‘BLAIR’S CLOSEST ALLY ON IRAQ’
A NEW study has highlighted the significance of the role played by former Cynon Valley Labour MP Ann Clwyd, pictured, in the Iraq War. Political editor-at-large Martin Shipton finds out her interest in the country stretches back to the 1970s and examines her influence over Tony Blair’s policies.
An extended essay by the historian Oliver Craner has highlighted the significance of the role played by former Welsh Labour MP Ann Clwyd in the Iraq War. Political editor-at-large Martin Shipton finds out her interest in the country stretches back to the 1970s
FOR many, Britain’s decision to join the United States in invading Iraq was a colossal error based on the false premise that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that could be used against our armed forces.
The fallout from revelations that appeared to back this view seriously damaged Tony Blair’s reputation and was partly responsible for the Conservatives’ ability to bounce back and eventually take back power in 2010.
But one Labour MP never deviated from her view that Saddam Hussein should be removed from office and that regime change in his case was a goal worth pursuing.
In his essay Everyone Middle East is here: The British in Iraq, Oliver Craner reveals how Ann Clwyd, who stood down as MP for Cynon Valley in 2019 after 35 years, exercised a critical degree of influence over Tony Blair at a time when he was being vilified for dragging us along on the coat-tails of President George Bush as he mounted the invasion.
Craner states: “On March 18, 2003, the day that Parliament voted to approve the invasion of Iraq, Ann Clwyd wrote a combative op-ed for The Times that made graphic claims about the methods of torture and execution being used in Saddam’s prisons.
“This included details of screaming prisoners being fed into huge plastic shredders, a claim that was dismissed as simplistic propaganda by opponents of the war but which caught the attention of the US Deputy Security of Defence, Paul Wolfowitz.
“There followed a unique tête-àtête in Washington between the Labour member for the Cynon Valley and the neo-conservative Pentagon civilian that typified the complexities and controversies of the 2003 intervention.
“It turned out that they had more in common than she had expected. ‘Surprisingly, we hit it off,’ Clwyd recalled, ‘it emerged that he had a long-standing association with human rights issues, dating back to his time as ambassador to Indonesia.’
“She was not the only person that Wolfowitz surprised in this way, but Clwyd also had a tendency to surprise people.
“Her support for intervention in Iraq did not go down well with former friends, allies and colleagues: ‘At Swansea, while attending a Welsh Labour conference, I was openly jeered and called Bradwr, Traitor,’ she wrote. ‘Somehow it sounded so much worse in Welsh.’
“Clwyd’s pragmatic approach to politics awarded her diverse allies, from Wolfowitz on Iraq to Jeremy Corbyn on East Timor. ‘In general, when weighing up whether or not to lend my support to causes and campaigns, I have learnt to make decisions based on what I believe is the right thing to do rather than the personalities involved,’ she wrote in her 2017 memoir Rebel With a Cause. The cause of human rights in Iraq eventually left her isolated within her own party.
“During their meeting Wolfowitz asked Clwyd who she thought would be the best candidate for the role of interim Iraqi president. She had acquired many contacts and friends over decades working with the Iraqi opposition, particularly within Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (INC), Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and Masoud Barzani’s Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), but her choice was unequivocal: ‘I spoke strongly in support of Jalal Talabani, since I felt he had the ability to draw the factions together, in other words he would provide the glue. At that point Donald Rumsfeld came into the room, and Wolfowitz said, ‘Tell him what you just told me.’ We discussed why I was against some of the names he had mentioned and why Talabani would be such a strong candidate, and I was delighted when Talabani did indeed land the job as interim President of Iraq.’
“Clwyd had credibility with the Iraqis and her opinions were taken seriously in London and Washington.
“During the years of Saddam’s genocidal Anfal campaign she had publicised the plight of the Kurds in Parliament and the media, while the British government tried to consolidate their own covert trading relationship with the Ba’ath regime.
“Following the Gulf War she travelled into the Zagros mountain range to meet Kurdish refugees, taking personal and political risks in order to witness and record their suffering. She was instrumental in lobbying for no-fly zones and could take some credit for the designation of Iraqi Kurdistan as a safe haven.
“During the 1996 Kurdish civil war, she facilitated a delicate prisoner exchange between the PUK and KDP, negotiating an agreement between Talabani and Barzani that foreshadowed their eventual political settlement.”
Craner writes that to understand the origins of Ann Clwyd’s role in all of this it is crucial to understand Britain’s
status as a haven for Iraqi exiles.
After 1958 a number of surviving members from the constitutional government fled to London, among them Ahmad Chalabi’s father Hadi, who had been head of the Iraqi senate before the coup. They would later be joined by exiles from successive purges until, by the end of the 1980s, London hosted a large and prestigious community of Iraqi refugees.
This was partly explained by the close links that remained between the British state and the old Iraqi elites. These survivors from the old regime retained their anglophone sensibilities and a powerful nostalgia for pre-coup Baghdad having benefited from the prosperous and liberal society of the Hashemites and their British sponsors; for some later additions, there were MI6 links.
