The Field

This week they are trying Tony Blair and we all have cause to cast our minds back and think about the things that we have lost because of him. The tragedy is that it could have been so different, that there was so much expectation for a very different future waiting in the wings. Nearly seven years ago, I’d wandered on the Downs in the sun and savage wind of what was still a newly Millennial spring. Amid the cries of burgeoning war there was some strange, undeniable hope, like it was rising up from underground, like it was the spring itself, all the more apparently perennial for the carnage that we all so strongly willed would not come to pass.

For my own part I hadn’t had the easiest of winters but I’d read a lot and fallen back on the music, learned a few good tunes and now my luck was changing and I had some things I could be truly grateful for. So my thoughts that day were on the hope the coming summer held, on the new green vividness of all the hills around me as well as memories of happier times and how they now seemed to be coming round full circle. When I went back to the city, I carried a piece of chalk as a token for the returning warmth and what the future seemed to hold in store.

Things did not work out. Many things that happened in the next few weeks were not without their toll; spoke of the almost unbearable juxtaposition of destruction and love. Back home, a pile of newspapers were waiting with the savage details of the news. When I finally got the chance to read them they spelt it all out all too clearly: a burning city, the unknown dead and scores of children wrapped in bandages, the weeping mothers, the boy who’d lost his family besides both arms. There was sense of shadow over everything for our being at war, for our part in that bombardment. Meanwhile rocket attacks scurried over soldiers in Camp Dogwood and the days and nights were marked out by near misses and later by more severe calamities, crowds of angry Iraqis storming buildings, lives lost overnight as our own safe havens were overrun, to say nothing of what we had helped bring about for the people of the country.

There was a haemorrhaging of beauty and of life. Everything seemed biblical; nomads in the wastegrounds of Baghdad were not without horses amid the scraps of metal and the tiny fires and, despite the horror, it was like we were living in a tale that had not ended and whose roots went back for hundreds of years if not longer, like everything Iraq still had to offer, its cradling of civilisation, its older ruins, its roots, the courage of its people: all of this cried out for deliverance, for recognition, honour.

Love and war spoke equally at once. George Bush, as the poet Chris Preddle put it, rode into the Dawn upon a tank. Today, I wish with every piece of me that it will soon be over, the news of bombings still like body blows for any kind of hope. We should not forget the pain of those now living in Iraq when seeking to call to account the ones who led us there.

In that daunting early day just after the invasion there was a sense of how things could work out, the full extent of the utter lack of planning had not become clear, there was a sense that a nation willing to invest so much in bombardment would surely have some kind of plan in place for what came after. But that brief dawn before the sinking in of monumental mismanagement, of the level of corruption of an institution who simply never gave a fuck, that all too narrow window still seemed full of some promise. Repressed minorities were rising up and there was no shadow then of the ethnic tensions that would follow.

The legacy of all of this stretches over all of us and all of us have been sullied, or wounded or worse. A year later the US election loomed as the fate of Fallujah hung in the balance, televison pictures of massed ranks of tanks and APC’s lining the roads to the city and this was surely Armageddon made only too real. It was inconceivable that Bush would get in for yet another term and unbearable to keep track of such a closely run determination. And yet there was a counter force, the shopkeepers in the Midlands who seemed to hold some kind of secret, some galvanising force of spirit that met what would have otherwise been despair.

So I hope, with the Chilcot enquiry, that Blair will really be given the grilling he deserves, for a start. We all know all too well just how he led us down the garden path, but some kind of official stamp could help us all come to terms with what our chief elected representative helped to lead us into, a chance to proclaim from the highest platform that we did not want this for a moment, a chance for some kind of real justice.

There can be no pleasure however much the man may squirm and it shall be interesting to see whether he is as unapologetic as his former spin doctor in chief. How does a man live with the knowledge he has been instrumental in sending ten of thousands to their deaths? The deception of unaccountability is on a par with that which led us into this, a chorus of bloody Halleluiah’s, a zeitgeist of a level of zeal coupled with a policy amounting to criminal insanity.

Whether this enquiry will or even can oblige in delivering somekind of just retribution in this respect remains to be seen. In the meantime we must carry on as best as we are able. Our every breath helps to determine the kind of world that lies ahead and knowing this gives us reason to continue; knowing that we all can make a difference, even if that difference is simply a matter of cherishing that which is dear while holding out the necessary hope that we can all someday put behind us the aftershocks of such an ill-conceived, barbaric use of force.