Several American Presidents have learned the “hard way” that it’s extremely difficult regaining credibility after it has been lost.
And now, it seems, it’s time for Great Britain’s Tony Blair to learn the same (painful) lesson.
You can monitor any number of news reports and newspaper stories on the new controversy raging in England on the eve of elections there and reach these conclusions:
- Blair is on the defensive on this issue.
- It probably won’t cost him the election.
- His credibility is damaged and even if he wins the controversies surrounding him and England’s entry into the Iraq war will likely continue unabated.
What’s going on? Blair — win or loses — is close (some believe he has already arrived or past that point) to losing his believability. Look at this report from England’s Times Online and see how it clearly charges the government made the decision to go to war and then waited and looked for a chance to frame that decision around an event or theory:
A SECRET document from the heart of government reveals today that Tony Blair privately committed Britain to war with Iraq and then set out to lure Saddam Hussein into providing the legal justification.
The Downing Street minutes, headed “Secret and strictly personal — UK eyes only�, detail one of the most important meetings ahead of the invasion.
It was chaired by the prime minister and attended by his inner circle. The document reveals Blair backed “regime change� by force from the outset, despite warnings from Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, that such action could be illegal.
The minutes, published by The Sunday Times today, begins with the warning: “This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. The paper should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know.� It records a meeting in July 2002, attended by military and intelligence chiefs, at which Blair discussed military options having already committed himself to supporting President George Bush’s plans for ousting Saddam.
“If the political context were right, people would support regime change,� said Blair. He added that the key issues were “whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan space to work�.
So the military strategy was in place and they needed to find a political context to press it. And they did:
The political strategy proved to be arguing Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) posed such a threat that military action had to be taken. However, at the July meeting Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, said the case for war was “thin� as “Saddam was not threatening his neighbors and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran�.
Straw suggested they should “work up� an ultimatum about weapons inspectors that would “help with the legal justification�. Blair is recorded as saying that “it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors�.
A separate secret briefing for the meeting said Britain and America had to “create� conditions to justify a war. The papers, the second sensitive leak close to the election, appear to be an attempt by disaffected Whitehall insiders to attack Blair’s integrity.
All of this is opening a hornets nest — and the angry swarm is headed right towards Blair. Note these tidbits.
The parents of British troops killed in Iraq are to demand that Tony Blair orders a public inquiry into the war or face legal action in the courts.
Six families will go to Downing Street on Tuesday to call for an independent inquiry into the legality of the war, after it emerged last week that the Attorney General warned the UK could lose in court if it failed to win the United Nations’ approval.
The families will hand in a legal notice to Mr Blair that warns they will petition the High Court for a full judicial review into the legality of the invasion if he refuses to set up an inquiry. The parents, who are being advised by human rights lawyers and supported by the Stop the War coalition, are led by Reg Keys and Rose Gentle, who are standing in the election against Mr Blair and Adam Ingram, the Armed Forces minister, respectively.
TO be honest, I think we always knew the Iraq business was going to blow up in some form during the campaign – and probably over the legal advice.” Alastair Campbell has rarely been praised for his honesty, but this weekend at least he was trying to be a pretty straight kind of guy.
A day after the government was forced to publish its full advice on the legality of the Iraq conflict, and after the Prime Minister was subjected to a remarkable assault over the matter on national television, Campbell was, inevitably, alive to its impact.
“Views on the issue of Iraq are so settled that we aren’t going to get much swing around on the back of it,” he declared from behind a desk in Labour’s campaign headquarters, his casual uniform of polo shirt and tracksuit trousers belying the gravity of his message. “But what we do get is the drowning-out of other issues.”
Jonathan Freedland in the Khaleej Times (READ THE WHOLE THING). A small taste:
COULD this be the smoking gun? In the last US presidential election, Democrats waited desperately for the killer document that would somehow blow a hole in George Bush’s case for war on Iraq. Could The Guardian’s publication yesterday of substantial parts of the attorney general’s advice to the prime minister on the legality of the war play such a role in the final days of this campaign….
It’s especially harmful because the leak touches not on the merits or conduct of the war but the honesty of its presentation — always the most sensitive part of the issue for Blair. The timing is painful too, coming just as Michael Howard is directly accusing the Prime Minister of lying, something of a campaign first…
In public-relations terms, the legal advice saga has been a disaster. As even the most junior PR consultant knows, it’s always better to get the whole story out in one go rather than allow a drip-drip-drip of coverage to prolong the torture over several news cycles. Labour know this too — but they preferred to cross their fingers and hope the Goldsmith document would stay secret. It has not. Bits of it are now public and more could follow.
Despite all that, this revelation is unlikely to sink Labour’s campaign. For one thing, this election cannot be a straight referendum on the war, because the main opposition party supported military action. That fact is always bound to reduce the political traction of any Iraq story. Labour can justly argue that a change in government would hardly make, or have made, a difference: when it comes to Iraq, the Tories would have done the same thing.
And that’s likely to be the outcome: Blair won’t be defeated by this information.
But his credibility will never be the same.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.