POLITICIANS AND commentators should learn from the Iraq war not to use the type of incendiary language that was evident in the months before the United States and the United Kingdom, along with other allies, decided to oust Saddam Hussein, the Archbishop of Canterbury said yesterday.
Dr Rowan Williams’s remarks, made during a speech in St Paul’s Cathedral, to honour the UK’s 179 dead from the conflict, were interpreted in some quarters as a criticism of former British prime minister Tony Blair, though this was dismissed by the archbishop’s staff later.
Mr Blair, prime minister Gordon Brown, Queen Elizabeth, Iraq veterans and family members of those who died, along with a host of serving and former military officers attended the St Paul’s memorial.
The archbishop was opposed to the war, both before and after it was launched, criticising it as “ignorant” and “flawed”, though he accepted that the choices taken by the British government had been made “in good faith”.
The morality of the conflict will exercise minds for years, he said: “In a world as complicated as ours has become, it would be a very rash person who would feel able to say without hesitation, this was absolutely the right or the wrong thing to do, the right or the wrong place to be.” But he went on: “Perhaps we have learnt something, if only that there is a time to keep silence, a time to let go of the satisfyingly overblown language that is so tempting to human beings when war is in the air.”
Later, he said: “The moral credibility of any country engaged in war depends a lot less on the rhetoric of politicians and commentators than on the capacity of every serving soldier to discharge these responsibilities with integrity and intelligence.” Quoting from St Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, Dr Williams said the struggle is not always against the visible enemies, such as a dictator, or a terrorist, “but there are invisible ones, too”.
“The invisible enemy may be hiding in the temptation to look for short cuts in the search for justice – letting ends justify means, letting others rather than oneself carry the cost, denying the difficulties or the failures so as to present a good public face,” he said.
Questioned about the speech last night, a spokesman for the archbishop denied that it should be seen as a condemnation of Mr Blair’s conduct: “I definitely would not see it like that, that is not the case,” he told The Irish Times.
Defence secretary Bob Ainsworth said Dr Williams had not criticised the government and acknowledged that politicians should deliberate carefully before going to war: “I know that it’s popular and fashionable to believe that MPs take these decisions lightly. They don’t.”