Jonathan Freedland: 'Iraq has poisoned our faith in politics'

Wednesday, 13 January 2010 16:06

Jonathan Freedland (pictured) in the Guardian today reflects on Alastair Campbell’s testimony to the Chilcot Inquiry yesterday and the enduring scars the Iraq war has afflicted on the body politic.

Freedland writes:

‘…the Iraq episode continues to cast a long shadow over our public life. It haunts domestic politics in the present and sets limits for what will be possible in the future.

‘Take one immediate consequence. Even if Labour is not ejected from power until this spring, the observers of the future will surely conclude that it was the Iraq war that broke the bond of trust between this government and the nation. True, Labour won the election of 2005, but it did so with a meagre 35.3% of the vote in a verdict that was more about the unelectability of the Tories than enthusiasm for Labour.

‘The damage extends far beyond one party. It was the widespread belief that Britons had been led falsely to war that planted the seeds of distrust which grew to full bloom in the expenses affair. After Iraq, voters believe the very worst about their politicians. There is no graver responsibility than sending men and women to face enemy fire: if our leaders can lie about that, they can surely lie about anything.

‘That, in turn, has fed a disenchantment with democratic politics itself. A refrain chanted with depressing regularity is: "If they can ignore 2 million people on the streets against the Iraq war then what's the point in ever protesting?"

‘There is a flaw in that logic: democracy does not mean rule by demo, in which policy is determined according to crowd size. But faith in the power of citizens to affect events was badly dented by the experience of 15 February 2003.

[...]

‘So where are the guilty men of Iraq? A permatanned Tony Blair travels the world by private jet, trousering multiple salaries to pay the £40,000 a month he needs to feed the mortages on his four homes in Britain. The foreign secretary of the time, Jack Straw, still has his seat at the cabinet table. Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary of that era, is alive and well and plotting in curry houses.

‘What of those who were right about Iraq? Robin Cook is dead and Clare Short is one of the political undead, severed from her party and cast into outer darkness. There is something unsettling about this fate, in which those who took us into a needless, bloody war flourish while those who opposed it remain as unheeded as ever.

‘The Iraq poison will remain in the body politic until we have a true reckoning with that episode. The gentleness of most of the Chilcot inquiry's questioning – its reluctance to forensically nail witnesses down to specific answers – suggests that it will not provide that reckoning. But we need it. Until we get it, our system will remain hobbled and haunted by an event that refuses to be laid to rest.’

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