Blair’s refusal at Chilcot to offer regret for Iraq War must disgust all decent citizens
At the Chilcot Inquiry a defiant Tony Blair went into Edith Piaf mode: he had no regrets. Small wonder that their dignified composure finally deserted relatives of the troops sacrificed to his delusions. Blair was fortunate to suffer only boos and the occasional cry of “liar” and “murderer”.
This empty, self-centred man was more concerned with his “legacy” and offered us a brand new sound-bite, the 2010 question. Would there not be, had Saddam Hussein remained in power, a new arms race with Iran, and both competing for the favours of al Qaeda?
Even by Blair’s standard – the gold standard of ignorance in Middle East affairs – this is stunning. Has no-one told him that the secular Saddam would cheerfully have hanged Osama Bin Laden? Is he unaware that al Qaeda and its copycats routinely murder Shia Iran’s co-religionists across the Islamic world from north Africa to Pakistan?
Farewell then to our own Bourbon king: he learned nothing and forgot nothing – except how to sympathise with those left behind by the troops whose lives he threw away.
Thomas McLaughlin, Glasgow.
The well-intentioned but forensically inexperienced members of the Chilcot Inquiry failed to lay a glove on Tony Blair. Their lengthy and convoluted questions gave Blair ample time to prepare his answers, quite often to a question of his own choice instead of the one asked. Worse, each member seemed to have a list of prepared questions to get through, and pressed on with them instead of following up on an evasive or unsatisfactory answer.
Despite much attention given to his Crawford Ranch private meeting with US president George W Bush in March 2002, Blair was not directly asked why he discussed (and perhaps committed) Britain going to war in what was an unofficial session with no ministers or advisers present and no record kept. No-one challenged his assurance “we will be with you shoulder to shoulder in whatever action is necessary to remove Saddam”, which must surely prove that the Prime Minister had indeed committed Britain to war a full year before it began, despite his constant denials.
No-one explored Blair’s assertion that 9/11 changed everything, “the calculus of risk” then convincing him that Saddam Hussein must be removed and Iraq prevented from developing WMD. Yet from intelligence he must have been aware that Saddam detested al Qaeda and that Iraq had nothing to do with the attack on the Twin Towers.
No-one asked why the Cabinet was given only the Attorney General’s one-page document stating simply that in his opinion the war was legal, but not his earlier 13-page assessment of that legality, setting out in detail the finely balanced arguments for and against. Nor was Blair pressed on the events leading to Lord Goldsmith so diametrically changing his opinion within a 10-day period.
Mr Blair was not asked specifically how the WMD intelligence described in the JIC report as “patchy, sporadic and unreliable” became “extensive, detailed and authoritative” in his speech to the House of Commons, nor why the many caveats in the original report came to be edited out of the published version (by a drafting committee chaired by Alistair Campbell). And his defence of his claim in the foreword to the dodgy dossier that the existence of WMD in Iraq was “beyond doubt”, by simply saying “I believed it” was meekly accepted without comment.
Throughout the day the megalomaniacal Blair constantly referred to “his decision”, as if the Cabinet and Parliament were merely appendages expected to
rubber stamp whatever he decided was right, even taking the nation to war. Once again the ultra-polite Inquiry members did not focus on this, apparently accepting that in our political system the Prime Minister is all-powerful and infallible.
The worst moment came right at the end of the day, when Blair declined the chairman’s invitation to express any regret or remorse for the hundreds of British troops dead or maimed in the war, or for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed and their country’s infrastructure destroyed. Such callousness must surely disgust all decent citizens of this country.
Iain AD Mann, Glasgow.
Level of support for euthanasia legislation determined by wording in opinion polls
One of the major justifications for supporting the bill to give terminally ill people the right to take their own lives is the notion that a majority of the Scottish population would be in favour of the legalisation (“Margo MacDonald launches bill to legalise assisted suicide”, The Herald, January 22). Those pushing the bill cite various opinion polls to back up this claim.
A closer look at such polls reveals the figures may be contradictory and require some explanation.
A poll published in September last year indicated that 52% of people in Scotland were against the legalisation of assisted suicide, compared with 42% in favour. This was after being asked whether, in principle, they thought that it should be legal or illegal to help end the life of a suicidal person.