Then, during the years of the Ba’ath, the genteel elegance of their lives in Mayfair, Bloomsbury and Surrey had been overshadowed by the threat of Saddam’s assassins: famously, Chalabi’s rival Iyad Allawi of the Iraqi National Accord had been attacked by an axe-wielding intruder in his Kingston-uponThames home and left for dead by the side of his swimming pool. The escalating brutality and depravity of the Ba’ath regime, as well as Saddam’s willingness to murder his enemies on foreign soil, focused minds among the opposition groups, although they remained too fractious and scattered to pose any real threat to the dictator.
London remained a key base for Chalabi, who kept his Knightsbridge office as an operational hub for the INC until the eve of the 2003 invasion.
The Chalabis were, in many ways, the epitome of the elite Iraqi exile families: wealthy, cultured, well
connected and determined to return to Iraq to reclaim their stolen inheritance and identity. While he shuttled between Washington and Tehran for the INC, Chalabi kept his family in an opulent Mayfair apartment overlooking Green Park, replete with silk Persian rugs, European and Middle Eastern paintings and a resident maid.
When he relocated to northern Iraq in the 1990s, he recreated this refined environment in his house in Salahuddin, decorating it with local sculptures and paintings, hardwood and walnut furniture carved in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright, a stateof-the-art stereo system and a library of imported cookery books from which he taught his Kurdish cooks French cuisine. One of his favourite relaxations in Kurdistan was to rewatch videos of his favourite TV programme: the 1981 BBC production of Brideshead Revisited, a work with great personal and atmospheric resonance for him. “Fighting Saddam does not mean you have to eat bad food or live in shabby surroundings,” he insisted.
Clwyd had worked closely with Chalabi as chair of the Campaign Against Repression and for Democratic Rights in Iraq (CARDRI) and its successor INDICT, in the effort to archive evidence of Saddam’s crimes against humanity.
In her memoir, Clwyd recalls the time Chalabi visited her in Cardiff on INDICT business and requested a visit to the National Museum of Wales to see the Davies sisters’ celebrated collection of Impressionist paintings: “as we walked past the renowned Brangwyn Panels, Ahmad pointed at them and said casually: ‘I bid for those at auction.’”
For Chalabi, European culture was simply part of the human inheritance that he absorbed without compromising his Iraqi or Shia identity. For his allies, he was the living embodiment of the possibility of a new Iraq, even a new Middle East: proof that a viable alternative to the totalitarianism of the Ba’ath regime or the medieval recidivism of Shia and Sunni fundamentalism actually existed. But for Clwyd’s comrades on the Labour left this was suspicious company, a feeling only confirmed by her subsequent meeting with Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. Even before the Iraq war, INDICT had received negative coverage or been treated with passive indifference, a fact that dismayed Clwyd, who wrote: “We knew people in Iraq were being tortured and killed in large numbers and could not understand why others did not feel the same sense of outrage.”
This feeling of anger and futility in the face of ongoing barbarity culminated in her stark declaration during the February 2003 parliamentary debate on Iraq: “I believe in regime change. I say that without hesitation, and I will support the Government tonight because I think that they are doing a brave thing.”
On the subject of Iraq, Clwyd had become Blair’s most committed ally.
There was a postscript for the Cynon Valley MP that capped all of the work she had done with the Iraqi opposition since the 1970s. In May 2003, a grateful Blair appointed her Special Envoy on Human Rights to Iraq and in this role she witnessed the excavation of the mass graves of Shia victims of Saddam in Al-Hillah.
In later years, evidence collected by INDICT was finally put to use in the Baghdad trials of Saddam and his captive inner circle, while the Free Prisoners Association, founded by widows of prisoners who had died in Saddam’s jails, would vindicate the work of CARDRI and INDICT and engage Clwyd long after the overthrow of the regime.
In her 2017 memoir she summed up this work with a statement that she could have easily made in 1988: “I still keep an eye on the plight of the widows . . . even though there are other enormous geo-political challenges and crises, someone must keep track of these things”.
Ever since, when challenged about the wisdom of invading Iraq, Tony Blair will speak of Saddam Hussein’s murderous brutality, effectively changing his justification for the war from rooting out weapons of mass destruction to regime change.
Had that been given as the reason for removing Saddam in the first place, Blair’s reputation might, ironically, still be intact.
Ms Clwyd told the Western Mail she had become interested in Iraq in the 1970s, before becoming a politician and when she was working as a journalist.
She said: “There were a lot of Kurdish students from Iraq in Welsh universities, especially at Cardiff, Swansea and Bangor. Many of them were campaigning about the repression by the Ba’ath Party [which was in government and from 1979 was led by Saddam Hussein].
“Emlyn Williams [then the President of the National Union of Mineworkers in South Wales] told a couple of them that he knew just the person to take up their cause. He meant me.”
She added: “I was never in any doubt that the right thing to do was to remove Saddam Hussein.
“I know personally many Kurdish politicians, including the current President of Iraq, Barham Salih, who studied at Cardiff University.
“He has invited me to Iraq and says he wants to honour me for what I have done for the country. I’m hoping to go this autumn.”