Jackie Ashley: There is now no doubt that Blair misled the Commons: After Butler's damning report, he should search his conscience again

(Guardian) "Damp squib or smoking gun? The conclusions from Lord Butler's report seem, at first sight, to provide the expected establishment support for the government. Lord Butler proves himself no patsy Hutton. He's shrewder than the judge, a real player. He makes several trenchant criticisms. But he decides, in the end, that no one's actually to blame. Everyone's acted honourably and in good faith, so we should all just work hard to make sure it doesn't happen again.
So there it is. The intelligence about weapons of mass destruction was wildly wrong. Warnings about the unreliability of the evidence were not included in the dossier the government presented to parliament. We went to war against the wishes of the majority of the UN. At least 11,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed. Islamist terrorists, who had no foothold in Iraq before, are more dangerous than ever. A bloody insurgency still burns in the country, punctuated by car-bombings and grisly videotaped beheadings.
Yet the prime minister continues to insist that it was right to go to war. Never mind if the original reason - the legal reason - for doing so has been utterly discredited. Suddenly, he finds the real reason for sending in the troops was to topple a very nasty dictator and make the world a safer place. So far, so convenient. Now we can just move swiftly on, after two Commons inquiries and the reports from Lords Hutton and Butler. Let the line be drawn.
But closer reading of the report presents us with one stunning and inescapable fact: the prime minister knew, from the evidence supplied to him and published yesterday by Lord Butler, that there were many doubts and uncertainties about the intelligence: to say it was dodgy is an understatement. Yet, in his forward to the September dossier, Tony Blair wrote: "What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt [my italics] is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, that he continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons, and that he has been able to extend the range of his ballistic missile programme." Lord Butler describes as a "serious failing" the fact that the dossier did not contain warnings and caveats about intelligence known to the joint intelligence committee (JIC).
If this does not add up to misleading parliament and the public, then I don't know what the word "mislead" means any more. Much has been made of the conclusion by Lord Butler and the insistence from Tony Blair himself that he acted in good faith. I'm sure he did. But whatever he believed about the merits of taking action against Saddam, there can be no doubt that he gave us all a misleading impression of the reasons for going to war. Thanks to Lord Butler, we have seen the original intelligence, and we know that the dossier was not a fair representation of it - it was sexed up.
Actually, I don't think Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell and the rest of them huddled together and twisted John Scarlett's arm behind his back. It wasn't necessary. Simply, as Lord Butler says, "the JIC was put under strain" and the decision then to let the JIC take ownership of the dossier was a "mistaken judgment".
What is pretty obvious is that the decision to go to war was taken in Washington. Blair felt he had to go along with it for reasons of politics. He'd decided to stand alongside the biggest boy in the playground and it was too late to go skulking in the toilets. The facts were distorted by desire. They ended up so distorted, they were a deception. It may have been self-deception as well as the deception of the rest of us: but two deceptions don't cancel out to make the truth.
The fact that the prime minister misled parliament and the people about taking the country to war is a matter of law, and international order, too. The invasion of a sovereign country, however vile its regime, is something we would normally only contemplate as a last-ditch matter of self-defence.
What the Butler report confirms, yet again, is that the war against Iraq was not a war of self-defence. It was not launched, first and foremost, to protect us. Those wretched weapons of mass destruction matter as an issue because they were the reason the Commons voted to go to war; they, we were told, threatened British bases and British interests directly. Well, they didn't. They didn't, because they didn't exist.
In his statement to the Commons yesterday, Mr Blair accepted personal responsibility for any mistakes made. Yet he proposes cheerfully to carry on, as if he'd done nothing more serious than forget the orange juice when sent out on a Tesco run. Of course, he can hold things together if he chooses. Whatever today's byelections bring, he cannot be removed except by a cumbersome and unlikely procedure. He has the awesome power and patronage of Downing Street. He has the backing of most of the cabinet. He has, not least, his own extraordinary personal resilience, his chirpy self-belief and optimism.
Mr Blair told MPs yesterday that he'd "searched his conscience" to see whether the war was justified. Now he should search it some more, to consider what effect this damning report will have on Labour's chances at the next election, and, just as important, on democratic engagement in general. How can the public be expected to vote, to get involved, to think politics changes anything, if some one can lead a country into war on a false premise, and not be held to account?
Lord Butler may not have put any heads on stakes outside parliament but he has tried, and found guilty, the pals' act way of doing business in Downing Street. He calls instead, in effect, for a return to traditional governance, with its checks and balances and its clear demarcations between officials and politicians. He wants government by cabinet, not cabal. That seems to me to be quite a verdict. Lord Butler may not have meant it this way, but it is a guilty verdict on the Blair way of using power.
Mr Blair has been a phenomenon. Whatever the political despair and anger engendered by the Iraq war and his collaboration with George Bush, Labour owes him a vast debt. He helped make the party electable. He won two landslides. Under him, we have had a government that has redistributed some wealth, which has expanded employment, tamed inflation and started to put some serious investment back into the welfare state.
But a real leader knows when he's done what he can do, and when it would actually strengthen his party to stand down. His good faith may not be in question, but his credibility most certainly is. After Iraq, Labour and the country need some healing. Lord Butler's report is not a healing moment. The gun is still smoking, it isn't closure. That can only come from the man at the top."