The Iraq war refuses to fade into the background of British politics. That is partly because of the continuing difficulties in Iraq itself. But it is mainly because of the way the decision to go to war provoked an almighty clash between the logic of a media-driven popular democracy and the logic of "grand strategy." The reverberations from that clash continue to dominate British politics. The Blair government failed to marry the two logics - and in so failing found itself in a battle for legitimacy with an important section of the media and public opinion. One consequence of that failure is that, for good or ill, it will now be virtually impossible for any government to pursue a preventive war strategy in the battle against terrorism.
The logic of popular democracy involves an extension of the democratic mandate into all corners of public life, with the media rather than parliament or formal checks and balances as its main agent. It demands maximum transparency. It enthrones public opinion as king and it insists that authority figures and politicians are guilty until proved innocent.
The logic of grand strategy - meaning the attempt to calculate the long-term interests of the nation on the world stage - assumes that decisions of fundamental national interest in matters of war and peace are taken by politicians in good faith consulting with experts, often based on secret intelligence. Complete openness with the public is problematic in this logic partly because the idiom of foreign policy is often brutally self-interested while the idiom of domestic politics is ethical. In the case of Iraq there were three more particular reasons for lack of openness. First, the arguments were complex and intelligence-based: whether, for example, there is a new form of terror threat, or whether Saddam could have acquired a nuclear capability within, say, three years. Second, one of the main reasons for action in Iraq was that the US administration had convinced itself that forced democratisation in the middle east was necessary; but this reasoning is not accepted by most people in Britain and even if it had been accepted, it runs counter to other obligations, such as membership of the UN. Third, some of the reasons for British involvement contained implicit rebukes to our allies. For example, it was thought that if we did not join with post-9/11 America it would become even more unilateralist, and that this would be bad for the whole world. Similarly, it was thought that if we did not act against Saddam, the pressure from France and Russia to remove sanctions on Iraq completely would become irresistible. (None of these arguments were necessarily right, but they all seem to have been factors in the government's thinking that were hard to express publicly.)
New Labour grasped from its earliest days the importance of managing the message in modern politics, yet the conflict between popular democracy and grand strategy on this occasion left Tony Blair with very little room for manoeuvre. That was partly because of the deep mistrust of George W Bush and the new America, both within the Labour party and a large section of the British public. It was also because the terms of the debate were being dictated in the run-up to war by the objective of getting support from UN member states who were open to arguments about the Saddam threat to other UN member states, but not, say, to arguments about toppling a brutal dictator.
In the broader picture, it is little appreciated how unusual Blair's situation was. In the case of the mass conflicts of the 20th century - the two world wars and the cold war - the threats were clear enough, even if there was disagreement, especially in the case of the second world war, about how to respond to them. With the arrival of the small wars of the 21st century against rogue states or repressive regimes, our national security is no longer so obviously at stake. War is now something that we do to other people. Moreover, the case for the Iraq war was for the first time in the democratic era based not on a visible threat but on intelligence reports of an invisible threat.
The taboo against using war as an instrument of policy has been partly broken in recent years, but only partly. The British public seems ready to support war on three grounds. First, that they feel directly threatened. Second, that there is a clear breach of national sovereignty, as in the case of the first Gulf war. Third, and most controversial, that there is a Kosovo-type humanitarian disaster - preferably with dramatic pictures on our television sets. None of the above applied in the case of Saddam, even though some serious grand strategy reasons did apply. Saddam was a destabilising force in the region and within a few years might have acquired a nuclear or biological capability with which he could have threatened the world's energy supplies. But preventive war, reminiscent of the "cabinet wars" fought in pre-democratic times such as the war of the Spanish succession, does not seem legitimate to most people in today's democracies, even if it is respectable again for some politicians and defence experts.
Britain went to war with Saddam to uphold UN resolutions. Since the UN itself did not back the war, this was a severely disabled justification. So the government felt compelled to squeeze its argument for war into reason one (immediate threat), with a muted undertow of reason three (Kosovo-type liberal imperialism) plus some muttering about the importance of standing with the US. At the time this must have seemed like a good gamble: even if there was an exaggeration of the immediacy of the Saddam threat in the process of consent-building for the war, who would find out? And, in any case, when the war was won, Iraq's WMD would be found. David Kelly's suicide and the intelligence failure on WMD in Iraq could not have been predicted. But as a result of those facts a bright beam has been shone on the evasions and exaggerations in the case for war, and the apparent gap between ostensible and real reasons for action.
