JOHN O'SULLIVAN ENGLISH ELECTION DIARY 6
by John O'Sullivan
NRO
April 29, 2005

This week has seen a boring election suddenly grow more interesting.
That is not because the issue is suddenly in doubt. The are varIations
in the level of support for each party in the polls, but as yet their
trend still shows a fairly stable prospect of a Labour victory. My own
instinct is that there will be surprises on election night with all
parties making unexpected gains and suffering unexpected losses. How
these will stack up in total votes and seats is anybody's guess, but
the likelihood is that Labour will win a modest majority but enough
for a full term. I will give a fuller picture in my weekend election
diary.
This week's excitement has come from the leak of the Attorney
General's initial advice to the Prime Minister on the legality of the
Iraq war under international law. The partial leak seemed to suggest
that the AG had originally advised that the war would be illegal and
that he had subsequently been leant on by the PM and ministerial
"heavies" to produce a more favorable verdict. When the full advice
was released, this turned out to be an exaggeration at best. But elite
opinion is so hostile to Blair and the war that the reporting was
heavily slanted to suggest that he had lied. My take on it is
below--courtesy of the Evening Standard--but a very strong
line-by-line analsysis of the two documents that defends the Prime
Minister was mounted on Melanie Phillips' blog (cited below.) I take a
slightly different view from Melanie. So you should read her to get an
authoritative view.
Meanwhile, here's my take . . .


Mr Blair had hoped to keep Iraq off the election agenda and to
concentrate on the economy and reform of public services. As PG
Wodehouse presciently remarked, however: "Fate, unnoticed in the
background, was quietly slipping lead into the boxing glove."
That lead struck the Prime Ministerial jaw when passages from the
Attorney General's 7 March interim legal advice were leaked to Channel
4 this week. It intensified the already fierce controversy over
whether the Prime Minister "lied" in order to justify the Iraq
invasion. Blair's reputation - whether he wins or loses - looks
glassy-eyed and on the ropes.
So what happened?
It must first be said that Tony Blair did not tell a "lie" in claiming
that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He genuinely
believed this - as did virtually every other prime minister, president
and intelligence chief in the West (including the French). Believing
this, he over-interpreted the evidence that Saddam was concealing WMD
stockpiles. Even so his concerns were reasonable. Saddam certainly had
possessed WMDs a few years before. And we know that Saddam had made
preparations to resume his WMD programme when UN sanctions collapsed.
Yet, in arguing the case for toppling Saddam, Blair made three errors.
He exaggerated the urgency of the WMD threat to Britain. He downplayed
the possibility that an Iraqi intervention might be illegal under
international law. And he placed insufficient stress on justifications
drawn from national interest and geopolitical stability.
It is the second misjudgment that opens Blair to the charge of lying.
Did he give a deliberately misleading account of the Attorney
General's advice by suppressing the doubts and qualifications
expressed in the interim document? Or was he justified in not
mentioning them because, as Lord Goldsmith now argues, those
qualifications were merely his ruminations on the way to a final
judgment?
As lawyers skilled in weighing their words past and present, both
Goldsmith and Blair can doubtless secure the Scottish verdict of "not
proven" on the charge of lying. But whatever the fine print, both men
gave parliament and people the false impression that the case for war
was legally less qualified than it was.
Why did Blair make these three misjudgments - and risk the charge of
lying on the second? The reason is not that he is simply a habitual
liar. Even supposing that to be the case, it would be too much of a
coincidence if Lord Goldsmith was a habitual liar as well. Blair's
wrigglings proceed from something more serious - Blairism itself.

