Helmintholog

There is a problem about lying over WMDs that is unique to Britain, and to Mr Blair. If the war was fought to advance democracy, and to overthrow a tyrant — and these would appear to have been Blair’s better motives — than it needed to be fought by practising democrats.

Part of democracy in general is that you don’t start wars, even just ones, without a democratic mandate. British democarcy, in particular, has a foundational principle that you don’t lie to parliament.

The accusation about WMDs is that Mr Blair’s parliamentary mandate for this war was obtained by deliberate, conscious fraud. That’s to say, he constructed a majority in favour of a war of self-defence against Iraq, or one to enforce the authority of the United Nations. There was no majority for a war to overthrow a repulsive dictator and govern his country in perpetuity.

Note that this is separate from the argument that says that Blair’s war to liberate the Iraqis was a bad or ignoble idea. It’s possible to approve of liberal imperialism in principle while believing that our practice of it is pretty disastrous. The point is that no one voted for the liberal imperialists’ war. Parliament voted for a different war, on the basis of lies.

The snag with this reasoning is that most of the Conservative party would probably have voted for anything the Daily Telegraph told them to do. I do know that. But it’s not a fact that will mollify the labour voters and MPs in whose hands Mr Blair’s future now must rest.

I prefer Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz to — say — Tony Blair and Jack Straw. They more honest and probably more intelleigent. They are also in a position to be more grown up, since the Blair and Straw cannot tell us their real policies, even after the event: it’s just to embarrassing to say “We need to find out what the Americans want us to do and then do it.”

So the celebrated Wolfowitz quote about how they talked up WMDs because this was the reason that everyone could agree with, doesn’t shock me at all. They did that, and they are now paying the cost. What does shock me is that he went on to say that the humanitarian or liberal imperialist aspect, which everyone is now stressing, was not in itself a reason enough for the war: “The third [reason] by itself, as I think I said earlier, is a reason to help the Iraqis but it’s not a reason to put American kids’ lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it.”

The reason this is frightening is simple. That third reason (the second was “terrorism”, relevant only if you’re an Israeli) is going to be all that’s left. And the risk to “American kids” persists for as long as there is an American garrison in Iraq. the long they’re there, the harder it will become to withdraw without conceding a huge victory to their opponents. Our opponents also, since there will be British troops in the American garrison and even if there aren’t, in any global war between Islam and America, we are on the American side, and quite right too.

But if one of America’s leading imperialists thinks, even after the war, that the maintenance of empire is not worth “American kids’ lives”, then they’re not going to be very good at imperialism.