Iraq war

Was I right about Iraq?

Back in March there was a glut of pieces about the 2003 Iraq war. The 20th anniversary seemed to much of the political and pundit class to be the perfect time to return to this scorched landscape. A number of people asked me to throw in my views and I failed, for two reasons. Firstly because, as some readers will know, I hate anniversaries and the lazy hook they provide to the news cycle. Secondly, because each time I sat down to try to write about those days I found myself unusually conflicted. Those of us who defended the war have spent 20 years filled with ‘if onlys’ The reason

Bush is leading us to tragedy (2002)

It’s 20 years since the clamour for the invasion of Iraq was at its loudest. Boris Johnson, The Spectator’s then editor, spoke to the Saudi ambassador to the UK, Ghazi Algosaibi. You can read more on our fully digitised archive. ‘No, no,’ says the Saudi ambassador. ‘This is how you do it. You cannot lift your arm above the shoulder, and you must do it sideways.’ He moves alongside, a big man with a faint resemblance to Leon Brittan, and makes a thwacking motion. Meet Ghazi Algosaibi, 62, a poet and author, the Arab world’s leading envoy to London, who has recently earned not just a personal rebuke from Jack Straw, but

Colin Powell: A great man – and a failure

My memory of Colin Powell feels personal, even though we were 6,000 miles apart at the time. I was in Baghdad, covering the invasion of Iraq for the BBC. Powell was giving the speech of his life at the UN Security Council, accompanied by Powerpoint, trying to convince the world that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. I had just come from a press conference with senior Iraqi officials, who denied there were any WMDs in the country. They were shifty, oleaginous, terrified of Saddam. It wasn’t hard to believe they were lying and that dignified, decent Colin Powell, was right. ‘If Powell says so,’ I thought, ‘it’s probably true.’

Incoherent and conspiracy-fuelled: Adam Curtis’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head reviewed

‘History,’ wrote Edward Gibbon, ‘is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.’ In this respect, though, history has nothing on the work of Adam Curtis, whose latest documentary Can’t Get You Out of My Head has now arrived on BBC iPlayer — all six episodes and eight and a half hours of it. Anybody who’s seen Curtis’s previous series (including The Century of the Self, The Power of Nightmares and The Trap) will know what to expect. Once again, he mixes terrific news footage, short clips of more or less anything, mood-inducing songs and a lordly commentary to remind us just how hopeless

Why great speeches are made for stage and screen

Curious thing, writer’s block. If you believe it exists. Terry Pratchett didn’t. ‘There’s no such thing,’ he said. ‘It was invented by people in California who couldn’t write.’ He had a point. Writers write, period. But there is a syndrome in my house known as Not Starting Anything New Through Fear Of It Being Not Very Good. Less catchy than ‘writer’s block’, but arguably a more accurate description of the condition. My Covid-induced version of the above involved endlessly ‘honing’ an already completed play about my mother to devastatingly little effect and musing on the oldest creative question of all: is there a formula for writing success, and if so

Sumptuous and very promising: A Suitable Boy reviewed

Nobody could argue that Andrew Davies isn’t up for a challenge. He’d also surely be a shoo-in for Monty Python’s Summarise Proust competition. After turning both War and Peace and Les Misérables into satisfying, unhurried six-part drama series, he’s now taken on Vikram Seth’s 1,300-page novel A Suitable Boy. The first episode started with a wedding that immediately established the programme’s visual sumptuousness, while also serving as a handy introduction to the main characters. The groom’s rebellious brother Maan, for example, chafed at the idea that he was supposed to be next. The bride’s spirited sister Lata protested that the newly weds hardly knew each other, before hearing the chilling

Katharine Gun: the spy who tried to stop the Iraq war

In his memoir of office, Decision Points, George W. Bush writes about going to see Tony Blair in the Azores in the last days before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was a crisis meeting because they had failed to get a second UN resolution, to give legal cover for the war. This was thought crucial to help Blair and his government survive a no-confidence motion in the House of Commons. After the meeting, the Brits and the Americans shook hands on the tarmac and walked to their planes. Bush remembers his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, saying to him: ‘I hope that’s not the last time we ever