Blair's foreign policy has been described as "muscular
internationalism". He has sent British armed forces into action in
Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Kosovo and Iraq.
In the first two, he had the United Nations and international law on
his side. In Kosovo and Iraq, he argued that the UN ought to have
approved intervention - and would have done so if Russia and France
respectively had not threatened vetoes. In the prime minister's
worldview, if the UN passes resolutions against oppressive actions, it
has a duty to enforce those actions.
In practice, however, internationalism is not a muscular doctrine. It
claims greater authority for international bodies and international
law, but it places large obstacles in the way of enforcing their rules
and rulings. Even rogue states have powerful patrons on the UN
Security Council-Saddam had France and Milosevic had Russia. They use
vetoes to defend their clients.
To devotees of the UN and international law (like most Labour MPs),
that is beside the point. If the UN withholds its approval, then
intervention is illegal - even if there are otherwise good grounds for
it.
On Iraq, there were such grounds. Saddam was a human-rights violator
on a massive scale, hostile to Western interests, a threat to his
neighbours, and an obstacle to an Israeli-Palestinian settlement to a
wider Middle East peace. And, with UN sanctions failing, Saddam was
escaping from his cage.
None of these dangers justified intervention to most Labour MPs and
Lib-Dems. For that Blair needed the urgent threat of WMDs. Nor would
such reasons satisfy international lawyers. He needed a legal opinion
that earlier UN resolutions would suffice.
In short, Blair was trapped between his muscularity and his
internationalism - between his desire to topple Saddam and his own
(and his party's) commitment to an expansive view of international law
and the authority of bodies like the UN. In order to escape that trap,
he resorted to his three misjudgments.
The Tories saw where this naïve internationalism led - dressing up a
Russian or French veto, actually cast from squalid self-interest, as
the collective moral judgment of mankind. It also treated the opinions
of unaccountable law professors as binding on democratically-elected
governments in sovereign states. Tory support for the war was
therefore robust intellectually as well as politically.
Their current stance is that they stand by their support for the war
while criticising Blair's "lies" about it. This mixed message is
defensible but looks defensive. It suggests that the Tories were
themselves deceived by Blair into a war about which they may now have
mixed feelings. It casts doubt on their judgment. It offers a reason
for some voters to switch to the Lib-Dems.
Michael Howard would do better to direct his criticism at Labour's
naive internationalism. He might point out, understandingly, that
Blair had to manufacture dubious legal justifications because Labour
MPs attached excessive importance to UN decisions whose real
significance they ignored.
He should insist that a future Tory government would base its foreign
policy on national interest, alliance cohesion, and geopolitical
stability.
These are not hypothetical points. If Mr Blair remains Prime Minister,
he will soon run into the next contradiction in his geopolitical
thinking. On the one hand he wishes to join President Bush in helping
to establish democracy throughout the Middle East while, on the other,
signing up to a common European foreign policy that would oppose and
obstruct any such project.
What legal contortions and intellectual acrobatics will Blair perform
to escape this new contradiction? They certainly won't be pretty.

*******************************************
A small postscript to the above column of interest to American
conservatives: Tory leader Michael Howard was on the BBC's Question
Time last night and, when asked his view of the war, said (a) that he
had supported it then; (b) that he supported it now; and (c) that he
would have supported it even if had known that there were no WMDs in
Iraq.
This surprised his interviewer, the fair-minded David Dimbleby, so
completely that he asked Howard several times if he had heard aright.
Did he really mean he would have supported the war if he had known
there were no WMDs there in advance. If so, how on earth could he
justify it?
Howard did so very effectively--it helps on some occasions that he is
a lawyer and has a grasp of international law--to the effect that
Saddam Hussein was a danger to his neighbors and the West even without
WMDs--and a monstrous tyrant to boot. By the end, he had won the
respect of the audience even if not their unanimous agreement. He was
actually slightly more effective than Blair on the same point later in
the program.
I wish I could claim that my article had influenced him, but
unfortunately it was published about seven hours after Howard's
appearance.

