{"id":2187,"date":"2016-07-07T11:24:16","date_gmt":"2016-07-07T09:24:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/?p=2187"},"modified":"2016-07-07T11:38:12","modified_gmt":"2016-07-07T09:38:12","slug":"guardian-iraqis-think-blair-made-a-mistake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2016-07-07\/guardian-iraqis-think-blair-made-a-mistake\/","title":{"rendered":"Guardian: Iraqis think Blair made a ‘mistake’"},"content":{"rendered":"

It will be no surprise to readers of this blog that I believe Tony Blair should be put on trial for crimes against humanity for assisting George Bush in attacking Iraq in 2003. The Chilcot inquiry, however compromised its members were by their establishment ties and however cautious they were in their use of language, have very belatedly reached the same conclusion.<\/p>\n

If \u201cmilitary action at that time was not a last resort\u201d and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein \u201cposed no imminent threat\u201d, then Bush and Blair launched a war of aggression. And that, according to the definition laid out by the Nuremberg Tribunal, is the \u201csupreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”<\/p>\n

But what I think of Blair\u2019s actions and what Chilcot thinks of them are irrelevant to the question of what Iraqis \u2013 who were the chief victims of this crime \u2013 think of the attack on their country. And here a deception, mirroring those we have endured from the corporate media for the past 13 years, persists.<\/p>\n

It is truly extraordinary that today\u2019s front page of the supposedly liberal Guardian continues to promote Blair and the British establishment\u2019s version of the Iraq invasion the day after the Chilcot Report officially\u00a0discredited it. Not only that but \u2013 shamefully \u2013 the Guardian stuffs its\u00a0Blairite spin on the invasion of Iraq into the collective mouths of the Iraqi people.<\/p>\n

The Guardian promises a story telling us how Iraqis \u2013 whose voices we so rarely hear \u2013 feel about the Chilcot Report and what Bush and Blair did to their country. The declared intention here, at least, is noble: it is vitally important that we hear what Iraqis think. But is that really what the Guardian offers us?<\/p>\n

According to the headline<\/a>, the Iraqis’ view is best summarised in the following quote: \u201cThey should have known better.\u201d And the standfirst below it continues the theme, claiming the Chilcot Report told Iraqis “what they already knew: the war was a grave mistake\u201d.<\/p>\n

One has to be truly delusional \u2013 as the Guardian and other liberal media so often are \u2013 to believe for one second that the most commonly\u00a0held view among Iraqis is that Bush and Blair made a \u201cmistake\u201d in destroying their country. I believe Blair is a war criminal. Chilcot appears to be believe Blair is a war criminal. But Iraqis are either so magnanimous or so dumb that they think it was just a \u201cmistake\u201d. Did the Guardian editors ponder adding a \u201cgenuine\u201d instead of “grave” before the word \u201cmistake\u201d?<\/p>\n

The reporter, Martin Chulov, did not write the headline and standfirst. That will have been overseen by the most senior editors \u2013 certainly the foreign editor, probably the home editor, at least one of the assistant editors and, assuming she is hands-on, the editor herself, Kath Viner. None of them apparently paused to consider\u00a0whether it was credible, let alone moral, for the Guardian to present Blair\u2019s \u201cmistake\u201d defence as the collective verdict of the Iraqi people.<\/p>\n

But Chulov, as so often in his coverage, is deeply implicated in this calumny. The headline and standfirst are based on a highly dubious reading of Iraqis\u2019 views Chulov presents in an early paragraph as he describes their reaction to the latest mass attack:<\/p>\n

Bystanders in the central Baghdad neighbourhood of Karrada seemed oblivious to the release of the Chilcot report, \u2026 which was little more than a footnote to most of the crowd. For the mix of mourners staring into the middle distance, desperate relatives wailing for help, forensic officers crouched near puddles and others who stood bewildered by the scale of destruction, it would merely tell them what they already knew: that the war and its aftermath were both grave mistakes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Chulov would doubtless defend this assessment, claiming it is based on several quotes from Iraqis in the piece. Shafi Abdul Hassan, for example, is quoted saying: \u201cWe need honourable men to lead us out of this. There were enormous mistakes made, but our leaders have not helped us since.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is nothing in this quote to let us know who Abdul Hassan is referring to when he speaks of \u201cenormous mistakes\u201d, but the context suggests he is talking about Iraq\u2019s own leaders, not Bush and Blair. It comes after he has mentioned the need for \u201chonourable men to lead us out of this\u201d. I assume he means Iraqi leaders have made \u201cenormous mistakes\u201d in the aftermath of their country\u2019s destruction and the Iraqi people need better leadership if they are going to recover.<\/p>\n

