Page 206 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 185

POLITICAL COMMUNICATION IN A GLOBALISED WORLD
or not, in the altered context of the post-September 11 environment, it was
necessary to secure international public and governmental support for
military action. Could America go it alone in removing Saddam Hussein
from power, and if so, should the UK join in? Or should the approval and
authorisation of the United Nations be sought before military action began,
as it had been on earlier occasions? In this debate much hung on the question
of whether, after September 11, the threat posed by Saddam’s Iraq was
sufficiently urgent to justify unilateral US (with British support) action, or
could be addressed by the slower channels of international diplomacy. In late
September 2002 concerns about the international political fallout of
unilateral US–British action against Iraq led George W. Bush, under pressure
from Tony Blair, to endorse and pursue a further United Nations resolution
on Iraq at his speech to the General Assembly. This resolution, when it came,
demanded that UN weapons inspectors be allowed unconditional and
unrestricted access to suspect sites in Iraq, and authorised the use of force if
such access were not forthcoming. In the following months, however,
international consensus broke down. After the withdrawal of Hans Blix’s
team of weapons inspectors from Iraq in early 2003, a second UN resolution
authorising force against Saddam’s regime was not achieved and the
invasion, when it came in March 2003, was undertaken not, as in the 1991
action against Saddam, by the international community as a whole, but by
a much narrower ‘Coalition of the willing’, led by the United States, closely
followed by the UK, Australia, Spain and a few others. The importance of
mobilising public opinion in these countries was shown by the US and UK
governments’ efforts to prove that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were
a major and imminent threat to British troops. Dossiers were published
appearing to show that such a threat existed, including one which later
turned out to have been largely plagiarised from a Ph.D. thesis. In the most
notorious case, the Sun newspaper interpreted one of the dossiers to imply
that Saddam had chemical weapons which could be used against Coalition
forces within 45 minutes. The ‘45 minute claim’ became the basis of the
Andrew Gilligan ‘sexed up dossier’ story which would later cause the Blair
government and the BBC so much difficulty (McNair, 2009a).
The presentation of the dossiers was intended by the government to secure
both public and parliamentary support behind the decision to invade. Such
support was extended by MPs to Tony Blair in the House of Commons,
largely on the basis of their acceptance of his argument that Iraq presented
a real and immediate threat to British, Western and global interests. A
majority of the British public also supported the invasion, although many
did not, and protests against the war took place in London and Glasgow, as
well as in many other European cities in February and March 2003. Without
this parliamentary and public support, mobilised not least in impassioned
speeches by Tony Blair himself, Britain’s participation in the invasion would
not have been possible. When, after the invasion, it was revealed that there

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