***********************************************

The Sun's editorial endorsement of Blair read curiously like an
old-fashioned Times editorial. On the one hand, the saucy Red Top
thought the Tories had most of the right policies this time; on the
other hand, it concluded you should vote Labour anyway. There was a
hint that it might urge a Conservative vote in four years.
That was cold comfort to the Tories who had cherished high hopes of a
Sun endorsement. Michael Howard's press chief, Guy Black, is a friend
of editor Rebekah Wade.And apparently she did consider backing Howard.
"There was a fierce debate inside the Sun," our source tells us., but
"in the end it was pretty irrelevant, as Murdoch decided the paper was
going to back Blair, because he stood firm on Iraq and his
relationship with Bush."
So, if it's a close Labour victory, it'll be Iraq wot won it.


******************************************************

WHY have internet blogs, those amateur freelance political
commentary on the world-wide web, played so little part in this
election? Bloggers were extremely influential in the last U.S.
presidential election and may have tipped what was a very narrow
balance to George W. Bush.
They revived stories that the establishment media wanted to
bury — notably, the allegations by the Swift Boat veterans that John
Kerry had been less than heroic in Vietnam.
They fact-checked the establishment media's own stories--sometimes to
destruction. When CBS and Dan Rather produced documents to suggest
that Bush had shirked his National Guard duties, a blogger
demonstrated they were probably forgeries within minutes.
And in general they prevented the media setting the themes of the campaign.
Nothing like that is happening here. In part that's because blogs and
bloggers are less well-established in the UK. Indeed, many British
bloggers have a larger following in America than here.
Our press is also ideologically diverse, America's monochromatically
liberal. (Well, okay, there is the Wall Street Journal's editorial
page on the right.) Fewer people feel that their point of
view is excluded from public debate. So they have less incentive
either to produce or read blogs.
But that does not necessarily apply to all topics or to
all elections. Issues on which large numbers of people feel excluded
or patronized in British political debate include moral and religious
topics, libertarian politics, and Europe.
Blogs dealing with these include Melanie Phillips
(www.melaniephillips.com/diary), the Samizdata
collective (www.samizdata.net.blog) and Helen Szamuely and Richard
North (www.eureferendum.blogspot.com) respectively.
For this reason Dr. Szamuely thinks that bloggers will be an
influential force in the European referendum campaign. She's almost
certainly right.


******************************************8

With the polls still refusing to turn favorable, some Tories are
looking beyond the election. The so-called Notting Hill Tories in
particular (or what opera buff Frank Johnson calls i modernisti) don't
want to be left holding a failed strategy when the music stops. So
their
representatives and allies in the media have been sending out faint
dog whistle sounds of disquiet and disavowal.
In the Sunday Telegraph one of their most talented scribblers, Matthew
d'Ancona, lamented the party's stress on immigration and its failure
to exploit the "agile dynamism" of its economic strategy. In the
Daily Telegraph, the New Labour columnist who is their occasional
ally, Rachel Sylvester, disclosed that senior modernisti like George
Osborne and David Cameron would have preferred to highlight "the
party's commitment to the public services, tackling crime, and rural
post offices." They are, she reveals, "deeply embarrassed" by the
focus on immigration.
The lesser objection to these advance regrets is merely substantive.
Whatever its electoral drawbacks, the stress on immigration has
compelled the government to adopt a Tory immigration policy based on
the Australian points system. The agile dynamism of the Tory economic
policy, however, consists mainly of endorsing Gordon Brown's strategy
of increasing the government's share of the economy by five percentage
points--and rising.
The greater objection is that the Notting Hill Tories have played into
New Labour's hands. Blair and Brown cited Mrs. Thatcher as their
fiscal model--a tough budgetary hawk whom they suddenly admired after
years of abuse. Of course, they were really mocking the timidity of
the central plank of Tory policy. Immigration policy filled the
vacuum--how well we shall learn, but better than nothing.
Did any journalists see this in advance? Yes, the Economist, the
Business newspaper editorial writer, the Daily Mail columnist Andrew
Alexander, and the political correspondent of Business, Fraser Nelson.
If the Tories want to hone their agile dynamism, they know who to read.

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