A poll published last November indicated that 68% of the Scottish population would agree that the law should be changed to allow doctors to help people with chronic illness who want to end their lives.
The disparity between these polls is because the questions are not a useful guide for gauging public opinion. You can get any answer you want if you ask a question the right way.
For example, nobody wants to see suffering when it could be avoided. What is often ignored by supporters of the bill is that, in all but the rarest cases, modern palliative care eliminates the suffering of terminally-ill patients. Yet questions can focus on suffering, rather than the immense ethical concern of voluntarily ending a human life.
The House of Lords authorised a special commission which published a report in 2005. The commission studied the issues surrounding assisted dying, its social repercussions and the public’s awareness of relevant information. It found that the polls used to survey people were flawed.
It noted that surveys sought to control results by swaying the responder with leading questions. Further, those seeking to push an agenda could pick and choose questions to serve a cause. Such surveys found the Lords, “may not be the ideal tool for providing understanding ... where ... the potential impact of euthanasia/Physician Assisted Suicide legislation clearly cannot be assumed”.
The commission said surveys of the public needed more context and information. It was noted workers in the healthcare professions, who are more aware of the complex issues involved, communicated a great deal of caution when surveyed.
Those with greater awareness of the issues are less likely to support a change in the law.
The commission concluded that: “The levels of agreement/disagreement with the concept of euthanasia which the numerous polls record are effectively built on what might be termed a knee-jerk reaction to the simple options provided by these polls and do not form a very useful guide to public opinion as support for legislative change.”
Such a massive change in the law should be the result of considered examination and not a knee-jerk reaction to leading survey questions.
Dr Calum MacKellar, Director of research at Scottish Council on Human Bioethics, Edinburgh.
Wrong strategy in Iraq amounted to crime against humanity
Tony Blair has just briefed the Chilcot Inquiry on the lessons he “learned from the invasion of Iraq that we may need against Iran”.
There are many more lessons that Mr Blair needs to learn then teach. For one, the latest wars in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrate that armies must use the correct strategy in the subsequent engagement.
Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait was appropriately met by US shock and awe against Iraqi armed forces alone: shock and awe, properly, were not used against the Kuwaiti people. Technically known as rapid dominance in the US forces, shock and awe are use of overwhelming power and spectacular displays of force to paralyse an adversary’s perception of the battlefield and destroy his will to fight.
The Kuwait model was suitable for Iraq and Afghanistan but it was not used. It was wrong for shock and awe to be used so indiscriminately against civilians in these subsequent conflicts.
Getting rid of power and water in a hot and humid country with dense centres of impoverished population like Iraq must be close to a crime against humanity: virtually nothing else could be guaranteed to turn an entire population overnight against a would-be liberator. Heavy US bombing of Afghanistan, inevitably resulting in civilian deaths, only recently abandoned, falls into the same category.
Both Iraq and Afghanistan may or may not have required a brief and carefully assessed minimum of shock and awe against solely military targets: they certainly did not need destruction of civil infrastructure in Second World War style. At last we are now seeing a new US-led strategy of hearts and minds in Afghanistan, rather late in the campaign.
Major (Retd) Michael Hamilton, Kelso.
The plummy tones of Sir John Chilcot and co asking questions in a very matter-of-fact manner reminded me of a middle-class dinner party. Awkward probing was avoided so as not to upset the guest. Sweeping generalisations by the witness, such as “Iraq is a better place”, “Saddam killed over a million people” and “the world is now a safer place” were accepted without demur.
However, even the most civilised dinner-party conversation would have queried Blair’s claims with more vigour. Has the war not divided Iraq along sectarian lines, displaced up to four million Iraqis, and killed between 200,000 and one million people?
During the war I asked my Labour MP to establish the number of Iraqi civilians killed. She agreed to do so but reported that the Government would not answer this question as they did not keep a count.
At the end of this very British inquiry Blair’s only act of contrition was to admit that he regretted it if his actions had divided the nation. No mention however of regret for the dead – British or Iraqi. This brought an outburst from the public gallery which was quickly quashed by the chair – I thought it was the waiter coming with the cheeseboard.
Tom Minogue, Dunfermline.
