New Delhi, Feb 01: In July 2003, Dr David Kelly took his own life. He had been revealed as the source of a flawed BBC report: a journalist falsely attributed to him the statement that the government had inserted into its ‘dossier’ on Iraq the warning. Britain, having invaded a Third World country in order to bring to it the benefits of democracy, sets up an inquiry, not into why we were led into war on grounds that have proved baseless; but into the suicide of a government scientist, a former weapons inspector in Iraq, to whose death the British government was accused of contributing by permitting his name to come into the public domain. The Hutton report found the government to be faultless.
The only dereliction lay with the BBC: it permitted the report to be broadcast, when a more rigorous check might have found it to be untrue. The director-general of the BBC and the chairman of governors have resigned; clearly their crime is worse than that of leading Britain into a war on doubtful evidence.
Could anyone imagine that a senior judge would permit to be tarnished the very democracy which we are so conspicuously bringing to the world? It was both necessary and inevitable that the government of Tony Blair should be “exonerated” of any wrongdoing; and indeed, within the narrow remit of the inquiry, it is blameless: it believed its own solemn and portentous warnings on Saddam. But Lord Hutton has produced 2,00,000 words on the wrongdoing of a BBC reporter; the reasons for the war and the faulty intelligence upon which it was based are not within his “terms of reference”. The report represents a fine old British tradition, namely, the ritual reaffirmation of the integrity and honour of British governance, and the ritual cleansing-by-official-report of all duplicity and untruthfulness.
Of course, the narrowness of the scope – the events surrounding the death of Dr Kelly – was designed to ensure the spotlight would be removed from the thousands of other victims of the invasion of Iraq. The issue was concerned solely with the fate of one tormented individual who took his own life rather than face the obloquy or shame, or whatever it was, when contradictions were revealed in what he told – or didn’t tell – journalists about the government’s presentation of a dossier which “proved” that Saddam presented an immediate danger to the United Kingdom.
The BBC is the sole guilty party in this highly selective version of truth. No doubt the BBC has its failings; and they were on clear display over the claims by its journalist, Andrew Gilligan, who attributed to Dr Kelly the allegation that the government had “sexed up” its dossier on Iraq. There was negligence both in editorial control and management, and an arrogant defiance when government demanded an apology for impugning its integrity. These failings all require attention. But for this to emerge as the principal “finding” from an inquiry that evades matters of overwhelming importance to the peoples of the world is simply incredible.
To vindicate Tony Blair in the fulsome way the report does suggests that a cordon sanitaire has been set up around key questions – where did the intelligence come from that sent us to war, who asked the thousands of civilians in Iraq if they were willing to sacrifice their lives for the liberation (by others) of their country; and perhaps even more pertinently, how is it that, “all the intelligence agencies in the world” concurred in their belief in the phantom weaponry in Iraq?
The only hint that the dossier might have erred in the vividness of its portrayal of the menace of Saddam comes when the judge states that the Joint Intelligence Committee may “subconsciously” have inflected the dossier to support the government’s case. This wasn’t the only piece of amateur psychology that His Lordship permitted himself – he also deemed Dr Kelly to be “difficult to help”, the author of his own misfortune.
The convergence of global intelligence opinion hints at a form of dangerous contagion, a spread of collective delusion among the most sensitive institutions in the world, those concerned with “intelligence”. This is one terrifying aspect of events, into which the government plans no inquiry. It seems a consequence of globalisation, that that even the bloated and overfunded bureaucracies of “security’ (which have done precious little to render the world a safer place) can be infected with the certainties of a single global power – the USA – and faithfully parrot its mantras of dominance, in defiance, not only of their own country’s interests, but of the evidence also.
The one-sided castigation of the BBC distracts attention from the workings of the bringers of democracy and freedom to the dark places of earth, which must, on no account be touched by scandal, since these are the model and example which a whole world is now bound to follow. How could a judge, the embodiment of conventional propriety, and appointed by Tony Blair himself, possibly say that the government was animated by anything but rectitude, honesty and transparency; even when in so many other areas of policy it has shown itself to be evasive, opportunistic and obsessed with appearances? The legalistic limitation of the scope of the inquiry provides the alibi and shield from too close an examination of the chaos in “post-war” Iraq, the exposure of service personnel to the hatred of those they have ostensibly liberated and the growing global reach of suicide bombers.
This government has falsehood running through its whole political programme. Even its identity is stolen: they hijacked the epic tradition of Labour, of those who devoted their lives to the struggle against injustice and exploitation; while the deepest purpose of this “modernised” Labour Party is to facilitate and to institutionalise the gross and growing inequalities of globalisation.
The huffing and puffing about honour, integrity and the lofty moral manner which accompanies it, is characteristic of British flummery and pantomime. Of course the truth was told to Lord Hutton by all those in, and close to, government. After all, these are the somebodies and dignitaries of power who uphold the untainted probity, truth and honourable conduct for which Britain and its imperial schoolboys have long been famed all over the world, playing the game, not funking it, owning up and making a clean breast of any faults. It is redolent of the public school: the suspected bad apples drawn up in front of the beak and asked on their honour to state the truth. They duly do so, and since everybody knows a gentleman’s word is his bond, everyone trusts the veracity of their answers. They aver their good faith and dedication to the greater good. They are duly exonerated.
If this sounds Victorian, that is exactly what it is. Out of the musty closets of imperialism, the luminaries of New Labour drag out the motheaten finery and the faded costumes, in order to re-enact antique myths of honour and principled disinterestedness.
That a new dramatis personae occupy the old roles should deceive no one – the script may be tattered, but no one departs from it; indeed, what made New Labour electable in the first place was that it had perfected its role, had rehearsed long enough to ensure that a seamless transition from the high imperial moment, when the voice of the memsahib and its peremptory orders to the serving classes of the world gave way, to be replaced in due course by the plausible suburban earnestness of New Labour. The actors change, the drama remains the same. In the shadow of American imperialism, Britain performs a few geriatric dance-steps of triumph in remembrance of the lost world.
It may come as a surprise that it is upon the BBC that the wrath of the establishment falls. The BBC is supposed to be dedicated to the same impartial scrupulousness which characterises all the other institutions of state. Its problem, of course, is that it hasn’t modernised after the fashion of New Labour. It has not yet quite learned to deliver market-driven news. It has not yet been privatised, so that it may legiti