LONDON: A London theatre has put British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the dock for waging war in Iraq, staging a mock tribunal where prosecution and defence lawyers question key witnesses.
As scrutiny over Blair’s legacy intensifies ahead of his expected resignation in a few weeks, “Called to Account” examines events leading to Britain’s participation in the 2003 US-led invasion that has damaged the leader’s popularity.
Based on a courtroom-style debate between lawyers to provide material for the drama, the play raises the question, asked many times before, of whether Blair and his officials deliberately manipulated intelligence to justify the 2003 invasion.
It also focuses on what pressure, if any, they put on the attorney general when he gave legal advice on the war, at what stage Blair agreed to back the use of force in Iraq and whether the aim was regime change and not weapons of mass destruction.
Some ground in the play was covered by the real-life Butler and Hutton inquiries of 2004, which cleared Blair and his government of deliberately distorting intelligence and misleading Britons.
But Richard Norton-Taylor, the Guardian journalist who wrote “Called to Account” based on transcripts of the mock legal debate, believes the remits were narrow and evidence has emerged since then that could compromise Blair.
“My personal view is that there is still a case to answer.
We don’t know the full story,” Norton-Taylor said after the press night at the Tricycle Theatre on Monday. He and director Nicolas Kent also quote from the Butler report, which said “as in the search for weapons in Iraq, one can never do too much digging.”
ARTS TARGET BLAIR: Among witnesses who gave testimony was Clare Short, a fierce critic of Blair and the war, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter and Richard Perle, ex-Pentagon official who backed the invasion but who has had doubts since. Blair does not appear.
“Called to Account” comes soon after Britain’s Channel 4 showed “The Trial of Tony Blair” in which the leader faces trial for war crimes as he steps down as leader.One commentator, David Aaronovitch, accused Norton-Taylor and Kent of seeking to “undo history” and obsessing over an issue that has already been debated at great length.
“Frankly, I think that there are bigger and newer problems for theatre to address,” he wrote in the Times newspaper.
The Tricycle shied away from an earlier proposal to ask the audience to act as jury each night with a show of hands, believing it would smack of a witch hunt against Blair.
Norton-Taylor believes audiences paying to see the drama would largely be made up of people opposed to the war, although that would not necessarily mean a win for the prosecution.
Several witnesses stopped short of accusing Blair of deliberately misleading parliament and his country.
“He doesn’t see it as a lie, but I’m afraid it is lies,” Short says at one point.—Reuters
