YOU CAN’T SLAY DRAGONS WITHOUT AN AUTHORIZING RESOLUTION

Tell us why we truly went to war
(Alice Thomson, The Telegraph, October 14th, 2004)

An Army friend who recently returned from a six-month tour in Basra was amazed that the only person who asked him what it had been like was a four-year-old. "This is how they must have felt coming back from the Western Front in 1918," he said.

It takes the discovery of a mass grave to shock people into remembering the barbarity of Saddam Hussein. When we think of him now, we see an ageing man who has lost his sons, an American prisoner.

We too easily forget that this was a disgusting, brutal dictator. A man who not only shot his opponents but, as the grave in Hatra shows, allowed pregnant women and children clutching toys to be murdered. A man who waged war against Iran and invaded Kuwait, who is thought to have killed more than 250,000 Shia Muslims and 50,000 ethnic Kurds.

This is the Prime Minister's fault. He has never been honest about the reasons he went to war. He has used all the most tenuous arguments about weapons of mass destruction. And we have accused him of other motives: he did it for America, for oil, to distract the voters from domestic difficulties.

But Mr Blair didn't go to war because he thought Britain was in danger of being attacked; he did it from a Gladstonian impulse to make things better in Iraq. He saw Saddam as an evil dictator and knew that, if he tagged along with the Americans, there was a good chance of getting rid of him.

He is an evangelist. He loves the idea of crusading against evil, and making the world a better place for everyone. But he refused to admit this. I remember seeing him just after Saddam had been caught. Privately, he was jubilant that this evil man would now face trial; publicly, he was still harping on about the dossier.

There is a very good emotional case for going to war, a case that makes traditional Palmerstonians cringe. They believe that Britain shouldn't become embroiled in the internal affairs of other nation states, but many Britons would have embraced a humanitarian reason more easily than any 45-minute claim, a cause that would have been easier also for the Iraqis to understand.

There is a valid and important point here, but it really isn’t fair to blame Mr. Blair. It isn’t his fault he lives in an age where public revulsion over mass murder, terror and assassination can be diffused in one fell swoop by a colorless academic or bureaucrat saying that trying to stop it is illegal.