According to various media reports Gordon Brown called Rupert Murdoch earlier this week to complain about bullying in The Sun’s campaign against the government’s handling of the Afghanistan war. Whilst some may see the irony, the prime minister’s phone call to his old boss the NewsCorp chairman underlines the rapid deterioration in relations between the government and the Murdoch media group.
Murdoch clearly saw the writing on the wall for the Labour Party and jumped ship. Meanwhile over at the Guardian they have announced 10% job cuts as they try to reduce the £61m loss that they accumulated last year. Unless they were paying each of those staff £400k they are unlikely to wipe out their losses with that level of cuts and matters are only going to get worse if the Conservatives win power and cut the Guardian's primary source of advertising revenue by scaling back on public sector recruitment advertising. Clearly times are not good for the wood pulp based commentariat and Labour risks losing its loudest mouthpiece.
Of course it would have helped the Guardian's readership numbers if they avoided such pisspoor opinionated articles such as last Saturday's telling the world how unattractive the Lloyds rights issue was. Clearly the world does not read the Guardian for its financial insights because today we hear that the Lloyds rights issue has been increased to satisfy demand.
But enough of the Guardian's problems. Unlike Murdoch they do not have the flexibility to switch sides, but also unlike Murdoch they never had any leverage over the Labour Party. Guardian readers were mostly in the bag for Blair, but Sun readers needed to be convinced, but there may be even more to it than that.
I used to work in the city with Jon Norton, late husband of the late Mo Mowlem, before and during the '97 election. He he told me at the time that the then Labour Shadow Cabinet were terrified about a story coming out about Blair and a woman, probably Anji Hunter, from when TB and pals paid a trip to Murdoch in Australia in 1996 to talk about how Murdoch could stitch up the election for Labour. According to Mr Norton, Murdoch's henchmen saw Blair and Hunter, um, "frolicking" in or beside Murdoch's pool and caught it on video.
I have no evidence that this is true but at the time I was told the story the sainted Mo was in the Blair inner clique, and when I repeated this juicy morsel at a dinner in a London Club, one of my fellow diners said he didn't believe it, but he had "friends in Fleet Street" and would check it out. Sure enough, the story was apparently well known on the Street of Shame and probably true.
Then again another husband of a Labour government minister told me that his brother-in-law and tennis partner, Alan Rusbridger of the Grauniad, lunched with Spedding (MI5) and Dearlove (MI6) in early 2003 who told him they didn't have a clue why we were going to war with Iraq. Doubtless they told him full well knowing that it would never be printed.
P.S. I love to watch the ISP's that turn up in the log after a post like this.
10 comments:
1993? 2003? I was 22, had a few theories about why we were going to invade Iraq, but was firmly of the opinion that there was no way we would park our army on their doorstep if we actually believed they have any WMD that they could fire at them, let alone within 45 minutes.
I spent those few months being ridiculed by my housemates who just seemed to believe everything Tony Blair and Sky News told them.
"no way we would park our army on their doorstep if we actually believed they have any WMD"
Ever heard of NBC kit??
After all, parking our army (in full NBC kit) on their doorstep was precisely what we did in 1990-91 when there was no shadow of doubt that Iraq had chemical weapons.
Sir Watkin is right about the first Gulf War. After all we knew Saddam had chemical weapons because we kept copies of the invoices.
12 years later it was a different kettle of fish. Apart from anything else there was no credible evidence of the existence of weapons, which in this day of spy satellites etc is quite remarkable, particularly considering Iraq had been under the cosh for the last 10 years.
It is also worth remembering that in countries like Iran and Iraq there are still elements that are pro-Western, harking back to pre-Saddam and pre-revolutionary times and many of these would be members of the government executive if not part of the political establishment.
They in turn would have external connections through the post-revolutio/Saddam diaspora of Iraqi/Iranian emigres and thus a conduit for leaking information.
As it turned out the US tied up with Chalibi, who, for $5, would have told them the moon was made of green cheese. But then that was probably the sort of information they were looking for.
"there was no credible evidence of the existence of weapons"
The problem was that tho' the evidence doesn't look "credible" now, it did at the time to those who were assessing it.
Over several years before war the JIC had become increasingly confident in its view that Iraq had some CW capability.
The sort of group-think and flawed reasoning that led to this unjustified confidence is very familiar to anyone who has examined the genesis of our current financial woes (Taleb's turkey metaphor is very apposite). It's stupid, it's blindingly obvious that it was wrong, but - hard as it now seems to credit it - it made sense at the time: it was sincere. The thinking in the Intelligence Community on the other side of the Atlantic was similar (one of the disadvantages of the close UK-US intelligence relationship is that it brings this sort of risk with it).
"which in this day of spy satellites etc is quite remarkable"
Not at all. CBW activity is very easy to hide. e.g. To make nerve gas all you need is a pesticide plant and apply a few minor tweaks. Once you've got eno' agent, you reverse the changes and the plant goes back to producing nice innocent bug killer to help hard-working farmers feed your citizens.
Pro-Western elements are as you observe a two-edged sword. It's a perennial problem with Humint: sources lie.
A further factor in the debacle was that the JIC's relatively cautious judgement that Iraq probably had a small amount of not very dangerous CW (key words in italics) got translated into "Iraq has WMD", which isn't untrue, but sounds much more alarming. A classic case of what happens when the views of experts are received by generalists (politicians, journalists, general public).
