SUICIDE BOMB
Weapons scientist David Kelly's suicide turned the British government's 'WMD' problem into a full-blown crisis. The former head of microbiology at Britain's Porton Down germ warfare laboratories turned weapons inspector David Kelly is an unlikely martyr, but that is what he has become. So widespread is the cynicism towards government that Kelly's death has drawn accusations that he was driven to it, principally by Number Ten's spin-doctor Alasdair Campbell.
We now know Kelly was the principle source for BBC correspondent Andrew Gilligan's story that Downing Street 'sexed-up' the intelligence service dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, to garner support for war. In the contest between the BBC and Campbell over the truth of the story, Kelly was forced to give evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee.
Bizarrely, it is Kelly's suicide that has raised him high above the merely venal politicians and broadcasting hacks. Twenty years ago Jean Baudrillard argued that the exemplary actor of modern times was the hostage, who by virtue of doing nothing - 'annulled in its sovereignty, abolished and non-existent as a subject' - held the entire political process in suspension (Fatal strategies, Pluto, 1990, p44).
Kelly seems to have felt that he was a hostage to 'dark forces' (presumably Campbell, and his own Ministry of Defence minders, as well perhaps as the BBC). But by taking his life, he went one better. In suicide he has succeeded where the official opposition failed, in pinning the government down to a judicial enquiry and opening up the argument over Blair's war claims, once again. No doubt critics of the government are tempted to praise Kelly's whistle blowing, and damn those that hounded him to his death, for that reason.
Still, it is hard to stomach the claims that Kelly was a decent and gentle man. He was, after all central to the British government's germ warfare programme. Later he was a senior figure in the weapons monitoring regime that was used to justify a crippling economic blockade against Iraq, as well as popularising the absurd idea that that Middle Eastern state was a military threat to the west. Kelly was no critic of the western domination of Iraq. Rather his differences only emerged when the weapons-monitoring regime that he had succeeded in was swept aside by open warfare.
Still stranger is the importance that one man's death - by his own hand - exercises, as against the scores of deaths of American and British servicemen in Iraq, still more so against the deaths of thousands of Iraqis.
That the ghost of David Kelly should exercise a greater influence on the debate than the living says a lot about the nature of Britain's 'anti-war' critics. The whole character of the anti-war movement was one of passive refusal rather than active alternative. The solipsism of 'not in my name' reaches its apogee in Kelly's ultimate opt-out. In this moral universe the victim has authority that the player lacks.
Rather like the suicide bombers of Al Qaeda, David Kelly's otherwise unremarkable life attains heightened significance in the manner of his leaving. No taboo attaches to suicide today. On the contrary, it is an act that lends the authority of the ultimate self-sacrifice. Perhaps the Prime Minister, having bared 'every fibre of his convictions' in a speech to the US congress this week should take note.
-- James Heartfield