Price vindicated on Iraq War IN 2004, the then Carmarthen East and Dinefwr MP, Adam Price, was ejected from the House of Commons for claiming that the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, had lied to Parliament when laying out the case for the invasion of Iraq.
The Plaid MP was leading the first attempt in over 150 years to attempt to have a serving Prime Minister prosecuted on the grounds of misleading Parliament, after mass protests the previous year had shown how divisive Labour’s war policy was. The publication of the longawaited Chilcot Report on Wednesday (Jul 6) appears to have vindicated much of what Adam Price and others thought at the time: that evidence was exaggerated; proper processes bypassed; and that facts were manipulated to fit a pre-determined agenda. Jonathan Edwards, Adam Price’s successor as MP, and Adam Price, recently elected to the Welsh Assembly, have both welcomed the report’s publication. Published after seven years in the making, the Chilcot Inquiry and its report were commissioned by Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, on June 15, 2009.
At its launch, the Chair of the Inquiry, Sir John Chilcot, outlined its scope: “[The Inquiry] will consider the period from the summer of 2001 to the end of July 2009, embracing the runup to the conflict in Iraq, including the way decisions were made and actions taken, to establish, as accurately as possible, what happened and to identify the lessons that can be learned.”
The taint of Britain’s involvement in Iraq affected not only the remaining years of Tony Blair’s period in office, but has overshadowed successive governments’ foreign policies over the years since. Carmarthenshire played a significant role in the anti-war movement in 2003 when hundreds of county residents travelled by coach to London to join over one million people in protest against the invasion of Iraq. The invasion, carried out without a mandate from the United Nations Security Council, led to the deaths of 179 British servicemen and women, alongside countless Iraqi deaths as a result of the invasion and the sectarian conflict that erupted in its immediate aftermath.
Adam Price, now Plaid Cymru’s Shadow Cabinet Minister for Finance and Economy, said: “The report is utterly damning of the former Prime Minister and vindicates all the work we did at the time to try to bring him to justice. It is now unequivocal that what Mr Blair told Parliament did not reflect the evidence given to him by the security services.
“This is not just about MPs being misled – this is about a deliberate deception that led to up to a million people losing their lives, with a failed state and the Middle East in flames. Our thoughts particularly must also be with the families of those service men and women who lost their lives unnecessarily. “We cannot have an illegal war with such devastating consequences without a judicial or political reckoning. Mr Blair must be held to account.”
Echoing Adam Price’s words, Jonathan Edwards MP said: “Plaid Cymru has always maintained that Iraq War was illegal. We cannot and will not let those who led Britain into an illegal war that led to such devastation and suffering go unpunished.” However, Chilcot’s remit excluded considering the war’s legality and since crimes of aggression were not defined by the ICC statute at the time of invasion, it cannot apply retroactively.
One possible legal recourse would be an action for misconduct in public office – an offence which is committed when ‘a public officer acting as such wilfully neglects to perform his duty and/or wilfully misconducts himself to such a degree as to amount to an abuse of the public’s trust in the office holder without reasonable excuse or justification’.
The threshold test for such ‘misconduct’ is, however, set at a level to prevent actions being brought against politicians and public officials by those with a grievance against them on political grounds. Furthermore, Chilcot does not say that Blair lied about Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, although he does say that UN weapons inspectors led by Hans Blix should have been given the opportunity to continue inspections.
Instead, the strong inference to be drawn from the report is that Tony Blair managed to convince himself – and thereafter others – that what he was saying was true, or at least justified. One thing is certain: at four times the length of War and Peace, there will be more people that will have claimed to have read the Chilcot Report than actually will.
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