STRAIGHT TALKING

by RAY FLEMING
THE Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is not the easiest person to understand. His thoughts are often wrapped in circumlocutions that blur their meaning. But his address at the Iraq war memorial service at St Paul's Cathedral on Friday was quite clear. While offering consolation to the relatives and friends of British soldiers who died in Iraq, he also pointedly questioned the political decision-making that led to the war. He allowed that “it would be a rash person who said without hesitation that the war in Iraq was the right or wrong thing to do” but he was unsparing in his references to the “mistakes” of those behind the conflict, among them those “policymakers” who had lost sight of the true cost of war. Tony Blair was sitting at the front of the congregation and he cannot have doubted that he was one of the principal targets of the Archbishop's admonition. There were, said Dr WIlliams, “policymakers and commentators who were able to talk about the conflict without really measuring the price, the cost of justice.” At the Falklands campaign service at St Paul's in 1982 the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, asked the congregation to pray for the relatives of the Argentinian dead. Dr Williams' only reference to the tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis who lost their lives was to “those whose names we do not know”. It would have been more in keeping with his overall message if he had been more specific.