Robin Cook - political visionary 1949 - 2005

In late 2002, just prior to the US unilateral declaration of war against Iraq, Robin Cook, then Foreign Minister in the Blair government, gave his boss clear warning that to move unilaterally against Saddam would be a serious mistake. It would be a mistake under several headings; international law, relations between Britain and the international community, humanitarian considerations in Iraq, and the efficacy of the war in terms of the (then) stated objectives. It was at that time, in a heated debate with some rabid American right whingers, that I described Cook as likely the most honest politician of the decade, and probably of the century.

He resigned from the Blair Cabinet, winning himself many supporters as a result. Not long after he began writing as columnist for the Independent. The Independent has set up a chronological index to Cook’s writings. As a one man history of the Iraq war and Britain’s place in it, it makes for quite chilling reading.



This one passage from March 2004 will become the popularist epitaph of the man, but there can be no more fitting tribute to his vision and foresight…

It says much about the nervousness in Government over Iraq that they have no plans to mark tomorrow's anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. This is very sensible on their part. Any retrospective examination would inevitably draw attention to questions that they find increasingly difficult to answer - such as why they ever believed Saddam was a threat since he turns out to have had no nuclear programme, no chemical or biological agents, and no delivery system with which to fire them.

A fitting way to mark the anniversary would be to drive a stake through the doctrine of pre-emptive strike and bury it where it cannot be disinterred to justify another unilateral military adventure. The new Bush doctrine claimed the right to make war on any country that could be a potential threat some years down the road. Iraq has proved beyond any reasonable doubt that intelligence cannot provide evidence reliable
enough to justify war on such a speculative basis.

…

Tony Blair is right when he insists that there can be no opt out from terrorism for any individual country. The lethal energy of al-Qa'ida makes no nice distinctions between those who opposed the invasion of Iraq and those who supported it. Given popular sentiment in Spain it is almost certain that nine out of ten of those murdered in Madrid had opposed the Iraq war. There is no certificate of immunity which can be obtained from al-Qa'ida. The rational approach is to ask whether our actions are making the world as a whole safer from their malign intentions.

The sober, depressing answer to that question must be that the invasion of Iraq has made the world more vulnerable to a heightened threat from al-Qa'ida, which is precisely what our intelligence agencies warned the Government on the eve of war. The bombs in Madrid resulted in the worst terrorist atrocity in Europe for 15 years and were the latest in a litany of murderous assaults from Turkey to Morocco.

…

Part of the problem of the present Western approach on terrorism is the insistence of our leaders in Washington and London on describing it as a war. As a metaphor the language of war may be a forceful means of expressing the priority our security forces should put into defeating terrorism. Unfortunately too many in the Bush Administration appear to have been misled by their own language into believing that terrorism can be beaten by a real war, as if we can halt the terrorist bombs by
dropping even bigger bombs of our own.

In truth we would have made more progress in rolling back support for terrorism if we had brought peace to Palestine rather than war to Iraq, but President Bush's promise that he would give priority to peace in the Middle East has become another of the commitments given before the invasion and broken in the year after it.

Not Britain alone, but the world is poorer for his passing.