Credit: Peter Kennard
Documents released this week reveal panic at the heart of Blair’s government in the run up to the Iraq war.
They show that a few months before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Blair’s foreign policy advisor David Manning told US President George Bush’s national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, that invading Iraq without a new UN resolution could lead to the fall of the Blair government. ‘The US’, said Manning, ‘must not promote regime change in Baghdad at the price of regime change in London.’
These are strong words in a special relationship normally based on Britain doing exactly what it is told.
This revelation confirms one of the things what we in the anti-war movement have been arguing ever since the invasion of Iraq. The huge protests in the run up to the Iraq war nearly toppled Blair and ended British participation in the disastrous invasion of Iraq.
Although we didn’t know it then, Alistair Campbell’s diaries revealed that around the time of the two million march on February 15, most senior cabinet ministers, including Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, were telling Blair to pull out of what they said was a US ‘war of choice’. Ministers couldn’t go out without being confronted by angry citizens, government had virtually ground to a halt and Blair himself confided to his diary ‘I thought: these really could be my last days in office’.
Because of Blair’s messianic commitment to war and the cowardice of too many MPs, Blair and the government just got away with it, with catastrophic consequences for the people of Iraq. But the decision destroyed Blair’s reputation and turbo charged gathering contempt for the political elites.
The fact that the government came so close to collapse is important not just for the historic record, it matters now. It shows how really broad mass movements with wide popular support can bring down governments.
Once again, we are seeing a Labour government reeling because of its Middle East policy. Having started out publicly backing Israel’s assault on the Palestinians (never forget Starmer’s ‘yes they do have that right’), they are now being forced to denounce Israel’s actions publicly.
As they continue to arm Israel, refuse to expel Israeli diplomats, and continue to deny the reality of a genocide, this is of course transparent hypocrisy.
But is also an ideological collapse and it makes continued support for Israel hugely harder.
As happened briefly over Iraq outraged public opinion is now determining the nature of the news coverage rather than the other way round. After two years of covering up or even justifying the carnage The Mirror, the Guardian and the Daily Express have all had front pages denouncing the starvation tactics in the last few days.
There is simply no way all this would have happened without the mass protests and the way those protests have shaped public opinion.
For all the unbearable horror of the situation, it is crucial that we draw encouragement both from the historical example and from the government’s predicament today. It means of course that we must both escalate and broaden the movement.
Government and police attacks are designed to isolate us from the wider population who are becoming more and more enraged at what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. We mustn’t let that happen.
In fact the opposite. Our priority must be to reach out to the millions of new supporters and do our best to draw them into the movement, to make sure that national and local protests are bigger and stronger than ever and to create a movement that with such social weight that continuing support for Israel is impossible.
Chris Nineham is vice chair of Stop the War and author of The People versus Tony Blair: politics, the media and the anti-war movement.