We were all led up the garden path about the war with Iraq and its consequences the former government minister Clare Short told the Iraq Inquiry today; the immediate consequence of which was lots of hacks implying that Ms Short is an unreliable and volatile witness.
Well Ms Short may be volatile, and may have damaged her credibility in the first place by not resigning as the rather more senior Robin Cook did, but her account rings more true than that of former PM Tony Blair last week.
But it’s now clear that Blair fixed the war from the outset along with George Bush and that senior ministers including Jack Straw and Gordon Brown went along with it. Straw out of a sense of self importance and ‘loyalty’, Brown, cravenly, because he was frightened that Tony Blair would sack him as chancellor if he opposed it.
Blair is apparently due to be recalled to the Chilcot Inquiry, presumably because they had such a bad press for their feeble questioning the first time round. Brown has still to appear.
In the meantime Short may be depicted as a grandstanding politician of little consequence by Westminster insiders. But her testimony is the most damning verdict on the Government’s behaviour to date.
One Comment
Good analysis, I particularly liked this view “…the immediate consequence of which was lots of hacks implying that Ms Short is an unreliable and volatile witness.”
The hacks will never accept responsibility for what they did to sell the war to the British people. They are as guilty if not more so than the politicians, they supported the war to sell more newspapers. We’ve had hack revisionists, apologists but very, very few willing to accept their complicity in the ultimate war crime, the war of aggression. They know they are guilty and will do anything to try and hide their guilt.
Well, fess up, it will do you good in the end.