In terms of democratic persuasion, more effort went into the Iraq war than any comparable war in recent British history. There was a parliamentary debate and - uniquely - a vote, two public dossiers and endless media interventions. If Alastair Campbell had not existed it would have been necessary to invent him for the purpose of popularising the intelligence reports that were the main justification for war.
In retrospect it's clear that the government's communication strategy, while not as deceitful as that of the Bush administration, was over-dependent on an immediate WMD threat. It did not adequately answer its own question. Why Iraq? Why now? The strategy seems to have been distorted by a tabloid inverted snobbery: focus on the "threat" arguments that will appeal to patriotic working-class Britain. Working-class Britain did, by and large, back the war. But the focus on such narrow reasoning for war was much less convincing to liberal, sceptical Britain - which from the BBC to the Guardian and Independent remains up in arms.
So is this just a hard lesson in honesty being the best policy? Not quite. David Marquand, writing on the Open Democracy website, assumes that "levelling" with the public and embracing "deliberative democracy" must always be the right thing to do. But what if levelling on the necessity of preventive war or standing by the US had produced even more public resistance, as it may well have done? Should Blair have pressed ahead anyway, facing the prospect of hundreds of troops dying in a war backed by only a minority of the population (even if he did have parliament and much of the media behind him). If, on the other hand, the answer is "if you can't get majority support you should abandon the policy," then we have shifted from a representative to a populist democracy in which all big decisions have to pass an opinion poll test. And what if the British public turns out to be wrong about preventive war in a new age of terror, and the Bush administration, and by extension the Blair government, turn out to be right?
Although the government was caught out being evasive and selective to suit its case - albeit with the agreement of the top intelligence officials - there is an unresolved issue here about how open governments can be on grand strategy matters. There is also the broader question of what space is left for leadership, for a government to be "ahead" of the voters - something that the left is always urging when it comes to tax and redistribution or attitudes to asylum and immigration. If that space has shrunk, and is likely to shrink further as popular democracy becomes more entrenched, then being ahead of the electorate is always likely to be accompanied by varying degrees of evasiveness: Gordon Brown's "progressive" evasiveness over redistribution and Tony Blair's "reactionary" evasiveness over preventive war.
Does a government have a right to do something unpopular - which it believes to be in the national interest - but then to try to reduce the collateral damage through presentational obfuscation? To achieve peace in Northern Ireland (where it is called constructive ambiguity)? To curb our freedoms in order to reduce damage to the environment? Whether it has that "right" or not, good governance may demand it and in any case it is naive to assume that governments will not behave in that way. Equally, it is part of the job of the media to uncover and publicise such government evasions.
Can we therefore accept a government plea of "justified evasiveness" in the case of the Iraq war? Some evasiveness, especially in defence matters, can be justified. But that cannot mean a government is free to say what it likes. It is a question of proportion. This magazine came down against the war because the justification for action was too narrowly focused on an imminent threat. Containment was working. It was not pleasant - indeed it represented a kind of low-level warfare against Iraq - and may not have worked for ever, but it was working well enough to make the claims of imminent threat seem unreasonable.
The tragedy, from the government's point of view, is that it could have closed the gap between the real and the ostensible reasons for war; it could, arguably, have used justifiable rather than excessive evasion. Most voters are not surprised by evasiveness in politicians. They know from their own lives that you sometimes have to say different things to different audiences for good reasons. And a more nuanced and subtle account of the government's many motives could have been presented that would have gone some way to satisfying even the Guardian and Independent-reading classes. Surely, for example, it was not beyond the wit of the communications experts to find a form of words to explain the longer-term geopolitical danger of allowing a paranoid post-9/11 US to fight alone, notwithstanding Bush's unpopularity. A fuller and rounder account would not have saved all the government's blushes when the WMD failed to materialise, nor would it have convinced everyone, but it would have made it appear far less devious.
Is it utopian to suppose that even now the government could admit to the Butler inquiry at least some of its errors in presenting the case for war? Certainly, if Blair wants to build consent for future small wars, especially preventive ones, it must be retrospectively more persuasive over Iraq.
This issue will rumble on into next year's election campaign and beyond. And it will be joined at the election by an issue which may require another fine line to be drawn between justified and excessive evasion: does the prime minister intend to serve a full term?
