"Unsparing of reputations"
Martin Bell has a new book out this week. It's called The Truth That Sticks: New Labour's Breach of Trust. In the meantime, Martin has a piece in The Guardian today in which he argues: "We need an inquiry to do for the war in Iraq what the Esher inquiry did for the Boer war - unflinching, far-reaching and unsparing of reputations."
By way of precedent, Martin cites the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Bosnian Serb Commission of Inquiry into the Srebrenica massacre. The example is extraordinary, while the recommendation is far from the principles of open and democratic government that Martin espouses. I suspect this argument will be rehearsed at length in coming months. I state here the grounds of my own dissent from it.
Historical analogies are never exact but sometimes useful. If they are to be useful, then the precedent needs at a minimum to be stated accurately. Martin's analogy is not accurate, because he has confused two different inquiries. The inquiry into the causes of near-defeat in Boer War was the South African War Commission. This was headed not by Lord Esher (though he was a member of the Commission) but by Lord Elgin, the former Viceroy of India. The Esher Committee (more properly, the War Office Reconstitution Committee, established in November 1903) was something different.
Though it too owed its origins to the disastrous experience of relations between the army and the War Office in the Boer War, the Esher Committee was not an inquiry into the war. Whereas the Elgin Committee was an extensive affair, sitting for 55 days and considering 114 separate submissions, the Esher Committee comprised just three members and reported quickly on a specific failure. As Great Britain, unlike other European great powers, lacked a mass conscript army, there were recurring difficulties in deploying troops on any scale far from the home islands. This weakness had been obvious as early as the Crimean War and went unrepaired in the Boer War. Esher recommended the establishment of a general staff, on the Prussian-German model, whose principal task was to prepare the army for war. The recommendation was implemented by the Secretary of State for War, Richard Haldane, in 1906.
The earlier Elgin Committee also proposed sweeping organisational changes to the War Office Council and the War Department, and the abolition of the post of Commander-in-Chief. These were important and necessary reforms to the organisation and control of the armed forces, which had been in no fit state to embark on the Boer War. (On the political background to this, see The Enigmatic Edwardian: The Life of Reginald, 2nd Viscount Esher by James Lee-Milne, 1986. On the military lessons of the Boer War, see "The Impact of the South African War on Imperial Defence" by Keith Jeffrey, in The South African War Reappraised, ed. Donal Lowry, 2000, pp. 188-201.) There is, in short, no parallel whatsoever with the types of issue concerning Iraq that Martin raises in his article:
We need to understand why the warpath was chosen when diplomatic options were not exhausted; why there was a plan for war but not for peace; why the armed forces were sent to kick in the door of a sovereign state on the basis of a whim about regime change and a falsehood about weapons of mass destruction. And what lessons can be learned, so that never again do we park our foreign policy so unconditionally up the Potomac.
These are political questions about the decision to go to war. They are not about the effectiveness of our armed forces once deployed in war. Raising those questions is legitimate in itself without resorting to tendentious analogies.
Even so, it cannot have escaped Martin's notice that those of us who identify with the foreign policies of Tony Blair have no particular diffidence in answering those questions (apart from the one about postwar planning, on which the principal failure is not British). There is never an obvious point at which diplomacy is exhausted, but there is a point at which you can reasonably say that diplomacy is futile and counterproductive. The government concluded that that point had been reached in our relations with Saddam Hussein. American security strategy can be faulted at immense length for its execution, but a strategy of pre-emption against hostile regimes is far from being a whim: it has historical precedent and academic weight. As the historian John Lewis Gaddis has argued:
I think we are actually back to a kind of situation which 19 th-century strategists had to deal with: the danger of non-state actors who, with state support or taking advantage of the failure of states, might gain locations from which they could threaten American interests. There was a sense that these dangers had to be pre-empted or prevented by taking over Florida, for example, from Spain, or taking over Texas from Mexico, or, according to many historians, provoking a war with Mexico so [the United States] could take California to prevent the French or British from taking it later.[Another example is] our interventions in Central America at the beginning of the 20th century, which were intended to prevent so-called failed states from providing excuses that might lead European powers like imperial Germany, for instance, to intervene. There is a long tradition behind this, and I think it obscures more than it illuminates to try to provide this pre-emption/prevention distinction from the nuclear debates in the 1950s and 1960s and try to make them work in this new situation.
The government was indeed at fault in its assessment of Saddam's arsenal, but that issue has already been considered by the Butler inquiry. Martin complains:
The inquiries we have had, led by Lords Hutton and Butler, were certainly no substitute for the inquiry that we haven't. Lord Hutton's investigation, whatever its quality, was limited to the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly, and Lord Butler's to the accuracy and use of the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction.
But of course they were. The decision to go to war was a political decision. Martin is not satisfied with the inquiries that have taken place because he disagrees fundamentally with that political decision. The place to manage - not resolve - fundamental political disagreements is in the political process. Martin is instead proposing a quasi-judicial arrangement to supplant the political process; in short, his proposals are not a reform to make good a weakness in our political system, but a challenge to cabinet government and the principles of representative democracy.
Martin's campaigns in British politics began a decade ago when he noted a malfunction in the party system. A particular parliamentarian (among others) had behaved in a way that damaged the reputation of his office, yet he appeared likely to escape electoral retribution. Supposedly that MP, the former minister Neil Hamilton, had a safe seat. Martin's intervention changed that. In the case Martin is now campaigning about, the political system works well enough. The government adopted an unpopular policy and has suffered political damage as a result. To my regret, Tony Blair has left office earlier than he would have done otherwise and with a tarnished public image. (It will not do, however, to engage in Martin's hyperbole about Tony Blair's vanishing from public view on the model of disgraced members of the Soviet Politbureau. Blair, by design, has tasks abroad, and the public perception of him is more favourable than Martin acknowledges, as I argued here.) Those who believe, as I do, that the former PM has been a powerful influence for good at home and in the international order are usually depicted - at least in my experience of debating these issues - as a minority on the defensive. That isn't "serious wrongdoing, on a scale from the discreditable to the shameful": it's politics. Martin's campaign, which he styles as a complaint about New Labour, is in fact an assault on democratic politics.
I have saved till last that remarkable comment about South Africa's historical reckoning and the Srebrenica massacre. Martin avers: "The cases are different [from our intervention in Iraq], but the principle is the same." When you examine that qualification, you realise it's meaningless. What is the purpose of invoking the atrocities practised by despicable, murderous, racist regimes unless to insinuate that Tony Blair is a criminal on the level of apartheid's practitioners or the genocidal forces orchestrated by Slobodan Milosevic? I am as disturbed by this argument as I am by Martin's complaint that by intervening in Iraq we "kick[ed] in the door of a sovereign state". I can understand the objection that our intervention was wrong because of the suffering that has ensued in Iraq. But the argument that Saddam's bellicose, genocidal, lawless gangster regime - note that Martin specifically says "state" and not "country" - had rights that we violated is something else again.
As I take down my field-glasses and look out to the Chomskyite fringe of political debate, I seem to perceive a familiar and splendid figure making haste in that direction. Come home, Martin.
