John Lloyd is a really admirable journalist. I suppose I think that he is the most substantial journalistic supporter of the war: he’s not a drunk; he doesn’t rant or showboat; he’s not unduly impressed by power, but he does respect its difficulty. He is also a damn good editor. So his retreat from Iraq is not a rat-like scuttle, but some altogether larger and more formidable rodent — a beaver, perhaps — moving backwards and snapping at his persecutors as he does. Perhaps the clue to why he got it wrong is found in his fondness for trade unionists: he was a cold war man, and a Moscow correspondent, and he may have just fitted Iraq into that pattern, as Condi Rice did. In any case, here he is on a Downing Street ceremony to honour a murdered Iraqi trades unionist.
First, Saleh’s life and death shows what the stakes are, and remain, in Iraq. Those who hated him, and who hate trade unions, do so because their vision of society is of one ruled by either a party or a faith or both that prohibit, on pain of death, any challenge to a totalitarian reality.
Blair is indeed beleaguered. It is true that there are real advances in Iraq in civil freedoms, but the chaos, mainly in the capital, offsets these and makes government and development hard. Also, the prime minister of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, is under pressure to deliver more, faster, in the way of security, by UK and US leaders anxious to set a date for withdrawing their forces.
But the little scene in Downing Street was larger evidence of a prime minister who knew, as few leaders now do, what the stakes are; the more so since he is tied to one. Through the doughty Labour MP Ann Clwyd, his representative on human rights in Iraq, he remains in touch with a range of groups, as well as unions. He is seeing the gamble he took in seeking the destruction of the regime take a murderous direction. He will be pilloried for it until the day he leaves office, and beyond. Yet he must hope – and so should we, if we value the ideas to which we subscribe – that it will be recognised how much honour he did his country by ensuring the end of a monster.
Only a pedant, of the sort that John Lloyd was, and on other subjects still is, would point out that it was hardly Blair who “ensured the end of Saddam”. We know, because Rumsfeld said so, that the invasion would have gone ahead without us. Nor is it easy to identify “real advances in civil freedoms”: the freedom to walk down the street without fearing death or torture seems to me more important than a democratic constitution which is totally ignored.
But the central mistake is surely the comparison of Iraqi trades unions with Solidarity. Quite apart from anything else, a nationalist and religious trades union movement, such as Solidarity was, would not be pro-American or pro-Lloyd, if it were to emerge in Iraq. And, to do him proper credit, Lloyd does mention that Hadi Saleh, the trade unionist he honours, had been and remained an opponent of the war.