Blair, Juan Cole, and UK-US duplicity

As I noted in London Calling, Juan Cole, professor of History at the University of Michigan and blogger extraordinaire, has used the occasion of the British general election (which Blair won, though with a sharply reduced majority) to put together all the pieces of news and intelligence that implicate Blair in lying to the British people over the War in Iraq. He focuses on a secret British memo (which originally appeared in the Times Online site) reflecting a clear consensus not only that Bush tampered with Iraq intelligence, but that Blair was complicit in Bush's scheme. Of course, none of this is new - although the latest memo does seem to be the clearest "smoking gun" for implicating Blair - but Cole's piece does bring Blair's and Bush's duplicity into sharp relief.

In some ways, the British action was even more reprehensible than that of the Americans. Depending on your point of view, Bush and his team either had a faith-based conviction that they were in a just cause, or they just didn't care about international law and, a la John Bolton, thought it didn't apply to a sovereign America. But the British were steeped in the importance of international law and global liberal functionalism (I covered this in London Calling). They decided to ignore all that and go with the Americans, even though they knew,right down to their socks, that what they were doing was wrong! As Cole notes about the "justification" for war:

So the "justification" would have to be provided by "fixing" the intelligence around the policy. Bush was just going to make things up, since the realities did not actually justify his planned war! The British cabinet sat around and admitted to themselves that a) there was no justification for the war into which they were allowing themselves to be dragged and b) that the war would be gotten up through Goebbels-like techniques!

It is even worse. British Attorney-General Lord Goldsmith was at the meeting. He had to think up a justification for the war in international law. Britain is in Europe, and Europe takes international law seriously. You could have war crimes trials.

Yes, you could have had (and could still have) war crimes trials - for British servicemen and women. That's what Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, former Chief of the Defence Staff, was complaining about when he felt he had not received full legal cover from prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC) - a court that Britain is bound to by treaty obligation.

I bring this up again, I suppose, because Tony Blair, the man who lied to the British people (and Michael Howard was right about this) has won his historic third election in Britain. And I'm a bit depressed by that. Now part of me still likes Blair. I don't like the Tories. Nor do I like that dangerous prima donna George Galloway, who narrowly defeated Labour MP Oona King on a vicious anti-Iraq war platform. But Blair's Iraq War policy was reprehensible. He didn't deserve to win a third general election, and doesn't dserve to stay on as prime minister (roll on, Gordon Brown!). I wish Blair would just go away now. If he could have served one useful purpose it would have been as a window for the American public into the Bush administration's duplicity. I'm not sure now that that's going to happen. This last point (the lack of U.S. coverage linking Blair's Iraq travails back to Bush) came up briefly in today's Diane Rehm show - the result of a caller's question - but it was quickly disposed of.

Addendum (5.7.2005):

I just have to note a piece by Salon's Joe Conason on this issue, that I quote from in a London Calling post.