False choices
Life is all about choices. So is democracy. Democracy is choice. At this general election, we are told that we have a choice between going forward with Labour or “back to a failed past” with the Conservatives. Either we endorse Bliar, or we get a dispicable Tory government that panders to racism, will dismantle our public services and ruin our economy. And anyway, the tories would have attacked Iraq too.
Presenting the situation as a choice of this nature is a clever strategy. It’s designed to make you feel that you have to vote for Labour, because otherwise you’ll get something even worse. But of course, this isn’t actually a choice at all. It’s the politics of No Alternative.
Never mind that the chance of the Tories forming a government is infinitessimal. Never mind that on a uniform swing from Labour to the Lib Dems, the Tories cannot win. Never mind that a protest vote could topple Blair, but keep Labour in power. The media does nothing to dispel the myth or check the facts, so by repeating the “it’s us or the Tories” mantra, Labour can frame voters’ decisions in a way that is favourable to them.
This false choice strategy (often used to obscure the likelihood of one option or to reframe an argument on the user’s terms — Wikipedia) is clearly one of Alistair Campbell’s favourites. Here it is being used by Blair in a different context, in his recent interview with Paxman:
I tried desperately hard to get a second UN resolution. I couldn’t get one. Now I had a decision to make as to whether to leave Saddam there, in breach of UN resolutions, and end up in a situation with the international community humiliated and him emboldened, or to remove him. I decided to remove him. …in the end a decision had to be taken; there was no middle way, there was no fence to sit on.
We are told that there was a choice between acting immediately or doing nothing. There were no other options, says Blair. This simply isn’t true. Hans Blix’s inspections were working. Had Blix’s efforts been seriously frustrated by Saddam, the UN security council could then have passed a resolution authorising war. Had the inspections continued to be tolerated, Blix would finally have concluded that Saddam posed no threat, and war could have been avoided altogether. There was no immediate need to act illegally.
This is particularly relevent now as more information leaks out about the concerns expressed by Lord Goldsmith in his 13 page legal advice, given to the prime minister on the 7th of March. The version of the Attorney General’s opinion, shown to MPs on the 17th of March, stated that:
It is plain that Iraq has failed so to comply and therefore Iraq was at the time of resolution 1441 and continues to be in material breach.
Thus, the authority to use force under resolution 678 has revived and so continues today.
Yet on the 7th of March, the Prime Minister was warned by the Attorney General that:
It could be difficult to revive the authority for military action in UN resolution 678 in 1990, given that 678 authorised action to remove Iraq from Kuwait and did not explicitly authorise an invasion of Iraq
After this, should we really accept that we have no choice but to vote for Blair? Does the pope shit in the woods?