Blair and his aides have used the Chilcot Inquiry as a forum to continue peddling their conspiracy theories that Saddam was conspiring with al Qaeda to attack the UK and its allies with WMD and that Iran’s government is doing the same.
Saddam had never used WMD on countries with nuclear deterrents or their allies. Nor was there any possibility of him being able to repeat his 1980s genocide against Iraqi Kurds, which was facilitated by support from the US, the UK and France, among others.
The Blairites denounce as conspiracy theorists anyone who points out that the real reasons for the invasion was control of the second-largest oil reserves in the world and profits for arms firms and military supply firms .
Most Iraqis are worse off now than they were under Saddam. Those who survived torture and cluster munitions used by Coalition forces face weekly suicide bombings as a result of an invasion which has attracted violent jihadists and created the chaos that allowed them to operate.
Nor are we safer as a result of the invasion. The London bombings would probably never have happened without the Iraq war.
Duncan McFarlane, Carluke.
Accurate ballot count needs extended time
I dare say many will share Harry Reid’s gloomy view of the forthcoming election’s outcome.
That doesn’t justify his criticism of Returning Officers, who, he claims, want to delay the count till the next day, on the grounds that the result will not “make any difference”. Their stated reason is that they want to get the count right first time. Given recent experience, that seems a worthy aspiration.
He also asserts that a new voting system would not change things for the better. I disagree. A system based on the single transferable vote would at least allow
voters to get rid of the “greedy, unethical mountebank” MPs, who are not “attending to the hard work of legislating well”. And they could do this without being forced to align themselves with a party that they don’t want to support.
The problem is that Parliament is a locked box as far as electoral reform is concerned and the key is still firmly in the hands of those inside it. They won’t let go of it without a fight.
Tom Gray, Lenzie.
National policy on class sizes could learn from Glasgow’s choice to focus on areas most in need
The attempt to create some kind of ideological conflict between the nurture group issue and the class size debate may suit political interests (The Herald, January 29) but it is surely misdirected.
The nurture group movement already assumes the benefits of small class sizes – current literature suggests an optimum number of 12 pupils in any such group.
The more interesting issue is whether or not targeting class size reduction (as in the example of nurture groups) would be an answer to the apparently insurmountable physical and financial problems besetting any attempt to make class sizes of 18 pupils in the early stages of primary legally binding across the country.
Far from being an obstacle, the policy favoured by Glasgow City Council may be the means by which national policy could be redirected.
If a mechanism could be found which was able to link class sizes to deprivation and additional support needs (not unaligned to the basis on which nurture groups are constituted), I think then that this could present a way forward.
It would mean that resources were allocated with an eye to equity and social justice, and it would also avoid the complications which would inevitably arise if class size reduction meant parents – in areas not blighted by disadvantage – were unable to get their child into the school of their choice.
Recent evidence about catchment areas and placing requests suggests strongly that parents would prefer to have their child educated in large classes in a school of their choice, rather than in smaller classes in a school they do not favour.
I do not suggest that this is an easy solution but, at a time of serious economic difficulties, targeting resources at areas of most need (as Glasgow appears to promote) seems to be a good way of moving the class size debate forward.
Dr Donald Gillies, Faculty of Education, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.
Work out a solution to retirement age
Anne Johnstone’s article on the subject of work (The Herald, January 28) would benefit from lateral thinking. I had a student grant in the 1970s (although I don’t recall walking into a job or buying a house and watching it increase in value). I’m grateful that my apparently wicked final salary pension (which I thought was prudence on my part) allowed me to retire at 60 and I am now happy to volunteer.
I volunteered this afternoon, delivering books to people in Govan who are housebound, on behalf of Glasgow’s library service. On Monday afternoons, I show visitors round the farmhouse at the
Museum of Rural Life in East Kilbride.
This week, in doing up my flat, I’ve had the chance to talk to a joiner, a painter, a gas fitter and an electrician. All in late middle age and tired, and happy to hand over to younger people but can’t afford to. Why can’t we devise a volunteering scheme that allows people aged 60-70 plus to work if they want to but wind down if they choose to? We could compensate them if they let young people shadow them to learn a trade.
Jean Nisbet, Glasgow.
