Donna Ferentes said:
And it's also largely acquiesced in by the media village, who will report "Blair is under pressure" but will also report "no smoking gun" until the cows come home, because they don't actually disagree with it.
Too true.
The day Saddam's statue fell I was in the middle of an assessment day for a place on a journalism course at Cardiff (reputedly one of the best journalist schools in the UK). My performance in the assessment tests was apparently 'excellent', but I came unstuck in the interview.
The journalism course leader asked a topical question, given the days events, can't remember what now, but it seemed more a personal question, not 'how would you report this?' but what do you think about this? (My responses would have been different, my reporting does not necessarily reflect my personal opinions, that's where editorialising comes in.)
Anyway, I think the news had already begun to filter through about the atrocities in Fallujah by then, although I can't recall the exact timescale, and I made a comment comparing Tony Blair and Saddam Hussein. And he followed up asking 'So you think there's a moral equivalence between Tony Blair and Saddam Hussein?' The course leader seemed quite affronted. Yes, I said. But the second interviewer on the panel realised I'd dug myself into a hole with this obviously pro-Blair course leader, and started saying: "I think she meant..." But by then, the damage was done. Funnily enough, I wasn't offered a place.
To my mind, it's all a matter of scale (and accountability/deniability/whether according to Dubya or Blair God was on your side). I don't have any up to date estimates as to latest casualties figures, that old report in the Lancet put it at 90k-100k civilians dead in the war for oil, oops, sorry, war on terror. And since then many more have been maimed and killed.
When the attorney general's advice was published (or at least part of it), I emailed an old school friend who's serving in Baghdad and told him to seek independent legal advice about the legality of the orders he was following, because I'm fairly fluent in legalese and believe the way it was written (if you can read legalese) is that the AG certainly was not totally convinced war was legal.
To this day, I stand by my comments about there being a moral equivalence between Saddam Hussein and Tony Blair, they each have a large amount of blood on their hands, the only difference is a matter of scale and their respective justifications for their actions.
I often wonder whether, with the benefit of the intervening revelations and hindsight, particularly in the light of the recent articles coming out of the US from right-wing commentators about how wrong they were, and the likes of Johann Hari's article, maybe the course leader's also realised I may have had a point all along?
I'm actually glad I didn't get a place on that particular course, but it really saddens me that anyone who challenges vested interests or commonly held political or other beliefs of lecturers, isn't going to get a chance. And it saddens me that over the past three years newly graduated journalists have probably been churned out of that school whose opinions and attitudes are probably cloned from those of the course leader, when journalism should be all about questioning.