BBC4’s The Vietnam War was unique, informative and shattering

The Vietnam War BBC4 The BBC should be praised for showing all ten episodes of this unique, informative and shattering American series on the Vietnamese war, despite screening eight fewer hours than in the original. Before each episode the BBC warned that ‘some viewers may find some scenes upsetting’. Which ones? A frog jumping in a pool of blood from the head of a dead Vietcong (NLF) fighter? The Saigon police chief shooting a prisoner in the head? The American colonel offering a case of whiskey to the first man to bring him the severed head of an enemy soldier? Which he gets. The eager US soldier on his first day in Vietnam noticing strings of

Corbyn is the real heir to Blair

Alastair Campbell once famously punched the Guardian’s Michael White in the face. A commendable thing to do, undoubtedly, as Mr White is the very incarnation of pomposity and self-righteousness. Quite possibly the best thing Campbell has ever done. But the brief spat (White hit back, according to White) was revealing in another way. Robert Maxwell had just drowned by falling off his yacht and Campbell, then working in the lobby for Maxwell’s paper, the Daily Mirror, took exception to White’s glee at this watery end to the proprietor’s life. ‘Captain Bob, Bob, Bob!’ White chortled, so Campbell punched him. He adored Maxwell and was his ‘close adviser’, no matter that

Lloyd Evans

Killing time | 18 May 2017

Jez Butterworth’s new play The Ferryman is set in Armagh in 1981. Quinn, a former terrorist, has swapped the armed struggle for a farming career and now lives with his sick wife, their countless kids, his sister-in-law and her only son. But the IRA, who murdered his brother as punishment for his disloyalty, are due to pay a visit with unknown intentions. More violence, perhaps? Protection money? Or both. Well, neither, it turns out. They merely want Quinn to refrain from blaming his brother’s death on them. Rather a low price to ask. And yet Quinn is willing to defy them even though he knows they repay disobedience with murder,

Changing of the Bard

Hamlet was probably written sometime between 1599 and 1602. The Almeida’s new version opens with a couple of security guards watching surveillance footage taken in a corridor. Well, of course it does. Nothing says ‘late medieval Denmark’ like closed-circuit television. Hamlet (Andrew Scott) appears. His black shirt and matching trousers suggest a snooker pro at the Crucible or a steward on a Virgin train. Scott is known as a ‘character actor’ (code for ‘baddie’) rather than a leading man. His petulant, squelched-up face and his Ronnie Corbett physique make him perfect casting for Third Crackhead in a squat melodrama but he hasn’t a chance of capturing Hamlet’s lordly despair, his

Sir John Chilcot says Blair damaged trust in politics

Sir John Chilcot isn’t a man who deals in pithy quotes. His Iraq War inquiry report came in at two-and-a-half million words, and even the executive summary was 150 pages long. Yet Chilcot’s assessment of Tony Blair during his select committee appearance this afternoon was about as damning as he could manage. Asked whether the former PM had damaged trust in politics, Chilcot had this to say: ‘I think when a government or the leader of a government presents a case with all the powers of advocacy that he or she can command, and in doing so goes beyond what the facts of the case and the basic analysis of that can

Blair witch project

I had been wondering where Gorgeous George Galloway might pop up next. Defenestrated from his seat in Bradford West, humiliated in the London mayoral elections — where he received 1.4 per cent of the vote — and no longer apparently an attractive proposition to the reality TV producers, his public life seemed sadly to be drawing to a close. But nope, here he is with a film about the person all left-wing people hate more than any other, Tony Blair. It’s a good film, too, in the main. The Killing$ of Tony Blair was partly crowdfunded and it may well be that the only people who watch it will be

