radiofree.asia

Alastair Campbell pronouncing on the Palestine hunger-strikers is truly audacious

Alastair Campbell is the kind of man who, even if you agree with him, still manages to be grating. Like when the office buffoon makes an actually funny joke and you have to laugh through gritted teeth. It’s partly the war criminality, I admit. It’s also how he has come to embody that sort of clout-chasing centrism once championed by James O’Brien.

But what really gets me is that he himself helped set in motion the process which led to this moment of state repression. Case in point: the pro-Palestine hunger strikes. The Canary led coverage of the hunger-strikers yesterday. But OF COURSE the Blair-era spin doctor had to chip in:

And this is exactly what I mean. He’s not wrong. The Republican hunger strikes did get more coverage. And our own hunger strikers — and they are our own, these brave people are in the vanguard of our movement — should be leading the news each day.

Yet there is something really disconcerting about how Campbell tweeted about a ‘QandA’ to his 1m followers. As if he was merely an observer of these events and not one of the people who set the current phase of global war and state repression in motion.

Let’s go back to the start.

Alastair Campbell’s role in Iraq

A central allegation against Campbell is that he sexed-up a key document. Campbell himself has always denied that his ‘dodgy dossier’ making the case for war against Iraq inflated the real Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) threat. Needless to say, many reject his claims of innocence. Including then-head of defence intelligence General Michael Laurie.

In 2011, Laurie told John Chilcot, head of the Iraq inquiry:

Alastair Campbell said to the inquiry that the purpose of the dossier was not ‘to make a case for war’. I had no doubt at that time this was exactly its purpose and these very words were used. I and those involved in its production saw it exactly as that, and that was the direction we were given. The previous paper… was rejected because it did not make a strong enough case. From then until September we were under pressure to find intelligence that could reinforce the case.

Adding:

We could find no evidence of planes, missiles or equipment that related to WMD, generally concluding that they must have been dismantled, buried or taken abroad. There has probably never been a greater detailed scrutiny of every piece of ground in any country.

Laurie said that “every fact” in the dossier was “managed”:

During the drafting of the final dossier, every fact was managed to make it as strong as possible, the final statements reaching beyond the conclusions intelligence assessments would normally draw from such facts.

The general was sure the purpose of the dossier was to make a case for war, rather than coldly present what was actually knowable — which is the true role of intelligence:

We knew at the time that the purpose of the dossier was precisely to make a case for war, rather than setting out the available intelligence, and that to make the best out of sparse and inconclusive intelligence the wording was developed with care.

These arguments will go on as before, for sure. But the people who opposed those wars made a stark prediction back at the time of Iraq. Let’s examine it.

Repression of civil liberties

I’m quite fond of Stop the War Coalition, personally. They get a hard time from left and right at times. For the right, they’re anything from pro-Russian, to antisemitic, to pro-Assad — it depends what day of the week it is.

For some on the faux ‘anti-imperialist’ red-brown end of politics they’ll simply never be Assadist enough. Which is fine by me, because I don’t think anti-imperialism is about glazing someone else’s oppressor to make up for my own lack of ideas.

One thing is absolutely clear. When they were founded in 2001 with a mission to oppose Bush and Blair’s wars Stop the War predicted the outcomes of the War on Terror exactly right.

This is what they said (my bold):

We condemn the attacks on New York and we feel the greatest compassion for those who lost their life on 11th September 2001. But any war will simply add to the numbers of innocent dead, cause untold suffering, political and economic instability on a global scale, increase racism and result in attacks on civil liberties.

Can anyone argue with that? Can anyone suggest this isn’t exactly what happened? And what is still happening?

I’d like to hear you try.

Bush, Blair — and Campbell — unleashed a global killing machine. The wars also dramatically hollowed out what passed for western democracy. Today, that process has culminated in a straight-up genocide in Gaza. The same genocide our hunger strikers are using their very bodies to oppose.

The very same hunger-strikes Campbell airily told his followers he’d done a “QandA’ about.

Alastair Campbell’s legacy

Campbell certainly isn’t a fool. He’s an astute (or, maybe, slippery) operator. In my view Campbell, like Tony Blair, used the Remain campaign to recondition himself as a serious political figure. We should recall that both were, rightly, pariahs after Iraq.

It is worth noting that for Blair this strategy worked less well than for Campbell. Yet for an entire bloc of poorly politically educated — or just plainly vacuous — centrists and liberals, Campbell’s anti-Brexit positioning was enough to wash away the wars.

If only it were that easy for Iraqis…

Let’s be clear, many liberals did back the wars from the start. As Phil Ochs once sang:

But when it comes to times like Korea
There’s no one more red, white and blue
So love me, love me
Love me, I’m a liberal

But many also opposed the coming disaster. The subsequent shearing off over Brexit of so many people who had previously criticised Blair, Campbell and their wars was jarring.

Because many on the actual left really meant it when they opposed the invasions. For those of us who saw the wars firsthand, and came to oppose them later, that twist was also deeply shocking.

Naturally, I have no say in what Alastair Campbell does. But I don’t think it will ever stop bothering me how such people have snuck back into public life after what they did all those years ago. And it particularly gets at me when they start to try and capture issues like Palestine Action. Because these aren’t neutral commentators. Or simple broadcasters covering the day’s topics. Far from it. Campbell was a key player in the illegal wars that got us where we are today.

And that should never be forgotten.

Featured image via Twitter

By Joe Glenton

This post was originally published on Canary.