Letters

Lord of the WMDs

Last year's Big read firmly established fantasy as the nation's favourite publishing genre, tales of unreal worlds such as Lord of the rings taking four of the five top places.

New Labour was quick to jump on the bandwagon. Two releases last year - Iraq, its infrastructure of concealment (February 2003), and Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (September 2003) - were savaged by the critics, who found their plots unconvincing, gratuitously "sexed up" and derivative to the point of plagiarism.

They were set in a world similar to ours, but in which Iraq is a superpower posing a direct military threat to the west through its 'weapons of mass destruction' - not unlike Tolkien's 'one ring'. As a result, the free world stands on the edge of destruction at the hands of the evil dictator, Saddam.

Sensitive to criticisms of implausibility, New Labour brought in a new writer for the third title, Hutton report. This takes up the story after Iraq has been defeated, and (nice twist, this) has failed to use any of its WMDs in its defence. Indeed, through some wizardry, the dreaded weapons have become invisible, unlike Saddam himself who turns up living in a hobbit-hole. Though I'm giving away the ending, it has been widely trailed: it all proves to be the fault of a revolutionary, underground group - the BBC.

It's no good: some things are beyond parody, and even Tony Blair seems uneasily conscious that the Hutton report whitewash of his behaviour over Iraq was too blatant for public taste. Hutton justified his findings partly on the basis of his limited remit: to investigate the death of government advisor David Kelly. Until recently, though, Blair refused any suggestion of an inquiry directly into the grounds for the war as "unnecessary", despite the fact that the Iraqi WMDs used to justify the invasion have not been found.

Then came David Kay's resignation as head of the Iraq Survey Group and his public admission that he had been wasting his time. This compelled president Bush to announce an enquiry into the question of WMD 'intelligence', and in turn forced Blair's hand. Blair has therefore appointed Lord Butler to chair a committee of five privy councillors, including two MPs: Labour chair of the intelligence and security committee Ann Taylor, and Conservative Michael Mates. It will meet in secret, and publish its report in the summer. Its will investigate the accuracy of pre-war intelligence of WMDs, but not the use made of it by the government. Robin Cook, who resigned from the cabinet over the decision to invade Iraq, has criticised this narrow remit, and the Liberal Democrats have refused to join the committee on the same grounds.

The report may scapegoat the security services for providing poor intelligence, but, given the risk that annoyed spies might brief against the government, it seems more likely that another whitewash is being prepared. Freshly confident after Hutton, Blair has been particularly blatant on this point: "We can do that without casting aspersions on people's good faith or honesty."

It seems it is left to others to cast these aspersions. Most ordinary people remain perfectly aware that they were lied to by Blair. War on Iraq was justified on the basis that the country was in breach of the terms of UN resolutions imposing restrictions on its armaments after the invasion of Kuwait, and it had to be disarmed of WMDs. These WMDs were never found, and the dishonesty of the government's attempts to prove that they ever existed has already been documented, week after week, not least in our paper.

At first sight, the specious justification of the war might seem unimportant. Communists, who begin with an understanding of the reality of capitalism and its international extension, imperialism, would never have been troubled by phoney arguments of 'international law' even if they were nominally consistent.

However, we must fight to expose the hypocrisy of our government, even on its own grounds, and precisely to highlight its true nature. The government's most senior lawyer, attorney general Lord Goldsmith, wrote that the war was "legal" only in as far as it was necessary to disarm Iraq, and explicitly not for "regime change". Without WMDs, the entire war was therefore 'illegal', and Blair is a war criminal not by any rhetorical stretch, but by his own lawyer's definition.

Lord of the WMDs