The Guardian could have chosen a surely more representative view \u2013 offered a little later in the piece \u2013 by Colonel Ahmed Hassan, an\u00a0interior ministry police officer. He says: \u201cThere is no excuse for [the decision to invade]. It was an extermination war.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the framing of this article suggests Abdul Hassan is some kind of compromised government insider giving the official line rather his own personal and\u00a0well-considered assessment. His quote seems to be there only for “balance” \u2013 to give the other side.<\/p>\n

Chulov talks to two other Iraqis, both from areas that were controlled by the British military and were least riven by sectarian discord. The first sounds remarkably relaxed about an illegal invasion that, according to best estimates, led to the deaths of at least a million Iraqis and the displacement of probably four million.<\/p>\n

Atheer al-Attar, an engineer from Basra, says:<\/p>\n

The way they handled things was wrong. If they managed it correctly, we could have had better relations with the British now.\u00a0I am for the invasion. I think it opened a lot of new horizons, but it could have led to a much better outcome.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The other, Fadi Faris, talks mainly about the context of the attack:\u00a0whether\u00a0Iraqi society was in a situation where it was\u00a0ready to be “democratised” by the US and Britain. Or as he puts it:<\/p>\n

It was like bringing a knife and giving it to a child. Under Saddam we had a government with a big problem. Now we don\u2019t have a real government and we only have problems.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Interestingly,\u00a0the Iraqis interviewed\u00a0seem to share the assumption of\u00a0the Guardian and the rest of the western liberal media that\u00a0the motives behind the attack were benevolent rather than cynical. None seem to think that oil was a factor in the US-British attack on their country. Which is strange because, having lived among Palestinians since before 2003, \u00a0I have\u00a0rarely encountered one\u00a0who does not think oil was a major consideration in the attack. (Another widely held view, of course,\u00a0is that the attack on Iraq\u00a0was about\u00a0disposing\u00a0of a major regional enemy\u00a0of\u00a0Israel. I suspect some Iraqis share that assessment too, but you won’t hear it in the Guardian.)<\/p>\n

And here we reach the issue of journalistic responsibility. In any conflict zone, places where societies are weak and divided and there are many competing interests, a reporter can find someone to take just about any position of any issue. There will be many\u00a0interpretations of what happened and who is chiefly to blame. Each interviewee may have more than one\u00a0perspective of any single issue.<\/p>\n

A reporter’s job is selection. Select whom to speak to. Select the questions to ask. Select which answers to highlight. Select which quotes to include. Select where to place them in the story and how much emphasis to give them.<\/p>\n

All journalists do this in every story they write. Chulov did it here. In a story of this nature \u2013 one freighted with so much historical importance \u2013 he was obligated to talk to a wide range of people in different situations to get a sense of these various views and then weight them in the article according to their representativeness. He was also obligated to present their opinions in a fair context. If the story claims to be telling us what Iraqis think of Blair and Britain’s role, then that is the key question he should have asked his interviewees, and their answer to that question should have been provided in the piece.<\/p>\n

Chulov, who has spent much time in Iraq, must already have a good sense of what Iraqis think about Blair and the attack on their country. But there is little evidence he fairly reflected that in his piece. Instead\u00a0he read into his lead quote the most benign interpretation possible regarding Blair and Britain’s role. And then he backed up that dubious interpretation with quotes from two people whose representativeness seems more than unlikely \u2013 both\u00a0appear to be\u00a0established contacts from his time in British-controlled areas of south-east Iraq, presumably whose views he already knew.<\/p>\n

Those\u00a0views are important. But in the case of Faris, he is\u00a0not\u00a0answering the question the Guardian suggests he is:\u00a0what he\u00a0thinks of Britain’s role in attacking and destroying his\u00a0country. He is talking about internal problems of Iraqi society – a very\u00a0different issue.<\/p>\n

In reality, Chulov and the Guardian’s assessment that the Iraqi people think Blair made a “mistake” is based on only one Iraqi’s\u00a0view \u2013 that of Al-Attar. Is his view\u00a0indeed\u00a0representative of the Iraqi people as a whole? Can we even say for sure that the quote\u00a0attributed to him is\u00a0representative of his\u00a0views as a whole, or is it just representative of the section\u00a0of the conversation Chulov has selected for us.<\/p>\n

Chulov\u2019s piece had a duty to\u00a0reflect the true anger of Iraqis about their country\u2019s destruction. Instead the Guardian recruited them against their will to act as a witness in\u00a0Blair\u2019s defence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It will be no surprise to readers of this blog that I believe Tony Blair should be put on trial for crimes against humanity for assisting George Bush in attacking Iraq in 2003. The Chilcot inquiry, however compromised its members were by their establishment ties and however cautious they were in their use of language, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[18,6],"class_list":{"0":"post-2187","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"tag-guardian","8":"tag-media-criticism"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2187\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}