The modern media desires to appease the most fanciful, paranoid and malignant minds of our time, writes JOHN WATERS
IN 12 months or so, the Chilcot inquiry will issue its report, concluding that, in the matter of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Tony Blair acted at all times in accordance with international law. The report will comment on the incomplete and contradictory information emanating from Iraq in 2002/3 concerning the military capacity of the late dictator Saddam Hussein, but will find that Blair acted in good faith. The British and Irish media will dub the whole thing a “whitewash”.
I feel safe in these predictions because this is what has already happened with four British government-commissioned investigations of the circumstances leading to the Iraq war. For six years, the media has dismissed findings that did not fuel the final-destination headline: “War Criminal Blair.”
This agenda and its projected denouement serve eloquently to capture the modern media’s desire to appease the most fanciful, paranoid and malignant minds of our time. Tony Blair is not a war criminal. He is a good man and a great politician who has sought, in every given circumstance, to do what he thought best and right.
Already, with the Chilcot inquiry less than a week old, journalists have dusted down their folders of baseless accusations, calling in the public’s media-inflicted ignorance and induced amnesia in a final attempt to make the conspiracy theories stick. Andrew Gilligan, having already disgraced the BBC on this story, has again emerged as a star of the international airwaves, including our own. He and others repeat their tired charges: that Blair, in concert with George Bush, had decided on regime change in Iraq at least a year before the invasion, and that he refused to be guided by intelligence sources who assured him Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
The idea of some kind of dichotomy between regime change and disarmament is bogus: disarmament was the objective of regime change. But Blair had never made a secret of his desire to get rid of Saddam, and rightly despised the British left-wing/media ambivalence towards this most vile of dictatorships. The impetus for invasion came from the US, but Blair, despairing of the radical fence-sitting of other European leaders, offered Britain’s support. He made his decisions having taken the best available advice, which is as much as can be expected of any political leader.
What is never referred to in reports on the Chilcot inquiry is that Saddam had already used chemical weapons on two occasions, once in Iraq’s war with Iran, and once against the Guernicas of Kurdistan. In 2002, the consensus of intelligence-gatherers, including UN weapons inspectors, was that he had again acquired advanced WMD capability, and from about September 2002 this position was hardening. Even the late Dr David Kelly, the alleged whistle-blower who committed suicide after he got caught in the crossfire between government and media, believed in early 2003 that the weapons were so well hidden that they would be almost impossible to find. He believed, as his sister told Lord Hutton, that military intervention was the only way to deal with Saddam.
If Winston Churchill had been subjected to the same level of scrutiny and media antagonism as Tony Blair, this article would be written in German. The manufactured controversy over Iraq issues from the radical irresponsibility of a generation of journalists who see their job as catching politicians out on any discrepancy identified between what is said or written down and what happens subsequently. It is a silly and dangerous game, but because we have a monolithic media culture posturing as a democratic discourse, there is little chance of this process being exposed in its total recklessness.
In his 2007 book, Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature, (Wiley, 2009), Mark Earls offers a glancing marketing-specialist’s analysis of how journalists can sometimes promulgate stories that, although superficially plausible, are plain wrong. He cites the 1998 UK controversy in which a link was suggested between autism and the MMR vaccine, a disturbing case of bad science changing the minds of a generation of parents, to the potential grave detriment of children. Reputable journalists ignored scientific findings in favour of a “good story”, causing a massive drop in immunisations and placing many children at risk.
The original MMR vaccine research, published in the Lancet, did not make the claim subsequently attributed to it. But the conspiratorial content of second-hand reports fed a perverse need in some parents to accuse someone of caring for children less than they did. Bad journalism generated hyper word-of-mouth communication of bad information, and the “story” grew legs as the pseudo-facts passed between parents, bloggers and taxi-drivers.
Our societies think increasingly in headlines. With trust in authority almost fatally undermined, paranoid theories spread like viruses, transforming into conventional wisdoms independently of the facts. For an interpretation to gain currency in this way, it requires merely a shocking implausibility.
“War Criminal Blair” is such a story, and, with our societies inexorably turning into one great taxicab, mere facts will not stand in its way.