OPINION - RAPHAEL VASSALLO | Sunday, 15 July 2007

We need a bigger bandwagon

Ah the little joys of life. Last week the inventor of media spin in the 21st Century, as well as the chief architect behind the justification of the Iraq war in 2003, published his much-anticipated diaries. And guess what? We now know, four years after the event, that way back in 2003 Alastair Campbell and his colleagues in the New Labour PR department had “serious reservations” whether the invasion of Iraq was actually justified.
That’s not all: the story that emerges from Campbell’s memoirs is that pretty much the entire government was uncomfortable with going to war. Of all the Cabinet of Ministers, of all New Labour spin doctors and media gurus, intelligence advisors and military hacks, it turns out “only Tony” was convinced that invading Iraq, toppling Saddam and replacing him with… um… (never mind, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it…) was a good thing. Everybody else now claims to have privately advised him against it including, naturally, his successor Gordon Brown, who just happened to take office as Prime Minister only days before the publication of Campbell’s journal.
How very interesting. And how remarkable that they all took so long to realize they were, in fact, against the same war they advocated so strongly four years ago. For, I seem to recall, only two ministers in Blair’s cabinet publicly disagreed with the Iraq war, at a time when public dissent might have made all the difference. They were Robin Cook and Clare Short – and both resigned.
But then, memory plays tricks on us all. For instance, I also seem to remember how Alastair Campbell was the same person accused of “sexing up” the intelligence reports that ultimately provided Blair with legal justification to go to war in the first place. How on earth could that be if Campbell thought the war was such a bad idea to begin with?
Cast your minds back to February 2003, and you might even remember a tiny little detail about how Iraq possessed WMD “capable of being deployed in 45 minutes.” On closer inspection of the kind carried out by the UN’s Hans Blix – you know, the man who said “No Smoking Gun” and routinely rubbished by Campbell & Co. – it turned out that the only WMD “possessed” by Iraq were still in design stage, and as such, yes, they would have been capable of deployment in 45 minutes; but only after around 12 years’ worth of assembling raw materials and manufacturing the actual weapons… which, with hindsight, proved to be entirely non-existent at the time of Campbell’s dossier.
But from a media point of view, “45 minutes” is infinitely sexier than “at least 12 years… and 45 minutes”. If nothing else, Alastair Campbell certainly knows the Media.
At this point you may well be asking what has changed since 2003, for people to have so thoroughly revised their opinions of the war and rewrite history in the process?
Oh, not much. First, there’s the little detail concerning tens of thousands of people – some say hundreds of thousands – now dead. Some of the bodies have surfaced without heads. Some without fingernails or toenails. Other corpses were retrieved full of holes drilled into them using power tools. The lucky ones, it seems, were those who were simply blown to smithereens in countless terrorist attacks, all of which were greatly facilitated by the dismantling of the country’s security infrastructure as a result of the Iraq war. But all of them were victims of the same decision from which Campbell & Co are distancing themselves.
Then there’s the insignificant factor concerning an easily predicted conflict between Shias and Sunnis after the fall of Saddam and the country’s subsequent downward spiral into chaos and fragmentation– so easy to predict that even I, who have no hands on experience of the Middle East other than eating my fair share of falafel, could (and did) see it coming.
Also, there is the domestic pressure for both the UK and the USA to follow Roger Waters’ advice, and “bring the boys back home”. Polls in both countries now reveal overwhelming majorities – the most conservative being more than two-thirds of the US – who want an instant troop withdrawal. But people who know the behind-the-scenes machinations (among them, Alastair Campbell) also know that this is not really a viable option… at least, not without having to later send more troops into an infinitely more unstable scenario, when the present “low intensity” sectarian conflict erupts into all-out civil war.
So all things told, it is hardly surprising that the people responsible for this horror are now falling over themselves in the mad rush to convince us all that “only Tony” is to blame.

But just in case you, too, are suddenly finding it hard to remember what you thought about the war in Iraq in 2003, here is a simple, step-by-step guide on “How To Adopt A Win-Win Position On The Iraq War” – tried and tested by a number of leading politicians, spin artists, opinion makers and journalists… all of whom are surprisingly quiet on the subject, now that it’s all gone so horribly wrong.
Step 1. Give the decision your tacit support.
Don’t worry, like Alastair Campbell, you can always change your mind later. Even Bill Clinton, who now calls the war a “big mistake”, was originally in favour way back in 2003 (i.e., when his support actually mattered). And HYPERLINK “http://savedfromtheskip.blogspot.com/2005/11/signor-berlusconi-are-you-in-favour-of.html”Silvio Berlusconi – one of the original Coalition partners - last year claimed he had been against the idea all along, and that he even tried to dissuade the US president in private. The fact that the Italian general elections were only five months away at the time had nothing to do with it whatsoever.
Step 2. Keep quiet for two years, and wait and see how things develop.
Don’t go shooting your mouth off too quickly. You never know, the war might turn out swimmingly. For instance: Iraqi children might line the streets after the fall of Saddam, laying garlands at the feet of heroic US liberators as they march triumphantly into the city. Or stockpiles upon stockpiles of WMD could fall out of every cupboard, and turn up under every bed. Who knows? Sunnis, Shias and Kurds might all forget their differences, and together forge the Democratic Republic of Shiny Happy Iraqi People. And above all, nice, juicy reconstruction contracts might rain like confetti all over the Western world.
In this case, proceed directly to:
Step 3: Outhawk the hawks
Make public declarations in praise of this great victory for Democracy and against the forces of Evil, never missing an opportunity to remind everyone how you had always given your wholehearted and unwavering support for this noble mission; how how you never once doubted that good old George would pull it off in the end, etc., etc. (Note: vomit bags are stowed under your seat)
If, on the other hand, things go rather, erm, wrong… for instance, if ungrateful insurgents insist on raining all over your parade by refusing to simply bow down and accept your military occupation of their country; or if the weapons of mass destruction turn out to be the figment of a mass delusion; or if more and more evidence comes to light suggesting that the entire case for war was crafted upon a downright lie;
… If the international press is suddenly awash with images of US soldiers abusing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib; then proceed directly to:
Step 4. Exterminate the brutes.
Come out strongly and unequivocally against the Coalition and its stupid policy; criticise their administration and every aspect of their handling of this entire fiasco; choke back your tears as you loudly remonstrate how you had always been against this tomfoolery, and had tried to talk sense into those warmongering morons from day one… and above all, get cracking on your Senate and Congress election campaign as quickly as possible!

Oh, and one last thing. If I were Alastair Campbell, I wouldn’t have written a book about my misunderstood opposition to the war. I would have gone and told it to the marines… ideally, before sending them off to the chaos and devastation that is now Iraq. (Telling them now would be a little pointless, wouldn’t it?)