Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth:Britain's "Chilcot Inquiry" into the origins of the invasion of Iraq has largely faded from the headlines, following Tony Blair's bravura display of pious bluster before the panel of Establishment worthies last month. And in truth, it has been a rather toothless affair, with the already deferential worthies further constrained by the narrow confines placed upon their investigation by the government: chiefly, the cloak of secrecy wrapped around the many documents that detail the deceptions and manipulations of the Bush and Blair regimes as they schemed their way to war.
And thus do we of wisdom and of reach,
With windlasses and with assays of bias,
By indirections find directions out.
-- Shakespeare, Hamlet
But as Chris Ames points out in the Guardian, in the wind-up of its first phase, the Chilcot panel seem to be trying to tell the public, obliquely, about some of the smoking guns in these buried documents: an official record of knowing deceit that confirms, yet again, the damning fact that the US and UK were determined to invade Iraq no matter what: with or without UN backing, whether or not Iraq had WMD -- and as we have pointed out here for many years, even if Saddam Hussein were no longer in power. The documentary evidence shows that every single purported reason or justification for the war -- the WMD, connections to 9/11, the repressive nature of Saddam's regime -- was false to the core, and known to be false by the leaders who put these explanations forward.
The Chilcot panelists were terribly craven when it came to confronting Tony Blair -- and they are likely to be equally circumspect when they politely pose a few inquiries to Blair's successor, Gordon Brown, sometime in the next few weeks. But they seem to have chosen the odious figure of Jack Straw -- foreign secretary at the time of the Iraq invasion, now serving, laughably, as justice secretary -- as the outlet for their frustrations at the strictures of the inquiry and the soft-shoe shuffling they've encountered from witness after witness.
What's more, aside from Blair, Straw was the only top UK figure completely "in the loop" throughout the long, complex manipulations toward war. Along with his American counterpart, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Straw played a key role both in the transatlantic talks that engineered the act of aggression and the hugger-mugger manipulations at the UN.
And so, to close out its first phase, the Chilcot Inquiry recalled Straw -- who had already given one sweaty, white-knuckle performance on the witness stand a few weeks ago. With the implacable politesse of the true British mandarin, panelist Sir Lawrence Freedman seized the opportunity to suggest to the right honorable minister that the right honorable minister might, perhaps, be lying through his right honorable teeth in denying that Colin Powell had informed him quite clearly that the Americans were going to war, come hell or high water, in March 2003. As the Guardian notes, Freedman's questions "make it clear that [he] has obviously seen some very interesting paperwork. Here is the exchange, from the Guardian:
Freedman asked: Can you start by confirming that you knew that military action was planned by the US for the middle of March come what may? You were copied in, presumably, to reports of conversations between the prime minister and the president?
Straw replied: Yes, I don't think there was any key document that I should have seen that I didn't.
Freedman: Was there any point where [Colin] Powell said to you that even if Iraq complied, president Bush had already made a decision that he intended to go to war?
Straw replied: Certainly not to the best of my recollection.
Freedman went on: I was going to suggest you might want to look through your conversations and check.
Mr Straw at last got the hint: I will go through the records because I think you are trying to tell me something.
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Yes, Mr Straw. He is trying to tell you, and the world, that he has the
paper in his hand documenting your conversation with Colin Powell: a
clear admission of the war crime of military aggression, as it reveals
that there was not even a pretense of a legally justifiable casus belli
among the American and British leaders -- just the cold, pre-determined
intention to attack.
(And Powell, as we all remember, was the "good American," the
"honorable American" in the run-up to war, a "decent man" who somehow
got "railroaded" into making a false case for war before the entire
world at the UN. A man so honorable and decent that the progressive
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama proudly claimed him as
one of his advisers, even as the million corpses from the war that
Powell and Straw knowingly and willingly helped launch were rotting in
the ground.)
But, as Ames notes, these kinds of oblique references are "the best
we will get for now" from the panel: "At the end, Sir John Chilcot said
that, however revealing the sessions have been, the great bulk of the
evidence, telling us 'what really went on behind the scenes,' is in the
documents." And the documents have not been and probably will not be
released -- at least not for many decades, by which time Blair and
Straw and Powell and Bush will have all lived out their days in wealth
and comfort.
But although documents can be kept under wraps, and testimony can
be falsified or prettified, the monstrous moral rot that has infected
the warmongers can never be fully hidden. "For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak/With most miraculous organ."
And Straw revealed his own moral depravity, his own arrogant and
unfeeling blindness, in his remarks at the end of his testimony.
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