Slippery slope

Besides flogging his new novel and memoirs of his time as Tony Blair's Communications Secretary, Alastair Campbell is trying hard to defend his evasiveness on the Andrew Marr show yesterday morning (his evasiveness at a judicial inquiry is clearly less shocking than on a BBC1 talk show).

The clip here shows Alastair Campbell avoiding answering a tricky question by having a mini emotional breakdown. Breakdown or fakedown, he still should have been forced to answer the important query posed by Andrew Marr: if the intelligence shows that there was not unequivocal evidence - evidence "beyond reasonable doubt" - that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction, does that mean Tony Blair misled the House of Commons when he repeated this as fact?

The answer is obviously yes. The heavy breathing and fury was Campbell buying time trying to think of how to avoid giving a 'yes' or 'no' answer. A 'yes' answer means that the ex-PM has to change his name to Bliar by deed poll when it emerges that there was no evidence "beyond reasonable doubt" of WMD. A 'no' answer posits the question: how? How is it not a lie to say you have seen evidence stating X when evidence stating X does not even exist?

What seems most frustrating about Alastair Campbell's discomfort with Andrew Marr's line of questioning (expressed here in his blog, paragraph 14 onwards) is his accusation of BBC bias against the government's decision to go to war. The BBC was sickeningly supportive of the invasion of Iraq, as the media almost always is of governments going into war. Journalists' proximity to action - and first-hand reporting - is reliant on a positive relationship with the armed forces. This is known as embedded journalism. The excellent book Tell Me Lies edited by David Miller about the media distortion in the run-up and opening weeks of the Iraqi invasion describes how BBC journalist Gavin Hewitt became so embedded within the army that he began to pick off targets to shoot and bomb. The use of language - liberation, not invasion - is systematic of the media's role in presenting war and bloodshed as democratic and peaceful.

In the opening few weeks of the war, Andrew Marr himself claimed that Blair's decision to invade had been vindicated by the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, which many saw as getting far too carried away by victory and jingoism and forgetting his journalistic integrity.

His most famous quote, that has undoubtedly come back to haunt him, that Blair “said they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right.” (see John Pilger's article)

To accuse the BBC and Andrew Marr especially of anti-war bias is an attempt to paint himself as a victim. The victims here are the hundreds of thousands of dead and injured Iraqis, coalition soldiers and the citizens of the warmongerng nations. We are the ones with no voice as the media and politicians scream at each other in a mutual love-in/hate-in.

Only good thing to come out of the Hutton Inquiry saga:
(Don't ask me ask the ministry)