Dodgy judgments

I wish I had never drafted the dossier, but I trusted Blair on Iraq - after all, he'd been right on Kosovo

John Williams
The Guardian, Monday February 18 2008

"It was clear in the summer of 2002 that Tony Blair's government was probably heading for war again: after Kosovo and Afghanistan, Iraq. My small part in the preparation was to advise on the media, and it seemed to me that the prime minister was making a mistake in planning to produce a dossier on Saddam Hussein's military capabilities.....

In the year and a half since I left the Foreign Office, I have thought a lot about how we got such a big thing so wrong. And I have questioned my own role. After all, I spent eight years being the outsider who said "yes, but ..." My alarm bells never rang about Blair's policy on Iraq. I think one reason why is a separate drama that has come back into the headlines this weekend: Kosovo.

I saw during that conflict how crucially important was Blair's certainty in what he thought needed doing. Throughout the military campaign there were serious, expert voices saying it could not or should not be done. He was, I think, proved right. That was still a recent memory when he decided his Iraq policy was equally right. I thought at the time that what he had done in Kosovo had set a precedent for justified intervention, and that Blair's judgment was sound. Sadly, being right once doesn't necessarily make you right twice......."

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Related to the connection between Kosovo and Iraq, please see Justin Raimondo's article below.