Heroes in error

In the first year or so of the Iraq occupation — or ‘big Army goatfuck’, as it is not quite specifically referred to in former US Army soldier Roy Scranton’s debut novel — three central storylines move through and around each other. Specialist Wilson, whose commanders can’t read maps but watch Black Hawk Down for ‘pointers’, and who is so frustrated he actually wants to be attacked by the Iraqis; Qasim al-Zabadi, a timid maths professor who lives with his Baghdadi uncle, enduring the attentions of unnamed government officials and of his Michael Jackson-loving cousins; and Aaron, who’s ‘just come back’ — too recently, in fact, to be breaking tofu

Don’t knock ‘secret deals’. We’ll need one soon

As a founder member of the Guild of Blair-Bashers, someone who reacted strongly against him from our first encounter at dinner when he was only an opposition spokesman, as a commentator who railed against the invasion of Iraq the moment the idea was mooted and right through to the end, and as a journalist who throughout Tony Blair’s time at No. 10 beat my tiny fists against the imposter I always thought him to be, perhaps I may deserve your attention now, after Chilcot, that I have something to say in Mr Blair’s defence? I don’t believe that in any important way the former Prime Minister lied. And I don’t

Themistocles vs Tony Blair

Tony Blair has excused himself for the Iraq war by saying that he did what he believed was right. But no one was suggesting that he had done what he believed was wrong. The charge was a matter of integrity: that he deceived Parliament and turned a blind eye to the evidence on weapons of mass destruction. The Athenians knew a sharpster when they saw one. The historian Diodorus described how in 477 BC Themistocles, a man admired by the Athenians but known to be something of a con man, conceived of a plan to turn Piraeus, at that time a rocky outcrop, into a full-blown commercial and military harbour.

Tony Blair’s rumination over his own ‘good faith’

Tony Blair appeared emotional, sounded hoarse, and constantly fixated upon his belief that he acted in ‘good faith’ over Iraq when he responded to the Chilcot report this afternoon. The former Prime Minister spoke or took questions for two hours, and started by saying that he accepted ‘full responsibility, without exception and without excuse’. But he also made clear that he disagreed with Chilcot’s findings that the decision to invade Iraq could have been delayed. The key feature of the long press conference, though, was Blair ruminating constantly on whether he had acted in good faith when taking the decision to go to war. He seems tortured by this question,

Isabel Hardman

Has Parliament learned the lessons of the Iraq war?

Normally whenever someone mentions Iraq in the House of Commons, the Chamber descends into a grouchy scrap. But today’s statement on the Chilcot report from David Cameron and the questions that followed it were surprisingly measured and thoughtful. As James notes, Jeremy Corbyn didn’t mention Tony Blair, and he didn’t give a furious response to the Prime Minister, either. Of course, his analysis of the report wasn’t comfortable for many Labour MPs – indeed, Ian Austin shouted from the backbenches that his party leader was a ‘disgrace’. But he did not call for Blair to stand trial, and neither did he rant at length about the failings of the West.

The Spectator podcast: Brexit, and the return of political lying | 28 May 2016

To subscribe to The Spectator’s weekly podcast, for free, visit the iTunes store or click here for our RSS feed. Alternatively, you can follow us on SoundCloud. Are David Cameron and George Osborne using the same techniques of deceit deployed by New Labour in the run-up to the Iraq war? In his cover piece this week, Peter Oborne argues that’s just what is happening. He says that in their EU campaign, the Chancellor and Prime Minister have put dirty tricks back at the heart of government. But Matthew Parris in his column says that in politics there’s no point complaining about being lied to. That’s the cry of the bad

The Spectator podcast: Brexit, and the return of political lying

To subscribe to The Spectator’s weekly podcast, for free, visit the iTunes store or click here for our RSS feed. Alternatively, you can follow us on SoundCloud. Are David Cameron and George Osborne using the same techniques of deceit deployed by New Labour in the run-up to the Iraq war? In his cover piece this week, Peter Oborne argues that’s just what is happening. He says that in their EU campaign, the Chancellor and Prime Minister have put dirty tricks back at the heart of government. But Matthew Parris in his column says that in politics there’s no point complaining about being lied to. That’s the cry of the bad