The Postbuttal Service - Independent (blog)

It looks as if my prebuttal on Thursday anticipated most of the nonsense in the biased media coverage of Tony Blair's appearance at the Iraq Inquiry. This was made easier by the absence of anything new of substance in either the questions or his answers.

I have already taken issue, rather unnecessarily, with my colleague Ben Chu, who disputed the first paragraph of Blair's written evidence, which repeated what the finest peace-time prime minister has said often enough since 2001.

The only important new thing to emerge from the Chilcot inquiry is that Peter Goldsmith, the Attorney General, thought there was no legal basis for the invasion before he thought there was. By stages, the precise sequence of his changing advice, and the documents, have now emerged.

Blair was asked about it and described Goldsmith's earlier opinion as "provisional". He even accepted that, if the Attorney General had not come to a better view, the British part in the invasion would have been called off:

I was going to take the view, and I did right throughout that period, there might come a point at which I had to say to the President of the United States, to all the other allies, "I can't be with you" …

[But] I wasn't going to be in a position where I stepped back until I knew I had to, because I believed that if I started to articulate this, in a sense saying, "Look, I can't be sure", the effect of that both on the Americans, on the coalition and most importantly on Saddam, would have been dramatic.

I can understand the rage of the antis at having discovered (a year ago) that the Attorney General initially agreed with what "everybody knows" and then came to a different view, but the view that counts is the one that he was prepared to defend in public.

One worrying question, from the chairman, Sir John Chilcot, reflected his exchange of letters with Sir Gus O'Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, asking for permission to publish notes from Blair to George Bush. Sir John brought up one of the sacred texts of the conspiracists, a quotation, supposedly from one of those notes, in Andrew Rawnsley's The End of the Party:

"You know, George, whatever you decide to do, I am with you."

Sir John said:

It is very important and central as to how far there was a commitment and what the nature of the commitment was, thinking also about what you said to Donald Rumsfeld on 5th June, you said in your statement to us about that: "I could not and did not offer some kind of blank cheque in how we accomplished our shared objective."

The idea that anything in any of these notes constituted a commitment in the sense of a quasi-legal undertaking is pure anti-war mythology. It is alarming that Sir John seems to subscribe to it. Blair's support for the use of military action if necessary to force Saddam to comply with UN resolutions was known, in public, at the time. The Americans were perfectly aware that the British decision had to be taken by the Cabinet and the House of Commons.

Photograph: AFP

Tagged in: chilcot, iraq inquiry