Mr Blair and the ghost of Iraq War

“The world performs
And we are entitled to wonder.”

From The Proverbs
of Bachchoo

Like Banquo’s ghost in Macbeth, the Iraq War returns now and then to haunt Britain’s ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair. This week he was giving evidence to the Leveson inquiry on the relations his government had with the Murdoch newspapers. He was being asked if his friendship with the Murdoch family could have influenced his government’s policies or resulted in corrupt favouritism towards the family’s businesses.
As he stood at the witness’ rostrum a man appeared from behind the drapes where Lord Leveson, the chair of the enquiry, sat.
The intruder shouted at Mr Blair playing to the cameras and reporters.
“You are a war criminal,” he repeated and alleged that Mr Blair had been paid by a bank to take Britain into the war.
The court’s security guards grabbed him before he could say much more and frog-marched him away.
The newspapers and the TV stations which reported the incident scrupulously avoided the allegations about being bribed by a bank to go to war.
Why did Britain go to war? The question has been the matter of two parliamentary inquiries. Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell, his chief spin-doctor, insist that they received reports from the intelligence services which said that Iraq had and was acquiring and perfecting weapons of mass destruction (WMDs as they were subsequently dubbed) of the biological, chemical and nuclear varieties.
Mr Blair told Parliament and the nation that these WMDs were a threat to the security of Britain and that Iraq could launch an attack on this country or other countries in 45 minutes and asked Parliament to ratify the deployment of the armed forces.
As the world now knows, there were no WMDs discovered in Iraq. Mr Blair and Mr Campbell, it has been alleged, manipulated the Secret Services and falsified their report to exaggerate the threat of WMDs. The spooks had nowhere said that WMDs definitely existed and the 45-minute deployment was pure fabrication.
All over the world people allege that US President George W. Bush took the US to war to serve the vested interests of a group of American profiteers. That vice-president Dick Cheney, Mr Bush himself and Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary for defence, had connections and investments in the oil industry and in firms such as Halliburton which landed huge reconstruction contracts, is not a secret.
Allegations that Mr Blair had a financial motivation have never been established and Mr Blair immediately insisted for the record perhaps, in denying the allegation.
Nevertheless, the episode has revived the media’s interest in the matter. An Iraqi exile speaking on London’s LBC radio station said he supported Mr Blair’s stance about WMDs as he was himself an operative in the biological field in Iraq and escaped the country because he knew that the war would target his facility. He claimed he could locate the sites devoted to the development of biological weapons by Saddam Hussein’s regime.
I don’t know whether the Iraqi government or the British Secret Services will contact this gentleman and verify his allegations. If I were Mr Blair I’d use some of my considerable wealth to privately investigate his claim if only to be able to retrospectively justify sending a country to war and being responsible for the expenditure of lives and money in what very many see as a futile, destructive and even criminal conflict.
Some years ago I set out to assist Mr Blair to do just that, though, gentle reader, I can see that this may sound like the comedian Spike Milligan’s satirical book title Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall.
It was after the parliamentary enquiry into the Iraq War had declared that there were never any WMDs in Iraq that I received a phone call from an acquaintance of mine in Paris.
This person had a criminal past and had spent a lot of his life in jail. He was at the time free and living in Paris but still involved in deals which some might have found questionable.
“Farrukh, you studied physics, so tell me what is Red Mercury?”
“It’s an Antimony compound which Soviet scientists claim to have fabricated which can be used as a nuclear trigger. Very many other physicists doubt its existence,” I said. “But why do you want to know?”
He said he’d been in Bahrain before the Iraq War for an appointment with some Arab gentlemen who were interested in buying Red Mercury which he could broker, for a substantial sum, from an ex-Soviet mafia outfit. He had evidence of his meetings with these Arab agents and written and taped records of their interest in purchasing nuclear triggers.
“Iraqis?” I asked.
He was sure they were acting on behalf of the Iraqi government.
“Then you are sitting on a huge international scoop. If you have evidence that even points to the Iraqis trying to acquire nuclear-related materials from the ex-Soviet countries, that’s big news. It vindicates Mr Blair and Mr Bush! Come to London.”
I introduced him to Boris Johnson, now Mayor of London who was then the editor of the Spectator. Mr Johnson said it was too big a story for the “Speccie” to break. It had to be one of the big dailies. He introduced my person to a leading reporter of the Daily Telegraph who was instantly interested.
The snag was that the Telegraph said it couldn’t pay the sort of money that my person from France was asking in exchange for handing over the evidence of the proposed transaction. I believe, though I wasn’t there, that my Paris acquaintance and the Telegraph reporter spent several days circling each other. The deal fell through.
My man had an even bigger transaction he said which couldn’t wait and he flew off to Nepal. He probably still has the emails and proof of his meetings with the nuclear clients and again, if I were Mr Blair I’d pay him a visit in Kathmandu, where he is a permanent guest of the Nepalese government, and strike a deal.