266. A time of dodgy dossiers

When Tony Blair took Britain to war in Iraq in 2003, as part of a US-led and rather limited coalition of nations, it was against the will of large numbers of Brits expressed in possibly the biggest demonstration in British history.

He’d also decided to hold a vote in parliament as to whether to go into the war, something he didn’t strictly have to do since it was a so-called ‘prerogative power’, one of the powers inherited from the monarch though exercised, not by the whole of parliament, but by ministers with no need to obtain parliamentary approval. His decision set a new precedent in requiring parliamentary authority to go to war. He also made it a matter of confidence, so his government would have fallen had he lost.

That didn’t stop a massive rebellion among Labou MPs, when nearly 40% failed to rally to the government’s support. That didn’t bring him down or prevent involvement in the war, because the Conservatives came to his rescue. It did, though, mean that he took Britain into the conflict in Iraq in the teeth of opposition both from around the country and from many within his own parliamentary party.

To push for support, he’d presented parliament with two dossiers detailing the dangers represented by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Both have been shown to be shot through with false claims. That meant that the war was fought on false premises.

Such a war, fought on that basis, marked the end of what Blair had once seemed to value, the government’s commitment to an ‘ethical foreign policy’. It’s no surprise that the architect of that policy, Robin Cook, and two other ministers resigned from the government.

It also meant that he as well as the victims of the war would be paying a heavy price for having got involved in it. As we’ll discover in the next episode.

Illustration: ‘45 mins from attack’: headline in the Evening Standard newspaper, in response to the September 2002 dossier on supposed weapons capabilities in Iraq.

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License