Friday 30 October 2015

WMDs, New Labour, Tories and Corbyn

Perhaps when the Chilcot report comes out, those who have blathered on about how wonderful the New Labour leadership were, how much better it would have been if one of them - David Miliband especially - had been chosen to lead the Labour Party, will pause for a moment and look through the details of what is coming out about how Blix told Blair that there was no evidence for WMDs, that Saddam's sidekick had said that Saddam had destroyed biological weapons and that these crucial pieces of information and intelligence were consistently left off documents and left out of speeches designed to convince MPs and the electorate that a gigantic war machine should be unleashed on Iraq. These exaggerators and deceivers and media-massagers are, say the media, the ones we should admire and support and follow. What fools we are if we find in Jeremy Corbyn anything we might agree with.

Now scoot forwards to the day of publication of Chilcot. Let's imagine for a brief moment that Chilcot does indeed produce some of this damaging evidence (that's so obvious to so many of us, anyway), will the Tories be able to point the finger at Corbyn and say, 'You are the culpable one too! You are part of the same crowd!'? I don't think so. Jeremy will have the trump card. He marched. He spoke. He was right.

Of course the Tories will say that they only supported the war because they only had the evidence made available by Blair. Of course they will.

Which will make it all the more mysterious that those of us who marched knew that the WMD story was a lie. Goodness me, how did we know?????