Groupies
1.52 p.m. Thursday 21st January 2010 Iraq Inquiry Hearing Room Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre ggggggg
I had looked for photos of the Iraq Inquiry to see how far and how high the public gallery was from the action. It turns out that there is no public gallery—assuming you imagined a balcony where the public look down upon the proceedings. The room more accurately suits another definition of gallery: a group of spectators. I walked in, having gone through the security checks, and thought that I must have been put in the secondary viewing facility, with just a TV to stare at for three hours. I found a seat right at the back against the wall. Looking to the front (about seven metres away) I saw the desk at which the committee sits and the desk for the witness.
Jesus, I thought, they’re holding the Iraq Inquiry in the spare bedroom. It is probably one of those rooms the architects (Powell and Moya) added to fill up the internal space between the bigger conference suits. Its arbitrary positioning was suggested by the large supporting pillar half coming out of the wall to my far right, and a solitary pillar standing about a metre into the room from the back wall. The ceiling is obscured by several large diameter air conditioning ducts, which I think might be adding to all the coughing that goes on in the hearings. There are also lots of lights that look like bug zappers rigged up above the committee, presumably to give the cameras good light for their subjects.
The public on my side of the room were mainly middle to old aged, well turned out and well equipped. One person was knitting, one was reading the paper and at least one other had a novel. To the left of where the committee sits were two stenographers with laptops, with a third sat next to the witness to make sure things were heard correctly. On the right there were two men, again with laptops, and when the hearing was in progress they looked like kids in school detention.
After a few minutes the BBC’s Nick Robinson came in and sat down with a lengthy typed document that he seemed to be making notes on. We were given some pre flight safety instructions and then the committee came in: Sir John Chilcot, Sir Lawrence Freedman, Sir Martin Gilbert, Sir Roderic Lyne and Baroness Usha Prashar. The Rt Hon Jack Straw entered through a separate door on the left, and a lady pointed him to his seat. He sat down amongst the confusion of committee members shuffling papers and looked a little like he was pulling out of his own skin, grabbing a bottle of water and opening it slightly awkwardly.
As Sir John Chilcot summarized the purpose of the hearing Straw’s face was solemn, looking like it suddenly remembered to smile every now and then. There was something about his face between the smiles that I couldn’t quite place. He was uncomfortable but it wasn’t nervousness. There were fractional moments of disdain in his eyes when the light hit them a certain way, but that wasn’t it either. It seemed like he was poised for an accusation or blunt remark, and the smiles were relief as he caught onto where the questioner was headed.
Sir Roderic Lyne examined first, noting how Straw’s memorandum had changed things: “we are not going to have to go into all of the issues that we have already discussed quite thoroughly in a lot of detail. I slightly wonder if we shouldn't just ask the questions by numbers and let you reply to them” (2/10-14) [1]. A perfect start, I thought; Straw had avoided what he thought would be the worst questions by preempting them with a wash of information that broadly encompassed the inquiry’s themes, and Lyne’s lighthearted remark told Straw that the committee knew damn well that’s what he’d done. Both sides informing each other that they are in on the games, knowing that they can’t be any more explicit about it or things start getting denied.
Straw went out of his way to distance regime change from the government’s Iraq policy, saying: “we didn't share the policy of regime change as a purpose of our foreign policy with the United States. It wasn't our policy in 2002, it wasn't our policy in 2003 and there would have been no legal base for it ever to be our policy”(11/6-10). He later called it improper and self-evidently unlawful: “The case therefore stood or fell on whether Iraq posed a threat to international peace and security by reasons of its weapons of mass destruction”(17/7-10).
Lyne attempted to determine how these views interacted with Tony “I would still have thought it right to remove him” Blair. He cited the 1999 Chicago speech in which Blair mentioned Saddam and dictatorships: “If NATO fails in Kosovo, the next dictator to be threatened with military force may well not believe our resolve to carry the threat through.” Of course, three days before this hearing Sir Lawrence Freedman (the man sitting to Lyne’s left) had written to Sir John Chilcot, detailing his involvement in writing draft segments of Blair’s speech. Back in the hearing Lyne and Straw had a brief volley that I rather enjoyed:
SIR RODERIC LYNE: […] We have heard from other witnesses how this seam of argument on regime change had been cemented, if you like, by the fact that it had appeared to have succeeded in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, and indeed in Afghanistan at this stage. So did he [Tony Blair] hold a different view on regime change to the one that you have expressed so firmly?It is not true that the public are silent during all of this; any mention of people expecting to find WMD or hoping for peaceful solutions got some amused and incredulous ‘Hurm!’ noises from around the room.
RT HON JACK STRAW: If I may, I think the best way to find that out is to ask him.
SIR RODERIC LYNE: We obviously will, but you say that you were having a debate with him about it.
RT HON JACK STRAW: Look, we are two different people.
SIR RODERIC LYNE: But in one government?
RT HON JACK STRAW: Of course, and we came to…
SIR RODERIC LYNE: …I'm trying to work out what the government's policy was.
RT HON JACK STRAW: Indeed. Of course. […] (23/19-25 & 24/1-9)
At the first break I stayed in the room, as did a few others. A lady a few rows in front let out an accommodating "Hi Jack!" as Straw was pushing the door to his side room open. He turned, not quite looking at her, and said ‘Hi!’ with his bemusement stealthily expressed in the intonation. "Groupies" said my associate. Apparently not—the woman started talking to the lady next to her: “It’s just like he always does: you ask him a question and he takes you down a blind alley.” The ‘you’ wasn’t just a turn of phrase either: “we know him a little bit; he likes to be Mr. nice guy…they’ll be taken in by it. […] I never liked him. No one liked [Robin] Cook but he did the decent thing.” The decent thing—she said she wanted to see a little bit of conscience, and for ‘them’ to admit they’d got it wrong. I fancy that too as it happens.
