[Futurework] Thus far, but no further

[Keith Hudson]

Professional Blair-watchers are saying that Tony Blair is now showing signs of extreme nervousness as he continues to try and justify the reason for going to war in Iraq. (Certainly the pitch of his voice seems to be getting a little out of control from time to time.) At the time that Blair threw in his/our lot with Bush, 140 of his own MPs voted against him and we had the biggest-ever demonstration in London with over 1 million people attending from all over the country. Many (including me) thought then that Blair was close to being forced to resign.

But he scraped by in Houdini fashion. However, now that it is becoming clearer by the day that Saddam Hussein was of no danger to other countries around him, never mind America or the rest of the world, the pressure against Blair is mounting again. He is being forced to choose his words very carefully indeed. As in his speech in Poland today, every sentence he utters is true, but there's no logical connection between them that amounts to a valid case. As the FT says below, he and Bush have deceived us and it's going to be increasingly impossible for Blair to convince most of this country (or at least most of those who care about the matter) otherwise.

Because I was wrong before about Blair's resignation, I hesitate to make another forecast. However, on my dogwalk this morning I bumped into a retired senior businessman (that is, much more senior than I'll ever be!) whom I occasionally meet (whose son, by coincidence, is an officer in Iraq and coming home tomorrow) who said quite bluntly, after we'd circled around each other conversationally: "Blair will have to resign."

And then, in the remainder of my dogwalk I read one of the editorials in today's FT. I thought that this was a pretty good summary of what's been going on so far. The FT is arguably the most respected newspaper in England -- by both left and right -- and if this is what the FT says then I rather think that Blair is in a much deeper hole than he's realised so far. What follows may seem rather sotto voce to most non-English, but to us it's pretty strong stuff. If Rumsfeld and Bush start taking silly decisions about Iran -- as it seems they are threatening to -- then I don't see how Blair can support them this time.

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WHERE ARE THEY?

It is time for a reality check: we have been deceived.

The US/UK occupation of Iraq has done nothing to prove the case for war. On the contrary, it has undermined, possibly fatally, their casus belli against the Iraqi regime -- namely that it was stockpiling chemical and biological, if not nuclear, weapons. The reality is that, 45 days after the war's end, all the US and UK appear to have found is two empty trailers suspected of having been mobile bio-weapon laboratories. This newspaper suspected as much all along.

Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary, now says Iraq may have destroyed its stocks of weapons of mass destruction before the war. In other words, he does not expect anything more to be found. Tony Blair is still expressing confidence in the existence of WMD. But he would; far more than President George W. Bush, the prime minister justified the war on the need to rid Iraq of its weapons.

So did the US and UK intelligence services get it wrong, or were their political masters lying? It seems a bit of both. Most of the evidence that Iraq might have WMD was based on what Iraq had at the end of the Gulf war of 1991, on what a high-level defector alleged in 1995 that Iraq was still concealing and on what chemical and biological material Iraq was believed to have made or imported after 1998. UN and intelligence assessments were, mainly, a series of questions, based on known or suspected stocks or inputs.

But in the mouths of US and British politicians, questions turned into assertions embroidered with assumptions. In its WMD dossier, Downing Street claimed Iraq had WMD ready for use in 45 minutes, based on a source that even UK intelligence apparently regarded as questionable; this could be the time required to launch a WMD-armed Scud - but only if it had a ready warhead. The same UK dossier also contained a fabricated claim of a recent Iraqi search for uranium from Niger. For their part, the Pentagon hawks apparently turned to their own Iraqi exile sources in preference to more doveish estimates of the Central and Defence Intelligence Agencies.
One of these hawks, Paul Wolfowitz, has now tellingly admitted that WMD was chosen as the casus belli "for bureaucratic reasons, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on". "Everyone" included Mr Blair. He knew that few outside the Washington Beltway, and even fewer in Britain, would buy the regime change argument, whereas the WMD case against Iraq was enshrined in 12 years of UN resolutions.

The intelligence failures in Iraq raise many questions, not least why Saddam Hussein was so unforthcoming to UN inspectors, if he had little left to hide. But there is one overwhelming caution for the Bush administration. If it ever wants to put its doctrine of pre-emptive war into practice again, it will need to come up with far more convincing proof of threats than it showed in Iraq.
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Financial Times; May 30, 2003


Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England