“A Python Getting Out of a Box”

Nothing new in Tony Blair’s appearance at the Chilcot inquiry on Friday, but three additions to The Dictionary of Iraq War Quotations. All of them first picked up by Paul Waugh, proving that his journalistic sharpness has not been blunted by his move to Politics Home.

For those of my colleagues in the London-Based Liberal Media who still do not understand how 9/11 led to the American-led coalition taking military action in Iraq, Blair had a new formulation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein:

Up to September 11, we had been managing this issue. After September 11, we decided we had to confront and change.

Or, as the MI6 officer who specialised in Iraq put it — ”more elegantly”, says Waugh — the idea

came out of the ground like a mist following the change of temperature on 9/11 … It became clear to all of us that nothing short of decisive intervention in Iraq was going to satisfy the Americans. That can’t be sourced to a particular telegram, conversation, that I can recall.

It was the same officer, known only as SIS4, who used such a vivid analogy to describe how seriously the intelligence service took the threat from Saddam that Blair quoted it in his evidence:

The lack of our response to the re-emergence of Iraq as a serious regional power was like having tea with some very proper people in the drawing room and noticing that there was a python getting out of a box in one corner. I was very alarmed at the way that Iraq was eroding the sanctions regime and evading it.

Footnote: In my tips for commenters in my prebuttal before Blair’s evidence I forgot to suggest two other responses that seem to be generally regarded as a conclusive refutation of my arguments. One is to suggest a financial or sexual relationship between the finest peace-time etc and me; the other is to invite me to stop writing.

Photograph from here

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