Lyne’s questioning had been good, although you always imagine a weird concoction of vested interests being mixed by his years in HM Diplomatic Service and as Private Secretary to the Prime Minister [2]. He was also special advisor to BP after 2004, and is now the same to JPMorgan Chase, who were chosen to operate the Trade Bank of Iraq. Certainly Stop the War are concerned about Lyne's role in discussions with America about invading Iraq in the mid 1990s.
Personally, from the hearings I have heard Lyne seems to ask the better questions: informed queries and contentions that aren’t so easily intimidated by witness’s alleged expertise in their field. Any vested interests on the committee became irrelevant as the hearing went on anyway, because Straw moved further into roundabout answers with anecdotes about John Maynard Keynes, Suez, the Falklands War, the Gulf War and Neville Chamberlain.
The Blix Bitch
3.20 p.m. Thursday 21st January 2010 Iraq Inquiry Hearing Room Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre
Sir Lawrence Freedman took over in the second session, and caveats started flying as Straw got into the circum-locution. Questions were being answered more and more with openings like: ‘Well, may I just say’, ‘May I just, if I may’ and ‘Let me just answer this’ rather like a bad Jimmy Stewart impression. Yes, the September Dossier linked the move to the UN with Weapons of Quite a Lot of Destruction, but no, it was never meant to be a case for war. It was a dull document (groans and ‘Hurm!’ a few times in the gallery). Yes, the 45 minutes claim was met with much expectation that something was there to be found in Iraq, but that expectation existed before anyway.
A little later Straw commented that his whole aim for this period was to resolve the matter by peaceful means, and a man sitting in front of me muttered “God” to himself. (During the second break this man talked with Nick Robinson animatedly, until the political sage made his excuses and left the room…with the man in tow.)
Straw went on another marathon in reaction to Freedman’s suggestion that there may have been top down pressure for things to ‘turn up’ in the intelligence coming back from Iraq: The evidence being discussed here wasn’t the basis for war, only a component of it. There was another group (the IISS) who were independent, and they said even more severe things about Iraq. And anyway in the Gulf War the inspectors had trouble finding things, but they were there after all. Intelligence is patchy by nature. The public sees intelligence in a different way.
Freedman’s tactic seems to be to wind the witness up and let them go into a prolonged defensive. In Straw’s case this defensive was either an anecdote binge or mixed critiques of the assertions the question had made. Freedman would then ask a ‘Doing that must have been hard work for you, tell us about it’ question to set the witness at ease again:
SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: […] It took considerable effort by you and Secretary Powell to push [attempts to ‘ramp up’ the resolution demands on Iraq] back. That was an indication which followed from what we said before that this was by no means a consensual policy within the United States.This in turn lead to the ‘having said that, how do you account for…’ questions. In this case it was to wonder: if the weapons inspectors’ findings were to be the accepted evidence for Iraqi compliance/non compliance with the UN resolution, then surely any issues with the Iraqis being unhelpful were irrelevant.
RT HON JACK STRAW: Sir Lawrence, I think that's a very kind description (68/4-10).
Straw immediately picked up on an assertion that it was made impossible for Saddam to comply with the resolution (shifting goalposts), and again started tripping over his own critiques. Well, they did find missiles. Anyway the resolution never said X amount of weapons had to turn up for it to count. Iraq not being frank with us counted as noncompliance anyway. Believe Straw: if Dr Blix had been satisfied we would not have gone to war.
It’s hard to convey what it felt like to be sitting in the hearing room for this part. It had gone on for about an hour like this, even Nick Robinson was now rubbing his eyes and looking at us in the gallery seats rather than at Straw. Though he did perk up again during the Blix bitch (Straw semi condemned Hans Blix over the discrepancies between their accounts of early 2003, noting that there are ‘those’ who put gloss on what they were meant to have said at the time and those who don’t, and “the jury is out on which camp Dr Blix is in” (88/19)). I realized that the best work of the Inquiry is probably done during the scrutiny of all the letters, accounts and paperwork, or by talking to people in private.
I’d sat through all of this with a fair amount of patience, but I finally realized its futility when Freedman asked Straw if he had ever thought about resigning, considering the escalation towards a war he had said he didn't want. Straw could have refused to be a part of the situation the government was getting into. He said he never considered it, and started talking about the Falklands War and Neville Chamberlain’s resignation. He also said that “you should talk to Robin Cook about this, because on this we are absolutely agreed […] (107/21-22).” Robin Cook (1946-2005) would certainly give a historical testimony, but Straw’s history ramble in response to a rather profound question about an ultimately bloody war finished me.
Jack Straw clearly thought he was in a press conference, and deployed the normal rules of engagement. I had thought better of him. At first I actually hoped that what lay behind Straw’s performance was a sense of protectiveness over his current government post. I even allowed for him to be protecting it out of a sense that his current work, both in Westminster and in his Blackburn constituency, is important—a sense of duty if you will. Now I regretfully conclude that his own skin was more of a factor in his reasoning. If you plan on watching Tony Blair this week don’t just scream at the screen; at least read some of the written evidence on the inquiry website—that’s got to be where the action is.
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[1] All quotations from the hearing are taken from the transcript: <http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/43198/100121pm-straw.pdf> and referenced as (Page No./Line(s))
[2] ‘About Us: The Rt Hon Sir Roderic Lyne’, Chatham House, <http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/about/council/roderic_lyne/>
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