LOOKING AROUND

WHAT is the connection between
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and the Great Train Robbery of 1963? Not much at first sight, you might think. Or at second or third sight. Unless, that is, you are Dr John Reid MP, currently Leader of the House of Commons, formerly Chairman of the Labour Party, and Secretary of State for Northern Ireland – all within the space of two or three years. In addition to his duties in the Commons, Dr Reid has been put in the front line by the Prime Minister to deal with troublesome journalists who will keep on asking questions about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Sometimes he has to sweep up after his senior colleague Jack Straw, who told Radio 4*s Today programme on Wednesday morning that “It's not crucially important” to find weapons of mass destruction. When the interviewer had picked himself up off the floor, Mr Straw knocked him over again with “Even if no weapons of mass destruction are found, the war will still have been justified.” Someone at the heart of government must have thought that the Foreign Secretary's comments were a little over the top even at a time when everything is being done to downgrade the importance of these weapons. So on Thursday morning Dr Reid was deployed to set the record straight and put the uppity interviewers of the Today programme in their place. He began by criticising the programme's “sloppy” reporting and then produced his rationale for the government's lack of concern about finding the weapons: ”Just because we haven't found the weapons doesn't mean they didn't exist and weren't a threat,” he said, and then came to the killer punch: “Not finding the money from the Great Train Robbery didn't mean that Ronald Biggs was innocent.” James Naughtie, who was questioning Dr Reid, is one of the BBC's most experienced interviewers but I swear that even he was taken aback. There was an audible intake of breath before he recovered himself. I hoped he was going to ask if Dr Reid thought, using the Ronald Biggs analogy, that Saddam Hussein might already have found his way to Brazil and was even now choosing a suitable girl with whom he could father a child, thus securing permanent immunity in that hospitable country. Reducing the issue of weapons of mass destruction to such farcical levels will not serve the government well. When Dr Reid said that the Today programme was making too much of the matter, James Naughtie pointed out that many Labour MPs had reluctantly supported the government in the crucial House of Commons vote on the war, because of what the Prime Minister said about these weapons, and now felt that they had been tricked. The government's line, and Washington's pitch also, now seems to be that the weapons definitely existed and were available for use at short notice but had been destroyed or moved in the last few days before the invasion by Britain and the United States. No one has yet given a coherent explanation of why Saddam Hussein would divert resources to destroy or move the very weapons his forces might need to defend themselves against a greatly superior enemy. The government is also trying to shift the ground of the argument by claiming that the recent discovery of mass graves of Shias killed by Saddam Hussein after the 1991 Gulf War is in itself a justification for the war. The Prime Minister said on Wednesday: “I hope, for those people who had some doubts about the wisdom of removing Saddam Hussein, these reports of these mass graves are an indication of just how brutal, tyrannical and appalling that regime was and what a blessing it is for the Iraqi people and humankind that he is gone from power.” With respect, Mr Blair, there was never any doubt about the brutal and tyrannical regime run by Saddam Hussein. But let us be clear: according to UN Resolution 1441, if you and President Bush had been able to ensure by peaceful means a disarmament of the weapons of mass destruction that you believed he possessed, you could not have called for military action to remove him. He would have been left in office. You are using the discovery of the graves and other evidence of atrocities ex post facto as justification for action taken for a different and now disputed reason. Many people have understandably been shocked by the photographs and descriptions of the graves uncovered this week at al–Hillah, some fifty miles south of Baghdad and are instinctively inclined to agree with the Prime Minister's comments. There are two points I would like to make, neither of which should be taken to detract from the sheer awfulness of what happened at al–Hillah. Firstly, the people whose remains have been found are almost certainly Shias who were murdered after the outbreak of the Shia rebellion that followed the Gulf War in 1991. The Shias were encouraged by President Bush to take the opportunity of Saddam Hussein's defeat to rise up against him and were given the impression that military assistance would be available to them; in the event it was not forthcoming and they were left to their fate. Secondly, if Mr Blair is going to rest his case for the war against Iraq on Saddam Hussein's human rights record then he must explain why he is not even now making plans to invade and unseat the rulers of other countries with comparable records. China, especially for its atrocities in Tibet. North Korea. Russia, for its brutality in Chechnya. On a lesser scale, Zimbabwe. And in Central Africa, a vast area from which the West prefers to avert its eyes, genocide on a scale that even Saddam Hussein cannot even have contemplated has assuredly taken place.

SURPRISING MYSELF
IN his letter to the editor this week Mr George Tomlinson of Puerto Pollensa expressed his suprise at my support for Home Secretary David Blunkett's “attempt to remove sentencing decisions from judges”. As a matter of fact, I should admit to Mr Tomlinson that I was also somewhat surprised to find myself in agreement, for once, with Mr Blunkett's policies! My reason, however, was that on this occasion the Home Secretary was very properly asserting the right of the elected House of Commons to provide guidance to unelected (and often unrepresentative) judges about the appropriate scale of sentencing for various offences, including murder. While it is true that apparently eccentric or indefensible sentences given by judges may be the result of considerations not known to those outside the courtroom, it does seem to me that some effort is needed to see that the punishment always fits the crime in a standardised way, whoever the judge may be. That having been said, I should add that I found myself in broad agreement with the humane views on crime and punishment expressed by Mr Tomlinson. His belief that prisons should always be seen as reformatories cannot be contested in principle although in practice it would require an investment in prison buildings and staffing way beyond anything that ministers or, I suppose, the general public is prepared to contemplate at the moment.