Britain loves a war criminal
Perhaps “criminal” seems a strong label for a Labour Party spin doctor. Yet, under international law, a criminal is what he is.
Is there any better demonstration of our ability to normalise the unthinkable than the continued omnipresence of Alastair Campbell in British public life? Ten years and one day ago, on 24 September 2002, the British Government released its propagandistic dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. A year later, Campbell was obliged to resign, in effect over the role he played in its composition - the publicist had become 'the story'. But this was not seen as a moral issue relating to the substance of the assault on British democracy he masterminded, but as a technical slip that could happen to 'any' public relations operative.
Since then, the public have had to endure his presence on Top Gear; onRichard & Judy; on Newsnight; Question Time; Comic Relief’s edition of The Apprentice; Sky News; the BBC News; “This Week”; the Channel 4 News; inEsquire; hosting Have I Got News for You; mentoring aspiring orators on BBC 2’s “The Speaker”; teaching politics in Channel 4’s “Jamie’s Dream School”;presenting Panorama; as a columnist for the Times; and so merrily on. So frequently has the BBC put Campbell on air that in January last year it was forced to address the issue publicly, in response to a rising tide of public complaint. If you knew nothing else about him, you’d assume he was some kind of national treasure.
Yet this man was intimately involved in one of the most abominable crimes of the twenty-first century. The illegal invasion of Iraq – which Campbell played a key role in facilitating – may have left a million people dead in four years. Millions more were forced to flee their homes and pushed into destitution. It led to the routine torture of prisoners and killing of innocent people by occupying forces. It led to the unleashing of US-sponsored death squads – a key component of its “Salvador option” for pacifying the country – across Iraq. It led to torture on a scale worse than under its former dictator. It led to anindiscriminate attack on a major city that included – in one of the cruelest ironies of the conflict – the use of banned chemical weapons. In the wake of the latter, Fallujah, a city the size of Leeds, is now experiencing a level of birth defects worse than post-war Hiroshima. In the words of US marine Ross Caputi, who took part in the attack on Fallujah, the Iraq war was “one long atrocity”.
If Campbell had propagandised for a Milosevic or a Hussein, it is unlikely he would now be exchanging chummy quips with Jeremy Clarkson. At best he would perhaps, like Iraq’s Information Minister “comical Ali”, be the object of derision; at worst he would be regarded with utter disgust. Instead, because the British mainstream media taken as a whole can't face up to the realities of a war in which it was largely complicit a remarkable transformation takes place in which the perpetrator becomes the injured party. A perfect example can be found in this month's Guardian of 8 September. It's splash called the pre-war propaganda simply “The dossier that killed trust” – as though Britain’s self-regarding political elite were the Iraq war’s primary victims, rather than its perpetrators. One interviewee was Charles Falconer, himself complicit in the crime as a supportive member of Blair’s cabinet. The record of the other, Menzies Campbell, is distinguished by his opposition to his party’s presence at the 2003 anti-war march – alongside people of all political stripes – lest they betainted with “anti-Americanism”.
