Tony Blair's long public nightmare is over. The chairman of the BBC is toast, and Andrew Gilligan's career is dead. The BBC board of governors is huddled in emergency sessions to deal with Lord Hutton's finding that its editorial system is fundamentally flawed.
The war on terror grinds on and on. But not even Mr. Blair could have dreamed that his war against the BBC would end in such a total rout. Who lied? Not he. "The allegation that I or anyone else lied to this House or deliberately misled the country by falsifying intelligence on WMD is itself the real lie," he thundered yesterday.
The terms of the Hutton inquiry were actually quite narrow. They were to examine the circumstances surrounding the death of one man, weapons inspector David Kelly, who either was or wasn't the source for one BBC story by Mr. Gilligan, which claimed that the government had deliberately "sexed up" the case for war. The story was delivered in the form of a brief television interview early one morning. It must have had an audience in the hundreds. But soon Dr. Kelly was dead (by his own hand, insists Lord Hutton, to the vast disappointment of conspiracy theorists), and the Prime Minister and his senior aides stood accused of hounding the poor man to death. Did the government sex up the dossier? Or did the BBC sex up the story?
From the start, the inquiry was really a proxy for the bitter fight over the war in Iraq. The BBC (and most of the British press) was on one side, and Prime Minister Tony Blair's government was on the other.
During the war, I sometimes tuned in to the BBC for news. One night, I saw Mr. Gilligan broadcasting from Baghdad. He was openly contemptuous of the U.S. military, which he insinuated was dishonest and inept, and he was ridiculing its claim (which was accurate) that it was in the process of securing the Baghdad airport. Later, after Saddam's fall, he told viewers that Baghdadis were experiencing their "first days of freedom in more fear than they have ever known before."
Not all the BBC's coverage was so ridiculously skewed. But when critics began calling it the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation, you couldn't blame them.
Long before the story about the sexed-up dossier, BBC news director Richard Sambrook had raised concerns about Mr. Gilligan's reporting. But no one did anything about it. Instead, as news organizations tend to do, they circled the wagons. Mr. Gilligan's boss described his sexed-up story as "terrific journalism," and everyone passed it up the line. At the time, the brass were in open warfare with Alastair Campbell, Mr. Blair's hyper-aggressive former communications director, and so they dug in even deeper.
Astonishingly, the outfit that really blew the whistle on the BBC was — the BBC. Last week it aired an exposé of itself, a scathing documentary called A Fight to the Death. In it, veteran journalist John Ware said the broadcaster's executives had made "fatal mistakes" in their handling of the case, and had "bet the farm on a shaky foundation." In one panicky meeting, he reported, BBC director-general Greg Dyke said: "Have we effing got this right, because if we haven't we better go back on it now."
Even now, Dr. Kelly's role in this affair is not entirely clear. He seems to have said slightly different things to different people at different times. One thing is clear. He was rather sure Saddam had weapons. The documentary included a previously unaired interview with him in October of 2002, a month after the Prime Minister had made the case for war with his allegedly dodgy dossier. When asked whether there was an "immediate threat" from Iraqi weapons, he replied: "Yes there is. Even if they're not actually filled and deployed today, the capability exists to get them filled and deployed within a matter of days and weeks. So yes, there is a threat." He added that he thought Saddam would be reluctant to use them "in the buildup to war."
Separately, in an article published posthumously, he wrote, "The long-term threat remains Iraq's development to military maturity of weapons of mass destruction — something that only regime change will avert."
Now we know that Dr. Kelly's first statement was almost surely wrong (although his second was almost surely right). It looks as if Saddam had nothing he could launch in 45 minutes, or even 45 weeks. He was a toothless tyrant.
But the war over the war in Iraq isn't really about the facts, or 45 minutes, or what went wrong with the intelligence, or who believed what when. It's a titanic clash of beliefs, between those who think the war was generally a good thing, and those who think it was rash, or dangerous, or opportunistic, or colonialist, or downright evil. It is not, mainly, about Iraq at all. It is a giant referendum on George Bush and the United States, and on those who chose to stand with them. And of one thing you can be sure: That war won't end any time soon.