Not at all. CBW activity is very easy to hide. e.g. To make nerve gas all you need is a pesticide plant and apply a few minor tweaks. Once you've got eno' agent, you reverse the changes and the plant goes back to producing nice innocent bug killer to help hard-working farmers feed your citizens.
I don't doubt that it pretty easy to whip up something in a bucket that you could throw over the ramparts of some fortifications. We did that hundreds of years ago, but it is not so easy to hide the weapons or their location if they are going to be a credible threat to other countries particularly when they are hundreds or thousands of miles away.
And I don't buy any "groupthink" defences. OK, so they are all incompetent, but that doesn't justify anything. It just means you have the wrong people doing the job.
[...] it is not so easy to hide the weapons or their location if they are going to be a credible threat to other countries particularly when they are hundreds or thousands of miles away.
I presume by "weapons" here you have in mind missiles plus nuclear, chemical or biological warheads.
Even these aren't so difficult to hide (remember the trouble we had locating SCUD launchers in 1991), but in any case they weren't relevant in 2002-03.
The only "WMD" directly at issue (and indeed the only such that Iraq ever weaponised) were tactical CW in artillery shells (of the kind used in the Iran-Iraq War). These are very easy to hide. The JIC never suggested that Iraq had anything that was a threat to distant countries.
And I don't buy any "groupthink" defences.
I'm not clear what you mean by this.
Do you think there wasn't any groupthink? Or that groupthink isn't a defence to the charge of dishonesty?
OK, so they are all incompetent, but that doesn't justify anything.
Are we discussing competence or honesty (or both)? They are separate issues.
It would be helpful too to clarify who "they" are.
I presume by "weapons" here you have in mind missiles plus nuclear, chemical or biological warheads.
Even these aren't so difficult to hide (remember the trouble we had locating SCUD launchers in 1991), but in any case they weren't relevant in 2002-03.
I presume (without any expertise) that extra precaution have to be taken with the storage of such weapons and that the location would thus leak out. I assume that Aldermaston, Porton Down and every significant weapon store in the UK is well known to whosoever might be interested.
I would also have assumed that with observers on the ground and improved satellite technology that it would have been easier to observe weapons movements and storage in 2003 than in 1993 or perhaps I just watch too many Bond films.
Re: And I don't buy any "groupthink" defences.
I could well believe that there was some groupthink, but that is not a satisfactory behaviour for an intelligence operation.
The response should be "we don't know" instead of "probably had a small amount of not very dangerous CW", in which case the government should have told the intelligence agencies to find out the facts.
There is a blurred distinction between dishonesty and incompetence. The indeterminate statement above might be a consequence of either, and the failure to correct public conclusions might also be down to either. Likewise the PM and many MPs expressed "sincere belief" in what they could be doing could be incompetence, negligence or wilfull misfeasance, but I am not going to be drawn into a debate on that point because none of us can know the truth.
I presume (without any expertise) that extra precaution have to be taken with the storage of such weapons
It depends on how concerned you are about "health and safety".
Britain's first nuclear device was driven down to Southampton in the back of a car (to be put on a RN ship to Australia where the test took place).
The risks were pretty low (even if we wouldn't take them today) and the benefit was "security through obscurity."
Where's the best place to hide a tree? In a forest. Where's the best place to hide shells containing mustard or tabun? In ordinary arms dumps with lots of other shells.
The HSE wouldn't like it, but in practice you'd probably get away with it.
I would also have assumed that with observers on the ground and improved satellite technology that it would have been easier to observe weapons movements and storage in 2003 than in 1993 or perhaps I just watch too many Bond films.
You watch too many Bond films.
Intelligence collection is much harder than people think, even in a benign environment, and Iraq (in general) and its WMD programmes (in particular) were classic examples of hard targets.
To address your two specific points:-
Imint is notoriously difficult to interpret, and capabilities hadn't improved greatly between 1993 and 2003.
Inspections ceased between 1998 and 2002. Moreover one would expect them to have had a Darwinian effect: the Iraqis would get better at concealment, not least because they would be able to reverse-engineer the inspectors' discoveries and get a clearer understanding of their own (Iraqi) vulnerabilities and of Western intelligence-capabilities. (It's an old paradox of intelligence that the more use you make of it the harder you make its future collection: geese/golden eggs.) Thus an intelligence agency looking at Iraq it would quite reasonably expect not more and better intelligence (as you suggest), but less and of poorer quality.
[More to follow.]
So the more we find the worse our intelligence gets. But I hardly thinks having poor intelligence and a hunch is justification for waging a war, or even making a probabilistic assessment. Sounds increasing like a combination of incompetence and dishonesty. A truly open mind would say what evidence do we have, and if there is none, there is no case for war.
As Count Oxenstierna wrote to his son:
"Dost thou not know with how little wisdom the world is governed?"
Momentous decisions are made in multinational companies on the basis of poor intelligence and hunches. Why are people surprised that it's no different in government?
We went to war over Kosovo on the basis of poor intelligence and probabilistic assessments, but no-one complains. (Incidentally, this "vindication" is probably one of the unseen factors behind the Iraq decision: if you think you made the right call last time, your confidence in your judgement increases, even tho' it was only a fluke.)
It's deeply ironic that the State, in the area of criminal law, will not even infringe a person's liberty unless the charge be proved beyond reasonable doubt, but military action - where far more is at stake - is routinely taken on evidence that would never even pass the civil law test of a balance of probabilities.
What happened over Iraq was the norm, not an egregious exception. It simply happens to have been more public and more disastrous than usual.
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