British Government Gives Iraq Story a Final Spin
By Robert Fisk
Editor’s note: This article was originally printed in The Independent.
“We acknowledge,” the letter says, “that violence has claimed the lives of many thousands of Iraqi civilians over the last five years, either through terrorism or sectarian violence. Any loss of innocent lives is tragic and the Government is committed to ensuring that civilian casualties are avoided. Insurgents and terrorists are not, I regret to say, so scrupulous.”
This quotation comes from the Ministry of Defence’s “Iraq Operations Team, Directorate of Operations” and is signed by someone whose initials may be “SM” or “SW” or even “SWe”. Unusually (but understandably), it does not carry a typed version of the author’s name. Its obvious anonymity—given the fact that not a single reference is made to the civilians slaughtered by the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq—is no surprise. I, too, would not want to be personally associated with such Blair-like mendacity. What is astonishing, however, is that this outrageous letter should have been written this year.
I should say at once that I owe this revelatory text (actually dated 20 January) to a very un-anonymous Independent reader, Tom Geddes, who thought I would find its “economy with the truth” interesting. I certainly do. We are now, are we not, supposed to be in the age of Brown-like truth, as we finally haul down the flag in Basra, of near-certainty of an official inquiry into the whole Iraq catastrophe, a time of reckoning for the men who sent us off to war under false pretences. I suspect that this—like the Obama pretensions to change—is a falsehood. Well, we shall see.
Mr Geddes, I hasten to add, is a retired librarian who worked for 21 years at the British Library as head of Germanic collections and is also a translator of Swedish—it turns out that we share the same love of the Finnish-Swedish poet Edith Sodergrund’s work—and he wrote to the Ministry of Defence at the age of 64 because, like me (aged 62), he was struck that John Hutton, the Secretary of State for Defence, described those who jeered at British troops returning home as “cretins”.
“Such jeering is clearly not meant to denigrate individual bravery and sacrifice,” Geddes wrote to Hutton on 28 October—readers will notice it took the Ministry of Defence’s “SM” (or “SW” or “SWe”) three months to reply—“(but) is a political comment on the general dubious legality and morality of recent military actions.”
I’m not so sure the jeering was that innocent, but Geddes’s concluding remark—that “unless you or the Government can explain and justify Britain’s war activities, you cannot expect to have the country on your side”—is unimpeachable.
Not so “SM’s” reply. Here is another quotation from his execrable letter. “It is important to remember that our decision to take action (sic) in Iraq was driven by Saddam Hussein’s refusal to co-operate with the UN-sponsored weapons inspections… The former Prime Minister has expressed his regret for any information, given in good faith, concerning weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which has subsequently proven to be incorrect.”
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