Poland to the invasion of Iraq in order to enforce United Nations resolutions is beyond me.

So, instead of the fifth inquiry into Iraq promoting the kind of respectful debate that might allow dispassionate judgements about the serious mistakes that were certainly made, Sir John Chilcot's deliberations are heralded by the anti-war zealots drowning out reasonable voices with their language of vengeance - urged on by a culturati that has turned simply vicious.

Number 179 in my series of Questions to Which the Answer is No, from today's, er ...