Question: Would you die for your country? If so, why? Question number two: Would you spy for your country? Let me rephrase that: Would you spy for your country, knowing that the place was run by scumbags who contradict themselves at every turn and are not possessed of a moral scruple worth mentioning — and who wouldn’t defend you when it came to the crunch?
The Dr David Kelly affair raises many questions. The inquiry into his death raises far more questions than answers. It might even end up bringing the British government down, and even, praise the Lord, snookering George W Bush’s bid for a second term as president of the United States.
In Britain, those few members of the public who are equipped to think are increasingly admitting not just being divided among themselves, but divided within themselves too.
‘What do I really think about all this?” they ask themselves, their spouses and their workmates. ‘I think everyone acted in a fishy way,” they continue. ‘The government lied, starting with that gormless prime minister bloke. But the BBC didn’t play a very savoury role either, betraying the confidence of that poor Dr Kelly bloke and selling him down the river.”
What no one is yet saying is: What exactly was that Kelly bloke up to, anyway?
The answer that increasingly emerges is that he was working for the British government. And his operations, as a presumably impartial professional in that murky, John le Carré-type territory, meant that he was inevitably taking the side of his dodgy government, whose intentions towards Iraq, and many other parts of the world, were less than honourable from the beginning.
Saddam Hussein’s people had said from the start that the supposedly impartial United Nations weapons inspectors were merely a front for Western espionage, and their activities would provide vital intelligence for the ugly war that the US was going to bring down on the Middle East at whatever cost.
The weapons inspectors generally gave Iraq a reasonably clean bill of health as far as its ability to launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes was concerned, and suggested that there was no good reason for unleashing the wrath of Armageddon on a country already brought to its knees by UN sanctions.
But there’s a bit of a problem with the role of Kelly. The Hutton inquiry, in that tediously thorough, Miss Marples-ish way that the British have, is revealing more than it was supposed to. Among other things, it is swinging the spotlight wildly to reveal that not only the government and the BBC, but possibly the saintly-seeming, martyred Dr Kelly himself, are all not exactly clean players in this saga — all of it fallout from the slowly unravelling disaster that the war against Iraq has indeed turned out to be.
Kelly was being ‘handled” from the Ministry of Defence (MOD) (known in Winston Churchill’s days as the War Ministry). How innocent can you be if you agree to work according to the terms of the MOD, in that lumbering granite building down Whitehall way, just across the road from Downing Street, the centre of power?
Until the end of the Hutton inquiry there can only be speculation about the cynical web of feed-ins that Kelly served, and who or what benefited from his exemplary scientific knowledge.
But what must surely be blown out of the water in a permanent way is the idea that the so-called weapons inspectors were attempting to get the Saddam regime to cooperate with the UN in order to avert the possibility of a war initiated by the government of the US. The last round of weapons inspections, of which Kelly was part, turned out to be a charade that even the phlegmatic Hans Blix would turn out to be ashamed of being involved in at the end of the day.
Bush, or rather Bush as a mouthpiece for Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, simply wanted to have a Good-Ol’-Boys’ war. Britain’s craven New Labour government, that prided itself on unseating several decades of Thatcherism, came meekly onboard, tying itself to a new American administration that would make Ronnie ‘the wrinkled fraud” Reagan look like a closet pink, and participating in an imperialist war that would make Margaret Thatcher’s chest swell with pride.
And so the ‘war” against Iraq began — a one-sided affair to begin with, which has turned out to have more dangerous and explosive implications than the aggressors ever imagined before they embarked on their pompous enterprise.
The chances now are that the occupying forces will be obliged to hand over to a new regime that represents a hastily cobbled up ‘collective will of all the people”. As in Afghanistan, that other monument to the New America’s unwise intervention in foreign affairs, this will probably result in the rise, rather than the fall, of Islamic fundamentalism and other forms of intolerance. But mostly the increasing rise of intolerance towards American insularity, which led to the whole problem flaring up in the first place.
One of the many questions that remain is: What is the world going to make of the Bush/Blair axis of arrogance and incompetence from now on? The two snivelling schoolboys, having bullied their way into a war that the rest of the world didn’t want, are now running back to the very UN they so contemptuously ignored in the run-up to hostilities and asking for help.
If the world gives in and joins them in their illegal war of pacifi-cation and occupation, it will be a sorry day indeed. And if it doesn’t, what future for Iraq?
The Iraqis are left sitting on the sharp end of the stick. Dr David Kelly’s body, meanwhile, lies mouldering in the ground.
If there were not so many lives going violently down the drain in the conflict, one might well see it as something of a comedy routine: Bush scratching his head in bafflement, like Stan Laurel, as Blair’s Oliver Hardy thumps him on the shoulder and says, ‘Another fine mess you’ve got us into this time!”
Unfortunately it ain’t as easy as that.