Adrian Hamilton: A desperate attempt to rewrite history

There's nothing like the sight of the rats leaving the political ship as the captain exits down the gangplank. At least we're being spared that in the case of Lord Browne of BP. The board members aren't publicly distancing themselves from a man they all went along with. They're just remaining abjectly silent.

Not in the case of the New Labour Cabinet. You can hardly hear yourself think for the cacophony made by ministers excusing themselves from the past and desperately trying to scramble aboard the Brown succession train before it leaves the station.

The latest attempt to rewrite history comes from Geoff Hoon. who was Defence Secretary at the time of the Iraq invasion before ducking for cover to avoid the fall-out of Dr Kelly's suicide, and hasn't really been heard of since. (There's a rumour he's still in government, but it's not known where.) Anyway he's now popping up to explain that, yes, there were some damaging errors made in the aftermath of the invasion, but that he and Tony Blair had advised the US administration strongly against the two worst mistakes - the decisions to disband the Iraqi army and to de-Baathify the ministries.

You can see what this is all about. In the apologia pro vita sua that is being prepared for the Prime Minister's final farewell, we're getting a revised version of history in which Tony Blair accepts that there were misjudgements post-invasion but implies that these were the fault of the US government and not the poor Brits who tried to warn the President and his senior officials but weren't listened to.

Indeed, in a delicious twist to the tale, Hoon suggests that neither Blair nor Jack Straw nor Geoff Hoon, dealing with their opposite numbers in Washington, understood the importance of Dick Cheney, the vice-president. So their messages never got through to where it mattered. Presumably this means it was all the fault of Christopher Meyer, our ambassador at the time, who should have briefed Number 10 on the White House power structure and built up some connections with Cheney.

Now there is something deeply demeaning about the way in which the British, having said they went into Iraq in full accord with the US, are now trying to say that subsequent disaster was all the fault of the Americans who didn't get the post-invasion policy right.

There is no doubt that they didn't. Even in the occupation of Germany after the Second World War, the allies learned to bite their lip and accept local government and police officials as the only means of keeping order and sustaining civic life.

I can even believe that Blair, or his officials (one doubts that either Straw or Hoon would ever have piped up in protest), had some concerns, although we won't know until the papers are released whether the doubts were sufficiently strong to end up being minuted.

But what is so insidious about this blame shifting is that it is all there to avoid the central question of whether we were right to invade Iraq in the first place. The reason we (and the British were just as much to blame as the Americans) didn't get the post-invasion plans right was because no one ever took any interest in the conditions on the ground.

For over a decade, we'd imposed an appalling, corrupt and ultimately self-defeating policy of sanctions on the country, but when it came to it, nobody in government seems to have had the faintest idea not just whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction but what was the condition and attitude of the people and their religious and tribal groups.

Someone in the system probably did, but not their political masters. And the reason is simple. We didn't go to war for the sake of the Iraqi people. We went to war to change a regime. The Americans wanted it as the first move in reshaping the Middle East. Tony Blair wanted it because he fancied himself as the toppler of a tyrant. The Iraqi people never came into it. They were just assumed to be oppressed masses who'd be grateful for the white man's intervention. No-one ever thought to see what effect it would have on them, their security, their economy or their civil society.

That is important not just as a response to Blair and those who keep bleating on about how, whatever the mistakes, it was right to remove a dictator, but in learning the lessons of this terrible episode of arrogant western misjudgement.

There is a belief, given some credence by Lord Ashdown, talking (as everyone else is at the moment) of the Blair legacy, that Iraq should somehow be regarded as a blip on a humanitarian trend line that includes successful ventures in Bosnia, Kosovo and Sierra Leone.

But these were interventions brought about by circumstances, justified as much on grounds of security and regional stability as humanitarian concern. Whether you approve or disapprove of them ultimately depends on your view of their success or otherwise in sorting out a particular problem. Iraq was different. It was never a response to an immediate humanitarian crisis. It was to do with ulterior aims bought at the cost of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian lives.

The fault wasn't with the follow-up plan to invasion, appalling although it was. It was with the aims and assumptions in going to war in the first place. And no one should let the Prime Minister fool them into believing anything else when it comes to his final self-justification on retirement.

a.hamilton@independent.co.uk

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