Conflict of Interest

Over the last two days, the war in Iraq has pushed to centre stage in the election campaign. That it hadn't been there for much longer has been a source of some wonder for political commentators, given how much exposure it received during the last Parliament. It seems though that the British are more concerned about health, education, the economy and even immigration, clearly.

We are invited by the Liberal Democrats to vote against Blair because he took the country to war on what they believe was an illegal premise. This has been their line ever since the conflict began, but it is a misguided one in my view, for reasons I'll expand on shortly. The Conservatives on the other hand have flip-flopped on this matter. Behind the government 100% when war was imminent, they have since seen an opportunity to attack Labour by utilising the uncertainty regarding the PM's use of intelligence estimates and his overstating the case. This is highly disingenuous stuff: everyone knows that Howard would have been "shoulder to shoulder" with the US, just as Blair was, had he been PM. Their position on Iraq is the least credible of the three main parties.

The Prime Minister was caught between a rock and a hard place as soon as he tried to justify the upcoming conflict by means Saddam's supposed flouting of existing UN resolutions. It's arguable that Saddam was still in breach of course, but it must now be accepted that had weapons inspector Hans Blix been given more time to do his work on the ground in Iraq, he would have shown the non-existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that Saddam had much less of a case to answer (in this regard anyway). Blair had no choice but to go down the route of attempting to establish legality however, because of the current UN Charter. For copper-bottomed legality to be established, an explicit resolution for war had to be obtained, and it never was.

This was sufficient for the LibDems to stand against the government on this matter. Never mind that Saddam would survive and would continue to abuse the rights of Iraqi citizens. The observance of international law outweighed that, in their view. Not in mine though. If the observance of international law protects men like Saddam, then that law's an ass. If the PM had challenged the legal status-quo on moral grounds, the clamour for a change in the UN Charter could have been loud, at least from these shores.

The PM should have been bolder and justified conflict, before it happened, in moral terms, and also in terms of the British national interest. Saddam had had WMD and undoubtedly had the capacity to create more, certainly in terms of know-how and very probably in hardware. He continued to pose a threat to international peace in the region, at least latently. He had already invaded Kuwait and Iran. He was a mass murderer, and used chemical weapons against Iraqi peoples supposedly in his care. On all these grounds, it was surely entirely reasonable to attack and topple this man. Actions such as these, to destroy totalitarian regimes and the evil dictators that run them, are precisely the sorts of operation the UN should be looking to carry out routinely. The fact that the UN Charter currently prevents its doing so weakens that body. Invalid governments which have no respect for the human rights of their own citizens should be deleted. The world is better off without the Taliban and without Saddam. From the point of view of the British national interest, it is the icing on the cake that the menace to our existent trading agreements in the region was also removed.

I believe that Blair would have won a greater part of the British people over to his cause if he had justified war on these grounds. That he felt himself unable to do so before the bombs fell has cost him big time. This is what I don't get about his opponents' current attacks on his integrity - what exactly did the PM gain from taking the line he did? He has made himself look like President Bush's stooge, he has brought himself, his image and his political legacy under personal attack and, as we are about to see I suspect, it will cost his party seats in the House of Commons. Why did he do it then? There can be only one answer surely: it was because he believed it was the right thing to do.