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The limits of power (3)

28 July 2003

Power lies in the ability to get things right. A decision is not right because the decision-maker is powerful, but because the process of reaching it has been effective. That requires openness to the truth, not managed information.

The fact that power cannot make true what is not true (the column 21 July - The limits of power (2)), does not, of course, prevent the powerful from attempting to make it appear to be so. It is, for example, to take a topical case, abundantly clear that chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons did not exist in Iraq prior to the recent war in the sense that the British public was told by its government they existed.

The expectation was that they would be used in the conflict, or, if not used, were stockpiled, available for use at short notice. Or, if not that, then facilities for their production existed that could produce them soon. Now, regardless of whether or not some rusting barrels of toxic goo or even evidence of new weapons programmes are uncovered, it can already be seen that the expectations that were created in relation to such weapons were, deliberately or otherwise, simply not true.

It is fascinating to observe the refusal of the British government to acknowledge this reality. You would think they might be pleased to discover that it is not as easy as all that to conjure up these murderous cocktails. Not a bit of it. Ministers are evidently exceedingly upset that Iraq is not awash with illegal weapons because all their prior justifications for the war were predicated on them. And this despite the obvious fact that the absence of these weapons in Iraq (particularly lawless post-war Iraq) means that the world is a safer place than it would be if the stockpiles were lying there, waiting to be looted.

But the government cannot bear to be wrong, so it persists in asserting on the one hand that the weapons will turn up, while with the other it is rapidly moving the goalposts so that almost anything vaguely dangerous will qualify as the lethal weaponry they warned of.

What makes this charade particularly farcical is that these notoriously elusive WMD were never the reason that the Blair government sought to make war against Iraq in the first place. It was evident at the outset, as this column noted on 7 April, that the British involvement in the Iraqi war was something of a personal crusade of Mr Blair's against a particularly tyrannical regime.

It is true that this aspect of the project (which came to be known as regime change) was probably illegal in international law. But then, British involvement in Sierra Leone may not have been strictly legit, either, but, hey, it worked out, didn't it, so who's counting. International law is not pedantically enforced, because only rarely is there someone to enforce it. Often it's about victor's justice; at best it's about getting a respectable outcome that a reasonable person would sign up to.

So if Mr Blair had been frank about his objective in Iraq, British participation in the war might still have been possible. With a little more genuine passion for human rights and a little less sophistry from the Downing Street press office about weapons intelligence, an honest debate about the merits of a war of intervention against an abhorrent government might have brought public opinion into line. As it was, the government and the million or more protesters on the streets of London were like ships passing in the night. They simply weren't talking about the same issue.

The protesters were talking about war; the government was talking about enforcing U.N. resolutions on WMD. The government's position was that if Iraq's continuing breaches of the resolutions could be established, the war would follow as a logical next step. Whether or not going to war was actually a good idea did not form a big part of the government's case.

Governments, particularly in open democracies, need some sort of trigger to impel them into war. It is not easy to say, in a developing situation, that today war is justified when yesterday it wasn't. The appeasement of Hitler continued as long as it did for that reason: at what point do you say enough is enough? Chamberlain finally drew a line in the sand on the right side of Poland so that when the moment came there was no decision to be made.

The same problem afflicted Tony Blair in relation to Iraq: why now, if not yesterday, or last year? What's changed that war is now so urgent? The truthful answer was that the U.S. was (post September 11) prepared to do it, and therefore, unlike Burma, Zimbabwe, Congo and all the other eligible candidates for enlightened intervention, it was now, suddenly, do-able. But political good manners still seemed to require a trigger, so the whole apparatus of U.N. resolutions and their deadlines was cranked up to ensure that a trigger moment would eventually arrive.

The consequences of this charade are both serious for the government and serious for Iraq and the wider international community. The government is left defending the indefensible, namely a war predicated on weapons that did not exist, while Iraq is in near-chaos, Iraqis remembering with dangerous fondness they days before the war when the electricity and the water came to their houses. If an open debate about the merits or otherwise of this war of intervention had preceded it, other routes, less swift, perhaps, but perhaps more sure, might have been favoured and the outcome less unfortunate for all concerned.

The essential point about problem-solving in this context is that one needs to see the real reasoning behind decisions in order to judge if the process of reaching them has been correctly followed through. This is why open government is such a Good Thing: it gives access to the genesis of policy and allows people other than the progenitors to assess whether it is likely to work.

After all, who knows whether Foundation Hospitals are a good idea or not, if they don't know what they are for? The arguments in favour are insubstantial, those against are equally so because both are founded in notions of principle rather than deriving from the facts of the policy itself. Why? Because the facts are obscure. We need to see where the idea came from and what happened to it along the way in order to judge whether it is useful or not.

If an idea is not useful or a policy not a good one, it is beyond the power of government (short of changing or ditching it) to make it so. Mere management of information will have no impact at all in this respect, although it has a big impact on whether the idea is adopted. This is true about hospitals and it is true about war in Iraq, and it helps to explain why any government's hit rate of successful policies is so low. Whereas businesses reckon on 51% good decisions to make a profit, governments typically do a lot worse than that and end up reforming their own reforms as a matter of course.

Good information is the key to getting this hit rate up, and the information needs crucially to start at the beginning of the process. But governments fear exposing the early part of the process to scrutiny because they do not wish it to appear that there was a "time before policy" in which they were floundering around with all sorts of good and bad ideas and not a clue what to do. Such machismo fatally undermines successful problem-solving since it both cuts short and protects from healthy scrutiny and participation the vital creative phase in which all possibilities remain genuinely open to consideration.

The consequence: a government exhausting itself defending duff decisions, appearing to make a virtue of fighting to impose its ideas rather than engaging with their objective merits.